Category Archives: Columns

By Phil Power April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. The English poet T. S. Eliot obviously didn’t have a Michigan spring in mind in 1922 when he wrote the famous poem, The Wasteland, from which the above lines are [...]

When Rick Snyder became governor, he received a lot of advice. “Be bold,” everybody said. Snyder was. And look at the trouble it’s gotten him into! According to a poll conducted by EPIC/MRA, Snyder had sky-high approval ratings when he took over in January: 59 percent favorable and only 9 percent unfavorable. But by the [...]

“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” — Winston Churchill, in a 1947 speech to the House of Commons In Michigan, the next few months are [...]

There’s no doubt that the biggest and most controversial idea in Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposed state budget is the one calling for the state to tax income from both public and private pensions. As thing now stand, pensions for retired Michigan public employees – teachers, police and other government employees and former elected officials – [...]

Every two years, more than three million Michiganders vote for their lawmakers in Lansing. They cast votes for state representatives every two years; for state senators, every four years. But many of those votes don’t really matter. That’s the main conclusion of a study released last week by The Center for Michigan on the effects [...]

It’s the dead of winter. We’ve had more single-digit cold nights than I remember for a long time. There’s so much snow piled up that it’s hard to find a place to put it. Spring looks faa-a-r-r-r away. So it’s time for a story to warm your heart. Over in Ann Arbor, the Humane Society [...]

What business are we in? What’s our product? Who are our customers? Focusing on these three fundamental questions is a great way for managers to avoid distractions and get to the heart of the basics of their organizations. If asked persistently and rigorously, they offer a way to calibrate and re-calibrate basic strategies. Anyone who [...]

Glen Sheppard, the long-time publisher of the North Woods Call newspaper, died last week at age 74. Sheppard was a towering figure on Michigan’s conservation scene, a passionate advocate for natural resources, hunting, fishing and gun rights … Not to mention the worst nightmare to those bureaucrats and politicians who might threaten them. He later [...]