Breaking News

Columnists

Great outcomes can be traced back to investing in skill building

When great results are achieved, the top leader is often asked how it happened. A frequent response is, “The credit goes to the team.”  Let’s dig deeper. What makes a team (the people who make the results happen) successful? In studying high-performing organizations, there are common themes. The biggest one is that successful companies invest considerable amounts of time and dollars in selecting and developing talent.  I was reminded of this recently at a session in which a company rolled out the key outcomes they want and need to achieve. All the outcomes made sense. They ...

Politics ain’t beanbag

There is an old saying that “politics ain’t beanbag,” meaning that the political arena can be a rough and tumble place. On one hand, I can understand West Virginia Democratic leaders jumping on the ill-timed nomination of former GOP candidate for governor and former lawmaker Moore Capito as the next U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia. On the other hand, I don’t believe it is deserved. To make a long story short, President Donald Trump released a list of nominees Tuesday for various offices – including Capito for U.S. Attorney for the Southern District ...

Looking like one big, beautiful disaster

Here we go again. This week, the Senate unveiled, honed and passed its version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and it’s a fiscal monstrosity. What was already an oversized mess in the House has been supersized into a $4 trillion ode to unseriousness. This isn’t tax reform. It’s a bipartisan pinata stuffed with pork, gimmicks and — of course — debt. We’re told to cheer because the bill makes permanent a few pro-growth policies, including 100% bonus depreciation and research and development expensing. However, a few pearls in a vast ocean of bad policies are nothing ...

Musk should return to Democrats

Elon Musk warned that if Republicans passed their big domestic policy bill, he would form a new “America Party” to primary those who voted for it. He doesn’t need a new party. He has his old one, the Democrats. Many Democrats have grown to intensely dislike Musk, and they have their reasons. His prancing around with a chainsaw as he gleefully fired thousands of valued federal employees was ugly. But his most damaging act was spending nearly $300 million to get Donald Trump reelected. As it happens, the right doesn’t like Musk, either. Trump’s serial abuse of him is ...

Living creatively with disabilities

Jim Wiest was an exceptional human being who understood how to work creatively to make life better for others. In 1971, when I first met my sister Scottie’s future husband, I could tell that he was there to make life better for Scottie. He was a leather craftsman who had built furnishings for Scottie’s pottery shop while she was living in a garage apartment near Lewisburg. After they married, they moved to a farm in Upshur County and finally to Elkins. She continued to make pottery, and Jim took a job as the regional Xerox representative. Whenever copiers broke down, desperate ...

Tillis and Trump

Thom Tillis’s dissent from Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” ending with his announcement that he will not seek re-election to his Senate seat in North Carolina, is intriguing. A self-described moderate conservative, he finds himself a political dinosaur along with Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and others who lurk in the Senate corridors complaining about President Trump, all the while voting for his proposals. The affair says much about the Republican Party. For instance, Tillis and Rand Paul of Kentucky both voted against moving the legislation forward, but for entirely ...