Leadership in Action: Dividends and Interest - The Pleasure and pains of Writing this Column

Dividends & Interest: The Pleasures and Pains of Writing This Column

Craig Chappelow

Over the course of five-plus years, I have written more than thirty Dividends & Interest columns for Leadership in Action. Recently, in a burst of end-of-the-year energy, I cleaned out and organized my column archives. While doing so I reread many of the columns, a process that turned out to be both enjoyable and agonizing. Some of the pieces seem thin in retrospect, but to me the single most satisfying thing about writing this column (or writing anything) is picking up a published piece a couple of years later and conceding that it was pretty good. This makes me a bit like Norm Abrams, the master carpenter on television's This Old House. Norm, after executing ...