Julie Smith

Conflict-free collaboration is sub-optimal collaboration. How can a team be wholeheartedly confident in their decisions and solutions if they haven’t been tested and improved through a healthy process of disagreement and debate? How can team members have full confidence in the strength of relationships with their peers if those relationships aren’t sufficiently robust to withstand the airing of differing perspectives? In short, they can’t. Constructive conflict fuels collaboration, which fuels collective confidence, which fuels team performance.

Are you familiar with Thorstein Veblen? I guess some background is in order because a family member made a casual reference to him several years ago, and I had never heard of him. He said Veblen was known for his 1899 book titled The Theory of the Leisure Class. The genesis of the conversation was “conspicuous consumption,” which Veblen went into great detail about in his book.

I fired up (no pun intended) the computer this morning to be met with horrible WMUR headlines. Beanie's is on fire . Think of when you (and everyone you know) learned that Notre Dame was on fire. Not only is Beanie's a Loudon community pillar, but they deserve everyone's support, whether we're Loudon locals or not. Let us all stay tuned in the coming days to find out what each of us can do, depending on our own talents, skills, resources, spheres of influence, and the owners' plans to do anything while awaiting reconstruction.

Not everyone had time to watch hours of Veto Day livestreaming or archived videos of our legislature, so it's important for NH dot gov's webmaster(s) to make records available to the public in a timely, user-friendly way. Good job, House staff members! Once the whole body steamrolled Her Excellency with a 314-7 roll call in favor of HB1422 , it was immediately possible to look up the reps who do NOT want wrongly convicted prisoners to have a new trial should new exculpatory evidence become available after 3 years.

I'm not going to pester Attorney Lehmann and the acting Senate clerk with an RTK request for all people with admin access to the FB page known as “NH

Most people are familiar with those ads for ambulance chasers, like attorneys James Sokolove, Dane Schulman, and Barry Feinstein, in which the small print usually says “affiliates in NH & other states outside Mass.” Attorney Bolton , though not an ambulance chaser, is best known as Nashua's “corporation counsel” and the bane of the L-Team's existence. The L-Team ( Ortolano Colquhoun ) have “affiliates,” like me, Beth Scaer , and anyone else aggrieved by city hall that makes lawful, narrow, reasonable, and articulate requests for public records.

Written By: Author(s): 12 min read 12 min read An exploration of studies and perspectives on motivation

Walking back to my car from the state house, a silly thought occurred to me as I walked toward the library. A Concord local in a chat group made a comment some time ago about two public figures being “besties” in high school. “Why not,” I thought. I was curious to see what these two 70-year-olds looked like in 1974, presumably the year of their graduating class, though they had not graduated from law school at the same time.

Ever since Beth Scaer showed me the enemy camp's calendar of events page, I've been lurking from time to time and thought a certain canine event had already passed, but it's next Thursday.

Saturday was a great day for NH because it's the day Annie Kuster becomes ineligible to be a judge. You might be thinking “so what, she's been a private citizen for almost 2 years and everyone eventually turns 70, assuming that they live that long.” Annie was an adoption lawyer, and family court is in extreme disarray. Just ask anyone who has lived it or tried to reform it. Regular court is also in disarray, and the last thing we need is removing what I call “the courts' version of term limits.”