IN 8 B.C., Augustus Caesar finished the calendar reform work of Julius Caesar, and in the process he named the eighth month of the year, August, after himself. In much of Europe and the Americas, August is the vacation month for workers. In the United States, August is deemed back-to-school month, as well as the month of preparation for anxious parents and their children as they are about to begin their formal schooling years in kindergarten. Vacations help with rejuvenation, and returning to school marks a restart for the education process. For readers of Performance Improvement, it is a good time to push the restart button and begin the article that you have been intending to write. Your work and ideas are valued; August is indeed a time for you to commit to sharing your knowledge and skills with your colleagues through our journal's pages. If you are hesitant or unsure, please contact me via the telephone or through email. I will be most pleased to discuss your ideas with you and walk you through the writing and publishing processes that we use with Performance Improvement. My contact information is, James (Jim) A. Pershing, pershin@indiana.edu, 812-339-3226. We begin this issue of Performance Improvement with an essay on performance improvement by Roger Addison and Carol Haig titled “An Essay on Performance Improvement.” Roger and Carol make a strong case that the practice of performance improvement is an integrative approach that unites a number of initiatives that organizations use to improve workers, work, and the workplace and also to have a positive impact on the world. They note some basic tenets of performance improvement and argue that the practice of performance improvement works best when it integrates a broad range of approaches and recognizes its symbiotic relationships and commonalities with related endeavors ranging from Six Sigma to human resource development to organizational development. Visiting ideas and principles from the past that apply to performance and learning can be a very good thing. Often we are so involved with and enamored by the latest and greatest ideas and trends that we forget about the time-tested knowledge that our field has accumulated. In a relatively simple and straightforward piece titled “Pragmatism: Making the Most Out of Training,” Jodi Beuder reminds us of the tenets of pragmatism and John Dewey's views about experiential education. She provides some sensible explanations about the power of learning by doing and related principles that we can all use to make the most out of our training. In our third article, Sultan Alarifi and Amr Alamri, two emerging professionals, share with us their views about the differences between human performance technology (HPT) and Six Sigma. While students at Wayne State University, Sultan studying performance technology and Amr studying industrial and systems engineering, they engaged in a spirited discussion about HPT and Six Sigma over a cup of coffee. This led to their working together to develop their article that compares and contrasts these two approaches to improving performance. It is interesting to learn of their takes on the similarities and differences between the two approaches, the limitations of each, and how they advocate for an integrated approach combining HPT and Six Sigma. Often in our thinking and in presentations in our business textbooks, leadership and management are treated as separate and distinct phenomena. John Schultz, in his article titled “Two Sides of the Same Coin,” presents a different view. He argues that leadership and management are not separate or distinct but are integrated competencies that can be mastered through learning and discipline. John notes that all too often managerial thinking fails when it focuses its problem-solving efforts on individuals, isolated events, and snapshots in time rather than on the dynamic complexities, trends, and series of events that organizations experience. He concludes that, at the root of many problems and challenges, the culprits are most often processes and the system itself. Email, is it a curse or a blessing? In our work as performance improvement specialists, all of us have been faced with this question whether it was in our own work or in the lives of workers whom we have encountered in our performance improvement projects. In a piece titled “Managing Email Overload in the Workplace,” Kim McMurtry provides us with an updated literature review that addresses this problem and reviews relevant research studies that focus on email overload. Because we face these issues as performance technologists, Kim provides us with a ready-to-use literature review that frames the issues and provides research-based strategies for designing and developing workable interventions. publications@ispi.org