Biggest So Far

While I plan to retire in the saddle, and no time soon, I have nonetheless provided my most comprehensive "Master Presentation" to date. It is a ten-part offering:

Parts 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4/Generic Master
Part 2/Leadership
Part 3/Talent
Part 4/"Value-added Ladder"
Part 5/"New" Markets
Part 6/"The Equations"
Part 7.1/Implementation
Part 7.2/Implementation
Part 8/13 "Guru Gaffes"
Part 9/Health"care"
Part 10/"The Lists"

With luck, it'll all eventually get annotated—in the meantime, you will have to live with my shorthand. As to the "Generic Master," it is constantly updated, and is my encyclopedia from which about 75% of each presentation is constructed.

Olympic Footnote

The Olympics are over, but one of Tom's old friends, Heather Schultz, sent him an interesting way to look at the medal results. It came from John Fawcett, a New Zealander and Shultz's colleague at Save the Children. John says, "[S]urely a better way to assess the depth and quality of a nation is to take a look at the per-capita medal table, the table that puts medal totals in proportion to population size?" Here's a pdf of the table. Some of you have been discussing this topic in the comments. Let us know what you think of the table. Erik Hansen raised a point about Iceland winning a silver medal in handball, and that their population is 304,000. As John asked, do you know any Olympic medalists personally?

Cool Friend #126: Richard Thaler

We continue the topic of last month's Cool Friends interview with the latest addition. Once again, Behavioral Economics is the subject of discussion with our new Cool Friend, Richard Thaler. Many people say that he invented the discipline. Thaler is Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and Director of the GSB's Center for Decision Research. Earlier this year, he and coauthor Cass Sunstein wrote Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Erik interviews Richard to find out the difference between a nudge and a noodge, what a choice architect is, and whether libertarian paternalism is an oxymoron. Thaler wants to help people make better choices. That’s why we think you might want to read his Cool Friends interview. You can also explore the website, Nudges.org, or the blog of the same name.

Addendum

Susan read yesterday's post, and informed me that in her conversations at the dinner in question there was discussion of one of our friends' sisters having a recent colonoscopy—in which the intestine was inadvertently punctured, with a nasty infection ensuing. (The victim, uh, patient, did live—I guess that's something.) Could it be that the odds of a screwed-up colonoscopy are higher than the odds of detecting a problem relatively early enough to justify the risk? I don't know the answer in this instance, but I do know that in any number of situations "Stay the f#^* away from the hospital" is the statistically correct choice.

Quote of the Day

"If I had said 'yes' to all the projects I turned down and 'no' to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same."—David Picker, movie studio exec, quoted in William Goldman's classic Adventures in the Screen Trade (cited by Caltech physics professor and author Leonard Mlodinow in The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)

NB1: Mlodinow's book gets a 10 out of 10 from me, hanging in with Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. (Another fav from Mlodinow: "Mathematical analysis of firings in all major sports has shown that those firings had, on average, no effect on team performance." A dozen or more studies appearing in prestigious academic journals are cited.)

NB2: If Randomness Rules then your only defense is the so-called "law of large numbers"—that is, success follows from tryin' enough stuff so that the odds of doin' something right tilt your way; in my speeches I declare that the only thing I've truly learned "for sure" in the last 40 years is "Try more stuff than the other guy"—there is no poetic license here, I mean it.

100 Ways to Succeed #136:

Ultimate & Perhaps Only "Sure-fire" Winning Formula

S.A.V.*

*Screw Around Vigorously

Furious!

Do most healthcare professionals care? My evidence is clear: Yes! (Exclamation mark deserved.)

Docs.
Nurses!!
Lab techs.
CFOs.
CIOs.
Etc.

Not good enough.

Hang out with old people, and the topic invariably turns to health—or the lack thereof. Well, I was at a small dinner last night, four couples. Among the men I was the youngster at 65, though 70 was the upper end. I've gotten in the habit, for professional reasons, of digging a little when the likes of surgery is discussed.

So, here's last night's scorecard:

***Bypass surgery: nearly died of infection in ICU.
***Other open-heart surgery: nearly died due to anesthesia problem; nurse caught it when patient's color went all haywire.
***Kidney surgery: nearly bit the dust due to badly wrong meds administered during recuperation—nurse caught it when patient turned odd color.
***Death: best friend of one of us died last year when pneumonia went un-diagnosed, patient was sent home and croaked in 72 hours.
***TP (me): bought my farm because 52-year-old prior owner had bypass surgery, went home, had severe pain, was told by phone it was routine—and died of infection in 48 hours.
***Etc.

Conclusions:

(1) Every one of us had relatively recent personal (family, close friend) horror stories.
(2) None of us, except for the installation of my pacemaker, could recall a personal hospitalization without errors worthy of remark.
(3) None of the horror stories involved the "it;" e.g., the surgeon's work during the procedure.
(4) Hence, all the above are preventable errors.
(5) Thank God for nurses!!!
(6) All agreed, not prompted by me, that a fulltime, "24/7" advocate (family or friend) was needed for any hospitalization.
(7) None of the above took place at a small "boondocks" hospital—all were in med centers of high repute.
(8) None of us or our friends in question was uninsured—we all had at least Buick coverage.

This really pisses me off.
And I shall continue to say so at every opportunity.

There are no excuses.
None.
Zip.
Zero.

Make no mistake, this is a story of lousy management and sloppy leadership—not, primarily, the result of lousy health policy.

Make no mistake, this is a story of unconscionably lousy management and almost criminally sloppy leadership—not, primarily, the product of bad health policy.

Fold 'em in Hell!

Fold 'em?

Consider this AOL report from Beijing: "[Angelo] Taylor, a once-troubled 29-year-old who was laying electrical wire 14 months ago, became the first 400-meter hurdler since Edwin Moses to win gold medals eight years apart Monday. He led the first sweep of the event since the U.S. did it in 1960."

(And for every Angelo Taylor there are hundreds who we never hear of, many of whom should have long before age 29 gotten a life beyond running. Yadda, yadda, yadda.)

World's Worst Advice!

An old friend visited for a couple of days last week. Google him, and you'll be impressed. Or you would be, if I'd tell you who it is.

In the course of a dozen conversations—old guy conversations—we shared stories of joys and sorrows, anger and pain, good fortune and ill winds, pals and foes and traitors and through-it-all supporters.

His Hall-of-Fame career includes bushels of excoriating criticisms along the way. Embarrassing and well-deserved failures. Off years—in fact, off decades.

And musing on it all reminded me of a Very Sensible Saying that I think is pure, unmitigated crap, in fact the World's Worst Advice: "Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em."

As I said ... pure crap.

Forget "fold 'em."
Drop it from your vocabulary.
Excise it.
Bury it.
Stomp on its grave.

If you care, really care, really really care about what you are pursuing, well, then, pursue-the-hell-out-of-it-until-hell-freezes-over-and-then-some-and-then-some-more. And may the naysayers roast in hell or freeze in the Antarctic or bore themselves to death with the sound of their "statistically accurate" advice.

It's a good fortnight to bring this up. I'll bet the farm, my farm, or at least an acre thereof, that less than 1% of the 10,000 athletes in Beijing moved smoothly through their careers. I'll bet virtually all had coaches who advised 'em to hang it up, "career-ending" injuries, humiliations heaped upon humiliations, and so on. And on.

And yet they persisted.
And they're in Beijing.

My anonymous visiting friend gave me The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, by David Price. Consider this paragraph:

"One of the curious aspects of Pixar's story is that each of the leaders was, by conventional standards, a failure at the time he came onto the scene. [Animator-superstar John] Lasseter landed his dream job at Disney out of college—and had just been fired from it. [Tech genius and founding CEO Ed] Catmull had done well-respected work as a graduate student in computer graphics, but had been turned down for a teaching position and ended up in what he felt was a dead-end software development job. Alvy Ray Smith, the company's co-founder, had checked out of academia, got work at Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Center, and then abruptly found himself on the street. [Steve] Jobs had endured humiliation and pain as he was rejected by Apple Computer; overnight he had transformed from boy wonder of Silicon Valley to a roundly ridiculed has been. ..."

That is, shit happens. And if enough of it happens to you, then, if you are wise, you'll fold 'em. And God (and I) will love you just as much as if you'd endured—but we won't read about you in the history books.

Now if you do indeed "endure"—well, we probably won't read about you either, because the odds indeed are long against you making it to that history book or Beijing. I readily admit that.

But if you really really really care ...

About computer animation. Or rowing. Or the shotput. Or those supercalifragilisticexpialidocious chocolate-chip cookies you bake. (Alas, Mrs. Fields announced a bankruptcy filing today.) Or haiku. Or better ways to provide a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious customer experience.

Or ...
Or ...

If you really really really really really care ... then there ain't no time to fold 'em until your last breath is drawn—and even that's too soon if you've bothered along the way to inflame others about your presumed Quixotic cause.

In the (doubtless not) immortal words of Tom Peters: "There's a time to hold 'em and a time to keep on holdin' 'em—if you really really really care."

Your responses are as always very very welcome!

100 Ways to Succeed #134:

Never Give Up.

Odds are zero.
Illogical.
Quixotic.

Screw "them."
Go visit the Lincoln Memorial.
Never give up!

100 Ways to Succeed #135:

Hiring criteria.

Are there enough people on your payroll who "lack common sense"?
Think about it.

Creeping (Raging?) Cynicism

My absence is a tribute to a good summer. Last weekend we broke from VT's deluges and went to visit friends in Sunny Chicago—awesome theater at Steppenwolf (Tracy Letts' Superior Donuts) and my 1st Wrigley Field visit were highlights. This week vigorous brushcutting has topped the agenda, plus a visit by some wonderful friends.

But last night, right after Michael Phelps' 6th and latest, my spirits plummeted. Admittedly, I am in a deep-deep funk over Georgia. (Humankind sucks.) But it was two back-to-back articles in the Wall Street Journal that iced the cake.

On Page A1, "Bad Blood: New Therapy For Sepsis Infections Raises Hope But Many Questions." We die by the freighterload from sepsis infections, and a relatively new therapy looks promising. But wait: The basic supporting research apparently has enough holes to drive my Kubota through. For example, in one sample, 30% of folks getting the new therapy died, compared to 46% mortality for those treated using traditional approaches—fine, except a ton of un-cited studies show that in general 30% mortality is the norm. Then there is the "missing subjects" problem—25 cases that have evaporated. And, surprise, the folks who performed the "unbiased research" seem to be hooked up to the folks who are providing the fix. There's a lot of contention over the facts, but there's a distinct odor to the air.

Move on to page B6, and the headline shouts: "Research Study For Boston Scientific Stent Is Found To Have Flaw." The BS study (excuse the abbreviation) reports a statistically positive outcome—but 16 other data analysis regimes provide different and non-positive conclusions.

While I am well aware of the contention that revolves around research activities, and I am also aware that two similar articles in the same day's paper is doubtless coincidental, I am nonetheless overwhelmed by the Infinitely Long Encyclopedia of Horrors that seems to attend the Wonderful World of American Healthcare. (Our system performance is ranked #37 by the World Health Organization—though we do come in 1st in costs.)

Attached you'll find some new slides I'm adding to my Master Health"care" Presentation. They are from Skin in the Game: How Putting Yourself First Today Will Revolutionize Healthcare Tomorrow, by John Hammergren (CEO, McKesson) & Phil Harkins. To preview, there is the report of 140,000,000 illegible prescriptions a year in the U.S. of A. And the fact that of the annual 1,500,000,000,000 healthcare claims filed annually, 30% have errors—which is not quite as bad as it sounds, because 15% of the claims are simply lost.

Georgia tops my short-term nausea list—but, increasingly, American healthcare seems to border on hopeless. (You know there's a problem when Hammergren and Harkins use the airline industry as a good example.)

On a brighter note, go Cubbies!

1984 Backwards?

How's this for a flip? Sunday's New York Times Magazine ran an article called "AntiPod," which speculates about what makes people buy Microsoft's Zune digital music player instead of an Apple iPod. The main thesis of the article is that many people are buying the Microsoft product simply because it isn't an iPod. Given the history of Apple and Microsoft, that's really ironic.

At 70% market share, the iPod is the big, bad marketplace monster, dwarfing the Zune with its 3% share. (SanDisk has a 10% share of digital music players.) The article quotes one Zune owner as saying, "I probably wouldn't buy an iPod," for that reason that she is "a little bit anti-Apple." Public radio host Jesse Thorn is quoted as saying that he was put off from owning an iPod by seeing so many "self-satisfied people carrying a ubiquitous object."

I have a great idea. Maybe Microsoft can take the film from Apple's famous 1984 IBM-bashing TV ad (Remember the days when "IBM Compatible" was synonymous with "It runs on Microsoft DOS?") and repurpose it into an anti-Apple ad. "Don't let those big bad guys at Apple take over your world. Be a rebel! Go with the cool, hip, anti-trend underdog ... Microsoft!"

Sorry. I have a hard time imagining people embracing a Microsoft product because it is the counter-culture, anti-trend answer to the imperial, controlling Apple monolith. Maybe Apple will become what Microsoft is, but Microsoft will never become what Apple was.

User Friendly Award!
(Where You'd Least Expect It)

At 6 p.m. Monday, I was out brushcutting. I apparently woke up a yellowjacket neighborhood buried in the mud. In short order, I was stung perhaps a dozen times—one YJ got stuck under my shirt. Luckily, I didn't go into anaphylactic shock. But, in a few hours the reaction was body-wide. I went to an ER the next morning after a truly crappy night. The doc said I should have come at the time—because I had some wheezing, which meant I'd moved in the direction of impeded breathing.

The good news was that I was on the mend in 12 hours courtesy an elephant-sized Benadryl injection and prednisone—courtesy the latter, I'd definitely test positive on an Olympic doping test. The bad news: once stung so badly, my predilection for full-blast anaphylaxis in the future soared. The additional good news: if prepared, one can handle the bad stuff—hence an EpiPen was prescribed. (The EpiPen, to be carried with you at all appropriate times, lets you self-administer a blast of Epinephrine, usually adequate protection-against-disaster until you can hustle to an ER.)

That's all prelude to my design story. The EpiPen, upon being wanged into your thigh, through clothing, if necessary, ejects a needle that in turn injects the Epinephrine. The package includes two locked-and-loaded doses. Now the best part: There is a third dispenser—which is for practice administration. Upon being yellowjacketed again, God help me, there is no time to read the directions! So the practice pen, sans needle and Epinephrine, lets you pull the pin as you actually would, and if you smack your thigh hard enough, it indicates that you've passed the practice test—the practice pen is infinitely reusable.

As all of us know, manuals are almost always (99%+) infuriating. This was the exception, to say the least. There was a mini-manual, but the practice injector went above and beyond. Trust me, I have a couple of testers for this and that (e.g., blood sugar measurement), and the directions merit the standard D- grade if I'm in a generous mood.

So hats off to the EpiPen designers—winner of the Tom2008 user-friendly-design award.

(Now all I have to do is pray I'm not stung again—and if so, pray that the Epinephrine was not made in China out of anti-freeze.)

On the non-yellowjacket side of the balance, a couple of pictures from the farm last evening.

100 Ways to Succeed #133:

Excellence in Manuals

Check every bit of instructional material in the joint—internal as well as that with which customers and vendors interact:

Clear?
Beautiful?
Simple? (Yet complete?)
Practice opportunities (à la EpiPen)?
Etc?
EXCELLENCE?

Odds are VERY high that you don't put in enough effort on internal and external material.

Work on it as a group. Test it with strangers. Test it with your spouse. Test it with your kids. Test it with the guy at the auto body shop. Etc.

Be like the Golden Gate bridge painters who never stop—finish one painting then immediately start over. Likewise, pick off some single instructional material and evaluate it—continue on a measured basis forever.

This is a very big deal. Here I go again with more bureaucracy: You need a very senior person, perhaps a VP and Chief Userfriendly Instructional Design of Bloody Everything—she should be independent of the prettify designers.

(User friendliness and clarity and simplicity are at least as important to Apple as is its gorgeous external design.)

The Goal of a Sales Call

What is the goal of a sales call?
Close the sale?
Receive approval for your proposal?
Secure a meeting with the CEO?

Yes. These are all possible goals of sales meetings. But there is another goal that transcends all of these. The goal of every sales meeting—yes, every sales meeting—is to create a relationship-building encounter.

This is not what always happens in practice. Sales training has taught us the value of a solid, sequential sales process, where we have learned how each step in that process leads to the next step: The purpose of a cold call is to get a meeting, the purpose of the first meeting is to get a second meeting, and the purpose of the second meeting is to be invited to make a proposal, etc. Of course, these are natural steps in the sales process. But what happens frequently is that sales people are so focused on getting to the next step that they miss the chance to have a great encounter during the meeting they are in at the moment. (It's also very obvious to a customer if a salesperson is more focused on what they can "get" from this meeting than on having a good meeting at this time. They can see the salesperson thinking ahead.)

What great salespeople know is that the sequential sales process is subservient to the current meeting. They know that the best way to get to the next step in the process is to create a relationship-building encounter in the present. (I’ve got a free ebook, Encounters, available by subscription at my website, www.yastrow.com if you want to learn more about creating relationship-building encounters.)

When you focus on "now," the future will come of its own accord.

Excellence!
Period!

Like it or not, my favorite definition of "quality" or "excellence," like the famous quote about "pornography," has always been, "I'll know it when I see it."

Well, I know it when I see it.

I am not a gaga Bruce Springsteen fan. Or I wasn't at 8:45 p.m. this past Saturday, as a monster thunder storm attacked Gillette Stadium (Foxboro MA) and delayed the start of The Boss's live concert—soggy and bedraggled, those of us on the field were herded (perfect word choice) off to escape our temporary metal floor while the lightning fired away as though Zeus was really pissed at Bruce. I was in turned pissed at my Bruce-besotted wife for dragging me 200 miles (actually, 173) from my VT farm and beloved Kubota to suffer through all this so I could watch a FOF/fellow old fart (okay, he's "only" 58) prance around as though he still thought he was 28.

Well, the storm abated, The Boss showed up—and I, one of Earth's newest Bruce Groupies by midnight, was mesmerized by the most amazing piece of performance art of any sort I've ever seen (65.8 years) or ever expect to see. Three+ hours, non-flagging energy, no intermission at all—he ran to a little table and threw ice water on himself a couple of times without breaking stride. If ever there was a time when the word "excellence" was not hyperbole, this was it.

The repertoire was great, but so what. The passion & energy & performance [P.E.P., "pep"—God help me] per se was the point, the whole point, and nothing but the point.

I really don't want to Blog this—I want to savor it forever & ever! To hell with Cirque du Soleil—or IBM in the early 1980s! I never want to use the word "Excellence" with a cap "E" again other than in ref to Bruce. Gillette.0802.2008.

Bruce was amazing!
The E Street Band was amazing!
The IMAG direction was amazing!
Sitting in Row #19 was amazing!

From a review by W. Zachary Malinowski in the Sunday Providence [RI] Journal:

"Last night, the hardest working man in rock-n-roll came to Gillette Stadium for
something like his 95th*-concert since last fall's release of Magic, his latest
CD. The tour kicked off in October in Hartford and has taken the band across the
United States and Canada and twice to Europe. ...

"There's an old adage among diehard fans of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street
Band that goes something like this: there are two types of people in the world,
those who love The Boss and those who have never seen him perform live. ...

"Sure, at age 58, Springsteen has slowed down, but not as much as the rest of us.
He still races around and slides across the stage. He pours his heart and soul
into each performance as if he's trying to convince each ticket holder that this
is an event that he is going to make you remember the rest of your life. If you
didn't like the last song, well, he's going to play the next one even HARDER!
In a time of mortgage foreclosures, layoffs, and $4-per-gallon gas prices,
Springsteen makes sure that each of the 60,000-plus fans in football stadiums
is getting their money's worth. ..."

*TP: Holy shit! ("Everybody" says I have high energy—forget it!)

For what little it's worth, I've added a trio of Tom-pics, from my set of 225, to this Post, and one to the next.

100 Ways to Succeed #132:

The Boss's 6Ps

Passion!
Persistence!
Partners!
Performance!
Painstaking!
Presence!

(Passion: Energy! Enthusiasm! Very visibly giving 1000%!)
(Persistence: Good years, bad years, lotsa years. Keep at it!)
(Partners: Bruce makes the E Street Band. The E Street Band makes Bruce!)
(Partners: Bruce "partners" with his audience—we are active participants in the show.)
(Performance: Good stuff! A brilliantly produced show per se!)
(Painstaking: A thousand details doth a great performance make!)
(Presence: In the age of ubiquitous downloads, etc., live performance matters!)

This & That ...

1. Freeze-Frame: One Minute Stress Management: A Scientifically Proven Technique for Clear Decision Making and Improved Health, by Doc Lew Childre and Bruce Cryer. I learned this technique at Canyon Ranch/Lenox MA a few years ago. And, improbable as it seems, it works—in even less than a minute, say, 30 seconds—or even 15. There may be more than you want to know in this book, and you may be skeptical—I was—but I will stick my neck out and call "it" "revolutionary;" it's lasted over 5 years for me and gotten better with age. Works in traffic, before a speech, during a meeting when something pisses you off, in the airport when something really pisses you off, in the middle of a delicate phone call, before your next serve, before your next M&M, etc. It's good for your professional life—and your health. (As advertised, it does take practice!)

2. As long as I'm doing "self help" (God help me), there's a lot of wisdom in Gordon Livingston, M.D.'s Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now. E.g.: "If the map doesn't agree with the ground, the map is wrong." (#1.) "We are what we do." "Our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses." "Not all who wander are lost." "It's a poor idea to lie to oneself." "Nobody likes to be told what to do." "Of all the forms of courage, the ability to laugh is the most profoundly therapeutic."

3. While my social views are liberal (I'd call them leave-me-the-hell-alone libertarian), my economics are unadulterated capitalist pig. They may stay that way, and probably will. Yet my entrepreneurial friend Alan Webber (Fast Company founder, TP partner in inventing "the brand called you") got me thinking when we met in Santa Fe last week—and got me reading afterwards. So far: Peter Navarro, The Coming China Wars; and (on order from Amazon) Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Mindless capitalist pig-ism is just that ... mindless. I've been a believer so long (35 years, I was somewhat collectivist in the 60s, not hippie, but a devotee of John Kenneth Galbraith, whom I now call "the man who got everything wrong;" now I'm true blue Hayek-ian) that I need to challenge my beliefs, rough myself up. Will let you know from time to time how it's coming.

4. Taxachusetts. On my way back to my part-time Boston home yesterday, after a root canal, I was struck by the obvious—how damn many colleges and universities there are in this town. After the procedure I stopped at a Starbucks inside the Boston University Barnes & Noble. A few blocks later I dropped into another bookstore (true addiction), this one associated with Berklee College of Music. (Walked out with a Berklee Hockey bball cap—bball caps another addiction.) Then an optometry college. Then etc. All in the space of a 45-minute walk.

It may be Taxachussetts, but once again—three in a row since it started—Massachusetts, underpinned by Boston-Cambridge, ranked #1 on the Milken Institute's very sophisticated evaluation-index of the U.S.'s "top technology incubators." (FYI, Maryland, Colorado, and CA were #s 2, 3, & 4.) Tax rates or not, the joint is a/the hotbed of profitable, high-growth intellectual activity. (MA & CA account for 50% of the World's Top Ten universities.) (Interestingly, and perhaps contrary to conventional wisdom, MA also gets very high marks on many-most social indicators, such as 2nd lowest divorce rate in the U.S.—FYI, D.C., PA, and IL #s 1, 3, 4.)

5. Kluge. Nudge. Sway. All terrific books. The world ain't rational my friends! (Duh.) (Even the economists now agree; God may not be dead as Nietzsche predicted, but "rational man" is in the ICU and a thunderstorm just knocked out the respirator's power.) (Godfathers of all this: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. See: Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky.) (My pick of picks, as you probably know by now, are Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan.)

… And The Other

It's August,* for heaven's sake. Turn your computer/s, blackberry, cellphone/s, and all other electronic handcuffs off for one bloody week. (The D.T.s should only last for a day or two.) (Call this Tom Peters' new book, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: One True Thing You Need to Know Now.)

(*I'll rerun this on 1 February 09 for our South of the Equator friends.)

The Boss

Off to see Bruce Springsteen tonight—68,000 of us stuffed into Gillette Stadium. Thunderstorms predicted. Let you know how it all turns out on Monday.