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.)

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!

Odds are zero.
Illogical.
Quixotic.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.