This picture was on a birthday card I received last week. It is a real photo of Rolland “Rollie” Free setting the motorcycle land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats September 13, 1948 eleven months after I was born. Rollie Free raced Indian motorcycles before World War II. He set a record at 111 […]
I wrote a book on consulting. I am writing another book on leading change. This quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower is in both books. “In planning for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable” This quote is attributed to Eisenhower in Richard Nixon’s book Six Crises. It is also […]
This picture is a cartoon archetype. A guru, hermit, wiseman sits before the mouth of a cave high in the mountains. Before him sits a young seeker, a supplicant, whose backpack indicates he has climbed high into the mountains looking for answers to his burning question: “What is the meaning of life?” The punchlines almost […]
To tell you the truth, I’m exhausted. I mean, I did manage to hold my pee till first light, and that seemed to make my man happy, but it wasn’t easy. I mean, I am so thirsty all the time and I drank a whole bowl since bedtime. But wait, I’m forgetting my manners. Hello, […]
The roots of a love affair When I was a pre-teen, I read a book about Doug, an American teenager immersed in hot rod culture. The story was about Doug finding himself, but was full of descriptions of bored-out V8s and chopped and channeled old Fords, accompanied in my memory by Chuck Berry songs, “. […]
Carl asks “Why? Whaddyer tryin’ t’be an Influencer or sumtin’?” Carl, a voice from my youth, not a friend exactly, just someone I used to know, questioned why I write this blog, and post on LinkedIn, and Medium, and BizCatalyst 360. He couldn’t understand my motivation. Truthfully, I was having a difficult time explaining it. […]
“I forgot how to pack!” My wife and I don’t travel as much as I imagined we would when I retired in 2018. Part of that is on me. I travelled for a living for almost forty years and the last thing I was interested in was another trip on an airplane or another night […]
Immigrants “That dust was everywhere. It got in your eyes, up your nose so you couldn’t draw a breath. So you breathed through your mouth and the grit was always on your teeth and crunched with everything you ate. The quarry slowed and there were no jobs, and then – America, the land of golden […]
I chose to become an independent consultant twice in my lifetime consulting career. I must have liked it because I was independent in various forms for twenty-three of my thirty-seven years in the field. The first time my boss gave me the opportunity to go on contract for a year, work about half-time, control my […]
First Love My first girlfriend was named Coke, not what you’re thinking. We weren’t fifteen year-old white powder fiends. Her real name was Carolyn. The nickname came from her first attempts at saying her name, but it stuck and she introduced herself, “Hi my name is Carolyn, but I’m called Coke.” We hung out after […]
