A Lifetime of Friends...

1961 was a decent year I suppose.  It was the last year that can be read the same way - upside down or right side up - until 6009 that is. 
             
That year, the United States inaugurated a new president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  Construction of the Berlin Wall began.  The cold war was in full bloom.

The average salary was only $5,300 but the average house cost $12,600 (less than 2 ½ times the average salary).  Then again...the average house was only 1100 square feet...no gated communities...no air conditioning...no swimming pool.

Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, was the first man in space.  TWA showed the first in-flight movie.  Pampers disposable diapers were introduced. 

The top grossing movie in 1961 was the Disney animated film "101 Dalmatians" raking in a cool $68.6M as compared with the second place film "West Side Story" with a paltry $19.6M (although West Side Story did win the Oscar for the best picture of the year).  Tossin’ and Turnin’ by Bobby Lewis topped the music charts all summer long.  Westerns were all the rage on television...Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Wagon Train ruled the Nielsen rating that year.

1961 was also the year that several of my friends were born into the world...a world where a sitting President urged people to build bomb shelters in their backyards, attempted to invade Cuba, and had a nuclear stand-off with communism but yet also founded the Peace Corps to help the less fortunate of the world.

I was driving to work this week thinking about all the people I know who are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their birth in 2011.  I began to wonder about the hierarchy of people who populate our lives and attempted to order their significance.  The people are neatly arranged in a pyramid with only a small handful of people on the top and billions of people on the bottom.  Now I’m sure that there are other ways to categorize people...but here’s my way:

1. Best Friends Forever - These are the people we attended Kindergarten with 45 years ago...went off to summer camp with...double dated with on prom night...joined the same fraternity while away at college...were in each other’s weddings (at least your first weddings), babysat our kids when we needed a quiet night out with our spouse and helped us to tend for our aging parents (those same parents who were perhaps our Little League coaches or Girl Scout leaders).  These are people you played with in the morning, fought with in the afternoon, and laughed with until your mom told the both of you to "be quiet and go to bed".  They know us sometimes better than we know ourselves.  These are the same friends who will someday give the moving eulogy at your funeral...they’re with you for the entire cycle of life.  Forever.
2. Friends - These are the people we have many common interests or years of shared experiences with.  They are people whom we care deeply about and try our best to remain in contact with despite our busy schedules.  These are the friends we play poker with a few times a year...watch our favorite sports teams with on a Saturday afternoon...and drag to the local tavern to sip a few beers on a "boy’s night" out...with them, we reminisce about past adventures and/or old mutual friends that you just ran into at the airport.  These are people who helped us to create great memories.  These are the people who weave seamlessly in and out of our lives. These are the people who help us to celebrate life and death.
3. Acquaintances - These are people we know...but really don’t spend much time with, other than perhaps seeing them at our kids’ Christmas pageant or waving to them as they drive past our house.  It isn’t that we dislike them...we just don’t have the time to give them much thought.  They are typically really nice people but we never really made a connection with them, created any memorable adventures, or had a lot of shared experiences (other than perhaps the experience of sharing the driving duty in the morning carpool).  We feel uncomfortable asking acquaintances for favors.  We knew these people in the past but our lives have now separated. 
4. ??? - These are people who we know of...but we really don’t know.  They may be known to us because of their celebrity such as a movie star or local sports hero.  They may be people that our other friends talk about (which I suppose is another form of celebrity).  We may have read about them and the lives that they lead in a book or newspaper.  We might read their blog each week.  They may be that person who’s name we see on the guest register - the one that rests on the receptionist’s desk of a local manufacturing company - as we ask ourselves..."who is this person who is always visiting all my customers?".  We don’t know them...but would be open to perhaps meeting them if the opportunity presents itself.
5. Strangers - These are people we don’t know and who do not know us.  Strangers constitute the overwhelming majority of the people in the world.  There are approximately 6 billion people who inhabit the earth and if you combine all of the people in the above 4 categories...you may be able to estimate that they represent perhaps no more than 50 thousand people (these are all the people you’ve ever met or have a certain familiarity with over the course of a lifetime)...this leaves us some 5,999,950,000 strangers still to meet (although I believe that roughly a third of those people do have a Facebook account).

I’m somewhat unsure as to what to call the people in between acquaintances and strangers.  Those people you know of...but haven’t met yet.  In preparing for this blog, I actually wrote to the folks at the PBS’s radio show "A Way with Words" trying to see if they had a good word for these people.  Unexpectedly, I received no response...nothing...nada.  Oh well...I guess one day I’ll need to coin a new word for this group of people (drop me a note if you know of such a word).

The group of people that I didn’t include in the above but who could be dispersed equally in all five categories are relatives.  These are people who share our DNA.  They may be our BFF twin sister or a simply a far distant relative that you didn’t even know existed.  Placing relative in the pyramid is tricky.

Each and every day I feel blessed to have so many great friends and acquaintances.  They came from blood, school, work and the neighborhood.  With them, I’ve built a lifetime of memories all within only a "half-a-lifetime" time period (or at least I hope so).

It makes me happy to be invited to toast their milestones and celebrate friendship this year.

This weekend, I hope you’re spending your time with the people who bring you joy and happiness whether at a 50th birthday party or just sitting around doing nothing.
           
Thank you very much for supporting OptiFuse where we hope to be counted as one of your friends one day.

Football is back...

It’s now the end of summer so that means two things...the kids go back to school and football season begins. 

Now I’ve never been a fantasy football player and in fact, I don’t even know the rules, but I do participate in a friendly NFL football pool where my friends and I attempt to pick the winning teams against the point-spread each week. The cost for the entire season is menial ($5 per week) and usually I just try to make my money back each season.

It does, however, make watching games I typically have no interest in watching a bit more interesting.

It also gives me reason to listen to the "supposed experts" when selecting my teams each week as I have very little knowledge in most teams and/or players. 

I say "supposed experts" because in reality, no one really knows who will win a particular game (especially against an evening factor like a point spread). Sure the better teams will generally win more games over the course of a season than lesser teams but one never knows exactly week to week.

This also brings to mind...why is it that some teams are simply better than most of the competition year in and year out?

Unlike college football, each team in the NFL has about the same amount of money to spend on their players and facilities (I’ll talk about the disparity of college athletics in another blog). So it’s not about money...

Additionally, the worse a team does in one year...the better its draft picks are the following year. So it’s not about opportunity to get premier players (like it is in Major League Baseball or Premier European football).

The reason, I believe, that certain NFL teams are perennial winners is based on their organization and management. They simply have a winning philosophy, a more selective eye for selecting talent, better coaching, and are better at preparing for a game.

This leads players and coaches to know what is expected of them at all times, the creation of game strategies that help to minimize deficiencies and to exploit the weaknesses of opponents, and lots of hard work and practice that helps to forge talent into skills and make very gifted athletes better.

The better prepared player, typically executes better during a game.

There will always be mistakes made along the way, but the quality teams are able to dissect the problem areas and learn from these mistakes so that they are not repeated in the future.

Lastly, the coaching staff knows exactly how to motivate their players in a way that gives the players the respect of being a professional player yet lets them know that they are a part of a larger team that needs individual contributions but also needs team cohesiveness to win.

Those same key attributes that produce perennial winning football teams are also the same characteristics of a quality business. 

A first-rate company starts, first and foremost, with quality leadership. It is this leadership that sets the tone and direction for the organization. It is typically a top-down structure but one that also embraces the opinions of others within the organization. 

The key element of an exceptional company is its innate ability to attract and select talented management and employees. Quality organizations (be it professional football or software design), know that it takes talent and attitude to win. 

Hire people for talent and attitude, and then train for skills.

With the proper management and employees in place, the next key to a successful organization is preparation and training. Management’s key job responsibility in any organization is to create strategy, communicate that strategy to the rest of the team, and then consistently train their staff to improve their performance and production. 

For example, it should NEVER be the sales manager’s job function to grow sales. Their primary goal is to grow sales people NOT sales (I attribute this piece of great advice to my friend Jack Daly, who in my opinion is the best sales trainer I’ve ever come to know).

The winning team diligently prepares itself for the game that lay ahead...but the game isn’t won in the locker room...it is won on the field. Therefore it means nothing to be well prepared but not execute. Execution is the culmination of preparation. Even with the best management, the best strategies, the best training, and the best preparation...the game is still won or lost on the field.

Mistakes do happen, sales and customers are lost, there are bugs in the code or flaws in the product design, there are shipments that don’t go out on time or items that are in the system but can’t be located in the warehouse, there are computers that go down and simply bad hires. It happens.

Even the best companies make mistakes...New Coke...Apple Lisa...ANY first version of a Microsoft product...the Edsel...

Quality companies try to learn from those mistakes and make corrections so that they never happen again. Great football teams watch and dissect game films in order to discover deficiencies and areas that need improvement. The best companies are constantly monitoring their performance against key indicators and making improvements within their organization. 

Companies like Dell Computers, Wal-Mart, and Amazon are constantly improving their processes to ensure that problems and costs are reduced and efficiency and productivity are increased. This attention to problem correction is what makes them leaders in their field.

The competition to win is fiercer than ever as it now comes from every place on earth with those willing to work harder, smarter and for less money than others. The only hope for a company to succeed is to create a better organization (top to bottom) than the competition, diligently prepare and train, execute on a daily basis, and then make corrections in order to prevent mistakes and increase efficiencies. 

Like a game plan on a chalkboard...the theory is easy...

Execution is hard. It takes attitude, dedication and a willingness to win.

To some, the efforts are worth the rewards.

Thank you very much for supporting OptiFuse where we wish you the best of luck in building your fantasy team (or company). 

Music to the Ears

Last week I was out riding my bicycle, trying my best to get myself in shape for an upcoming ride from San Francisco to San Diego. 

One of the glaring deficiencies of my riding is my ability to climb long hills. Unfortunately, the ride down the coast will require me to transverse a lot of hills...day in and day out...and frankly I’m very concerned that I won’t be ready (nothing is as embarrassing as watching a cyclist walk his bike up a long hill).

Therefore, I decided that it is imperative that I do some additional hill training during the next few weeks before my long ride down the coast. So last week, I left work a bit early in order to get in a mid-week climbing workout.

The hill I selected is about 4 miles from my home (which makes for a good warm up) and allows me to ascend about 750 feet over 3 miles at about a 5% grade (a decent size hill for the non-riders who are reading this...but it is in no way to be confused with some of the extreme hills of the Tour de France). Nonetheless, I figured if I could go up and down the hill three times, it would make for a good workout.

Along the way to the base of the hill, I ran into a cycling friend who was on his way to another destination. We started talking as we rode up the hill and before too long we found ourselves at the top of the mountain (hill).

At the top, I was surely breathing hard but I hardly noticed it because of the distraction of the conversation I had with my friend along the way. I wished him a safe ride and proceeded to go back down the hill for my second attempt.

Unlike the first time, the repeat visit up the hill was a grind. Not only was I a bit tired from my first attempt, I also didn’t have the distraction of conversation. The rate of climbing was markedly slower than my first trip. There was pain in my legs which was translated to the grimace on my face.

After heading down the hill for my last hill repeat, I remembered that I had packed my iPod with me. I inserted the ear-buds and tuned it to my favorite riding music.

Although I had already ridden up the hill twice before, with the music beating, my last try up the hill seemed almost easier than the first time. Each pedal stroke was in synch with the beat of the song playing. The music helped me to replace the pained expression on my face with a smile. My attitude went from dread, to triumph in a mere 3 miles.

The music transformed my experience from a painful grind up the hill to that of accomplishment.

Why is it that music effects our moods in such an extreme way? The environment didn’t change (I was still on my bike...climbing a hill at the end of the day), yet something in my attitude changed.

My experience that day caused me to reflect a bit about how music really affects us.

Music can have a calming effect or a stimulating effect (like on my recent ride). 

Music can cause us to remember events of the past. It can bring tears of pain or tears of joy to our eyes. 

It can make us angry (there seems to be a lot of anger in rap music), it can make us happy, it can make us thoughtful, reflective, or nostalgic.

Music is a common ground among all people of the world and helps us to create cultural bridges. Music is something we can agree on and share from one population to another.

Music can make a movie better by adding depth, suspense, or drama. It can help to tell a story as in opera or a Broadway musical.

Attend any religious service and you will find people rejoicing with music.

My daughter enjoys listening to classical music when she studies (she’s currently a college student) because she says it makes her think better.

Many times the same song can fill our head the entire day...perhaps it was the song that woke us up in the morning from our clock-radio alarm...maybe it was the song we played in our night time dreams (doesn’t everyone’s dreams have a soundtrack?)...phychologists even have a name for this phenomenon...they call it an "earworm".

Back when I was a kid, there was really only one method to get your music. You heard a song on the radio and if you liked it, you went out and purchased the single or perhaps the entire record album. Record companies and radio stations controlled what music we heard and subsequently purchased.

Today there are so many options when it comes to music. Music is still available on the radio, but it can also be delivered via satellite or the internet. 

Many different internet sites, such as Pandora, Slacker, Live365 and Jango, allow you to program your own individual and unique musical preferences, even if those preferences change on a moment’s notice, and stream it to your computer or smartphone. 

Using services like iTunes, you are no longer forced to purchase an entire album but can rather buy any individual song that strikes you for about one dollar. 

Portable listening devices such as iPods, smart phones, and portable satellite radio receivers allow us to take our music with us whether we are driving in the car, hiking in the mountains, or out on the road with our bikes.

I can’t imagine living in a world without music. 

Everyone in the world has music inside of them and that may ultimately, one day, bring us the peace we covet. 

Thank you very much for supporting OptiFuse where we desire to stay in tune with what you’re thinking.