I like the ride sharing business and use both Lyft and Uber, probably more Uber. It is very convenient when I have to go downtown for a meeting. It is cheaper than the cost of parking and less stressful.
I am concerned about the prospect of Uber ever — EVER — becoming profitable. You have to ask yourself how a company can come public at a huge value when they are neither profitable nor are they likely to be in the near term.
Bit of warm weather in the ATX which makes me get out and do my outside chores first thing before the sun sets things ablaze. Going to be 103F today, but I don’t believe it.
Get a call from a CEO, who says, “I have this burning in my gut all the time. Butterflies and napalm.”
Nice turn of a phrase. I laugh to myself because I never laugh at CEOs. Not a good practice, ungentlemanly.
So, he continues, “Does it ever get better? You were a CEO for 33 years, when did it all settle down and the flaming butterflies took a vacation?”
I wanted to comfort him, but I always speak the truth, so I hesitated for a second.
“They never go away,” I said in my most comforting Saint Michael the Archangel voice. “You know how sometimes when we discuss one of the List of Horribles and I tell you, ‘Sorry, that’s normal.’?”
“Yes, you also say the only normal people are the ones we don’t know very well. I get that,” says the CEO. “When did the flaming butterflies go away and everything was peaceful, calm, and you didn’t lay awake in bed thinking about things? Tormented by things?”
“Sorry, amigo,” I said. “They never go away. In fact, what you see as butterflies, flaming butterflies even. They become condors. Big, vicious condors with enormous talons that rip your guts apart while they are bathing in acid. On bad nights, you can feel their talons slicing and the acid flowing into your abdomen. When you scale, your problems scale with you.”
If you are born in America that first day you will have much of your future defined by the family into which you have arrived. There are no do-overs or Mulligans.
The first question is this — were you actually born into a family?
As you can see, a substantial portion of babies are not born into a nuclear family — a mother and a father in a stable relationship that will foster the development of a child.
The obvious first impact is that a single-parent household is limited in the number of person hours they can dedicate to child rearing.
A Tactical Officer who had an influence on me when I was a cadet at Virginia Military Institute died back in March. I didn’t find out about it until the other day. This man had a profound impact on my life.
His passing made me think about what I call “organizational mentoring.” It is not an exact thing, but I think it is something worthy of discussion.
In our lives, we join organizations either voluntarily or involuntarily. They are places like schools, sports teams, churches, clubs, and other organizations that impart structure and discipline into our lives. There is something called MeetUp that exists to create a critical mass of folks with similar interests.
We long to be with people like ourselves.
Not every organization provides a platform for organizational mentoring. In my life, it was the church, work, school, the Army, and business. I am talking about a time after I was away from home and my parents.
I want to take a second and explore the power of mentoring and organization when I went off to college at Virginia Military Institute. I had never seen VMI when I arrived on the bus.
It looks like a prison.
That’s Stonewall Jackson and the Rockbridge Battery of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — combat veterans of the Mexican War and the Civil War.
Allow me to admit up front that I am a closet supporter of a $15 minimum wage. I don’t think it is a smart policy, but I like the idea. Unfortunately, it has been tried in several locations, the report card is in, and the results are not good.
A good number of reliable sources prophesied that a $15 minimum wage would devastate the restaurant business whereat that wage is applicable to kitchen workers, bus boys, servers, and even some cooks.
Turns out those prophesies were correct. Let’s take a look at New York City restaurants. This chart comes from an American Enterprise Institute publication by Mark J Perry that was sent to me by my pal Jeff Carter.
So, I’m reading a few things and I stumble on this bat shit crazy story from a former FBI guy, Frank Figliuzzi, about how President Donald J Trump is signalling to Nazis, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists “Heil Hitler!” with his choice of the term for which government flags will be flown at half mast to honor the recent murder victims in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas.
Let me step back for a second: There is NOTHING funny, clever, or wise about making gratuitous references to Hitler, a truly evil person who unleashed Hell on earth. It is repugnant.
He — this Frank Figliuzzi in his blue suit, blue shirt, coordinated tie, sleek haircut — looks like a normal enough guy, right? And, he was with the FBI, right?
Look at his mouth. Let me tell you about the words that came out of that nasty mouth. Guy says President Trump is sending “coded messages” to Nazis, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. This guy.
One of the best bits of advice I ever received was to practice the same way I intended to play — good advice when pertaining to sports, the military, and business.
Startups are often given a pass for not following sound practices.
“Hell, they’re just startups.”
You may remember the Gillette ad made in the aftermath of peak #MeToo that scolded American males about what it meant to be a “man” in the modern, toxic masculinity, #MeToo, woke world in which we now live.
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