Morning Humvee Ride
We got a little, unexpected blessing this morning. Our neighbor stopped by in his Humvee and took us for a ride. As many of you know, one of Chuck's passions is to get a Hummer. Riding in a military Humvee on a Saturday morning was a grand experieince. I'm still rooting for the H2, but am open to negotiations. Some of my friends at work had told me that Hummers were pretty uncomfortable. I found the stability of the H1's ride to be better than our 4-wheel drive Chevrolet pick up truck. I'll keep you posted.

Have You Seen Them?
Whoa! I walked by a large framed picture in my doctor's office today. There were about 40 little photographs of babies, but wait, were they? Little bronze babies? Looked a little like baby Oscar statues in fetal positions. Oh, right, fetal positions.

They were fetal images made by the newest 4D sonogram technology. I'm tempted to link a photo here, but if you want to see one, a quick Google search using the keyword phrase "4D sonogram" will bring a long list for your viewing pleasure. The quality is absolutely unbelievable!

A few weeks ago, I saw an interesting chart in the Denver Post displaying several columns and rows of heart attack risks and remedies. (My apologies for not remembering the exact info.) The point was if your cholesterol is xxx, you need this amount of exercise to avoid problems. In other words, there was no hyper "we're all gonna die from fat consumption!" The chart simply gave you offsetting remedies for your specific risk factors. I noticed how positively I responded to the approach. (If I dig up the chart, I'll update this entry.)

How I wish we would use information more often to explain our prolife position instead of the typical emotionally charged phrases, such as "murdering babies.". Of course, there are other points to the debate besides how the fetuses look, but the visual impact of these 4D sonograms is certainly powerful. Anyway, this type of picture will save a thousand words in your next "blob of tissue" debate.

Abortion is a medical procedure and the patient should have all of the available information before making an informed choice.

Corporate Challenges
Cox Cable is considering going private rather than staying a publicly traded company. I find this fascinating. As many of you know I was previously a manager in a Fortune 500 company. One of my theories in early 2004 was that some companies might eventually return to being privately held. In other words, not beholding to Wall Street. (Am I a prophet or what?)

Satisfying your customers should be paramount in conducting any business. Except in a large, publicly traded company, who is your customer? Certainly, the stockholders. However, corporations must spend a lot of time trying to make their employees happy. And let us not forget about the real customers (Those people actually giving you their money). You can't please all of the people all of the time. You can rotate the needs of various customer groups, but you still can't make everyone happy forever. Which is what sets up the rise and fall of a business.

Another challenge "too many customers to answer to" sets up is quality problems. Have you noticed how "normal" it has become to have a problem with a product or service. Businesses have elaborate procedures and processes to handle returns. Why? Because they happen so frequently. Store employees never understand why I get so upset when service or product quality go bad. They give me a replacement product or redo the service with no questions asked. I'm the only one who seems to care about my time.

I have come to believe that it is the normal evolution of capitalism for quality to decline. While building your business, good quality is fairly critical. However, once a company is established, and is making money, they implement "friendly return policies" and actually get away with lowering the quality a bit. (Especially if they also lower the price.)

I must admit that have noticed a difference in "bargain" stores and upscale stores. Perhaps I'm spending too much time in bargain stores since I lost my job. When I lived in California, I thought this bad service and product craziness was simply "LA Stress Syndrome." However in the ten years we've lived in Colorado, I've seen customer service, as well as product quality decline. Well, I assure you, if you shop at one of my online businesses, we will always strive to deliver the best quality possible. Our prices aren't the cheapest, but returns are very rare. Our customers are very happy. No plans in the near future for a public offering.

I guess I have slightly misunderstood the goal of many businesses. They are in existence to make money, which I would assume would be accomplished by making me and the other customers happy. Think about it. If the business is making money, even if the quality is a little less than perfect, does the business care? If they're profitable, does it matter that some customers walk away unhappy.

An industry example is Hollywood films. They make movies to make money. Sometimes this overlaps with pleasing their audience and making the best quality films possible. However, their goal is to make money. The short answer to the question "Why doesn't Hollywood make better movies?" is because "great" movies don't always make money.

Sorry for the rant, but service and product quality are so very important to me. Guess I'll have to wait until I get to Heaven for good service and products.

First Church of the Introvert
Have you ever noticed how many Protestant churches have worship services designed for Extroverts? I have a request to make to the leaders of churches: Don't forget the introverts. All of us are not comfortable shouting out a prayer request in church. I realize that some pastors like the interaction, however, make sure you've thought of us quiet ones, too. We want to participate, but we'd probably rather write a prayer request.

Extroverts like attention and even need it. They also need to hear themselves speak to know what they think. That doesn't bother me a bit. I'm glad they're talking, so I don't have to. But remember that introverts can have good ideas, too. The difference is we have them the next day when church is over. We are sometimes embarrassed by attention and don't really need much of it in public.

The world is set up for extroverts, but the church doesn't have to be.

A Stat That Makes Sense
I heard a stat in my pastor's sermon this week that was not a "good news" stat, but one that made a lot of sense to me. I keep hearing at writer's conferences that book sales are increasing. The writer audience applauds, but this stat never rings true for me because people are exhausted. We have so little time.

The stat I heard at church was that although book sales are up, Americans read 20% less than they did 20 years ago. Now I get it. We buy more books, but don't read them. I have so many books that I've never read, but intend to. And I keep buying more. I also borrow from friends and get loans from the library, but never have time to read them all.

Why do I care? I struggle with the decision of what to write. I write just about everything, except poetry and feel I need a writing focus. The big struggle is always "Do I make this story a screenplay or a novel?"

Watching TV and movies is much more passive than reading, so I hate to say it, but as time goes on, we will all watch our entertainment more than read it, especially with the advent of digital technologies. Many of these entertainment products will be local access TV and straight-to-DVD movies. Can't wait to see if I'm right. I won't stop writing novels, but I am structuring them so I can rewrite them easily as screenplays.

Job Creation Data Gathering
Newscasts frequently report the number of jobs created for the previous month. I assumed that the numbers were coming from all U.S. companies with employees. Yesterday, I learned that this number is taken from major corporations, not all businesses (Not even a sample of all businesses). Even more disturbing, these major corps provide less than 1% of all jobs in this country and are never the source of the most jobs in the U.S.

I plan to do further research on this data gathering claim. The source was a business seminar. I'll let you know if I learn anything different and would appreciate hearing from you, if you have further information.

Loving Yourself First?
My pastor, Brian Young, is preaching a wonderful series about the Christian concept of "grace." In the midst of several profound points, he gave one of the best analogies I've ever heard about "loving."

He quoted a popular saying of our day, "You can't love anyone else until you learn to love yourself." I've bought that line for years. He reminded us that loving God was indeed the greatest love we could experience. His point was if we rest in God's love, our focus is on Him rather than ourselves. Neat concept, huh?

He left the congregation with a beautiful image that I'd like to share with you. He said that loving ourselves first instead of loving God first, would be like standing before the Grand Canyon and exalting yourself. "I'm so beautiful." "I'm so great." "I just can't believe my glory!"

This visual example just won't go away. Thanks, Brian!