Musings at Altitude

I don’t have time to write this morning…sorry…have to make a burrito run!

There is nothing quite like breakfast burritos to feed and fuel a team!

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Yesterday, I heard cheers.  I saw jubilant tears.  I saw joy beyond belief.  I saw the exhaustion of waiting in eager anticipation for something to come turn into complete rejuvenation in the blink of an eye.

Yesterday, after a year of work and months of waiting, the highly anticipated email was sent announcing the winner of an incredibly important contract providing significantly meaningful services to our customer.

And that email came to us.  And then the congratulatory call followed.  And then the announcement to our team occurred.  And the party started!

The joy with victory is intense.  We didn’t pop champagne bottles, but we certainly shared the same level of emotional celebration that would come from winning a championship.  This was that kind of important victory!

In business, you win some, and you lose some.  You hope you win more than you lose, but that’s not the norm.  You hope the value you can provide comes across clearly and meaningfully in what you propose, but often times the price trumps the value and the value gets lost in the dollars.  And in almost every case, you don’t know where you really stand until that email and call come.  Thus the tension.  Thus the incredible anxiety and the roller coaster of emotion that leads up to that day of announcement. 

And we won!  It’s amazing to see the elation of those who worked so hard for so long to achieve such a dramatically important victory for the company.

WOW, it’s good to win!

PS.  The celebration will be short though,because delivering against contract expectations begins almost immediately!  We’ll smile some more today, but then we’ll have to get to work.  In sports, training camp is several months after a champion is crowned.  Quite often in business, however, capture moves to phase in and delivery in weeks not months.  That’s the case for us.  We certainly can feel good, but we have a new team to hire and inspire and a new customer to serve!

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That last posting has created what I can only characterize as grave concern for my life at our home.  All I did was post a “natural remedy” to a continuing problem, and my “just trying to help” is not helping at all.  I didn’t even talk about the size of the cabbage that would be needed! 

In many ways, my “just trying to help” is fueling the fires that already exist and creating more heat at a time when the world really needs to cool off!   

So from now on, I have to talk in code.  I’ll use the following:

TTICTA – “that thing I can’t talk about”

BTIR – “body temperature is rising”

WMSPMLAR – “wild mood swings put my life at risk”

NHN – “need help now”

I’ve been watching commercials on TV about intervention.  This would make a pretty amazing TV show.  I can see the plot…TTICTA woman dragged from home wrapped tightly in blankets and immersed in tank full of ice…ice melts…more ice added…ice melts faster than ice can be added…studio floods…entire city power grid goes down from short circuits caused by rapidly melting ice…chaos reigns throughout city…the show could be called “Naturally Occurring Catastrophes”.  I’m sure there’d be lots of candidates.  I can name at least one!

If I ever use NHN, please don’t hesitate…mobilize all available assets to save me.

And please don’t anger “it” in any way through your calls, emails or comments to this posting.

We need to let things settle down just a bit!

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Denise and I have been apart a lot recently with both of us traveling, me for business and her to visit the remotely located grandkid.  And last night I was reminded that the perimenopausal symptoms can last up to 4 years, as I was shivering in the bed with the window open and she was comfortably taking in the cold night air.  There is an upside to this though – I think I lost 3 pounds from all the shivering.  I sense a new weight loss program in the works focused around opening all the windows at night and shivering yourself to lower weight and increased health!

On a serious note though, I failed to mention a couple weeks ago that I had the great pleasure of going out to dinner with several corporate family members (all females), and the conversation somewhat unnaturally turned to my blogs on living with a perimenopausal wife.  We quickly got through the sure to be heard, “You really blogged on that?” and “You’re still alive?”, and then we got serious.  One of the listeners asked, “Have you tried cabbage leaves?”  That really got my attention.  She went on to say that rumor has it that if you put cabbage leaves over the breasts of the one suffering the perimenopausal conditions, the conditions are eased.  I quickly wondered if the cabbage leaves needed to be frozen – that would make sense – although the cabbage would be warm and wilted within minutes and the conditions I’m sure would remain.  But she assured me it was just room temperature cabbage leaves and no special treatment required. 

I’m not making this up…this is really true!

So I’ve been pondering on this one for two weeks now and just don’t know how to break it to Denise.  I’m very worried about what she will do if I show up in the room at night with two big cabbage leaves in my hands!  It’s certainly a life threatening move on my part. 

But desperate men do desperate things!

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The rain came and quickly went, and now the sun is back out again.

But there is something very troubling that is growing in the street right in front of our home:

We used to have just a slight dip in the road, right on top of where the sewer pipes run.  In fact, you can see the manhole cover for that main pipe, just to the left of this new body of water growing in our street.

In the last few months, that dip has become an increasingly deep hole that is now a small pond when it rains.

I remember talking with our builder when he was putting in the connecting pipes into that main sewage line.  I always worried about not having a big enough pipe coming out of our house (we do have some people in this house that could easily fill a small pipe), and I certainly didn’t want a backup in that 4 inch pipe.  I never anticipated a possible leak or break in the main line…and I certainly hope that’s not what this is.

In business, we have “continuity of business operations” plans.  I think I need to seriously think through a “continuity of use of the facilities” plan.

I’d hate to have to plan my use of “the facilities” well in advance so I could drive elsewhere instead of using mine at home, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be caught “facilities-less” if indeed we had a catastrophic failure in the main sewer line.

I wonder what my neighbors would think if we put a portable toilet out back…just in case…for emergency purposes only…and even let them use it if a total shut down did indeed occur while they dug up our street. 

It might be like Noah building the ark.  I’d be scoffed at for being proactive and planning ahead.  That’s the norm nowadays.  But I could be a real hero if indeed “the facilities” were shut down in all of our homes.  It might be a pretty long line though.

I may need to think about this just a little bit more!

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I’ve been spending time this afternoon out on the front porch, watching the storm clouds move in, and waiting for that inevitable flash of lightning followed by the boom from the thunder.  I’m not lucky enough to get the lightning in a picture, but the clouds show some of the menacing nature of the rapidly approaching afternoon shower:

Even as I type this, the wind is picking up.  The birds have gone silent, and the pigeons that sit so mockingly on our roof have sought shelter somewhere else this time.

I mentioned earlier today about the hail storm from yesterday.  Not so coincidentally, I finally went through some old mail this afternoon, and I got a letter from our insurance company.  They typically send big packages with lots of pages, so I was curious as to what a simple, one page letter might be.  It started out with a wonderful reminder that they try to keep things affordable for all of us that use them as a carrier.  It then immediately followed with, “we’re going to raise your deductible for hail coverage to keep your current costs the same.”  That didn’t really bother me…till I looked at the fine print…and they’ve raised the deductible from $2,000 to over $8,000!  I guess that hail storm wasn’t such a fluke.  Maybe I just haven’t been noticing!

So I’m going to go back out front and watch some more of this storm!  If it’s going to cost me $8,000 out of pocket to fix my roof if I get damage from a hail storm, I want to be out there watching and get $8,000 worth of excitement from watching the storm!

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I landed in Denver at 6:10 in the morning yesterday after the “redeye” flight out of Anchorage.  It was a beautiful morning, about 60 degrees, and a wonderful reminder of the majestic nature of the mountains.  As I drove south, about 10 miles north of Colorado Springs the sunshine turned to a pretty dense cloud deck that appeared to be sitting just above the city.  It was dark and quite ominous in places, and I had to use lights in the house at 8:00 in the morning to read anything.

As the day went on, the clouds lifted and the sun returned, so I rushed outside to mow the yard knowing that one should never “wait till later” when given the gift of sunshine in the early afternoon in Colorado!

Sure enough, the gift was only a few hours long, and by late afternoon or early evening, this was happening:

Which then resulted in this:

But in Colorado, what may be happening now may be a distant memory just a while later.  So this morning, only 12 hours from the hail storm, we have this:

With one stubborn piece of evidence about the hail storm that passed:

In Genesis 8:22, we have God’s promise:

As long as the earth endures,

seedtime and harvest,

cold and heat,

summer and winter,

day and night

will never cease.

In Colorado, we see that promise of a never ending cycle of seasons in less than 24 hours.

It’s beautiful.  It’s one of those many things that make Colorado so special.

And the anticipation of what may or may not come just adds to the excitement of every single day!

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I’ve been in day long meetings for 3 straight days now, and there were donuts & danish in the morning, a plethora of great options at lunch, and then a robust and deep fried dinner both Monday and Tuesday.  So I got back to the hotel tonight and decided I needed to work for my dinner.

So I walked…and walked…and walked.  Out in front of the hotel was a lake.  It ended up being a fairly big lake.  And in fact, the lake ended up also being a runway:

And it ended up being a very big runway at that, and as I walked around it, it took me all the way to this:

And as I kept walking, I found this:

And I kept walking and then saw this:

And because I walked 4 miles at a fairly brisk pace (interrupted only by a few photos), I rewarded myself with this:

And yes, life is good!

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Denise made me cry today…for good reasons and not bad…and I don’t cry very much.

You can see why at www.necascorner.blogspot.com.

You’ll need a tissue too.

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I’m in Anchorage this week, feeling every bit of the itinerant worker that I really am.  I’m only getting up here about every 2 months now, sometimes every 3.  At one time, I was coming up 2 or 3 times a month, and it was really wearing me down.  Every 2 or 3 months seems like the right timing.

But even though I’m traveling to Anchorage much less frequently now, some things stay the same:

(1) I still find a beautiful flower on my desk (yep, I still have a desk) every time I show up in the office

(2) I still find hugs and smiles when I tour the hallways

(3) I still sense excitement in some and see the passion in others

(4) I still hear the concerns and the challenges that come with growth and increasing bureaucracy

(5) I still hear the constant churning of the copying machines and printers in preparation for board meetings and major briefings

(6) And I still sense that we’ve got a long way to go to transition from that “small company that could…” to that “large company that is…”

I first started coming up here in 2003, and the old adage applies perfectly – “some things change, but lots of things remain the same”.

I think the biggest difference is the buzz…when we were small and growth was contagious, the buzz was intoxicating.

Today, we’re at least 6 times bigger than we were 6 years ago, and the buzz seems much more process than passion driven.  It’s more of a hum of the machine than an amplifying roar of excited growth.

I guess that has to happen in organizations.  The contagious attitude of an entrepreneurial, “just get it done” mentality changes to the somewhat more mundane and risk averse profile of a bigger corporate bureaucracy.

But I remember reading about fast growing churches and how those churches broke themselves down into ministerial pods.  So that church may have had 10,000 members, but the real pulse was at the 100 person pod level.  The senior pastors were enablers and messengers, but the real labor was being done at the pod level.

I’m wondering why business couldn’t be the same way.  We’re close to 10,000 people now, and our senior pastors – sorry, meant senior leaders – could very well focus on enabling and messaging.  Then the real work could be done at the pods – sorry, meant operating company – level.

It works in the churches.  I wonder if it can work in business.

I’d love to give it a try.

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