Friday, April 12, 2019, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

Thoughts on Jefe’s Death

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I wrote about the death of our dog Jefe (left) last week. I said that he gave us so many gifts – so many moments of laughter and love – during his lifetime. Thinking about it since then, it occurred to me that pets like Jefe provide us with another sort of gift, an existential gift.

Dogs have a relatively short lifespan – typically 8 to 15 years. That’s enough time for us to see them grow from puppies into adults and then into those frail years. It’s also enough time for us to learn to love them. Sometimes very deeply. But then they die and we have to deal with the grief of losing them. It’s painful, but we go through it and we move on.

We’re likely to experience the death of half a dozen pets before we are middle-aged. That’s half a dozen opportunities that our beloved pets give us to practice the grieving and recovery process – to prepare us for what we will one day have to go through with the humans we love and have loved for the longer length of human life.

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A Word to the Wise

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Evenfall (noun) – Evenfall (EE-vuhn fawl) is twilight; dusk. As used by George Allan England in Darkness and Dawn: “Haze drew its veils across the world, and the air grew brown with evenfall.”

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Worth Quoting

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“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.” – Samuel Butler

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Worth Watching

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Yes, You Can You Eliminate Bureaucracy in Your Business

When I was a child, I was an idealist. In my early adulthood, I became an economic ideologue – first as a Socialist and then as a free market advocate. But as I grew older and more focused on achievement, I became a pragmatist. I still am attracted to the pull of ideas, especially when articulated in the abstract. But I cannot pretend that I could have achieved anything important without compromise – putting aside cherished beliefs in favor of solving problems and getting things done.

In Ready, Fire, Aim, I talked about the primary challenge of the Stage 3 business: Growth has created too much disorder and the intelligent founder/CEO must now implement protocols and practices. But protocols and practices will turn into bureaucracy if you don’t watch out. And that’s the challenge of the Stage 4 business.

This essay does a good job of arguing that, although natural if not inevitable, you can wean your business of bureaucracy. LINK

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Fun and/or Interesting

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Everything is already with us – including heaven and hell. Here’s a bit of heaven…

 

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