Steel Drum Band at the Mackinac Island Yacht Club Reception

Morning at the Grand Hotel

What do with all of these untensils?

Somewhere over the rainbow...

We made it to the Island

The view from our room at the Grand Hotel.

Good News/Bad News

Good news is that I'm on a plane with a nice seat in first class. The bad news is that they need to change the tire, so another 30 minute delay. Hopefully that's all it is.

Homeward Bound

I had a pretty decent sleep in the airport. I popped an Ambien, bought a traveler pillow and stretched out on the nice, hard, linoleum floor. I slept from about 11 - 4am and then got up and went through security. Five hours of sleep on linoleum with a woman announcing every 10 minutes that you can only have one carry-on bag of luggage is better than no sleep at all. When I went to sleep, I thought I'd carved out my own area. When I woke up, I found about 20 others had found the same area to sleep. The Northwest World Club Lounge opened at 5:30, so I'm hanging out in here until my flight leaves, hopefully, at 7ish.

The Saga Continues

After sitting on the tarmac for two hours, they canceled the flight. I jumped on the phone with Northwest and everything was booked out of Laguardia for tomorrow. They found me a flight out of Newark for Wednesday morning. I jumped in a cab and headed over to Newark, on the phone trying to find a hotel meanwhile. Because flights out of JFK, Newark and LaGuardia were cancelled, everything was booked. When the cabbie got me to the airport, he tried to charge me double what's listed on the rate sheet. I wasn't going to pay and I had him find a cop. It was pretty impressive listening to the Jersey cop tear this guy a new one. While all this was going on, my corporate travel agent had found me the only room nearby at a Knights Inn. I jumped in another cab and headed to this place, which was in a really bad party of town. The place was nasty - as the cab driver described it in broken english, "I would not stay here. It not safe." I had him taken me back to the airport, where I'm spending the night in baggage claim.

I'm sitting in the Newark airport right now, camped out near a power outlet waiting for a flight tomorrow morning - recharging my phone and trying to get comfortable. I guess it could be worse. I could have all this going on while having uncontrollable diarrhea.

Cathie and I are heading up to Mackinac Island tomorrow after I get home for my Dad's retirement gathering at the MBA's annual conference. We were planning on leaving at 5:30AM, but I'm guessing we're going to have to push that back for a few minutes. We're meeting Kevin, Sooze, Dan and Kris up there to hang on the island and to be there with my Dad.

Almost Home

I arrived at the Laguardia where I found a Northwest gate agent who was clueless. This seems to be the norm with NWA these days (not including my dear friend Marge, who constantly bails me out of tight spots). I smiled while she stumbled on the computer and kindly sugested she ask for help. She had booked me on coach on a late flight but couldn't figure out how to get me into first class. The other agent not only put me on an earlier flight, but got me into first class as well. We're now sitting on the runway waiting for weather to clear. At least I'm not in back in coach.

Freakin NWA

The upside of being accesible is that I got a text message from Northwest while in my taxi telling me my flight was cancelled. They'd re-booked me on a flight leaving tomorrow. I was able to call NWA and re-route myself and get on the last flight out tonight. I guess getting home at 11pm beats getting in tomorrow morning.

Yahoo E-Mail Advertising

My DSL service is through AT&T/Yahoo and I've been pretty happy with it so far. They have a great web-based e-mail interface, which is all I use. They recently upgraded the mail service and along with the new features came a load of advertising all over the interface. If I'm getting the DSL service for free, I'm okay with a few ads. I pay for my DSL and the associated e-mail (well, my company does, anyway), so keep it ad-free.

I'm trying out Google's Gmail interface to see how I like it. Will has already made the switch, but I'm a little more cautious. I'm pretty attached to my e-mail address and don't want to be like Will and have 19 different addresses pointing all over the place. What is everyone else using for web-based e-mail clients?

The Big Apple

I flew into NYC this afternoon. Flying into LGA I had the most amazing view of the city. I love this play. I love the buildings, the sounds, the people watching, the architecture, the cultures and the overall energy of the place.

I'm flying home tomorrow evening.

I won $5

Our presentation to Ursula Burns, the President of Xerox went well. I was really impressed by her understanding of the business and the technology at Xerox. She came up through the ranks as a Mechanical Engineer yet she gets the big picture business ramifications where we need to be and how to get there.


Prior to the meeting, my team picked the word trifurcation to try and work into the conversation. I won $5 from my team by using it appropriately: "We need to trifurcate the value proposition of the offering across the three business units to maximize the value." The hard part was not laughing or looking at my team after I'd said the word.


It was a long week and I'm beat. I'm looking forward to day of relaxing tomorrow. I'm glad to be home.

Pinball Wizard

I love video games. In high school and college we'd head out to the arcade in East Lansing and play video games. It was a classic, dungy arcade in a basement where you could get a giant pop for a quarter. One of the guys I used to do computer stuff in high school with, Mark Lachniet, put this video together on Pinball Pete's, Fatherhood and the Zen of Pinball.

Cat's in the Cradle

I get home tomorrow night from New York and on Sunday morning (Father's Day) we're heading up to Spring Hill to drop Nate and Maddie off at camp for the week. I'm in the Big Apple next Monday and Tuesday and then on Wednesday, Cathie and I head up to Mackinaw Island for my Dad's retirement and then pick up the kids on the way back on Friday from camp. The following Monday I leave for camp for the week, leaving my family behind once again. I come back on Thursday night from camp and on Friday morning we leave for Iowa for our family reunion. I will see my kids for roughly 2 days out of the next 3 weeks. Sigh.

'Hoppy' Thursday

Business Simulation

Much to my team's chagrin, we finished third in our simulation. We had the right strategy but another team had a very similar strategy and executed better. We blew the first year and played catch up the rest of the time. We tried to come up with a disruptive slingshot strategy to take down the other team at the end, but we couldn't catch up. I'm okay with losing as long as we lost to a team that did a better job than us. As long as the team didn't win through dumb luck or an inferior strategy, I'm good. They won by taking our strategy and just plain doing it better.

The simulation was fantastic and it was a huge learning experience. We learned how to manage a company like Xerox from the top top and how all of the pieces fit together in terms of investment,, revenue, margin and cash flow fit together.

Business Simulation

We started the business simulation in class today. The six guys on my team are basically running a two billion dollar company based on some of the corporate strategies and directions we've been working through all week as a team. In the simulation we are managing cash flow, resources, head count, costs, the supply chain, pricing and strategic direction over the course of three years. We make all the appropriate investments in each area based on market trends, strategy, strengths and weaknesses in competition against four other teams. In the first year, each team starts off with 20% of the market - and we grow from there as the market matures and our competition makes a run at different market segments and strategies.

The teams are measured based on Compounded Annual Growth Rate, Return on Invested Capital and Net Gross Profit. We've got wagers with all of the other teams, planning on winning this hands down.

Dinner

My team had dinner tonight with one of our senior executives. The particular leader we met is one that I've met with before and a guy I've been continually impressed with. Russ is a Christian who has done amazing things in the world with what he has. Russ went to Romania with a missionary group about 15 years ago and was taken aback by the number of orphans on the street. Russ and his group of friends started by trying to find families for the orphans, and then began to look at the systemic issues that created the orphans. They leveraged their consulting and entrepreneurial abilities to create a manufacturing company that made bricks and a sister company to build houses from those bricks, both of whom would employ the parents that were putting the children on the streets. They went from hundreds of orphans at five orphanages in this particular area, to a single orphanage with only 21 kids.

I love working in a company where people use their abilities for Xerox and for the Kingdom of God.

Training

I'm in New York in training all week. Class goes from 8am to 6pm with working lunches. It's an interesting class with a very broad cross-section of people from my company of 50,000 people. The class is half leadership development and have business training, but from a very right-brain approach. We look at the idea of questions and conversations, the creation of new solutions and Blue Ocean Strategies, instead of just focusing on left-brain problem solving. The goal is to get a broad-cross section of people working together on various issues within the company in order to cross-pollinate and deal with some of the silos. and barriers we have organizationally. Midway through the week we conduct a two day business simulation, competing against the other four groups. I'm pretty sure I can get some side-bets going on this thing. We get to interact quite a bit with very high level Senior Management throughout the week, with the 5 of us on my team sitting down with the President of Xerox, Ursula Burns, on Friday to walk through some of what we've accomplished throughout the class.

Xerox is a company that prides itself in diversity, and looking around the class it's very representative of that core value. In an industry filed with white males, we are only a small segment of this class. It's also interesting having about 25% of the class is from outside the US.