Saturday, October 21, 2006

If you smoke only expensive cigars, you'll cut back... Wrong

If you smoke only expensive cigars, you’ll cut back… Wrong.

After learning to smoke cheap cigars, primarily as a way to get back at cigarette smokers while on business trips, I found that I was ‘hooked’ on the experience.

I soon transitioned into thinking that If I only smoked good, expensive cigars, I’d smoke less often… only on special occasions. Again, wrong.

Now I’ve stopped feeling guilty about it and find that the relaxation that I enjoy while smoking a cigar, while golfing, fly fishing, reading, or writing for pleasure, is a good… bad thing.

Favorites:

Fuente Hemingway Signature

Ashton Aged Maduro 60’s

Cohiba Red dot Robustos

Just Venting .... life in corporate America...

<>· During a recent corporate layoff, I was traveling overseas and had to be on email and the phone at 3AM to defend my team. I returned home to a very unpleasant work day, in which people were being told they were no longer needed. One sad irony was that our HR folks were not even around to help with common messaging and support because I believe they were in a room being told they were no longer needed as well.

· Why do the working masses take the brunt of the corporate ax swing? Executive management allowed thousands of jobs to be created at a time when the business model could not support it? Should 'nt executive management be held responsible as well? How about corrective action plans for all?

· The process of reduction... Job cut edicts, applied 'surgically' to singular areas vs. balanced reductions miss the intent. For example, you don't need many operations heads if you don’t have sales & marketing demand input.

· One definition of crazy…You find yourself on yet another long flight, over the middle of some ocean, crammed into a coach class seat, plane shaking all over the place with turbulence, thinking…. I’ll never see my family again.

· One of the best lines i've ever heard said by an executive after a long , strategic discussion.... “Well... you’ve either done a good job of explaining a shitty strategy or a shitty job of explaining a good strategy, and I don’t know which one it is….”