Thursday, December 22, 2011

Help That Really Helps - The Charity Problem



Does anyone out there remember Band Aid? Back when I was growing up their hit single "Do they know it's Christmas?" was a wake up call to all us MTV crazed teens and pre-teens that not only was there a big scary world outside of America, but there were places that were out of the pizza delivery zone. Horrors! Many of us, after recovering our composure with a big handful of chips washed back  with a new liter sized bottle of Coke, begged our parents to send a turkey to Africa to feed the starving babies. We were going to save the world!

Fast forward 25 years and what do you know, not only are there still starving babies in Africa and around the world, but we have witnessed even greater horrors like what happened in Darfur. We sent our turkeys and our biggest rock stars delivered them, so what the hell happened?

Monday, December 19, 2011

Do-It-Yourself Gifts #1



Or maybe this should be #2 with my post on making vanilla as number 1. Of course my kids would be rolling around laughing at that. 'Two' is apparently the funniest of numbers especially when referenced as #2. Anyway, that's another blog post ...that probably is best read with air freshener.

So here we are in the midst of the holiday season. It's a swamp of shopping, wrapping, delivering.  We buy, we give, we return, we regift. It can get so hectic you may catch yourself building fortifications out of ginger bread and candy canes, not that I would know anything about that...*whistle* *whistle*.

I do like giving presents, but you all know, it gets costly to give something to everyone, including your son's cub scout den mom, the UPS guy you are on a first name basis with because of your QVC habit, or that arresting officer who was nice enough to hold your hair back.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Embracing Failure


To paraphrase and old saying, success has many parents, failure is an orphan. It's no wonder. Who wants to stand up and admit to being short sighted, duped, acting hastily, or just being down right dumb. I'll bet not to many out there. We have our pride and we want to protect it.

Yet the very sad truth is that we pay a huge cost to keep that pride intact by repeating the same failures over and over and over. In some cases, like for pilots, the cost of making a mistake can be very high. Surely we can do better.

In a great stroke of awesome some very brave folks are