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10 Days Complete. Feeling stronger every day.

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I completed radiation 10 days ago. I must admit I haven’t felt any better over the last 10 days until today. It was small and I’ll spare you the details. But finally a small improvement.

I guess I had expected the effects of radiation to wear off faster. No taste, burned sinuses, burned face and eyes. Yesterday I was able to hit the 10,000 steps demanded by my Fitbit but then I slept for 12 hours.

Oh and it doesn’t hurt that we are on a cruise with our friends. 😎

More to come. Feeling stronger every day.

The Backstory

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I’m one of the few guys I know that actually do what they set out to study.  I have always loved technology and frankly technology’s ability to transform business.  I just love it. And I’m good at it. I studied information technology in school, went on and got an MBA in international business and subsequently traveled all over the world doing IT and ultimately owning a company overseas.  It’s been an amazing ride …one that I wouldn’t trade for anything. 

Except one problem.  I have been “checking the box” for 30 years.    I had built a business, been in consulting, failed miserably in one startup, bought a business, grew it, worked for huge global consulting companies and built systems that help power the world’s energy industry.

I was controlled by ambition and building the most amazing resume I could build.    But, I was changing. Older, mellower. Less intent on being right all the time, or winning all the time. 

We sold my business a couple of years ago.   That business had consumed me, my health, our finances and mostly, I simply didn’t enjoy it anymore.   But, I had done what I set out to do, build a strong career, a financial plan that works and a beautiful family.    We lost my mom a few years earlier and it impacted my view of life, and how long we really have.   

After careful thought and planning, we executed a successful sale of the business to a large corporation.   At the end, they turned out to be bozos and managed to pull back almost half of the value of the deal. Aside from being annoyed, I had accomplished my objective.  Escape.   

Now, this is a longer story for another time.  But after 30 years, I was tired and Mary and I wanted to travel.  So we did. Alot.

  • Ireland
  • Germany
  • Australia
  • New Zealand
  • Mexico
  • Cuba
  • All over the USA
  • France
  • Spain
  • Hawaii

I’ve constructed a new business and it’s still a work in process and always will be.   I have constructed this one in a way that it will never consume me the way the old one did – and I can run it from anywhere.   The reason I am sharing this is there’s a HUGE lesson here. Do it while you can! Get out there …I will write MUCH more about this.

Something’s not right…

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After an incredible trip to Australia and New Zealand – I had been suffering from a prolonged “cold” and stuffed up nose for a few weeks, really since March.    I visited my local doctor, who had prescribed steroids. I took the drugs, and they didn’t work.

I poked around, found a friend who is a doctor and he suggested an ENT (ear nose and throat doctor) way across town.   This doctor, who shall go nameless at this point enters the room, spends approximately 3 minutes typing on her computer, 1 minute looking at me and promptly prescribed steroids.    I object, her response “these are better drugs”.. 

“Thanks, that will be $400 please for my 4 minutes of time”.  Again, I dutifully took the prescription. She says “Call me back in two months”.  Thanks. Nothing changes.

Customer Service in the age of AI – interacting with American Airlines bots and real people

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I fly American Airlines way more than I would care to admit. Over the span of 30 years living in Dallas the reality is that AA is the only real airline we can use. The good news is we live about 15 minutes from one of the largest international airports in the world. We can be anywhere in the USA within a few hours or Europe by the next morning. Asia is merely 13 hours away and if you are up to a 16 hour flight you can be in Qatar, Hong Kong, or Sydney. Needless to say we love living here. Dallas is a great city for business and a wonderful hub for an international lifestyle.

I have tons of patience and respect for the airlines, especially AA. Over the years they’ve done an amazingly good job of shuttling us and our teams around the world with few incidents. And when those happen they are usually resolved quickly and efficiently.

What I have started to notice though is a slow shift over the last ten years from discretion based decisions by capable employees to more process and rules driven. This is understandable. When you are operating thousands of flights a day with hundreds of thousands of passengers in the air, processes are really the only way to manage them.

So it went yesterday. I woke up like a normal day and wanted to check in for our flights tomorrow to San Juan that I had purchased back in May for a southern Caribbean cruise. Or so I thought.

Turns out I had no tickets. I had simply held the original reservation and not purchased them. Ugh.

To make things worse it was my kids tickets. Doh! No problem will just buy some and get hosed on outrageous pricing. Nope. All sold out. Oversold. I’m screwed. Huge winter blast is in the northeast and the normally friendly agents on the executive platinum desk were an hour and a half wait. Crap.

I’ll save you the gory details of this story. What I will say is the first two interactions I had with AA executive platinum customer support were definitely rules driven. No you can’t do this you can’t do that. No help really. What we ended up doing was making the mess bigger and more expensive.

Fast forward to yesterday evening. Apparently problems from the storms had calmed down and I got a very helpful, knowledgeable and capable person who spent the next hour with me sorting things out. Wow what a difference. She actually took a moment to stop and think about me and not the rules and as a result found a decent solution for my self inflicted dilemma.

So all is well we are good to go and my tweet to AA thanking them was promptly responded to – by a bot I am fairly sure. But hey sometimes even a bot says the right thing.

What this highlights to me is the importance of keeping the human factor alive as we make the bold move to process driven, decision making Ai robots. True the efficiencies can be enormous. But people when given tools and good education can outperform Ai robots every time. At least for now.

As AI impacts our interactions with companies more and more I think we will see this issue more and more. As much as I love technology and business efficiencies that go with it we can’t forget that there’s a real human still involved. You.

By the way, thanks Julia!