Archive for the Thought for the Weekend Category

I’ve written before about Murphy’s Law. Murphy must have been an avid traveler, because it seems that every time I’m on the road, something goes wrong. You may have noticed that our Thought for the Weekend is a Thought for the Week today, coming to your inbox on a Monday afternoon, instead of a Friday morning. My travel schedule, combined with a few other unforeseen factors, resulted in this uncharacteristic delay. Although my business trip was a success, these days, the act of getting across the country and back is rarely a smooth one.

This weekend is Father’s Day weekend, an opportunity to show gratitude and love for our dads. Last year, I shared the greatest lesson my father taught me about parenting. In that Thought for the Weekend, I mentioned that my favorite family moments with Dad included camping, fishing, and watching football. Professionally, my first sales call with Dad (who founded Matchmaker) had a huge impact on me. When I asked the team members at Matchmaker Logistics to share their favorite memories of their dads, the responses were a perfect mix of all of the things

The end of May marks the end of the school calendar, the promise of summer, and for some, graduation. Richard Lawson wrote: “Graduation season means, among other things, commencement addresses that drunken, sleep-deprived kids will sleep through”. That said, some graduation speeches are definitely worth listening to– like the one beloved Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch (of The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams fame), gave to the Class of 2008 just three months before he passed away from liver cancer. Other commencement speeches, however, last far too long and only offer the

It was Memorial Day 1996. Kathlena Peebles was a Junior at Highlands High School in North Highlands,California when she wrote the essay below as punishment for missing a Memorial Day band function. Instead, she chose to attend a Memorial Day presentation by her father’s submariner veterans group aboard the USS Pampanito, regardless of having an extra assignment because of her absence from a band performance. As we’ve seen this week in Oklahoma, life can change in an instant–sometimes for the better; sometimes for the worse. Sometimes those life-altering moments are due to choices we

On a recent business trip, I started reading The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. It turned out to be a page-turner that I didn’t want to put down. Duhigg, a NY Times reporter, explores the science behind habits by telling incredible stories that really drive home how habits have a huge impact on our lives and our businesses. Duhigg argues that in almost any scenario in life, habits can be changed, provided we know how they work. For me, one of the most

Last year, on the Friday before Mother’s Day, I wrote about my own Mom from an adult perspective. This year, I thought it would be fun to explore how kids view their mothers. A group of 2nd-grade children were asked to participate in interviews about their moms. Here are some of the questions they were asked, followed by a few choice answers: If you could change one thing about your Mom, what would it be? She has this weird thing about me keeping my room clean. I’d get rid of that. I’d make my

Eggs, milk, sugar, salt. They are classic commodities, products so uniform in quality that you can’t tell the difference between one company’s product (or service) and another. Commodities are sold based on price with increasingly thinner margins. And, over the past several years, many in our industry have bemoaned the commoditization of transportation logistics. The way I see it, this is a glass half-full/glass half-empty quandary. One could argue that every product and service is a commodity just as easily as one could argue that no product or service is ever truly a commodity.