My wife and I had a disagreement.

This is an extraordinarily rare occurrence in our house, but this was real enough.

Very disturbing, I must tell you.

If this brings to mind images of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid Virginia Wolfe or Philip Marlowe-like private investigators, you are getting a sense of the magnitude of the matter.
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When I was 12, my brother and I lived with my mother in a small three room cottage at the end of a dirt and gravel road. When my mother was asleep or away with someone else, I would take the keys to her ‘51 Chevy and back it down the narrow dirt road.

The car was parked nose-in to a parking space on the side of the house. I would put the car in reverse and back the car down that road, stop, put the car in low gear, and drive it forward to the house. Up and down that road I went time and time again. I learned how to use a clutch and I’ve never had a problem backing a car up.

My first car was a Chevy ‘53 Chevy which a friend of mine unceremoniously totaled on New Year’s Eve a couple of weeks after my 16th birthday.

Not an auspicious start.
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When Public Opinion is Ignored

It wasn’t just the allegations of the sex scandal and murder that lost our client the election; it was the fact that he wouldn’t believe the survey results.

We had been retained to conduct surveys for a client that was running for the office of Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of a large county in East Texas – a position of considerable power in that next of the woods. READ MORE

Life is full of surprises.

Some time ago, as the President of a company I had co-founded, I wanted to expand our brand’s service offerings to embrace everything the industry had to offer. This was the result of a “brilliant” (unsurveyed) marketing strategy.

In fact, it was the opposite of what needed to be done.

There is a fascinating law about this. READ MORE