Captain Obvious

It is nice at this late stage in my life to learn new things.  Except that sometimes you learn things that take the joy right out of your life because they point out the incorrect or circumstantial proof of things we hold dear.  After all, we always want the good guy to win over the bad guy.  Or, we like to see meaning in things that otherwise seem hopeless and futile.

I have become suspicious of many stories I read online and then Google the key phrases to see if they have been debunked or simply taken out of context.  You all know about this because you see countless questionable statements online.  We should always take what has been reportedly said by Abraham Lincoln: “Don’t trust everything you see online!”  Honest Abe wouldn’t lie 😊

But checking on recent Facebook post brought a new word into my vocabulary: glurge.  Here is the definition from Snopes:

“What is glurge? Think of it as chicken soup with several cups of sugar mixed in: It’s supposed to be a method of delivering a remedy for what ails you by adding sweetening to make the cure more appealing, but the result is more often a sickly-sweet concoction that induces hyperglycemic fits. In ordinary language, glurge is the sending of inspirational (and supposedly “true”) tales, ones that often conceal much darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer or undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering a “true story.” Many of us, it seems, cannot overcome the urge to glurge.”

I have to say this does ring true.  Be advised, especially in this year of political nonsense to beware of this urge.

This last week another American iconic brand bit the dust, claiming to fail in part because of the COVID-19 issue.  Perhaps you didn’t even notice.  But I did because

I grew up with it being THE outboard motor everyone wanted.  What I find most interesting about this is that everyone else in the boating industry is celebrating a banner year with unprecedented interest in getting out on the water now that many other recreational opportunities seem less desirable.

Read for yourself if you truly want to see how the emperor can remain naked. 

Two-cycle vs. four-cycle might be the latest example of Betamax vs. VHS.  It has always intrigued me to see how superior technology often fails the market survival challenge.  Betamax was the clear technical winner.  VHS apparently did something else better: they decided that people didn’t buy technology, they

bought a viewing experience and decided to woo the movie producers.

This reminds me so well of one of my industrial process audits for Quaker State Oil.  I was so excited to do this since Quaker State was an iconic company in my mind having grown up in the Northeast.  As I sat with the company president at lunch he told me that the plant was failing because their competitor Pennzoil had recognized that people didn’t want to buy oil, they just needed an oil change, so they had opened up stations that made that easy called Jiffy Lube.

See the pattern repeating?  This is a sad day in my life regardless.

The adage then implies you are dying.  This was attributed to many people for obvious reasons.  Success implies things are getting better.  Better in business generally implies you are getting bigger.  We at Apogee have never defined success that way, but certainly celebrate successful growth as one metric, but learned early on that some business elements are winners and others are losers.  You always have some losers you keep because extracting them just to pump up earnings tends to render you an incomplete provider of services.

This is different than loss leaders that many companies use to “get you into the store.”  They are things that attract you, usually because of a low price, that hopefully results in you buying other things there because you are already there.

Today’s world of electronic overload and talking heads use flamboyant language to play on common fears, and with today’s 401Ks more like 201Ks, a common fear is not having enough money set aside for retirement.  Most of us have never really looked at our retirement accounts carefully, and when we do there can be a wakeup call about winners and losers.

Well, a recent news article about the TV personality who covers stocks caught my eye.  It is Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” who has declared fossil fuels dead.  Read it for yourself. 

You see these antics all the time.  I wish they were all about thoughtful people trying to be helpful.  I have concluded they are not.  They are deliberate attempts to move stock prices using fear which then traders can detect and use to make windfall profits.  These are truly evil acts.  Here is how it works.

You take a commonly held long run belief: right now that is certainly the notion that the world is moving away from fossil fuels for a host of reasons.  You then scare people to believe the sky is falling using some recent stock movements, implying that the “end is near” and it never is.  The market responds and quickly.  You then wait for it to settle at the bottom of the moody cycle and buy knowing it will return to the long term trend line.  “The trend is your friend” is the rule for most trading organizations, and it is.  Market moods especially scares cause short term deviations.  Day traders just love these.

Look, folks, take a hard look at global oil production statistics.  Yes, they may not be increasing, but it is not going out of style quickly.  Yes, oil companies may now diversify to include renewables and energy efficiency investments to “green up” their appearances, but the majority of their business is still going strong, and will for many years.

One of our professional friends who mails things for people knows the long term trends on things being mailed, but still invests in the business because he is hoping that the others who mail things for people will go out of business.  His strategy is to be the last mailing firm in business and then face the realities.  His business is growing as a result.

I know the title caught you off guard, but the research is in.  We are cooling off. The “we” being human beings.  The “normal” healthy body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is no longer normal.  The average American’s body temperature has evidently dropped. Take a look at the research for yourself.

The 98.6 F standard was established in 1851 and is now being updated to 97.9 F.  Anyone who has watched their own temperatures over their lifetime has probably noted that our body temperature moves around, so what does average really mean anyway.  Plus, if you have been infirmed in a hospital you may have noticed your body temperature changes all day long.

What I find most interesting is that for once, this is not being blamed on climate change!

Perhaps you have been watching the Disney Plus online movies which include the series called The Mandalorian.  He is a bounty hunter in the Star Wars series who takes a liking to one of his assignments: finding and rescuing what looks like the baby form of Yoda we all know in that series.  The baby, by the way, is 50 years old, but given that the Yoda species can live 1,000 years or more, I guess this still qualifies as a baby.

You may not be aware, but Disney never anticipated people would be so captivated with baby Yoda that they wanted one for Christmas.  It was insane how many “knock-offs” emerged to fill this void.  That was certainly a missed opportunity for the Disney franchise.

Well, a cartoon showed up on my Facebook page which I thought was a riot.  It shows a girl receiving a baby Yoda for Christmas and her complaining that she wanted a Toyota.  That triggered a whole series of thoughts to me about how selective our hearing really is and how easy it is to miscommunicate and talk right past each other.

I am sure you can recount many situations where customers misinterpreted your ideas and offerings, and how difficult it is to be sure we are communicating.  That reminds me of a pastor who runs across one of his parishioners in the grocery store who had not been in church for a long time.  He asks her, after exchanging greetings, “I’ve noticed you haven’t been in church lately.  Aren’t you worried about the hereafter?”

She nods knowingly and states: “Yes, I worry about that all the time!  I walk into a room and ask myself ‘what am I here after?’”

I rest my case.