Good Morning! I hope you had a good week! I hope you have a good week next week! I hope you have a good life!

Lots of thoughts are coming to mind when I think about what to write in this week's edition of “Thoughts of the Week.” The summer solstice. The passing of the greatest cat ever, Pudding Perkey. My desire to sell bumper stickers that say, “HONK IF YOU ARE A REPUBLICAN RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!!!”

But the topic I keep coming back to is…

Randomness.

What got me started down this track is the retirement of Chris Oddleifson from Rockland Trust in Cohasset, Massachusetts.

At the end of each basketball season, the great coach and teacher John Wooden made it his practice to pick a topic of interest to him and to do a “deep dive” study into that topic in a manner that would bolster Wooden’s coaching ability, his strategies, and his team.

With UConn having secured its second straight NCAA D1 Men’s basketball championship, the Gamecocks of South Carolina winning the NCAA D1 Women’s crown, and my Golden State Warriors being bounced from the NBA Play-in Tournament, my basketball season is officially over.

Thus, it is time for me to pick my study topic for the 2024-2025 executive search season!

And the winner is…

1. It is stunning how beautiful Atlanta is at present and how Mother Nature has whipped up the wind just in time for The Masters.

2. Wind does not impact my golf game as much as ant hills.

3. I always reference Stephen Covey’s Habit #2 of Highly Effective People – “Begin with the End in Mind “ – as the reason to begin a CEO succession project with a SWOT analysis, and a “visioning” session about the organization’s “end game.” The board needs to be asking: “In 3 to 5 years:

It is amazing what you can get at Macy’s at Union Square in San Francisco.

I thought my wife Jill had gone there to get a pair of cheap (read that as “cheap,” not inexpensive) reading glasses.

Instead, we left with a dog.

Jill’s phone rang just as we got into Macy’s.

“Really! Are you serious? He is ours?” Jill said.

“What did you mean, ‘he is ours?’’’ I asked when she ended her call.

“You remember, I put in an application to get a rescue dog, and …WE GOT HIM!”

“WHAAAAT?” came my reply.

1. This article, spotted on Shane Parrish’s wonderful Farnum Street blog, really made me think about how I walk CEO Succession clients through the process of “beginning with the end in mind” — Why Focusing on What Won’t Change is Key to Long-Term Growth 

2. Speaking of CEO succession – I collaborate with a wonderful organizational psychologist, Dr. Ben Dattner, on our core business of CEO succession projects. Ben penned a great piece, published in the Harvard Business Review, on the ways that CEOs can “self-sabotage” their succession.

You are damn right I am mad!

I am not quite to the Howard Beale “I’m mad as hell, and I am not going to take it anymore!” level; I am not going to shout that out our bedroom windows.

I can still take “it,” “it,” being the madness in the world today.

But then again, perhaps it is healthy to vent about things every once in a while, instead of keeping everything pent up inside. Maybe, just maybe, Frank Costanza is correct, that the annual “Airing of the Grievances” that is of Frank’s favorite holiday, Festivus, a good thing!