I don’t get many messages via Facebook Messenger. But on Monday of this week, I was pinged by somebody named “Lynn D. Ramage.”

“I used to know a guy named Dickie Perkey who used to catch for Montague Betts and made fun of my batting gloves.”

Hmmm, this message is not from your usual Nigerian prince who has lost his wallet in Italy and desperately needs me to wire him money. (I empathize, as I lose stuff all the time, thus…)

“I remember a kid named Lenny Ramage,” I messaged back.

Indeed, there was a lot of information contained in that message telling me that Lynn D. Ramage, aka Lenny, had come to the right place:

“I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her.”

- Trevor Noah, in Born A Crime – Stories from a South African Childhood

“A big breakthrough for me – in my job as a writer, but really in life as a whole – came when I figured out that making solid progress on creative work, and enjoying the process rather than hating it, is in large part a matter of being willing to be who you actually are.

"One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.

Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. "You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business.

It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity. In all of these, the rich get richer.

Lately, I have had feelings of amazement and gratitude.

Amazement for the way life unfolds.

Gratitude for the opportunities that have come my way.

This started when a friend of mine mentioned that he was going to be in a meeting with a CEO who was the successful candidate in a search that I had led over a decade ago.

The thought later struck me – if Cathy Bessant, the EVP of Technology and Operations for Bank of America, had not called me on January 31st, 2011, then my friend would not have been in that meeting last week with the CEO; neither my friend nor the CEO would have been there.

It is hard to be jovial, given the news over the course of this month. I don’t need to (and won’t) give the list of events that are horrible, sad, tragic, or nonsensical.

The list seems to grow daily. What we see are only the events that the Western media outlets are getting paid to beam into our awareness. The events that advertisers pay media outlets to bring to us crowd out stories about many other catastrophic events that advertisers don’t feel will sell products.

Question…

How many people died in the September 11th earthquake that hit Morocco?

Answer?

This item from the San Francisco Business Times caught my eye, and brought to mind the pugnacious baseball manager Leo “The Lip” Durocher, who famously said “Nice guys finish last:

“The Bay Area’s Most Underrated CEOs” 10/16/23

Do nice CEOs finish last? Not in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where some leaders have managed to keep the loyalty of their troops and woo Wall Street at the same time.

We asked Glassdoor, the workplace-review site, for a list of Bay Area CEOs with minimum approval ratings of 90%, based on a broad set of reviews. We then ranked those CEOs by their year-to-date stock returns. The results were illuminating.