A couple months ago I did a Google search of a guy I had once worked with. A Wiki entry on him appeared high in the search, so I clicked on it and discovered he was among a long list of Mexican bullfighters, along with a mutual friend of ours with whom we once worked.

So, the question of the Day of the Month is this: what do you want your fake Wiki entry to encompass?

First thing that jumped to mind for me, thanks to Banjo’s invocation of bullfighters, was Mexican rasslin star, as I love those fetishistic masks dearly, and I have a nice pot belly to hang over the waistband of my tights, and the boots are pretty cool, too, if a lot of damn work to lace up.

Then I thought of all the things I’ve really wanted to be over the years: cattleman with my own brand, suave CIA agent doing foreign duty, smoke-jumper putting out forest fires with my bare hands, battle-hardened SpecOps badass with a sniper’s eagle eye, old-school stock-car race-car driver, coder extraordinaire who turned the internet tubes into something worthwile.

But I think, on the bottom line, I’m pretty damn thrilled to be where I am and who I am doing what I do. It’s really pretty fun, even if I get into blue funks and bloody moods over picayune crap. So my fake Wikipedia entry would end up as a martini-sipping, piano-playing lounge lizard covered up with delicious dolls from the very early 60s right before rock-n-roll tidal-waved his ass out to the big empty sea.

Which, speaking of RnR, I’ve come to appreciate you a whole lot more since you left the building, Elvis.

TCB, baby…I get it now.

…but could some web hippie out there pull together a blog aggregator dealio that doesn’t include blogs by people being paid by magazines & newspapers? All I really want out of a blog is regular every-day dudes and dudettes. Once they make it to the big time, they’re just another one of the a-holes in the media, and everything goes downhill from there.

Not that I don’t want my peeps to profit from their talents, you see, but that’s a completely different market — call it the airplane market, or the Manhattan subway market, or the shiny-clay-coated-paper-in-the-mailbox market. For my tastes in pixel-slinging time-wasting, I want the real, self-published shizznit, not another tweedy dork in the overgrown media backyard.

Good stuff:

While we often read about economies of scale, we probably should pay more attention to the diseconomies of scale.

When a solid sphere doubles its radius, its surface area increases 300% while its mass goes up 700%. The same ratio seems to affect organizations. As they grow, the center becomes more remote from the surface-the part that actually is in contact with customers, competitors, and new technology. The gravitational pull of the increased mass draws more and more efforts inward where they focus on internal processes, procedures, rules, expenses, and politics.

Internal forces soon overwhelm the organization’s ability to respond intelligently to external events. As Jack Welch puts it, the company “has its face toward the CEO and its ass toward the customer.” An odd posture to be sure since as Peter Drucker has preached for a half-century “the only profit center is a customer whose check hasn’t bounced.”

“ass towards the customer” happens way more rapidly and often than people might believe, or even believe possible. No matter what I do or where I go, I try my damnedest to keep the customer front and center. I fail, sometimes, and it’s rare that I don’t regret it.