Heading for a car trip out of town five weeks ago, I scrambled around in the back seat of my car.  Unlike many other people today, I still use an atlas, and I wanted to make sure it was handy.

Like most atlases, ours (mine) is beat up and creased, with pages torn out even though it is only a few years old.  For some reason, atlases take a pounding.

People scoff when I tell them I still use an atlas.  Obviously, GPS is the way to go, and using Google Maps on your mobile device is the technologically astute way to navigate unknown terrain or highly complex urban environments with significant traffic and construction. I fully understand the benefits of tracking the most up-to-date information, but still reject it in favor of pondering over a large piece of paper.

The atlas just feels good.  It is comfortable, like a good pair of shoes and a hot cup of your favorite coffee.  You savor it, feel it, and absorb the terrain visually and mentally.  The atlas is a journey onto itself.

You lose that as you begin to choose electronic directions as your modus operandi.  The first restriction is a simple one:  Your field of vision is restricted.

Rather than having some big pages to look at and let your eyes wander over, you are scrunch your field of vision into a one-inch by two-inch (or slightly bigger) area.  That’s no fun.

The second restriction is on your imagination. One of the joys of opening up the atlas is the broad sense of travel it gives you.  The possibilities are almost endless.

You can roam across northwest Nebraska, trying to find a town.  The Cascade Mountain Range in Oregon beckons.  That leads you to towns on the eastern side of the mountains and wondering what it would be like to visit.

This wandering fantasy leads you from state to state, across rivers, through national forests and past national borders.  Highways, parks, golf courses and monuments pop up for your consideration.

You can stop anywhere and explore the atlas more deeply.  Go from the state map to the city map.  You’ll find more details.  The local museum is at your fingertips.  If you need a hospital, there it is.  If it’s the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia you seek, it’s right in front of you.

The atlas gives you an expansive perspective.  It’s a much larger better projection of the U.S., Canada, Mexico or other countries compared to the small screen of your phone or GPS.  You see the big picture, not the little one, literally and figuratively.

Finally, maps teach you about directions.  You learn to navigate on your own.  I’ve taught all our kids to use it, and when the electric grid goes down and the lights go out, they’ll still be able to figure out which roads to take.  They won’t be blind.

It’s great to believe in the power of our modern electric infrastructure, but who knows what storm, war or other cataclysmic event might someday send all that information down the tubes.  If that happens, it’s best to be ready so you can get to Point B from Point A and not end up in Chattanooga when you wanted to arrive at Tallahassee.

With an atlas, you dig in and learn.  When the GPS or Google is talking to you, you’re being told.  You’re captive.  I’d rather be active, figuring it out on my own, or having my kids analyze routes.  Give me an atlas any day.

If you don’t need it, axe it!  That’s my motto when it comes to meetings.

What’s startling is how few people in business seem to understand the value in cutting out a meeting that will be lightly attended, unproductive or just plain useless.  Instead, the meeting stays up on everyone’s calendar, coworkers arrive, they yawn, they text, they daydream, they work on their laptops, and when they leave, their memory says, “Why did we have that meeting?

If you work for a company that has meetings, particularly a larger business, you know what I mean.  No matter your job or your position within the hierarchy of the company, at some point you are pulled into a meeting where you wonder, “What the heck is this about?  We’re going to waste our time.”

Sure enough, you do.  That’s because the agenda hasn’t been set, people don’t know the purpose of the meeting, or whoever is running the meeting has no idea how to run an effective meeting.


What is an effective meeting?  The short definition is, “One that ends before it is scheduled to.”  That’s a sign that the meeting was well-organized, solved a problem and accomplished what it was set up for.

The more complex definition of an effective meeting is one where people come out and say, “I learned something.”  Or, “NOW I know what we need to do next.”

Really, that’s quite simple, don’t you think?  For some reason we don’t walk out of many meetings feeling that way.

Instead, we walk out confused, bored or frustrated with the lack of direction or finality.  You should leave a meeting knowing something new, having a clearer direction on a project or a better sense of what to do next on your job.

The meeting organizer is responsible for this.  Set expectations.  Establish clear direction.  Keep on the agenda.

I’m not sure where business meetings lost their way.  If you read business publications or talk to people around your office, most would agree there is a lack of direction in the meetings they attend.

One of the best solutions to the unnecessary meeting is to cancel it.  I’ve found this not only frees up time for everyone to actually work on their projects, but it increases your popularity.  People love it when you give them time back in their lives.

This point was driven home recently to me.  I host a regular weekly meeting and it typically has a fairly lively agenda that we keep rocking.  One of its goals is to generate ideas.  We also have to check off deliverables on a consistent timeline.  Those are the standard reporting items, along with a monthly report we go through to gauge success and help us decide on adjustments down the road.

Despite frequently having good new issues as topics of discussion, there are weeks where nothing new is going on.  We could decide to hold the meeting.  I did this a couple of times, then thought, “What the heck am I doing?  Nothing is going on that requires us to meet, so let’s cancel this dang thing.”  So I did.

And I continue to do this once every six weeks or so, and sometimes in back-to-back weeks.  Why invent work if the trains are running on time?  Give people time away from meetings so they can focus on other parts of their jobs.

Sometimes it seems there is a mindset that you have to be in meetings to prove your importance.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Meetings serve a function, but sometimes it’s the canceled meeting that serves the most important function.

Keep it small.  Keep it simple.  That’s a great personal motto and one for successful businesses as well.

Many years ago, E.F. Schumacher wrote the book, “Small is Beautiful.”    It’s a series of essays centered around the theme, “if people mattered.”  That phrase in and of itself encapsulates why keeping things manageable is important, and conversely why so many people experience frustration with the way the world is today.

There is so much bigness we can’t control or wrap our hands around.  We grow anxious and disconnected, wanting to lash our verbally and physically.  Bigness is badness.

The essays by Schumacher championed appropriate technology.  His core point attacked the concept of “bigness is better,” and was designed to empower the individual.

We need to hear this message now more than ever.  As we increasingly distance ourselves from the institutions and businesses established to serve us, we need to reconnect with what we can actually do in our jobs and daily activities by asking a question:  “What can I personally accomplish?”

“What can you control?,” translates into, “What can you do something about?”  It’s the things we can’t do something about that most frustrate us, and that’s when we tend to blow off steam.

The weekend before last, we were fortunate to see our younger daughter run in the state cross country meet, and further blessed that she won her event.   That was something we couldn’t control but gave us a lot of joy.  My wife and I just cheered and soaked it in.

On the other side though, my wife’s father was to have joined us for the race, but instead was hospitalized after falling in his hotel room and hitting his head.  He is fine, but at the time there was a lot of worrying, from how long he’d have to stay in the hospital to finding a local hotel room for another night, to other odds and ends that had to be taken care of back home for him.

Some of the things we could take care of and others caused needless worry.  They were issues out of our hands.  Those are the ones that are hard to let go of, and you tend to obsess about them, “What if this happens if I can’t do that?”

Never mind that there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT THEM.  Your mind continues to worry.

Most of us want a voice in the outcomes relating to our lives.  We would like a say-so, but like the case when you needlessly worry, we often can’t affect the outcome.

The bigness of so many institutions creates a built-in wall against outside input.  That leads to frustration, greater worry and a heightened sense of meaninglessness.

When you try to get your medical prescription addressed through the 800 number from your insurance company and it takes 22 minutes to get someone on the line, and another 8 to be told that you need to go back to your doctor to get a new one written, then follow the process again, it isn’t surprising you want to slam the phone against the wall afterwards.  Multiply this one incident by several (dealing with the cable company; the Department of Motor Vehicles; the car dealership), and you have a recipe for continued brain-boiling temperatures.

They are big.  You are small.  You become anonymous.  Your voice disappears.

The solution is to take care of your own business, handle the things you can control.  The rest?  Let it go. 

If that doesn’t work, do like a friend of mine often suggests:  “Pretend it doesn’t exist.  With enough time, it will go away.”  It works.

Almost two months ago I had the opportunity to drive a Ford Escape, categorized as a smaller SUV, or less-than-full-sized SUV.  Let the record reflect, I hate SUVs.  They are big, clunky and waste gas.

So when I got this car at the rental counter, I asked for another.  They didn’t have any.  I resigned myself to a heavy lurching experience, too high off the ground and an inability to park in anything but a king-sized space.

Rather remarkably, driving the Escaped reformed my opinion, and actually made me want to buy the vehicle.  It was smooth, accelerated well, handled nicely and was extremely comfortable, none of which I expected.

Since returning from that trip, I have told the story to multiple friends about how I want my next car purchase to be a Ford Escape.  I am somewhat kidding and somewhat serious when I make the statement, as I still want to get exceptional miles per gallon, and the SUV does not make the grade on that front.  But on some qualities, it woke me up.

I am not a car person, and haven’t been for years.  For 4-and-a-half years in my early 20’s, I chose not to have a car when I lived in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C.  I lived close to where I worked, played and socialized.  This allowed me to walk, bicycle or take mass transportation anywhere.

Getting rid of my car had been easy, and was facilitated by one of my college professors in Milwaukee. He and his wife had lived in NYC (where he taught at Fordham), Greenville, NC (East Carolina University) and Milwaukee without a car, and maybe even Tulsa, OK, if memory serves me correctly.  Regardless, they were able to do everything they wanted without driving, and he helped spur me towards getting rid of my wheels.

Once you do this, you come to understand how often you drive when you don’t need to, and the consequences -- from air pollution, to paving over farmland and beautiful country so we can have roads and parking lots, to the incessant traffic and congestion in urban areas.  It’s when you get “out” of the car that you see all those problems more clearly.

This further fueled my non-love affair with the automobile.  Bicycling across the United States in 1982 cemented many of my views about living without a gasoline-powered vehicle.

When I backed into buying one next, I had few requirements:  High gas mileage; leg and head room; space for my golf clubs.  Comfort did not matter.

For almost 30 years, those standards have remained the same, though getting married and having kids has mandated a slightly larger vehicle to transport three kids.  Still, small, environmentally-friendly cars have been my modus operandi.

Which is why the Escape, and my feelings toward it, seem so unusual.  I loved the sound system, the cushy seats and the acceleration. 

Getting back to my Hyundai Accent upon returning home felt like climbing into a tin can.  The doors rattle when shut.  The engine strains every time you need you to get up to highway speed.  When we drove it into the country last weekend, every time a pebble kicked up, you could hear it rattle the undercarriage.  The seats are hard, cut into my hamstrings and strain my back when riding long distances.

I’m become soft, that is clear.  I want a nicer car.  It’s something I never thought I’d say.  I’m going to fight the urge.  But someday the call of the Ford Escape may prove too hard to ignore.

Everybody has an opinion, but very few people want to discuss constructive ways to resolve issues.  Complaining is so much easier than solving.

You see this in many ways.  Politics is the easiest example.  We love to harangue our elected officials about what we don’t like, but how many of us choose to run for office?  How many people even contribute money to a campaign for a candidate they prefer over the one who is in office?  Or, if money is something you don’t want to donate, how many people actually volunteer time for a candidate they prefer?

On all those counts, I’d argue most people stay on their couch, watch TV, and yell at it when something isn’t going the way they’d like rather than take a step in the direction of contributing to a changed environment.  Someday they’ll pop a blood vessel in their forehead.

During a recent conversation with a work colleague, we got into an extremely spirited discussion about Ebola.  He was adamant about all the things that “had” gone wrong – airplane flights should have been prevented, the hospital messed up procedures, we weren’t equipped to properly deal with it.

It was a “blame” argument.  I asked what we could do to move on from where we are now.

He continued to blast away on what was wrong.   So I changed tactics and asked whose fault it was.

Was it the airlines for letting people fly out of the hot spots?  Was it the hospital for not dealing with it properly?  Was it President Obama?  Was it the “government,” and if so, which one?  Was it the medical community at large?

The point was that there is not one person to blame.  It’s a complex situation and you can’t control all the variables.  All you can do is manage them in a smarter way moving forward.

The irony in this conversation was that we were attending a summit on creativity and working to “move forward” on issues rather than backwards.  That meant flushing the past and looking instead at making progress regardless of bad decisions previously made.

That’s hard for many people to get their arms around.  Be part of the solution instead of complaining about the problem.

When you blame, you remain mired in the past.  It seems like that’s what most people want to do these days.

It would be interesting if somehow we could craft s system where you weren’t allowed to complain unless you volunteered a solution and to be part of implementing it.  When you start thinking of the public issues we face, complexity once again rules the day.  It would be hard to figure out where to put the person who has to volunteer.

If someone wants to fix healthcare, do you send that person to an insurance company, hospital, doctor’s office, claims processing company, a diagnostics firm, someone in preventive care or a pharmaceutical business?  They are all hooked into healthcare, but where would you put a person to “fix” things?

Similar statements can be made about global climate change, immigration or Ebola.  Many variables are involved if we’re going to improve the situation, and they require discussion and analysis before proceeding. There is no one-stop shopping solution.

I think in many ways, people are just plain impatient.  We want things we don’t like to be changed yesterday.  “I’m tired of the potholes on Main St.  The city should repave the entire street.”

Where’s the money? Should the potholes be refilled or paved over?  How many days will it take?  Where do you reroute the traffic?  What will it mean for downtown business when the work is being done?

Seemingly simple problems still require thoughtful consideration.  Then, don’t look back.