I am in remission and living life fully. Less talk about cancer from now on. I recently wrote a letter to family and friends, ending with:
“As cliche as it sounds, a cancer diagnosis has taught me so much. I am not sure if I would have learned these lessons otherwise, or with as much clarity. The most difficult times of the early weeks after diagnosis compelled me to figure out what was solid, and who and what I most wanted to hold on to. I appreciate the stronger connections to friends and family. I'll continue to reflect and think about this, and am always up for a chat.”
Many of my chats with friends are about our relationship to our work. These discussions are rich and dynamic because of life timing and global economic circumstances:
Getting more senior at our companies
Running into stratospheric levels of corporate bullshit as we get more senior at our companies
Running afoul of management or stressing ourselves out as we try to reconcile our principles with corporate bullshit, incompetent people who get paid a lot more than us, or stress us out with their half-baked directions.
Switching lifestyles, companies, roles to find a better fit or learning how to cope.
The realignment of our priorities, including quiet quitting. The great resignation from the pandemic. Turns out companies are not great at giving us fulfilled work identities, much less happiness.
Kids, and parents growing older requiring different parenting effort and attention
Getting diagnosed with incurable diseases that put things into perspective
Since this whole cancer thing went down, I have felt very little work stress. This is partly due to my manager and colleagues, who are genuinely wonderful humans. I’m also fortunate to have financial stability through dual incomes. I am back full time. My work gives me energy, and I give some of mine for a company that I believe in, despite the aforementioned and bullshit that is inherent in any group of more than 100 humans trying to accomplish a goal.
Warning: this post will have some views about work and the nature of humans that might come across as arrogant and elitist. It’s also geared towards those who are fortunate, and have met all of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is still my attempt to see the world and its systems as objectively as possible… and find a meaningful place in it. That said, if you see unhealthy lenses or bad arguments in this writing, please point them out to me.
Most of all, I write this because life is short. There’s no sense in slogging through it, weighed down by work, or feeling like an inadequate worker. We all have bills to pay, and people who depend on us. If you are fortunate enough to have some flexibility to pick a company and job, I hope your work doesn’t suck the life out of you such that you can’t enjoy the good things and people around you. And hopefully your work might even invigorate you, and bring you joy and purpose. With my cancer lens, I want to see my friends happy and fulfilled, and not bothered by something as silly as… work.
Let’s dive right in.
You’re on the clock…
The old cliche question: you win the lottery tomorrow such that you never need to receive a pay stub again to live the life you envisioned. How long until you quit your job? This is a stupid question, given the odds of the lottery. It’s not even useful as a thought experiment. If you have way more money than you need, hopefully you are not masochistic enough to spend your days loathing your job. Better to reflect on the identities you want to cultivate, and how you want to spend your energy and time to interact with people and communities. It is useful to ask how much money you need to be happy, and question the tradeoffs of trying to earn more.
Getting diagnosed with an incurable disease and quitting your job is a far more interesting question. You might have to work as hard and creatively as you can to provide financial security for your family, like Walter White did in Breaking Bad. You also need to invest in building memories and compress them into the shorter time you have left. These two goals are in tension. I had to ask some of these questions, and started to answer them. Fortunately, my treatment path has been successful early on, so I didn’t have to answer them fully decisively enough to execute. I have not quit my job, which I enjoy, but I am spending more time building memories.
Failure Modes
Let’s start by examining the failure modes of modern knowledge work. By failure modes, I mean the kind of accumulated stress and contempt that leads you to finally exit the company. This applies more to middle-senior individual contributors and management of large (500+ employee) companies. This applies less to tradesmen, small startup founders, artists, content creators, small business owners, and non-profit leaders. However, everyone needs to engage in some kind of larger system.
The failure modes, in no particular order:
Idiot boss(es) who you don’t respect, and don’t respect you.
Idiot boss and management who directs your time in a way that is not a good use of your skills or time. You are made to dig ditches with a spoon when you know how to operate an excavator.
Huge amounts of stress due to unreasonable expectations, or epic, uncontrollable market and external circumstances which you are expected to control to hit the end of quarter goal.
Burnout, either due to overexertion, or when the bullshit cup overfloweth.
Losing faith in the system: seeing the unfairness in idiot bosses and incompetent people rising and getting ahead.
Not enough pay and compensation for the level of stress.
Managing employees stresses you out.
Immoral, unethical company which you didn’t know about when you interviewed, or had rationalized it away for a while, but now you can’t ignore because you are wiser.
The company runs itself into the ground. You told them so.
If we can manage these 9 failure modes, or make peace with them, then we should avoid the failure modes of getting fired, or finding ourselves burnt out in a work malaise. We can have enough energy to be healthy, and fully present with friends and family. We do not feel guilty when we’re not working for the company. We might even enjoy our work. Here are the first order solutions:
Don’t work for idiots. Once you get an offer, interview the shit out of your potential boss, and their boss. Go to lunch and see them in a neutral power dynamic, even though they are putting on the sell. See how they treat waiters.
Get used to some amount of your time being wasted in any human group activity. More than 25% is probably too much. Sometimes you do need to do grunt work, and nobody is above that. Sometimes others above you learn by wasting your time.
This is not all on you, even if your name is attached to huge and abstract Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like “gross margin (profit).” Don’t feel bad for not hitting these relatively arbitrary goals set on a short time horizon for eager investors, shareholders and analysts during last November when the world was different.
Manage your own energy. Learn to control what you let bother you. Draw proper boundaries with work and the company. You are not that important. Build redundancies such that you can take a 2 week vacation almost whenever you want, and not bring your laptop and answer no email. Somebody’s self-generated crisis does not have to be your crisis. Do not encourage this learned helplessness. To test this, go on a boat trip with no connectivity.
Get used to this. Idiots are everywhere, and rise to the highest levels. Some are truly pathological liars. Others are sycophants. Most, I think, are post turtles. As the old folk tale goes: "When you're driving down a country road and you see a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle. You know he didn't get up there by himself. He doesn't belong there; you wonder who put him there; he can't get anything done while he's up there; and you just want to help the poor thing down.”
Know where you want to be on the stress-compensation curve. More on this later.
Managing employees can be messy. They are adults, and you are not completely responsible for shaping the pile of shit doled out by the company into a nicely formed cake for them to eat. You are not responsible for their happiness, but you can have a big impact on their failure modes. In the modern matrix organization, you can still lead and influence many others without the stress of being a people manager.
Avoid these companies! And the people who stay there. Avoid the Purdue Pharmas, and the global consultancy (McKinsey) that advised them to create and profit off an opioid epidemic. Avoid giant e-commerce, logistics companies who invade your privacy, bankrupt local economies and businesses, and exploit workers until they can figure out how to replace them with robots.
Sometimes back luck happens, but usually there are signs. Don’t assume people at the wheel are awake, or understand how their industry or company works. Ask to see a working prototype when interviewing during the early days of Theranos.
Given these failure modes, why do we work for big companies, and how come they all get stupid?
For the crappy health insurance in our crappy healthcare system, of course. Just kidding. Large groups of humans trying to do specific things are fun. Large masses of humans recruited and organized for a purpose are bound to have some percentage of smart, fun people who you can learn from and make friends with. (This excludes certain political parties, cults, and financial institutions, etc.) You can learn from experts, and also help do something you care about. Big companies can execute at scale to change the world. They also help small companies and startups make their ideas come to life. They also train people to operate at a high level of complexity to grow smaller companies successfully.
At a big company, you learn all of the functions and appreciate the deep expertise to manage operations and impact at a global scale. You can breathe life into ideas, and see them through their whole lifecycle. You can explore all the different ways humans organize themselves, and know that no way is perfect. There are some better ways to organize for a given set of circumstances. And big companies trying big things, even trying to do the right thing, will fuck it up sometimes. Bigly. They tend to have the staying power (and financial reserves) to keep going and try again. Companies outlast individuals, and capture the hard-won knowledge of how to do big, hard things in the form of business processes and systems. Their inflexibility is partly their momentum and staying power, and why we need them to keep civilization going.
Big companies are also perpetual shit shows. This is true of any collection of humans doing a sustained task where diverse work is required. Diverse work means diverse skills and thinking, and different approaches to risk. At best, these different views are in healthy tension, but typically clash comically and lead to siloed bureaucratic infighting and jockeying for power. Accountants, software developers, salespeople, and assembly line workers are wired differently. The decisions that come out of this melting pot of disciplines are bound to infuriate one or many sides. But companies muddle along because hopefully they are making more right decisions than wrong ones, or at least have the cash and time to waste while they correct their mistakes, even if they don’t learn from them. When they fail badly and consistently enough, a management flush out is best.
Clever and Lazy is Best
Speaking of good leadership, a quote from a German general has made the meme rounds about a decade ago. I don’t usually go around quoting German leaders of the WWII era, but this guy was on to something:
“Erich von Manstein, one of the top strategists in Hitler’s German Military, described Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Reichswehr as “… probably one of the cleverest people I ever met.*”
Both men… are widely credited with the following quote that gets to the heart of the matter.
First, I’m glad that German military high command and political leadership was rife with bureaucratic dysfunction. As much horrific atrocity and damage that they did achieve, they might have gotten away with it and more had they been more organized. The same cult of Hitler’s personality that galvanized the population could not, thankfully, allow the brightest German military leaders to win the war. Enough on this. Von Hammerstien-Equord’s classification raises several follow-on questions:
What % of a large organization is actually making the good decisions that matter? How many smart and lazy + clever and diligent people are at all levels that actually keep all the lazy and stupid employees from peeing in the well?
In a poll of friends, this is between 10% to 33%. A good mental model is that ⅓ of the people can be relied on to do good work. One third can be taught or heavily supervised to do good work. The last third are lost puppies who have somehow managed to hang on. The takeaway is do not have high expectations of everyone, or even most people. If you feel you are in the top group (and most of you on this substack friend list are, in my assessment), then figure out how you want to spend your energy in the top half. Also, be mindful of how much of your time is drained by the bottom 10% who insist on peeing in the well that we all drink from. Elon Musk does have one quote I like: “If you find yourself arguing with an orangutan, whose fault is it?”
Wait… so you’re suggesting that up to half of the modern knowledge workforce at a big company isn’t adding any value?
Yes.
But our economy and society needs to find a place for them and give them an identity, or they will cause trouble. So we park them at big companies in cubicles and corner offices. Welcome to the Matrix.
When you take two knowledge worker employees of similar background and experience, how much might their objective work output vary for the same input tasks?
The difference can be anywhere from 1.5x to 10x in productivity. As a program manager, I interact often with multiple team members of the same discipline. I see the same straightforward tasks come in, and one functional team member will crush it within hours with an effective solution. Another will schedule 4 weeks of meetings to arrive at a weak solution. After seeing this, and believing that I’m in the efficient crowd, I no longer feel guilty for working 40 hrs/week. Someone putting in more face time and creating drama at 65 hrs/week is not good for anyone. Stupid and diligent, as our German general would say. If you lead and manage people, and influence them to be even 25% more efficient, you will have made an outsize, exponential impact over time. Daily execution habits form culture over time, and strong cultures adapt and win. My favorite boss early in my post-Navy career was comically efficient. Some VP or senior director would write long 4 paragraph emails, and he would respond concisely in under 10 words, with the right answer and often a couple grammar mistakes as English was not his first language. I noticed that he wouldn’t punctuate the last line of his emails. When I asked him why, he responded: “why I need to? You know the email is over.” He could close a months-long supplier negotiation with two sentences. He could see through internal bullshit and find the practical path of least resistance. He did not argue with orangutans. Lazy and smart. Best boss I ever had. And funny as hell to work for.
Why is large corporate leadership filled with so many people who aren’t smart and clear headed?
Some people crave power and titles faster than they build their competence to assume them. Above senior manager level, people often get promoted to spans of control to manage pyramids that they are no longer expert in. That is normal, as nobody can be expert in everything. However, some middle managers don’t learn to adapt fast enough, or haven’t spent enough time to see patterns and build a strong mental model of how these pyramids under them should interact with other pyramids in the org. In the absence of competence, intelligence, experience, and a fast learning mindset, these people have perfected the skill of organizational survival. They are good at deflecting, obfuscating, and creating defensive alliances. At worst, they are sycophants to other leaders who like and need sycophants around. They are gatekeepers to a club to which you are not welcome with your better ways of doing things. The modern matrixed organization is a free for all web. Therefore, accountability for shared goals is hard to enforce. It favors those who are systems thinkers and can connect dots (and competent people) efficiently. Middle level individual contributors and managers can have a lot of influence, provided they don’t run afoul of insecure directors and VPs who are unwittingly strangling the business, their function, and their people. The takeaway here is that top-heavy incompetence is here to stay. Assume half of the higher ups you meet are in over their heads, but put on a good game face. Most of the time that’s okay, and you might find yourself in over your head from time to time. Expect and be prepared to work around idiots, even at the highest levels. They did not get to their positions the way you did with the same values and competence that you might think is a prerequisite.
If big companies are so dysfunctional, how do they survive?
They survive against other big companies of equal dysfunction, in an industry that tolerates and normalizes it. Each company crawls just fast enough to avoid going out of business. High growth companies risk flaming out. When the company reaches a certain scale, customers demand stability and staying power. They do not want to see their suppliers and service providers taking big risks, or becoming unfocused. They want 9-5 regularity, and with it, the people and culture that will show up to maintain this consistency. The takeaway is to appreciate big companies for the role they play, but know that they occasionally need to adapt. You might be hired to be this change, but know that it is hard, and being right is not enough. Especially when trying to convince people who do not know what right and good look like.
Sometimes, big companies actually die. But they do so slowly, so it’s hard to tell even when you are in them. Or, they divest and the somewhat valuable parts crawl away. Or they get acquired and you wonder how the buyer got duped by what slide deck and financials.
How do clever and lazy leaders put up with climbing middle management to become in charge?
Not well. Because they like to get shit done, they typically set fires, make most of existing management feel insecure, and create more political enemies than they realize. They think delivering consistent results will smooth these resentments over. Nopes. They need political protection from mentors who will need to bail them out from time to time, and unruffle feathers. They don’t always follow a traditional path, and often bounce around. They usually end up getting promoted when other smart and lazy leaders bring them in to unfuck the organizational dysfunction at hand. The takeaway here is to keep a network of smart and lazy people who will appreciate what you have to offer. They will bail you out when you’ve reached the end of your blaze of glory at your current gig. You can go far under the mentorship of a smart and lazy leader who has found the right balance of not pissing off existing structures while driving excellence. The right leader-mentor will appreciate your skills and energy, and do their best to insulate you from the most egregious bullshit. They will help you adapt to a dysfunctional place (and they all are) such that you can make your best contribution, and not get too frustrated and teeter on the edge of contempt and burnout.
Bouncing Around Companies
Long term loyalty to a company is long gone. This big name company that gave you awesome perks like Twitter, Meta, and Amazon, does not actually love you back. When it’s time to go because of huge market corrections (or reckless takeovers), be on your way out with a smile. In this day and age, we should not be loyal to companies, or even our functional orgs. We should build genuine relationships with other individuals we respect as professionals and people. We should add them to our good people networks. We should share ideas and ask for their expertise, and we should find ways to work with them in the future at a more functional company. See the company as the place to find and build lasting and meaningful friendships for life.
For me, if I have five good friends at work that I can talk and vent to over lunch, and also hang out outside of work, I’m content. If I can have five people who I can learn a lot from and are willing to teach me, I’m fulfilled. I try to build a small tribe of solid professionals whose work I respect, and vice versa. Making ten solid friends every few years is a gift.
The Stress - Compensation Curve
When I look at the management layers above me, I do not envy them, or want their job. At all. I see very few of our business leaders crushing their roles with a smile on their face. Most of them are harried and booked from 7am to 9pm, on global calls around the clock, and responding to the corporate demand of the day. They are dealing with the economic, market, and supply chain headwinds. We have to lay off people because we can’t soft land this current ride. The pyramid below them does not have the people, processes, and systems to adapt to the current and future conditions. The function next door is creating all sorts of problems and takes no responsibility for it. We’re operating in the red, and didn’t have the systems in place to see it coming. Some of them don’t have the experience to know how to put in these systems and processes, and don’t know what good looks like. Ignorance is not bliss. They don’t know the levers that can be pulled to solve some of these, and it’s hard to learn while you are in a running gun battle. It results in a lot of knee-jerk reactions. It wears out the people who are trying to keep the ship afloat and pointed generally in the right direction.
Good managers in the business are able to dampen some of this roller coaster, but not always. The need to hit quarterly numbers drives any number of short term fixes, and takes away focus from building robust and sustainable long term systems. This is true at everywhere I have ever worked. Systems are always bursting at the seams with manual workarounds, held together by clever and hard working people. Processes are not flexible, or non-existent. Both cases cause chaos.
I define work stress as being expected to achieve a result, without the skills, resources, or time to do so properly. The stress increases if the consequences of not achieving the result are more far reaching and permanent.
The charts below are my assessment of how stress and pay build as you climb the corporate ladder. Stress increases as you climb because the crazy increases faster than your ability to manage it. My observation is that stress climbs faster than pay, and at the senior director level, the ratio of compensation-to-stress takes a dip. It stays low through executive management. There is chaos to manage from above and below, and horizontally as well.
Once you are a board director, life is good as nobody ever holds you to account. Executives (and board directors) who read this may disagree with my characterization of their stress level. Perhaps the intangibles of being in charge with a fancy title make up for the stress. Perhaps the huge pay is worth it, and will allow them to retire early. Perhaps when you spend enough time in an industry or in the corporate stratosphere, you’ve seen the patterns and know the levers to manage all the chaos. When people retire, maybe you are the most experienced person around, and would prefer to be at the wheel than watch someone else drive everyone into a ditch.
The stress climb in the timeline may also contribute to the U-shaped “happiness curve.”
Image source:
The happiness curve is a well-documented phenomenon of the malaise that many adults feel between 39 and 55. It helps explain midlife crises. It shows the confluence of work and family demands on you. Parents feel limited influence over their unruly teenagers and making decisions that affect their future. You watch your parents age, and realize that you should cherish the time you have left with them. I’m getting balder, fatter, and crankier with more aches and pains in the morning. Around 55, the kids are out of the house. I’m at peace with what I can and cannot control. At 55, I hope to be content with my career, and at peace with my professional identity. I know where it will and will not go. Male pattern baldness has set in, and I’m as pear-shaped as they come. I’m good with all that.
The Fastest Way is Through That Field of Shit
I’ve seen this following scenario play out so many times at a big company: We want to accomplish this big, audacious project. People get assigned to it. Jamie is assigned as the program manager. Jamie has not arrived at this position through experience or competence, but rather by being a corporate boot licker. This is, in fact, Jamie’s first rodeo. Jim is one of the functional leads on the project, and has a wealth of experience. Jim, being a competent team player, is the glue that holds the project together while Jamie gives pretty powerpoint presentations to management. Jim is the de-facto program manager, and Jamie starts to resent this… but doesn’t say anything.
As it always happens with these things, Jamie leads the project off-course down a dark windy road, and Jim suggests a course change. Jamie has finally fucking had it with Jim challenging her authority and judgment. She digs in. Jim starts to feel internally conflicted. As the real leader of the project team, should he stand up to Jamie and deliver a win for the team and business or should he let Jamie run the car into the ditch with everyone in it? He tries to escalate to his management, but they lack backbone. They know Jamie is well-liked by other leaders because she delivers pretty presentations, and is a sycophant. Jamie is in the club. Jim is not. Jim is on his own here. After some internal debate, Jim decides to shut up and color. Jamie’s path it is.
Without fail, Jamie drives the project car into a ditch. But fear not! Jamie sees a shortcut… she tells everyone to get out and push the car… through a field of cow shit. Jim, ever the team player, gets out and pushes. He doesn’t say “I told you so.” He can only hope that Jamie has learned to appreciate his experience and input for the future, so the team doesn’t wind up covered in shit again. Management, not knowing that this could have been avoided and forgetting Jim’s warning escalations, is happy that Jamie got the project out of the ditch, and praises the team for pushing the car through a cow shit field. Jamie is still insecure, and solves this by kicking Jim off of the project. After this project, Jamie will likely get promoted to something like “Director of Special Projects, Strategy, and Integration.”
Having just written all of this, I’m not sure what the moral of the story is. I think it’s: if you find yourself in the project car with Jamie at the wheel, make sure you pack your knee boots and don’t wear your best clothes. You will likely get covered in some shit.
Image Credit (Bedfordshire, UK, Fire Control)
Big vs. Small
Big companies are not bad. They are what they are. Small companies and startups are not immune from some of these failure modes either. I’ve summarized the pros and cons.
The Many Identities of a Worker and How to Keep Yourself Sharp
The big company is a nice place to park. As you peer across cubicle fields of mediocrity, you might ask if you will become dull, and how to avoid it. Late in your career, you might become that change-resistant curmudgeon in the corner that people keep around to “maintain legacy systems and business processes.” (Congratulations, by the way, for reaching this exalted status.) Some rising grasshoppers might be writing substack posts about your myopic leadership style, and resistance to the latest innovations like cryptocurrency and the metaverse.
In the meantime, you can keep yourself sharp by signing up for interesting projects which push your skills, especially with people with high standards that you can learn from. Find top notch people to collaborate with, in and outside of your company. Stay plugged into friends at startups and the fun and chaos of small companies. Volunteer your skills in the community, or for a non-profit, or to help a friend’s company. Create some content to educate and entertain others. Solve a local problem that connects you meaningfully to others in your community. Perhaps conceive of your total work identity as:
70% the work you do at the company that offers you health insurance
15% the side gig you have going with some friends that you are learning a lot from
10% Volunteer non-profit and community work that keeps you grounded and connected
5% Some fun, hare-brained idea that gives you and others joy to keep tinkering with
We’ve covered a lot of ground, including a cow shit field. One last story, and then let’s call it a day.
In 1607, England established the Jamestown colony in Virginia. Over the next 2 years, they resupplied it twice. By 1609, the colonists were almost wiped out. Colonist leader John Smith urgently asked for more supplies and skilled laborers. In 1609, the London Company financing this operation decided to assemble a fleet of nine ships to bring supplies and 600 people. Within days of arriving at Jamestown, the fleet was caught in a hurricane, and many ships were lost. The Sea Venture was the newly constructed flagship of this fleet and took on water until she was unseaworthy. The captain steered her towards land in sight, and the Sea Venture ran aground on the reefs east of Bermuda. On board the Sea Venture was a captain, James Davis.
For the 150 survivors, Bermuda proved to be full of forage-able food and fish, and also Bermuda cedar, an excellent wood for ship building. On board the Sea Venture was also a carpenter named Richard Frobisher. Within weeks of landing on Bermuda, Davis and Frobisher organized the survivors to start building two ships from the local cedar trees. They salvaged rigging and tools from the wrecked Sea Venture. Using the knowledge in their heads and hands, they built two proper pinnaces (the Patience and Deliverance) to carry 137 survivors to finish the trip to Jamestown.
I like this story because it highlights what it means to be a master of your craft. This captain and carpenter had enough know-how to design and build entire ships on a deserted island, using the tools and people they had. They then had the nautical skill to sail them hundreds of miles across the open ocean. This stark execution of competence is a far cry from the modern world of endless excel and powerpoint.
In your work, may you each build a good ship, find a good crew, and sail to a worthy destination.
The TL:DR Summary
Avoid working directly for idiots.
Don’t argue with orangutans.
Find the best people around and learn from them. Apprentice yourself to them early in your career. Keep them in your lifelong network.
Put in a solid day’s work, but do not feel guilty when you step away. Your colleague working more hours may be wasting a lot more time and company money.
Earn the respect of a few people at work. Don’t expect loyalty from “the company.”
The big company can’t help itself from being stupid sometimes. Most of the time. It is caught in tension from too many opposing forces, both internal and external.
Sometimes the fastest way for people to learn is to swim through a pool of shit, but you don’t have to get in.
Being right is not enough.
…especially when people don’t know what good looks like. Your solution, however gracefully you present it, fundamentally makes them feel insecure.
More capable and competent people should not be spun around by lesser idiots. Be the court jester that rules the foolish king. Sometimes you still have to go swimming in the shit pool though.
Separate your own professional identity from the company’s brand.
Branch out. Find many sources of professional satisfaction. Don’t rely on just the one organization that you happen to get your health insurance from.
A thought provoking read summarizing a lot of ideas we all have in a single place. It all rings true. I love the turtle post! I also live/love the idea of “not jumping into the shit”.. or only doing it eyes wide open, or maybe crawling out when you decide you have had enough. Now what to do with these realizations? Can we find the best intersection between the satisfaction curve and stress/comp ratio? Or is it more dynamic than that… constant readjustments back and forth that achieve some balance over time? Thank you for the read and raising the questions!
Love it ! Great read !