“A clean forest is a happy forest” has become, over many years, my mantra about the annual cleanup of my woodlot in Vermont.  For me, retreating to the woods on a Saturday like yesterday, right at the crack of dawn towing my chipper with one of our ATVs is definitely part of my “Time-to-Clean-My-Head” therapy. 

Beginning the weekend after the snow melts, my ragtag team of high school students and I attack the woods dragging out fallen trees and collecting the wind-tossed debris into piles to be munched later in the season by “Charlie the Chipper”.  Easy-to-snap branches become necessary kindling and are quickly sorted into bins destined for winter storage in the potting shed-not a small task since we burn 4 cords of wood just to bring our propane and electricity costs down to a reasonable budget that doesn’t require a home equity loan.  The rest of the debris in the woods becomes food for Charlie, who has a big appetite and managed yesterday to devour everything else in the woods leaving me with both “a clean and a happy forest”.

The last class of the semester was this past Wednesday.  Actually, it was one of the two exam presentation days-this past Wednesday plus the prior week-when the management of the project companies returns to Tufts for their final presentations.  30 students organized into 6 teams, companies with complex, semester-long marketing projects and a ton of work over 13 weeks of lectures, field work, road trips and four HBS case studies.  We do a lot of “real world” in my class, and, this year’s students in both semesters were outstanding.  

Since much of the course focuses on not only the strategies and execution tactics of the rapidly changing world of marketing, but also on tying that content back into how the students need to be marketing themselves, one of my personal deliverables is to make sure that the graduating seniors end up with the best jobs.  Good news is that I’m pretty well connected and can open a few doors so that my graduates can now be found in sales and marketing jobs at great companies like HubSpot, Brainshark, Brown Brothers, Fidelity, Monitor, Siemens, Digitas, Jones Lang LaSalle and numerous other businesses among our customers and friends in the community.

Beautiful day yesterday even though the only initial glimpses I got of it was as I and the team raced from various hotels and offices in Boston and Cambridge, jumped into careening cabs as we shuffled from one venture fundraising pitch to another.  Good for the team as we scored great insight and a couple of “c’mon backs”, and good for me to get down on my knees again searching for funding-always an exciting…and humbling…learning experience. 

Had lunch with Jerry yesterday.  One of my favorite venture guys in Boston.  Bright, energetic, a great sports guy, but there we both sat on State Street eating salmon and not wolfing down Fenway Franks and attending Opening Day.  My excuse was that I opted for the root canal that I had just had yesterday morning rather than watch the Sox.  Jerry’s was that he felt guilty after we had both broken numerous prior meeting plans, but that really can’t be true about feeling guilty, since, as I mentioned, Jerry’s a venture guy.   By the way if you want to watch a point-counterpoint discussion/argument between Jerry Bird from MTDC and me on “Venture Capital or Angel Funding-Which Money Should I Take?”, go to the 128 Innovation Capital Group site to register.  It’s on the morning of May 10^th and should be a lot of fun as I take these smart venture guys down a peg or two…or maybe not.

$349.51. That’s the amount of my March electric bill in Vermont-the house that I live in at most eight days a month. BTW, I pay $84 in NH, where I live 20 days a month.

My new iPad was delivered last Monday.   On the marketing bell curve, I’m on the far left side of the “early adopters”, and although I’m no longer sleeping on the sidewalk waiting for the store to open, I always like the excitement of new toys.  Most of the time the new toy syndrome plays out perfectly in products such as Apple’s, and sometimes it backfires like when I bought that piece-of-junk Touareg the week it was introduced.  With computer products, back in the day, I would then block out the rest of the morning and afternoon to upload, download, plug in, plug out, reboot and reboot again after reading through inch thick manuals. 

Coffee this morning?  Of course, and each of us has our own thought process in making the choice of whether it’s going to be Green Mountain, Starbucks or Dunkin'.  Since we have lots of Keurigs strategically placed in our various kitchens, the Boston office and our home offices, my choice is less about the coffee, but the convenience and the variety.  But, then that’s me, and as the LP (Little Princess) often reminds me that since I have the taste buds of a warthog, I’m pretty sure that I can’t tell the subtle differences. 

Most people are wired to like consistency.  Consistency represents a recognizable pattern, and in the way we run our crazy lives, patterns provide relative predictability.  As a result, if I’m doing things in a somewhat consistent way, I know that I can naturally increase my percentage of predictability, which gives my brain a tiny shot of dopamine, which makes me “feel good”. 

Finally, the first big snow Thursday - 14 inches at Stratton and 6 on the NH beach.  As any addicted snowboarder like me knows, the adage at any ski area is that…“there are no friends on a powder day”…just get headed up the hill as quickly as possible.  Since I had already made the wise decision not to make the commute to Boston on Thursday, calls and texts came flooding in all day from people looking for me who were either headed to or already on the hill.  Unfortunately, I had to make a choice about my time and rather than make the 3 hour trip to Stratton, I stayed glued to the computer and the phone all day.  An okay day all the same, but of course, I would have rather been figuring out how to avoid the trees in the glades than calculating how to avoid the politics of a sales comp plan for one of our customers.

I’m an enabling kind of guy…I think.  I enjoy making things happen in my day-to-day: connecting people, improving this and building that.  I like tearing things apart that aren’t working well or are badly fraying around the edges and then reconstructing them on a firmer foundation.