A few weeks ago, my friend Anne Jackson blogged about American Airlines. Her inspired blog post aptly titled “American Airlines is the Devil” drew a lot of comments from weary travelers who had similarly painful experiences with the airline. It took American Airlines a long time to notice and respond to Anne’s post, which is read by thousands of people. Eventually someone from the company acknowledge her complaints and even confessed that AA needs to do a better job managing its online reputation. As far as I’m concerned, they need to do a better job managing their entire business let alone their online reputation. But I’ll leave that discussion for another time. In contrast with the flying woes of AA, I had a WOW experience with Southwest recently. They did something I didn’t expect them to do. Last Wednesday I boarded a Southwest airline flight from Nashville to Hartford and…

Lately I have become an unwilling member of the emergency room frequent guest program. Six weeks ago I spend the better part of an afternoon at ER of centennial hospital after finishing the Nashville Marathon. [I wrote about it here.] This past Saturday I returned to another ER, Williamson Medical Center, with my youngest son, Derek, after he got a small gash on the top of his head during a “friendly sword fight” (official version by his older brother, Marcus). The swords in question were not real swords but hockey sticks that doubled as ninja weapons. However, the whole incident was not as traumatic to the family, including the busted boy, as was our trip to the ER. No wonder our health care system is in such a crisis. Since the cut happened Saturday afternoon, we called the pediatrician’s office to see if we could get the physician on weekend…

Lately, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t introduce someone to Twitter. Mike Hyatt has a great blog about it here, if you don’t know what it is. Most people’s first reaction is almost always the same: “Do you really think anyone cares what you’re doing throughout the day?” Yes, I do, but that’s not the point here. The most import aspect of Twitterland, however is how it facilitates community through small, succinct posts of 140 characters or less. Recently I introduced a good friend and seminary professor, Mark Overstreet, to Twitter. At first he didn’t know what to do with it, but last night he called me with a proposal: “What if a church used Twitter for evangelism?” First I thought he was envisioning people sharing their faith through tweets (a twitter post). While I could see someone doing that, I’m not sure that it would…

The 2006 Brazilian National team was favorite to win the World Cup. They were touted as, potentially, the most talented soccer team ever assembled. Yet, the world favorite was eliminated during the quarter finals much to the disappointment of Brazilians worldwide, including yours truly. What happened? How can so much raw talent, experience and stardom result in such a poor performance? While some blame Brazil’s coach, Parreira, most of us saw clearly the problem play itself out on the field: superstars who could not play together as a team. It was obvious that the players were more preoccupied in looking good than winning games. Individually, they were the best in the world; together, however, they were less than the sum total of their talents. All the pride and praise of Brazil’s “jogo bonito,” translated “the beautiful game” could not make up for the lack of team spirit and comradely on…

Lately I have gotten a lot of “feedback” from friends, family, associates and even complete strangers on my obsession with technology, as some have labeled it, specially my ongoing usage of Twitter. Since I syndicate my tweets (what we call a twitter post) on my blog, my Facebook page, and Plaxo, I can see how, for a non web-savvy person, it seems that I’m spending most of my days updating these sites with seemingly trivial information. Even, Gwen, my lovely wife, emailed me the other day with the indicting words, “if you have time to twitter, than you have time to . . .” and so it began my “honey-do” list. The truth is that it only takes a few seconds per post. I estimate that I might spend a total of 5 minutes–on a busy tweet day–on my social network posts. First of all, I’m in the communications business.…

This was my first day ever to be called for the dreaded, or loved, jury duty. It was something I hoped to escape altogether, but with only two days left in my window of service, I got called in. Being a product of our popular culture, I envisioned my experience as a juror playing out much like a scened from popular shows like Law & Order, Bones or CSI. Some of you followed my tweets (learn more about Twitter from fellow blogger and Twitter Master Mike Hyatt here) during my illegal postings from the courtroom throughout the morning. Here’s 6 ways real life courtroom is different from your favorite tv courtroom. No musical score. I’m not just talking about the high-energy, fast-beat fare heard in “Boston Legal” episodes. There’s no music, no sound, no nothing. We just sat in this cold room with no ambient noise. Musak would’ve been awesome.…

Going live with a website is analogous to the birthing process–ok, ladies, please give me some latitude here. First, there’s a conception plan, then the site begins to take shape in the womb of a development server. A lot of work goes into creating and growing the new site that’s hidden from everyone but its creator(s), and then one day, the new site goes live after the DNS records propagate. And much like the birth of a baby, the site, no matter how large, will continue to develop and grow in the days to come.Over the past few days we have given birth to some great websites: www.eagledrygoods.com and their sister sites www.Tommybahamacs.com and www.calvinkleingolf.com. Beyond the clean, streamlined design of these sites, their most powerful function is something most people will never see: the back end custom programming that allows different people, from designers and product buyers to inventory…

Between worrying about the thunderstorms and getting up on time for the race, I was a restless man Friday night. But as 4:00 AM came on Saturday, I was up and getting ready for the longest, biggest race of my life. After all, the longest race I’d run before yesterday was the Boulevard Bolt–a five-mile run on Belle Meade Boulevard every Thanksgiving morning. To make things more interesting, six weeks ago, I had developed Achilles Tendonitis on my left foot and was told I might not be able to run at all. But after physical therapy, a slower training pace, I felt ready to go. My running team, Innerstrength, met under the pavilion at Centennial Park at 6 am for stretching, tattoos, group pictures and a pep talk from head coach Matt Royka. Lining up at West End Avenue with 30 thousand people was an awesome sight to see. It’s…

I like tapering. No, I love tapering. A few years ago I didn’t even know what that meant, but today, I’m officially tapering my training for the Country Music Marathon this coming Saturday. The whole thing is pretty simple: you only do a very short run early in the week and then you eat like a cow. Now, how can you not love tapering? Instead of getting up at 4 AM every morning and spending 2 to 3 hours exercising, I’m going to sleep in this week and then eat tons of food I’ve avoided for long time. Thinking about it, I believe a lot of people live on “tapering” without the training. But, however great this sounds, I’m having a difficult time not running in the morning. My running partner and I just text back and forth about “tomorrow’s plan” and reluctantly committed to take the day off. Well,…

Last week I was flying to Orlando to speak at a conference. The flight was full with not a vacant seat in the whole plane. Half-way to our destination a lady two rows to the front right of me started having an attack. First she vomited and then her body began to convulse. Things weren’t looking good. What follows next was a lesson in team work and how being prepared for an emergency makes all the difference. The Southwest crew jumped into action right away. They moved the two passengers in that row out and began dealing with the sick woman. At one point, one of the flight attendants plugged a microphone/headset combo into a jack on one of the overhead bins near the lady and began communicating with ground EMTs in order to diagnose the issue. They identified family members who were on the plane and probed on medical…