Victor Bond

Introduction to The Bond Group

Posted on November 4, 2010, under "Telling It Like It Is.", Business, Change, Communication, Life, Relationship Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Spirit, Technology, The Ties That Bond (tm), Video.

We have a lot going on at The Bond Group… but this will give you a taste of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

If this works for you, or even if it doesn’t, you should also have a look at Bond Group TV (BGTV).

You’ll be surprised and – we hope – pleased at what you’ll find there.

Victor Bond

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Nothing at all…

Posted on March 6, 2011, under Funny!.

This has nothing to do with anything at all, except it’s just so darned cute.

Victor Bond

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Food and Antibiotics…

Posted on March 4, 2011, under Health.

Sometimes the sum of two good things is less than the parts.

This is one of those cases.

Victor Bond

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Remembering Sam Albert…

Posted on February 16, 2011, under Life.

I hardly remember my first day as a new manager at IBM in the fall of 1981.

In fact, the only event that I do clearly remember about that day started with being told by my secretary (remember secretaries?) that there was “a crazy man” on the phone who absolutely needed to talk to me “right now!”

I was in the middle of a tornado of new people, new responsibilities, a completely new environment, and a flurry of requests for my time…all of which needed to be attended to “right now!”

But something told me to take that crazy man’s call.

It was Sam Albert, IBM’s Director of Consulting Relations (if I remember the title correctly).

He might better have been titled “Tornado in Chief.”

In a torrent of words, made bearable only because I only picked up only half of them, he blasted me with the absolute urgent, “right now” need to invite a key customer of mine to a meeting that Sam was hosting that very week in White Plains, NY.

The fact that I had not yet even called to introduce myself to the new customer was only an incidental impediment for Sam, who had known the man for years.

Sam thoughtfully suggested introducing me to the new customer himself.

I demurred, thinking that this was a privilege best reserved for my new boss, the Branch Manager of Boston Public Sector and Commercial, Gale Fitzgerald. She and I were arranging schedules just that day.

She was new too, having just replaced John Thompson (now of Symantec fame…see earlier post), who had actually hired me into the branch.

In the midst of Sam’s word-torrent, it oddly occurred to me that, despite his actually incredible demands and expectations of me, I wasn’t irritated or upset in any way.

The man’s sincerity and passion for his objective was in no way disrespectful or anything but…sincere and passionate.

And I was deeply impressed that he – who’d known my customer for years, and could have called him directly – respected my role in building the customer relationship.

Before I knew it, I was juking and jabbing, trying to get a word in edgewise.

Not to put him off…his mission had now become mine, though I was only then beginning to understand its importance.

No, I was trying my rookie best to impress this “crazy guy” with my appreciation of the urgency of “our” effort to get this customer to Sam’s meeting.

All of this taking place in the span of about 60 seconds.

As Bogart said to Claude Rains in Casablanca: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

It was…and still is…

Sam was a friend, a mentor, and an all-round bon vivant, in the best possible sense of that over-used and so often wrongly used French phrase.

Sam truly did love life and living, and I do more because of knowing him.

Years later, when we’d both left IBM, and were independent consultants, Sam gave me a Yo-Yo (he was Yo-Yo champion at American University).

That Yo-Yo has always reminded me that life is up and down, but it can always be fun…always.

Today is the anniversary of Sam’s death.

Thanks, Sam, for showing us how to live.

Victor Bond

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Martin Luther King. School Days…

Posted on February 15, 2011, under "Telling It Like It Is.", Life.

I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1951.

Until I was twelve, I went to school in Henderson, N.C.

I attended the all-black Eaton-Johnson Elementary School until I was eight or nine, then all-black Henderson Institute (the black Middle and High School) until 1963, the year of the March on Washington.

I’d had very little consciousness of Martin Luther King before the March.

The day of the March, on (appropriately) March 18, I watched it on our (also appropriately) black and white Zenith TV.

For the very first time, I was keenly aware that I had never (and actually still have not) set foot on the grounds of the all-white Henderson High School.

Henderson High was less than two miles – and a universe – away.

It had never even occurred to me to wonder what it was like there…in the halls and classrooms where white boys and girls went to school.

For the first time, on that I day…I wondered.

For reasons that are lost to my memory now, I picked up a dime store tennis racquet that my mother had bought for me, along with my one can of white (not yellow) tennis balls, and took off for the back wall of the Eaton-Johnson School.

That wall faced (and still faces) the dusty playground on which I’d spent many recesses.

“Recess.”

That word brings back memories.

Anyway, as I batted the ball against that red brick wall, my muscles worked.

And as I thought and thought about the man whose speech I’d watched and heard less than an hour before…

My mind worked…and opened.

Thank you, Dr. King.

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Beauty is as beauty does…

Posted on January 25, 2011, under "Telling It Like It Is.", Professionals.

Beauty can be an elusive thing.

Is it only in the eye of the beholder, or does it have an independent existence?

Whatever may be true, it is certainly true that human beauty needs help.

It cannot truly exist without good attitude, good health, and - sometimes - a little help from a friend… a beauty professional.

We welcome all of you who help others to feel and to be more beautiful, and so to be more beautiful yourselves.

Victor

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“Stress Doesn’t Cause Ulcers!” Or, How To Win a Nobel Prize in One Easy Lesson

Posted on January 24, 2011, under Leadership, Life, Spirit.

This is an except of an excellent interview in Slate Magazine.

It is the story of a man who was right, when just about everybody else thought he was wrong, including those for whom gigantic fortunes depended on his being wrong.

The next time somebody tells you that the truth can never prevail over entrenched, moneyed interests, send them this post.

Victor

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Stress Doesn’t Cause Ulcers! Or, How To Win a Nobel Prize in One Easy Lesson: Barry Marshall on Being … Right

Posted Thursday, September 09, 2010 6:35 AM | By Kathryn Schulz

Not that long ago, Barry Marshall was an obscure physician studying the etiology of ulcers at a hospital in Perth, Australia—several thousand literal and figurative miles from the center of the medical universe.

His work was unconventional, not to say heretical, and in 1986, he was invited to discuss it at a gastroenterology conference in the United States.

His wife came along and, while doing some sightseeing, overheard a conversation among some other gastroenterologists’ wives who happened to be sitting in front of her on a bus. “They were talking about this terrible person that they imported from Australia to speak,” Marshall told me. “You know: ‘How could they put such rubbish in the conference?’ “

In 2005, that “terrible person” won the Nobel Prize in medicine. Marshall, along with his colleague and fellow Nobel winner Robin Warren, proved that up to 90 percent of peptic ulcers are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori—not by stress, as medical wisdom had long held. In most of the interviews in this series,

I’ve talked to people about being wrong: about what they’ve learned from their own mistakes, and about how their work—whether as an astronaut or speculator or lawyer or marriage counselor—affects how they think about error.

But in this interview, Marshall and I talk about being right. In particular, we discuss how it feels when everyone thinks you’re wrong, what it takes to get the scientific establishment to change its mind, and what it’s like to finally be proven right. All that, plus a guest appearance by Adrienne Marshall, Barry’s wife, who describes how she felt when Barry decided to test his ulcer theory by drinking a batch of bacteria.

***

Can you describe the received medical wisdom about ulcers before your research?

Peptic ulcers became more common in the 20th century, at the same time that these theories of Freud and other psychoanalysts became popular. And somehow those meshed, and this tradition emerged that ulcers were caused by stress or turmoil in one’s life. I don’t know where the data came from, but there was this idea that stress caused high acid levels; maybe there was a small amount of evidence for that, although I haven’t been able to find it when I’ve looked.

Anyway, all those things added up to convince people that ulcers were caused by stress. There was no proper data of any kind. It was smoke and mirrors as much as anything else, but terribly convincing for everybody.

Are you saying that there was no basically no empirical evidence to support the stress-and-acid hypothesis?

You can always find stress in someone’s life if you want to. You ask a few questions and eventually it’s, “Yes, I admit, I was worried about something recently.” So they tried to find evidence for stress causing ulcers, and whenever they had an experiment which worked, it would just be blown out of all proportion, and everyone would get so much publicity out of it that you would think, “Ah, at last, it’s proven.” But the data was very bad. And in fact there was plenty of evidence showing that stress didn’t make much difference.

What kind of medical advice was dispensed to all these patients with ostensible stress-induced ulcers? “Relax”?

Basically, yes. The medical advice was take antacids and modify your life style. The first drug that came out in the ’70s was Tagamet, an acid blocker. By the time Robin Warren and I came along with this idea about bacteria, that was selling $3 billion of medication per year; it was the world’s number one drug.

And then that type of medication was the number one drug for about 10 years after that, with global sales of $8 billion or something. But it didn’t work very well. It was quite sad, really; people were so disappointed, because as soon as they stopped taking their drugs, the ulcers came back.

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