UPDATE: A coworker told me about the “Pound for Pound” promotion that will support local food pantries. I just signed up!

While I avoid making New Years resolutions that include the words “diet,” “exercise” or “resolution,” I did decide to help organize a weight-loss challenge at work.

Maybe it was the endless commercials for the television show, “Biggest Loser.” I did stop watching them after I read about an Australian study linking television watching to an earlier than necessary death. No sense tempting fate.

Whatever the reasons, I joined 22 fellow employees who are throwing $10 into a pot that one person will earn on March 8. That person will have the greatest percentage weight loss between today and March 8.

Most of us are using the challenge as a motivational tool to eat better and exercise more. I’ll use it as an opportunity to trash talk my colleagues, now that football season is winding down and my Chicago Bears have gone into hibernation. Lately it stinks to work with Vikings and Packer fans.

First challenge: The IABC/Chicago board meeting tomorrow night at the Ben Pao restaurant. I might have to pass on the egg rolls and fortune cookies.

Any helpful ideas for losing about 25 pounds in eight weeks? Please don’t suggest that I cut off a limb or stop eating completely. I may like to trash talk my colleagues, but I hate eating my words.

What are the links between effective communication and a company’s profitability? In this YouTube video interview that I recorded for IABC/Chicago using its Flip camera, Jill Folan, a senior communications consultant with Watson Wyatt Worldwide, shares some findings and insights gleaned from the firm’s “2009 Communication ROI Study Report.” (The report itself is available at this link.)

The interview was conducted just two weeks after the study results were released, at a Dec. 15, 2009 lunch event organized by IABC/Chicago’s professional development volunteer staff.

Folan was interviewed by IABC/Chicago member Julia Winn, who also created the video.

I plan to spend part of my New Year’s Day watching a movie that I received as a Christmas present: “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”

As anyone in my immediate family will tell you, this is the movie that makes me cry every time, without fail. I’ve watched it often, and always lose it at one or more places within the movie.

Recently I took my family to watch the movie, “The Blind Side.” This is the movie starring Sandra Bullock as the woman who takes in a homeless black teenager. That teenager is now a professional football player.

The Blind Side also is the movie that seems destined to join Mr. Holland’s Opus as a movie that is guaranteed to start my waterworks flowing.

I’ve already added it to next year’s Christmas wish-list.

A few days before Christmas, I read David Murray’s blog post about a fundraising effort to cover nontraditional treatment for a family’s terminally ill wife and mother. I thought about other people who had died after placing desperate hope in some unproven, promised cure: Farrah Fawcett, whose battle against anal cancer included treatments in a German clinic to boost her immune system, and my own sister, Annette, who died 18 years ago from breast cancer.

Cancer is ugly and scary. This year, about 562,340 Americans are expected to die of cancer, more than 1,500 people a day, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS). Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the U.S., exceeded only by heart disease. In the U.S., cancer accounts for nearly 1 of every 4 deaths, according to the ACS statistics.

While cancer is ugly and scary, its treatment can be even more grim. Chemotherapy with its nausea, hair loss and other side-effects. Mastectomies and other surgeries. Radiation.

All for what? The 5-year relative survival rate for all cancers diagnosed between 1996-2004 was 66%, up from 50% in 1975-1977. So even with progress in diagnosing certain cancers at an earlier stage and improvements in treatment, one-third of all people in the U.S. who were diagnosed with cancer in 2004 aren’t alive today.

That’s why people like the Wieland family fight like hell to beat cancer. When someone you love has cancer, the first response, after the tears, is to stay positive and to expect to defeat the cancer. Unfortunately, studies show that a positive attitude doesn’t extend the life of a cancer patient.

Of course, support groups can affect quality of life, but the threat of death from cancer-related causes can open the door to long-shot treatments and no-shot money wasters dangled by charlatans.

As research intern Krystal Wilson said in an October 2007 online article for the American Council on Science and Health,

That’s why I had mixed emotions when I read Murray’s post and checked out the “Lana’s Hope” site. I want to help the family in this small way, by spreading the news about the fund-raising effort. I want Lana to get those long-shot treatments that just might cure her cancer.

On the other hand, I want this emotionally drained family to avoid being taken by charlatans on the hope of a fake miracle cure. But I understand what’s driving them.

In the fall of 1982, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment in Aurora, Colo., just outside Denver, with a former college journalism buddy. I had called him the previous August from Decatur, Ill., where I had just decided to leave my job as a reporter at the Decatur Herald & Review. I told him that I had decided to move to Colorado “to see the mountains.” I was pleasantly surprised when he called me back later to say that he would go with me!

My friend, Bernie, quickly secured a nice position in the call center of a national check security firm. I was more focused on partying, and had floated through some low-paying, no-future “jobs.”

One day, the phone rang. It was my sister, Annette. It was about three months after she and her husband had their first child, a son. Annette was reaching out to her younger brother, to offer some encouragement.

During the phone call, Annette mentioned that she had been having some inexplicable back pains. A voice in my head said, “Tell her that is a sign of possible cancer.” But I pushed that thought aside; I mean, how weird would I have sounded, scaring my sister with the idea of cancer?

A few weeks later, I learned that Annette did indeed have breast cancer, and she needed to begin chemotherapy. I decided to move back into my parents’ home shortly afterward, stating that I wanted to be there to support Annette. The larger truth was that I needed the support of my family just as much.

Annette and her family went through a lot of ups and downs in the next eight months before she died on June 1, 1982. I later referenced that time in a song I wrote titled, “Cells of Fear”:

Near the end, as the cancer spread to Annette’s brain and lungs, choking her breath and stealing her sight, her family was desperate.

My mom told me that Annette’s husband had paid a fee and expenses to bring a “faith healer” from somewhere in Canada. “Don’t you say anything,” my mom sternly told me through tears. “This might be Annette’s last chance.”

I couldn’t help but glare at the “faith healer” as she was escorted past me in the hallway outside of Annette’s hospital room. I wasn’t going to watch the “show,” even if I had been invited. I wasn’t going to be invited because my unbelief might affect the potential “miracle,” some of my family thought.

So I spent a few minutes alone in the hallway, until the procession left Annette’s room. I may be making this up, but I have a partial recollection that someone commented that Annette was now “in God’s hands.”

I believe that she was always in God’s hands, and he did the merciful thing when he ended her suffering. That’s the way we deal with cancer: Expect to beat it, then if we don’t, hope to limit the suffering with a quick death.

I hope that Lana’s family raises the money to pay for the treatments they desire for Lana. If the treatments provide her with a longer, more enjoyable life, that would be a blessing.

I pray, as well, that they don’t fall victim to charlatans, dangling empty promises of hope. That is a curse.

When my wife and I began premarital counseling 20 years ago at her Lutheran church, I decided to convert from the Catholic to Lutheran faith. It was an easy decision for me, because I had long before stopped identifying with the Catholic religion I was taught from birth through high school. The Lutheran faith was similar to Roman Catholicism, but it held key theological and practical differences that made sense to me then…and now.

As someone who made a reasoned decision two decade ago regarding my religious beliefs, I was perturbed a few weeks ago when my dad sent me an email, inviting me to “come home” to the Catholic church.

The problem isn’t that the Catholic church is making an outreach effort to win converts. The problem is that the outreach efforts are sending a message to people like me that the Catholic beliefs are the only right choice. Even other Christian denominations “have it wrong.”

That message is, in the words of the apostle Paul, “a resounding gong,” (1 Corinthians 13:1) because it demonstrates a lack of love on the part of the people behind this outreach effort. How else to explain an outreach effort that alienates brothers and sisters in Christ, that assumes that “home” is a belief system that people like me left behind for theological reasons without regret?

I don’t want to get into a debate with Catholics. I want them to be able to express their beliefs, while respecting the beliefs of others. This “Come Home” campaign doesn’t do it in theory or in practice.

Advertising Age yesterday posted a video in which Verizon CMO John Stratton discusses the “Map War” it is conducting with rival service provider AT&T.

In the video, Stratton states that the cellular service provider market has cycled back to a focus on network reliability, rather than available phone choices, as the primary differentiator among service providers. Of course, as AdAge points out, Verizon has hung its marketing hat on network reliabilty ever since it introduced us to the “Can you hear me now?” guy.

I don’t know whether Stratton is correct that customers will focus more on network reliability than phone products. He admitted that the introduction of the Apple iPhone disrupted marketing when tens of thousands of customers drooled over the iPhone and had no problem going with AT&T, which had an exclusive distribution agreement.

I experienced something similar today at work, when I overheard a coworker talking about his new Motorola Droid, which he purchased through a Verizon “buy one, get one free” promotion. I asked him if he was happy with Verizon, and he said, “Oh yeah, the coverage is great.” But he really wanted to show us the cool features of the Droid.

Back around 1990, when I was working in the public relations department at Cellular One in Schaumburg, Ill., network reliability and reach were the primary marketing angles used by us and our primary competitor, Ameritech. At Cellular One, we ran story after story about the most recent cell towers that we built, and how that would improve coverage and reliability. We couldn’t keep our coverage maps as current as we would have liked, because new cell towers were being introduced at a fairly rapid pace.

But that began to change for two main reasons:

• Local communities became disenchanted with the many cell towers dotting their landscapes, and were less inclined to approve new towers, and
• Reception with existing towers was average-to-good over the majority of Cellular One's "coverage area."

But all of the talk of coverage and network reliability ignores a basic fact that continues to be ignored by the media and service providers:

After you achieve a base level of network coverage, the experience of a particular customer depends far more on that customer's travel and cellphone usage patterns than the company that provides the cellular service.

For all of the advertisements that we see and hear that are focused on the benefits of a 3G or 4G network, the fact remains that the root of any cellular service is the transmission of data through the air. Those transmissions can be limited or blocked by natural and man-made obstacles including trees, hills, bridges, and buildings.

No cellular provider has the resources needed to blanket every city or state with unbroken cellular service. So–with the exception of occasional service outages that might occur at a particular cell tower–a customer’s impression of a network’s reliability will depend upon how many “dead spots” exist for that customer as he or she travels. That experience will be different for every customer.

That’s why I chose AT&T as my service provider. I talked with many people who live and work in the same general geographic area as me. I heard their experiences with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others. In my case, AT&T was considered to be more reliable by most people with whom I talked, and, in fact, I have been very satisfied with its service. Yet at the IABC World Conference in San Francisco last June, I spoke with Shel Holtz, ABC, who was looking forward to getting a new Palm Pre through Sprint. He had several unsatisfactory experiences with AT&T before he “abandoned” AT&T several years prior to writing the review of the Palm Pre on his blog.

It may not be wise for all cellular service providers to put all of their marketing chips into one basket, whether it be network reliability, new products, price or something else. Find what resonates and stick with it, as long as you can support any claims that you make. I get a sense that neither Verizon nor AT&T have been able to make an airtight case in the “Map Wars” battles.

Let me know what you think. Call me, if you have enough bars.

My grandfather, Clarence Fieberg, was in the trades for all of his adult life. He worked up the ranks at McNulty Construction Company, eventually earning a role as a vice president.

This is my grandfather, whom we called “Pop-pop,” along with his wife, Gladys, her mother, Maud, my mom, and her six children. That’s me in front, threatening to shoot the photographer (my dad).

Among its projects, McNulty Construction helped build the Pentagon in the early 1940s. Pop-pop commuted by train for months as he worked on the Pentagon project.

One day, his boss told Pop-pop that the firm had won another large project bid in the Washington, D.C. area, and that it would be a multi-year commitment. Pop-pop talked things over with my grandmother, and they decided to move to Washington so that they would be together.

They went ahead with a few suitcases, leaving the rest of their belongings to be loaded onto a moving truck. They had barely arrived in Washington when Pop-pop was offered a kickback from someone related to the new project. He refused it, and when he was told, “that’s the way things work around here,” he reported the incident to his boss at McNulty. “McNulty Construction doesn’t take bribes,” his boss affirmed.

Pop-pop called the movers back in Chicago and told them to stop loading the truck. McNulty Construction pulled out of the project, and Pop-pop returned home.

I remember feeling very proud of Pop-pop years ago when he told that true story to me and my siblings. He spoke matter-of-factly, as though it was understood that honesty was not something to compromise.

I wish that I remained forever unsoiled by the attitude that “it’s the way that things are done around here.” But I eventually became jaded growing up in Chicago, and reading numerous newspaper accounts of widespread graft, favoritism and an apparent lack of accountability for wrongdoing. It wasn’t just in the newspapers, it was in companies where I worked, among people who worked alongside me, or were in management positions.

The attitude that “right doesn’t matter, getting your way does,” even reared its ugly head in the youth sports in which I coached and in which my kids participated. Many people had a great perspective–that sports was a way to teach the values of honest work, determination, and discipline. But it seemed like there would always be a few coaches or parents on the sidelines, dragging down the team with ways to “play the system” or complain about fair calls that didn’t go their way.

Anyway, I thought about Pop-pop and McNulty Construction recently when I shooed the dishonest tradesman out of my home (read Part One of this post for the background). I’m not “Ivory Soap pure” by any stretch of the imagination, but every once in a while, I can do the hard thing, the right thing, that let’s me feel good about looking at myself in the mirror.

Sometimes, I guess I see part of Pop-pop looking back.

I hope to complete some minor repair work today to my family room ceiling. An overflowing second-story toilet led to me drilling holes in the family room ceiling to drain the water that had begun to impact the ceiling drywall and taped seams.

The day after the overflow, I contacted my homeowners insurance company to see about options for repairing the damage. My brief interaction with two tradesmen who came to provide repair estimates, and a third who talked with me by phone, reminded me of the sharp differences in integrity that you see within the trades. It also reminded me of a true story that involved my grandfather and the construction company for which he worked.

First, here’s a summary of my recent experiences with local tradesmen. The day after I contacted my insurance company, an employee of the insurance company called my home and spoke with my wife. The employee said that her husband was in construction, and he could come over to provide an estimate. Kim called me at work, and I agreed to ask for a half-day’s vacation so that I could be there to talk with the construction worker.

Have you ever gotten a sense that a conversation was going to become uncomfortable just before it did? That happened to me when the husband of the insurance company employee took a brief glance at my family room ceiling, and said, “What’s your deductible…$500?”

I confirmed that, and was about to say that the deductible had nothing to do with his estimate…but then, with a wink, he let me know how it had everything to do with his estimate.

“Yeah, this will be about $500,” he said, studying my face. “But there’s no need for you to have to pay the deductible. We can tell the insurance company that it’ll be $1,200, and that’ll cover my cost, your deductible and the cost of your painter.”

My son, who had joined us just after the contractor had begun his “inspection,” looked at me with a “what’s going on?” expression. I felt like telling the contractor off for suggesting that we agree on insurance fraud, but I guess I was too hardened by seeing it and hearing about it as I grew up in Chicago. I just wanted him out of my house.

As I closed the door and looked at my son, he blurted out, “What a creep!” I nodded in agreement, and silently thanked God for a son who understands the difference between right and wrong.

I then called a second contractor to talk about the ceiling repair. He was a referral from a neighbor. As I was scheduling time for him to come over to give me an estimate, this second contractor also asked about the deductible. I later told him not to bother coming.

Contrast that with a neighborhood “handy man” who was a referral from another neighbor. This person was honest and straightforward, and said that he was better at electrical work and plumbing than drywall taping and mudding. “I usually put on the first coat of mud, and then pay someone else to finish it off,” he said. He also said that the ceiling seemed to have dried quickly, with minimal damage. I wouldn’t need to have the extensive repair that the “professional” contractor recommended.

Over the past couple of days, with the help of my brother, Scott, I’ve repaired the ceiling. All that’s left to do is to sand it for the final time, and wait for the painter. As I was laying on the final coat of mud, I thought about a true story that my mom and grandmother told me about my grandfather, Clarence Fieberg. It was a story about the integrity of my grandfather and the construction company for which he worked.

I’ll tell that story in Part Two of this post. I may email it to the dishonest contractors who work around here.

In recent years, my appreciation of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday has grown. Thanksgiving is different than the highly commercialized Christmas holiday which follows in a month. Non-Christians (and, sadly, many Christians as well) use Christmas as an opportunity to covet things they don’t have.

Thanksgiving, on the other hand, provides an opportunity to be grateful for what we already have been given, in context of spirituality, health, relationships and “worldly goods.”

I slept in a bit today, a benefit of a holiday from work. Still, I began the day as usual, with time spent reading a bit of the Bible, along with a related devotion. Today’s devotion quoted a proclamation made in 1863 by then-President Abraham Lincoln.

I’m not well-versed in the study of speeches or proclamations; for that, I defer to DaMurr, David Murray. As editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, Murray has shared many examples of well-written prose.

Yesterday, Murray reprinted a very touching account by military veteran Stephen Banko, of events during one Thanksgiving lived in Vietnam during the war. It made me say thanks to the thousands of military men and women who are spending this Thanksgiving away from home, family and friends. I pray for their safety and honor their service to the nation.

President Lincoln designated Thanksgiving as an official U.S. holiday with a proclamation he signed in 1863. It was during another major military operation: the Civil War. As I read the proclamation, I thanked God for all of the things He has given me, and for all of the things He has taken away.

Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation
Washington, DC—October 3, 1863

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.

In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this 3d day of October, A.D. 1863, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.

Abraham Lincoln

By the President:
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State.

I had to leave the family room just now, as Access Hollywood began its reporting of Oprah Winfrey’s BIG ANNOUNCEMENT regarding her decision to end her long-running television show.

I didn’t run out because I was overcome by emotion over losing Oprah. It was the absolutely idiotic fawning by Access Hollywood’s on-air “talent” that caused me to race to this blog. Someone at “Ground Zero” needs to tell the rest of the globe that Chicago will be okay without Oprah.

“Everyone in Chicago was in shock today” at the news that Oprah is ending her show, according to Access Hollywood. Now, I admit that I work and live in the northern suburbs of Chicago, so my home and office may not actually be considered Ground Zero to some of the entertainment reporters frantically covering Oprah’s life-changing announcement. But my personal observations indicate that, to the majority of my fellow Chicago-area residents, Oprah just isn’t really that significant.

Sure, we might wonder how much she will be throttling down the Oprah, Inc. money machine after a quarter century or so of work. But the truth is that I haven’t seen more than 10 minutes of any Oprah show in the past three to five years. I don’t have an Oprah jones.

Before you label me as one of the few around here who “don’t get it,” you need to know that while I was working, not a single coworker burst into tears or started shouting, “Oprah, Oprah…why???!!” As I drove home, not a single driver in any vehicle swerved across the median headed toward a light post or pond in a suicidal response to the reality that the Oprah Winfrey Show was coming to an end.

As I pulled into my neighborhood, not a single neighbor had started a candlelight vigil, with flowers, pictures of Oprah and cards with messages such as, “All of Chicago is in shock, Oprah, and we will NEVER be able to watch television again.”

Bye-bye, Oprah. Someone probably will let me know when your last show airs. I won’t be watching it; I have a life.