Above all else

It's an amazing thing to build a great team and achieve success. What's much harder is to keep that success going. Sports teams provide a few apt examples. As a Liverpool fan, it grates mightily to use this example, but... Sir Alex Ferguson was manager of Manchester United football club from 1986 to 2013. When he first took over, the club was second from bottom in a league of 22 teams. By the end of the season, he had hauled them to 11th. Even after that, success didn't quickly materialise. It was 1993, seven years after his appointment, and after many ups and downs, that Manchester United finally ended their 26-year wait to be league champions again. Though his 1993 breakthrough success was fantastic, what was even more amazing was that he kept the club successful for another twenty years after that. Ferguson continously rebuilt and refreshed his teams, succeeding goalkeeper Schmeichel with van de Sar; transitioning from the stoic defence led by Bruce and Pallister, to th

No, not the TV series!  The wife and I were driving out one night, when she asked me to help her adjust the rear view mirror. I'm quite a bit taller than her, so whenever she takes the wheel after I was the last person to drive the car, she has to wiggle the mirror into the right position.  But this time, try as she might, she couldn't seem to adjust it to see behind her. So I tried to adjust the mirror for her, while she stopped by the side of the road just outside our place. But I couldn't do it either - the mirror just seemed to be unable to show the rear window. It was utterly mystifying! Then it struck me. I adjusted the mirror to look straight into it and realised that I couldn't even see my own face. Even more creepy! After I discarded the momentary (and alarming) thought that I'd somehow turned into the Asian Edward Cullen (the angst ridden Twilight vampire for all you non-teen fiction fans XD), I realised that the mirror had been blackened.  Just as I was e