Last Thursday night, the unstoppable freight train known as the “PittsKreig Express” came, at least temporarily, to a halt.

The reason? A pretty banged-up team of young men known as the Philadelphia Flyers (just what is a Flyer, anyway?) had decided that if the Division Championship Cup was to be handed to their cross-state rivals, the PittsKreig Penguins, that hand-off was at least not going to take place in their city.

“You have to give them credit,” Penguins forward Max Talbot said. “They came at us hard. They played really, really, desperate. When they play like that, they’re not an easy team to play against.”

Grammar aside, you get the point … “They played really, really desperate.”

And so should we all.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve spend virtually my entire lifetime studying people. I’ve studied their strengths, their weaknesses, and their motivations. And if there is one thing that clearly stands out, it is the simple fact that human beings are capable of achieving almost anything so long as they are willing to pay the price tag attached to that accomplishment.

Which translates into, “doing whatever it takes.”

Which is also known as being desperate.

Desperate behavior is that behavior which enables us to achieve things we may have previously only thought to be possible. Think of times in your life when you were truly backed up against the wall with no hope of achieving your goal. What was your reaction at that point? Did you perform superhuman feats? Or, did you just throw in the towel?

I remember once having a payroll due in less than twenty-four hours. My company employed about two dozen people, and the monthly payroll was in the $50,000 range, not counting me. (I never take a paycheck from any company I own until such time as that company has been profitable for at least one full quarter.)

As I sat behind my desk the morning before this payroll (and taxes) was due, I contemplated my options:

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There can be no doubt that Don Jones (Founder of Carnegie-Mellon’s Don Jones’ Center for Entrepreneurial Studies) is my all-time favorite entrepreneur.

Over the years, I’ve come to know a whole lot of entrepreneurs - both serial and static - but Don just seems to trump them all. You have to watch him in action to appreciate his sheer genius.

On a Saturday morning talk radio show, Don re-told one of those almost-apocryphal stories that I have heard about him over the years. This one had to do with his having once begged, borrowed, and commandeered every last penny he could raise in order to “have the most impressive booth” at a key industry trade show for his then-nascent company.

Behaving just like a puff adder, Don bet his company on this “look big” gambit. And it worked. He came away from that once-a-year show with orders and status that could not have been built up by years of traditional marketing and selling.

So how did he know? What little birdie sat on Mr. Jones’ shoulder telling him to go ahead, draw to that inside straight? Especially when virtually everyone else was telling him that he would likely “lose everything, with almost no chance of winning.”

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Brenda Lee sang those very lyrics way back in 1961, and because human nature never changes, neither will their significance.

The other day, a good friend of mine was negotiating to purchase a business from a third party that she had never before met, and a party she would likely hardly ever deal with again once the transaction went down.

It was for the purchase of a restaurant/coffee shop whose key differentiator was it’s unique location. This place was located in the kind of place where people could easily get together, but also the kind of place that would likely never be able to do great volumes of food and coffee due to the fact that it was also an outdoor location.

But towards the very end of the negotiations, my friend (who we’ll call Sally) found another, more interesting location with a far greater volume of business, which was located inside of a fairly prominent building that itself could provide significant revenues. When I asked her how negotiations were going with the first site, she couldn’t seem to wait to tell me about this new opportunity.

“It’s got far greater upside potential”, she said, “plus, the current owner isn’t really out there, selling to the businesses located within the building. So I know I could build this side of the business up.”

She went on to point out other advantages of the second business and eventually I had to stop her and ask the obvious question --- “Sal, if this new place has so much going for it, why are you even going ahead with your negotiations with the first place?”

Again, she is young. And green. And so her next monologue didn’t surprise me in the least. “Ron, I’ve got so much invested in the negotiations with the first set of owners and they with me. How can I possibly tell them that I’ve now changed my mind and that I am instead planning on buying the second business? They’ll be heartbroken.”

As the words left her lips, all I could think of was a very similar decision that I had made some 30+ years ago

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First off, this doesn’t apply to my current attorney, Mike Fox.  Mike, please take my word on this!

But if there is one thing that I have grown weary of during my three plus decades as a business owner it is the propensity of attorneys to settle, rather than fight.  By settle, what I mean is that the phone will ring and it will be my attorney calling to say something along the lines of, “Ron, I’ve been back and forth with their attorney and all things considered, why don’t we just write them a check and be done with the whole matter?”  

The first time that this happened I was in my early 20s and my reaction was, “But I’m right! This is nothing short of blackmail!”

And, it was.  However, my attorney would invariably invoke the old bromide, “But it’s going to cost you X dollars in legal fees anyway and don’t forget your time, and don’t forget … ”  

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Recently, I listened to an outbound voicemail message made by one of the employees of a company I own.  I seldom call this guy’s number, as I try to keep my nose out of the businesses run by others, but nonetheless, the outbound message that I listened to on his phone was, at best, monotonous.

This is probably the one-thousandth time in my long business career that I have been taken aback by the surrogate representation of one of my people.  My first thought when I heard his outbound message was, “ugh … anybody listening to this is going to paint a mental image of someone who simply has no joie de vivre.”

So, I called this particular individual (who, by the way, is a wonderful person and a super-performer) and informed him of how I personally interpreted his outbound message. He is a young guy and was quite grateful for the constructive criticism.  

(Constructive Criticism … the subject of an entirely different future blog.)  

But it got me to thinking. In today’s electronic age, there are so many avatars being employed as substitutes for the individual him or herself.  Think about it … in addition to voice mail, there are now electronic signatures, stand-in representatives (such as FaceBook and MySpace), and, of course, those avatars themselves!   

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