On My Mind
The Berkshire Hathaway 2018 Annual Shareholders Meeting will be held May 5, 2018 in Omaha, Nebraska. This is one of the best-attended annual meetings in the world because of the opportunity to learn from the dynamic duo of Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet and his long-time partner-in-profit Charlie Munger. The Q&A session begins at 9:15 a.m. CST and it will last several hours. The event will be live-streamed on Yahoo! Finance at http://finance.yahoo.com/.

Interesting Stories
According to news reports, one of 24 metal jet engine fan blades broke during a flight causing a catastrophic engine failure which led to the death of a Southwest Airlines passenger. I believe it was the first domestic commercial airline fatality since 2009. What a sad event. The flight crew and some of the passengers have been recognized for their heroic efforts during the emergency landing. The commercial airline system has been performing above the six sigma level of performance in terms of air fatalities. Unfortunately, tragedy can strike at any time and so leaders of systems must remain vigilant even at extremely high levels of performance.

Company News
I’m one of the sponsors for the PENworks 2018 event May 3-4 at the Earle Brown Heritage Center in Minneapolis hosted by the Performance Excellent Network. The event is a great learning opportunity! The schedule for the next public Strategic Improvement Systems, LLC events has been set: Advances in Strategic Planning Course – May 30, 2018; Customer Experience Deep Dive Workshop – June 12, 2018; Leading Strategic Improvement Course – June 20, 2018; Introduction to Analytics & Big Data Course – July 11-12, 2018; Strategic Improvement Green Belt Course – Starts August 15, 2018; Strategic Improvement Black Belt Course – Starts August 21, 2018; Strategic Improvement Master Black Belt Course – Starts August 27, 2018; 10th Annual Advanced Strategic Improvement Practices Conference – October 2, 2018. The brochures are available on this website.

Intriguing Reads
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the book “The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos” by Christian Davenport. People tend to associate Elon Musk with Tesla and Jeff Bezos with Amazon, but they both also control space companies. You should read this book if you want to learn more about the personal backgrounds of these two fascinating people and how they think far beyond the confines of earth.