My Dear Rotary Family,

A Montana cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust of cloud toward him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses, and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?" The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his iPhone cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his iPad that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves." "That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?" "You're a Congressman in the U.S. government," says the cowboy. "Wow, that's correct," says the yuppie. "But how did you guess that?" "No guessing required," answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are, and you don't know a thing about cows. This is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog."

 

Now that I have your attention, I just returned home from the Rotary Synergy Summit and there were a lot of points that really hit home.  Public Image, the fact that we do not boast/brag enough about what Rotary does internationally and in our community.  When you are asked “What is Rotary”, what is your response?   Well, Rotary is a service organization and is close to the eradication of Polio and so on.  I’m guilty of these types of responses as well.  We need to point out much, much more.  Here are a few bullet points that we take for granted and you may or may not be aware of, Rotary is…

There is so much more we can capitalize on our Public Image.  Rotary is looking for members who are innovators and innovators will only give you one shot to win them over.

May God Bless this club and its membership and may He bless the United States and Texas.  Be safe!