Ah, Karma.  Karma is a funny, scary, tempestuous thing.

Karma is everywhere, in every walk of life.  It has a significant role in Buddhism and Hinduism, but is also in popular culture.  Karma was the basis for four seasons of the television show “My Name is Earl“, for example.  The general premise is that bad things happen to those that do bad things, and conversely, good things happen to those that do good things.  It may not be immediate, but the universe has a way of evening the score.  Buddhism defines Karma as the law of moral causation.  It’s the idea that the things that happen to us all, good and bad, are partly caused by our own actions in the past and present.  This can be expressed in many ways, with maybe the most popular being “what goes around comes around”.

Karma found me last week.

I previously wrote a blog about teamwork titled “Every Link is Important“.  I included a video of an ex-professional football player disparaging kickers.  Even though the blog went on to say that kickers are important, I put the video in because I thought it was funny.  But last weekend, my son’s football team had the chance to win a particularly big conference game that would have all but assured them a spot in the upcoming playoffs.  At the end of the game, wouldn’t you know it, it came down to the kicker.  And Karma settled the score.  The kicker missed the kick, and my son’s team left with a hard-fought but bitter loss.  They still have a chance to make the playoffs, but not nearly as good a chance as they would have had if the kicker had made that kick.

Live and learn, I guess.  And sometimes remember lessons forgotten.

I have written other blog entries about things like character and trust.  I think these are key themes for both our personal and professional lives.  The actions of people within companies shape the reputation of that company.  In other words, we are a reflection of our own actions, both individually and collectively.  If a company has a good reputation, it’s most likely because that company has high character, honorable and honest people interacting with others to shape that reputation.  And if a company’s reputation is less than stellar, the same root cause is likely the culprit.

We all know companies that fit into both categories.  We’ve all dealt with them, both good and bad.

Here at EXAIR, we take great pride in doing the right things for our customers.  We give great service before and after the sale.  We make a ton of information easily available, and you can actually talk to us.  We make most of the products that we sell.  We have our own engineers.  We design and develop new products all the time.  We have our own labs.  We do our own testing.  And the data that we publish was derived by our engineers in our labs doing the testing themselves.

We’ve been in business for 27 years, and we have a fantastic reputation thanks to our dedicated people.  Our standards are high.  Excellence is our goal, and our culture will accept nothing less.

Sometimes Karma can be ironic.  A business with words “Good Karma” in their name bought some items from us but never managed to pay for them.  I keep wondering how that one will play out…

Have you seen Karma in action lately?

Think about that while you enjoy this video of Karma finding Brett Favre yesterday.

Bryan Peters
President
bryanpeters@exair.com