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Keisha’s insights were the foundation for everything else that followed. Once I knew the right questions to ask, the rest of the interviews went amazingly well.

People were so used to accepting the status quo, they just didn’t think about it until someone brought it up. But if you happened to stumble across one of their pet peeves, that was usually a match to a can of gasoline. In fact, if you knew their pet peeve, and indicated that other people hated that thing, too, they would go off on all the things that were wrong with the company.

And because of Keisha, I had a whole laundry list of potential pet peeves.

I think some writer gave a speech once that started with a joke about an old fish who meets two young fish and casually asks, “How about the water today?” and then swims on. After he’s gone, one of the young fish turns to his friend and asks, “What the hell is ‘water’?”

When you’re in it all the time, you stop seeing it – whether the ‘it’ is water, or bullshit problems at a cor