I wrote about the strike at the Caterpillar plant in Joliet, Illinois, three months ago. Cat was absorbing a strike of union workers who were being asked to accept a six-year wage freeze and a cut in health care benefits to keep their jobs at the hydraulic components plant one hour southwest of Chicago.

This past week the workers took a slightly modified deal, against the wishes of the officers of the Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Cat raised a proposed $1000 ratification “bonus” to $3100 to tip the vote to their side and is converting a $7.8 million dollar fund that had been used to supplement the wages of laid off workers into a pot sweetener for older workers who are being paid well to retire.

Cat earned $5 billion last quarter, but still threatened the Joliet plant’s striking workers with moving jobs either to other North American plants or abroad. The recent closure of a London, Ontario, factory after the workers rejected a 50% pay cut by Cat, validated the threat of a plant closure if the workers refused the company offer.

The workers’ capitulation at Caterpillar in Joliet, which is only a half hour away from our Oak Forest facility, finally evens the playing field between big companies and their job shop suppliers. It will enable Cat to keep more work in-house because their labor costs will be more competitive with local companies, but it will also even up the hiring landscape for skilled workers, many of whom prefer the atmosphere in smaller well-run suppliers to big company regimentation and union peer pressure.

At the same time the Caterpillar union news came out, the even more astonishing news appeared that “tenure as we know it” for New York City public school teachers had been broken. This had long been a goal of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and he finally gained the upper hand against the entrenched unions in the city that made it so difficult to prune weak teachers when they got their tenure card after three years on the payroll, even if they stunk at their jobs.

In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, the new mayor, is also pushing back against the Teachers Union with some success. The housing recession in Chicago has kept yuppies with kids locked into their homes, when they normally would have moved to the burbs for better schools. Many of them are getting active in their local schools, giving Emanuel an important ally in pushing for change in the system.

Recently, Motorola Mobility, now a division of Google, announced they were moving a huge number of jobs to downtown Chicago from the Northwest suburbs. This puts more pressure on Emanuel to upgrade the public schools in order to enable companies like Motorola Mobility to hold onto and hire younger workers with children.

It is an interesting development in American politics that ambitious and smart politicians like Bloomberg and Emanuel have chosen local office rather than Washington jobs. They probably have done so because it is actually possible to make meaningful change in a relatively short period of time in a city if you can control the levers of power – not that different from the position of Douglas Oborhelman, CEO of Caterpillar Inc.

Question: Does the Caterpillar labor deal make you happy or mad?

Wayne Dyer, the motivational speaker, once told the story of going to a spa to deliver a speech. The day before his appearance he decided to try the baths, which were the spa’s big attraction. There were a dozen small pools with water of varying temperatures. Cold was on one end of the pools, hot on the other, with the pools gradually ascending in temperature. He noticed that all the people in the pools were sitting in the two in the center. Dyer wanted to experience the gamut of water temperatures. He tried the 140 degree one and then plunged into the frigid pool for a sauna-like experience. Then he randomly immersed himself in every pool.

I thought of Dyer last week when my wife and I spent seven days at the Chautauqua Institution near Jamestown, New York, where we heard lectures every day and a variety of music we’d never sampled before.

One talk was about the devious behavior of insects. Another was a conversation between Roger Goodell, Head of the National Football League, Mike Slive, Commissioner of the Southeast Conference, and Luke Russert Tim Russert’s son, about ethics in big time football.

Music ranged from Beethoven’s Eroica symphony to K.D. Lang doing country. But the highlight was listening to some of the best young opera singers in the country performing selections in a venue seating 150 people. The singers were students from Juilliard and Curtis spending the summer at Chautauqua, polishing their skills before beginning their professional careers.

In Chicago, frankly, I would never go to the opera – dealing with traveling into the city, parking, a huge theater with big costumes, and the expense – who needs it? But at Chautauqua one weekly fee covered everything, so going to concerts was easy.

I think that the bigger message from our Chautauqua week is the same as that of Wayne Dyer’s spa experience. Don’t be so timid about testing the water, even if you know it’s going to be hotter or colder than you are used to. I’m often reminded of this in business. It’s easy to keep doing what you’ve always done. “I’m a screw machine guy. I’m a grinder. I do heat treating.”  As if that’s your identity. It is possible to re-label what you do, to yourself. Maybe the big opportunity is two pools up or two pools down the line. Maybe the next big break in your business is in 3D printing of components, or something as mundane as starting an apprentice program.

I had learned about Chautauqua 25 years ago and always wanted to go – but never got around to it. It has always been easier to bathe in the tepid pools. Glad I finally made the trek.

Question: What is something you’ve always wanted to do?

Recently I finished Andre Agassi’s autobiography, “Open,” the most interesting and entertaining non-fiction book I’ve read since the Steve Jobs biography.

From the first chapter on, Agassi states that he “hates tennis.” As soon as he could hold a racket, his domineering father began grooming Andre with the goal of him becoming the number 1 player in the world. Every day from grade school until he left home for Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, Andre was forced to hit for hours with a ball machine his dad had souped up, which he named “The Dragon.” His dad would stand behind him constantly yelling, “Hit Harder!”

Agassi played as a child because his father gave him no choice. His father was determined to spawn a tennis champion, and he had fallen short with all of Agassi’s older siblings.

Agassi lost a match for the first time at age 10 to the future pro, Jeff Tarango, when Tarango blatantly cheated on a line call in the final point of a tiebreaker. Agassi cried afterward. He was devastated. He hated the feeling of losing so much that from that day on, he devoted himself to perfectionism in his tennis despite his stated hatred of the sport.

He still hated the solitude of playing singles. He hated being forced to practice every day when normal kids got to play with friends. He resented tennis because it represented not having a choice for his life’s path.

As he got older, Agassi came to believe that playing tennis was his only option for an occupation. He had manipulated Nick Bollettieri to let him drop out of school in eighth grade, which further limited his career options. As a teenager he had no money, so with his older brother Philly coaching him, he traveled the U.S. playing the on the Satellite Tour in an old beater, trying to win enough to pay for gas and food.

Many times in the book, Agassi justifies playing the sport he hates by comparing himself to the countless other people in the world who strive for excellence in their jobs despite hating what they do. How many people in this world choose a job because they have been ordered to do it since birth? How many people have a certain occupation because they just happen to be great at it and they believe it’s the only job they can succeed in? How many people stay in a job they hate because they equate quitting with losing and failure?

I often watch professional athletes and think to myself, what they do would be my dream job. Wouldn’t it be nice to play a game as your job, get paid millions, and have unconditional love from fans? I have always taken it for granted that people who make a living playing a sport, devoting their lives to a sport, playing with the passion to be the best in the world must love playing it.

But think about all of the Olympic champions the last few weeks from countries like China and Russia, who are forced to devote their lives to winning a contest they never chose to participate in on their own. I’m sure some of the champions do love their sport, but I wonder … how many of them just hate losing?

Question: Do you have to love what you do to be great at it?