Call me old- fashioned but I like to do business face-to-face, one-to-one, with a real live person – and when I say one-to-one that means a preference away from a computer screen.Today’s technology has changed the way we do just about everything in business. I get that. I know also that that change includes how we interact with our fellow human beings – be they customers, clients or even rivals.

Take the Interstate 35 and head north out of Austin.Best do it early in the morning. Just drive; just keep driving …About five hours later you’ll hit Grayson County. Make for Lake Ray Roberts; then you’ll find it by the shore. It’s not much of a place when you get there. It never really was.

The thing that surprises many when they leave Austin airport is how green the land is all around.Europeans think that Texas is a desert. Something propagated endlessly by Western films - ghost towns with the tumbleweed drifting across a forlorn town square is the image most conjured up on celluloid.

Texas is is the second largest state in the Union - Alaska is bigger but with a population of just over 700,000. Texas has over 28 million people within its borders and that number, like the Lone Star economy, is growing fast. Take Austin, for example, they tell me that 150 people a day are moving there from other parts of the States.

Name me another place on the planet that is so business-friendly, or as rich. Or a place that values those who try and fail, and try again, try harder, and then succeed. You see the men and women who built what became known as the United States, they too came from the Old World with a dream.