Rally

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Good morning, Team!  It’s Friday!
WARNING:  THIS IS A SHARPEN THE SAW ISSUE.  LEADERSHIP LESSONS MAY BE HARD TO FIND.
This week we took a little time off and bounced around the Black Hills during the 78th Sturgis motorcycle rally.  For those who haven’t made it to a rally, pictures don’t do it justice.
The riding is spectacular because of the weather, no bugs, plenty of landmarks and beautiful scenery.
Like most significant events, the rally draws a lot of people from different walks of life.  Observing or ogling or just people watching combined with each bike a likely reflection of the personality of the rider, it is difficult not to be intrigued by the environment.
As we sat at a local tavern on the main drag in Sturgis with good friends, I couldn’t help but think there were a few basic categories of people attending.  For ease, I labeled the categories; committed, convicted or copy cat.
You might ask, “What makes you an expert?”…I’m not.  I did, however, grow up next to the local chapter president of a prominent motorcycle club.  When they pulled up with their ‘57 Caddy hearse, we thought the neighborhood had gone south.  Truth was Bill and family were great folk and I demystified preconceived notions about them and their lifestyle.  It’s better than simply looking at someone’s shoes, clothes, haircut or teeth to make the judgement.
I’ve been going to the rally off and on over the past twenty years and like most things, some factors change while others stay the same.  Diversity of the crowd is a constant, weather is a moderate variable, how much you enjoy yourself is entirely up to you.
Have a blessed weekend!

Bully!

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Good morning, Team!  It’s Friday!
Meet the 26th President of the United States, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt.
My travels this week took me to Medora, North Dakota.  A remote, touristy town with some history, some oil, some hearty folk and some beautiful badlands scenery and the honeymoon destination of a couple of broke college kids over 33 years ago.
Select company leadership met with the Board to discuss performance, review completed projects, talk with clients and  subject matter experts to get a taste of what we do.  We also gained insight into some of the challenges and delays associated with completing infrastructure projects in a county where half the land is publicly owned.
Roosevelt claimed at a stop in Fargo, ND in 1910 that he would not have become President of the United States were it not for the time he spent in the badlands of North Dakota.
What leadership lessons did he learn from a sparsely populated state?
-Was it an appreciation for the diversity of lands that differed from his New York City stomping grounds?
-Was it the rugged nature of the people that carved out a living in the badlands?
-Was it his love for nature?
-Perhaps it was the time at Elkhorn Ranch where he relaxed, cleared his head, developed thoughts and aspirations adding to his collection of writings.
We all find peace in different ways whether escaping the hustle of the big city, shooting wild game, or simply collecting thoughts or enjoying nature by sleeping under the stars.
Whatever your leadership aspirations might be, find the time and your own sacred place to collect your thoughts and make plans how you are going to rule the free world.
Have a blessed weekend!

Portfolio

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Good morning, Team!  It’s Friday!

I’m rushing through the airport today and I see a middle aged woman wearing a shirt that says “Keep it simple”…
(I guess T-shirts are the new bumper sticker.)   People desiring to impart wisdom, that is … assuming you, the audience, are paying attention or if you really give a hoot.
Being the contrarian I have been known to be, I wondered how practical that is (to keep it simple), even understanding the aspirational nature of the sentiment.
I can’t think of much of life (the “it” in the request) allows us to keep simple.
•Money – nope, have you figured out how much is the right amount to: save, spend, make, leverage, invest, contribute to charitable organizations?  What about forms of payment?  Gift cards for Christmas, Bitcoin, currency exchange…remember when you could spend your Canadian coins at the grocery store?  Now my BANK won’t even maintain a counter for my domestic change!  I guess I’m supposed to melt it down or put it in a big clear jug for my kids to deal with.
When an investment advisor refers to how they allocate your investments, they suggest “diversifying your portfolio”.  Honestly, this is probably good advice for every aspect of our busy, complicated lives today.
•Home ownership – nope, the already decade old mortgage crisis took care of that.  Obvious investment choice no more.  Who wants a big home when they retire?  Now it’s more like to buy or not to buy.  Enter “Air b n b” to complicate further.  Then there’s sub lease, rent out, tiny houses to build (maybe on a vacation property?), on the other end there is the competition for the $100 million mansions in Southern California.  Google it.  We’ve now entered into the era of assisted living rather than the 4 bedroom straight to nursing home scenario.  Hardly simple.
•Vehicle ownership – nope, if you can get around with shared ride service, bicycle, walk, etc, you can save yourself time, headache, space, and probably money.  The very likely answer is you have multiple forms at your ready disposal and you use several of them for a variety of reasons to gain maximum optimization.  For instance, I own a motorcycle but it has limited viability in a four season zip code.  I love it and ride it almost exclusively for pleasure the 4 or 5 months a year but it’s not my work horse.
Perhaps a little adjustment in our approach is all that is required.
*Instead of home ownership, we need to consider this as taking up multiple forms of residency.  Where do you go to stay out of the elements?  How many forms at what point and each stage of life…
I travel a lot so within the last year so far it’s been multiple hotels, several resorts, a time share, a motor lodge, family member house, family member apartment, and our house.
*Instead of “our car”, which is deeply personal and often referred to as an expression of our personality, maybe we just look at transportation.  Getting from where you are to where you want to be (most often) in the simplest and most efficient manner possible.  Within the past 12 months, I’ve used snowmobile,
bicycle, motorcycle, golf cart, personal car, rental cars, Uber, rental pickup, limos, light rail, train, boat, planes-charter and commercial, walking/running, crutches, and wheelchair.  Again, not simple.
*Instead of money…think value.  Are you a giver or taker?  Money is a trap.  It’s necessary to maintain order, I get that.  Keep score?  Maybe.  What are you doing to give back, add more than you take?  If you place importance on the size of your financial portfolio, you’ve missed the point.  Focus on your contribution.
Pardon the extensive musing.  I just don’t think any of this is meant to be “simple”.  We can choose to ignore the things around us and keep it simple but it’s probably not the best, smartest, cheapest, easiest or most practical.
I’d prefer,
“Open your eyes to possibility, own your journey, place limits on your existence at your own risk and don’t take advice from a T-shirt.”
Have a blessed weekend!

Connections

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Good morning, Team!  It’s Friday!
How well connected are you?  I’m not referring to how many LinkedIn professionals are in your network or if you have a triple redundant power supply to your residence or your internet provider speed.
How well connected are you to
Your self?
Your loved ones?
Your core beliefs?
In commercial aviation vernacular, if you don’t make your connections, you suffer delays, frustrations and other possible mishaps and miscommunications (lost luggage, lost opportunities, disappointment, etc).  This is a primary reason why Carole and I live in a hub airport city.
*We minimized airline connections necessary to get from where we are to where we want to be.
In technical terms, the market areas I currently focus on; Power, Communications and Oil & Gas systems …connections are the most vulnerable points.
•The ends of power cable and the splices are the common points of failure leading to outages.  No one likes a power outage.
•Transmitting light long distances is challenging and we’ve become used to lightning fast data speed and super high reliability.  The fiber optic network transmitting all of that data in real time is susceptible to weak connections.
•Oil and gas pipelines are in the news quite a bit because of the hysteria that a pipe connection may leak and cause damage to the environment.  Pipeline integrity and safety is a very big issue for the O&G industry and they do not take connection failure lightly.
*The utilities that bring primary elements to the quality of life we enjoy today maintain connections to ensure safety and reliability.
On the personal side, connections are so critical for the circle of life from cradle to grave, literally and figuratively, that one could argue nothing else really matters.
I’ve been blessed to know a number of really good people who have unfortunately suffered breaks in their primary connections recently.  I would argue that this type of a break is the most devastating impact physically, financially, and emotionally.
-One friend I met with this week shared he was hospitalized twice in a week by the triggering event of his spouse stepping out and eventually filing for divorce.
-Another friend lost his long-time-hero-father of 93 years.
-I’ve come to notice that when my connection to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is severed or weakened by the busyness of schedule so I’m not praying daily, I lose my sense of Peace and I quickly get misaligned.
*There is plenty of argument to be made that you need to maximize your personal connections.
Everything else will fall in place.
Have a blessed weekend!

Crescendo

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Good morning, Team!  It’s Friday!
I’ve been navigating through this mid-life … contemplation (crisis too common, dramatic and overused a term).  I’m not a very emotional animal, my self-confidence is in tact (some would suggest too strong) and I’m no longer in “early middle age”.  I’m somewhere beyond center of that metric.
What do I plan to do with the rest of my life, leveraging what experience and wisdom I’ve accumulated?
I recently read some hokum article regarding the average age when people stop working “extra hard”, classified as more than 50 hours a week.  No surprise that the demographics polled showed the younger people happened to be, the earlier age they considered was THE age to slowdown.  Millennials thought 50 was the age you should slow down but boomers thought the age was closer to 60 and retirement had a similar spread.
What does this mean for me?
Every situation is unique.  Some have saved enough early to retire or redefine what a work day looked like at a tender age rather than having social security define their cool down date.  I just spoke to Carole this past weekend about a couple of her family friends, one who is still singing professionally regularly and another still hauling gravel 6 days a week, both well into their 80’s!
So here are three examples of historic figures who reached their prime at the end of their life, not in the middle.
•Charles Flint orchestrated the consolidation of three companies into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911 at the age of 61; the company became known as International Business Machines in 1924.  Flint stayed on the board of IBM, retiring in 1930 when he was 81.
•Peter Drucker lived to be just shy of 96 years of age and worked for over 70 years defining modern management.  He wrote 39 books and contributed to the Wall Street Journal for over 10 years and contributed regularly to Harvard Business Review and The Economist.
•Anna Mary Robertson-Grandma Moses began her painting career at age 75 when she couldn’t do needlepoint any more.  Instead of retiring, she took up painting and by the time she hit age 101 she’d painted over 1600 pieces!
Each example appears to have lived their lives in crescendo, getting louder and louder as they aged rather than going quietly into the night.
If I got serious about how much, how hard or how long I “had” to work, I could probably eke out a living without being gainfully employed from now until my ticker stopped.  The quality would suffer but not from whether I had three squares a day or if I had to sleep in a tent…it would suffer because I wouldn’t be maximizing my purpose.  God designed me to fix and solve and reconcile, no matter the stage, the tools or the timeframe.
Yet again I am reminded of the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Indeed.
Have a blessed weekend!

Breakfast

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Good morning, Team!  It’s Friday!
I’m guessing you’ve heard the quote credited to athlete Martina Navratilova “The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs.  The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.”
So are you a chicken or a pig?
Here are a few examples from history for your consideration:
•Abraham Lincoln started his political career on March 9, 1832 and between then and March 4, 1861 when he took the oath of office as sixteenth president of the United States of America, he suffered multiple election losses; 8/6/1832, 12/3/1838, and 2/8/1855.  We all know that he went on to change the face of history, define what it means to be committed to an idea to make this country better with no easy victories along the way.
•Roald Amundsen, arctic explorer, reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911 with methodical, disciplined consistency.  He followed the famed 20 mile march.  Each day, despite perfect or poor conditions, 20 miles each day until the goal was reached.  The approach compares to his prime competitor, Robert Scott, who perished along with his four men on their 700 mile return.  A commitment to an approach yielded success and survivability.
•Thomas Edison’s business suffered a fire in 1941 that burned ten of his buildings costing him approximately $23 Million (today’s dollars) in losses that the insurance company only covered about a third of.  A significant setback could have been, and often is, the end of prominent businesses but not to a committed soul.  He said, ”There is great value in disaster.  All our mistakes are burned up.  Thank God we can start anew.”  With a loan from Henry Ford he was back up and running three weeks later.
Quitting, changing course, even slowing down are not options for the committed.   There is only picking one self up when knocked down by public sentiment, relentless weather, chemical fire or any number of various obstacles this world throws at each of us…daily.
Have a blessed weekend!  Stay committed.
Oink, oink

Missing the point

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Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

Good morning, Team!  It’s Friday!
(Note: for all the ultra literal reading this post the second I publish it and saying, No, it’s Thursday night!  Allow me to explain my thinking…
I enjoy the tag line from (the former) Paul Harvey’s morning radio show even though I have a Team, he had America’s ear.
If I set a standard to publish “by Friday morning” I will catch my friends in Cincinnati when they wake up at 4 am ET, my esteemed former colleagues in all time zones, my friends, family and coworkers on the day and it will be there Saturday morning when my siblings catch up.  It’s meant to provoke thought and carry you across the finish line Friday and into the weekend.)
So I’m watching a few minutes of “No Reservation”-Bourdain stuff and he’s in the Caribbean.  He said something like if you’re rushing around trying to do this or that, than you’re missing the point.  In other words, you’re in the Caribbean, enjoy the relaxation, the food, the peace and quiet…pull up a hammock and swing in the ocean breeze.  For a New Yorker, typically wound tight and seldom willing to relax, that’s saying something.
How else does this apply?
For leadership, if you’ve made it to the room where the decisions are being made; pay attention, speak up AND listen actively.  Don’t be intimidated and don’t be intimidating.  Don’t be an asshole.  Make the best decisions with the information you have at the time, go forth and execute.  That’s what leaders do.
For family, if you work to provide, whether you’re bringing home the bacon or fryin’ it up (or both) Great!…but don’t forget who you’re providing for.  Compelling issues can distract the best of us from our real job.  Don’t get caught up in the game so badly you forget what winning means.
Have a blessed weekend and a safe Independence Day celebration!  We live in the greatest country on the planet, live up to your potential since most of the barriers to prosperity have already been removed.
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Reengaged

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Good morning Team!  It’s Friday!
I’m sitting next to a distinguished gentleman on my regular flight from where I work back to where I live.  He dresses, acts and behaves like someone who was once retired and now reengaged.
After looking for an executive administrative coordinator/business partner for … an extended period of time, I reached out to a former colleague to gauge interest in filling the role remotely.  She respectfully declined indicating she is happily retired.  She reached a point where it wasn’t appealing to reengage.
Today, I modified an offer to a talented technician who no longer felt their efforts were appreciated and sought affirmation and recognition elsewhere.  I don’t normally make a practice of re-recruiting someone who has secured an offer somewhere else.  This was an exception in an attempt to get someone to reengage.
I feel I have a tremendous amount of experience in this area of reengagement over my career but specifically over the past three years and four distinct roles.  I can empathize with each scenario and a few more of my own.
It’s possible to be:
•Engaged and employed
•Engaged and unemployed
•Disengaged and employed
•Disengaged and unemployed
The common point in the examples here is that all people were disengaged for one reason or the other.  The art of reengaging is far from simple or easy and may require much more than a reintroduction.  It requires a level of trust, a reassurance that the environment will be more forgiving than the last reason to disengage and there has to be higher perceived value than simply staying disengaged.
In a new book from a former colleague, Jim Nevada.  He wrote “Igniting Purpose-Driven Leadership” detailing principles of successful leaders
-the need to focus on your purpose
-the need to unleash the creative energy of your people
That’s a detailed and specific way of engaging “your people”
Have a blessed weekend!

The hard way

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Good morning, Team!  It’s Friday!

On Tuesday night after a long weekend with family, I scheduled the latest flight out to spend a little more time at home (and a little less time away).  Enter thunderstorms to delay the flight well past the Sky Club hours, leaving me to generate my blog early and question why I’m compelled to follow through with a well intended plan turned sour.
If I were Goldilocks, I’d burn my mouth on the whole bowl of hot porridge, sit uncomfortably in the chair too big for me and sleep on the hardest bed with a rock for a pillow.
Why?
As one coworker recently put it, that’s very German of you.
-Stubborn?
-Stoic?
-Stupid?
Come to think about it, I’m the one sitting around the table in “those” meetings asking Why not?
-Searching for a better answer and willing to sacrifice (too?) much in order to solve a wicked hard problem?
-Over compensating for fear of ending up destitute?
-Was it ingrained in me as a kid that easy life leaves you soft, vulnerable (in a bad way), hard work is good for you and harder work is exceptional?
-Has it gone on so long that my trigger response is to pick challenge over charm?  Tough love over compassion even when everyone else can clearly see that compassion is the only answer?
I don’t know any more.
I have nothing left to prove.
•Climbed the proverbial career mountain
•Kids are all adults; responsible, educated, paying tax, adding societal value, starting their own families, getting married, pursuing their own dream, no longer in need of the self-appointed disciplinarian
•Dad passed away so the Freud argument weakens
My partner of 33+ years has endured my pursuit of rigor and extraordinary accomplishment with minimal peace.
I grew to believe…
Comfort breeds complacency.  Complacency breeds entitlement.
Entitlement breeds discord.
Discord breeds dissension.
Dissension breeds fracture.
Fracture breeds failure.
Shorten the equation and comfort is the beginning of failure.  Can I afford to get comfortable this far away from retirement?
Conversely, if I continue this hard ass behavior, who will want to spend time with me when me and Uncle Sam jointly declare I served my purpose and now it’s time for a 25 year break?
That all sounds suspiciously “easy”…
I’ll increase my efforts in search for middle ground and a “just right” epilogue.
Have a blessed weekend!