Monthly Archives: May 2018

The Right Tool at the Right Time

After about a year of writing my “Notes from the Southwest Corner,” i began a second weekly column entitled “Minding Your Own Business” in 2009. Amelia Hipps, the editor at the time, was kind enough to take on both columns in the Lebanon Democrat. i wrote 296 of those columns. New management decided $50 a week was too expensive and that column was stopped. It was probably a good thing because i was beginning to make things up.

The idea was generated when JD Waits and i co-wrote The Pretty Good Management Book in the early 1990’s. The manuscript remains above my desk.

In the middle 1990’s, i wrote a similar column for The Independent Community Post, a small local paper in Bonita, which only lasted for less than two years. That editor came up with the title “Minding Your Own Business.” i will include the Democrat columns here under JD’s and my title of “Pretty Good Management” because of the source.

We began writing our book with the idea most high end consultants try to sell a perfect system to make an organization run smoothly with minimal management and leadership. That, of course, never happens. JD pointed out his and my mothers would pay one of their highest compliments to anything with the term “pretty good,” as in leaving a fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and fresh tomatoes supper and commenting, “That was a pretty good meal.” We figured we weren’t going to blow smoke and promise perfection, but that the principles we brought forward would allow a leader/manager to run a pretty good outfit.

i thought about the genre where the column fit and made up my on term: business leadership. The below was the introductory column for The Democrat.

Using the Right Tool at the Right Time

In forty-plus years of observing people and organizations working toward success, I frequently have been amazed at how bollixed up we can get.

Nearly all of us seem to have a pretty good idea of how we would like our business to work. Most of us have good intentions and pretty high ethical standards. Generally, we display a pride in our work and believe in our service or product. In most cases, the skills, intelligence, and common sense are sufficient to produce success are in place.

This seems to be true for nearly every kind of organization: profit or non-profit, product or service, large or small, technical and non-technical, government or commercial.

Invariably, a large number of businesses don’t fare as well as they should. We work hard but the rewards are elusive.

Why Are There Failures?

I continue to ask myself, “Why do people and businesses not succeed when they appear to be capable?

“Why do numerous people and businesses, which have initial success, have such a difficult time staying at the highest level of success?”

I do not have THE answer. Even more sadly, I haven’t seen anyone, any theory, any program, or any process which provides THE answer.

This suggests I too may never find the answer.

I refuse to believe this.

A Right Answer For You

Yet there is hope. Although there’s no single right answer, there is A right answer for you. Getting to your right answer is not easy. It wasn’t meant to be. If it becomes easy, it is about to change in a way you will not like.

Making lives and businesses work like we want them to work requires dedication and hard work. But it can be done, and this is enough to give us hope.

When I go out in my garage on the weekend to pursue some project, it is an amazing process. The garage is in disarray. I have a number of tools and materials in that garage, but finding them is a different matter. I normally can’t find the right ones. I become frustrated and head for Home Depot to buy new tools and materials.

I love this part. Wandering around a Home Depot is like visiting a wonderland of human nature and great gadgets. This fun part lasts until dark, delaying the project until the next day. And so it goes through the weekend. The project doesn’t get done, but I have lots of fun.

I can afford to do that with my garage, but neither you nor I can afford to do that with our work.

To succeed in our work, we must be organized. We must have tools and we must know how and when to use the right tools. It requires application, what our parents recognized and called “hard work.”

The good news, as I have discovered through my varied and lengthy experience, is doing it right can be mostly fun, especially if the hard work is done correctly and leads to success. It took me a long time to realize hard work can be fun.

POA&M

Success doesn’t require genius or some special tool, process or some consultant selling tools and processes (although getting unbiased help and outside skilled facilitation is often a necessary assistance). Succeeding in business can be accomplished by knowing where you want to go, knowing how you want to get there, and making it happen.

This Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) includes:

  • Taking care of your customers (and every business has customers)
  • Taking care of your people
  • Taking care of your finances
  • Being aware of your business environment
  • Doing what makes good business sense
  • Realistically assessing how you are doing in all of the above
  • Modifying what you are doing based on assessment
  • Working hard at all of the above

My plan is to write articles about what to consider in your quest for continual business success. The considerations will be around the basics I’ve listed above. This article is, hopefully, the first of many for you to use at your discretion.

My goal is to give you some ideas about how you want to conduct your business, not what you think I want you to do. I plan to work hard and have fun. I hope you do too.

Why Navy?

In 2008 , i wrote this for my weekly column for The Lebanon Democrat. i don’t know if anyone will really understand my love/passion for a life at sea. My father after his day at sea with me came as close as anyone i know.

SAN DIEGO – As the new year ramps up, I am back in the Southwest corner considering why I made the Navy my career.

My father also has wondered why a boy from Middle Tennessee would choose the sea for his livelihood. Others have wondered the same thing.

The sea called me during my midshipman cruise on the U.S.S. Lloyd Thomas (DD 694) in 1963. We steamed from Newport, RI, to Sydney, Nova Scotia; to Bermuda; and back to Newport as part of the U.S.S. Intrepid (CVA 11) battle group.

My last four weeks were in engineering with two watches and normal work requiring 16-hour work days. Having no more sense than now, I went from my last watch to the crew’s movie in the Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter (DASH) hangar – “DASH” was a weapon which did not last long. Sailors called it “CRASH” instead of “DASH.” But its hanger on the 02 level just aft of amidships was perfect for showing movies.

This night, I watched “The Quiet Man” for the first time. As I left the theater and traversed the torpedo deck, I walked to the port side and gazed at the full moon.

The ship was making 15 knots. The moon’s reflection cut a wide, rippling, reflective path straight to me. The boilers roared through the forward stack. The bow wave was white, curling from the side and swishing its whisper as the ship cut through the water. “Darken ship” allowed no lights except those for navigation. At least a billion stars blanketed the black sky.

The sea grabbed me. She came down that path from the full moon, wafted across the bow wave, and reached deep inside. I felt her grab my heart and take it away.

I have loved her in her fury of the winter Atlantic, when she tossed a 500-foot ship around like a cork, ripping off protruding metal like dandelion bristles, and tossing sailors around the ship like matchsticks. Her intense fury blanketed the sea surface with froth.

I have loved her in the doldrums of the South China Sea where not a breath of wind existed, and the sea surface was glass for a week. I saw my first “green flash” then.

In the summer of 1973, steaming in the operating areas off of Newport, Rhode Island, my father saw why I went to sea. My ship, the U.S.S. Luce (DLG 7), was undergoing a major inspection. My Commanding Officer learned of my father visiting and invited him to ride during our underway day.

As a lieutenant, I was the sea detail officer of the deck. My father was by my side as I had the “conn” while the ship stood out of Narragansett Bay. As soon as we reached the operating area, we went to 25 knots for rudder tests, rapidly shifting the rudder to max angles both ways. The commanding officer and I went into a frantic dance, running in opposite directions across the bridge to hang over each wing checking for small craft in the dramatic turns.

After the rudder tests, I took my father into the bowels of the ship to our anti-submarine warfare spaces. My father stood behind me as I directed prosecution of a submarine contact. In the darkened spaces with sonar pings resounding, he watched as we tracked the sub on our fire control screen and simulated firing a torpedo.

After lunch, we set general quarters and ran through engineering drills. Finally, we transited back to Newport.

With mooring complete, the captain gave my father a ship’s plaque. My wife and mother were waiting on the pier when we debarked from the ship’s quarterdeck. As we walked the brow to the pier, my father said to me, “Son, I understand why you would want to make this a career.”

I did. Somewhere in the latter stages of that career, I met a woman, a native of San Diego, and we got married. After a brief taste of being a Navy officer’s wife, she and I returned to San Diego for my “twilight” tour, the last four years on shore duty.

So now when I walk up our hill to raise and lower the flag, I look out to sea and check to see how many ships are pierside at the Naval Station.

And that, my friends, is why I made the Navy career and live in the Southwest corner, far from my home in Tennessee.

Something to Remember

Last night, i wrote my post about Memorial Day.

Today after all of those nice words from me and about a gazillion others on every media option possible, i was recipient of a Facebook post that put it all in perspective for me.

Larry Wood relieved me in my last Navy tour. Larry had been a helicopter pilot of some renown. He and i had a cup of coffee at the Naval Amphibious School, Coronado. He now lives in Florida.

What he posted today brings into focus what this day is really all about. i confess when i saw the photo and read Larry’s comment, i had to catch my breath to keep control of myself.

Larry, i stole this off your Facebook page. Here it is:

Larry is the dark-haired guy on the left in Navy dress whites. The Navy has shoulder boards on dress whites. Marines do not. Here is Larry’s explanation of the photo:

This is the class I got my wings with in’69. All Marines and me. We all went to NAM! To my knowledge, I’m the only one who came back. RIP Marines!

i don’t think anything i might add could say more about the deepest meaning of Memorial Day.

Thanks, Larry, for giving me a  better understanding of what Memorial Day is really about.

Memorial Day

Monday is Memorial Day.

We celebrate with a long weekend, car races, baseball games, picnics, and sales, lots of sales. We all do it under the red, white, and blue pretense of the Memorial Day weekend.

There are some precious souls who travel to military cemeteries with their neat crosses in a row marking the fallen soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, many of whom made the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of their country, their flag, their constitution, and ALL of the people who believe in liberty and equality. i am not one of those precious souls.

There are a bunch of folks who travel to the Vietnam Memorial in our nation’s capital. Ken Hall and his wife Diane joined Rolling Thunder in the motorcycle riders tribute. The last time i was on a motorcycle was in 1969 when Andrew Nemethy, Rob Dewitt, and i would tour the mountains in eastern Virginia on weekends when we didn’t have the duty on the USS Hawkins, about six months before i went to my Vietnam tour.

i honor those who died for our country in my own way. i have also written a number of pieces about this honoring of our fallen on past weekends such as this one. i began to write another tonight, but i think you’ve had enough of that already.

So i returned to the powder blue “Deluxe Baby Gift Box” that once held “Baby Powder, Baby Cream, Baby Soap, and Baby Oil,” the Johnson & Johnson products of “New Brunswick, NJ,” and “Chicago, Ill.”

i am guessing it was handy when he was deciding what to do with the photos he brought back from the war, the big war as they called it. The products in the box, i’m sure were for me. When he got back i was a month from my second birthday and those baby products had probably been used.

So he took the photos, put them in a box and stored the box in his chest or closet. i wonder if he ever took out that box and went through the photos. It was intact when he gave it to me about a half century later. i have refrained from showing nearly all of it to anyone except my brother and some very special friends who served later, like me. Some are rather grotesque, some show some pretty horrific things, but all of the photos in the box are like his private memories of the war. i’m not sure he ever showed any of them to my mother, including the ones she sent him of her and their newborn chubby baby.

My father didn’t die in that war. Neither did my  Uncle Bill Prichard who was flying fighters on the opposites side of the world or my Uncle Pipey Orr who rode a minesweeper out of Charleston. Somehow, my father received photos of his brother-in-law beside his aircraft in Britain. i’ll remember each of them throughout the weekend but not because it’s Memorial Day weekend. i remember them for their sacrifice, but those sacrifices weren’t the ultimate one. i honor their service, but this weekend is for those who didn’t come back.

Still, i think a number of the less graphic photos  and some memorabilia in that box might give us pause to think about what those men and women were up against in WWII, and by extrapolation, our service men and women in all of the wars and conflicts from the revolution to today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The one on the left is my father’s rating badge for Machinist Mate Second Class, Automotive. The one on the right is the patch designating him as in a Construction Battalion or Seabee. They are from three quarters of a century ago. He advanced to First Class Petty Officer before the war ended.

He apparently received this photo from his brother-in-law, Bill Prichard. It is my uncle with his aircraft named Colleen for his new wife. On the back my uncle wrote “Notice the snow. Guess  you haven’t seen any for quite a while.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He carried these two photos, the left one of me with Mother right after we got home from the hospital. He was there for my birth but caught a train back to Gulfport the day after i was born,. The second was of him and me in Gulfport in May 1944. My mother; Aunt Naomi, and my grandmother drove me down there so he could see me before the liberty ship took him and his 75th Construction Battalion boarded a liberty ship for the transit to the South Pacific.

This was taken the week after MacArthur returned to the Philippines. It is the beachhead encampment and stores being offloaded from cargo ships.

And what Monday and this weekend is all about. This one is a US military cemetery on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Many of the men buried here have relatives who have never seen their grave. i honor all of them with a silent moment while i conclude this post, and i will honor them again tomorrow and Monday.

Thank you folks for your service. i will not forget you.

Dark Side of the Moon

i awoke this morning around 6:15, unusually late  for me. i was charged to take care of one of about two hundred thousand chores i had either invented by myself, had been requested by my most significant other, or required, like damn near everything in this twenty-eight year old house. i also thought i would finish a post i promised Eleanor Hicks.

Then i remembered a phrase that had passed through my somewhat scattered brain either from a dream or an actual thought blossoming up like a dandelion in my head.

So i  scrabbled around the office as i usually do to start the day, rather than doing the stretches i should do every morning, had a lovely breakfast with Maureen, piddled, and sat down to consider the fairly substantial to-do i had planned.

That thought just refused to go away.

So i added some words, got a little bit enthused, added some more words, and liked what i had written, just a tad off center from what i usually enter here:

i walked on the dark side of the moon
where living, breathing gargoyles screech,
where souls with black hearts rule,
slithering about everywhere with no compassion;
i could not see the world;
indeed, it was dark and damp
with coldness of the sickly kind;
i walked through the dark side of the moon
without guilt; therefore
unharmed by the living gargoyles and souls with black hearts
although they screeched their pitiless cries of harm and fear;
finally, i turned in the darkness to ask
“why are you so cold and heartless
when, if you just walked with me
from the dark side of the moon,
you could see the light;”
the gargoyles and dark souls scratched their heads;
a couple began to walk with me
from the dark side of the moon;
the others retreated to the dark;
the breathing gargoyle and the dark soul
who walked with me to the sunny side of the moon
smiled when they met the light and warmth;
the gargoyle turned into an infant angel;
the soul lost its darkness and glowed;
i thought how sad the others had stayed
on the dark side of the moon;
but
for the two who walked with me,
my walk on the dark side of the moon
was worth it;
enough reason to continue walking.