There are some really neat things about having a home on a mountain. On most days you can see thirty or forty miles. Only really clear days the world seems to be at your doorstep.
Because of the geography of the Roanoke Valley, snow sometimes drops down from the north. It did that yesterday. I first noticed the snow at the foot of Tinker Mountain where Interstate 81 wraps around it and heads north to Troutville and places up the Shenandoah Valley.
Gradually the snow worked its way across the valley. It was not long before the Peaks of Otter disappeared into the white. Not long after that downtown Roanoke was swallowed up. One after another valley landmarks disappeared until all we could see of the valley was a white cloud.
Then we were basically down to the woods behind our house and the homes near us. Yesterday there was no real worry about isolation, I knew the snow would be gone by afternoon. But for a moment it was nice to focus on the snow in the trees and forget some of the big problems that we face.
We seem to have become a society that is very hard to please. We want it all, but no one wants to pay for anything. We seem to mobilize well only in times of disaster. I once surprised a manager that I had at Apple. It was in the late eighties, very early in my career there. She had asked to see my business plan for my territory. In a world of of people focused on hitting their quarterly number, I had created a five year business plan.
My manager was amazed. I only worked for her for a year or two before I ended up being a manager myself. I made a lot of progress on that five year plan in a short time. For the next twelve years, one of my trademarks was creating long term plans in a company that only cared about short term results. The plans were not built in isolation. I took the best ideas of my team, and we wrapped them around the company's direction and created a road to success.
At the beginning of each year, we would make a top ten list that I would work at delivering to my team. The list was important to them because it has come from them and their experiences with their customers. Sometimes we made a lot of progress, and other years we only checked off two or three things. It was a good way to do business.
It seems we Americans have a hard time agreeing on our top ten list. Some believe we need to fix our infrastructure. Others have no other mantra than we are being taxed too much. Those with health insurance seem to care little about those who have no health insurance or those whose premiums are continually going up. Everyone believes in education, but no one can agree on how to deliver it.
On top of it all, we have put people in positions of power who spend most of their time trying to stay in power. Then there are the special interests who spend amazing sums of money to get close to those people in power. I am not surprised to hear politicians resigning in frustration. Is it even possible these days to do what is right and win an election?
Now I am back to the trees standing resolutely in the snow. I am comforted by their presence. I know that at one time all the mountains around Roanoke had the trees stripped from them. Now in the year 2010, for the most part the trees have reclaimed the fields that were on the mountains. Our creaky system has figured out how to produce food more inexpensively from distant flat fields with giant tractors, often using mechanical harvesting equipment.
The farmers that farmed these hills went to work in the plants near the city or on the railroad. Today the plants are mostly gone and the railroad is not the employer that it once was. We create information, analyze it, and try to make money from the knowledge that we mine. Much of the production of goods is thousands of miles away.
I have this feeling that we are about one year into a five year business plan, but the only problem is that no one has a copy of the business plan. One of the sayings at Apple used to be that the best way to control the future was to invent it. Apple has done well at that, but inventing the future is a process, not just an one time event. Only time will tell us if Apple's new iPad is part of another new future or just a footnote on a page.
Today there is no longer snow in the air, but the winds are blowing hard from the north. We are feeling someone's snowstorm from far away. This is a winter that will be one to remember. There has been winter snow in all the 49 states at one time. Snow has even fallen on along the coasts of North and South Carolina. It has been an undeniably snowy winter. Visiting Northern Virginia even through pictures makes you think you are in Canada.
Our friends living near Dublin have had snow on the ground almost continuously since the first week in December. Their driveway also looks like a scene out of Canada. Yet when I talk to Canadian friends, their winter has been mild and relatively painless.
So it is with the weather and the economy. While some suffer, others prosper. The cold winds of change are blowing hard across American this winter. We will remember the economic challenges just as well if not more vividly than the snow. The challenge is always figuring out where to be so that you can enjoy the warmth and prosperity.
Opportunities that are not seized are just like bare ground. The trees will find the bare ground. That is way in works in nature. It happens just as in the business world someone will figure out the opportunities where new business will grow in the shadow of old dying businesses.
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