View from the Mountain

For The Greater Good

There are parts of your life and people that have a huge impact on the person that you become. 

I remain proud that I was a Boy Scout when growing up.  After many years I also can look back on my years in military school at McCallie with fondness. The McCallie motto of Honor, Truth, and Duty has been as much a part of my being as Harvard's motto of Veritas (Truth). My years at Harvard were a time when our country seemed to be ripping apart at the seams, but I remain convinced that our country's foundations handled the challenge of the sixties and seventies without breaking and were stronger after all the turmoil.

It used to be a joke in our family that my mother would give a friend or family member almost anything that they asked for that she had.  She was never one for letting things be stuffed away unused in the attic or even under-used somewhere in the house.  She was always happy when useful homes were found for things in storage. Life was for living and accumulating stuff was not part of her plan for happiness.  Mother was also not very forgiving about donations that were wasted.  My father once gave the Mount Airy YMCA a $20,000 donation.  They used the money for a parking lot and mother thought they could have done much more with the money.  She never forgot or forgave them.

Considering my background, perhaps it is not too surprising that I became disenchanted with politics in the early seventies.  It was a time of assassinations and Watergate.  It was also a time when I felt like that I did not know myself.  I took a chance and went off to Canada.  With $6,000 from my mother, I bought a home and farm on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.  My father helped with a few thousand for a farm tractor and some equipment and I went back to the land for three years.  There were a few cows, two Labrador retrievers, tons of hay and lots of gardening.  Of necessity I learned to do almost everything from copper plumbing to electrical wiring and building cabinets.

About two years into my back to the land experiment, I made a trip down to the states to help a college roommate get married just outside of Boston.  From there I wandered down to Washington to visit a college friend. The trip to Washington convinced me I had made the right decision to move to Canada.   After Washington I headed down to Mount Airy where my mother was living. With the help of a blind date, I was smitten and ended up marrying a wonderful North Carolina lady a few months latter.  I convinced her to come back to Nova Scotia with me.

Once there is someone else in your life, it is impossible not to think about others. In 1974, my wife, our two retrievers, the tractor, several cats and all our belongings moved to a farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. There I learned almost everything I had not learned in Nova Scotia.  While more cattle came first (eventually the herd numbered 200 Angus), the children showed up within a few years.  Our three children had the most impact on my worldview.  It is impossible to have children and not care about the world where they will grow up.  With children you get involved with all sorts of things like Sunday school, Brownies, Cub Scouts, soccer, hockey, and even schools especially when they are threatened.

Our children in the end were what brought us back to the United States.  Even after we moved off the farm to Halifax, Nova Scotia and I went to work for Apple, we still loved living in Canada.  We had great friends and enjoyed the relative tranquility of Canada.  I still remember the story of the one bank robbery that we had in the small town of Stanley that was near our farm.  The bank robber came in and was told the safe was on a timer and he would have to wait for it to open. The teller asked him if he would like a cup of tea and being Canadian he said yes.  The teller made the tea, called the RCMP, and after the robber finished his tea and left with the money, he was picked up on the one road that led out of town.  We left Canada not because of Canada but because we thought our children would have better opportunities in the States.

We first moved to Columbia, Maryland, but quickly figured out that we needed a place closer to our roots so within a couple of years we were living on the side of a mountain in Roanoke, Virginia.  There in the Roanoke Valley we found a great Presbyterian Church (to match my years in a Presbyterian military school), wonderful schools, and friends that still delight us.  Still my Apple job was a pressure cooker and the little time that I had was often dedicated to family and staying sane.  In 2000 my mother moved in with us in Roanoke and we became part of the sandwich generation.

By 2006, my mother had passed away and I was gone from Apple and its unethical culture.  That year we found a new place to heal from the wounds of the corporate world. The Crystal Coast has been a dream place to be, and as the pressures of work eased up after my departure from Apple, I was able to start volunteering to help others on a consistent basis instead of just being a good Samaritan when I cleaned their driveways with a snowblower, helped dig graves, or pulled folks out of snow drifts.  I learned a lot in my three years as a Presbyterian elder and still feel great peace from our church family.  However, the last year of my three years as an HOA board member made me feel like I was back in the seventies.  It has not made me want to move back to the cold winters of Canada.

While I am just as disenchanted with the problematic HOA board that took over from our team as I was with our government back in the days of Watergate, I do not feel as helpless.  With the skills that I learned over many years, I know the problem can be fixed and it is just a matter of time before things will be back to normal.  It will take work and a thick skin but with others standing shoulder to shoulder with me, the problem while troubling is manageable.  Long ago I learned that you cannot let others hijack your institutions for their own benefit.  There are times you have to stand for what you believe.  I take great pleasure in knowing that many others are already standing with me and rooting for our success.

Much of what people seem to learn today is that anything goes. That is especially true if it makes their own tiny life better.  Even when they make many others miserable in the process, it is justifiable because they benefit.  The selfishness that drives many of these people makes no sense and I often wonder how they even sleep at night.

Only as people understand that promoting the greater good helps us all will we make true progress.  Sacrificing a little of yourself for others is a grand American tradition that has been lost in much of the business culture of this country.  We need to bring it back and refuse to elevate those whose only goal is success on the backs of others.

My Amazon author page has books that chronicle all parts of our journey including the fourth edition of our book, A Week at the Beach - The Emerald Isle Travel Guide.

 

The Chance to be Great

We all start out wishing to do great things.  With life's ups and downs, being great can be a formidable challenge.  Whether you are a business hoping to serve your customers a wonderful meal, a professional trying to deliver a fantastic presentation or proposal, or even a student trying to get into a top tier school, you hope that your efforts have been worthwhile and that someone will notice.

You do not have to get far in life before figuring out that mistakes always seem to be noticed far more than efforts toward greatness.  If you are manager, one of the first things you need to learn is not to assign the blame whenever you can but to take the blame sometimes even when the fault is not yours.  One of my golden rules of management is that a mistake is not a mistake the first time around, it is a learning experience.

In essence if your team makes a mistake, you need to have broad enough shoulders to say that I did not prepare them well enough for this challenge.

If you are running a restaurant and a less than satisfactory meal gets delivered, where does the fault lie?  The staff in the kitchen, the waiter/waitress, or the owner/manger?

We try to review a few restaurants each year before updating our Emerald Isle travel guide.  Often we will take the risk of going someplace where we have been disappointed before but we have a hunch that the elements are there for a great meal and a very nice dining experience.  More often than not, we end up disappointed a second time.  We do not put bad reviews of restaurants in our travel guide.  We just do not recommend places where we would not take friends.

Our last visit to this one restaurant started well but ended up reminding us why we quit recommending it a few years ago.  We got to the restaurant at a little after the noon hour on a Monday.   There was only one other couple having lunch. Things do get quiet in the area during winter so that is not an immediate red flag.  There was a waitress and a cook but no manager.  We both ordered subs and twenty minutes later, the waitress brought us our meals.  My order was completely wrong.   While the waitress offered to have the correct one made, we did not feel like waiting another twenty minutes and decided just to split my wife's sub.  This is not a subway.  We ended up paying close to $20 with tip for one sub, one soda, and a cup of water with our plate of rolls.

No other people had come into the restaurant while our order was being prepared. The owner of the restaurant did pull up outside in a car and the waitress went out and talked to her.  We are a small community so I happened to know the owners because in a previous life I was a buyer's agent for the people who bought their home.  The waitress spent most of her time in the kitchen talking to the cook.  While we enjoyed our perfect plate of rolls they were not the meal we wanted.

So whose fault is it that I got the wrong meal?  I blame the owner.  Past experience leads me to doubt the restaurant has the proper procedures for making certain that the right food is ordered and gets back to the customers. The last time we visited the restaurant, I ordered exactly the same menu item also without any modifications and I also got another wrong meal.  It was a different wrong meal but it was still not what I ordered.  The waitress was certainly different and I suspect the cook was also different.

How could it have gone differently? The owner could have walked the twenty-five feet to the restaurant and checked on her customers and what was going on in the kitchen.  A good owner might have stopped at the table to say hello and ask about what had been chosen for a meal and walked back into the kitchen to make certain that was what you were going to get.  It would have taken less than ten minutes. That did not happen and they have lost a customer. We will not go back to the restaurant and we will not recommend them in our travel guide.

So how does this apply in other businesses?  If I am a manger sitting in a corner office,  I need to be involved just enough in the business to know what is happening and to make sure it meets my standards, but I need to do that without micro-managing everything.  It is not an easy balance to achieve.  Sometimes you can best achieve it by carrying the water buckets for your team. 

One of the best examples that I can give you comes from my days as an Apple manager.  Back in the mid-nineties I had a team of over twenty people working with me.   We got frustrated with Apple corporate and their refusal to get our message out so we decided to do events in over twenty cities across the Southeast. Some of the events had three or four hundred people at them and we had to get equipment from our office in Reston, Virginia to cities all over the District of Columbia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania.  Some of it we shipped but it was expensive and challenging to get to the closely scheduled shows.  Because I had a large Toyota Previa van, I took it upon myself to fill it with equipment and drive it to as many shows as possible.  Often I loaded and unloaded the van myself, and even when I did not bring equipment and had to fly in, I helped with the setup the night before.  I also developed one of the technical presentations and delivered it.

You could have asked anyone on the team if I knew what was happening in our business and they would have probably said yes.  I was helping them with what some managers might have considered not their job.  It gave me a way to find out what was going on and to see if something was not getting communicated to me.  It worked well.  Stepping out of your role and helping others do their job has immense benefits.  If the restaurant owner had tried helping the waitress and figured out that wrong orders were coming out of the kitchen, things might have improved.

If you are student and have been encouraged to join the mass of students applying to Harvard or one of the other Ivy schools, how does this apply to you? You have been told you are great by a lot of people around you.  Maybe you have had very few setbacks along the way.  The first piece of news is that this is harder than you think it is and you are your own manager and probably in something of your own ivory tower.

The goal of getting into a top tier school sounds reasonable especially if you have great grades and scores, but the better goal is to get into the school that best fits what you want out of life.  I know that when I was seventeen or eighteen that I could not define that but life has changed a lot in the last fifty years.  The competition is tougher and there are a lot more people so you have to work harder and smarter.  Look at yourself, understand your strengths and weaknesses and be prepared to explain why Harvard or Yale is the place that you want to go.  Also if you get interviews, ask for feedback and impressions. You do not want to talk out of interview which was not good and think that you were great. I have seen it happen many times.  Like the manager who has to get out of the corner office to really understand what is happening, you have to get out of your own bubble to get an honest appraisal of what college might work for you.

Being great boils down to taking almost nothing for granted.  That includes what is supposed to be happening around  you.  Own the situation along with your success or failure in handling it.  Take the needed steps to get better and closer to being great. Never forget that great is a relative thing.  We each can achieve greatness in our own way.

You often hear that surrounding yourself with great people is a way to success.  That only works if they are the right great people and you create an environment for them to help you achieve your goals and theirs.  Sometimes a bunch of great people in a room can end up being like a Boy Scout troop without adult leadership- see Apple in the late eighties and early nineties for plenty of examples.

 

 

Good Service Wins Locally & On The Internet

In this picture of Swansboro Harbor if you are familiar with the area, you can pick out a number of local businesses.  As someone who has written a travel guide to the area, I consider it part of my job to evaluate restaurants and other services that our visitors might use.  Since people moving to the area also use my book, I mention other businesses which might be of interest to newcomers.

Swansboro, North Carolina has made the news recently for first putting a moratorium on big box stores (specifically Walmart) in the town and then banning them. This happened and almost instantly an opinion poll appeared that shows almost 68% of Swansboro supports Walmart coming to town. This has caused some controversy and interesting letters to the editor of Tideland News, the local paper.

I got motivated to pen an article, Not Every Local Business Deserves to be Saved, when I saw a business that I will no longer use vehemently opposing Walmart coming to down.  I had a bad experience with the business man and expect that I am not alone.  I like the products he sells, but not enough to buy them from him.

Harvard Business School has now chimed in on the Swansboro issue with an assertion that banning big box stores actually hurts smaller retailers.

With a long career in sales from purebred cattle to Apple computers and fiber to the premise networks, I have learned that customer service is the key to success. 

However, I also learned that there is a significant percentage of people who do not care about customer service one way or the other.  That is true even if poor customer service ends up hurting them.  Some of these people are only interested in saving a buck and that is true of both business owners and customers.

This translates into some businesses will never do a great job because they are so tight with a buck. No customer of theirs will ever get the benefit of a doubt.  Few serious problems with their products or services ever get handled properly.  It does not matter if you are a huge company like Apple or the local Toro dealership.  Companies can become more interested in money than anything else. Sometimes big companies trying to force us to do business with a local merchant can backfire on the company when the local service is terrible.

On the customer side this means that no matter how well you as a business person treat some customers, they will display no loyalty and are only interested either in getting your services for free, at a discount or their item for the cheapest possible price.

Some of these customers make a career out of trying to take advantage of all businesses on the assumption that all business owners are rich and need to be fleeced.  On top of that some customers cannot be pleased no matter how far backward you bend for them.

All this is part of the competitive environment that is the American economy. While mostly things get worked out, they generally get far out of whack when government tries to control what businesses we have access to or tries to protect certain businesses for reasons that those of us not in government can never understand. 

Things can also get messed up when a company like Apple has a stranglehold on customers and decides money is more important that having happy customers.  You can read my iLemon story for a taste of that. Why would a company with billions of dollars quibble over a $100 hard drive that they had already marked as defective in some systems?  There is only one reason, $100 is more important to them than a satisfied customer.

We lived in the planned community of Columbia, Maryland for a couple of years.  The community regulated how many grocery stores and what type of shops we had access to.  The result was fewer services, higher prices, and in some cases businesses that did not deserve to be in business.

I worked out of the Apple office there for years and I can remember the only hotel in town getting so bad that none of us would stay in it.  We would drive miles to avoid it.  The last time I stayed in it, I had to ask for another room since someone had obviously kicked in the door in my room and left the safety chain hanging with a piece of broken wood on it.

This summer I have dealt with two issues on products that I purchased.  One was a fishing rod that I bought last summer.  Fortunately I bought it at Reel Outdoors in Emerald Isle.  The rod broke this summer.  I took it to Reel Outdoors to see if it could be fixed.  They replaced it on the spot no questions asked other than when did I buy the rod.

The second case was a shipment from Amazon.  I received a box on Saturday with four items.  One of the boxed items was a glass bottle and it was broken.  Another glass bottle in the shipment was fine.  I did an online chat with an Amazon representative this morning.  Within minutes she had an expedited replacement order on its way to me.

In the last few years I have had similar good experiences with Nikon and Canon. Both companies obviously are willing to stand behind their products.

All this contrasts vividly to my experience with the local Toro dealer who wanted me to pay for a warranty repair on a product that I took the time to buy from him and Apple who cared not a whit that the bad hard drives they had identified in another warranty recall were in more products than they thought.  Interestingly the Toro part cost almost exactly what the replacement product that Amazon is shipping to me at no cost.

The business world is neither easy nor fair, but in general if you treat your customers well, you will do okay.  Usually most people in a town know the good businesses and the ones just hanging on because they snared a good brand before someone else did.

Swansboro did not help any of us by banning Walmart.  They might actually end up hurting locally merchants as the Harvard Business School article suggests.  Maybe their efforts should have been focused on making sure that Walmart pays their employees a living wage so they can afford to shop in the boutiques on Front Street.  That would be a win-win situation and probably hard to explain.

Locally owned is usually a pretty good recipe for success, but it is not a guarantee.  I have two sets of friends who went to different locally owned restaurants this weekend.  One set who ate at Angie's Lighthouse Cafe, which I recommended to them had a great meal. 

The three other folks who ate at a restuarant on the Island which has operated under three different names since we have lived here had an unsatisfactory experience.   The same owner had it under the previous two names and each time I ate there, I was unhappy.  I have not even bothered trying it under the latest name since it is the same owner.  You cannot fix a restaurant or a business that is not doing well by just changing the name.

 

 

The power of being driven to do your best

Surf at the Point

I make no claims to having lived a charmed life.  There have been plenty of challenges over the years and yet they have never stopped us.  Sometimes in our modern world you get the impression that you have to be famous to be successful.

I guess it depends on how you define success.  Some people believe that the person with the fanciest toys is at the top of the heap.  I long ago gave up on defining myself by the tools and gadgets that I need to achieve satisfaction.  I cannot remember when success was being better than the next person.

I like to think that one of the great lessons that I got from my mother was that you do not work hard for the material things that it delivers but for the personal satisfaction of doing a job well.  Mother frowned on families that paid their children for good grades.  She always said that you are earning those grades for yourself not for money.

Somehow that helped me become my own taskmaster.  I was given many assignments in my days at Apple.  Most could easily have been done and the results would likely have pleased my bosses.  However, I never did it for my manager. I always did it for myself and it had to meet my standards which are far harder because there are no shortcuts and it is impossible to hide less than stellar work from my own eyes.

When you are your own best competition, you never get to the top of the mountain.  You are always climbing, always trying to go higher, or working to make your results better. It is not easy, but sometimes it can be very satisfying in terms that have nothing to do with money.

In 2012, we published our first travel guide to Emerald Isle.  It was my very first effort with a Kindle book, and in putting the book together I soon found out that a lot of the instructions on how to do it contradicted each other.  Still after a lot of work, we got it published and many people bought it.  We listened to our readers and their requests.   In 2013, we did a major update which included lots of maps which were the most requested feature and lots more pictures.  Later in the year, we even got brave and did a print edition.

Still the book was not exactly like I wanted it to be and I started working on another update this spring.  As always I learned a lot more in the process.  I went back and resized all eighty images that were in the book.  Then I went through and challenged myself to find a better image than what I had used in the 2013 book.  I ended up replacing forty of the images with new ones.  I added another beach map for clarity and rewrote many sections of the book.

In fact I rewrote the book to the point that I almost could not stand reading the words of the book, but I kept pressing forward, trying to get the book to the point that I could let it go and know that it was the best that I could do.

I ended up changing the Word template, switching fonts, and almost driving myself to distraction, but this Friday, June 13, 2014, the new Kindle version of our A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide went live. I am proud of it.  It was just one day after I ordered a couple of proof copies of our color print version of the same book. The print and the Kindle versions have substantial technical differences like margins, page numbers, and image sizes. One is a PDF-X3 file and the other is a compressed HTML file.

As soon as I got the notice that the book was live on Amazon, I began another battle.  I wanted Amazon to left those who bought the 2013 version have the ability to get the new version as an update. There is no technical reason why not, it is an Amazon policy thing.  I still have not gotten an answer, but I had to go back to the book once again and actually provide Amazon with details and samples of the many changes that I did to the book. I hope my resolve can make it happen.

Getting my book published and to the point that I am pleased with it is another milestone for me.   Some say that you only get to those milestones because you have fire in your gut.   I find it more like a smoldering ember that never dies and can be fanned to a flame if need be.  Ocean waves are an even better metaphor for me.

Like the waves on the beach, I never give up.  I might seem calm one day and the next day I am crashing at the beach in a relentless effort to finish my work just like the waves reshape the sands along the shore.

There is no easy way to success and if you did perchance find one, you might find that an easy success has an easy failure just around the corner.  If you set your own goals and they really matter to you, you will reach them because to not do so is to give up on yourself and there is no return from that.

I am on to my next goal which is to write a fiction novel.  I expect it to be a good one and I am busy working on the plot during some of the perfect beach evenings that we are enjoying on the Crystal Coast.

A Life With Passion

In The Waves, Third Street Beach, Emerald Isle, NC

Most of us try to focus on the things that we love.  If you have been lucky in life, you have enjoyed work or a career that fits your passions.

I have been very blessed in that respect.  After college I worked with my hands and lived close to nature. Spending sixteen years in Canada with ten years devoted to building a cattle operation in a snowbelt in New Brunswick gave me more than I could have asked to receive.  We started with no cattle and ended up with over two hundred. I built barns, took care of cattle in minus forty weather, and handled things that hardly seem possible today. It was a dream come true. 

I believed in Angus cattle, wintering my cattle outside, and putting up my hay in round bales.  None of those things were the norm in New Brunswick.  At the time the Department of Agriculture thought I was nuts. No one did round bales, cattle stayed in barns, and Herefords were better adapted for New Brunswick.  We managed to survive in farming long enough to prove that we were not crazy.  Our performance tested bulls and the breeding stock born from the cattle we brought from Western Canada made a big difference in the province's Angus cattle. Today the few farmers left in New Brunswick use round balers almost without exception.  Few of them keep their cattle enclosed in barns and Angus are not looked down on as they were when we were farming there.

After we sold all our cattle in 1982, I developed a love for technology.  I went to work at one of the first computer resellers in New Brunswick.  The technology that we were selling at the time really changed people's lives and let them do things they could only imagine.  It got even better when I went to work at Apple in 1984.  I often got to see the gleam in people eyes as they figured out that we really were selling magic and not snake oil.  A Macintosh and a LaserWriter could do things that had always been sent to professionals.  Whole new worlds of computing were opened up.  People's lives were changed.

Even as the rest of the computing world caught up with Apple's ease of use, in 2000 my team of sales professionals were selling the idea of cyber security through diversity of platforms.  I felt passionate about what I was doing and that our country needed to do more about computer security. We had CIOs, many research scientists and department heads who agreed with us. I even got to sit in as technical backup on a Congressional hearing on home computer security. Things really aren't much more secure in the computer world, but Apple and I have both moved on to new things.

My passion for North Carolina's Crystal Coast helped convince me to write a travel guide for the area.  It is a great place to live and visit.  The articles and books that I have written about the area are something that I really enjoy doing.  It is pretty hard to complain about something that lets you fish, boat, kayak, hike the beaches, and take pictures of some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.

Sometimes I think those years of chasing my passions should be enough for me, but there are still some dragons to slay.  I recently accepted the job of vice president of marketing for WideOpen Networks. I took the job because what the company is doing to help communities get fiber to their homes and businesses inspires me as much as anything I have ever done.

I believe that the infrastructure that matters most in this century is the way that we are connected to the Internet.  Most of us have a pretty poor connection.  There is a huge information super highway being built around the world and many people still connect with modems, the dirt roads of yesterday, or cable modems which are little more than crooked two lane roads. 

While we should have a national program which brings fiber to everyone and lets private enterprise compete for our business, we have the worst model.  Private companies are responsible for the infrastructure so they put in the absolute minimum and basically hold the customers hostage. Improvements will be a long time coming. There is no real competition except in most densely populated urban areas. Since they own the infrastructure, you have no real choice and even now they are trying to prevent reasonable access to what was supposed be put in as a service to our communities. 

Think of it this way, what if all our roads had been built by private companies?  Would we have a national system of Interstates where almost everyone has access to good roads?  What if a private company could decide what businesses could drive on our Interstate highways?  Would they let competitors use their highway or make them use the twisty two lane roads? 

The next time you pay your cable bill, multiple it by the number of homes in your subdivision and see how much money is being made and compare it to places like Chattanooga, Tenessee which is delivering fiber to the home. 

Think also about what is determining the services you get through your cable modem.  Is it your needs or the cable company's desire to maximize profits?  Are you getting the services and competitive prices you deserve and want or are you getting what your cable company wants you to have at prices they determine.  Studies have shown that when communities have open networks where customers have a choice of services, prices come down.  Remember long distance prices when there was no competition?

I am enjoying the conversations that I have with forward-looking community leaders who understand how their communities will be at a disadvantage if they do not get state of the art fiber connections to their homes and businesses so they can compete with others around the world. It will be interesting to watch their communities thrive while some whither as they let current Internet providers cherry pick the best places to make money and ignore the rest of us.

It is whole lot easier to convince people to look at something if there are real reasons why it makes sense and fiber to every home and business makes even more sense than an Interstate highway system did in the fifties or a LaserWriter in the office in the eighties.

I have been fortunate to be on the cusp of real change several times.  I love being back there.  I am also happy to not be in the position of convincing people that they need colored iPhones.