One of the nicest things I did in 2005 was read a book by Anne Lamott called “Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.” This is a book about writing but I would encourage anyone to read it because it is filled with wisdom applicable to everyone, regardless of their vocation.
Lamott offers a lot of very good advice for writing, such as “good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said,” and “plot grows out of character… Characters should not serve as pawns for some plot you’ve dreamed up,” and “Novels ought to have hope…there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”
Her advice gives us writers a lot to think about. She emphasizes the importance of the process of writing. She notes that so many people like the idea of getting published and don’t think much of actually writing. Most people like the idea of having written more than the idea of writing. But the fact is, a person doesn’t have a lot of control over whether they get published, only over whether they write. Lamott notes that getting published brings only a small measure of satisfaction that wears off relatively quickly, while writing brings a great sense of satisfaction that cannot be taken away from you.
But even more enjoyable than Lamott’s advice about writing are her observations that apply to life in general. Consider these little gems:
“My deepest belief is that to live as if we’re dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.”
“To be a great writer [and I would say, a great person], you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care… A writer always tries to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.”
“If you don’t believe what you are saying, there is no point in saying it.”
“To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass –- seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.”
Lamott quotes Annie Dillard, another great writing instructor with something to say about life: “Day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more.” That’s a philosophy that requires a certain amount of faith. Lamott takes the idea further and says: “You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing…There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published but there is in learning to be a giver.”
Real love is something you give without expecting anything back, and that is why writing is a good metaphor for love. Writing does require you to give and give, and it is rare that you get much back for it. People who write for years don’t do it because they get something for it, but because they are happy to give something to it. That’s a lot like love.
In paperback, Lamott’s book is 227 pages; it’s an easy read, partly because she writes with a sense of humor that I haven’t found in a lot of other serious books. I consider Bird By Bird to be a real treasure and I will keep a copy close to me and re-read it every now and then for affirmation about my love for writing and my love for life.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Monday, December 26, 2005
Merry Christmas
Now that December 25th has passed, I finally have a little time to think about Christmas. The Incarnation is such a great blessing, God made man, in the flesh. It brings a sort of sanctity to materialism –- not in the sense of what we see at the shopping malls in the weeks leading up to Christmas, but in the sense of our earthly life, the here and now, that those people and things around us are important…really, really important.
We got a DVD player in our house recently and I discovered that movies for home viewing often include “additional material” –- things like deleted scenes and an interview with the director. Wouldn’t it be cool if it worked this way for writers? If I should ever publish another book, I will be certain to include in the back all the material that I initially decided to cut out.
But wouldn’t it be even cooler if it worked this way in life? I would love to be able to delete some scenes from my life, or include extra scenes, or add an interview to explain what I was trying to do. If we were making a DVD about the Bengtson family in 2005, it might include these scenes:
* The entire Bengtson clan, all 29 of us, meeting in the Wisconsin Dells for a family reunion in July
* A Kjos family reunion, featuring barbecue in our back yard
* Paula, our 10-year-old fifth-grader, playing in her first piano recital
* John, our 9-year-old third-grader, playing in two guitar recitals
* Catherine, our 6-year-old first-grader, learning to ride a bike without training wheels
* Michael, our 3-year-old, entering pre-school
* Susan, the gracious matriarch, helping too many people to count
* And Tom, learning for a week at Georgetown University on a fellowship for business reporters.
Deleted scenes: I would edit out frustrations at work related to our facilities; Hurricane Katrina which permanently damaged New Orleans, one of my favorite cities; and the Gopher football season, featuring a team that at times showed so much promise but ultimately lost too many games to earn even an end-of-season ranking. (Good luck at the Music City Bowl, Dec. 30!)
Bonus interview: I would explain how much I love my wife and kids, how much I value friendship and family, how grateful I am to my colleagues at work, and how much hope I have for all of us living in the early 21st Century despite debilitating distractions and damning temptations.
Christmas Day was a great blessing at our home, and if anyone had filmed it, they would have seen a gift exchange that delighted the children and adults alike, sledding in the afternoon, and our first-ever fancy family dinner in the dining room. Christmas Mass the evening before grounded us in the meaning of the day, which we celebrate only because God gave us something to celebrate.
We wish you a blessed season during the remaining 12 Days of Christmas, and a bountiful new year.
We got a DVD player in our house recently and I discovered that movies for home viewing often include “additional material” –- things like deleted scenes and an interview with the director. Wouldn’t it be cool if it worked this way for writers? If I should ever publish another book, I will be certain to include in the back all the material that I initially decided to cut out.
But wouldn’t it be even cooler if it worked this way in life? I would love to be able to delete some scenes from my life, or include extra scenes, or add an interview to explain what I was trying to do. If we were making a DVD about the Bengtson family in 2005, it might include these scenes:
* The entire Bengtson clan, all 29 of us, meeting in the Wisconsin Dells for a family reunion in July
* A Kjos family reunion, featuring barbecue in our back yard
* Paula, our 10-year-old fifth-grader, playing in her first piano recital
* John, our 9-year-old third-grader, playing in two guitar recitals
* Catherine, our 6-year-old first-grader, learning to ride a bike without training wheels
* Michael, our 3-year-old, entering pre-school
* Susan, the gracious matriarch, helping too many people to count
* And Tom, learning for a week at Georgetown University on a fellowship for business reporters.
Deleted scenes: I would edit out frustrations at work related to our facilities; Hurricane Katrina which permanently damaged New Orleans, one of my favorite cities; and the Gopher football season, featuring a team that at times showed so much promise but ultimately lost too many games to earn even an end-of-season ranking. (Good luck at the Music City Bowl, Dec. 30!)
Bonus interview: I would explain how much I love my wife and kids, how much I value friendship and family, how grateful I am to my colleagues at work, and how much hope I have for all of us living in the early 21st Century despite debilitating distractions and damning temptations.
Christmas Day was a great blessing at our home, and if anyone had filmed it, they would have seen a gift exchange that delighted the children and adults alike, sledding in the afternoon, and our first-ever fancy family dinner in the dining room. Christmas Mass the evening before grounded us in the meaning of the day, which we celebrate only because God gave us something to celebrate.
We wish you a blessed season during the remaining 12 Days of Christmas, and a bountiful new year.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Growing Up (a short story)
On the second day of January, two weeks before Paula was to turn seven years old, I told her there was no Santa Claus.
“Is there a Santa Claus?” she asked me as she lay in bed during our normal bedtime routine.
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“But is Santa Claus real?” she persisted.
“Saint Nicholas was a real person and Santa Claus is another name for Saint Nicholas. Santa means saint and Claus is short for Nicholas,” I explained.
A few minutes of silence passed. Then she asked again: “Is Santa Claus real?”
“Santa Claus is the spirit of Christmas and that is very real,” I said. “But as you know Christmas isn’t really about Santa Claus, it’s about the birth of Jesus.”
Paula sat up and began to cry. I hate it when she does that. Her crying will wake Catherine, asleep in a crib in a room only a few feet away. It will disrupt John, in another room where Susan is trying to get him to go to sleep.
“Paula,” I asked. “Why are you crying?”
“Because you won’t tell me the truth about Santa Claus,” she said.
“I’m telling you the truth,” I protested. “Santa Claus is the spirit of Christmas.”
She continued to cry. I couldn’t tell her there’s no Santa Claus. It would be like taking away a little of her childhood. I love the innocence of my little girl. How could I bear to see any of that disappear?
When I was a kid, I never asked my parents if Santa Claus was real. Oh, I knew there was no Santa; I didn’t need my parents to confirm it, although maybe I didn’t know as early as first grade. When I did figure it out, I did what anyone in my family would have done -– I didn’t talk about it.
That blasted Natasha! She’s the first-grade schoolmate who told all the kids in Paula’s class that Santa’s a fake. Paula came home and told us all about it the day it happened. In damage control mode, we told Paula some kids don’t believe, but we knew Santa was real. Susan called Natasha’s mom to inform her of her daughter’s destructive truthfulness.
“Paula, please stop crying,” I pleaded.
“No, not until you tell me the truth,” she said.
“Okay, Paula, you are right. There is no Santa Claus.”
Long, silent pause. I can’t believe I just said it. (Paula blackmailed it out of me.) Paula can’t believe what she just heard.
“Really?” she responded timidly, a smile creeping across her face. She stopped crying and lay back down in bed.
“We put those presents under the tree,” I said.
“And you put the candy in the stockings?” Paula clarified.
“Yes.”
“And you eat the cookies and drink the milk we leave out for Santa Claus?”
“I do.”
“I thought I saw cookie crumbs on your lip on Christmas!” she said. “Hey, did you give yourself a present last Christmas and say it was from Santa?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence. Paula continued to wear a smile.
“Daddy,” she said.
“Yes, Paula.”
“Is the Easter Bunny real?” she asked.
“No, the East Bunny’s not real,” I conceded, the truth unraveling out of my control.
“How about Saint Nicholas?” she asked.
“There was a real Saint Nicholas,” I said.
“Yes, but one who puts the candy in my shoes?” she persisted.
“We do that, mom and me,” I said.
There was another long, silent pause. The interrogation apparently was over.
“Now Paula, you listen to me,” I said, grabbing her chin to turn her face toward mine. “You are not to tell anyone what I just told you. You cannot tell John. You cannot tell Catherine. You cannot tell anyone at school.”
“How about my teacher?” she wanted to know.
“No, don’t talk to her about this,” I said.
“Dad, are you going to tell mom about this?” Paula asked.
“Yes. But Paula, it is very important that you keep this to yourself,” I said. “You can’t spoil it for the kids who believe.”
“I won’t tell anyone, Daddy,” Paula assured.
She didn’t say anything else. Within a few minutes she fell asleep. She looked a lot older to me than she had 15 minutes ago. I told my wife and she sighed.
“She’s growing up,” Susan observed.
“Is there a Santa Claus?” she asked me as she lay in bed during our normal bedtime routine.
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“But is Santa Claus real?” she persisted.
“Saint Nicholas was a real person and Santa Claus is another name for Saint Nicholas. Santa means saint and Claus is short for Nicholas,” I explained.
A few minutes of silence passed. Then she asked again: “Is Santa Claus real?”
“Santa Claus is the spirit of Christmas and that is very real,” I said. “But as you know Christmas isn’t really about Santa Claus, it’s about the birth of Jesus.”
Paula sat up and began to cry. I hate it when she does that. Her crying will wake Catherine, asleep in a crib in a room only a few feet away. It will disrupt John, in another room where Susan is trying to get him to go to sleep.
“Paula,” I asked. “Why are you crying?”
“Because you won’t tell me the truth about Santa Claus,” she said.
“I’m telling you the truth,” I protested. “Santa Claus is the spirit of Christmas.”
She continued to cry. I couldn’t tell her there’s no Santa Claus. It would be like taking away a little of her childhood. I love the innocence of my little girl. How could I bear to see any of that disappear?
When I was a kid, I never asked my parents if Santa Claus was real. Oh, I knew there was no Santa; I didn’t need my parents to confirm it, although maybe I didn’t know as early as first grade. When I did figure it out, I did what anyone in my family would have done -– I didn’t talk about it.
That blasted Natasha! She’s the first-grade schoolmate who told all the kids in Paula’s class that Santa’s a fake. Paula came home and told us all about it the day it happened. In damage control mode, we told Paula some kids don’t believe, but we knew Santa was real. Susan called Natasha’s mom to inform her of her daughter’s destructive truthfulness.
“Paula, please stop crying,” I pleaded.
“No, not until you tell me the truth,” she said.
“Okay, Paula, you are right. There is no Santa Claus.”
Long, silent pause. I can’t believe I just said it. (Paula blackmailed it out of me.) Paula can’t believe what she just heard.
“Really?” she responded timidly, a smile creeping across her face. She stopped crying and lay back down in bed.
“We put those presents under the tree,” I said.
“And you put the candy in the stockings?” Paula clarified.
“Yes.”
“And you eat the cookies and drink the milk we leave out for Santa Claus?”
“I do.”
“I thought I saw cookie crumbs on your lip on Christmas!” she said. “Hey, did you give yourself a present last Christmas and say it was from Santa?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence. Paula continued to wear a smile.
“Daddy,” she said.
“Yes, Paula.”
“Is the Easter Bunny real?” she asked.
“No, the East Bunny’s not real,” I conceded, the truth unraveling out of my control.
“How about Saint Nicholas?” she asked.
“There was a real Saint Nicholas,” I said.
“Yes, but one who puts the candy in my shoes?” she persisted.
“We do that, mom and me,” I said.
There was another long, silent pause. The interrogation apparently was over.
“Now Paula, you listen to me,” I said, grabbing her chin to turn her face toward mine. “You are not to tell anyone what I just told you. You cannot tell John. You cannot tell Catherine. You cannot tell anyone at school.”
“How about my teacher?” she wanted to know.
“No, don’t talk to her about this,” I said.
“Dad, are you going to tell mom about this?” Paula asked.
“Yes. But Paula, it is very important that you keep this to yourself,” I said. “You can’t spoil it for the kids who believe.”
“I won’t tell anyone, Daddy,” Paula assured.
She didn’t say anything else. Within a few minutes she fell asleep. She looked a lot older to me than she had 15 minutes ago. I told my wife and she sighed.
“She’s growing up,” Susan observed.
Monday, November 07, 2005
Take the time to write your story
I like reading books about other people; it is not so important to me whether they are famous, just that they have a story to tell. And everybody does.
For a long time, I have been encouraging people to write their stories down. Everyone who has any inclination to write should take the time to consider their own life and write about it. The reaction I typically get when I suggest that someone record their life’s story is that their life is uninteresting. They say things like, “Who would want to read about my life?”
This question misses the point. It is true that when we read an autobiography or a memoir that we learn something about the person who wrote the book, and there is value in that. But the real reason to read such a book is for the reader to learn something about himself. If there is something in the book that the reader can identify with, can relate to, then the reader will learn something about himself. This is why books by ordinary people are so important. Books written by rock stars, actors, politicians or big time CEOs offer little that is relative to my life. A book written by an ordinary person, who has common struggles with a spouse and a boss and his kids – now that’s a book I will be able to relate to.
There are at least three very important audiences that can benefit from a story written by an ordinary person. The first audience is your immediate family and friends. Your closest circle of acquaintances will be interested in your story and they will read your work. Most will probably be grateful to learn a little more about you.
Several years ago, I had an opportunity to listen to a speech delivered by an astronaut, Jerry Linenger. He had spent five months aboard a Soviet space station. He nearly died several times. There were fires on board, and the oxygen went bad, and he had several very difficult experiences. He said he thought he was going to die at least a half dozen times. In the middle of his first emergency, he thought about his wife and children on earth, and lamented the fact that he had never shared with them his dreams for their future. He promised himself that if he ever made it back to earth, he would write down his hopes and dreams for his children and family. And he would attempt to articulate his deep love for his wife and children. He did return to earth and he did write those things down. They were compiled into a book, called “Off The Planet.”
It shouldn’t take a life-threatening incident for us to realize the importance of recording our thoughts about our love for family. Wouldn’t it be sad if you died and your kids actually weren’t quite sure what you thought of them? So I say, don’t risk that. Write down what your kids mean to you so there is never any question, even after you are gone.
The second important audience for your story is future historians. At some point in the future, people will look back to life in the early 21st century and they are going to try to figure out what life was like then. How will they do that? Typically, they will go to the newspapers and magazines of the time. But do you think that will give them an accurate portrayal of life today? I know when I read the newspapers, I generally think there is nothing in them that has anything to do with my life. Stories about terrorists and criminals and popular trends that seems strange to me, don’t say anything about the life I’m living. If historians are going to get a glimpse of life as I know it, I am going to have to tell them what it was like. I cannot leave that task up to the media.
My daughter loves to read the “Little House of the Prairie” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Those are good books because they are written from the perspective of an ordinary person dealing with the ordinary struggles of her day – getting food, settling in a home, Pa earning a living, going to school, dealing with illness. These are universal, timeless struggles that are common to nearly all people. It was interesting when Ingalls Wilder wrote about it and it will be interesting if you write about it.
But who cares what historians think? Why is that important?
Historians don’t just look at the past for fun. The reason you look into the past is so you can see into the future. Someone once said that the farther you can see into the past, the farther you can see into the future. I believe that is exactly correct. The more we can understand about our past, the more we will be able to understand the things that are yet to come. And as a corollary, I would postulate that the more accurately we can see into the past, the more accurately we can see into the future. And if historians are going to get an accurate picture about life in the early 21st century, then you need to write your story.
The final audience that really needs to read the story of your life is you. Yes, you need to read your own story. You may think you know your story, but I guarantee you will know yourself even better if you take the time to think about your life, define your story, and write it down.
You might ask, “How do I start? Writing a book seems like a big challenge; where do I begin?”
When I wrote “Emerging Son,” I started by journaling. I didn’t worry so much about what I was writing, I just wrote. I bought a notebook at a drugstore and every day I would write a page or two. I ended up filling three notebooks. I would think back to my childhood and write down everything I could remember. I described the neighborhood I grew up in, I wrote about the friends I had back then, and I wrote about our life in our little house in South Minneapolis. I didn’t worry about whether I wrote the stories in chronological order, or whether I spelled everyone’s name correctly. I just wanted to get a rough sketch of my various memories written down.
Then I wrote down the things I remembered from being a teenager, and the things I remembered from being in college. I wrote with the idea that nobody was ever going to see my notebook, so I just wrote whatever came to mind, without worrying about whether I was being mean or uncharitable. As I wrote about the more recent years in my life, there seemed to be more to write down. Perhaps that was simply because it was easier to remember. After about a year, I had a lot of information, more than I’d ever be able to use. It was jumbled and sloppy, but it was a starting point.
Then I started another journaling exercise. Instead of writing about the things I did, I wrote about the things I thought. For example, I would consider my relationship with various family members and friends, and write about them. I asked myself questions, such as “How do I distinguish good from evil?” “What do I think will happen to me after I die?” and “What does God mean in my life?”
These questions are important because I believe that intuitively everyone deals with these questions at some point in their life. Some people deal with them by choosing not to answer. But these questions are inescapable and I think any meaningful story about a person’s life needs to touch on these areas to some extent. If I read a whole autobiography and the author never once mentions God or anything spiritual or something to do with his mortality, then I consider the book to be rather shallow. I am not looking for a sermon, but I do want to know how the person dealt with these questions, the same way I want to know how they dealt with love, disappointment, sorrow and all the other things that are common to the human experience.
Once all this is written down, then it is a matter of going back and reading the material and seeing what is there. At this point, you are looking for trends. You are looking to find a common thread through these journal entries.
At this point, the writer has the advantage of hindsight. There are a lot of things a person can see looking back that were not obvious at the time. By looking back on history, by looking back at seemingly unrelated anecdotes, you may find the real story. You may find that incidents are related in powerful ways – ways that could only be apparent from the perspective of several years later.
Let me offer an example of what I mean. In the early 1930s, a young British politician came to New York to deliver a speech. In the evening, he was getting out of a taxicab. He got out on the street side instead of the sidewalk side. As he stepped out of the cab, another car came barreling along and knocked him over, taking the door off the cab. The politician was hospitalized and very seriously injured.
Months later, the president of the United States was riding in an open car during a parade in Miami. At one point during the parade, a woman in the crowd raised her arm. She was holding a handgun. She shot at the president from point blank range, but just as she was pulling the trigger, someone else in the crowd bumped her hand and her aim was disrupted. She missed the president and hit instead another passenger in the car.
These two incidents seem entirely unrelated, until you know that the British politician was Winston Churchill and the U.S. President was Franklin Roosevelt, two men who would form a unique friendship and lead the Western World through the Second World War. What would have happened if that car had killed Churchill in New York? How would the world be different today if the assassin had succeeded in Miami? These are big questions to ponder, but we only know to ponder them by looking back at history.
In your own life, certain incidents may take on entire new meaning when you look back on them and pair them up with other incidents in your life.
Ultimately, what you want to do is look at the different things in your life and order them in a story format, with a beginning, middle and end. There should be a certain build-up to a crucial question that gets resolved near the end of the story. A book is not just a collection of unrelated anecdotes. There should be an overall story. There should be a narrative that walks a reader through the story of your life.
Writers often talk about “finding the narrative.” That means defining the story. This can be the most difficult part of the whole project. But if you have written down stories from your memory and your answers to life’s common questions, you will have the building blocks of your story. It is now a matter of you building the story. How do you see the blocks coming together?
I wrote “Emerging Son” at age 40, and sometimes people ask me about writing a memoir at mid life. What does a 40-year-old know? That’s a fair question, and I am not claiming any special knowledge, especially at a relatively young age. But I do think mid-life work is very important, especially for the writer. At 40, I am still young enough so that if I look at my story and decide I don’t like it, I can still change it. I am still young enough that I will likely have some time to change my story to what I want it to be.
I think of that movie, “About Schmidt,” in which Jack Nicholson plays a retired insurance man who tries to patch up some troubled spots in his life. He waits until his retirement, until after his wife dies, to try to make things better. What he discovers is that it is too late. So it is important for us to consider our stories, to look at our life, at a point in time when we still have the opportunity to make some changes if we need to.
Taking time to examine your own story to the point where you are willing to make changes in your life, requires a certain amount of humility. Humility is accepting the fact that you don’t know everything; you admit you are not perfect, and you attempt to make improvements in your life. I think it is very interesting that in Jim Collins’ book, “Good to Great,” he talks about the importance of humility. Collins looks at companies that perform exceptionally over a long period of time. He looks at those companies and compares them to everyone else and tries to identify the keys to their success.
When Collins looked at the CEO of the really successful companies, he found several things. One of the things he found was that those CEOs, universally, were humble. They were not big-ego blowhards. He says they “display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated. In contrast, two-thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”
Humility is a characteristic anyone can cultivate within themselves. Sure, some people are born with it more than others, but I believe most people can develop a strong sense of humility. It starts with self-awareness.
Self-awareness is at the heart of something called “emotional intelligence.” This is a concept that has found a lot of favor in the business community in the last decade. It is basically a way of measuring a person’s ability to relate to others. Great leaders generally have very high emotional intelligence. The good news is, emotional intelligence – unlike an intelligence quotient -- can be improved with study and practice.
Leadership and good business management is a matter of connecting with people. In order to connect with others, you have to first be able to connect with yourself.
Writing down your story is a way to define your life, articulate the things in your life that are important to you, and highlight the path that your life is taking. Others will benefit from your willingness to share your story. And you will benefit enormously from seriously considering your own story.
For a long time, I have been encouraging people to write their stories down. Everyone who has any inclination to write should take the time to consider their own life and write about it. The reaction I typically get when I suggest that someone record their life’s story is that their life is uninteresting. They say things like, “Who would want to read about my life?”
This question misses the point. It is true that when we read an autobiography or a memoir that we learn something about the person who wrote the book, and there is value in that. But the real reason to read such a book is for the reader to learn something about himself. If there is something in the book that the reader can identify with, can relate to, then the reader will learn something about himself. This is why books by ordinary people are so important. Books written by rock stars, actors, politicians or big time CEOs offer little that is relative to my life. A book written by an ordinary person, who has common struggles with a spouse and a boss and his kids – now that’s a book I will be able to relate to.
There are at least three very important audiences that can benefit from a story written by an ordinary person. The first audience is your immediate family and friends. Your closest circle of acquaintances will be interested in your story and they will read your work. Most will probably be grateful to learn a little more about you.
Several years ago, I had an opportunity to listen to a speech delivered by an astronaut, Jerry Linenger. He had spent five months aboard a Soviet space station. He nearly died several times. There were fires on board, and the oxygen went bad, and he had several very difficult experiences. He said he thought he was going to die at least a half dozen times. In the middle of his first emergency, he thought about his wife and children on earth, and lamented the fact that he had never shared with them his dreams for their future. He promised himself that if he ever made it back to earth, he would write down his hopes and dreams for his children and family. And he would attempt to articulate his deep love for his wife and children. He did return to earth and he did write those things down. They were compiled into a book, called “Off The Planet.”
It shouldn’t take a life-threatening incident for us to realize the importance of recording our thoughts about our love for family. Wouldn’t it be sad if you died and your kids actually weren’t quite sure what you thought of them? So I say, don’t risk that. Write down what your kids mean to you so there is never any question, even after you are gone.
The second important audience for your story is future historians. At some point in the future, people will look back to life in the early 21st century and they are going to try to figure out what life was like then. How will they do that? Typically, they will go to the newspapers and magazines of the time. But do you think that will give them an accurate portrayal of life today? I know when I read the newspapers, I generally think there is nothing in them that has anything to do with my life. Stories about terrorists and criminals and popular trends that seems strange to me, don’t say anything about the life I’m living. If historians are going to get a glimpse of life as I know it, I am going to have to tell them what it was like. I cannot leave that task up to the media.
My daughter loves to read the “Little House of the Prairie” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Those are good books because they are written from the perspective of an ordinary person dealing with the ordinary struggles of her day – getting food, settling in a home, Pa earning a living, going to school, dealing with illness. These are universal, timeless struggles that are common to nearly all people. It was interesting when Ingalls Wilder wrote about it and it will be interesting if you write about it.
But who cares what historians think? Why is that important?
Historians don’t just look at the past for fun. The reason you look into the past is so you can see into the future. Someone once said that the farther you can see into the past, the farther you can see into the future. I believe that is exactly correct. The more we can understand about our past, the more we will be able to understand the things that are yet to come. And as a corollary, I would postulate that the more accurately we can see into the past, the more accurately we can see into the future. And if historians are going to get an accurate picture about life in the early 21st century, then you need to write your story.
The final audience that really needs to read the story of your life is you. Yes, you need to read your own story. You may think you know your story, but I guarantee you will know yourself even better if you take the time to think about your life, define your story, and write it down.
You might ask, “How do I start? Writing a book seems like a big challenge; where do I begin?”
When I wrote “Emerging Son,” I started by journaling. I didn’t worry so much about what I was writing, I just wrote. I bought a notebook at a drugstore and every day I would write a page or two. I ended up filling three notebooks. I would think back to my childhood and write down everything I could remember. I described the neighborhood I grew up in, I wrote about the friends I had back then, and I wrote about our life in our little house in South Minneapolis. I didn’t worry about whether I wrote the stories in chronological order, or whether I spelled everyone’s name correctly. I just wanted to get a rough sketch of my various memories written down.
Then I wrote down the things I remembered from being a teenager, and the things I remembered from being in college. I wrote with the idea that nobody was ever going to see my notebook, so I just wrote whatever came to mind, without worrying about whether I was being mean or uncharitable. As I wrote about the more recent years in my life, there seemed to be more to write down. Perhaps that was simply because it was easier to remember. After about a year, I had a lot of information, more than I’d ever be able to use. It was jumbled and sloppy, but it was a starting point.
Then I started another journaling exercise. Instead of writing about the things I did, I wrote about the things I thought. For example, I would consider my relationship with various family members and friends, and write about them. I asked myself questions, such as “How do I distinguish good from evil?” “What do I think will happen to me after I die?” and “What does God mean in my life?”
These questions are important because I believe that intuitively everyone deals with these questions at some point in their life. Some people deal with them by choosing not to answer. But these questions are inescapable and I think any meaningful story about a person’s life needs to touch on these areas to some extent. If I read a whole autobiography and the author never once mentions God or anything spiritual or something to do with his mortality, then I consider the book to be rather shallow. I am not looking for a sermon, but I do want to know how the person dealt with these questions, the same way I want to know how they dealt with love, disappointment, sorrow and all the other things that are common to the human experience.
Once all this is written down, then it is a matter of going back and reading the material and seeing what is there. At this point, you are looking for trends. You are looking to find a common thread through these journal entries.
At this point, the writer has the advantage of hindsight. There are a lot of things a person can see looking back that were not obvious at the time. By looking back on history, by looking back at seemingly unrelated anecdotes, you may find the real story. You may find that incidents are related in powerful ways – ways that could only be apparent from the perspective of several years later.
Let me offer an example of what I mean. In the early 1930s, a young British politician came to New York to deliver a speech. In the evening, he was getting out of a taxicab. He got out on the street side instead of the sidewalk side. As he stepped out of the cab, another car came barreling along and knocked him over, taking the door off the cab. The politician was hospitalized and very seriously injured.
Months later, the president of the United States was riding in an open car during a parade in Miami. At one point during the parade, a woman in the crowd raised her arm. She was holding a handgun. She shot at the president from point blank range, but just as she was pulling the trigger, someone else in the crowd bumped her hand and her aim was disrupted. She missed the president and hit instead another passenger in the car.
These two incidents seem entirely unrelated, until you know that the British politician was Winston Churchill and the U.S. President was Franklin Roosevelt, two men who would form a unique friendship and lead the Western World through the Second World War. What would have happened if that car had killed Churchill in New York? How would the world be different today if the assassin had succeeded in Miami? These are big questions to ponder, but we only know to ponder them by looking back at history.
In your own life, certain incidents may take on entire new meaning when you look back on them and pair them up with other incidents in your life.
Ultimately, what you want to do is look at the different things in your life and order them in a story format, with a beginning, middle and end. There should be a certain build-up to a crucial question that gets resolved near the end of the story. A book is not just a collection of unrelated anecdotes. There should be an overall story. There should be a narrative that walks a reader through the story of your life.
Writers often talk about “finding the narrative.” That means defining the story. This can be the most difficult part of the whole project. But if you have written down stories from your memory and your answers to life’s common questions, you will have the building blocks of your story. It is now a matter of you building the story. How do you see the blocks coming together?
I wrote “Emerging Son” at age 40, and sometimes people ask me about writing a memoir at mid life. What does a 40-year-old know? That’s a fair question, and I am not claiming any special knowledge, especially at a relatively young age. But I do think mid-life work is very important, especially for the writer. At 40, I am still young enough so that if I look at my story and decide I don’t like it, I can still change it. I am still young enough that I will likely have some time to change my story to what I want it to be.
I think of that movie, “About Schmidt,” in which Jack Nicholson plays a retired insurance man who tries to patch up some troubled spots in his life. He waits until his retirement, until after his wife dies, to try to make things better. What he discovers is that it is too late. So it is important for us to consider our stories, to look at our life, at a point in time when we still have the opportunity to make some changes if we need to.
Taking time to examine your own story to the point where you are willing to make changes in your life, requires a certain amount of humility. Humility is accepting the fact that you don’t know everything; you admit you are not perfect, and you attempt to make improvements in your life. I think it is very interesting that in Jim Collins’ book, “Good to Great,” he talks about the importance of humility. Collins looks at companies that perform exceptionally over a long period of time. He looks at those companies and compares them to everyone else and tries to identify the keys to their success.
When Collins looked at the CEO of the really successful companies, he found several things. One of the things he found was that those CEOs, universally, were humble. They were not big-ego blowhards. He says they “display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated. In contrast, two-thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”
Humility is a characteristic anyone can cultivate within themselves. Sure, some people are born with it more than others, but I believe most people can develop a strong sense of humility. It starts with self-awareness.
Self-awareness is at the heart of something called “emotional intelligence.” This is a concept that has found a lot of favor in the business community in the last decade. It is basically a way of measuring a person’s ability to relate to others. Great leaders generally have very high emotional intelligence. The good news is, emotional intelligence – unlike an intelligence quotient -- can be improved with study and practice.
Leadership and good business management is a matter of connecting with people. In order to connect with others, you have to first be able to connect with yourself.
Writing down your story is a way to define your life, articulate the things in your life that are important to you, and highlight the path that your life is taking. Others will benefit from your willingness to share your story. And you will benefit enormously from seriously considering your own story.
Friday, November 04, 2005
General offers insight into terrorist situation, leadership and more
Retired General Barry R. McCaffrey was in Minneapolis Oct. 28 speaking to a business group. McCaffrey was Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces Southern Command coordinating national security operations in Latin America. During a military career, he served overseas for 13 years and completed four combat tours. He commanded the 24th Infantry Division during Operation Desert Storm. At retirement, he was the most highly decorated four-star general in the U.S. Army.
From 1996 to 2001, McCaffrey served as Director of White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Today, he is an adjunct professor at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., and is president of his own consulting firm.
I had an opportunity to interview him. Following is a transcript.
Is the United States doing a good job reducing the chances of suffering another terrorist attack?
It seems to me that we were grossly ill prepared to defend ourselves prior to 9-11. We had a decade of increasing violence against our armed forces and embassies. Yet we took no definitive action. We viewed it as a law enforcement challenge; so we would investigate, gather evidence and go to a grand jury when, in fact, we were dealing with international terrorism. We didn’t respond to it. So we ended up with 3,000 people murdered.
We are immeasurably better prepared today to defend ourselves then we were prior to 9-11. We have started to organize our borders and our ports of entry. We have a much more robust counter-intelligence program. We have taken into account the threat to our critical infrastructure. We have gained new allies in the law enforcement intelligence communities abroad. We have arrested thousands of suspects overseas and domestically. Many of them have talked, so we have a much clearer picture of who these people are. And, finally, I think the fairly robust muscular response to the initial attack on 9-11 made an impression on the seven states the State Department has accused of supporting terrorism: Afghanistan, Cuba, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. And I think they are well aware that if their fingerprints are on an operation that results in a dramatic blow to the American people, the repercussions will be direct. And so I think many of them have backed off and that they are certainly trying to act in a much more distant fashion from these threats to the American people. So I think in a macro sense, that’s were we are.
However, we are still at huge peril. There are attacks against us on a constant basis…us and our allies. Many of them have been successful. Although we have made some dramatic changes and progress in the aviation system and in our efforts to protect our nuclear power plants, we still have almost done nothing to confront some of our vulnerabilities, such as ferries, subways, train systems, and many of our bridges and tunnels. We still have to rethink some fundamental political issues. For example, we don’t have an immigration policy right now. We never had one. Until we face up to that, I think we’re to some extent involved in a charade in terms of preventing terrorists and their weapons from entering the country.
What about in the Midwest, are we safe here? We kind of think that the rest of the world doesn’t know where the Midwest is.
It’s hard is come to a beautiful city like Minneapolis and not understand that it’s also a crucial part of the economic and political fabric of the United States. So yeah, sure, the Midwest must be a target. I think we should argue that there should be priorities. The places that are most at risk are New York and Washington D.C., period. They are going to be the target of attacks multiple times in the coming twenty years -- hopefully not successful. So the extraordinary security situation that might be appropriate for the financial district on Wall Street would be inappropriate for a bank in the Midwest.
I don’t think this is target number one but I also don’t think there should be any room for complacency.
You were responsible for our efforts to protect against drug abuse. In the Midwest, in a lot the rural areas we have a big problem with meth, people manufacturing it, and so forth. Can you comment on that? What is the extent of the problem? Are there things regular folks should be doing to try to mitigate this problem?
Drug use in America peaked in 1979; it was about 14 percent of the population. Now it’s well under 7 percent. Casual cocaine use in America has gone down dramatically. Drunk driving deaths are down dramatically. Teen pregnancies, crime in America, everything that is clustered around substance abuse is immeasurably better today then in 1979. So the first thing a lot of folks will say is, we fought a war against drugs and we lost and why don’t we try something new. I don’t think it’s a war. I think it’s a cancer threatening American communities. But we clearly have changed the nature of the problem dramatically.
Of the new chemically manufactured psychoactive substances, absolutely the worst we have seen is meth. It is a blowtorch that destroys human flesh, brain function, causes enormous psychoses and turns you into a threat to your own children and to law enforcement officers. And it can happen pretty quickly. If you are a single mom, working two jobs, and taking care of three children, and you start taking meth because you like the feeling of confidence and energy it gives you, watch out. If you start off using it because you thought it would help you lose weight, and come back a year later, it is very likely you will encounter someone who is emaciated, has rotted teeth, has huge open soars on their arms and legs, has permanent irreversible organic damage to brain function and is completely psychotic.
In terms of actual addiction rate, it’s still less prevalent, by far, than other substance abuse problems. Probably just under a million Americans abuse heroin. There are probably 6 or 7 million people in the country who could be considered chronic drug abusers. A growing number are involved in meth and it’s all over the country now. It is no longer just a West Coast phenomenon or a biker gang drug.
What can ordinary people do to help? Anything?
Absolutely! I tell people if you want to fight a war on drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk to your own children. There is an education function to it. We gotta make sure our children know about new drug threats as they come up. There was a widespread belief that ecstasy was harmless. Now we are reasonably confident that a significant dosage of ecstasy over time will end up causing damage to brain function. So we’ve got to educate our kids. We’ve got to tell them what meth is. We’ve got to explain to them its impact on their bodies. We have to make sure the people passing that message are the business community, the educators, coaches, and pediatricians. I think that is the most important function.
And then I think the other thing is we gotta make sure we back aggressive law enforcement action against those making meth. Half the meth made in the United States is in illegal operations all over the Midwest, all over California. We have taken a lot of measures to try to restrict the easy availability of mass quantities of the drugs that are used to manufacture it. The main thing the business community can do is to stand up behind law enforcement and make sure there’s an active drug education program in the school system. That isn’t to say we want to unload it just on the teachers. It has to be a message that is consistent from all of us.
You obviously worked around leaders; you were a leader yourself. You have seen good leaders, and bad leaders. What leadership tactics have you observed in the military that would translate into the business world?
Leadership is everything or nearly everything. It is more important than the technology you have; it’s more important than the competitive advantage that you think you have. And leadership and management go together but they are not the same thing. One of the great companies I worked with is Sikorsky Helicopters. They have a beautiful factory in Stamford, Connecticut. It’s a mile and half long production of these beautiful Blackhawk helicopters. The CEO there told me he has 6,000 employees. He said, “Look, I tell my people, if you had an option of either keeping this incredibly sophisticated, billion dollar factory and losing the workforce, or keeping the workforce and losing the entire factory -- under which of those two options would you be soonest back producing helicopters? And the answer is, a year later you would be producing Blackhawk helicopters again with those 6,000 employees. It would not be a problem. If you lost the employees and had the factory, it would be 15 years before you had another Blackhawk flying. So these are team skills. These are people skills, experience skills.
There are three aspects of leadership. One is obvious and gets talked about way too much and that’s authority. So if you are the CEO and you have 80 employees, you have hiring and firing authority, you can set compensation levels, you can send people to schooling as a reward, you can draw attention to their good work. That’s a pretty powerful tool. But it is the least important, bar none, of the levers you have on human behavior.
The second area, and one I think is important for all of us to remind ourselves in crisis situations, we know that people follow a leader’s directions because they are perceived as experts at what they do. Employees watch and they say the manager’s judgment is exquisite; if we do what he told us to do, it’s going to come out good for all of us. Then they are likely to follow your instructions. Expert power is something you can work at. You can become more credentialed, you can study, you can demonstrate to your team that you really know what you are talking about.
The final one doesn’t get talked about enough at all and that’s referent power. To what extent do I look at you, my CEO, my branch manager, and do I want to be more like you? Do I admire your character and trust you?
These are all values-based. They have nothing to do whether you can up my pay or give me a Christmas bonus. It has everything to do with character. And so if I look at you and I’m 22 and just came out of the University of Minnesota, and after about a year of watching the CEO, this woman is a servant of her employees, is a person of absolute integrity and her personal behavior matches what we have on the vision statement of the company, then my loyalty in not only to the leader but to the institution because I am glad to be part of that team.
You have been involved with the military both at a time when people were drafted and at a time when it was entirely volunteer. I am interested in your observations on the difference between the two scenarios.
I graduated from West Point in 1964. We had the draft. It was a peacetime army. And then suddenly, bang, we were in seven years of war. And so, I served in an Army that was largely 18-year-old boys who had been drafted. And I commanded a company in Vietnam in the First Calvary Division during some very intense fighting. Essentially, it was 100 percent draftees. The First Sergeant and I were the only ones in the company who were regular Army. Both of us were on our third combat tours, both wounded three times. The rest of them were 19-year-old draftees.
But if you didn’t volunteer, if you didn’t go to Canada, you ended up with what you feared most. You were in the Amy, in the infantry, and in Vietnam. And it was 100 percent draftees. They were terrific soldiers! They were just terrific!! They had a sense of dedication; they particularly didn’t believe in the war, their dad told them that they had to do the right thing. They came in and served with great skill and they served for two years.
But now you go forward to this era and our soldiers and servicemen in general come in, they will enlist for four years for college money. They are high school graduates. They have no arrest record. They see skill development. They see huge enlistment bonuses. They see Veterans’ benefits coming out the other end. They are patriotic, and huge numbers of them stay with us. So the competence, the maturity, of the Army today is unbelievably better than any time in our history. That’s not a comment on the draftees; it’s a comment on a different era. The army is better off in a volunteer status. More stability, longer service, and we will never go back to the draft. It’s just not going to happen.
From 1996 to 2001, McCaffrey served as Director of White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Today, he is an adjunct professor at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., and is president of his own consulting firm.
I had an opportunity to interview him. Following is a transcript.
Is the United States doing a good job reducing the chances of suffering another terrorist attack?
It seems to me that we were grossly ill prepared to defend ourselves prior to 9-11. We had a decade of increasing violence against our armed forces and embassies. Yet we took no definitive action. We viewed it as a law enforcement challenge; so we would investigate, gather evidence and go to a grand jury when, in fact, we were dealing with international terrorism. We didn’t respond to it. So we ended up with 3,000 people murdered.
We are immeasurably better prepared today to defend ourselves then we were prior to 9-11. We have started to organize our borders and our ports of entry. We have a much more robust counter-intelligence program. We have taken into account the threat to our critical infrastructure. We have gained new allies in the law enforcement intelligence communities abroad. We have arrested thousands of suspects overseas and domestically. Many of them have talked, so we have a much clearer picture of who these people are. And, finally, I think the fairly robust muscular response to the initial attack on 9-11 made an impression on the seven states the State Department has accused of supporting terrorism: Afghanistan, Cuba, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. And I think they are well aware that if their fingerprints are on an operation that results in a dramatic blow to the American people, the repercussions will be direct. And so I think many of them have backed off and that they are certainly trying to act in a much more distant fashion from these threats to the American people. So I think in a macro sense, that’s were we are.
However, we are still at huge peril. There are attacks against us on a constant basis…us and our allies. Many of them have been successful. Although we have made some dramatic changes and progress in the aviation system and in our efforts to protect our nuclear power plants, we still have almost done nothing to confront some of our vulnerabilities, such as ferries, subways, train systems, and many of our bridges and tunnels. We still have to rethink some fundamental political issues. For example, we don’t have an immigration policy right now. We never had one. Until we face up to that, I think we’re to some extent involved in a charade in terms of preventing terrorists and their weapons from entering the country.
What about in the Midwest, are we safe here? We kind of think that the rest of the world doesn’t know where the Midwest is.
It’s hard is come to a beautiful city like Minneapolis and not understand that it’s also a crucial part of the economic and political fabric of the United States. So yeah, sure, the Midwest must be a target. I think we should argue that there should be priorities. The places that are most at risk are New York and Washington D.C., period. They are going to be the target of attacks multiple times in the coming twenty years -- hopefully not successful. So the extraordinary security situation that might be appropriate for the financial district on Wall Street would be inappropriate for a bank in the Midwest.
I don’t think this is target number one but I also don’t think there should be any room for complacency.
You were responsible for our efforts to protect against drug abuse. In the Midwest, in a lot the rural areas we have a big problem with meth, people manufacturing it, and so forth. Can you comment on that? What is the extent of the problem? Are there things regular folks should be doing to try to mitigate this problem?
Drug use in America peaked in 1979; it was about 14 percent of the population. Now it’s well under 7 percent. Casual cocaine use in America has gone down dramatically. Drunk driving deaths are down dramatically. Teen pregnancies, crime in America, everything that is clustered around substance abuse is immeasurably better today then in 1979. So the first thing a lot of folks will say is, we fought a war against drugs and we lost and why don’t we try something new. I don’t think it’s a war. I think it’s a cancer threatening American communities. But we clearly have changed the nature of the problem dramatically.
Of the new chemically manufactured psychoactive substances, absolutely the worst we have seen is meth. It is a blowtorch that destroys human flesh, brain function, causes enormous psychoses and turns you into a threat to your own children and to law enforcement officers. And it can happen pretty quickly. If you are a single mom, working two jobs, and taking care of three children, and you start taking meth because you like the feeling of confidence and energy it gives you, watch out. If you start off using it because you thought it would help you lose weight, and come back a year later, it is very likely you will encounter someone who is emaciated, has rotted teeth, has huge open soars on their arms and legs, has permanent irreversible organic damage to brain function and is completely psychotic.
In terms of actual addiction rate, it’s still less prevalent, by far, than other substance abuse problems. Probably just under a million Americans abuse heroin. There are probably 6 or 7 million people in the country who could be considered chronic drug abusers. A growing number are involved in meth and it’s all over the country now. It is no longer just a West Coast phenomenon or a biker gang drug.
What can ordinary people do to help? Anything?
Absolutely! I tell people if you want to fight a war on drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk to your own children. There is an education function to it. We gotta make sure our children know about new drug threats as they come up. There was a widespread belief that ecstasy was harmless. Now we are reasonably confident that a significant dosage of ecstasy over time will end up causing damage to brain function. So we’ve got to educate our kids. We’ve got to tell them what meth is. We’ve got to explain to them its impact on their bodies. We have to make sure the people passing that message are the business community, the educators, coaches, and pediatricians. I think that is the most important function.
And then I think the other thing is we gotta make sure we back aggressive law enforcement action against those making meth. Half the meth made in the United States is in illegal operations all over the Midwest, all over California. We have taken a lot of measures to try to restrict the easy availability of mass quantities of the drugs that are used to manufacture it. The main thing the business community can do is to stand up behind law enforcement and make sure there’s an active drug education program in the school system. That isn’t to say we want to unload it just on the teachers. It has to be a message that is consistent from all of us.
You obviously worked around leaders; you were a leader yourself. You have seen good leaders, and bad leaders. What leadership tactics have you observed in the military that would translate into the business world?
Leadership is everything or nearly everything. It is more important than the technology you have; it’s more important than the competitive advantage that you think you have. And leadership and management go together but they are not the same thing. One of the great companies I worked with is Sikorsky Helicopters. They have a beautiful factory in Stamford, Connecticut. It’s a mile and half long production of these beautiful Blackhawk helicopters. The CEO there told me he has 6,000 employees. He said, “Look, I tell my people, if you had an option of either keeping this incredibly sophisticated, billion dollar factory and losing the workforce, or keeping the workforce and losing the entire factory -- under which of those two options would you be soonest back producing helicopters? And the answer is, a year later you would be producing Blackhawk helicopters again with those 6,000 employees. It would not be a problem. If you lost the employees and had the factory, it would be 15 years before you had another Blackhawk flying. So these are team skills. These are people skills, experience skills.
There are three aspects of leadership. One is obvious and gets talked about way too much and that’s authority. So if you are the CEO and you have 80 employees, you have hiring and firing authority, you can set compensation levels, you can send people to schooling as a reward, you can draw attention to their good work. That’s a pretty powerful tool. But it is the least important, bar none, of the levers you have on human behavior.
The second area, and one I think is important for all of us to remind ourselves in crisis situations, we know that people follow a leader’s directions because they are perceived as experts at what they do. Employees watch and they say the manager’s judgment is exquisite; if we do what he told us to do, it’s going to come out good for all of us. Then they are likely to follow your instructions. Expert power is something you can work at. You can become more credentialed, you can study, you can demonstrate to your team that you really know what you are talking about.
The final one doesn’t get talked about enough at all and that’s referent power. To what extent do I look at you, my CEO, my branch manager, and do I want to be more like you? Do I admire your character and trust you?
These are all values-based. They have nothing to do whether you can up my pay or give me a Christmas bonus. It has everything to do with character. And so if I look at you and I’m 22 and just came out of the University of Minnesota, and after about a year of watching the CEO, this woman is a servant of her employees, is a person of absolute integrity and her personal behavior matches what we have on the vision statement of the company, then my loyalty in not only to the leader but to the institution because I am glad to be part of that team.
You have been involved with the military both at a time when people were drafted and at a time when it was entirely volunteer. I am interested in your observations on the difference between the two scenarios.
I graduated from West Point in 1964. We had the draft. It was a peacetime army. And then suddenly, bang, we were in seven years of war. And so, I served in an Army that was largely 18-year-old boys who had been drafted. And I commanded a company in Vietnam in the First Calvary Division during some very intense fighting. Essentially, it was 100 percent draftees. The First Sergeant and I were the only ones in the company who were regular Army. Both of us were on our third combat tours, both wounded three times. The rest of them were 19-year-old draftees.
But if you didn’t volunteer, if you didn’t go to Canada, you ended up with what you feared most. You were in the Amy, in the infantry, and in Vietnam. And it was 100 percent draftees. They were terrific soldiers! They were just terrific!! They had a sense of dedication; they particularly didn’t believe in the war, their dad told them that they had to do the right thing. They came in and served with great skill and they served for two years.
But now you go forward to this era and our soldiers and servicemen in general come in, they will enlist for four years for college money. They are high school graduates. They have no arrest record. They see skill development. They see huge enlistment bonuses. They see Veterans’ benefits coming out the other end. They are patriotic, and huge numbers of them stay with us. So the competence, the maturity, of the Army today is unbelievably better than any time in our history. That’s not a comment on the draftees; it’s a comment on a different era. The army is better off in a volunteer status. More stability, longer service, and we will never go back to the draft. It’s just not going to happen.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Community banks are distinct from the attention-grabbing big guys
When I tell people I am a journalist who covers the banking industry, often they respond with a story about bad service they received at one of the big banks in town. Or they may ask me if I know a friend who works at Wells Fargo or U.S. Bank. (Usually I don’t.)
I cover a part of the industry that few people –- especially residents of large cities -- think much about. I cover community banking. I understand why people typically think of the big banks; they dominate the industry. Banking is an industry in which there are a few big players and everyone else. I cover the banks in that “everyone else” category.
You may think that every bank is huge, but in fact, only three banks have more than $1 trillion in assets: Citicorp, Morgan Chase and Bank of America. There are about 500 banks, or about 7 percent of the industry, that have $1 billion or more in assets. Those banks, however, control 86 percent of all the assets of the industry. There are 7,549 banks in the country, which means about 7,000 banks have less than $1 billion in assets. And 3,996 of those banks have assets of less than $100 million. That’s more than half of the banks in the industry, and they control just 1.9 percent of all the industry’s assets.
In Minnesota, when you mention banking people think of Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank and TCF Bank. Funny thing is, only TCF is actually based in Minnesota. Wells Fargo is based in San Francisco and the U.S. Bank charter is in Cincinnati. Minnesota has 449 banks, with 305 of them having less than $100 million in assets.
What does a $100 million bank look like? Typically, it would have about 30 employees and perhaps two or three offices. It would have a board of directors, meeting monthly, with outside board members earning compensation of about $500 per meeting. The owners of the bank likely would have about $8 million invested in the business and if the bank performs about average for banks of that size, they would earn about $1.2 million in a good year to divide among them. The president of the bank would make an annual salary of about $125,000, plus a bonus if the bank performs particularly well.
But the best stories I write about the banking industry usually don’t have a lot to do with the numbers; they are focused mostly on the people. In 20 years of covering community banking, I have had the opportunity to write about people who have done extraordinary things for their communities and neighbors. There are bankers who take big risks lending to start-up businesses, and others who work evenings and weekends to attract new businesses to town. I have written about bankers who have renovated and restored historic buildings, bankers who have funded theaters and special schools, bankers who have hosted visitors from all over the world including third world countries and Russia. I have written about bankers who have devoted a lot of energy to educational efforts designed to combat financial illiteracy. And I have written about bankers who have donated millions of dollars to students, hospitals, community projects, art organizations and many other endeavors.
Oh, I’ve also written about crooks who have ended up in jail or about ventures that failed or never worked out as intended. But my point is, there are thousands of interesting stories in the community sector of the banking industry which go almost completely ignored by the big time media.
I cover a part of the industry that few people –- especially residents of large cities -- think much about. I cover community banking. I understand why people typically think of the big banks; they dominate the industry. Banking is an industry in which there are a few big players and everyone else. I cover the banks in that “everyone else” category.
You may think that every bank is huge, but in fact, only three banks have more than $1 trillion in assets: Citicorp, Morgan Chase and Bank of America. There are about 500 banks, or about 7 percent of the industry, that have $1 billion or more in assets. Those banks, however, control 86 percent of all the assets of the industry. There are 7,549 banks in the country, which means about 7,000 banks have less than $1 billion in assets. And 3,996 of those banks have assets of less than $100 million. That’s more than half of the banks in the industry, and they control just 1.9 percent of all the industry’s assets.
In Minnesota, when you mention banking people think of Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank and TCF Bank. Funny thing is, only TCF is actually based in Minnesota. Wells Fargo is based in San Francisco and the U.S. Bank charter is in Cincinnati. Minnesota has 449 banks, with 305 of them having less than $100 million in assets.
What does a $100 million bank look like? Typically, it would have about 30 employees and perhaps two or three offices. It would have a board of directors, meeting monthly, with outside board members earning compensation of about $500 per meeting. The owners of the bank likely would have about $8 million invested in the business and if the bank performs about average for banks of that size, they would earn about $1.2 million in a good year to divide among them. The president of the bank would make an annual salary of about $125,000, plus a bonus if the bank performs particularly well.
But the best stories I write about the banking industry usually don’t have a lot to do with the numbers; they are focused mostly on the people. In 20 years of covering community banking, I have had the opportunity to write about people who have done extraordinary things for their communities and neighbors. There are bankers who take big risks lending to start-up businesses, and others who work evenings and weekends to attract new businesses to town. I have written about bankers who have renovated and restored historic buildings, bankers who have funded theaters and special schools, bankers who have hosted visitors from all over the world including third world countries and Russia. I have written about bankers who have devoted a lot of energy to educational efforts designed to combat financial illiteracy. And I have written about bankers who have donated millions of dollars to students, hospitals, community projects, art organizations and many other endeavors.
Oh, I’ve also written about crooks who have ended up in jail or about ventures that failed or never worked out as intended. But my point is, there are thousands of interesting stories in the community sector of the banking industry which go almost completely ignored by the big time media.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Ethicist offers life principles for doing the right thing
One of the latest fads for newspapers and other organizations seems to be to hire an “ethicist.” The New York Times has an ethicist who writes a column in its Sunday magazine. The Minneapolis Star Tribune just added an ethicist to its business section. CNN has a news analyst, Bruce Weinstein, who calls himself “The Ethics Guy.” These guys have a tough job; usually they comment on situations without treading into any moral judgments but I am not sure that you can ever really separate morals from ethics.
I had an opportunity to hear Weinstein address a business group recently and he offered five “life principles,” as he called them, “for doing the right thing.”
First, do no harm. He said this applies to everyone, not just physicians. It means things like we don’t let others drive while intoxicated, and that we immunize our children. If we couldn’t trust that people were not out to harm us, we would never leave our homes, Weinstein said.
Second, make things better. It is not enough to simply try to avoid doing harm, we actually need to make a positive impact on our world. If our sole goal were to avoid doing harm, we’d never get out of bed. Making things better is a positive call to action, and motivates us to get out in the world and do things.
Third, respect others. We do this, Weinstein said, by observing three principles: confidentiality, telling the truth and keeping promises. When people share things with us in private, they expect you to keep it to yourself. If they discover that you shared their secret with the neighborhood, they will no longer respect you. Telling the truth is a fundamental obligation, although in some cases it is okay to lie if telling the truth threatens a greater obligation. For example, the obligation to protect life is greater than the obligation to tell the truth, so if you were hiding Jews in your house during World War II and the Gestapo knocked on your door inquiring about who was in your home, you could lie to protect the innocent. And keeping promises is essential to maintaining relationships. The bigger the relationship, the more important it is to keep the promise. Marriages break up when spouses break promises they make to one another on their wedding day.
Fourth, be fair. Many of us try on this point, but get steered in the wrong direction. Weinstein said, “one size does not fit all.” He said too often we try to treat everyone the same and consider that fair. But, in fact, sameness and fairness are not equal. He gave an example where it was fair for a mother to give a thin child a big piece of cake while giving a fat child only a small piece of cake.
Fifth, be loving. Weinstein offer three simple ways to show your love for others – not just your family members, but your neighbors and co-workers as well. First, smile. “When you smile, others smile back. Smiling is contagious,” he said. “Moods rub off on one another.” Second, take a genuine interest in others. “Ask others questions about them,” Weinstein said. And third, show sincere appreciation. “How often do you take the time to tell those around you that you appreciate them?” Weinstein asked. Note peoples’ contribution to the company or the neighborhood and you will make a big impact on those people.
I had an opportunity to hear Weinstein address a business group recently and he offered five “life principles,” as he called them, “for doing the right thing.”
First, do no harm. He said this applies to everyone, not just physicians. It means things like we don’t let others drive while intoxicated, and that we immunize our children. If we couldn’t trust that people were not out to harm us, we would never leave our homes, Weinstein said.
Second, make things better. It is not enough to simply try to avoid doing harm, we actually need to make a positive impact on our world. If our sole goal were to avoid doing harm, we’d never get out of bed. Making things better is a positive call to action, and motivates us to get out in the world and do things.
Third, respect others. We do this, Weinstein said, by observing three principles: confidentiality, telling the truth and keeping promises. When people share things with us in private, they expect you to keep it to yourself. If they discover that you shared their secret with the neighborhood, they will no longer respect you. Telling the truth is a fundamental obligation, although in some cases it is okay to lie if telling the truth threatens a greater obligation. For example, the obligation to protect life is greater than the obligation to tell the truth, so if you were hiding Jews in your house during World War II and the Gestapo knocked on your door inquiring about who was in your home, you could lie to protect the innocent. And keeping promises is essential to maintaining relationships. The bigger the relationship, the more important it is to keep the promise. Marriages break up when spouses break promises they make to one another on their wedding day.
Fourth, be fair. Many of us try on this point, but get steered in the wrong direction. Weinstein said, “one size does not fit all.” He said too often we try to treat everyone the same and consider that fair. But, in fact, sameness and fairness are not equal. He gave an example where it was fair for a mother to give a thin child a big piece of cake while giving a fat child only a small piece of cake.
Fifth, be loving. Weinstein offer three simple ways to show your love for others – not just your family members, but your neighbors and co-workers as well. First, smile. “When you smile, others smile back. Smiling is contagious,” he said. “Moods rub off on one another.” Second, take a genuine interest in others. “Ask others questions about them,” Weinstein said. And third, show sincere appreciation. “How often do you take the time to tell those around you that you appreciate them?” Weinstein asked. Note peoples’ contribution to the company or the neighborhood and you will make a big impact on those people.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Old-timer from Central Minnesota shares stories
John Owen Bohmer is an 84-year-old gentleman living in the central Minnesota community of Brooten. He is chairman of the Bonanza Valley State Bank there; he was president of the modest bank from 1954 to 2000.
I had a chance to meet Bohmer last spring when he presented me with a copy of a book he had written to commemorate the bank’s centennial anniversary in 1994. The book is called: “Your Friendly Hometown Banker.”
“I wrote it in 19 days in our motor home in Arizona while it rained outside,” he said. Bohmer is the author of six books, including a book he wrote for the bank’s 60th anniversary.
The book is a collection of 83 short stories or reflections. Bohmer writes about growing up during the Great Depression, about farming in the early 20th century, about being a banker in a small town and about a number of other things that I found interesting. I am an advocate of ordinary people writing down their personal stories for the benefit of peers and future generations. This is what Bohmer has done.
I want to share a few of the gems I discovered in “Your Friendly Hometown Banker.”
Confidentiality
For many years, we cooperated with the school in training a senior boy or girl in the bank, and then when the training period was over and after graduation, we would help them find a job in another bank.
The first thing we did to get them acquainted was to introduce them to the staff, show them where they would be working, and what they would be doing, and then sit down and have a talk.
The talk consisted of being polite to customers, about correcting mistakes, about being careful with names, among other things, and about confidentiality.
If there is anything people want confidential more than their personal life, or their church or school problems, it is their financial matters.
I always told the employees that when they leave the bank premises, they must leave their “bank knowledge” behind them. I have a permanent sign in the back bookkeeping room that says: “Warning: When you leave this bank, leave your knowledge here. Failure to do so will result in your immediate dismissal.”
People are inquisitive, and if one of the employees is out for the evening, he or she may be questioned about one of our customers. It may be hard to say “no” in certain cases, so I give them a good excuse. I say: “Just tell them if they want to know the answer, they should ask John Bohmer.” That is the end of that, as nobody has ever asked me.
We hired a brilliant young girl from school, a local girl who started in the fall when school started, and worked faithfully every afternoon for an hour and a half like we required. This went on all during the fall and winter, and sometime during spring a local businessman came to me and said: “How come so and so knows how much money I have in the bank?”
I was taken by surprise, as this had never happened before. After discussing it further, and looking into it, I determined that the leak came from the girl.
That afternoon when the girl came to work, I called her into my office to discuss it with her. She immediately began crying and told me her mother made her tell how much money was in that account.
How low can a mother get? To sabotage her own daughter is unthinkable. I had no choice but to let her go. I’m quite sure that if I could have kept her she would have been an excellent employee after she had learned her lesson.
She was so ashamed of herself that she never again came into the bank, and went out of her way to avoid meeting me on the street. After graduation she left town, and I haven’t seen her since. What a pity.
Counter Checks
Why carry a book of check blanks along with you? Not necessary. Every filling station, and store had a supply of “counter check” laying around which you could use to pay your bills or get some cash.
Counter checks are just a piece of paper printed with the necessary blanks just like regular checks. They were originally intended to be used on the check counter at the bank, and that’s where they got their name. A handy way for you to withdraw a little cash while in the bank if you forgot your checkbook at home.
Because of lax rules, the counter checks spread in popularity to the point that our counter checks were in other business places and in other towns, and we had checks in our bank from other banks in other towns. In fact, we had counter checks on hand from all the surrounding banks.
You can imagine how tempting this situation would be for someone who was broke but had no account anywhere to just write out a check on any bank and get some cash.
As the morals of people have changed of the years, it has become necessary to eliminate the counter check.
Another drawback of the counter check was that the amount of the check probably did not get marked down in the stub of the regular checkbook, and soon there would be an overdraft of their account.
In this day and age, you must use your own check blanks, which have magnetic numbers of your bank, and of your personal account. Unless he gets one of your check blanks, the unscrupulous person cannot write a check on your account.
We had a flamboyant character that usually came to our auction sales years ago. He would buy some things and when it came time to pay for the items, he could say “fill out a counter check for the amount.” When the clerk asked on which bank, he would say “It doesn’t make any difference,” and he would be quite loud about this to be sure his friends would hear.
The clerk had all the local counter checks, so she would fill out a check on some out-of-the-way bank and he would sign it. The check was always good however, and we felt that he was trying to impress his friends to make them think he had lots of money in many banks.
What really happened is that he would drive to that town the next day, go to the bank and leave enough money to cover the check. What a character.
Growing old is not for sissies
Do you remember when you were five years old? There was that kid in first grade who was so much older and smarter than you were. Oh boy.
Then when you were a freshman in high school, how inferior you felt to the juniors and seniors. They hardly wanted to associate with you.
How about asking a girl out for a date that was a senior when you were only a junior? Fat chance!
Then when you get into your working life, you start all over again. You enter an arena where everyone is an expert except you. By this time however, most of your associates try to help you get going. You hope they are doing it so you will take on part of their workload.
Throughout your lifetime there is competition of one form or other. There is competition in sports, competition in business and competition for your favorite girl. There is competition between ages. The older person readily and easily competes with you when you are young, but later in life, you are that older person.
Competition is good for the soul. It keeps you on your toes, and it keeps you healthy in body and in mind. Everybody needs it.
As you grow older you become more confident in yourself, in your own values, and at the same time more tolerant of differences.
Young adulthood and middle age doesn’t leave much time to explore the heart and spirit; we’re too busy making a living, but as confidence grows, competition becomes less important, and it’s in the latter years of life that spiritual development becomes a reality. The older you get the more wisdom you acquire, but it’s hard to share that wisdom with a young man who doesn’t want to listen, but instead chooses to acquire it by experiencing his own hard knocks.
For people who keep an open mind to change and growth throughout their lives, the mature years are unexpectedly rewarding.
You can use every experience you have ever had, everything you have ever done or known, and use it better than you ever have used it before.
You were given two ends: One to sit on and one to think with. Your future depends on which one you use the most.
Spit & Whittlers
The rate of unemployment in the 1930s during the Great Depression was up around 25 percent. It was no fun to sit around home all day, so [the unemployed] would come downtown and find a bench on Main Street where they could visit with their friends, and where they may be noticed by someone needing some help, where there was a possibility of getting a job.
To pass the time of day, they took up whittling. Everyone had a pocket knife that was kept razor sharp, and it was used to carve something out of wood. Usually it was used just to take a twig and carve off the bark, and then chop it into tiny pieces only to start on another one when that was finished.
When they were whittling, they were also smoking that pipe or chewing tobacco, and naturally they had to spit out the juice every once in a while. Brown juice it was. The aim was for across the sidewalk into the gutter in the street but it didn’t always make it that far. The bulk of it perhaps did, but the overspray colored the sidewalk.
It’s no wonder the merchants didn’t like them sitting in front of their establishment.
My grandfather heard a rumor at one time that our bank was going to be robbed. He immediately went to the lumber yard, had two benches built and put one on either side of the front door of the bank. He then invited the spit and whittlers over to the bank so they could be witnesses in the event the bank robbers did show up.
The robbers never came, or if they did, they probably didn’t like the looks of all those witnesses. In that respect, the spit and whittlers served the community well. We wonder if it was hard to get them to move away once the threat was past.
The Survivors
I did a little research recently and discovered some interesting information about survival and live expectancy of a new business.
For every 100 new businesses established in the United States, only 10 of them remain in business after one year, and only one will be in business at the end of 10 years.
This gives you some idea of how really tough it is to reach the age of 100. Some people say the race is to the swift, the risk-taker; but the ancient Greeks knew that steadiness of purpose over the long term is a surer path to success.
As bankers we’ve learned this lesson. Through the many periods of depression and bank failures over the years -- and there have been quite a few -- it’s the conservative banker that has survived the onslaughts, and the periods of roller-coaster economics that have occurred.
To roll with the punches and do what has to be done while at the same time serving your community in the best way possible is the ultimate goal for survival.
I had a chance to meet Bohmer last spring when he presented me with a copy of a book he had written to commemorate the bank’s centennial anniversary in 1994. The book is called: “Your Friendly Hometown Banker.”
“I wrote it in 19 days in our motor home in Arizona while it rained outside,” he said. Bohmer is the author of six books, including a book he wrote for the bank’s 60th anniversary.
The book is a collection of 83 short stories or reflections. Bohmer writes about growing up during the Great Depression, about farming in the early 20th century, about being a banker in a small town and about a number of other things that I found interesting. I am an advocate of ordinary people writing down their personal stories for the benefit of peers and future generations. This is what Bohmer has done.
I want to share a few of the gems I discovered in “Your Friendly Hometown Banker.”
Confidentiality
For many years, we cooperated with the school in training a senior boy or girl in the bank, and then when the training period was over and after graduation, we would help them find a job in another bank.
The first thing we did to get them acquainted was to introduce them to the staff, show them where they would be working, and what they would be doing, and then sit down and have a talk.
The talk consisted of being polite to customers, about correcting mistakes, about being careful with names, among other things, and about confidentiality.
If there is anything people want confidential more than their personal life, or their church or school problems, it is their financial matters.
I always told the employees that when they leave the bank premises, they must leave their “bank knowledge” behind them. I have a permanent sign in the back bookkeeping room that says: “Warning: When you leave this bank, leave your knowledge here. Failure to do so will result in your immediate dismissal.”
People are inquisitive, and if one of the employees is out for the evening, he or she may be questioned about one of our customers. It may be hard to say “no” in certain cases, so I give them a good excuse. I say: “Just tell them if they want to know the answer, they should ask John Bohmer.” That is the end of that, as nobody has ever asked me.
We hired a brilliant young girl from school, a local girl who started in the fall when school started, and worked faithfully every afternoon for an hour and a half like we required. This went on all during the fall and winter, and sometime during spring a local businessman came to me and said: “How come so and so knows how much money I have in the bank?”
I was taken by surprise, as this had never happened before. After discussing it further, and looking into it, I determined that the leak came from the girl.
That afternoon when the girl came to work, I called her into my office to discuss it with her. She immediately began crying and told me her mother made her tell how much money was in that account.
How low can a mother get? To sabotage her own daughter is unthinkable. I had no choice but to let her go. I’m quite sure that if I could have kept her she would have been an excellent employee after she had learned her lesson.
She was so ashamed of herself that she never again came into the bank, and went out of her way to avoid meeting me on the street. After graduation she left town, and I haven’t seen her since. What a pity.
Counter Checks
Why carry a book of check blanks along with you? Not necessary. Every filling station, and store had a supply of “counter check” laying around which you could use to pay your bills or get some cash.
Counter checks are just a piece of paper printed with the necessary blanks just like regular checks. They were originally intended to be used on the check counter at the bank, and that’s where they got their name. A handy way for you to withdraw a little cash while in the bank if you forgot your checkbook at home.
Because of lax rules, the counter checks spread in popularity to the point that our counter checks were in other business places and in other towns, and we had checks in our bank from other banks in other towns. In fact, we had counter checks on hand from all the surrounding banks.
You can imagine how tempting this situation would be for someone who was broke but had no account anywhere to just write out a check on any bank and get some cash.
As the morals of people have changed of the years, it has become necessary to eliminate the counter check.
Another drawback of the counter check was that the amount of the check probably did not get marked down in the stub of the regular checkbook, and soon there would be an overdraft of their account.
In this day and age, you must use your own check blanks, which have magnetic numbers of your bank, and of your personal account. Unless he gets one of your check blanks, the unscrupulous person cannot write a check on your account.
We had a flamboyant character that usually came to our auction sales years ago. He would buy some things and when it came time to pay for the items, he could say “fill out a counter check for the amount.” When the clerk asked on which bank, he would say “It doesn’t make any difference,” and he would be quite loud about this to be sure his friends would hear.
The clerk had all the local counter checks, so she would fill out a check on some out-of-the-way bank and he would sign it. The check was always good however, and we felt that he was trying to impress his friends to make them think he had lots of money in many banks.
What really happened is that he would drive to that town the next day, go to the bank and leave enough money to cover the check. What a character.
Growing old is not for sissies
Do you remember when you were five years old? There was that kid in first grade who was so much older and smarter than you were. Oh boy.
Then when you were a freshman in high school, how inferior you felt to the juniors and seniors. They hardly wanted to associate with you.
How about asking a girl out for a date that was a senior when you were only a junior? Fat chance!
Then when you get into your working life, you start all over again. You enter an arena where everyone is an expert except you. By this time however, most of your associates try to help you get going. You hope they are doing it so you will take on part of their workload.
Throughout your lifetime there is competition of one form or other. There is competition in sports, competition in business and competition for your favorite girl. There is competition between ages. The older person readily and easily competes with you when you are young, but later in life, you are that older person.
Competition is good for the soul. It keeps you on your toes, and it keeps you healthy in body and in mind. Everybody needs it.
As you grow older you become more confident in yourself, in your own values, and at the same time more tolerant of differences.
Young adulthood and middle age doesn’t leave much time to explore the heart and spirit; we’re too busy making a living, but as confidence grows, competition becomes less important, and it’s in the latter years of life that spiritual development becomes a reality. The older you get the more wisdom you acquire, but it’s hard to share that wisdom with a young man who doesn’t want to listen, but instead chooses to acquire it by experiencing his own hard knocks.
For people who keep an open mind to change and growth throughout their lives, the mature years are unexpectedly rewarding.
You can use every experience you have ever had, everything you have ever done or known, and use it better than you ever have used it before.
You were given two ends: One to sit on and one to think with. Your future depends on which one you use the most.
Spit & Whittlers
The rate of unemployment in the 1930s during the Great Depression was up around 25 percent. It was no fun to sit around home all day, so [the unemployed] would come downtown and find a bench on Main Street where they could visit with their friends, and where they may be noticed by someone needing some help, where there was a possibility of getting a job.
To pass the time of day, they took up whittling. Everyone had a pocket knife that was kept razor sharp, and it was used to carve something out of wood. Usually it was used just to take a twig and carve off the bark, and then chop it into tiny pieces only to start on another one when that was finished.
When they were whittling, they were also smoking that pipe or chewing tobacco, and naturally they had to spit out the juice every once in a while. Brown juice it was. The aim was for across the sidewalk into the gutter in the street but it didn’t always make it that far. The bulk of it perhaps did, but the overspray colored the sidewalk.
It’s no wonder the merchants didn’t like them sitting in front of their establishment.
My grandfather heard a rumor at one time that our bank was going to be robbed. He immediately went to the lumber yard, had two benches built and put one on either side of the front door of the bank. He then invited the spit and whittlers over to the bank so they could be witnesses in the event the bank robbers did show up.
The robbers never came, or if they did, they probably didn’t like the looks of all those witnesses. In that respect, the spit and whittlers served the community well. We wonder if it was hard to get them to move away once the threat was past.
The Survivors
I did a little research recently and discovered some interesting information about survival and live expectancy of a new business.
For every 100 new businesses established in the United States, only 10 of them remain in business after one year, and only one will be in business at the end of 10 years.
This gives you some idea of how really tough it is to reach the age of 100. Some people say the race is to the swift, the risk-taker; but the ancient Greeks knew that steadiness of purpose over the long term is a surer path to success.
As bankers we’ve learned this lesson. Through the many periods of depression and bank failures over the years -- and there have been quite a few -- it’s the conservative banker that has survived the onslaughts, and the periods of roller-coaster economics that have occurred.
To roll with the punches and do what has to be done while at the same time serving your community in the best way possible is the ultimate goal for survival.
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