I'm not bragging, but...

It's easy sometimes to take stuff for granted. You know, some stuff happens everyday, and you get where you just expect that. You forget sometimes how unique it is, or how special or whatever. Then, something happens that makes you realize what's going on.

Your kids are that way. You work hard all their lives to help mold their personality and stuff, and when they get a little older (remember, everything is relative), when they act or behave or whatever in the manner you expect,  ehhh, no big deal. But when you hear of some of the things that other kids do, you begin to appreciate them a bit more.

I'm very blessed with my kids. I have five, which got everybody's attention when I was answering questions during jury selection one time. My two older girls, now 29 and 26 (27 in November), and my three boys, aged 17 (18 in January),16,and 11. Each one is as different as night and day. The oldest has the outgoing personality, the next is the student. The youngest has a silly sense of humor, and enjoys being the youngest (just ask him, he admits it!) At 16, Middle Boy is the prototypical high school nerd, who loves gaming and wants a career in computer software engineering. And the 17-going-on-25 boy is the most like me in terms of his love of sports and such. We have (at least I think we have) a good, strong relationship with all of them. The girls even get along with and seem to like their stepmother (and yes, in deference to all the Disney movies, I often refer to her as the "wicked stepmother", a joke that only I seem to truly appreciate).

I say we're blessed because I don't usually face some of the issues I hear others dealing with. My boys do their chores. They come home and sit down and do their homework. They ask permission to go places. They watch their soda intake (which I understand is a MAJOR problem in a lot of homes). They do their own laundry (more or less...). I was complaining to someone one day a while back about how one of them says "Hello" every time they see me as if they hadn't seen me all day, and they expect me to answer. My complaint was that it was distracting. The other person thought it was nice, and wished their kids would speak to them even just once a day. I've learned to appreciate it more now.

We had a run-in with Honorable Number One Son a couple of weeks back. To be brief, he let us down on something, and Mom and I were pretty upset about it, but, being a Mom, it particularly got to Monica. It took quite a while to get everybody over it, because, as I explained to them at the time, we didn't know how to get over something like this. We'd never had to! We had always been able to sit down, talk over a matter briefly, and be done. And we still can. This one just took a little more work than usual.

That's what I mean about being blessed. #1 has gone back to school to get her degree and improve herself, #2 is about to finish her doctorate and has a good career outlook, #3 has done a great job of looking at colleges, and he has a job and a girlfriend now, #4 continues to do well with his engineering studies and is still on the path to being an Eagle Scout, and #5 still makes me laugh. We all of us can sit around a dinner table, or be riding in a car, or whatever, and carry on a conversation, often intelligent, sometimes cracking each other up (ask the boys about Zoltan the punter.)

Oh yeah, and Monica completes the final course for her Master's degree in Education this weekend. (Had to throw that in. That's quite a blessing as well!)

Leadership

I posted on Facebook the other day the results of my annual performance review at work. I received a total rating of "Solid Performer", which is about as good as I can expect to get at my wage level. Let's face it, you're not going to qualify for the top wage increase after 13 years in a skill position. But, one category was listed as "Development Needed". Reason: "Daniel works too hard. Leaders lead, and workers work." OK, now I get the point that leaders should provide direction and so forth, but I've never heard of someone being marked down for working too hard. After basically 30 years of management, the vast majority of that as General Manager, and a significant chunk of THAT as GM of Manager Training Units, I have some opinions of what leadership and management should look like. (I know, you're surprised that I of all people would have an opinion...)

Most managers make things too hard on themselves. Managers have ONE job: to get their employees to perform at a certain level. All other jobs that managers think they have are based on this one. You can't manage the supply cost: it's a piece of paper. Managing the bottom line doesn't work either, it's theoretical. There are as many ways to get people to perform as there are people. But managers have to deal in generalities first, and there's only one way to get people to work the way you need: they have to want to. They have to have a desire deep down in their gut to do the job right. Without that, no amount of begging, pleading, threatening, bullying, or, to use the current phrase, holding them accountable will make a difference. If they don't want to do it and do it right, they won't. Period. End of story.

So how do you get someone to want to move 50 pound boxes from one pallet to another for 8 hours? How many people get up in the morning saying "Oh boy, I get to go bust my butt today!" There's only one way here too: they have to want to make their manager happy. This old "I'm not here to be liked" doesn't apply anymore. People want a leader, someone they can look up to, someone they can believe in and count on. And someone they can trust. They MUST trust that leader to the point that if he says "This job can be done in one hour", they know it can because he's done it and he knows what he's talking about. Therefore, they will do the best they can to do it in that hour, because (wait for it) they want their leader to be proud of them and happy with their work. If they've never seen that leader pick up that 50 pound box, then it becomes "Who does he think he's talking to? I do this every day." Leaders have to be out in front, leading the way, looking over their shoulder and telling their folks to catch up to them.

Leaders DO work. The difference is that they shouldn't be working that hard the whole day. One of my favorite expressions was "If I'm out of breath, you should be sweating." If a manager finds themselves doing their people's work all day, they need to look at why, but they need to keep doing it until they solve that question.

This is getting WAY too long, so I'll end here. Next time I'm in the mood, we'll have a class on motivating people, which is similar, but not exactly the same. One thing's for sure: I'm trying to make sure I never get marked off for working too hard again!

I Remember When Rock was Young

CLICK HERE and listen to this (Click the back button on your browser to come back here. I guess I need to learn how to embed this stuff)
OK so this just hit me earlier today. This is good music. Actually, one of the best covers of this song I ever heard was way back in 1989 or 1990. At O'Charley's, we decided to have live entertainment on Friday and Saturday nights. My memory is that it didn't last but whatever, that's beside the point. One guy I hired for awhile did a great job with this song, so much so that we had the whole saloon singing the refrain. Later this same guy started playing regularly at Courtyard Cafe at Hickory Hollow, which is where Monica and I had our first date. He later bought Courtyard, changed the name to Nathan's, and kept playing there. His name? Phil Vasser.

I searched for him doing this cover, but couldn't find one. I'll keep trying. It was dynamite!

Did you know that a relative of Englebert Humperdink (I think his son, actually) heard Vasser there at Nathan's and hired him as a songwriter. That's how he got his start.

Monica actually was friends with Vasser for a while before all this. I still kid her that her old boyfriend is on whenever he's on TV. Of course he wouldn't know me from Adam's housecat nowadays, but oh well.

Along those same lines, when I was running the Fifth Quarter on Thompson Lane, we remodeled the saloon and changed it to a piano bar. It was pretty uptown too, with upholstered chairs, a sunken bar, and a mirrored stage. I hired a girl, I forget her name for sure, who was immensely talented, both as a musician and singer. She packed the place out. One night as I'm doing the manager thing, one of the waitresses says a customer was asking me to come by his table. Naturally, I'm like "Oh man, what did we do wrong this time?" I go to the table, and it's Lee Greenwood. Now this is right when "God Bless the USA" had just become popular. Click here to Jog your memory Anyway, he was asking about the entertainer. I told him what I knew of her, her background and so forth, and he said that he was very impressed by her. He asked me not to say anything to her because he wanted to go in and listen to her after dinner. To get to the point, it was basically an audition. He was going on a brief road trip and his opening act had cancelled two or three of the dates. So he hired her to front for him later that month. I never did hear much afterwards, except I know that it got her several jobs, mostly studio work I think, but for all I know she's now some famous artist. Can't believe I can't remember her name.

There was fun in the restaurant business, lots of it, but the crap outweighed the gold. Too bad too.

Let's Go Camping!

Maybe it's because I don't have an RV and have never gone camping in one, but that commercial for RV World or whatever it is that yells "Let's go camping!" makes me smile a little every time. To me, that's not camping. You gotta vehicle, beds instead of sleeping bags, refrigeration, all the comforts of home.

To me, camping is tent camping. You have to carry everything you're going to need for the trip in at one time. The food has to be packed in ice. Clothes have to be rolled up and packed away neatly. You have to plan it through because there's no room for extra stuff.

But for a real camping experience, go along with almost 100 other people, where about 50% of them have never been camping. Make sure you have about 45 of them under the age of 10, and a good portion of them on their first trip. Make yourself responsible (with one other person) for their experience, and you get the feeling of what it's like to be a Cub Scout Leader at a Cub N Family weekend.
Of course, the activities were planned and put on by the Boy Scouts. They had all kinds of fun things for the boys to do, including the highlight of every fall camp, BB guns and Archery. But I spent the last month getting out the information, signing people up and collecting money, registering with the scouts, and then answering the fifty million questions that come up from the new people. And the occasional last minute emergency, like the family that didn't know until 4 days out that they were supposed to come and the boy couldn't be left by himself. Problems, stress, silly questions...

So why do I do it?

On our way to one activity, our Cubmaster was leading the way with me bringing up the rear of this parade of little boys. He was using his hiking staff and one of the boys asked another "Why does he have that stick?"
   "Because he's old," was the answer. Now imagine 30 8-year-old boys going "Oooooohhhhhhh", Reminds me of the little green aliens in Toy Story. "The claw"

High temperature Saturday 82, not a cloud in the sky. Lows at night 52. Perfect sleeping weather, and keeps the bugs down. MARVELOUS weather.

We were sitting in front of our tents resting when one of the new scouts came running up from the woods. "Mr. Dan! Mr. Dan! Look! Look!" I looked, and he was carrying a skeleton skull of what we think was a deer that he had found out there."Isn't this great! I'm taking it to school!"

There was one little boy who had never been camping before, and he was the most excited, enthusiastic kid you ever saw. Every move he made he reported to me in detail. At the campfire Saturday night, he was grinning so big making s'mores that I thought his face would split. He was talking up a storm, then suddenly he was quiet. He'd had such a big day that he fell asleep almost in mid-sentence. Friday night we could hear him whispering to his dad in the tent for a long time. Saturday night he begged his dad to be quiet and let him sleep.

We did a flag retirement ceremony Saturday night at the campfire, a very formal, solemn affair. To be brief, the flag is cut into pieces so that it's no longer a flag, and each piece is laid on the fire. The Union with the stars is not cut because Lincoln said after the Civil War that "no man will separate the union", and it is put on the fire last in one piece. One of our new parents is a veteran, and recently retired. We asked him to do the union. As he stepped away, parents and scouts gave him an ovation. Without prompting.

Those 5 examples are why I do it. There are several others from this weekend. What a great trip. What an honor.

Long Day

If you get up at 4AM, right now (8:48PM) is late. I'm tired. I get off work at 1:30, go home for 30-40 minutes, then drive downtown to pick up the boys from school. Got home about 4PM, then left at 5:15 for Middle Tennessee State's Reception for Seniors at LP Field. Got home just before 8, then had to pick up Joshua from scouts at 8:30. Long day.

I knew MTSU was a good school, but didn't realize how high their national rankings were. Highest undergrad enrollment in Tennessee. #4 healthiest campus in the country. #47 best educational value for the money in the country. #51 best academics in the country. Very nice reception there at the stadium.

The reception was held in the club level at LP Field. Man, could I enjoy going there for a Titans game! Had a great scenic view of downtown on one side, and a line of concessions and so forth on the other. You could see the luxury suite doors on the upstairs level, and through the hallway was the field. Very nice! And of course, TV's everywhere so you wouldn't miss a minute of the game.

Then at Scouts I find out: I need to set up an Eagle Scout Court of Honor and this Friday night at our camping trip, we're an adult short at the troop campsite so I need to provide one from our pack (probably me). Which means setting up my tent at the pack site, then driving over to the troop site to sleep, then driving back in the morning to my site. Pain in the rear end. But we volunteered to help IF NEEDED so that the troop could go. I was afraid that once we said if we had to we'd do it, that then we'd have to. Pretty automatic.

Ugh. I'm going to bed. 4AM comes awful early.