Category Archives: Randoms

The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; Yes, I have a good inheritance. Psalms 16:6 NKJV

Know Your Partners

“Everyday your competitor gets up to take away your business.”

A mentor and partner spoke that to me at a critical juncture. Later his competitor nature surfaced and he took away the business. Daily, I served the partnership in expectation of continuing reward. I should have listened more closely.  I thought he was talking about someone else. He was warning me of his nature. I was duly warned. My bad.

In Aesop’s fable he tells of the duck and the scorpion.  The scorpion convinced the duck to give a ride across the water, promising he would not hurt him. With caution and compassion the duck agreed. As he jumped off the duck’s back at the end of the ride, he stings and kills the duck.  The duck astonishingly asked, “Why?”, as he dies. Scorpion replied, “I can’t help it. It is my nature.”

After dealing with such, we find it hard to trust a faithful and good God. He defines a great path for those under His grace and protection. It is His nature.  He also has a nature of justice and just retribution, for those who live outside His path. We need to understand both and chose the path of greatness that appeals to His protecting and providing nature. Once we become family, He stays with us.

The beauty of God is His unchanging good nature.  We might shift, but He does not shift. He puts us in a world of reward and growth. Our defining lines of strength are given and He does not change. Yes, we choose to live in them or not, but He does not change. When He commits, it is forever.

Know Your Swing

 I didn’t learn how to swing a golf club until late in my career. And even though I won all those tournaments, I still struggled with consistency, and I relied on my strengths, which were hitting the ball long and high, and I could chip and putt with the best of ’em. Tom Watson

Watson gives great insight. Gold is not my thing.  I play for fun and friendship. When I take out a new ball, I paint a smiley face to remind myself why I am playing.  Each has ability and strengths.  Weakness is hard to fix. Cover it with strengths. Adjust and play to your best side. Early in my career, I found a ready and excellent skill to fix broken processes and develop others.  Those skills serve me every day. I enjoy them. They have served me in retail, print-publishing, discount, non-profit, community, and healthcare concerns. The skills are adaptable.  What are your skills?

 Three Hats Check this out.

Know Your God

In business and community, God is faithful to give me good.  Companies have folded and sold. Partners have shifted and shafted. In all, my contract with God has held solid. We always stay together and the situations always work through to good benefit. My lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. They can for you, also.

Those who run after other gods will suffer more and more. I will not pour out libations of blood to such gods or take up their names on my lips. Psalm 16:4 NIV
Developing life, business, and community can at times take too much of us.  Our pursuit takes over our thought life and overall sense of well being.  When that happens, our balance is tipped and the joy begins to retreat. The Lord sees that.  He wants us to enjoy balance.

“Faith gives you an inner strength and a sense of balance and perspective in life.” Gregory Peck

Many gods consume attention. Social climbing, physical beauty, happiness, perfect health, good works, education, personal fulfillment, recreation, profit, and religion are a few of these gods. They do not need to be of wood or stone or precious metals. They only need to take our primary attention away from The God.

Every one of these gods mentioned is good. They build us.  They build our lives and the lives of others. Each develops a component of life and society. You need to develop socially, physically, mentally, financially, well being, personally, benevolence, and expression of faith. They only become a god when we worship and serve above our worship and service to The God and His desire. Anything that becomes bigger than Him destroys. Our creative design is upset.  Enjoy all of life starting with the God component only He can fill.

Businesses and organizations become skewed. Over focus on profit and mission disallow balanced lives of colleagues. The corporate man or woman must conform to the corporate look, feel, and religion at unreasonable levels. Eventually, it fails. A certain freedom of personal balance needs support.

Personal lives become skewed. Drive to look good or have the best or promote personal opinion stifles faith, family, and friendship. Love becomes violent. Hurt replaces health. Anger stirs and streams.

Three of the Ten Commandments focus on: 1. God first 2. God honored and respected 3. Keep His days separated to worship and rest. The others speak also to family, finances, friendships, community, and order. The Lord of Creation wants us to be balanced and fulfilled in Him and others and self. He is not hung up on hard living.  He is hung up on us living fully and healthily in spirit, soul, body, mind, will, emotion, wisdom, wellbeing, relationships, and family.

Consider the layout of your week.  Prioritize time in each day and the Lord’s Day to worship Him. Prioritize your relationship with Him. Many distortions can be healed through a simple and top priority friendship with the Creator.

Have a great day. The Lord of All is on your side. He is FOR you.

Phil@shepherdok.com 

I say of the holy people who are in the land, “They are the noble ones in whom is all my delight.”
Psalm 16:3 NIV

Every journey in business and community begins with company. in those people you will find help, strength, wisdom, grief, betrayal, loyalty and a thousand other characteristics. Mixed in those people are people of the Lord’s tribe, so affected by Him that they bring Him to every meeting, every workday, and every interaction.  Thy aren’t preachy or perfect, just different.  They are refreshing. You find Him in His people.  That is where He lives.

Separated to Him is a God thing. These people don’t follow the flow of lemmings. They are hard and faithful and caring individuals. This world must lose hold and the Master gain influence. If you join them, you are a separated and distinctive and peculiar people. Love His people. In some ways we are strange as we become more like Him. Love these people. Embed yourself in them. Become like them.

Noble people are loved of all.  True believers are loved by others because they are loving toward others. And they are noble.  They stand above not aloof. They are not haughty but distinctive. They are repulsed by the banal but not judgemental. They are turned off by the crass, but understand why others live there. This is the Lord”s people.

Delightful people give us a place to join and are grateful to serve. The Lord’s tribe is an open table. Anyone with the committed heart is welcome to join.  Anyone can sit at the table and try out the food to decide.  The committed join. These people know how to explain their love of others and service to God without being offensive. There is a delightful place for all.

 “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” Melody Beattie

In all things be grateful for the Lord”s noble and grateful people.  He builds a living monument to His love and mercy and strength and calls it a family.  You thrive in the family. A business or community endeavor will grow with the influence of these.

Once at a lunch room table, a rather crude man rose to tell an off color joke.  It was obvious and his normal habit. Off color usually means sexual lyrics or racially demeaning.  A loving believer quietly pushed back his chair to exit the conversation.  Just then as the joke opened, a woman piped up, “Really. Jack (the believer), doesn’t want to hear your joke and neither do I.  Why not keep it for the bathroom?” The others at the table chuckled and nodded.  Jack settled back in his chair and the air stayed clean.

Continual learning environment is a must. Executives and managers make it happen. Leadership is involved. Learning is the never ending story. An organization with a bend towards learning produces excellence.

Learning is not training. Training is a part of learning. Learning is a lifelong commitment, a morning attitude, and an approach toward information and experience. It is a must.

“Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.” Sir Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister

At a time when individual operations and entire organizations cannot afford to make mistakes, it seems there is great potential for highly-visible errors. The complexities of implementing multi-channel, response-driven customer communications pressure. Modified workplace rules, legislative and executive mandates on business, and global pressures stretch staff. Can we expect operations run on a shoestring budget with no time or money for skill upgrade to accomplish adapting? Can we expect staid operations and staff, who’ve become resistant to change, to survive? Not really.

You Don’t Want This To Be You: Learners Look

The US Army sent out letters to families of soldiers killed overseas. They featured a salutation of “Dear John Doe,”. What probably happened? Did someone put “John Doe” as a place holder into a mail merge letter and forget to merge? Did the data scrub go bad? Was a routine process double check missed while someone checked Facebook?

But why did it not get caught? No one noticed that all the letters had the same salutation? Was it because the shop doing the work was rushed? Or did the shop not have a quality- control person who knew what to look for? Or was the QC person off running some production equipment and never had the chance to check before the mailing went out? We may never know.

The end result is damaged reputation and emotional distress. This error is reported by national news organizations. The shop was named in the articles. The price they charged the Army was published. An Army official was quoted as saying the Army was contemplating “appropriate action against the contractor.” Ouch! Worse was the impersonal impact on grieving families.

Oh, and a General (the Army Chief of Staff) had to hand-sign 7,000 apology letters. I wouldn’t want to be the shop that made this unfortunate mistake, and I feel for them. But it is a good example of what can happen when processes are not followed or things get rushed. This particular error may not be attributed solely to a learning issue, but inadequate attitude of attention and learning could certainly have played a part.

There are three active attitudes in a learners’ team.

Learners constantly assess, inspect, and appeal. They are ‘in the stuff” every day, all day. A learner will see an error outside of expected routine checks. They notice compliance variances and modify.  They see process issues that threaten on time delivery of services. They become experts at their jobs. They invent shortcuts for production and service delivery that speed customer time to market. You will find a learning shop team huddled over an issue as a team coming up with solutions.

Learners are led. Executives and managers set the curve. One astute client executive commented, “I’ve had a good day, I learned something new about this operation.” This was the senior most executive in a large insurance company. He looked every day to learn something new about the trench work. Managers should be bringing fresh insights to the team. Managers should be increasing their customer knowledge every week. An executive or manager cannot be the best at what their people do, but they should be the best leader at what they do. Be curious.

Learners look. If it ain’t broke, break it. There is no excuse for lax process. Learners take apart what looks fixed. They don’t break it to be mean. They break it to find a better way, a cleaner routine, a process stripped of extra steps, or a more predictable performance. Learners learn by looking under the hood.

Summary: The “looking learner” environment in an operation will produce predictably excellent results. Unfortunately, our workplaces easily drift into drone mentality through blind adherence to institutional objectives. Creativity takes spark and acknowledgement from leaders. Learning is stimulated by example.