Notes and Musings

In July of 2021, I began writing a weekly email to my mailing list, in order to reconnect with friends, clients, and candidates, i.e.,relationships built over the past 40-plus years, but from whom I may have grown distant during COVID. Writing this does more for me than it does for you – thus, I appreciate you indulging me.

Writing TFTW helps to surface lessons from the 500+ executive search and assessment projects that I have taken on – and allows me to repackage and redistribute those lessons. Let’s face it, the entire world is a classroom, and the answers to the questions that test us are not always multiple choice. We bounce the answers off of our hearts, our intuition, our spirit, our experiences, and the values that have been inculcated in us through our parents, teachers, mentors, the church, educational institutions, and the media. I hope these thoughts can help shape the answers to the questions with which you wrestle.

Know that I appreciate it when you respond with a note or a question. I don’t sit here thinking I am the fountain of knowledge, or much of an expert on anything.

But I was a damn good bag boy at Miles Market on Timberlake Road in Lynchburg, Virginia, “The Home of Everyday Low Prices”.

What does it take to be a good bag boy?

Well, you need a minimum level of judgment, like, put the cans and jars at the bottom of the bag, double bag if you have any questions about whether the paper will rip under the weight of the contents, and if you put anything in the bag with the eggs, make sure it is very light. Don’t crush the bread! Double bag the beer – those cans “sweat” once they come out of the beer cooler!

Writing these missives to you on a weekly basis is a lot like being a good bag boy. Put everything in, don’t stuff it too much, be thoughtful about how you arrange it. Separate the heavy stuff from the light (hearted) stuff. Be quick, but don’t hurry.

Know that I am happy to carry the bag out to your car, and unlike bag boys at Publix, I accept tips from you!

In fact – I love your feedback, observations, and pushback. Thank you!

This week’s Thoughts is a potpourri, including:

I get so many notifications on my phone that it is ridiculous. If somebody’s water breaks in Birmingham…if there is a lost kitten in California…if I have a qualified for a free bowl from the salad place up the street – I hear a DING!
The demand for executive search services at the top end of organizational charts has stayed steady and solid. I have always said that I have never heard of a company putting out a press release that says, “In order to save money, we are doing away with our CEO position.”
It angers me that people have hijacked the word ‘woke’ and use it as a pejorative. Take a moment to study the etymology of the word ‘woke’ and you will see what I mean.
Consumers, on a relative basis, are bearing the brunt of higher interest rates and higher prices. Companies have a much greater ability to pass along higher rates and higher prices, often to people who can least afford the extra cost. Has anyone looked at the improvement in bank net interest margins lately?
I admire any 80-year-old who will hop on a plane and fly into a warzone in order to show his support for a country that is fighting for our freedoms.
I recently finished reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership: In Turbulent Times, in which Goodwin examines the performance of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson in times of challenge and crisis. I cannot do justice in one paragraph to this excellent book – it is chock-full of timeless lessons. The biggest takeaway for me was that empathy is a foundational quality of being a great leader.
I am a bit embarrassed that here in Atlanta we are missing all the wonderful winter weather that the rest of the country is getting to experience. I mean, it hit 80 degrees here this week. Green shoots are shooting from azalea bushes that looked devastated after the 10 degree weather that we had just weeks ago.
Smart clients are using this economic ‘reset’ in order to get ahead of their competitors. Because they were already lean, these clients are hiring sales and operational talent that they need in anticipation of the inevitable improvement in economic conditions.
Am I the only person that feels that having a decade of real interest rates near zero was an aberration, and that the rates that we are seeing now are more of the historic norm?