Anonymous Distributor
Helloooooooooo, Spring? Are you there? Do you know it’s June already? Good grief, it’s past the beginning of hurricane season, and you’re nowhere to be seen. You certainly picked a terrible time to hide. We thought you arrived in March, but you had us fooled. Then, April came along, and the weather turned wet and very cool again. You realize you’ve really messed up OPE retailers’ and manufacturers’ visions of a great spring selling season that they thought had begun in March? Now, large inventories of OPE can be found at all levels of the sales channel. I suppose we’ll just give up on you, Spring, and look for your cousin, “Summer.” You see, we’ve found Summer to always be a whole lot more reliable than you. So, we’re all planning on selling lots of OPE and service during the Summer season to meet what we hope is lots of pent-up demand.
By the way, Spring, please make sure your cousin Fall is here on time for a change. We could use a nice surprise.
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Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, gives a little speech to employees when they’re promoted to vice president at Apple, according to Adam Lashinsky in a recent and very interesting Fortune magazine article titled “Inside Apple.”
“Jobs tells a newly promoted VP that if the garbage in his (Jobs) office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor would reasonably respond by saying, ‘Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn’t get a key.’” Though irritated, Jobs knows this is an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn’t do his job. As a janitor, he’s allowed to have excuses. “When you’re the janitor, reasons matter,” Jobs tells newly minted VPs.
“Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering,” says Jobs. “The Rubicon is crossed when you become a VP. In other words, you have no excuses for failures. You are now responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn’t matter what you say.”
Being a successful boss or manager does have its responsibilities and its rewards for success. And as Jobs states, “There are real consequences for not being successful at higher levels of management.” I guess we could call it “paying the piper.” If you want to “play,” you have to be willing to accept those consequences. Are you?
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There was a recent front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle, about a female humpback whale that became entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, tail and torso, as well as a line tugging in her mouth.
A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the San Francisco Bay) and radioed an environmental group for help.
Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her.
They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.
When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles.
She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around — she was thanking them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives.
The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.
The best part of this story is that it is true!
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Harvey Mackay tells recent college graduates as they start to learn the realities of the business world that “they will have to pay their dues.” He also advises them that “you can’t start at the top and work your way up.” That would be a very hard and very short “trip.”
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The next time you’re thanking God for all of your blessings, say a prayer for all of those affected by tornados in the southeastern and midwestern United States. They need your prayers and your support. It very easily could have been you and me.
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Contact the Anonymous Distributor at anonymous.distributor@gmail.com or read his blog at www.anonymousdistributor.blogspot.com.
