The trail back from Yellow Mountain…. A lesson for a new year with Covid !

 

 

 

The Yellow Mountain Hike in the mountains just north of Highlands N.C. is a real “ass kicker!”  It’s an out and back hike, with the halfway point being a fire tower built by the C.C.C in the 1930’s on the top of Yellow Mountain (not quite 6000 ft. above sea level.)  The hike is about 10 miles in total, with more than 7000 ft. of elevation change (up and down several mountains from the trailhead to the fire tower,) and is at the edge of my physical capability. It typically takes me close to seven hours to accomplish the feat…. and for me it is truly no small feat to achieve!

 

The picture above is of one of the trail signs that are about ½ way out to the fire tower, at a crossing in the trail.  Since it’s an out and back hike, we pass this sign early in the day and then again on our way back, about when we have done ¾ of the hike with only ¼ to go!!  The problem with the sign’s specific location is that its on Goat’s Knob, one of the most challenging parts of the hike and on the return route the sign hits as you are making your way UP Goat’s Knob in a steep and difficult stretch.  Every time I have done this hike, I know that while I am getting close to making it back to the trailhead, with only ¼ of the trail to endure, the path ahead will be steep, challenging and very difficult…. the end was near but challenging miles lay ahead.

 

It’s with that spirit that I see us today, as we are facing the end of 2020 and the “trail” ahead for vaccinations in 2021.  We can see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel… with hopefully millions vaccinated by April or May, and a wide percentage of the population covered by the end of summer.  The hope and excitement is palatable but still difficult “miles” lie ahead in our path.  The next few weeks and months are extremely dangerous and challenging and we are not “out of the woods” by any means, we are merely about at the Yellow Mtn. sign on our way back home.

 

I learned on my second Yellow Mountain hike (the first was successful but pretty messy…. more on that another time) that by taking frequent breaks, having enough water and food to sustain myself, I could make it back feeling winded and tired, but healthy and successful.  In that same spirit, I am looking for ways right now to apply those lessons to our current challenges with Covid.  How can I slow down, use good planning, focus on health and safety protocols and most importantly remember that there are really challenging miles ahead and to ensure to prepare well for those challenges.

 

As much as I desperately want this to be over, and to get back to travelling and seeing family and friends like we did before March 2020, those days aren’t here yet!  We all need to stay patient, vigilant and as careful as we can be… with plenty of water and food for the rest of the proverbial hike, so we can all find our way back from the Fire Tower on Yellow Mountain and back to our homes safely with our families and friends in 2021…. we are at the “sign” on the way back but not finished the hard journey yet!  

Stay safe and healthy over the next few months and we all can find our way to vaccinations in 2021 and a return to more normal times with our families, friends and communities.

 

    

It's very hard this year, but "start with Gratitude"

This is a note I sent out to my team at Bolthouse Farms, and I wanted to share it more broadly....

I just wanted to send out a note before the Thanksgiving holiday this week.  This year is unlike all others for me ( and I think for all of us) as we head toward this day of thanksgiving….. this year has been so hard, so challenging, so painful, and so long, that I for one am having a hard time being very thankful; it’s in that spirit, not in some “hallmark card” moment, but in the midst of all of our challenges and pain that  I share these thoughts and reflections.  

 

Maybe 10-15 years ago I had the chance to see The Dalai Lama live at Canon chapel  on the campus of Emory University.  The setting matters since it was where Jennie and I were married ( by her Father,) where both Bryson and Marie were baptized and where we attended the funerals for both Jennie’s mom and sister… certainly a sacred space for our family!  It was there that the Dalai Lama, with a number of monks, held a “service” of sorts that included all sorts of Tibetan Buddhist rituals and comments from The Dalai Lama.   While I was struck by how “cheery and jovial” he was ( often chuckling/laughing) one comment he shared has stuck with me over the years…. that being to “always start with gratitude.” 

 He encouraged the crowd to 

 

·     “start every day…” 

·     “start every meal…”

·     “start every conversation…”

·     “start every walk…”

·     etc.

o  “with gratitude.”

 

I think back to that moment, so many years ago and find strength and inspiration thinking about this note today.  In the midst of rising covid cases and so many challenges facing our world, I am very thankful for my family, my sweet Jennie and our two wonderful kids, Bryson and Marie.  I am thankful to have the chance to work at Bolthouse Farms, and to work in a business that is trying hard to find ways to get more fruits and vegetables (go carrots!!) on family’s tables, and to work with a team of hardworking “Bolthouse People” that care so much and are so committed to our mission.  I am thankful to be healthy and capable to find ways to try to make tomorrow a bit better than yesterday…. and the list literally could go on for paragraphs….. I am actually thankful for so much!!

 

I wish all of you a very happy, healthy, safe and “grateful” thanksgiving holiday and I do sincerely hope that you can enjoy some well deserved time off this week with your family and friends as safely as possible!

 

The accelerating “Trajectory” of talent

 

 

 

The simplest way to start this essay is an old lesson, one that I learned years ago from some un-named boss or mentor, that is captured in the simple line….“Yesterday’s A+ is tomorrow’s B-!”  the idea being that in a business that is growing, thriving, and dynamically responding to a changing competitive landscape the exceptional performance that drove exceptional results last year will actually look pretty “un-exceptional” when faced with the expanded and accelerated results expected in years to come.

 

It’s always good to remind us what this “looks” like mathematically on the chart to the right. Y=mX+b is the age-old formula for the line and when “m” or the slope of the line is positive, we have a line showing positive growth….. whether it’s depicting net revenue, gross margin, or EBITDA, the “m” being positive and in growth mode is what’s key!

 

At the center of this concept is a belief that an organization, and the key individuals that make up that organization, needs to keep learning and growing their individual and team skills/capacities in order to generate expanding results expected in future fiscal quarters/years.  It also assumes that a stagnant organization, a group of individuals not building their skills and capacities over time won’t be able to generate and create growth oriented results for very long.

 

This “lesson” is very present for me in my current role at Bolthouse Farms.  As I mentioned in earlier essays, coming back to Bolthouse Farms has been an incredible opportunity to have a “2^ndchance to work on your legacy” and I am trying to take full advantage of that chance. In that spirit we have rebuilt the team and have accelerated the business dramatically over the past 16 months since we bought the company back from Campbell’s.  It is in this context that I am thinking so much about this idea about “trajectory.”

 

As our business grows and changes, so do the needs and demands that are required from our team. Getting the business stabilized and back on its feet was job #1 ….LAST YEAR …. but now our focus is on building a platform for growth for the years to come and to build an organizational strength and depth to drive and sustain that growth for years to come as well!

 

This is the crux of the idea that as a business changes and grows, so the demands on and the expectations of its key executives change and grow correspondingly. What’s really interesting ( and very challenging) is when the growth itself accelerates….. e.g., when a business grew 10% last quarter, 15% this quarter and is planning on growing 25 % next quarter the reality is that the business is not just growing, but the growth rate is actually growing.  For those math nerds reading this essay, we are talking about a curve with a positive derivative as seen in this chart ….

 

In these business circumstances, it is very important to work to stay active in building the skills and capacities of your team.  Insure that you have a team ( and that you are modeling) which is focused on delivering the required results today AND in building their abilities to drive much greater results in the future.  Being a leader who is both an active learner and an active teacher is a key element of this “equation” working well.  As a leader be open to show all the new things that you are learning and working on…. Be open with what you have to learn to be great next quarter/next year/ etc. Too many leaders think about this as some sort of weakness…. nothing could be further from the truth! Equally have a “teachable point of view” and be active and patient as a teacher to your direct reports and your team.  Leaders that can combine both of these traits ( active learner and active teacher)  are positioned well to build organizations that can accelerate their capabilities and thus drive accelerating growth!

 

"Hope", a dream and a wish!

It is rare for me to reference a dream in one of my posts, but with 200+ essays posted on this blog it was bound to happen. As I have referenced, Jennie and I have two wonderful, bright, generous and beautiful children ... Bryson and Marie. Bryson recently graduated from UCLA ( Go Bruins!!) and Marie is a second year at UCSB ( Go Gauchos!!) The dream I reference today featured Marie and the UCSB campus. In this very vivid dream, I was visiting Marie at school and we were walking up to an overlook to catch the sunset. For those of you who have never been on the University of California, Santa Barbara campus, it is set on the bluffs above the pacific and faces due west and has STUNNING sunsets from a number of spots across the campus. In my dream, we walked to a specific spot to watch the sunset, along with a large crowd of people, all heading to the same vista. As we got to the top of the bluff, Marie and I talked about how incredible it felt to be able to share the moment with a large group of "strangers," and not feel uncomfortable or unsafe because in my dream, the vaccine had been discovered and the world was vaccinated... the fear of covid was a memory! 

It was an incredible sensation to feel the openness, the freedom, the optimism and the communal "beauty," newly freed from the fear and trauma of Covid-19! As I awoke from the dream, the sunset image clearly in my "minds-eye," I was deeply struck by the truth that someday (and hopefully/prayerfully "someday" soon) we WILL confirm a vaccine, we WILL work to have the world broadly vaccinated, and we WILL mix and mingle with others without the fear of today. We WILL have a bright tomorrow, not without its challenges, but without some of our most pressing CURRENT challenges. 

When I reference "Hope" in my title, it is the "hope" of that sunset moment in my dream, the "hope" of a brighter healthier tomorrow, the "hope" of a more peaceful world that we need to find a way to find in the dark days of today. No one knows when the vaccine will be discovered and scientifically validated, or when 7+ billion doses will be manufactured and successfully delivered to all citizens across the globe, but we do know that those days will come!

 In closing, I "wish" for all of you a chance to find your own UCSB "sunset moment!" I "wish" for all of you to have a chance to dream/see the future "post-covid" and imagine just a few of the blessing and beautiful gifts that future will offer to all of us!

Building "Community" Together

Building “Community” Together It was almost 20 years ago that I first got involved in the Atlanta Community Food Bank (ACFB) as a board member. I had volunteered with the organization before that time, and had gathered canned goods as part of food drives at work and at church, but in 2002 I was asked to join the board for the first time. ( I recently finished serving my second 6-year term on the board, and continue to be a big fan and supporter!) Back in 2002, I was asked to be part of a marketing committee by Bill Bolling, founder and long running Executive Director of the ACFB. Bill and I continue to work together today, as he has now retired from the Food Bank and I work with him as a board member of The Food Well Alliance, a non-profit focused on strengthening the local food system in metro Atlanta by supporting urban farmers, community gardens, farmers markets and other organizations involved in the local food movement. If interested, see more at www.foodwellalliance.org.

Back to the marketing committee! At that time, the ACFB was expanding its footprint and was involved in numerous side projects/initiatives and the marketing committee was asked to work on how to capture all the projects under a common “food bank umbrella” and develop a re-branding/re-naming approach that might help all of the initiatives make more sense to the supporters of the food bank. We dove into the project, worked with a local agency, and came up with a number of branding/naming/graphic ideas that would simplify the communication challenges and one of the recommendations that we came forward with was to drop the word “Community” from the organization’s name as a way to streamline/simplify things. I still remember the immediate and dramatic reaction from Bill Bolling when we showed him our ideas, with him exclaiming that the word “Community” was the ONLY word that could NEVER be dropped….. that we were at the food bank, using food as a tool to help our community…. especially the members of the community most in need….. that the food was not the objective, a stronger healthier community was the objective…. Community was the whole thing!

Community: noun,
• a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
o "the scientific community"
• a group of people living together in one place, especially one practicing common ownership.
o "a community of nuns"
• a particular area or place considered together with its inhabitants.
o "a rural community"

While the marketing committee project didn't go too far , the lesson from that review has stayed with me for decades and has been growing on my mind over the past few months with the challenges and struggles facing so many of us across so many communities. Consider the challenges the entire world is facing from the Covid crisis, the struggle for racial justice and equality, the growing pervasive issues from accelerating climate change, the nightmare of gun violence in our country, and the list goes on! WE are facing an incredible set of challenges across the board and before we try to dive in and “fix” one of them we have to come back to the fundamental truth that WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER! We are part of one large COMMUNITY!

If we have learned anything in 2020 it is that our actions affect those around us and vice versa…. Whether it is someone not wearing a mask in a grocery store ( not good!) or one town/country spewing toxic emissions into the air and water that flows downstream to the neighboring town/country, we don't live in small isolated units…. we live in a world incredibly interconnected and what we do (or don't do) doesn’t just affect ourselves, it ALWAYS affects each other! Maybe its overly simplistic, but I am thinking back to Bill Bolling’s admonition a lot these days ( “Community: is the indispensible word!) and am thinking about how we can take action and work on “Building Community Together.”

Where ever you are, urban or rural and regardless of country (or political party) we can all chip in and find ways to help support and strengthen our communities broadly. Partly driven by the covid crisis, our food banks have never faced a time of greater need, our local support organizations have never been more stretched, look around you and find ways that you can help/support/strengthen ‘community” wherever you live….. the need is great and as a “community” we can accomplish great and needed things for OUR COMMUNITY, but only if we act as a “community!”

Through the lens of Gratitude

It seems difficult to think about the idea of looking at our world and our lives through a "lens of gratitude," but that challenge is what I want to focus on today. Surrounded by a still growing global pandemic, expanding civil unrest over systemic racial injustice, and mounting global geopolitical pressures and strife, it almost feels misplaced to even suggest that "gratitude" could or possibly SHOULD be the filter/screen or "lens" for our complicated world today.

Recently our son had a terrible accident and had to have emergency surgery.  I won't go into any details here, but he is recovering well and getting stronger everyday.  His accident caused a significant amount of internal bleeding, and his surgeon shared how lucky he was to have gotten to the hospital as quickly as he did (via a 911 ambulance call),  since his internal bleeding was so severe.  I was shocked, and terrified about our son's "close call" and was so deeply appreciative that he had come through surgery so well and was going to have a full recovery.  I was deeply grateful, full stop!

That realization of deep gratitude pushed me to think about gratitude more deeply, and how hard it seems to have as a constant filter for life, and how especially hard it seems to apply today!  With all the pain/loss/tragedy in our world in the summer of 2020, "gratitude" does not seem like the first place to start in approaching our world.  As a counterpoint, I want to suggest in this essay that we might all benefit if we try to apply our "gratitude glasses" to the challenges we all face today across our landscape.

Gratitude: noun; the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.


A few quotes from a breadth of voices help amplify the definition above:

Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”

Maya Angelou 

“Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.”

Epicurus

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

Rumi

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life 
becomes rich.”

Mother Teresa
"The best way to show gratitude is to accept everything, even my problems, with joy.

Now that we have refreshed ourselves on the core definition of "gratitude," and have been nudged by a number of voices from across the centuries, lets think about how to apply this seemly simple idea to our lives this summer:

• "Leading" through a lens of gratitude:
• Many business leaders find it tempting to start conversations or business reviews with a summary of what has NOT gone well, or a discussion of the gaps or mis-steps of the organization.  Try starting with the greatest successes of the year, the biggest wins, the loudest moments .... THE GRATITUDE LIST ...what are we grateful for as we begin this conversation??  there will be plenty of time to review the negatives.... lets ALWAYS start with the positives (even after a bad quarter/year!)
• 
  
• "Parenting" through a lens of gratitude: 
• Like many families, we have had an experience over the past few months "during Covid" where we have had a lot of time with our college aged kids, much more than normal!  Rather than myopically focus on the clothes on the floor, or the forgotten coffee cups left around the house, I am working on realizing that this moment will actually be over MUCH TO SOON and I will miss having this "regular time" with Marie and Bryson kicking around the house... a time that might never be replicated!  
• 
  
• "Marriage" through a lens of gratitude:
• This coming week, Jennie and I celebrate our 33rd anniversary.  After three + decades of marriage, a kind and wonderful life partner, two smart beautiful healthy kids, a lovely home, and the list goes on ...  there are tons to be appreciative of and grateful for and I am thinking this year about how to centered on those truths!

While I won't "fill in" the following few thought starters, this idea continues on in the same direction.... take the items of our current day-to-day life and work to "look" at them through the "lens of gratitude!"

"Volunteering " through a lens of gratitude: 

"Friendship" through a lens of gratitude:

"Politics" through a lens of gratitude: 

We all have a lot to be grateful for, lets not forget it as we lead our busy lives!  Lets turn these attitudes into actions and SHOW our appreciation to those who touch our lives.... through the "lens of gratitude!"

"Storm the Breach".... but come well prepared!

As many of you know, I am a bit of a history nut and enjoy looking back at history to look for clues or advice about how to face the challenges of today.  In past essays I have turned to many voices across time, including Plutarch, Ghandi, Dr. MLK jr, and many others to help illuminate and inspire; today I am turning to Wellington... the British general most well known as the leader who defeated Napolean at Waterloo.

While famous for that final battle in 1815, a few years before he lead the British forces in Spain in what was known as the Peninsula Campaign, driving French forces across Spain ( the Iberian "Peninsula") ultimately ending in the final battle in Waterloo Belgium.  As Wellington drove across Spain, the French forces would take up defensive positions in various small "cities" that were defended by ancient stone walls and attempt to stop Wellington's advance.  In many off those situations, none more famous than the "Siege of Badajoz," the British artillery would fire upon the walls until there was an opening, or a "Breach," where one part of the wall had collapsed and was opened, the British infantry would "storm" into the "breach" and fight their way into the city, ultimately routing the defenders into a panicked retreat.

The notes above are taken from Wellington's dispatches from that time, and are incredibly detailed in the plans and preparations for the soldiers preparing to "storm the breach!"  This wasn't some sort of wild, unplanned assault but instead a highly coordinated, and well prepared plan to take advantage of an opportunity and to drive it to its maximum impact. ( the fact that he highlights the number of ladders and that the troops should bring "light materials" to be thrown into the ditch is an incredible level of detailed planning!)

I have reflected back on Wellington this past week because of a competitive opportunity facing our company.  We have owned Bolthouse Farms for just over a year, and late last week we received word  that a long standing competitor had announced their plans to close operations in the next 30-45 days!  What an incredible opportunity and in appropriate fashion we gathered our teams and within a few hours were having calls with key retail buyers to maximize our ability to capture the opportunity.... we were "storming the breach!"  The reality that this competitive news came a year after buying the company back from Campbell's, not a few weeks after closing last summer, is so key because it gave us the chance to "come well prepared" to this moment! We had rebuilt the team broadly ( still more work to go of course but we are in good shape with a great group of people).  We have rebuilt our operational capabilities and our quality system, allowing us to run the plant at efficiency levels well above a year ago and has expanded our capacity levels to allow us to take on more business AND do so profitably..... and literally the list goes on!  We are "storming the breach" and have "come well prepared!"

While success is never assured, and we will have some ups and downs in "storming this breach," this moment has reminded me of an important lesson; in business and in life you never know when an unexpected opportunity will present itself, but you are always able to build capabilities and become "well prepared" when the opportunity breaks to "storm the breach!"