The vice president syndrome

The first time I made vice president, my son told me that I had finally made it to the land of empty suits.

My couple of stints as vice president did not do anything to convince me that having a big title made much difference.

I worked just as hard or harder as when I had a less exalted title.

I have also worked for a number of vice presidents.

There are a couple of things I will say about the role of vice president. In some corporations, vice presidents are almost gods with the ability to do almost anything they want.

As companies become smaller, the role of vice president is largely irrelevant. Often the CEO in small companies creates vice presidents only to make their own role seem more important.

That isn't too difficult since in a small company, the CEO has all the power. The vp role is largely ceremonial in those companies.

It can get a little worse. You can have a sales driven company with more vice presidents than sales people. At that point you have a reached a danger point of having more chiefs than Indians.

There is nothing worse than a top heavy company filled with people who think their title exempts them from real work.

The kind of organization that you really want to build is one where titles don't matter.

Most people don't like those, but they can be the most productive of any organization.

A focus on getting the job done instead of awarding meaningless titles make more sense.

Keeping your credibility

Long ago I decided that my credibility was the most important thing that I had to lose in writing.

It is easy to make some wild statements to drum up traffic, but most of that traffic bounces quickly.

You bring people back to your blogs with quality content that is interesting and truthful. They become faithful and regular readers.

I am not trying to play any particular role as I write, except that of a writer who tries to present a balanced opinion even when it is nearly impossible to do so.

My degree is in history, and I have worked hard to stand back and look at situations to understand the facts and try to present them as logically as I can. I do that so that I can understand the situation, not necessarily so I can influence others.

I consider myself something of an expert on technology, sales management, leadership and on a number of places where we have lived. I have definite opinions, but I am always willing to hear another point of view. I value my reputation for expertise in those areas.

What I don't like are self-appointed experts who don't have the experience or knowledge to back their statements. I often see folks on forums that believe their opinion no matter how one sided or unsubstantiated is the only possible way to look at things.

It has been my experience that blanket statements are usually wrong. No place, person, or company is as bad or as good as we might expect.

To understand the truth and then make sure it becomes a positive factor in your decisions if a worthy goal for anyone.

If you help others understand the truth and interpret the facts in a way that keeps their options open and their minds moving forward, you have gone one step further.

This is how that I have built my credibility, and how I plan to keep it.

Selling the beach

No matter where I have lived, I have convinced myself that my particular spot is one of the greatest on earth.

Perhaps that is human nature. Still I like to think that I have lived in some gorgeous spots from Nova Scotia to Roanoke, Virginia.

We now live near the beaches of Emerald Isle, NC. It is pretty hard to deny its beauty. A couple of photos that I have taken in the area are among my all time favorites.

The first, Morning Waters, was a sunrise taken from the beach. The second, The End, was taken looking from Emerald Isle across Bogue Sound.

Since living in the area is almost as nice as the Southern Outer Banks pictures are beautiful, it isn't too much of a jump to selling property in the area as a Realtor®.

I really think this is a great area to live. It is easy to sell something you believe in unless you are trying to do it on city-data forum and you have anything to do with real estate.

I started blogging in late 2004 and have a tremendous number of posts about areas and things that have absolutely nothing to do with selling real estate.

While my Realtor® site and my ActiveRain site are definitely about selling real estate, it is really hard to argue that the first page of my Southern Outer Banks site has much to do with selling property. I might be promoting an area, but I am not doing much selling real estate or talking about my services as a Realtor® on a page with steamed crabs.

Today I got banned again from city-data forum for linking to my current Southern Outer Banks site and its Crab Feast article.

At the same time city-data forum is full of Google real estate ads. I am pretty sure that the city data forum folks have a special deal with Google to serve up members of the forum only to Google's paying customers.

I was very careful not to link to my Realtor® site while posting at city data forum and as you can expect I wasn't doing a whole of lots of selling my services as a real estate agent on a post about fried clams.

I may spend a lot of effort selling the area we live in, but that is not the same as being a real estate agent. City data forum must be making so much money for Google placements that they can't afford to have the chance that any forum members might wander across agents other than the ones that advertise on Google.

My latest site is about restaurants on the Crystal Coast. My guess is that the monitors at City Data forum would classify it as real estate site.

What I miss on the coast

There is not much that I miss on the coast or I would not be creating websites with titles like "Coastal Paradise."

I do miss some of the unbelievable lush green colors that we see in mountain valleys of Virginia.

It is the closest green that I have seen to that of summertime in Nova Scotia and the Canadian Maritimes which I believe are the greenest spots on earth.

Even trips to New Zealand and Ireland with their fabled green have not persuaded me to back down.

The beaches of Emerald Isle in North Carolina cannot hold a candle to the green of the mountains this time of year. Of course, they have other attractions that keep me happy most of the time.

At the coast I also miss the hundreds of beautiful Irises that adorn many of the garden's in the interior of North Carolina and Virginia.

In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the Irises would grow in the damp spots in the pastures.

We have lots of beauty on the coast, so I guess it is only fair that we save some of nature's spectacular decorations for the hills and mountains.

I had hoped to have more regular posts here at Ocracoke Waves, but I have been doing some all-consuming web work that has slowed me down.

My CoastalNC.org site and my Coastal Real Estate site have been completely redone after many hours of work.

My goal was to create a better user experience and make the information easier to find.

You can see some of the results of my work in the clickable buttons to my sites that are now in this blog's side panel.

I would love to hear any feedback. You can click here to email comments to me.

I have also started a real estate newsletter about coastal property which I will t try to do once a quarter, The first one is available for viewing and if you would like to subscribe, this link will get you to the form.

I have also chosen the Reston Backfence Online community for my first online ad. I will be interested to see what the response is.

Fear of salespeople

I am wondering if it is a particularly American thing to be reluctant to talk to salespeople. I will admit to visiting car dealerships only on Sundays until I am ready to engage in the battle of wits.

I wrote about auto buying in America in the "That peculiarly American dance, the auto two-step." Still I like talking to good salespeople who know their products.

That's probably the reason that I avoid many of the big box sales people in electronics stores since it is so rare that they know their products. There are exceptions to the rules as I found in my purchase of one of the HP all-in-one printer, scanner, copiers.

Actually I have always considered myself something of a knowledge sponge, willing to soak up whatever wisdom I can glean from an expert. In real estate, we have used a Realtor® every Itime we bought a place but once. That once reinforced my belief in using Realtors®.

I have been in sales most of my adult life. Even when I was farming for eleven years, sales was never very far in the background. I firmly believe that sales done right is an honorable career.

I have found that in most cases, people have already sold themselves by the time they reach a sales person. The best that a sales person can do is make certain they do not end up buying the wrong product and become unhappy.

I am sure there are plenty of sleazy sales people in the world, but I cannot believe that people have become so divorced from their critical thinking skills that people ignore the opportunity to learn valuable information from people who actually know what they are talking about when it comes to a particular product.

We are almost ready to buy a boat, and I have been wandering around boat show rooms for months since I know almost nothing about boats. Aside from one guy who tried to convince me that if I bought a skiff I would stay wet all the time, the salespeople and nearly half have been women have been very knowledgeable and helpful. In fact most of them haven't been real sales folks since I have gotten almost zero follow-up on my visits. That includes email requests for pricing which have mostly been ignored.

I recently had another experience which made me wonder how some people make decisions. I was participating in a forum where people are trying to find out about cities and towns where they either live or might want to live. Though I thought I was being very careful to adhere to the rules of the forum, one of which was not advertising my services as a Realtor®. I was, however, uncomfortable with people not knowing that I was a Realtor® when I was talking about real estate. I ended up being banished from the forum by what was likely an over zealous moderator who I am sure thought he was protecting people from me. Unfortunately for the readers, I was just trying to help some people learn the facts instead of hearsay.

I have a long history of posts about Apple and their computer products. I recently did a post about my letters to a friend who was considering buying a Mac. A couple of my readers there have suggested that I was doing everything I could to stop him from buying a Mac. Actually all I was doing was making sure that he went into the purchase with his eyes wide open.

In the end his friendship is worth more to me than whether he buys a Macintosh or not. I could tell from his letters that he has already decided to do it, so he might as well know the complete truth about the products instead of the Apple fanboy version of reality. Sugar coating the truth would only lead him to question our friendship.

It's easy to own one product and think that you have had the greatest experience in the world as an owner or user. When you have been involved in the industry or had a history with a particular company, things might not look so rosy.

I will no longer buy a Volvo, and I know a couple of Volvo owners who say the same thing. I only got to that point on my third Volvo. I will not buy a Maytag washer or dryer no matter how many cute the commercials they run are. If my current Apple MacBook breaks again, I might well buy a HP or Sony Laptop. In spite of what some of the Mac users want to believe the reality is that the reliability on my recent Apple purchases has not been good, and dealing with Apple on them has not been a lot of fun.

Still having said that, I am not afraid to engage a salesperson for Volvos. A good one would run back to the company and tell them how they lost someone who could have been a Volvo customer for life.

In this age of full disclosure on the Internet and with the power of Google, I find it hard to believe that there are people who are still afraid of being tricked by Realtors®. I spent nearly three years trying to find the right spot on the Crystal Coast. It was only with the help of a true local expert and Realtors® that we found it.

Expertise might be hard to find, but anonymous expertise is impossible to find. Engage the salespeople and learn what you can. You might find someone whose knowledge keeps you from making a mistake.

If you want to know about living along North Carolina's secret coast, the Crystal Coast, visit my website, "Coastal Paradise." I promise not to sell you anything since the facts speak for themselves, and you might even learn something from someone who is learning from the real local experts as fast as he can.

Produce stand ethics

After college in the seventies, I moved to Nova Scotia. I wanted to own some land. There was nothing affordable on the east coast of the United States  like the 140 acres, house and barn that I got on the Bay of Fundy near Bridgetown, Nova Scotia.

Having lived in Boston for the previous four years and awakening one morning to find nothing but a pile of glass where my car once was, I was initially surprised that many of the produce stands in the Annapolis Valley would operate on the honor system.

There would be produce, a scale, and a box or can for money. Sometimes the money containers would be attached to the stand, but often you could have walked off with the money with little effort. Though I am sure robbery happened, I never heard about it.

Even today in our fairly rural area, I know a fair number of spots where people could make off with products that aren't locked down yet I don't think it is huge problem with those businesses that are still in areas like ours where most of the people are trustworthy.

Still I doubt that many places remain like the small village of Tay Creek, north of Fredericton, New Brunswick in Canada where our farm was for 17 years. I can't ever remember taking the key out of our pickup truck, and we never had a lock on the house until we moved. We just didn't need it.

I spent nearly twenty years at Apple and got to see first hand how the drive for success can change people.  It occurs to me that whether intentionally or not Steve Jobs created a pressure cooker environment where resources will forever be tight and the expectation is that there will be no excuses unless you are so high on the corporate tree that mistakes are never your problem.

It creates something of a moral wasteland where people tend to look out for themselves and just be thankful that they have survived another year. It is something like a fruit stand where selling the fruit and making the most money off of it eventually becomes more important that producing great fruit.

You hear lots about what a creative place Apple is, but I doubt you will ever hear anything about how ethical Apple is. The simple reason is that Apple is a company which has pretty well institutionalized the idea that the ends justify the means. If there are a few employee bodies scattered along the way, what does it matter as long as the end result is that another great product makes it out the door to help grow the company's reputation? When the products begin to lack greatness, the body counts will grow.

I doubt that type of environment has made Apple products great. I do know that it has created an environment that most people would rather forget than talk about when they leave the company.

I worked at Apple nearly twenty years, and I never saw any ethics training in my career there. I heard a vice president say you should make sure you didn't save any of your email because it might get the company in trouble.  I know lots of employees who lost their jobs because they were on the wrong side of a corporate struggle that they did not even know was happening.  It is unfortunate that 

collateral casualties during internal struggles have become such a part of corporate culture in America.

There are plenty of companies just as bad or even worse than Apple. The challenge is that Apple lives in a glass bowl.  Lots of people assume life on the inside of the great Apple mother ship is wonderful and yet they have never walked inside the halls of Cupertino much less worked there.

I was in real estate for a few years and ethics were a big part of the job.

While having a code of ethics certainly is not a perfect solution to bad behavior, it is certainly better than the free wheeling world of technology where anything goes.  Of course Realtors® in most states live with the knowledge that consumers can easily complain about their behavior with just a few mouse clicks. I am sure knowing the NC Real Estate Commission is watching is a good thing for many people who might stray from the straight and narrow.

Having that code of ethics behind you, makes it a little easier to stand tall for what you believe, but in reality it only reinforces what you have grown up with from your youth.

If you grow up a Boy Scout and graduate from McCallie, during its days as a military school you learn about Honor, Truth, and Duty. My college had the simple Latin word of Veritas as a motto. All of that builds character as my mother used to say.

Still we can all learn from the fruit stand vendors of Nova Scotia. If you build your business on trusting your people instead of creating a climate of fear, you might have an organization that does the right thing by default.

You can read about our early years in Nova Scotia in our $2.99 Kindle book, A Taste For The Wild - Canada's Maritimes.

What makes me happy?

dualdogwoods,
originally uploaded by ocracokewaves.

I have lived lots of different places during my life, rural North Carolina, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Columbia, Maryland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Ste. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia to a farm in the wilderness of central New Brunswick, Canada.

Figuring out what makes you happy at any given point in your life is always a challenge. I spent a good part of my childhood trying to get away from North Carolina or Mount Airy to be specific. Now I am happy living in North Carolina.

A few years ago, we got the opportunity to spend a lot of time in the Mount Airy area. It felt like home. As we started looking for a place to spend the next ten years, we started spending lots of time looking in North Carolina.

Spring in North Carolina or southern Virginia is a pretty special time. These pictures of my family's home place in Mount Airy capture some of the spring feeling just as the Dogwood picture in the post does.

While the beauty of spring or these inviting waters near Emerald Isle, NC might attract you to an area, to be really happy, you need more than a beautiful spring or warm ocean waters.

In the end it is the people of an area, perhaps even the culture of the area that ends up being the most important factor. I have found friendly people in almost every area that I have lived. Some of the most supportive neighbors that we ever had were on our wilderness farm in Canada.

However, from that perspective I think parts of North Carolina and parts of Virginia where the local culture and traditions still survive are among the friendliest places that I have ever seen. The openess of people and the willingness to help are rare traits that are a little harder to see the farther north you go or the deeper you get into urban areas.

I think a couple of places that I have lived in Canada have helped me understand what makes this possible. One was Ste. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia which was a very isolated coastal community where the same families had lived for years with little change. My welcome to the community there was someone running down my Labrador Retriever on purpose. Outsiders while welcomed by some, were distrusted by most. It was as beautiful a place as you have ever seen in the summer, but when you don't feel welcome in a place, you might as well move on. We did.

The next place we lived was in the wilderness about twenty miles north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. We had farm of two hundred acres. We were welcomed by the community with open arms. The difference I believe was that Tay Creek had seen and accepted new comers for many years. They were viewed as the life blood of the community. We spent eleven wonderful years there and made some great friends with whom we still communicate.

I think much of rural and small town North Carolina and Virginia are similar. They have seen many changes and have adapted to them. By in large, people are very accepting of people with different backgrounds.

So if I had to put one thing high on my list of being happy, it would be acceptance by neighbors. We have had it in Roanoke, Virginia and in Cape Carteret, North Carolina. Both places have stunning natural beauty on top of friendly people.

While you might have to search for the right neighborhoods in a particular area that are open and friendly to newcomers, it is well worth the effort. Talking to the neighbors in your potential new neighborhood is also an important step in evaluating what will make you happy.

With one foot on the mountain and the other in salt water, I live in great neighborhoods both in Cape Carteret and in Roanoke. As a Realtor® I would be glad to help in Cape Carteret or refer you to a good Realtor® in the Roanoke or Blacksburg, Va. area.

If you are interested in Roanoke, you can check out my View from the Mountain blog. If you are in interested in affordable coastal living in North Carolina, check out my Coastal Paradise blog.