The great coastal tomato crop

It is hard for me to not smile a little when I read about tomatoes disappearing from store shelves.

I took this picture about a week ago. It is a great start on our 2008 tomatoes especially considering the challenges others are facing. It is a very tough year even for small growers.

Tomatoes are among the easiest of vegetables to grow. They also have great diversity and taste if you grow them yourself.

We had practically given up growing tomatoes in Roanoke, Virginia where the deer seem to have defeated all attempts at having gardens.

With the well drained sandy soil of North Carolina's coastal plane, I just dig a hole and put in some top soil, Ozmocote, and water liberally. At some point I have to attack the nasty hornworms, and stake the plants.

All in all it is agreat way to help the food budget. My plants went into the ground on April 3 this year.

It did not seem long until June 1 when we picked the first tomato. We have been getting them in quantity for about ten days.

Maybe it is all the years I spent on the farm, but there is something very satisfying about bringing in a great crop even if it is just tomatoes.

Just tomatoes, what am I saying. There is no better use for bread than in a tomato sandwich.

I didn't know about the little micro-climate beside our garage when I bought the property, but I am glad it is there.

I know that my competition in the tomato contest is already hungry for the next year, and I think that I have the spot that will defeat these pretenders to the tomato crown.

The easy way in today's society

Sometimes I wonder if there is more free labor in the economy than paid labor.

While our beach towns still do lots of work promoting the area, there is a whole other world of blogs and free sites that will often sing the praises of an area for free.

I know that there are still photographers out there, but much of the photography that we see these days is done by amateurs like myself.

Not long ago I was writing for a free magazine. The theory was that my articles would bring recognition to me and that would be my pay. That works great but it helps if the magazine lasts more that six months.

We live in a world of free services like Gmail and Flickr. Sometimes folks think more of the free services than they do of the ones which come with a fee. A good example of that would be .Mac the $100 per services that many people believe are inferior to Gmail and other free services.

We even have people who want to sell their homes themselves. They can use Zillow and Trulia for sites like "For Sale by Owner."

All this is probably a healthy trend unless it get out of hand. I am a Realtor® which I consider to be one of the transitional professions. We work as independent contractors.

We get paid on what we sell. If we don't sell anything, we don't get paid. Actually it is worse than that since we have to pay fees every month to work. From those fees you might get a desk and some access to office equipment and some advertising support. You also end up sharing your commission with your company. In good times in works fairly well. These days it is a challenge.

Still I don't see the current real estate sales system changing massively I do see consumers making similar changes to what they did in the early days of computers. That could herald some real estate changes.

I doubt the changes will be the same as in the computer industry, but there are going to be some changes.

In the early days of computers, few people understood them so a local computer store was a source of not only computers but also knowledge. People came to the stores to get an education so that they could be informed consumers.

Stores paid sales people to answer questions and hopefully sell computers. As computers began to be available online and through mail order, people would come and learn all they could from a computer salesman in a store and then go order online.

This is one of the reasons that there are almost no computer salesmen left.

As a real estate agent, your knowledge of your local area is your greatest resource. When you have people who want to talk about an area, and the same people are unwilling to commit to work with you, you are likely be set up for hard fall.

People do the same thing with cars. They learn about them online, then visit the actual dealership to see the product and then order the product from an Internet dealer.

While a manufacturer might be providing much of the information about an automobile or a computer, the information on houses that are listed in MLS systems is there as a direct result of the effort of agents who list the house and are paid when the house is sold.

However, potential home buyers have figured out how to work the system. Buyer's agents only get paid when a client signs up with them and then buys a house.

Some clever real estate consumers are gaming the system and using buyer's agent as a free source of information about the area and about homes that are for sale.

If you drive around a potential client without getting a commitment from them, then you are likely providing information for free with little hope of getting paid.

People are getting their feet wet in an area by wading the shallows with the aid of buyers' agents.

I recently heard of a buyer's agent who would drive people around unless sign an agreement with him. On top of that he charges than a $300 fee.

There is no free lunch for most of us. Wasting the time of a professional without the intention of working with that professional isn't very fair.

Not ripple in sight

There are days when you feel extraordinarily privileged to be on the water.

We had one of those days last week when we came back from Bogue Inlet. Bogue Inlet is the water between the green arrow and Bear Island on the Google map.

Since it changes all the time, it doesn't look much like the Google map, but you get the general idea.

Bogue Inlet is where a lot of currents meet, and almost all of the time there are lots of waves. There are also lots of fish. The general area is a great place to fish, but navigation can be challenging.

There are days when it is just nice to skim across ripple free water at top speed. The White Oak River in the picture in the post offered us a very smooth ride and a lot of fun.

It was nearly pure fun since there no obstacles in our path because we know that water very well. The passengers, especially my wife, always enjoy a smooth ride.

The one problem is that avoiding the waves often means I am avoiding the best places to fish.

So there is a balance between finding water you can enjoy which supports fish you can catch.

Finding good fishing water with no waves is a little like finding markets where you can be successful with customers who readily buy your products. You can also look at smooth water as taking the easy way and keeping as many people as possible happy.

As is often the case in life, the areas with the most challenges are the places you find the biggest rewards. The bigger the fish, the greater the challenge.

Yet not everyone has to catch big fish. Many of us are happy with what we catch in the much calmer sounds. A lot depends on your stage in life. When you are trying to rise to the top, the risky waters with high rewards are appealing. Later in life, smooth sailing looks pretty good.

You may have fought as many battles as you can take. Perhaps the risky water belongs to others who still have a thirst for the challenges.

As you work the waters of business, sometimes it is good policy to try not to create a ripple because you want to be unnoticed. You just want to do your job without causing any problems. You might want to slide through a particularly touchy area without upsetting anyone.

You need to understand what waters work for you at different stages of your life and how best to navigate them.

The older you get, the more likely you are going to see situations which offer you a choice.

You can make some well-needed waves and still not change a situation. You can ride the waves and sometimes get to where you want or you can slide through a situation without a ripple.

I don't think there are any perfect rules. Now days as someone approaching sixty, I try to achieve as much overall good as possible, and if it can be done, to make sure whatever I do doesn't harm anyone intentionally.

I had a colleague the other day who made a mistake which resulted in some extra work for me.

There were some choices open to me, I could just tell our boss who would then correct my colleague. I could send an email note to my colleague and cc: our boss. Or I could do what I did which was do the extra work and just send a note to my colleague and suggest the problem get fixed before someone else notices.

Everyone who works in an office faces these choices. While there are times to make waves and stand up for what you believe, there are other times making as few ripples as possible is a good decision.

It is nice to out there working in the waves where all the opportunities live, but it can turn out to be a place where a lot of good people get hurt especially in very competitive businesses.

Unfortunately a lot of our corporations believe that internal conflict makes for better employees.

I think most companies are better served with a cooperative and supportive work environment. I have seen both types and the human cost of the dog eat dog inside the corporation is very high. It takes away people's humanity. A lot of people trade money for friends pretty quickly in today's corporate world.

In the end it is better for the company and the customer to have team members working together towards a common goal.

The fishing in that environment ends up being pretty good.

The power of being present

Sometimes you have done something so many times, that it is automatic.

In fact I often do things and then try to remember whether or not that I have actually done them. The more times you have done something, the easier it is to fall in this trap.

I think that is one of the advantages of pushing yourself to try new things. You get out of the rut and have to pay attention to what you are doing.

I actually like being challenged. I like to try new things, but life is not all new stuff.

Probably the most boring thing in life is sitting through a lecture on something that you already know and which is being read from a teacher's book.

I absolutely hate being in a situation like that. My brain immediately starts shutting down and sending signals that I need to grab a few winks.

Because I came close to perfecting the ability to sleep sitting up with my eyes open while in military school, I have to really try not to slip back into my evil ways.

It seems so wasteful to listen to useless material we have already learned. I have plenty of things that need to be done and sitting in classroom that is historically boring isn't the way to make things happen.,

Still I try to focus on the present. Just like when I am having a conversation with one of our kids, I make every effort to hear them out and give them my full attention.

I have found being present opens up many other opportunities for communication. Living in the moment with your brain in gear is one of the way to keep that brain healthy.

A few days ago I managed to tune out for a few minutes while sitting near the beach. It actually felt like I was clearing cobwebs from the brain.

The whole experience was magical. It made me really appreciate living so close to the beach.

I took some pictures before we slipped into meditation. I also posted some pictures of the adventure.

Understanding the value of being open

We were at Tryon Palace this past weekend when I snapped this photo of a gate. It reminded me that gates were more than just decorative in the past. In colonial times, gates were a serious affair.

Actually with the resurgence of gated communities, I guess we can say that lots of folks believe that gates will protect them. There are some interesting philosophical points on open and closed gates.

While many people believe that closed software or perhaps more properly proprietary software is at less risk to being hacked, the evidence is exactly the opposite. A recent contest showed that Linux or "Open Source" software was most resistant to hacking.

So do closed gates make us safer? I seriously doubt it. I doubt that building walls or gates is a long term security solution. I actually believe that a close knit cooperative community is the best security that there is. Certainly we have evidence that it works in software. It just might work in human society also.

The gated theory can also be applied in management. There are managers who are afraid of their employees and keep their doors closed. Then there are managers who have a true open door policy where employees are always welcome. No only are they welcome but they are valued partners in whatever task that needs doing.

One man inside a walled palace is not nearly as safe as a man walking among many friends who will do whatever is necessary to help each other.

Sometimes it is better to open the gates and figure out how to work together for the common good than it is build a palace just for the pleasure of one man.

Positive thoughts can snowball

The other night I was walking into a grocery store, a young fellow asked me for directions to a local restaurant. I managed to come up with some intelligible ones for him.

He was really happy to get the info. It occurred to be that in this world of GPS, text messages, and omnipresent cellphones that asking someone for directions is a little unusual.

I found it nice to have human contact on a mission where I could easily have had little or no human interaction.

I was feeling good as I walked into the grocery store and someone commented on how nice it was to see a LL Bean sweat shirt as far south as Roanoke, Va. It was a young guy stocking the shelves. We had a little conversation over how much Freeport, Maine had changed since my first visit in 1967 when LL Beans still had a potbellied stove in the tiny store.

Once again, a conversation where I had not counted on one keep the good feelings going.

As I got up to the automated checkout, it occurred to me that I had forgotten my grocery identity card. I was going to skip the discount, but the young girl watching over the checkout managed to force feed my telephone number into the computers to save me the forty cents that I was due as a loyal Kroger shopper.

She could easily have been preoccupied with a cell phone call, but she took the time to do her job pleasantly which left me feeling really positive about what was a routine shopping trip.

I had actually ended up talking to three members of the millennium generation (or pretty close to it) without having any text messaging involved. No one had taken a cell phone video and posted it online. There had been no emails. We had talked.

I had ended up with a totally different perspective than I would have if each of the people had been on their cellphones, playing a game, or too busy listening to an iPod to make contact.

Isn't it amazing what human contact can do for us. It can snowball and renew our faith in the next generation.

When I saw this mornings' Dilbert cartoon, my experiences the night before made me smile. Just maybe this generation will turn out alright after all.

That experience was a great prelude to a nice trip from Virginia through North Carolina. Even better than the trip was finding tomato blooms when we got home. That might give me a shot at winning the great tomato race. I have to let those positive feelings roll.

Staying True to Yourself

Sometimes you do not want to cause any waves. Occasionally the situation demands that you have to jump out of the water.

By the time you get close to sixty years old, some pretty strong ideas have become your close companions. They turn out to be great friends especially in tough times.

In those few decades you have also likely decided which battles are worth fighting and which are better ignored.

In my business career of nearly forty years, I have not seen many meetings that mattered much in the long run. The organizations where I have seen real success really do not need meetings to get their job done. They sense what needs doing, and it gets handled.

In these cases, the leaders of the teams spend most of their time running interference so that the team members can focus on their important tasks.

However, meetings happen, and there is not much you can do about them since so many organizations believe that you measure progress by meetings or by Powerpoint presentations.

It was always my theory in my fortune 500 career that the longer you could go without a meeting, the more likely things were working well. On the flip side, when times get tough companies demand more meetings to figure out what is wrong. Most of the people at the customer level already know the problems, unfortunately they do not have the power to fix them.

Sometimes organizational structures do not even allow executives to see these real problems.

In spite of my distaste for meetings, trying to prevent them is not worth the fight. It is much easier to go to them, try to learn something, and hope they do not last very long.

While I might not ripple the water over a meeting, I will jump out of the water over being instructed how to handle my clients.

I have never cared what sales promotion is in place or what bonuses are being paid, I am going to do what is best for my client or customer. That is the way it is supposed to be. If I have to make some waves over treating my clients right, I will. That is a fight worth the effort.

This is not a new philosophy, it is just the way I operate.

One of my simple rules is to never ask anyone to do something that I will not attempt to do myself. If manure needs shoveling, hand me one of the shovels.

The second rule is to treat everyone like you would want to be treated.

My third rule is to respect the work of every individual no matter what they do.

The final rule is to ask more of myself than I ask of anyone else.

Of course in order for these things to be effective, you have to deliver on them.

It is important to say what you are going to do and then do exactly what you said.

That's how I stay true to myself.