Front porch storm watching

Maybe it is a southern thing, but I have always enjoyed watching thunderstorms from the porches of our homes.

We have had a few homes without porches, but those have been in the minority. Perhaps my favorite storm watching porch before we moved to the coast was the one in Mt. Airy, NC where I spent my teenage years.

Our side porch there was protected but had a great view of the building storms that skirted the Blue Ridge Mountains. That former home is now a bed breakfast, Sobotta Manor, so you can book a stay and hope for a nice southern thunderstorm for some entertainment.

Thunderstorms sometimes break the heat in the south or at least provide some temporary relief. Sometimes they are damaging, but often they just bring welcome precipitation and some noise like they did today here on the Carolina coast.

Watching the power of thunderstorm is a humbling experience. I actually like North Carolina and Virginia thunderstorms much better than the ones we had in Canada. The Canadian ones were ill defined. They seemed to be all over the place. You could never really tell their direction.

Make no mistake, you can tell if a southern thunderstorm is headed for you. Most of them leave no doubt. Tonight's edition went south of us. We got to watch the fireworks without getting in the line of fire.

Still the strong breezes and lightning brought back many childhood memories of listening to the rumble of thunder in Mount Airy or Lewisville, NC. Storms in Roanoke, VA were a little different. Once they got in the mountain valley that is Roanoke, they could go in circles. Many times we saw the same storm more than once.

In the summer, thunderstorms are a regular occurrence here near the water. When we are fishing we try to have our boats back at the dock by three PM which is when the storms often fire up. With the flat territory, you can see them for miles.

I know the storms are to be respected. I had a cousin killed by lightning, but I like to think that if I am careful, the front porch makes a pretty good spot to watch a storm unless we are in the middle of it.

Not a normal dinner spot for us

We are actually more comfortable out on the beach than we are going out to dinner these days.

Still when someone gives you a gift certificate to a good restaurant, you do not want to waste it. With that in mind we headed off to Red Lobster in Roanoke, Va. recently.

We managed to get there during their lobster festival. With my love of lobster, I ended up ordering a dish with a couple of kinds of shrimp, a lobster tail, and a few crab legs.

After a Caesar salad and some of their yummy rolls, I was feeling pretty good. Dinner arrived quickly since the restaurant was not as packed as has often been the case before the economic recession.

It was hard not to compare our dinner since we had just fixed some shrimp and grits at home down on the NC Coast. That is something we do fairly often so we are pretty familiar with seafood. To say I was a little surprised at the tiny size of the shrimp on my plate is an understatement.

Shrimp of the size that I was served in garlic butter would never even make it to bait shrimp on the Crystal Coast. In fact a couple of our Crystal Coast shrimp would equal the amount of meat in the lobster tail on our plates.

Now I had plenty to eat, but I am not certain how much money Red Lobster is saving in the long run by purchasing juvenile shrimp and lobsters. The crab legs were also tiny. Serve fewer but bigger shrimp. I would rather have three shrimp that I can cut into bites than six which are so tiny that you hardly know you have eaten them. I have to believe that normal size shrimp is a better use of marine resources. Of course here I am thinking that these shrimp were caught in the sea. They were probably farm shrimp.

However, the lobsters had to be wild caught, and my guess is that they came from Canada where I have heard the size limit is smaller than Maine. I know there is a certain size lobster which the lobster men in Maine claim should be harvested. Anything smaller or bigger hurts the lobster stocks which I want to make sure survive. You can read about their efforts at lobster sustainability.

We had some great lobsters this fall at our area church suppers, and I know they came from Maine because I saw the truck. The lobsters were on the order of 1.5 lbs each. I cannot believe that the lobster tails that we ate at Red Lobster recently came off of a lobster anywhere close to even one pound in weight.

I think that perhaps I will go back to making my own seafood dinners. Now I just need someone to donate some right-sized lobsters.

Riding the right wave to success

Watching ocean waves is a favorite activity of mine. Getting a picture of just the right color wave is a challenge that I love.

Getting the right picture to post is far more important to me than staying on top of the latest trends or gossip in the entertainment industry.

Our society is moving so fast that it is hard to keep up on even things that interest me. I finally got to the point that I realized that there are lots of things which I can live without understanding. I am not embarrassed that I could care less what Brittany Spears is doing today or that Madonna is not in the news.

I want to focus on what I know and where I can be successful while enjoying what I do. That removes a lot of fluff from my life.

I know that there are lots of television shows which can be downloaded, but I will remain a bystander since I have a hard time finding ones worth watching much less downloading.

There are the extreme sports fans who like jumping off a mountainside and buzzing roadways in the Alps. That is fine with me, just do not expect me to chip in on the medical bills. I really do not care how hard it is drive a truck in Alaska or work in a kitchen with a maniac.

I am also not interested in endless complaining about how poorly the new administration in the United States is doing. They inherited the mess, it will take a while to fix. No one is smart enough to be able to tell if this stuff is going to work yet. That is the end of the brain discussion for me except that rooting for a President to fail is about as low as it gets.

One of the best lessons that I ever learned was to spend more time listening and learning than telling others how to do their jobs. If the job is never going to be yours, you might as well see how well your advice works in your own life.

I can still remember the time when during one of Apple's many reorganizations, I ended up being moved from years of managing a team calling on higher education institutions and selling directly to calling on businesses and selling through resellers.

It was not a move I wanted. I had two choices, become a whiner or figure out how to do the job to the best of my ability.

I knew how to manage people, and I knew how to be a good reseller since I had been one twelve years earlier before I came to Apple.

After the move, I spent a lot of time out in the field with the existing reps, listening to them and their resellers. Mostly I found an incredible amount of arrogance among the reps. Some of the system engineers were even worse. One even gave a new sales rep bad directions to an account so he would look incompetent when taking me there.

Being successful was an option that most of them felt required too much hard work. Complaining about everything was easier. In a year's time the only person out of nearly twenty that I had inherited was my area associate. I had found new people who were willing to work, to listen, to learn, and to be successful.

We put together a series of mini-MacWorld seminar events and delivered them in nineteen cities across the Southeast. We partnered with resellers instead of complaining about them. The resellers loved what we did. The customers were beyond enthusiastic.

We brought value to the equation, and in spite of what the former experts said, we ended up being successful.

We were one of the top regions in the country the next year. Sometimes success just takes fresh faces with new ideas and the willingness to work hard. It did not happen over night, and a lot armchair experts told us we would fail.

We believed in what we were doing and kept going even when the hours were long, and there were lots of people pulling for us to fail.

I think I will keep doing what I know works even now when the times are tough.

You can ride the right wave to success

Reinventing yourself

As I look back to the summer of 2004 when I left Apple Computer, I have no doubt that I have learned more in the four years since Apple than I did in the nearly twenty years there.

While I learned a tremendous amount as I worked at Apple, the nature of the company perhaps limits your growth in ways that are hard to see until you leave.

Perhaps the biggest challenge at Apple is the overwhelming pressure for the company to present an image which has no blemishes.

I have learned more from my mistakes since I left Apple than I did from my successes at Apple.

You certainly did not want many mistakes at Apple because that was the quickest way out of the company.

Measured in awards and sales results, my last years at Apple were my most successful.

Other teams flocked to learn what we had done in order to be held up as an example. When you are asked to present to other groups on how to be successful, it might be a warning that you have become a little too successful for your own good.

Success at Apple has to have a sponsor. You can be very successful at Apple and labor in anonymity. However, if your success helps move an agenda forward, you can easily be held up for others to admire. If your success looks like it might overshadow your sponsor, you might see it evaporate.

Success can be turned into a failure with just the right negative words whispered into the appropriate vice president's ear.

In my last four years at Apple, I led a sales team that more than tripled Apple's federal business.

Yet when it was decided that an inside sales team needed to look better than my team, our success got repositioned as failure.

All corporations have similar messes when one executive wants to leap ahead of another. Maybe at Apple it is a little worse, but that is pretty hard to measure. The point is that what you learn from those situations does not help you grow a lot in your skills.

If success at Apple comes not from what and how you have accomplished something, but from what others want to showcase in order to advance their agendas, then it is hard to pull many valuable lessons from the experience.

Since leaving Apple and being on my own for the last couple of years, I have found that the only way to learn whether something works is to try it. If it fails, you try to evaluate why and try something else. You can make a lot of progress that way.

You quickly realize that perfect does not exist in the real world. You can get close, but you soon come to realize that being a lot better than the competition is much more achievable when being realistic and flexible than when agonizing over the perfect words to include in a mailing.

I once watched Apple spend over a year trying to decide what they wanted to say in a security document describing an operating system which had already been released. In effect Apple's programmers managed to get an operating system out the door before Apple's marketing could figure out the perfect words to describe it.

The interesting thing about security and OS X is that Apple missed a huge opportunity to market to many customers who were very troubled about computer security. Apple did not miss the opportunity because they did not have a good product, they missed it because they were afraid to talk about it.

While there is financial security in a place like Apple if you are in favor with the right folks or if you have found away to hide, you will never learn the skills to actually make intelligent decisions.

Significant decision making ability at Apple is restricted to the very few.

If you want to be nimble and ready for this new economy, Apple is not the place to prepare. Try creating your own business, you will learn a lot more.

Having to reinvent myself every six months is an amazing experience, but it gives you a lot of confidence in your own abilities. It is much better than figuring how to cover your rear or whom you have to sacrifice in order to save your own skin.

I would rather have the successes and failures that have taught me much since leaving Apple than the always suspect favor of an Apple vp.

Inauguration Day- A new road?

NBC News is reporting that 75% of the American public think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

That puts anyone looking for change in the majority. I know government is not the answer to everything.

However, government needs to be part of the solution, just as much as corporate American needs to revamp itself.

It will take leadership in government and a change in corporate leadership techniques to restore success to America. I know more about corporations than government so here I will focus on corporate behavior.

Last spring Wired had an article, "Breaking the Rules: Apple Succeeds By Defying 5 Core Valley Principles." One of the points in the article was the following.

5. CODDLE YOUR EMPLOYEES
Valley Rule
Since the best ideas bubble up from within the ranks, encourage autonomy by allowing workers free time to focus on their personal projects. Also, shower them with perks like free food and massages to make them feel special.

Apple Rule
Motivate through fear. Don't be afraid to scream. Threaten to fire them. Withhold praise until it's truly deserved. Go ahead and bring them to tears. As long as you can inspire them with your sense of mission, they'll consider this the best job they've ever had.

At the time, it appeared that Apple and Steve Jobs could do no wrong. Ten months and Steve's health problem have changed the equation.

Steve has built a company that has with his help turned out some fantastic products. My guess is that Steve has not created a management style which will benefit other companies or America or aid Apple in building a long term proposition.

Nearly twenty years at Apple taught me that fear of retaliation is not the best way to get the most out of your employees. Fear of failure certainly is not the best way to build a strong leadership culture in a corporation.

I continue to believe that the best management technique is to build strong interdependent teams where individuals are committed to supporting each other and to mutual success. Apple being enthralled by slash and burn management techniques where employees are often afraid to convey anything but good new has a weak leadership culture as a result.

I saw Apple corporate employees rush to cancel events where results would be anything less than perfect. I saw a brochure about security in a new operating system take longer to write than the operating system because people were so afraid of making mistake. I saw a simple customer request ignored by a handful of vice presidents because everyone was afraid of making the wrong decision.

What we need today is a culture in both government and private corporations which emphasizes accountability but also recognizes that you rarely get something right without making some mistakes along the way.

If you are honestly focused on trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, mistakes should be written off as long as progress is made towards a solution.

No business and certainly few government officials are immune to the politics of personality. New leaders try to make their marks, and when the personality becomes more important than the solution, more problems are created than solved.

Now that Steve Jobs is gone, Apple will continue with the products it has in the pipeline. Some will undoubtedly be successful. However with an attitude that typically ignores customer input and focuses on delivering margin to the company at the expense of value to the customer, I think the long term outlook for Apple is negative.

Articles such as the recent WSJ one, "I Once Was Chic, but Now I'm Cheap," indicate that others are questioning the value proposition of Apple. I have long suggested that Apple's market share will peak at 10%. The culture of Apple is to create the easy hit and move on to the next one, often with little effort beyond exacting the highest price from the most people in the shortest time.

I cannot hold Microsoft's Vista up as an example of success, but I can credit Microsoft for a strong effort to fix the product and deliver a new one that is better. Vista is a far better product today that what it was sixteen months ago when I first purchased it.

In the meantime, hardware manufacturers have delivered vastly less expensive products which help the Vista operating system look better.

Certainly Apple's Leopard came out of the gate as a far better product than Vista and has shown some improvement. However when I look at Apple hardware line, I am disappointed.

The MacBook went up in price, the MacMini is still spec starved, and we are still waiting for a new iMac and a product between the iMac and Apple's expensive towers,

In the end, I want better, lower cost products not just hit products from Apple's culture of fear.

Winter beach days

Most people associate the beach with hot summer days and vacations. However, beaches do not disappear when children go back to school.

They actually stay in business all year here along the Crystal Coast. I can think of a handful of really cold days over the last few years when I stopped by the beach to find it completely deserted.

However, those days are definitely the exception rather than the rule. Almost every visit to the beach I find someone walking along the water. In January there are likely wearing jeans and tennis shoes instead a bathing suit, but people are still on the beach regularly in the winter.

I love sunny skies so I typically do not go to the beach when it is very cloudy like it was today, but I know from experience that a day in January when the temperature topped out at sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit is likely to have drawn a few beach visitors.

It will not be long before the North Carolina sun starts to really provide some heat which will make walking the beach a true winter pleasure. I am counting down the days before I will be able to get in the water once again.

Last year my first dip was June 3. This year I am hoping that I can get wet in May, but I have no desire to jump into cold water so I will wait until the water has reached a civilized temperature.

I recently posted a few late December and early January beach photos.

Some people need some salt water scenes to get through a snowy winter. I am happy to help.

Winter Sunsets

Viewing a spectacular sunset is truly one of the great pleasures of life. This picture was taken in one of our favorite spots for sunset photos during early winter.

My wife and I might be called sunset seekers because we are usually lurking somewhere near the water when there is a chance for a great sunset.

We are usually not alone, people tend to congregate in the best spots to enjoy that last flash of warmth and light before the sun goes down. Maybe we are hard wired that way from hundreds of thousands of years living by the light of a campfire.

I cannot pin down why I want to watch the sun go down. It is one of the most spectacular light shows available. Here on the coast often the colors in the sky after the sunset are even better than the ones at sunset.

There is the idea that the sunset marks the point in the day when most of what I have to do is personal as opposed to business related. However, having reached the special status in life of semi-retired or un-retired, I doubt that is the case.

My guess is that it is nothing more complicated than the pure, often warm light, and beautiful colors that attract us. That with the day's activities winding down and the opportunity to catch our breath is all that we need to flock to those places where the sunset is the attraction.

There is a human need to enjoy and appreciate beauty. That natural beauty enriches our lives is a given.

Sunsets are the most cost effective way that I know to personally enjoy and share that beauty.