The Limits of Who You Are

I’ll never forget the days that I served under ‘Mate’ in the Hurricane season of 2004, one of the worst hurricane seasons recorded in history.  I volunteered for the assignment, because I knew it was dangerous and would help my career.  Mate was the best there was out there at running a ‘box.’  By box I mean distribution center.  He’d help run LaGuardia for Eastern Airlines and he just knew his stuff.  He also ran Home Depot’s flagship distribution center in SlowVannah, Ga when times were really tough.  Once they tried to fire him, for what reason I don’t know, but they couldn’t because hundreds of calls flooded the Chief Human Resources Officer.  People loved him because he built great loyalty in his relationships.  To spend even a few months working for him would be like gold in my career.

Hurricane season was tough; there was lots of ‘Yes Sirs’ and doing what ever you needed to make the merchants happy.  I noticed Mate was a little off his game.  It must have been the erratic disturbances of schedule caused by Charlie, Frances, Jean and Ivan.  One day he came in as happy as a blue bird and he’d put the pieces back to getter again.  He had recaptured his routine.  He started swimming at the YMCA and reading the Wall Street Journal.  He proceeded to do this almost everyday.  I know because I asked him.

This routine is important and it requires the use of a very special word.  A word that is only heralded by the most successful of leaders, a word that people make movies about, a word that children literally break up in tears over.  Yes, you guessed it…the word is No.  Which reminds me of another story.  A time when he wouldn’t let me talk for about a week.  He literally came in my office and wrote the word ‘listen’ on my whiteboard.  But that’s another story for another post.

In the frog making business there is a certain rhythm to things.  There are things we do to really get the day hopping so to speak because it generates a power we like to call FrogShway.  Many of these things are built around a word that is part of our essence.  That word is routine.  Each day we start at 10 AM and work hard till lunch time at 2 PM to 230 PM.  We take lunch every day at the same approximate time.  It’s a good lunch, we chat and come back and hit it hard and usually there’s some loud rock and roll.  We’ve had some disruptions in the recent week that have caused us to take what some people would call ‘an early lunch,’ we are learning that this is a path to FrogShwah because it takes us off course.  We don’t get much done in the front part of the day and the last part of the day we are totally sagging.

So, we at the FrogShway encourage you to find your routine and live by it, but make sure you put the right things into each day, we’re not endorsing work-a-holism blind-sighted discipline.  We at the FrogShway endorse self-discipline with a purpose and will you a day of right on ness.