Category: Idea Sharing Adventure Blog Posts
“If an apology is followed by an excuse or a reason, it means one is going to commit the same mistake again they just apologized for.” —Amit Kalantri The morning light summons silence and awe as I enter Wind Cave National Park. As I drive, I marvel at the natural beauty that surrounds me. In…
READ ARTICLEThis blog post is a reprint from an article Kevin recently wrote for The Maine Monitor, published October 24, 2021 ______ There’s a lot to learn from babies, one step at a time The CEO of Hancock Lumber notes that infants learn to walk with minimal training or coaching. Leaders can structure their organizations with…
READ ARTICLE“All this time I was finding myself and I didn’t know I was lost.” —Avicii, “Wake Me Up” How do you find and stay on your path? This is the question often pondered by self-actualizers for which I have acquired five personal tenets: You finding your path may have very little in common with me…
READ ARTICLE“Everyone is beautiful.” — Ariana Grande Jenny Edwards cleans and cares for the Hancock Lumber home office in Casco at night, after finishing her day job. I work an odd collection of hours, which brings me into the office at night once or twice a week. This is how Jenny and I met and then…
READ ARTICLE“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” —Buddha I was driving through Rapid City, South Dakota, when I saw him. Cresting the rolling hill in front of me appeared an all-white Ford pickup truck with a giant cross towering over the cab. Streamers…
READ ARTICLE“Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that has been given to you from what we call the Muses—or, in biblical language, ‘God.’ This is not fancy, it is fact. Since…
READ ARTICLE“Everything you can imagine is real.” —Pablo Picasso We were driving through rural, agricultural Florida just north of Lake Okeechobee when I saw it. “What is that?” I said, removing my sunglasses for a second look. Several vehicles ahead, on a four-way section of downtown road, was an old yellow school bus with the…
READ ARTICLE“The most dangerous moment comes with victory.” —Napoleon Bonaparte Thursday, April 13, 1978 I’m twelve years old, in my bed on a school night. The only light in the room is coming from the illuminated station finder on my alarm clock radio. It’s Ned Martin’s last year calling the Red Sox, play by play, and…
READ ARTICLE“Liberty means responsibility. That’s why most men dread it.” —George Bernard Shaw It was six a.m. when I left Route 44 and passed through the veritable ghost town of Scenic, South Dakota, onto Bombing Range Road. I was on my way to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to have breakfast with my friend Rosie…
READ ARTICLE“Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it.” —Buddha Earlier this year I shared the following short message with everyone at Hancock Lumber: Hello! I was doing some work with another company in another industry yesterday. The subject of their “mission statement” was on the agenda….
READ ARTICLE“The problem with homelessness is not houselessness.” —Matt Haig Eugene, Oregon, is a city like no other. Nestled on the western edge of the Cascade Mountains, it’s surrounded by a valley of agricultural bounty. Sheep graze at the edge of the airport runway. The rivers flow and the flowers grow across a Disneyesque kingdom-like…
READ ARTICLE“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” —Soren Kierkegaard Catherine, speaking only in Lakota, conversed with the buffalo scattered across the high grasslands of what is today Wind Cave National Park in present-day South Dakota. The wind blew as it always does…
READ ARTICLE“All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in the human DNA.” —Reid Hoffman Entrepreneur is one of the least-understood words in business, and possibly the entire English language. We tend to equate it with an elite and short list of icons. Bill Gates, Elon…
READ ARTICLE“Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.” —Angela Ahrendts The first mission of a modern company should be to advance and enhance the lives of the people who work there. All other corporate value creation is derived from this central priority. Companies that do…
READ ARTICLE“I am a wild, wandering nomad, I belong everywhere and nowhere all at the same time, and in that gap between worlds, I am free.” —Ritta Klint I’m fascinated by the nomadic past of the Sioux tribes on the northern plains. Before the reservation era, the Sioux moved freely across a vast territory stretching from…
READ ARTICLE“A lion sleeps in the heart of every man.” —Old Turkish Proverb At the corner of a serene collection of shops and restaurants in the Park Shore neighborhood of Naples, Florida, stand two twenty-four-foot curved stainless-steel columns. At first glance this giant piece of minimalist art reveals little specific meaning. But upon closer inspection one…
READ ARTICLE“The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.” —Carl Jung Speaking mostly in Lakota, Medicine Man begins to talk, then chant, then pray, then sing. Others, circled in darkness, echo in response. The heat within the hut quickly intensifies and the sweat comes…
READ ARTICLE“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom.” —Mahatma Gandhi The potential blessing of this essay series is that I am writing from experience. The potential problem with this essay series is that I am writing from experience. * * * When I decided to write this yearlong series about shared…
READ ARTICLE“Strange what being slowed down could do to a person.” —Nicholas Sparks Even though the gymnasium was filled with whistles, shouting, and squeaking sneakers, I can still hear the coach’s wisdom nearly forty years later. I was at SWISH basketball camp at the University of Southern Maine, a junior in high school preparing for…
READ ARTICLE“Do not wait for the green light. You are the green light.” —Dr. Jacinta Mpalyenkana Shortly after participating in the Leadership Learning Exchange for Equity sponsored by the Maine Community Foundation, I received a poignant question from one of my favorite global citizens within our company: What are we doing to bring more underrepresented groups…
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