'Cause I gotta have faith
I gotta faith
Because I gotta to have faith faith
I gotta to have faith, faith, faith
-George Michael

As we come to the end of the year, we have much to be thankful for at Gibson: an amazing team, great clients, and we get to do it all in some truly wonderful communities. I feel very blessed and grateful to be a part of our employee-owned organization.

I also feel a renewed sense of hope and anticipation for all that lies ahead in the coming year. Yet, with this optimism and excitement comes some typical (for me) angst as planning sessions kick off, initiatives are prioritized, and rocks are set. Can we measure up to past success? What threats might our clients face in their businesses? Will the saber rattling in Washington seriously destabilize our economy?

About seven years ago we were putting the finishing touches on a new vision for Gibson. Like everyone else, we were emerging from the fog of the Great Recession. Even before the economic downturn we had misfired on a major multi-year plan. To say we were a little gun-shy about verbalizing some new grandiose plan would be an understatement.

Yet aiming for something that seemed out of reach to most of us was exactly what we needed. It pushed us to be better, to be more. We had a financial target in mind that would have us more than doubling in size over the next decade. From a math standpoint, while not a given, it was certainly achievable. We needed to average about 7 to 8% net growth per year. But after years of economic fear, this goal caused much angst among our management team. We wondered if we could really afford to fail again in the eyes of our employees. To our fragile team, to double in size seemed unthinkable.

In August of 2009, I was named President of Gibson. The fourth one in our entire history. Most of you remember what it was like in our country back in 2009-10. "The Great Recession" was crippling our economy. Companies were laying off large chunks of their workforce or closing their doors entirely.

Our lunch was great. It was like the twenty years had never passed. We talked about our wives (only good things of course), our families, and certainly business. I laughed hard more than once as he shared anecdotal parenting stories from the past two decades. His sons, teenagers when I began working for him right out of college, were now grown men with wives of their own.

About a year into my tenure at Gibson, I was named to the Leadership Team and responsible for our revenue and growth in a “Chief Growth Officer” role. Not only was I new to Gibson, I previously had no technical knowledge or career experience in two of our three business units. Before my first major meeting with our group, I was already hearing the whispers about this newly created role and my (lack of) qualifications to be in it.

What scares you? Is it clowns like the 2017 movie adaption of Stephen King’s It? Maybe it’s public speaking or blood and needles? If you relate to any of these, you’re not alone. This Washington Post article has all of them in their top 12 list of fears.

For me, it’s acrophobia, a fear of heights. I’m not sure where it came from. Perhaps it was my summers in high school painting the overhangs of old houses on a flimsy extension ladder. In any event, I prefer to avoid heights, namely situations that leave me up high and exposed. 

On a recent trip with my 14-year-old son William, I came face-to-face with my old nemesis, acrophobia. Not that I planned to.

There is a “great restructuring” taking place right now in America, with one study by Oxford University suggesting that automation and artificial intelligence could threaten 50% of white collar jobs. And that jives with a Gallup survey where 58% of respondents see technology as the biggest threat to US jobs over the next decade.

Business management guru Tom Peters believes it doesn’t have to be this way. In his capstone book The Excellence Dividend, Peters advocates for organizations to vigorously focus on putting their people first. This means a total obsession by leaders to develop and deploy the “soft skills” in their workforce that, in turn, can leverage the new technologies to create a truly unique, and distinctly human, client experience.

“There is no education like adversity.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Things have come easier for one of my sons over much of his life. If you’re a parent with multiple children, I’m sure you can relate. I’d say he’s at least a "B+" at most anything he tries and when he works at, he gets himself into the "A" zone. That's one of the things I respect about him. In spite of a natural ease he often seems to have, he also applies himself diligently, rarely giving less than a 100% effort.

Things didn’t go his way at school recently. He unexpectedly lost a close election for President of his class. This is a role he’s held for three years. And the resulting musical chairs for the general student council left him without a seat. While I would never wish it upon him, and was rooting for him all the way, I know this loss will carry with it a much greater return than another victory would have.

What we learn about ourselves when the chips are down far outweighs anything we get while riding high. And those lessons learned or missed follow us into adulthood where grit, resilience, and perseverance seem to be in short supply these days.

Like the Peanuts cartoon depicts, organizations often have someone operating a complaint department. Most visitors are well-intentioned in their session with the company “therapist.” They’re seeking coaching or advice on a challenging issue and plan to act upon it. Unfortunately, what they often get back is the equivalent of Lucy’s “Eat a jelly-bread sandwich” guidance to Charlie Brown.

Alternatively, they may just be looking to release some pent-up frustration. They’re looking for “a sympathetic ear, and the promise of keeping things ‘between us.’ In many organizations, these therapists seem to serve a valuable purpose – or at least do no real harm,” writes author, speaker, and business leader Mike Paton.

But is that really the case? Does this habit of “complaint departments” really cause no harm?

It was from Jim Collins’ masterpiece Good To Great that I learned Admiral James Stockdale was something other than Ross Perot’s running mate in the 1992 presidential election. Long before he was a target of Saturday Night Live’s irreverent humor, Stockdale was the highest ranking naval officer to be held as a POW in Vietnam.

After Stockdale's A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965, he shared space at the “Hanoi Hilton” with, among others, John McCain. He was brutally beaten, starved, and denied medical care, never knowing if he would survive or see his family again, until his release in 1973.

Stockdale and his wife Sybil shared their story by writing alternating chapters in the book In Love and War. Collins, in preparing to meet Admiral Stockdale, read his book, describing it as bleak and depressing, even though he knew that Stockdale got out and reunited with his family. When Collins asked Stockdale what it felt like living the story and not knowing how it ended, he replied: