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Home > Michelle's Blog
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The postings of our President: |
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July 10, 2008:
The Amazing PeopleWhat happened next is amazing! I told the story, the one written about my friend Jerry Jenkins and his
flooding, a few weeks ago to my customers at our once a year, national conference. It was during my opening presentation and the audience was approximately 200 people from 20 states ready to listen to Michelle talk for an hour. It’s always a mystery as to what I’ll talk about, and this story became the backbone of my presentation on “Mastering Innovation Using Teamwork for Business Success”. I thought this story showed both…
So, besides this story, the other part of my presentation was an activity I had the audience perform. While I was talking, my employees were handing out $5 bills to each person in the audience, plus a stack of 10 small sticky notes.
I broke in my presentation and asked the audience “If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be?” They were to write their response to that question and put it in their right pocket. Next I asked them “What keeps you up at night?” They wrote that response on an index card and put it in their left pocket.
As the conference went on throughout the day, they were to go up to 10 people and initiate a conversation with them by introducing themselves and then saying right or left pocket. Whichever one they chose, the person was to pull out the piece of paper from that pocket and tell them what their response to that question was, and then vice versa, causing a very good engagement between two strangers.When they had this engagement with another person, they were to exchange sticky notes with their initials on them and put that on each other’s $5 bill. The goal was to get 10 sticky notes with all kinds of initials on your $5 bill by the next day, when I would tell them what we would do next with this money.
The next morning, right before I was going to bring them all back together and ask about their engagements and to see their $5 bills with all the sticky notes on them, a woman came up to me and said she needed to talk to me. She said the story I told the morning before, the story about Ursa Farmers what they were going through, made her cry. She was not the first person to tell me that. So many of them told me how heart-touching it was. She asked if she could give her $5 back to me and have me send it to Jerry.
So I made that announcement to everyone, and, low and behold, I got every single $5 bill back, plus much, MUCH more. I didn’t count it, but I’m sure it was well over $1500. Many people then gave more than $5 from their own pockets. One of my own employees gave the $105 she had earned as a reward for her efforts. Another of my employees gave the $50 he earned in this weight loss program we had as an incentive. Even since then, I have been receiving money from all kinds of sources.
I left the sticky notes on the bills, piled it all into a UPS box and sent it off to Jerry. I know this money is not even a small dent in the amount Jerry and Ursa Farmers is at risk to lose, but what a great story about humankind. I had intended on having the audience give their $5 bill to someone later that they met on the street, but this reaction was bigger than that.
I wrote a long letter to Jerry about this act of human kindness and when he received it, he sent me the most heart-wrenching email. Check back in a couple weeks to hear about that email and the end of this story…
Keep Smiling!
Michelle
June 24, 2008:
Three Farming StoriesI have a customer and friend whose name is Jerry Jenkins. He is the General Manager from Ursa Farmers Coop in Ursa, Illinois. He was to do a presentation last week at my National User Conference in the Leadership track titled “Innovation at Ursa Farmers Coop”. While preparing this presentation, he sent an email to me to make sure he was on the right track. At the end of his email, he wrote, “Sorry if there were typos on this presentation. I can’t be Handsome, Sexy and Literate too.” This is typical Jerry – always the jokester…
I laughed at this and sent back appropriate responses, to which he wrote this back. “Michelle, It just so
happened that my wife walked in while I was sending that email to you and saw my last sentence – “…Handsome, Sexy and Literate too.” But she didn’t say anything until I pressed the send button. Of course after being married for 34 years, she flew over the handsome and sexy stuff and went directly to the “Literate too” and said, “Honey – it’s not Literate too – it’s literate also.”
He went onto say it reminded him of a few years back when him and his wife were shopping for Christmas, and if you’ve met Jerry, you’d know that is a funny picture in itself – Jerry shopping. Anyway, they walked past a Victoria’s Secret (which when Jerry sent it to me, he wrote Victories Secret – I’m thinking if it were a man’s store, that would be a good name). He told his wife, “I’ll buy you anything you want in here honey.” And after circling once, he had had enough – especially with the strong looks from the girls that worked there. He realized he did not belong in Victories Secret, so he passed by Theres on his way out and said, “pick something out and I’ll see you later.”
That night, naturally anxiously to see what his wife had purchased, Jerry waited while she showered. Jerry said, “She proudly displayed her new….yes you guessed it …Flannel Pajamas.” He said, “What the hell is that?” You said, “Anything I wanted.” Jerry remembered saying, “Yes, I guess I did.” And fell asleep while Theres read a good book.
I am telling you these two stories because I wanted you to get to know Jerry first, before I follow this up with what’s happening to Ursa Farmers Coop, located on the Mississippi today, in an email I received from Jerry last week – a few days before he was to be a presenter at my conference.
Dear Michelle,
I have a problem I need to share with you. The Mississippi river has risen to extreme danger levels. Only 1993 has the river reached these levels in our areas. When that occurred, it flooded nearly 40,000 acres in which both our river terminals were surrounded by water. We rode in by boat each day all summer. We actually pulled a flat deck barge into/up against our elevator, hired Hugh vacuums machines from Texas, which were flown in by Schinook Helicopter and placed on the barges.
We cut holes in the bottom of the concrete silos and sucked the grain out of the bins. We spent probably 6 months getting the grain out of those bins, cleaning up, rebuilding the equipment, electric system, etc. and completed most all that just before the river fell to the level that allowed you to drive a truck into the town and our elevator.
That year the levee broke at the 27 foot river mark. Normally the river level is 14 to 15 ft. Today, the river is expected to rise to 23 feet. If we get more rains, that level will only rise until levees break. This situation has been building all spring with wet conditions, but not until yesterday did the corps of engineers release the above mentioned threat. Today we began preparing to sandbag and are currently loading the remaining empty barges before the Lock and Dams are closed due to high water.
We have millions of bushels of grain at risk if the levee breaks as it did in 1993. The immediate risk - over 1 million bushels of corn and soybeans valued over 10 million dollars. Do we have insurance? Yes the only insurance you can get is National flood insurance, where the policies are maxed out at 1.5 million in stocks. Even I can do the math and it’s not good.
You cannot haul out 1 million bushels by truck in a few days, plus there is nowhere to haul it. Anyone with a market down here is river terminals and they all are facing the same situation. Everyone that experienced the flood of 1993 must be called on to lead that procedure. I happen to be one of those people that endured that flood, along with holding the position of General Manager and must accept this responsibility.
As you know I like to kid around, keep things light when possible, but I take my responsibilities very seriously. I cannot think of a time in my professional career I have felt the need to back out of a promise, yet I feel I have to on this occasion. If I left my station during this time and something went wrong, I simply would not be doing my job as a leader. I would feel like the captain of a ship that was about to get hit by a tidal wave and then asked to be airlifted out. That is not how I lead.
Michelle this is a very difficult thing for me. I consider you more than a business associate, you are my friend. I realize we have not spent much time together but the visits we've had only strengthens my thoughts regarding you and your management style although much younger, fresher, smarter than mine, are very similar....We both value people and see the strength in them.
Please accept my apology for missing your conference. My employee, Karen, will still be coming and I will brief her on how to cover my presentation. If I really am a good leader, she will be able to do it better than I could anyway.
Your friend,
Gerald JenkinsI shared this story with you today because it’s a very heart-touching story and last week during my opening presentation, I also told this, and was asked to share it with the “Michelle Blog Readers”. So I hope you enjoyed it. Touch back in a few days and I’ll share with you how my other customers responded to this story. It’s quite something!!
Keep Smiling!
Michelle
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