Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist
This is Jim’s traditional Christmas column.
Some say I’m a scrooge. They might be right.
The following exhibits (excuses) are placed into evidence in my defense of this indictment:
A. The early part of my career was spent in retail. Retailers know what that job does to your holiday spirit. There’s a survivor syndrome for everything else, why not one for retail survivors? Let’s call it RPTHSS: Retail Post-Traumatic Holiday Shock Syndrome.
This is a story about how cause and effect merged parallel universes and one person made a difference that changed the course of human history.
As the 17th Century dawned on the New World, a manchild was born to the Patuxet tribe. His father named him Tisquantum. They were part of a confederation of tribes known as the Wampanoag (“eastern people”) inhabiting much of what became known as New England.
In time, Tisquantum would become a very important individual to the future of America, but not before his life would change in ways not to be imagined by any 17th-century Earthling.
Veterans Day, as we know it, has its origins in Armistice Day.
“To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory.”
That was the 1919 acknowledgment by President Wilson on the first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI “in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”
Congress made Armistice Day a federal holiday on November 11, 1938.
But after World War II, Alvin King, a small business owner in Emporia, Kansas, had a problem with the narrowness of those honored on Armistice Day. Al was so moved by the death of his nephew, John E. Cooper, who was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, that he and the Emporia Chamber of Commerce started a movement to redefine Armistice Day and give it a new name – Veterans Day.
This is the 20th edition of my New Regular series that focuses on the macro and microelements of small business success in the post-coronavirus economy. “Normal” is a term used by those who haven’t made a pandemic payroll.
Fear and greed. Individually, they represent two of the purest primal emotions of modern humans. The headwaters of both spring from the emotion-dwelling part of the brain called the amygdala.
When used together, it’s appropriate that fear is first because it represents a primitively instinctive and less reasoned response. When an unexpected blast occurs, we duck first and determine the caliber of the cannon later. A very primitive emotion.
Unlike fear, as an emotion, greed is a wholly-owned human franchise. When people progressed to produce more than was needed for survival, the luxury of greed was born. Greed is a modern human emotion.
But as different as these two emotions are, humans have leveraged them in tandem for 10,000 years to form the paradoxical pendulum that created and continues to power one of the most important human creations: the marketplace.
This is the fifteenth edition of my New Regular series, which has the sole purpose of helping small business owners emerge into the post-pandemic economy successfully and happy. Normal is now as relevant as an employee-of-the-month parking space during the shutdown.
In any other year, my column this week would be about the national holiday which for at least 126 years has provided America’s workers with a paid day off on the first Monday of September. Also noted would be that half of those Labor Day celebrants – over 70 million – would be paid to not work by America’s 6.5 million small business employers.
But this year, in the throes of a coronavirus pandemic threatening our lives and the economic shutdown attacking our livelihoods, the Labor Day needle registers low on the concern-o-meter. Instead, my thoughts keep coming back to something emphasized earlier in this series: Perspective. Part of the New Regular is keeping what’s happening to us this year in perspective. With that in mind, I’d like to tell you a couple of stories.
This is the eighth edition of my New Regular series, which is devoted to helping small business owners deal with the financial and emotional damage created by the coronavirus shutdown(s). Normal went MIA around March 15.
Recently on my radio program, one of our many smart Brain Trust members, Jim Schreier, introduced us to a new condition that neuroscientists are studying. Markers of this syndrome include, but are not limited to:
Veteran small business owners will laugh at these, recognizing them as a short list of what they eat for breakfast every morning. Stress? Worry? Struggle? Is that the best you got?
The levels of adversity Main Street operators take in stride every day would kill most civilians (anyone with a regular paycheck). But on top of all the risks and rough edges small business owners learn how to manage, the pandemic-caused, unprecedented, economic shutdown that separated us from customers, frankly, is a new item on our business breakfast menu.