Slouch / No Slouch
No matter a certain malaise in the economy and the endless bucket brigade that bails out one atrociously run financial institution/mortgage company after another, the price of oil soars, the price of gold soars and Easter flower shipments soar right along with them…so all are not losers at the hands of the sub prime miscreants in Calabasas and their ilk. Having lurched through January, pulled back in February this is a more positive time to be in flowers. The last week or two have been active in a quite positive fashion. On a swing through coastal central and southern California I sense a grower community very upbeat about upcoming Easter sales and the planning, planting and harvesting seem to bear it out. I lost count of all the times I heard the old adages about not thinking as… and therefore not becoming a victim. Those words still ring a touch trite in my ears and I have to smile just a little as too much simplistic ”self help” thinking can victimize just as easily… but for now the run up to the spring equinox and the days originally set aside for the Anglo-Saxon goddesses Eoster and Frey look good. Perhaps one really need think like a pagan to succeed in business!
In these same weeks as much maneuvering has been completed off the farms as on. Domestic goddess Martha Stewart once again folds her flower tent, packing it away from where she had it pitched with Proflowers only to be found staking it back out across town on the front lawn of 1-800-flowers. She is not alone in breaking camp these days as the good people at Hallmark apparently are going to use the coming of Spring to disappear from the flower trades in entirety. They will be “pushing up daisies” rather than pushing daisies!
Back in Portland and watching the blossoms get rain thrashed from the trees I think of the five plus hours spent on the bike this past Saturday pedaling around Lompoc, Santa Maria, Santa Ynez and Solvang thinking of what I might say at Monday’s CRAVE conference in Portland. I have the points in mind and my opinion(s) cemented long before 100 miles and the cold beer show up. The lush green hills, still dormant trees and that almost but not quite yet, burst of wildflowers have the Santa Ynez Valley, its vineyards, ranches and old aermotor windmills looking like a poster for a ‘49 Chevy pickup truck in paradise. What is there not to like about this place and today’s tail wind?
The Studio Theatre at The Armory in Portland seems pretty full of people and the stage with its hot lights, three chairs, table and a microphone for the panel plus one for the moderator seem awfully far removed from paradise. My long summoned bravery suddenly quails. Its jacket off, jump onto a stool, take time for a long look at the stacked ranks of audience and show time commences…sort of, as memory and brain are suddenly devoid of all those long cycled and well considered opinions and facts about email marketing, blogging, search engine optimization and the likes. It’s always at that first moment when I need to open my mouth and say something substantive… that it happens. The quaver in my voice, the slightly higher tonality and that awful knowledge of every soul in the place knowing damn well you are scared witless in those sweaty moments between first and second question, when the confidence floods back in. No matter how much I psyche myself up for the opening remarks…the resultant fear is always the same.
The questions are good and the audience is attentive and both my fellow panel member’s lucidity and focus make up for my urge to layer too many facts upon yet more facts. There is too much good stuff to tell of on the far periphery of the questions and unerringly I want to gravitate there. I am given a drop and I return a waterfall or rather a flash flood. Whatever, the deluge must have worked as the ensuing weeks commentaries are reasonably positive barring the one delivered in person by the owner of a local stationers who admonished me to sit more up right because “the slouch” was hardly becoming! Yes Mom, pointer well taken.
Another day, another “Power Breakfast”. For sure Tom Schmitt, President & CEO Fedex Global Supply Chain did not slouch as he pinned back many an ear in outlining the current moves of a behemoth some 290,000 employees strong into China and its likely future moves to Bangladesh and Brazil. It was his vision and version of “skating to where the puck is going to be”. It is incredible to think the soon to open facility in China is going to be far larger than Memphis. While the massive fleet of aircraft is the visible FedEx poster child it is obvious that the logistics of moving larger cargoes by any means other than aviation is a priority and an urgent one given the rise in oil prices and the unstoppable decline in its production. In conjunction with the emphasis on sustainability and lessening the environmental impact, Schmitt, a 43-year-old dynamo originally from Germany and with educational horsepower from there, the UK and from the USA shows there is much afoot and that there is fascination and payoff in good forward thinking. Talk about being neither a victim nor a slouch