May 2015 – Page 2 – Art Parkerson

How do you respond?

From the book, “That Ain’t No Deal!” by Charlie Parkerson

I’m blessed to have five [now six!] grandkids living next door, and I’ve gotten a kick out of teaching them how to do things—really important things—like how to ride a bike and how to play cards.

Maybe fun and games don’t strike you as important life skills, but I see ’em as a great way to learn how to deal with things outside of your control. What kid would choose to fall off their bike and scrape their knees? And nobody chooses to be dealt a losing hand. But bad things happen. The question is, “How do you respond?” The first step toward responsibility is learning we are able to choose how we respond, especially to the bad things we don’t want to face.

Sometimes it seems like children actually do fall down on purpose. They get scared or frustrated and just quit. They almost seem to throw themselves off their bikes. You can see adults do the same thing when they are in uncomfortable situations: at work, in their relationships, in struggling with addictions or dealing with change. Throwing yourself off your bike is a choice, but it’s a supremely childish choice.

Persevere! The suffering is worth the sacrifice. I can still see the amazing change that came over each grandchild’s countenance once they finally mastered their bike. They suddenly stood taller; their faces beamed. They had done it! They were independently mobile! They were now free to go make their way in the world!

Been dealt a losing hand? Play it out, man! You gotta play the cards you’ve been dealt. You don’t have to like it, but quit your bellyaching.

Everything is a choice

From the book, “That Ain’t No Deal!” by Charlie Parkerson:

I reckon there are two types of people: those who cry and complain about what they “have to do,” and those who simply roll up their sleeves and get busy doing what they “choose to do.”

I’ve got no patience for folks who complain about their job, their boss, their customers, the traffic on their morning commute…the list goes on and on. I just can’t listen to it.

Who put a gun to your head and made you do that job, work for that boss, live in that city or take crap from those customers? Whatever circumstance you find yourself in, it’s of your own choosing.

You say you hate your job? Well, who picked that job? You did. “But I didn’t realize I’d hate it when I took it.” So quit and find something you’ll love. “But I’m not qualified to do my dream job.” How is that your boss’s fault?

Change is hard, but it starts with a simple choice. Why don’t we change when we aren’t happy with the results we’re getting? Are we too scared or too lazy? Apathy and inaction are decisions to keep things just the way they are.

Don’t complain about it. By staying in that job you hate so much, what you’re really saying is, “I believe this job is better than any other possible alternative.”

Everything is a choice. It’s gotta be one of life’s toughest lessons. It can really hurt to own up to the fact we have chosen the lives we live.

It is painful to take away the scapegoats we love to abuse, because then that abuse is directed squarely at ourselves. Ouch!

Success is a choice

From the book, “That Ain’t No Deal!”

Succes is a choice Just as true quality is never a happy accident, neither is success. Good things happen for a reason. Sure, sometimes you’ll get lucky and come out smelling like a rose despite making bad decisions, but that’s like winning the lottery.
Success you don’t earn doesn’t last very long. It’s not sustainable. In my mind, success you can’t count on is no success at all.

So, if success is a choice, who in the world would ever choose failure? I don’t think most people are stupid, but I see people do stupid things every day. Nobody sets out to fail, and nobody would ever agonize in front of a signpost faced with a simple dilemma: “Do I choose the path to success or failure?”

The tricky thing is that success isn’t the result of one choice, but of a million choices. It takes wisdom and foresight to know which direction you’re heading in. It’s pretty hard to have the clarity to step back and read the signposts, but they’re there.

Too many people spend their whole lives walking down the wrong path only to realize, once they reach the end of the road, that they wasted their lives. And far too many people lose their nerve. Paralyzed with fear, they don’t have the stomach to lead their own life, much less to lead their business, family or organization. Have courage!

It takes guts to own up to the fact that success is ultimately your choice. Embrace the challenge, and you’ll find it incredibly liberating.

Quality is a matter of choice

This has been the “motto” of Lancaster Farms since I can remember. Here, Charlie explains what he means by it. This is the first “chapter” of the book, “That Ain’t No Deal!”

Quality-is3 These six words express the heart of my business philosophy. That’s why I made them the motto for Lancaster Farms, the business I founded in 1969.

I don’t like being average, so early on I decided I wouldn’t make lousy products. I wanted to grow the very best shrubs, trees and flowers, and I wanted to sell them to customers who valued and appreciated the difference between a wimpy plant likely to fail and a superior plant ready to thrive.

Back when I started, that was a pretty radical idea. The name of the game in the plant business was to grow your crops as cheaply as possible. It seemed our customers—independent garden centers and landscapers—only cared about price. Agricultural products, such as corn and cotton, naturally tend to become commodities, right?

Well, I’ve bucked conventional wisdom all my life, and I say, “Quality is never a commodity.” It’s also no accident, because true quality isn’t hit-or-miss. Consistent results come from making deliberate decisions. You have to choose quality every day, in every process.

You don’t define what quality means; only the customer can do that. Quality isn’t just being better, it is being better in ways that are meaningful. In my business, that means not just having a larger, healthier plant, but having a plant that will make more money for the customer.

Landscapers lose money when their design plans call for them to install twelve shrubs but one isn’t the same shape or height as the other eleven. Garden centers lose money when the plants on their shelves wither and look unhealthy within a few weeks. And everyone in the whole supply chain loses when plants die in the homeowner’s yard.

“Roots” vs. “shiny” quality

The truest measure of quality is often hard to see, especially to those who aren’t experts or who don’t take the time to examine what they’re buying. In the plant business, we have annual trade shows where growers display selections of their plants and buyers walk around and hopefully place orders for the coming season. To make their plants look their very best at trade shows, many growers spray their plants with a glossy coating. It makes the leaves seem brighter, more vibrant. The green just kind of “pops.”

I have never done this. It’s so fake. This is a “shiny” quality. It misleads. It’s just for show. It adds no real value to the product.

At Lancaster Farms, we focus instead on “roots” quality. We invest more time and effort into developing the roots, which are almost never seen, than we do the tops of the plants. It’s easy to grow a great top half of a plant. Just give it a bunch of water and fertilizer. (Then spray on a glossy coating!) But wise gardeners know the unseen root system is what really determines success.

What good are features that don’t make a difference? We could put bushes in gold-plated pots. We could carefully hand-water each flower, but these things are not going to deliver the value the customer is looking for. “Shiny” quality is fake quality.

Do you get what you pay for?

A lot of people probably interpret our motto, “Quality Is a Matter of Choice,” as being synonymous with, “You get what you pay for.” I don’t see it that way, because I can recall times when I’ve paid a whole heck of a lot for crummy products.

Several years ago, my wife Maggie bought a new washer and dryer. She wanted the best. These babies were made in Sweden and they cost three times what the GE and Kenmore models did. Why? Because they used less water, were more energy efficient and they sported a cool European design. Wow! We were sold.

The only problem was, their capacity was so tiny you had to do three times the number of loads, the washer sounded like a plane taking off and the dryer took three hours to dry a load. Sometimes you pay extra for “shiny” quality, but you seldom choose it a second time.

“Quality Is a Matter of Choice” wasn’t just a promotional jingle for me. It told everyone in our company, “We control, by the decisions we make every single day, how good our product will be, and thereby what level of success we will enjoy.” These are words to live by!

Introduction to “That ain’t no deal!”

This is the introduction to the book I wrote with my father, Charlie Parkerson, to mark his retirement from Lancaster Farms, the business he started and I now manage (along with 100 great employees, that is).

[tw_dropcap]V[/tw_dropcap]ery few real people have catchphrases. The good ones usually belong to fictional characters. We find them in movies, books and TV sitcoms. “Just the facts, Ma’am.” “Shaken, not stirred.” “Good night, John Boy.” “ET phone home.”

It takes an attentive writer (or team of writers) to carefully and intentionally craft a character-defining catchphrase and insert it into dialog for maximum effect. Normal, everyday people like you and me can’t hope to be so consistent.

My father has a catchphrase, one he never planned to have. It was an accident. He never sat down and thought, “What should be my signature saying, and how can I make sure I say it all the time?”

Charlie is almost wholly without artifice. There’s nothing fake about him. He’s the same wherever he goes. He swears at prayer meetings.

And he hates bad deals.

Anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes with Charlie Parkerson has probably heard him say, “That ain’t no deal.” As his son, I bet I’ve heard it more than anyone, and I have come to realize it’s a good catchphrase, for it captures the essence of my father’s character, the way he thinks and the way he views the world.
As catchphrases go, “That ain’t no deal” may seem pretty negative, but it’s not negative at all. In fact, it’s an incredibly positive statement.

Let me explain why.

Lesson #1: Face the facts

A truly positive outlook, one that is useful and robust, is not a Pollyanna blindness, but rather it acknowledges problems. The world is often screwed up. Optimists don’t deny problems exist or make excuses for them; they simply think they can be fixed.

What is a “deal?” Everything you do is a trade. You spend time, energy and money to get things or do things. You make deals.

It’s your job, especially if you’re a leader, to turn bad deals, which are everywhere, into good deals.

Lesson #2: Conflict is caring

It’s not mean-spirited to point out bad deals when you see them. Confrontation shows you care. It’s a heck of a lot easier to shrug and say, “Whatever.”

“That ain’t no deal,” is not an ad hominem attack. It doesn’t blame. It doesn’t point fingers. It attacks the problem, not the person.

However, when they are confronted, people often take it personally. They hear something that is not being said. They hear, “You’re stupid for doing that,” or “I’m better than you.”

Oversensitivity can blind you to one of the most remarkable things about “That ain’t no deal.” It invites you to step back and see things from a different perspective. Taken literally, it simply asks, “Is this a good trade? Is this how we want things to be?”

So, if it’s not a personal attack, why do the wording and delivery feel so much like an accusation? Why are they so striking?

It’s by design.

Lesson #3: Provoke a response

There’s a safer, less provocative way to say, “That ain’t no deal.” You’ve heard it before: “There has to be a better way.” The meanings are the same.

But the safer words have one problem: they’re boring. They don’t kick you in the pants. They don’t demand a response. Somebody says, “There’s got to be a better way,” and you nod and say, “Yeah, somebody should fix that.”

And then you forget about it, as if they had commented on the weather or said, “The kids these days,” or “Congress needs term limits.”

Safe words are ineffective words.

Here we go

I could go on and on. I could wax philosophical about the colloquial grammar, the irony of the double negative and the expression’s Southern-born roots. But this is Charlie’s book, not mine, and “navel gazing” has never been his style. From here on out, the in-depth mumbo-jumbo and the “what does it all mean?” stuff will be kept to a minimum. You’ll get to hear Charlie explain the ideas and habits that powered his success.

I’ve been a student of my father all my life. For more than thirty years, I have been listening, absorbing his wisdom. It has not been a waste of time. I am sure you will agree!

Arthur Lancaster Parkerson
August 28, 2013