Rivers of Thought
Life, Leadership, Business & Technology
Thinking back, I am not sure what I expected. I had been asked to represent the executive staff by speaking at the graduation ceremonies for one of our high schools (didn’t know Goodwill Indy had high schools, did you?). I was flattered to have been asked, but really had no idea what to say. This was not an ordinary high school, this was a school for adults who had dropped out for one reason or another, but who now wanted to come back and complete their high school diploma, not just earn a G.E.D. I would be speaking at The Excel Center – Anderson. What could I possibly say that would be meaningful to them? Would their families come to watch? My own graduation was over 35 years ago, what connection would I have to them? I didn’t realize I was about to be blown away!
I arrived early (wouldn’t want to be late) so I sat in my car and worked a bit (OK, I read email, but hey that IS my work!). I was stunned, as car after car pulled into the lot. I walked inside to find the place packed with friends and family. The students were busy putting on the caps and gowns. I was immediately struck by their genuine excitement (some nervous excitement maybe), their closeness to each other, and their closeness to the faculty. The mood was one of celebration and it was contagious!
I donned my robe and took my place next to the school’s director (principal) as we processed in. As the graduates walked down the aisles (making a pass down each aisle so friends and family could see their graduate) the excitement built as cameras (ok cell phones) flashed. Sitting in the front on the stage, I could see the faces of husbands, wives, parents and children of the graduates, already I was choking back tears.
Three graduates had been selected to speak. I can’t begin to do their stories justice. One was a woman who had dropped out twenty-three years prior. She wanted to come back, now years later, to get her diploma to be a role model for her kids. Another was a young man who had struggled in traditional school and had been tagged “special needs”. He was now graduating with several certifications and heading off to college. The third was a young lady whose best friend had been murdered, the depression and confusion this brought into her life destroyed her high school career. She had come back to earn her diploma to honor her friend. Amazing stories! My guess is, the other 53 graduates’ stories were just as amazing!
You can read their stories hear: Laura, Isaac, Sarah.
How could I possibly follow THAT? A few days before the event, I had come to the realization (kind of a duh moment) that no one was there to hear me speak. They were all there for them, for the graduates. Keep it short, keep it simple.
I am truly honored to be here tonight representing the Goodwill family on such a special occasion. We, your friends and family, your teachers and faculty, and Anderson community leaders are here to celebrate with you.
To the community leaders of Anderson, I want to say thank you. Thank you for the partnership and the vision that lead to the opening of the Anderson Excel Center just two short years ago. Your support of the Excel Center has enabled them, the third graduating class, to achieve what otherwise might have been un-achievable.
To the teachers and administrators, I want to say thank you. Thank you for the dedication and caring that enabled you to teach, inspire and change lives. What you do is incredibly difficult, and yet so incredibly important. I and the rest of the 3,000 employees of Goodwill are honored to be your colleagues. Your work here has been nothing short of amazing.
To the friends and families of our graduates who are here tonight, I want to say thank you. Thank you for being here to celebrate with your graduate. Thank you for the support you have shown as they attended classes, did homework, and studied. I am sure it was not always easy, nor convenient. They are here in front of you today due in part to your support.
To the graduates, I want to say thank you. Thank you for allowing us to join in your celebration. Your lives have been forever changed. Each of you has a story, a story of roadblocks and obstacles. But tonight, you have added a chapter to that story, a chapter of perseverance, of fortitude, of overcoming those roadblocks and obstacles. Whether your next step is a career, or you plan to go on to college, you have accomplished something tremendous. You can say, proudly, “I am a graduate! Thank you for sharing your story with us, thank you for sharing your moment with us. Thank you for changing our lives as well.
As each student received their diploma, I had the honor of shaking their hand. Each one of them looked me in the eye, 
proudly. As I congratulated each of them, tears continued to well up. This is why we do what we do, this is why I do what I do, for those 56 new high school graduates that are ready to take on the world!
To see pictures of that night at The Excel Center – Anderson, or the other Excel Center graduations check out the photo album. To learn more about The Excel Centers visit our website at: The Excel Center.
If anything you read here or in other posts strikes a chord, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, hit me up on Twitter (@jtongici), find me on LinkedIn, or Google +.
A couple years ago I wrote a short eBook titled “Everything I Learned about Leadership…I Learned from Lewis and Clark“. Well, guess what? It was a lie! As the dedication in the book declares, I really learned about leadership from my dad! Dad spent the majority of his career as an American Baptist minister, later taking roles in denomination leadership. What this meant was, that as a kid, I spent a LOT of time in church and a LOT of time listening to him preach. Think about it…18 years, give or take…Sunday morning service, Sunday night service, Wednesday service…and all the special services like Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Christmas Eve. A conservative estimate says it was over 2,000 sermons!
Today, almost 40 years since he was last my pastor and probably 10 to 15 years since I have heard him preach, I can remember many (ok not all 2,000, but many) of them. Why? or better yet, how? I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning, but I can remember the time he had one of the drollest members of the congregation walk up and eat an apple, leaving the core on the alter during “pledge” Sunday, or when some of the youth stood up and questioned him in the middle of a sermon (planned as a part of youth Sunday of course), or the many times, he would take on a persona of a character from the bible…Peter and Paul being the most memorable or the old lady who proclaimed “You ain’t e’er gonna shroud that light, eer ya?” as an adult lesson of the children’s song “This Little Light of Mine”, or , or even the time he stopped mid-sentence and asked my mother to go to his office and get the copy of his sermon because he’d lost his train of thought and his notes weren’t helping (he STILL says this was not planned).
Why do I remember them? I can hear you saying, “Oh sure, you remember those, they had memorable moments, something that set them apart”. Of course they did, I guess that’s the point. He was (is) a master at creating a visualization through a gesture or an action, some way of saying “This is important! Pay attention!” When he got out from behind the podium, I would (the whole congregation would) sit up and take notice. It was the energy and forcefulness (not in a hell-fire and brimstone sort of way, mind you), but in a way to capture all of our senses. It might have been as simple as pacing across the front of the church, or as in the examples above something even more captivating. As I reflect on this now, my guess is many of the gestures just became a natural part of his delivery when he wanted to make a point, still others were very rehearsed and planned.
Like my dad, Roosevelt was a master at making a point through a gesture. Do an image search on Google for theodore 
roosevelt speaking and you will find hundreds of pictures but you would be very hard pressed to find any of him standing still behind a lectern. You will see him teeth bared, leaning forward, fist pounding in hand, or arms spread wide. Some of these were very much thought out, others were as natural to him as speaking itself. The audience was captivated, he was talking with them (not TO them), he was their voice. Roosevelt once declared “I’m am not public opinion, I am the public”, a bold statement certainly, but at the height of his presidency he was absolutely correct.
For me, I inherited my dad’s propensity to wander away from the lectern to make a point, to engage with my listeners. Even during my monthly staff meetings I stand so I can move around. During my exploration of #RooseveltRiver, Dan challenged me to think about times or messages when I should break from the natural, instinctive gestures to make the point even more impactful. Recently, I had the distinct privilege to speak at a high school graduation (future post alert!) as I thought about my words and my delivery, I realized this was one of the times Dan was referring to. What I said was irrelevant. It was not about the message. It was about the graduates, their families and their celebration. I delivered my short remarks passionately, yet standing still behind the lectern. Think about your own delivery. How do you emphasize your points? When you are presenting to your team, the board or a larger audience is your point made by some instinctive gesture? Do you rehearse and plan your gestures? Sometimes the natural, instinctive gestures are the most powerful, however, there are other times that may call for a more intentional, rehearsed gesture, or even times when no gesture at all is the course of the day.
#RooseveltRiver is my year long exploration with Dan Miller of Historical Solutions into leadership using the backdrop of history and the life of Theodore Roosevelt. To read more in this series, select “Roosevelt River” from the Category drop down on the right.
If anything you read here or in other posts strikes a chord, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, hit me up on Twitter (@jtongici), find me on LinkedIn, or Google +.
The room fell silent as I walked in. I got the feeling I had interrupted a joke or a story. It was my first time at the table. The proverbial table. The table at which we all talk about being seated. The table of power. Here were gathered, the ten most powerful people in our company, sans the owner himself. It was intimidating, to say the least. I was nervous. Nervous? Hell, I was scared shitless. I had 20 minutes to lay out the IT Strategic Plan. 20 minutes to convince them to invest a boatload of cash. THEIR cash. 20 minutes to convince the strategy was the RIGHT strategy. Clutching my notes in one hand and the “clicker” in the other, I went through the slides. There were a few clarifying questions, but mostly there was silence. As I closed with my summary and stopped, all eyes were focused, not on my slides, but on me. Was this going to be the nightmare from my childhood all over again? That terrified sixth grader wanted to scream and run. Breathe. Breathe deep. Then…then it happened…
The President of our company, leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head and said, more to me, than the 
room, “THAT is the first time I have EVER understood technology!” Suddenly that petrified sixth grader wanted to jump for joy, wanted to slap high five with someone, anyone. Even now as I write this, I get chills. How did it happen? How did we get our point across? An image…permit me to go back in time a bit.
One of my first duties as the new CIO (my first CIO role, by the way), was to develop a three year technology strategic plan. Work on this had started before I even joined the company with me working behind the scenes to select the 3rd Party consulting firm as a partner in developing the plan. Once I officially started, work began in earnest. Weeks went by. The consultant did a yeoman’s job of gathering data, meeting with me and other stakeholders, working with the team to flush out the details. Weeks turned into months. We had a lot of great stuff, but nothing was coming together. The document being produced had a lot of words…much more than 1,000 trust me. It just wasn’t conveying the message. We needed something…but what? Something to pull it all together. An idea began to form. We needed a way to convey some very complex messages to an audience that was, by their own admission, not technical. (I knew I was in trouble when one SVP looked at me during a discussion and said “Technology? We don’t need technology, we used to design buildings with pencils and drawing paper, we can do it again.”)
This was a company that made multi-million dollar decisions every day. How did they get comfortable with the risk versus the reward? They used a very tried and true process. The development group would envision a project, do their research and then
build what was called internally “an Investment Memo”. The Investment Memo had 20 or 21 distinct sections, The Executive Summary, the elevation drawings, market surveys, risks, financial proforma and others. What if we put the strategic plan in the form of an Investment Memo? We could use the analogy that building IT systems are like building a building. But…no one on my team, myself included, had ever written an Investment Memo, we didn’t even know all the sections or the lingo. I reached out to a coworker who worked in the construction department. He had an interest in IT, was young and passionate. Would he help me?
I fle
w to his hometown of Charlotte. He and I literally locked ourselves in my hotel room for three days. The result? An image! The image of a building, complete with elevation drawings and a proforma. An image that everyone in the room would understand. (Thanks to Matt Cashatt, for working his day job and burning the midnight oil with me for three days…and thanks to his wife for letting me impinge on their family time!)
It is true, an image IS worth a 1,000 words (or, in this case, several thousand words). A few years after the strategic plan presentation, as I explored the #RooseveltRiver, time and time again I discovered Theodore Roosevelt understood this, as well. Sometimes he created the images, sometimes others created them, but he always leveraged them. On a hunting trip, he and his group came upon a small bear chained to a tree. Even at the urging of some around him, he would not shoot the bear. Within days the image of the Teddy Bear was all over the press. During a speech he quoted an African proverb about “walk softly but carry a big stick”. The next day hundreds of people turned out at a speech carrying baseball bats and clubs. Later as he introduced the “Square Deal”, held up scales to convey he wanted all people to have fair deal and make a fair wage. These images were burned in the minds of his constituents.
Washington Post
Images can be a powerful tool. They can be intentional, as in the case of the scales, or unintentional like the Teddy Bear. What images are emblazoned on your mind? What images can you use to communicate to your team? to your peers? to your management? What intentional images can you create? What un-intentional ones can you leverage to get your point across?
#RooseveltRiver is my year long exploration with Dan Miller of Historical Solutions into leadership using the backdrop of history and the life of Theodore Roosevelt. To read more in this series, select “Roosevelt River” from the Category drop down on the right.
If anything you read here or in other posts strikes a chord, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, hit me up on Twitter (@jtongici), find me on LinkedIn, or Google +.
Follow me
Insights is the weekly, thought-provoking newsletter from Jeffrey S. Ton.
Every Tuesday – Delivered to your inbox.
A different focus each week:
Leadership Thought – A lesson-learned, an insight shared
Leadership Q&A – A response to a reader’s or a connection’s question
Leadership Spotlight – A highlight of a person or company helping others to grow their leadership
Rivers of Thought – A more personal thought, observation or musing
