INKLINGS

Notes from a Road Warrior

David P. Campbell

While unpacking from an overseas trip on December 29, 1997, I made a quick telephone call and found that I had flown 96,990 miles in 1997 on my favorite airline. Damn . . . there are many benefits to breaking 100,000 in terms of upgrades, ease of reservations, and other little niceties that help diminish the pain of constant travel—but I was 3,010 miles short, with only two more days in the year.

“Well,” I thought, “I'll fly to San Francisco and have lunch with my son.” (The benefits in eventual free tickets would more than make up for the cost of the flight.) But that would result in only 1,600 more miles.

A little creative thinking and another telephone call produced an invitation to be a houseguest over New Year's Eve in Hawaii (3,300 miles). The recipients of the call had earlier been houseguests of mine, so the act was not as brazen as it first appears. Consequently I experienced the incredible firecracker binge that hits Honolulu every New Year's Eve. I learned that fireworks are legal in Hawaii only from 9:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. on New Year's Eve and that families save up all year for this pyrotechnical spree.

When boarding the flight from Colorado Springs to Denver (90 miles) on December 31, from the New Year's Eve camaraderie on the plane I noted at least three other people were doing what I was doing, logging more miles. One person lacked only 100 miles, so he was flying merely to Denver and back.

In Denver, boarding the flight to San Francisco, I found it was the same story. More road warriors getting their 100,000-mile tickets punched at the last minute. What a life.

Now, 100,000 miles translates into at least 200 hours in the air, the equivalent of five working weeks—which is a conservative estimate because it does not include time spent waiting to board, time sitting on the runway because of congestion, or time circling an airport waiting for a thunderstorm to move on; nor did it include the 25,000 to 30,000 miles traveled on other airlines.

In earlier days I used to be fairly productive on airplanes, working on projects, editing manuscripts, planning the future. Now, for whatever reason, I am more zombie-like; I usually just zonk out or maybe retreat into what are called around our office “airplane novels”—Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Robert Ludlum.

However, I do write paragraphs of observations as they pop into my mind while I'm waiting, for example, for the plane to be de-iced. Here are some of my musings. There is no flow here, only the same sort of disconnected thinking that travel produces.

• Why can't I find colorful luggage? I want a bright red, patterned, extremely durable, highly visible, unique suitcase that I can see all the way across the terminal. Yet the typical bag is black, brown, or gray. In fact, most baggage carousels have signs saying something like, “Check your name tags. Many bags look alike.” And that's right. They do.

Why? In contrast, go to a ski area and look around. You can ski all day long, interacting with hundreds, even thousands, of skiers, and you will continually see bright, colorful clothing and equipment—reds, yellows, oranges, blues, purples, greens, plain and fluorescent—never with a duplicate ski jacket, backpack, hat, or even skis.

I have an extremely durable black hard-sided suitcase with excellent wheels and handle. It has served me well, yet it is not uncommon for there to be two or three identical bags on the same flight. In self-defense I have plastered mine with a Broncos sticker and some colored tape.

Why should I have to do that? I wish someone like Head or Rossignol would take over a luggage company.

• There is at least a five-to-one ratio between the productive levels of the best and worst people in the world. Learn to recognize the top performers early. Work for them if possible, hire them as subordinates, and hang around them as peers. Their habits rub off; so does their glory and maybe even some cash. (According to an article I read recently, Microsoft has produced six thousand millionaires among its employees in Seattle.)

• No matter what your contingent preparations, weather will sometime affect your plans. One of the more important presentations of my career was shortened from an hour to five minutes because of an East Coast snowstorm. (“We've got to get out of here.”) The project never recovered.

• As people ascend the leadership ladder, they tend to cut themselves off from those who will tell them unpleasant truths. At least 50 percent of the people I have known well in top leadership positions have a reputation among their subordinates for killing off messengers. Curiously, not a single one believes that about themselves. Most of them operate as did Samuel Goldwyn: “I want you people to tell me the truth even if it costs you your job.”

• If you have no particular passion for the specifics of what you do, you might as well seek out the most lucrative position available, because dollars will likely be your only reward. However, paradoxically, if you have little passion for what you do, you will probably never make much money.

• Why doesn't the corporate world use music more for motivational and inspirational purposes? The military understands its value; there are military bands all over the place, and the best of them have truly professional musicians in their ranks. Church leaders understand the value of music; in fact, for centuries the church was virtually synonymous with music. Universities devote entire departments, even separate schools, to music. The intellectual, philosophic, spiritual, and motivational ends are apparent in these settings. Why not in a corporation? Indeed, corporate CEOs often invoke a symphonic analogy to explain what they do. “My job is to come up with a score (a vision) so that our talented performers are all reading from the same music.” Why isn't there an IBM symphony, or a GE traveling chorus, or—given their quasi-Scandinavian Minnesota location—a 3M polka band?

• Most people make up their minds about the people they meet in the first four minutes, which can be an unnerving fact if you are about to embark on a full day of employment interviews or a blind date.

• When you achieve a leadership position with some power and influence, you will soon be introduced to lawyers and the legal process, and you will inevitably become frustrated, even furious, when you realize that there are times when you must pay more attention to a lawyer's advice than to your own instincts.

• Why doesn't the world recognize the enormous need for energy and physical durability in a leader? I have sat through what seems like a zillion discussions of what leaders are and of what leadership requirements are needed in any particular organization. I have seen dozens of idiosyncratically produced lists of the necessary characteristics to succeed in corporation ABC or agency XYZ. None of them has ever included physical stamina and energy. Yet the typical leader's day is chaotic with demands—wearying jet-lagged travel, long meetings, conflicts and confrontations, a variety of diets and sleeping arrangements, and unpredictable crises. Perhaps this is why both early military and athletic experiences so often show up in the biographies of leaders.

• Speaking of athletes, why aren't athletes who use a set of muscles disproportionately in their trade, such as baseball pitchers or tennis players, grotesquely deformed? Why isn't Pete Sampras lopsided?

• If the world were truly fair, the seats on airplanes would systematically vary in the amount of legroom provided, starting with seats in the rear of the plane for, say, six-foot-six passengers and working their way forward to seats for, say, five-foot passengers. Then boarding would be by height, with the taller passengers boarding first. They would immediately go to the rear of the plane, expediting the boarding process. The result would be a much fairer distribution of available space. I know, I know, this is another one of my truly great ideas where the details still have to be worked out.

• The most universal motivation for wanting to be in charge is the wish to be relevant.

• I note that while flying the equivalent of almost seven working weeks last year, I did not meet a single person that I will ever see again. Even the extroverts tune out while in the air.

Nor, for the record, were there ever any crises. While flying about as many miles as five times around the globe, I never experienced a single white-knuckle fear or really even any severe discomfort—except for lack of legroom. I really do wish that someone would do something about the legroom.

David P. Campbell is Smith Richardson Senior Fellow in Creative Leadership at CCL in Colorado Springs. Formerly professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, he is the author of several well-known books, including Inklings: Collected Columns on Leadership and Creativity (CCL, 1992).