The Choice With Risk

Do you take the easy path or the one with more risk?  Tom Ward shares a lesson from his father and a choice that made all the difference!

Transcript

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Welcome to the Power of Living by Design Podcast. My name is Tom Ward. In each episode, I'll be bringing you a story, an experience, something that might help you gain insight how you can make the choice to live by design. Let's get on to the story. The choice with risk. Procter ⁇ Gamble was a wonderful company to begin my career. The Jackson, Tennessee plant where I began my career, was almost a back to the future experience when it comes to the social systems in the plant. In other words, technicians were paid for skills mastered instead of position on the floor. They received growth appraisals twice per year, and performance appraisals twice a year as well. It was a very progressive social environment. My next plant assignment was the Iverydale Food Plant in the Cincinnati area. It gave me a chance to apply much of the learning I'd gained. It also gave me a chance to begin exercising my skills as a change agent. Working at both plants was a wonderful experience in learning about systems, management, and leadership. So when the executive recruiter called to ask if I would interview with Friedolai, I agreed, but I must say cautiously. It turned out that the opportunity offered was a great growth step that moved me directly toward my chief aim to become a plant manager. After the interviews in Dallas and then with the San Jose California plant, I was offered the plant manager designee position. My acceptance of the offer naturally led to me needing to write a resignation letter to my manager at PG. Back then, PG was designed to be a career company, especially in manufacturing. You were recruited there for a career, not just a position. So leaving meant that I was taking a very different career route than most of my peers and friends. Ed Foreman taught me and the thousands of participants who attended the Successful Life course that winners develop the habits of doing the things losers don't like to do. Accepting the challenge at Free Dole was a risk. I was established at PNG. I was successful. I was comfortable, maybe too comfortable. That's when one of the three biggest lessons Dad taught me popped back into my memory. Dad shared with me, Tom, you'll never be a success without risking failure. So one way to risk was to accept the Fritolet opportunity. I did, and it was a great learning experience. In my resignation letter to PG, I included Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken. It's a great poem, but the last stanza is how I felt joining Frito Lay. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveller, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth. Then the other, just as fair, and having perhaps a better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear, though as for the passing there, had warned them really about the same. And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black, oh I kept the first for another day, yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference. It is the choices in life that create the difference in our life, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference in living by design. That's our story for today. I hope it helps you make the choice to live by design. Have a terrific day.