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Welcome to this edition of influence and impact. My name is Philip Van Hooser and I’m your
host for the day. I’m glad to have you join us. In this fast-paced world in which we live,
too often we take for granted the way things are. Whether our focus is on our education,
our business activities or even our relationships, most of us have been conditioned to look longingly
and expectantly to the future, but happily ignoring the lessons of the past and the present.
Occasionally, it’s beneficial to look backwards. In so doing, we learn how we got where we
are in the first place. As we investigate our past, we might just discover the seedling
of a dream or vision that set us on the journey initially and who knows – we might just
learn something that will help us even more in the future. Welcome, John, to Influence
and Impact. Thank you.
Well, I guess we start by simply saying happy birthday. Happy birthday to a company that’s
celebrating its 40th birthday now. I guess my first question of you would simply be where
did the vision begin? When I started college, I didn’t know what
I was going to do. By the time I was a junior, I had decided I wanted to go in business and
I had the good fortune of having an instructor who sent us to the library to read current
periodicals. One of the periodicals that I read was about the standardization of the
funny numbers across the bottom of the check and what impact that was going to have on
the buying habits of people and how we pay for things that we purchase and the focus
was on the big banks – how does the Bank of America handle their volume – and I began
to think about what impact that would have on a community bank. Would they go away or
could someone fill the need and deliver services to the community banks in community town USA.
Well, that’s interesting. A lot of us stumble upon things that we read or see or hear that
become interesting to us to the point that we think it can change the future, but very
few of us then, take that next step which requires some sort of action. What was that
next step for you? You started thinking about it, but what was the next progressive step
that got you to where you needed to be? Well, once you’ve got a vision and you really
believe you can achieve that vision, then you’ve got to start planning and it’s
just part of the process. I mean I can visualize things, dream things all day long and do nothing
about them and get nowhere, but if I visualize and then start a planning process and develop
a plan, that’s the way you achieve them. Okay. Let’s talk about that for a second
– dreaming, visualizing, crystalizing that whole dream and vision into some sort of plan.
If you can, give us two or three steps or whatever’s appropriate that you personally
started. Step one, step two, step three in that crystallization process.
Well, step one’s the vision and I use that word rather than dream because when I have
a dream last night, I don’t remember all of it this morning, but I can more clearly
visualize. Now, that doesn’t mean I see everything in clear focus. Some things will
be unknown and the second step is what are all the issues that I can define with that?
What are all of the problems that I know? What are all the obstacles that might be there?
What are the values that could be delivered and once you work through those, then starting
to finding the alternatives, to find what you don’t know, begin to research what you
don’t know and those lead to the plan. Well, now once you have your plan in place,
obviously, you’ve also got to start the critical things of capitalization and finding
the right people to join you and the whole thing. In the time that we have before the
break, tell me, if you will, what you thought were key issues in the people you surrounded
yourself with. What did you look for? Well, I looked for people who knew things
I didn’t know. You have to complement your own skills by the selection of good people
and prepare a method for those people to grow in terms of managing others and leading to
the vision. Well, obviously, in just a few minutes we’ve
been able to get into something that has taken you 40 years to realize fully and we want
to hear more about that when we get back from the break, but we’ll be back with more with
John Williams to talk about dream and vision and where we take those dreams in just a moment.