Working Impressions

Today, we welcome the employees of Dollco Integrated Print Solutions to the Lowe-Martin Group.

Dollco is one of the storied companies in the Ottawa region, having received its charter in 1918 as the Dominion Loose Leaf Company. Over the years, its staff and management have earned the respect, not only of their customers, but also of their competitors.

Over the years, Lowe-Martin has been involved in many competitions against Dollco, winning some and losing some. In every case, the competition has been marked by professionalism and integrity.

As they turn the page on their notable history, Dollco employees in every part of the company can take pride in the legacy they built. And they can be assured that their new environment will give them every opportunity to succeed and grow in their profession.

It’s an exciting moment in the history of Lowe-Martin. To all our new colleagues, a heartfelt “Welcome to the team.”

In my days as a grad student, I spent hour after hour in the Public Archives of Canada, immersed in letters, diaries, memos and official reports composed in western Canada a century earlier by government officials, missionaries, merchants and settlers. The information and hints in the documents helped me build up a vivid picture of a long-past era, complete with character sketches of the documents’ authors.

The archivists who organized and tended the records were as impressive as the documents themselves. Unfailingly, they found the records I asked for and delivered them almost before I was ready to work with them.

Since that time, I’ve become a pack rat. I keep books, old documents and pictures because of the pleasure they give me by triggering memories of events I’ve participated in and people I’ve known. In a way, they form the scrapbook of my mind. Now, another type of scrapbook has entered my life: I Googled my name and found all sorts of memory triggers, some expected and others undreamed of.

First, the expected items: links to this blog, my Linked-In profile, my Twitter profile and comments I had left on other blogs. Then there were the books. Jill Bobula has generously listed me as an editor of her remarkable We are Powerful children’s books, so my name appears in numerous links to libraries and educational resources. I had served as editor for G.D. Mitchell’s anecdotal history of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, RCHA – Right of the Line, which led to links at Amazon and numerous military history resources. Finally, there were references to my membership in various associations, including the Heidelberg Digital Imaging Association, the Knights of Columbus and my home parish.

Less expected were links to the history of my home town, the cemetery records listing many of my relatives, obituary notices of family members and even a reference to the honours paper I wrote at the University of Regina. A scan of the birth announcement my wife and I put into the Ottawa Citizen when our elder son was born brought back particularly poignant memories.

Totally unexpected, though, was the link to footnotes in a book published in 1996 by the University of Toronto. During my days at the Archives in the mid-1980′s, I had met a young professor from the University of Saskatchewan who was conducting research into the history of residential schools in Canada; I casually mentioned that some of the records I had been reviewing might pertain to his research. We didn’t meet again. More than a decade later, Professor James R. Miller published Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. In two footnotes, he acknowledged our brief conversation, giving me credit for the reference to records he undoubtedly would have found without any assistance from me. Discovering these footnotes was remarkable. Sixteen years after the fact, Google had drawn my attention to an act that spoke eloquently about the integrity and generous spirit of a dedicated historian.

How does Google compare to the archivists? It may retrieve its information more quickly than the archivists, but it is much less discriminating. To get through the listings that referred to me, I had to wade through great numbers of near misses and mistaken identities. However, that’s not the important comparison. How does it compare to my own record-keeping? Very well indeed for the items that make their way into the public domain. The surprise is how much information actually leaks and the extent of the character sketch that could be constructed. And for my own interest, Google will be at least an extra page in my mental scrapbook.

Do I need another list?

Lists, lists, lists! I have so many lists that I’ve had to develop a list of lists, just to keep things straight. Our culture promotes list-mania. From life coaches to self-help authors to late-night comedians, everyone pushes a list: 10 foods to avoid, 10 foods for a healthier you, 10 foods that make absolutely no difference to your health. Don’t miss the 10 books you have to read, the 10 hi-res images that will dress up your web pages, the 10 tips that will help you master Excel, the 10 things you have to know to raise your children right.  And don’t forget your bucket list.

In business, lists are practical. I couldn’t get along without my lists of goals, targets, priorities, commitments, and tasks. While it’s easy enough to ignore, prune or adapt lists from the general culture, lists in our work environment are hardier creatures. They’re like the dandelions that have taken over so much of the green space in the city: in isolation, a dandelion is beautiful to look at; when countless dandelions colonize a park, the effect is a lot less pleasing. In business, when lists beget lists, perspective and priorities get choked out by the numberless tasks that colonize our day.

Peter Bregman offered some timeless advice in a Harvard Business Review blog post about how to weed our lists. The answer is in another list, of course. This list, though, tracks the things that we should not be doing.

To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask the equally important but often avoided complementary questions: what are you willing not to achieve? What doesn’t make you happy? What’s not important to you? What gets in the way? 

On the personal level, Bregman’s advice can be hard to follow. The world is such a rich place, with so many fascinating things to see, read or experience. We discover talents we didn’t recognize earlier in life. Responsibilities come our way, whether or not we ask for them. How can we not develop those talents and discharge those responsibilities?

In our work lives, it’s even harder to develop and be guided by a ‘no’ list. The most trivial tasks can be presented to us as fundamentally important. Our colleagues may need help only we can provide. Our customers may put temptation in our way.

To attempt everything is to guarantee that the dandelions will take over. To create a well-considered ‘no’ list is an investment in the green spaces of our lives and careers.

Mike Landers specializes in delighting his customers.

Last week, an email from a customer contained a ransom demand — $1 million in unmarked bills — for the safe return of Mike Landers, one of our account managers. No, Mike had not been kidnapped. He had just delivered one of the most inspiring examples of customer service I’ve witnessed in twenty years in this industry; the customer’s ransom note was meant to draw our attention to Mike’s extraordinary effort.

Our customer, located in a city nearly three hours flying time from Ottawa, had designed an annual report for an organization. Unfortunately, delays crept into the project. On the day before the organization needed to distribute copies of its annual report at a shareholders meeting, the reports were still in production and only 200 were in a finished state.

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