Ireland, Rewind to the Fecking Beginning

FUDGE! Only I don't mean fudge. I mean THE Word. The queen mother of dirty words... That's not really a bad way to start a post on Ireland as it is a fairly common word in the Irish vocabulary -- The real dirty word I mean, not "fudge". However, I didn't intend on scaring away those with sensitive ears right off the bat. The thing is, though, I lost my little notebook that I carried around hundreds  of miles around the Emerald Isle taking notes of the things we did that day and little observations. That's part of the reason that I am so late in getting around to finally writing more about Ireland than just the adventure that we had in getting back. Procrastination due to anxiety, stress, and depression play into it too. I'm clawing my way back to some normalcy just by starting on this. A friend sent me a quote about just getting started and then everything falls into place or some such thing. The quote's around here somewhere; I just can't find it at the moment.

Anyway, I figure I can piece together what we actually did each day based on the photos that I have and that my mom and Jen took. (My mother was a photo taking MACHINE... which i guess would make her a camera. Hm.) I will probably lose some of the little observations that I had written down, though what is going to stick with me are the little memories that I still have stuck with me. Maybe those will do. Or maybe the photos will evoke some little thoughts as well. I'm not sure. There were just little things, like thinking it was sort of funny how Trinity College had sweatshirts the sort that fans would wear to a football game. Maybe fans do stop in the university bookstore to buy some apparel before rugby matches or quidditch tournaments or whatever they play on a Saturday afternoon.

So I know that we landed in Dublin. Yeah, that much I am certain of.. but I need to rewind. Our flight from Orlando to Washington Dulles was delayed by almost an hour. We ate dinner at MCO. I had a hazy IPA, which was my first alcoholic drink in 171 days. I need to write a completely separate post on drinking during this vacation. It's a complicated feeling, even now after we are done and back home. Then I had a Sam Adams Hazy IPA NA (non-alcoholic), which was really pretty good. Less hoppy than the IPA I had just had (sorry, I didn't take notes on what brewery that first one was from).

Okay, so the flight from Orlando to Dulles was fairly uneventful. I don't remember what I did on the flight and don't have my scuzzy little notebook. Do people still use the word "scuzzy"? The plane got  to the gate in Dulles, though just as the flight from Dulles to Dublin was supposed to be taking off. They held that flight, though, as there were apparently enough of us trying to make that connection. Besides myself, Jen, Mom, and Mike, there was another couple that was in our group coming from Cape Canaveral. Plus I think there were three or four others. Also, I had Usain Bolt's brother pushing my wheelchair. I've never gotten through an airport so quickly. So thankfully we all made the flight to Ireland, plus Jen had worked it that we had a ton of extra leg room, you know, for my booted leg and all. (If you are just joining us, I made either the courageous or insane decision to have lapiplasty done to correct the bunion on my right foot a couple months before leaving for Ireland. The initial surgery got pushed out due to me getting Covid over the holidays, so at this point I was just six weeks out from surgery and had just been put into a walking boot rather than a full cast. I was still on crutches, though.)

I do remember what I did on the flight from the U.S. to Ireland. I slept. However, I really didn't even sleep all that much because the in-air entertainment had the show "What We Do in the Shadows". I honestly don't know what prompted me to decide to watch it. I think the one beer in Orlando must have gone to my head because I was laughing out loud at this ridiculous vampire comedy. Laughing out loud with headphones in on a full plane. I believe I binged the full season. And haven't watched another episode since.

I really thought that being away from work and doing a lot of travelling from place to place would afford me a lot of time to get caught up on all the reading that I've been meaning to do. If you plan on following my series of blog posts regarding this trip, notice just how often I mention reading a book. Compare this with the number of times I mention watching rugby or playing video games on my tablet or staring vacantly out a window. Compare the number of books I mention finishing to the number of bookstores I stop in and number of books I mention buying!

Anyway, we made it to Dublin without the plane crashing or even losing an engine. All the way across the Atlantic Ocean with zero engine failures. Tied a record.

I've Never Been to the Galapagos

 I just got done with an inspiring Leadership Open Space virtual conference with my colleagues at Nordstrom. One of the topics that came up is How do we continue or transfer the Nordstrom culture to a new working environment post-pandemic?

Nordstrom has a culture that in my view is heavily influenced by two principles. First, if you know or have read anything about Nordstrom culture and certainly if you are one of our loyal customers, you know that Nordstrom culture starts with how we treat our customers in the store. Our store employees are truly customer obsessed. The second principle is that as large as Nordstrom is, it is still a family business. The Nordstroms sit on the board, are key stockholders, and hold chief officer roles. More than that, though, they have a genuine care for us as employees just as when their great-grandfather began the store. My first meeting as a Nordstrom manager was with all the other engineering managers, over 200 of us, in a ballroom in the Four Seasons in Seattle overlooking the sound. Blake Nordstrom reminisced about how that meeting had been previously held as a barbecue at his home and lamented a bit that it couldn't still be that way. (The Four Seasons doesn't suck, though.)

Like other corporations, Nordstrom is beginning to think about what the workplace will look like post-pandemic. I believe it is certain to say that we are not all going back to our prairie dog villages of cubicles in big office buildings. As a manager, I am looking to fill open developer positions and am not just looking local to Denver here. I already support contractors in every timezone in the U.S. not to mention in India, and don't see a reason to change that. My belief is that many companies will adopt some sort of hybrid solution with employees "hot desking" (a number of employees co-sharing a group of desks) and making use of conference rooms for meetings where collaboration is especially effective, but otherwise working remotely. 

Like I said, Nordstrom has a very specific culture. A culture unlike other places I've worked. With our group being in Denver and Nordstrom HQ in Seattle, we used to have engineers go out to Seattle almost expressly so they could get a better sense of what the Nordstrom corporate culture is. Now that kind of travel is no more, and likely won't be again. Plus  with even many in Seattle contemplating working remotely and with us finding tech talent in other areas of the country, the question put forward today was, how do we continue that culture in the future? We had a breakout session on this topic, and after 45 minutes the surprising answer I think we came to is "We don't." We don't continue this same culture; we evolve it. We keep what is good, we throw out what just won't work anymore, and we evolve the rest to fit our new environment.

I sort of joked with my Seattle counterparts that part of the Nordstrom culture, being an outsider from a corporate perspective, is wandering around downtown Seattle trying to figure out in which building you are supposed to be meeting someone. The buildings are One, 805, 864, and 865. One is easy: That's the flagship store and there are offices above that. 805, 864, and 865 are not addresses. Those are "store numbers" as well. You would think that at the very least 864 would be next to 865, but you would be wrong! 865 is next to 805, and 804 is a good fifteen minute walk away. (Twenty if you are going in the other direction because it is uphill!) I mean, how are we ever going to replicate that sense of frustration that every Nordstrom employee must have realizing they are in the wrong building for a meeting starting NOW?!

I think we go back to the essence and the principles that made Blake wish he could invite us all back to his place. We start with being customer obsessed. As internal service providers and as people managers we recognize that being customer obsessed means being obsessed with making sure that our store employees can do their very best job and that our digital storefront performs its very best. Then we continue to treat each other as family as we've tried to manage staying close to our own families through this time. We get creative in including them even when we can't all be together. We take time out to check in on each other. We recognize that sometimes we are just going to have some bad days, and that is okay. 

There WILL be a new environment coming whether it is this summer or fall and we need to evolve with that changing environment.

Divided We Die of Typhus

I woke up this morning needing a pep talk. With no Knute Rockne there nor drill sergeant, I turned to myself for some inspiration. I didn't exactly find a Rockne speech in me. I was able to remind myself that our current situation is not normal, nor is it the "new normal". The current situation is not normal, yet we try as try might to seek "normal". For work, even though people are all working remotely, even though they are all dealing with their personal issues regarding dealing with the virus, we are still asking teams to deliver as if things are normal.

So I reminded myself that this is not the new normal and thought I'd pass on that message to my team at work. I also thought I'd try and enhance my inspirational message with some historical inspiration. Where in time, besides the oft-cited Spanish Flue Pandemic, were people cooped up for months at a time. Valley Forge came to mind. They were cooped up there for an entire winter, right? That must have been like three whole months, right? 

So, like I do, I looked up what I could about Valley Forge. They weren't there three months. The Continental Army was camped out there for six months! Dec. 19, 1777 - June 19, 1778. Okay, granted, they could leave their huts -- And it's a good thing they could since an entire squad of twelve enlisted soldiers typically shared a stone hut, sometimes with wives and children as well. Also, the winter wasn't as bad then as we were made to believe in elementary school. (Apparently the winter encampment two years later in Jockey Hollow was much worse and was the root for the myth of the horrible Valley Forge winter.) Still they suffered typhus, typhoid fever, dysentery, influenza, pneumonia, and smallpox (because a group of the soldiers had not been inoculated the year before when General Washington ordered it), not to mention the starvation. (Yesterday, I ordered DoorDash from one of the local Mexican restaurants.) About 1000 of the 12,000 soldiers encamped there did not survive the winter. About 8% mortality.

Anyway, it could be worse... I guess. It wasn't exactly the inspirational message that I was looking for, so I decided to play it. Plus, what did those men have to look forward to? America lost almost every major battle for the next several years until Nathanael Greene took the fight to the Southern theater. 

There is a battle to come for us, probably many. For Nordstrom there is going to be a much smaller pool of higher-end retail shoppers. We're going to be battling other retailers for those customers. For us as a nation there is going to be a battle of words over how and when to come out of this mess and get the economy going again. For many of us individually it is going to be a struggle just trying to get back to normal, to find jobs again, to restart some semblance of a social life, to just get back to a routine. One thing that I think this pandemic has shown us is that we accomplish much more when we can work together rather than apart. The phrase, "United we stand; divided we fall," comes to mind -- something to keep in mind.