On the Road with Henry Albert

Hello again,

One of the principles I have operated my business from is the old adage when life throws you lemons you make lemonade. This adage has served me well over the years through the many twists and turns that my business as well as my life has gone through.

I adopted “When life gives you lemons make lemonade” originated from my days racing stock cars.   Nearly every year something in the rulebook would be changed in a manner that I found would disrupt the performance of my racecar. Sometimes the rule change would add an expense that would make it more difficult to be competitive and other times it would take away, something I all ready had which would reduce my cars performance. 

Here is how the process would normally go, during the racing season drivers and team owners would enthusiastically lobby either the sanctioning body or the track promoter for rules that would most benefit their race team. I was always active in lobbying for rules that would benefit my race team and many times the racing division as a whole. Sometimes my efforts would lead to changes that I had lobbied for.  However, all the other teams were actively pursuing the powers that be in a similar manner.

Despite all of these efforts we were not the decision makers. It wasn’t until after the rule book was published that we knew what the rules would be for the new season. Some of the rules I would find worked to my advantage while others did not.   At this point I was left to decide, do I want to continue to race or not. Every year that I could I raced. 

Many of the teams exerted their energy complaining about the rules rather than finding ways to make the rules work in their favor.   Little did I know that my early days of racing would lead me to a philosophy that would serve me so well in my business today. I learned how to stop concentrating on how bad the new rule was, but instead I turned my thoughts over to make decisions made by the officials work in my favor. On each rule if I looked hard enough I could find silver lining to be exploited advantageously on the track. Sometimes making lemonade out of lemons was not the answer, as at times I had to make lemon pie.

The big parallel I see is that whether it be officials in racing or regulators in trucking neither one gets behind the wheel.

Do you see where I am going with lemons to lemonade? I would like to hear your comments and thoughts on how you have made out of lemonade lemons. Just click on the comment button below the blog.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 4, 2010 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.