I was raised with dogs. One of the first black & white pictures my parents took of me was with my grandparents and Gypsy, their white spitz. In my early years in Africa where my father built and ran a hospital, there was Buck, a German shepherd with a real ability for hunting wild game. There still remains in family lore the story of how Buck stole a rare, canned ham that had been shipped from the United States over months and months of travel to reach us. Buck ate the whole thing. Not only was he “sick as a dog,” my father always ended the story with “I thought your mother was going to kill him.” Buck was inadvertently speared by one of the African hunters while chasing a large antelope through thick underbrush and died.
The first dog that my brothers and I claimed as our own was in Africa as well. Ahab, a basenji, was as consummate a hunter as Buck had been. I watched him run down rabbits on open ground. One day he tackled a wild boar that was three times his size. He was ripped to ribbons in the effort to pull the boar down. Being a hunting dog in Central Africa was a rough job.
When we came back to the United States, my parents had Shelties; skittish, high-strung dogs that could focus so completely that they lost track of what they were actually doing. Once, I watched one spinning madly on a dock in her excitement over something. She fell over the side of the dock and had to swim to shore. There’s a lesson in that somewhere.
During the early part of our marriage, my wife (who was also raised with dogs) and I did not have a dog. Then we decided our kids needed one. There was the sweetheart border collie-mix Daisy to begin with. My young son named her after the pretty woman character in the TV show, “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Then there was the lean, long-legged black and tan hound. We named her Missouri after my great-grandmother. I’m not sure how the good lady would have reacted to being remembered in that fashion.
A completely black husky-lab mix we found wandering in the country near our farm came next. Our kids were up and gone by then. Jude proved to my wife and me that we had dogs because we wanted them, not because our children needed companions.
My most recent rescue is a red border collie. Cooper is more intense and high-energy than any dog I’ve ever had. All she wants is a job. Since I don’t have a herd of sheep, we go to the park each morning to run. And to throw sticks. Time after time, I throw the stick. She takes off with every bit of energy contained in that lean red-coated body. Her job, which she does with every fiber of muscle and canine focus, is to bring the stick back to me and drop it at my feet to be thrown again. Time after time after time until I’m the one that tires and stops.
During those “work sessions,” I can be in the middle of a field, cock my arm to throw the stick and, before I release it, Cooper will take off in the direction I’m going to throw the stick. If I turn 90 degrees or 180 or whatever for my next throw, she’s off in the right direction before the stick leaves my hand.
I realized the other day how she knows in which direction I will throw the stick. In that flash of a moment when I cock my arm (which tells her that the stick is going out), she follows the glance of my eyes and heads in that direction. She never fails to be in the right place at the right time. Just as with the dog spinning off the dock into the water, there is a lesson in that.
For many years I worked as a vendor for a large national integrator of material handling systems. They were a tough, demanding customer that did really fine work for the end user. Their core strength lay in contract administration. Whether you were their customer or their vendor the only way to survive a project profitably was to understand the contract for that project and the integrator’s intent to make money in any legal manner possible. That intent wasn’t wrong in any sense. It just meant I always had to know the contract as well or better than they to avoid “project creep” for which I did not get paid. In many years, I never had a project with this customer in which I did not make a reasonable profit and, in some cases, a really fine profit. Across those years we maintained a friendly and viable relationship as well.
I see a lesson about this in my dog Cooper’s way of doing her job. She knows what is supposed to happen...I intend to throw the stick. She stays on target by watching the nuances of my actions. She knows the direction I’m headed with that stick in the same instant that I do. She always grabs the stick the moment it hits the ground. If the stick bounces (sticks do not bounce well or often), she is ready and catches it on the bounce.
We owe that to ourselves as businesses that survive and make a profit from our actions and products. Focusing intently on every written and spoken word from our customers, on every glance and nuance, allows us to know what they really want, insure they get what we’ve agreed to sell them and to make a profit for our company. That is the entire basis for business.
