Much of what I learned about improvisation in business came from my father, “Cowboy Bob” a farmer, entrepreneur and incorrigible dreamer from Ireland, Indiana by way of Louisville, Kentucky.

As my friend, the screenwriter Christopher Lofton, describes my early relationship with Cowboy Bob: “He was a teacher who didn’t know what he was teaching and you were a student who didn’t know what you were learning.” But teach and learn we did, and today I gladly share what I learned with my own sons, and with anyone else who’s interested. All you have to do is ask.

Most businesspeople could learn a lot from some time working on a farm like the one where we lived (there are not many of them left any more). No one is more adaptive or more adept at dealing with edge economies than a farmer devising strategies for keeping a family-owned-and-operated farm alive. The variables — markets, weather, cost of raw materials — fluctuate madly. The lessons that come from working with the earth cannot be taught by a mortal animal, and cannot be learned any other way.

The teamwork and resilience required for family farming are matters of survival. You don’t question what needs to be done, you simply do it (though if you’re 12 years old and have been assigned to muck a barn when you want to be watching TV, you might gripe a lot about what needs to be done).

The most important aspect of the whole family farm shebang, was that my mom, Fern, made my father’s performance as local legend, Cowboy Bob, possible. She talked sense to the bankers, kept her six children focused on their schoolwork and their music and their chores, and kept the peace between restless sons and their rambunctious dad. All the while, she showed us how to laugh at life, exposed us to art and language and literature, and demonstrated unfailing grace in the most trying of times. If not for her support, and her abiding tolerance for my father’s schemes and dreams, our family story surely would have been a tragic one, not the happy one we experienced. We may have learned improvisation from my father, but it was my mother who showed us how to change the game.

As many family farmers do, my dad always held some kind of job off the farm to balance the unpredictability of the farm’s revenue. The best of these jobs, it seemed to me at the time, was his position as the southern Indiana sales rep for the Bel-Tone Hearing Aid Company. This came as a relief to me. No longer would my old man be known to my friends as a nutty rehabilitator of castoff horses and dreamer of unlikely dreams, the Don Quixote of Dubois County. Nosirree, he was a guy with a sweet company car, a big yellow Plymouth Fury III, and an office on the town square with his name on its door in gold lettering.

And then one day, just like that, it was all gone. No more company car, no more office on the town square, no more name on the door, and no explanation about what had happened.

Months later, I asked my mom about it. She said that my dad’s boss at Bel-Tone had invited him to the company Christmas party and he had declined because it conflicted with one of my high school basketball games. “If you don’t show up at the party on Friday, you won’t have a job on Monday,” the boss told him.

Without a word, Cowboy Bob handed over the keys to the company car, his hearing test kit and his sales records, walked out of the office with his name on the door in gold lettering, and never looked back. We never heard him say one recriminatory thing about Bel-Tone, the boss or the situation that resulted in the loss of his job. The choice was clear for him. The choice was easy. If asked to choose between business and his family, he was always going to choose family, no questions asked, no hard feelings, and not a second thought about the possible consequences of his actions.

So this is Lesson One, the first lesson about anything, really: Let yourself be guided by love. My father loved his family, loved his ridiculous horses, and thanked God for the life he embraced in a great big bear hug of love. Nothing else was even in the race. Acting on love, doing what you do because of it, is the only way that the pursuit of happiness can be a happy trip. First name your loves. Then go out and prove them to the world.

Tags: basketball, Beltone Hearing Aids, Bob Bonifer, Character, Christopher Lofton, Cowboy Bob, Don Quixote, Dubois County, Entrepreneurship, Family Farm, Fern Bonifer, Improvisation, Indiana, Ireland, Love, Small Business

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Character, Entrepreneurship. 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.