Fred’s Countdown to Closure (Episode 1 of 5, revisited)

starush photo

August 1981

With spent flash bulbs and empty film cases bulging out of his pockets, Fred continued to click away. He took photo after photo of grocery shoppers picking up Home Dairy milk from the supermarket's dairy case.

Ralph, vice president of manufacturing for the parent cooperative, stood in one of the side aisles with the store's manager, watching as Fred switched film again. Fred needed both black and white prints as well as color transparencies, and he only had one camera.

Time was short. Fred knew it was 6:00 p.m. They were still in Valparaiso, Indiana, and Fred knew Ralph wanted to get back to Wisconsin that night so they could be in the office the next morning.

Patience. Fred was always impressed by how patient Ralph was with him -- helping haul his clumsy camera and tripod into and out of cars and into dairy plants and even supermarkets.

Fred clicked off five more shots. He glanced at Ralph and could see it was time to go.

"That's it," Fred finally said. "I'm all done."

"You sure you don't want anymore?" Ralph chided, chuckling with the store's manager.

It was Fred's one opportunity to highlight Home Dairy milk, one of the organization’s consumer brands, in a major supermarket setting, and he didn't want to pass it up without getting some usable photography for his publications and audio/visual programs.

Ralph helped Fred load the camera equipment into the car, and they took off for Wisconsin.

"Got a little carried away there," Ralph said.

"Yeah," Fred replied weakly. "Good photography, though, is 90 percent luck. I have to take 10 frames to get one good one."

"Depends on what you consider good," Ralph teased.

"You have to bracket and all that – so you get various exposures."

"All I know is that you blew your photography budget again on this trip," Ralph kidded. "You're going to have 20 pictures of the same thing."

"The trick is to wait out your subject so they get used to you," Fred explained, more seriously, trying to justify the time they had spent at the supermarket. "That's when you get the good candid stuff -- when people forget you're there, clicking away."

But Fred could feel Ralph wasn't interested in his philosophy about taking good pictures.

"Fantastic dairy case, though," Fred offered.

"Right," Ralph agreed. "One of our best customers."

Fred assumed Ralph didn't understand why getting it right was important to him. At the time, Fred didn't fully comprehend it, either. Fred knew that he enjoyed his job as communication director because it gave him the opportunity to plot his progress in continually improving his work.

After all, in publication work, he could always shoot for a better product with the next issue. He started every month with a clean slate -- a new issue to get out and new photos to take.

Yes, perseverance did yield improvement. But, in the process, Fred made a lot of mistakes -- photos that turned out blurry, feature stories that did not jell, business proposals that did not fly.

Failure, though, was a part of his life. It was a lesson Fred had learned early. To walk straightly, to talk clearly, to write plainly -- all required trial and error. There was always that one chance in 90 that he would someday get it right as a person with life-long cerebral palsy.

But, at 38, Fred was as good physically that he was going to get. Intellectually, he accepted that, but, as a first-child perfectionist, he now knew he had inadvertently transferred his thirst for continual improvement to his work.

Life was a gamble, but he had to try, try, and try again – even at the risk of becoming excessive in his pursuit of perfection, Fred would tell himself.

And, during the go-go business years of the 1980s, that made some portions of his life redundant to those who knew him best -- associates, family, friends. He justified his try-again approach to corporate life by insisting that basic change in business is a long-term effort. For example, he personally wanted to see the cooperative switch from commodity sales to value-added marketing, from top-down management to team building and gain sharing.

But the rewards were not going to those who worked to get it right. They went to those who risked even more to move on to new cities, new firms, new people, and new challenges.

Ralph had been right. Fred ended up with 20 very usable photos of people picking up Home Dairy milk from a dairy case. The persistence that served Fred well in his personal life became redundant and was not always useful in the business world.

Fred’s takeaway tip from Episode 1: Recognize that persistence can have an upside as well as downside, depending on the situation.