Most of you know that I have a passion for reading and over the years I have learned a great deal from authors like Tom Peters, Jim Collins, and Simon Sinek. From my years here at NISC and what I have learned from my readings I would summarize my entire wisdom, of my career, with the following statement; Hard is soft and soft is hard. Let me explain.

Hard. These are the financial reports that we share each month with our board and our employees. It's the supporting budgets, the forecasts, the endless PowerPoints. and projections. Hard includes the surveys and the dashboards that we use to track our performance as an organization and as individuals. Hard is the balance in your bank account, your 401k statement, and the number of candles on your birthday cake. Hard is, for the most part, black and white with little room for interpretation.

Soft. Soft as the people of NISC. Now that's not to say that I think you're soft. We actually have to be pretty tough and resilient to survive and thrive here at NISC. What I mean is that our relationships the relationships that we have with one another and our members. It's the culture of our organization. It's understanding what's serving each other and our members really means. It's believing that "do the right thing, always" is more than just a quaint statement. Rather that statement is at the core of how we do business here at NISC. Our shared values may be considered soft but it is how we do what we do.

But we all know that soft is hard. It's hard to build relationships and a strong culture and enduring values. It's hard to build, nurture, maintain, and consistently follow these important items. Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic, once said and I quote the capacity to develop close and enduring relationships is the mark of a leader. Unfortunately, many leaders believe their job is to create the strategy, the organizational structure, and the organizational processes and then just delegate the work to the people, remaining removed from those people. I know from experience that that method that disengagement from the employees is not successful over the long term.

Here at NISC it's critical that we focus on relationships and building the trust with our members and our colleagues that's so critical. So those soft skills are very important. But as our Vice President of research and development Dan Wilbanks recently said to me "our hard-technical skills are also very important. We are a technology company and every single NISC employee from our most recent hire to the CEO needs to be continually upgrading their technical skills to stay relevant. It's not effective for a supervisor just to be a manager of people rather they need to be technically hands-on." In other words, those hard-technical skills are also important for the progression of your career.

Back to the phrase soft is hard. You get things done around here on the basis of your patiently developed network of relationships both inside and outside of NISC. The stronger and the broader your network the more value you bring to our organization. That's why here at NISC our focus is on people not stature, not titles, not things. NISC is nothing more and nothing less than people, our employees, serving people each other as colleagues of NISC are member owners and the communities that we serve.

Anyone in leadership or anyone who aspires to leadership here at NISC must understand that when you're in leadership you are in the full-time people business. It's all about people, Leaders serving people our employee members in our communities.

Another lesson that I have learned is that developing soft skills takes time and patience. Simply put you cannot speed up the soft stuff to try to do so is a design for disaster. Relationships are built on trust and trust is established over time. Difficult projects, members, and employees’ situations where you have to prove yourself and over time establish and strengthen those relationships based on your proven track record.

So in summary I would say that the hard part of NISC is not the numbers, the financial reports, wins and losses, employee recruiting and retention. Rather the hard part is the soft stuff. Relationships, trust, credibility, and consistency. Although this approach to our business may seem a bit unusual it is how we do things around here. It is what has made us successful for the past 50 years and what will make us successful in the future. Because you see, here NISC, we pride ourselves in being Wired Differently and we understand that hard is soft and soft is hard.

Thanks for listening.

I appreciate you,

Vern