Forbes, of all places, has a short piece featuring leadership lessons from a few successful fishing guides. Interesting insight from those that work the sticks on a drift boat, and ride the platform of a flats skiff all day. I think these are generally good ideas no matter what business you’re in. Below are a couple I particularly like.
Tom Montgomery - Jackson Hole, Wyoming:
Years ago, when I was floating a river on, say, the right bank, and a client looked over his shoulder to the left one, I would confidently say: ‘that bank’s not any good, this is where we want to be.’ But now I think: ‘maybe there are fish over there.’ And as often as not, I give the other bank a shot.
I’ve come to realize that narrow expertise isn’t everything; that it can blind a person to the fact that those who know less still have good ideas and insights. Listening carefully and keeping an open mind have made me a better guide.
Oliver White, owner of Abaco Lodge - Bahamas:
One of the biggest breakthroughs of my guiding career was understanding that it is acceptable—and sometimes required—to tell the clients (the ‘boss’) ‘no.’ A lot of your clients are very much type ‘A’ personalities. They are used to giving directions and getting their way. Developing the ability to say ‘no’ to guys who run companies and countries, and who were paying you for the day on the water, is a very practical leadership skill I got from guiding.
My Dad and I will be on the Missouri River in August. This trailer for Sipping Dry is my daily reminder of what’s to come. The Mo is both a dry fly Mecca and a river that many anglers find humbling. We’ll see later this summer. Until then, enjoy this very well done piece from Sharptail Media.
I’ve been away from here for six moths or so. Even the best of intentions don’t always help in finding time to write. I’m working on getting back in the swing. Maybe shorter pieces, photos, who knows. Topics may still range around the fly fishing-outdoors-etc areas, but, again, who knows.
Jim Harrison has led a life that seemingly could only exist in the novels and screenplays that have flowed from his pen. With a lazy eye, a gout-stricken frame, and a lethargic meat grinder of a voice, Harrison’s physical attributes threaten to betray his literary resume. He’s the author of Legends of the Fall and True North, as well as dozens of other fiction, non-fiction and poetry works. In typical fashion, he once described Hemingway’s work as “a wood stove that doesn’t give off much heat.” Surely a debate for another time, and one I wouldn’t get into with Jim Harrison.
Harrison is a native of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His life has followed a path leading from Michigan’s wilderness, through education at Michigan State (where he was a classmate of author Thomas McGuane, with whom he still exchanges weekly letters), a professorship at SUNY Stony Brook, and a literary career littered with accolade.
Jim Harrison has become a sort of western cult figure leading a life many wish to have, but few have the guts to pull off. As an early participant in Livingston, Montana’s artistic renaissance, Harrison developed a reputation as a town eccentric. He, along with others like artist and outdoorsman Russell Chatham, built a culture emphasizing good food and drink as much as anything else. To wit, Harrison once enjoyed a 37-course meal.
To me, Harrison represents an arrangement of personality to strive for: the personification a culture at home among city literary societies and in the open wilderness. Not least important, he’s an avid fly fisherman. He and his wife divide their time between Livingston in the summer and Patagonia, Arizona in the winter. Harrison spends the warm months searching for trout in the legendary rivers surrounding his home.
Anthony Bourdain featured Harrison in his profile of Montana, included here. And, damn, he mentions brown trout fishing in the first thirty seconds. Right on, Jim.
Another piece of Harrison from the same show includes him preparing a meal for Bourdain, and speaking philosophically in a way one has had to live some pretty rich experiences to reflect upon.
Most days, Mr. Harrison winds down from writing by hunting with Zilpha, his Scottish Lab. One of their favorite spots is a ranch owned by the San Rafael Cattle Company — a place that is, as Mr. Harrison says, “preposterously beautiful,” almost savannah-like, with knobby hills, rolling ridges and stately emory oaks. Off in the not-so-far distance are the Huachuca Mountains, sometimes dusted with snow. “This place is so visually overwhelming that you forget you’re hunting,” Mr. Harrison said. “I’m spoiled. I have to hunt where it’s lovely, which means that I am no longer a serious American sportsman of the blast-and-cast school.”
Chef and restaurateur Mario Batali, a friend of Mr. Harrison’s for a decade, often seeks inspiration in his freezer, usually packed with morsels such as antelope liver and white tailed deer kidneys. (Mr. Harrison “will eat anything,” says his novelist daughter, Jamie Potenberg.)
Last fall, Mr. Batali, who called Mr. Harrison’s house “gastronomic heaven,” cooked a feast for 18 people there. He made cheese ravioli in a Hungarian partridge ragout, and fideua—a Catalan variety of paella that’s made with thin noodles—with grilled birds, he said.
During productive stretches, Mr. Harrison, who chain-smokes American Spirits and downs a glass of vodka every afternoon around 4, spends weeks in his writing studio. He keeps a poem by the 14th-century Zen Buddhist poet Muso Soseki on a bulletin board next to the desk: “It would be merciful for people not to come calling and disturb the loneliness of the mountains, to which I have returned from the sorrows of the world.”
