Featuring Tim Haslam – Team builder and forward thinker! I met Tim and his wife Diana when we simultaneously began our adoption process. We have held hands, hugged a lot, eaten overly frosted birthday cake, bravely forged relationships with birth families, and watched as our four adopted children grew. And they are still growing! I admire them both more than words can say, as each of our families grapple with the small victories along this complicated set of paths we undertook. When Tim told me he was writing a book, I had to wonder how he would ever find the time? In addition to working long hours, he and his wife also remodeled their home, doing much of the work themselves, volunteered extensively, and found time for camping, fishing and all sorts of other outdoor family activities. I’ll never forget the day that Tim presented me with a signed copy of his magnificent memoir --- ah, but I’m getting ahead of the story. I’ll let Tim take it from here…
Tell us about where you grew up, how that framed your ethics and viewpoint on life and what lessons were learned that you’ve carried forward during your remarkable life.
I was born in Hollywood…yep, the movie place in Southern California, and raised in a pretty typical, "Leave It to Beaver" like, middle class neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. My dad was an executive at 20th Century Fox and headed the wardrobe departments there. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work my summer vacations at the studio while in college. It was pretty exciting even though most of my work involved brooms and shovels. It was actually pretty hard work and, as my dad had a really good reputation around the studio, I was strongly motivated to maintain the family reputation for work and contribution.
My neighbors in Van Nuys included doctors and lawyers, school teachers, airline pilots and salesmen. Most all of the women were stay-at-home moms who worked as hard as their gone-from-home husbands. There were various religious denominations represented on our street as well as atheists and agnostics, none of which seemed to matter to anyone as this territory was generally accepted to be private and personal with tolerance and acceptance easily blending our different beliefs. There were Republicans and Democrats, and everybody seemed to get along really well…and so that’s what comes to mind when I think of a neighborhood…everybody was different and unique and yet it was all a natural part of "our" neighborhood…we were all neighbors and neighborly. It was a stable and safe place to grow up. All the adults were great role models who had learned a lot of their own life lessons during the Great Depression and the Second World War although none of them ever talked about those experiences; they seemed to be too busy tending to the responsibilities of their present lives and the futures of their kids. I could go to virtually any house on our street and be welcomed and feel at home. Yet I would be expected to behave myself and show proper respect for everything and everyone within the various homes. It was really great that there was almost always somebody to play with as a kid and we rarely ever had to be driven anywhere to be entertained. I walked to public schools and as I grew older my neighborhood expanded in geography but not in character.
I think these experiences still constitute my frame of reference for most of my perspectives and attitudes, and I think of it through rose colored glasses as the good ole days. Respect, responsibility and hard, honest work were in ample evidence everywhere…oh, and always a lot of fun too.
You served in the military in Vietnam and have written and published an amazing and very interesting book about that period of your life and the life of our country called, Stars and Stripes and Shadows. Can you share with us what prompted you to write this book and the book’s focus and themes?
One evening in the winter of 2003, at our dinner table, my son Austin, then 11 years old and keenly interested in GI Joes, said something like… "You were in a war weren’t you Dad?" I told him I was and started to fumble about trying to say more. I think he lost interest within a few seconds but it set something in motion within me. The next morning I took my laptop to a little coffee shop in Alamo with the intent of writing some of the things I could remember. My mom had kept all the letters I had written home while I was in Vietnam and so I had those to help rekindle some of the long buried memories. Once I got started I really couldn’t stop and so, four years later, the story was told. Certainly this was never undertaken as a commercial endeavor, but the spread of the book has reconnected me with many of the men I served with over there and that has been of immense value to me. One of those men told me that he had spent 35 years trying to forget about that war and the last five years trying to remember. I think that’s been true for a lot of us.
In addition to your years of service to your country, you have had a very robust and varied professional career, starting work in the boom days of the tech sector at Burroughs, thriving through the boom, coping with the collapse of tech stock values and then re-engineering your professional focus and your career path. Please share with us how you started your career path, what prompted you to make the career changes you have and how you were able to do so successfully during some very challenging times.
My college roommate was working at Burroughs when I finished college and said I could probably get a job there as I now had a degree. He was right; and that was about all the credentials I had. I was first hired as a material planner and had to quickly learn about transistors and resistors. Not so much about the technical aspects but what to do when the production line ran out of them. I spent three years there and moved up into the position of Master Scheduler with responsibilities for scheduling the whole production facility.
I was never one to be very focused on a career path and so I’d characterize my approach in the early years as one of always trying to move forward keeping my eyes and ears and options open. Most of my career was in high tech and, as I’m a technical illiterate I’ve had to rely on a more basic common sense approach to problem solving and the pursuing of business opportunities. That seemed to work pretty well for me over the years and allowed me to move my way up and play along with the techies. I’m more the analytic type than a "driver" and yet I’ve always really liked working with people and so I think that’s helped me to be able to coach people and teams in a less autocratic argumentative way than is often the norm. Over my working years I’ve experienced mergers, spin-offs, and acquisitions. I’ve ridden the business cycle roller coaster through numerous ups and downs…some gradual and some abruptly steep. I’ve benefited from stock options inflated during the high tech boom times, and my wife Diana and I have had to tighten our belts when boom would suddenly start to look and feel like bust. Today, in my work at Kaiser Permanente, I have a lot of confidence in my ability to draw on these experiences and use them to help guide people into and through opportunities that they might not otherwise have considered. They sometimes even think I’m pretty smart when, in fact, I’m really using my technical ignorance to pull out the basic, common sense solutions to problems.
I hear rumors that you are working on another book and that this one will be Americana fiction. Tell us how you find time to write in addition to being a full time employee in a challenging career, a husband and father and maybe finding a small bit of time to rest and relax. What inspires you?
I’ve been slowly pecking away at another book, a novel this time, for a couple of years. It’s part of my Saturday and Sunday morning routine to go to one of several coffee shops and write for an hour or so. I can’t do it any place that’s quiet and isolated. I like having the noise and motion of living people around me and yet I can easily tune out the specifics of what they might be up to and concentrate on bringing life to the characters in my book. I have this fantasy that someday I’ll have the time to actually write more than a page in a day. The whole writing experience is really fun and rejuvenating for me offering a most interesting set of challenges that involve words, plots, people and places with an objective of taking them all somewhere together in a cohesive and hopefully artful way.
You were personally honored this past September 11th during the 9/11 memorial ceremony in Walnut Creek. Please share that day with us and what that meant to you.
A neighbor of ours, Bryan Welden, is very active in supporting our troops when they return home by pulling together welcome home celebrations for them. Bryan also has been active in orchestrating an annual 9/11 memorial ceremony on the west side of Walnut Creek. Bryan, knowing of my book, invited me, as a Vietnam Veteran, to come to the 9/11 commemoration to sell and sign some of my books. I was happy to take him up on his offer. As I was talking to people passing by my little book display, my wife Diana said I should come and listen to a speech that Bryan was making to a large group of people that had gathered. As I approached, Bryan asked that I come join him and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes the focus of the commemoration turned to me in the form of an overdue "welcome home" from the Vietnam War. I was given plaques, commemorative coins, countless handshakes and hugs. It was awesome. I certainly didn’t deserve any of this but I was honored to be a face for the two million Americans who served in Vietnam and came home to a country consumed by political turmoil.
Tim, Diana and Austin Haslam honored by veterans groups at 9/11 memorial ceremony in Walnut Creek.
What advice do you have for today’s challenging times regarding re-engineering ourselves for longevity in our careers?
Remember I’m a technical illiterate and so a term like re-engineering is probably out of my jurisdiction. I’ve become a "process" professional in the last ten years and so I’ll more naturally reach into my "process tool kit" to answer this one. Basically, in whatever I do—business or personal—there are three things I always try to be mindful of; where I am now, where a better place to be is, and what the obstacles are between the two. These three images are constantly changing as life is always in motion. So, my advice for longevity is to maintain our ability to keep up with the motion. Certainly at my age there are a lot of signals suggesting I should get off this train and take a break for awhile. Beguiling as this sometimes sounds, I know how risky it would be to give in and just watch from the sidelines. I try to keep myself in pretty good shape. I’ve always liked to be on my feet so being outdoors and playing isn’t too hard. Reading and writing keep the mental images moving. My 63 years of successes and failures have made me pretty good at removing a lot of the obstacles in the minefields that keep getting laid in front of us. This doesn’t mean we have to ride the same train we’ve been on for our long careers. Perhaps our "better place" image may require a transfer to another line?
What lessons have you learned that you would like to share with us about having such a full life with so many accomplishments and being fulfilled and happy?
OK, here’s where honesty…not humility…has to rise to the surface. I really don’t see anything that I’ve done as unusual. Certainly I’ve been really fortunate my whole life, particularly when it comes to the people I’ve been closest to. I mentioned the strengths of my parents and the other adults that surrounded my childhood. I’ve always had a lot of great and true friends that have allowed me to participate in lots of things. My wife Diana is the real hero however, complementing my cerebral endeavors with her practical determination and spirit. Any accomplishment attributed to me must be shared with her. Her strengths and courage to take on the day to day things that I shy away from are what allow me to keep moving along to my own rhythms.
Since this is the Ballou Plum Blog I really would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the vital role that Lynn and Marilyn have played in our lives over the last 20 plus years that we’ve known and worked with them. Their guidance, coaching and brilliant stewardship of our "nest egg" has also allowed us to reach this point in our lives with lots of options for finding the "better places" and for getting to them. I particularly appreciate Lynn’s honest assessments of some of my ideas tendered with the same sort of diplomacy that my mother used… "NO, YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO DO THAT!"
What else would you like to share with us about your remarkable life and your thoughts about the times we live in?
Since you’re giving me the pulpit here for a moment I’ll share some thoughts about the state of the American neighborhood today. I’m bothered by the polarization of the folks in this neighborhood and the efforts of partisan politics to keep dividing us up along the simplistic lines of us and them, good and bad, right and wrong, even segregating the neighborhood into red and blue states. This, in my mind is completely inconsistent with the reality of our moving world and a long way from the "good ole days" that I experienced growing up (or perhaps just pretend to remember). It seems to me that every time our country faces a disaster or problem, the reaction from our leaders these days is first to affix blame, then to use the situation to scare everyone into thinking that their way will keep us out of these messes in the future. Back in the neighborhood that I remember, when there was a disaster or a problem, or when any of the neighbors were in trouble, the reaction was always the same…how can I help? I keep listening for these words from those who’d like my vote. If and when I actually start hearing them I’ll have a lot more confidence in our economy and our financial future.
Tim and I worked on his Blog just before the Chilean miners were rescued --- an immediate and excellent example of what Tim applauds as the "How can I Help" approach to life as the better path. I know many of you personally embrace this philosophy in your own lives, and over the years as we share all of your stories, I can only say how blessed we are to be part of your lives! Thank you, Tim, for reminding us about our commonality.
Many of you may be interested in Tim’s book, or in simply discussing your own experiences with him. Who knows --- maybe there’s yet another story to tell? If you’d like to reach Tim, he’d be happy to hear from you at TimHslm@aol.com. For those of you who would like a copy of his book, here is the link to order a copy, or you can simply email Tim: http://www.authorhouse.com/Bookstore/BookSearchResults.aspx?Author=Tim+Haslam
