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Whether or not I fully understood at the time it was imparted, your infallible wisdom has been profound at all stages of my life. The dedication and incomparable passion you brought to agriculture and the people business continue to encourage and inspire me, especially at times when I struggle to find my own passion. Your unfailing love bestowed so generously upon your family and treasured members of the community is overwhelming even now, and you remain a model to anyone who seeks a model for how to live.

Goodness, the stories I could tell about our adventures growing up in this family. Granted, some tales are sworn to secrecy and will remain that way until I forget our vows of silence or the statutes of limitations are lifted, either of which could happen at any time. What a blessing it is to have traveled our journey of youth together—I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You taught me to embrace the unknown, as you truly understood nothing on a farm but didn’t seem to care.

Frozen in fear, I stood silently staring down the barrel of a pistol. While not sure what kind of pistol, I clearly recognized it was a gun. The make and model seemed a bit unimportant at this moment in time.

The police officer holding the gun was intense. He screamed at me, “Get down! Get down!”

How does someone who is teaching a business training class find herself in such a predicament? A million questions flashed through my head but the most daunting one was: “Where did my life of crime start?”

I am just a simple farm girl from the Ozarks. Was this going to be the legacy that I leave? Seriously, I have college degrees in agriculture.

Actually, this book is not about my life of crime, but what I have learned about leadership. In the corporate world, we are taught that leadership is all about influence:

Based on that model and my early escapades in my corporate career, becoming influential seemed a bit out of reach for someone like me.

I have noticed through the years that a different model is actually more effective. Interestingly enough, it is the same model my dad taught me from the farm:

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a collection of confessions that will explain everything you need to know about leadership. I promise.

I was born in Arkansas and raised on a small dairy farm. Everything I needed to know about leadership I learned on the farm. Or, should I say, I learned from a farmer.

I was fortunate to have a close family and be blessed with good parents. Growing up on a farm isn’t glamorous. Oh no; farm life is not like living in a rustic log house, doing chores two hours a day, and then reading a newspaper on the front porch with a perfectly groomed collie resting peacefully under your feet. Television has missed reality just a tad. If you want a reality show that is the real deal, try farming for a living.

We lived in a small but modern red brick house on 120 rolling acres in the Ozarks straddling the Arkansas-Oklahoma border. Again, film and TV will always paint a picture of a green, grassy knoll. Northwest Arkansas, where our farm resided, is far from that. Grassy yes, for about four months out of the year. We were lucky to be able to experience all four seasons. On rare occasions (not really that rare) we could experience all four in one day. Yep, that is true.

Our farm was unique in that we had meadows, a wooded area with wildlife, hay fields, and a cemetery. The cemetery was not ours or even reserved for our family. It belonged to another family. However, the cemetery added a value for me as I was growing up. There is nothing better for a fall party than playing hide-and-seek in the dark through an overgrown cemetery. Maybe that is why I enjoy Halloween so much.

We had many barns, one of which was our dairy barn. Our dairy barn was moderately modern as well. A dairy barn is basically a cement brick building housing two main compartments. The first is the area where we milked the cows.

For our enterprise, the cows were ushered into one of two sides of this first area. Each side had room for six cows at a time. This meant we could milk twelve cows at once. Each station had a stainless steel bowl that held grain so the cows could eat while we attached the milkers.

In the middle of the two aisles of cows was a pit, an alley of sorts. That is where I spent what turned out to be years of my life. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was noble and important work. We made certain each cow had grain in her bowl; we washed her udder, attached the milker, and then removed everything when she was empty.

The other compartment was our milk room. Once the milk left the cow, it traveled in a maze of stainless steel pipes to the milk room and landed in a giant tank. That tank housed the milk at a controlled temperature until a tanker truck came to empty it.

Our milk truck driver’s name was Charlie, and he came every other day. He was about six feet four inches, 180 pounds, and always had a grin on his face. Visiting with Charlie was always a bright spot in the day.

Charlie always had the gossip. Living and working on a farm sometimes limited our ability to properly interact with our neighbors, so we were always starved for good gossip. For instance, Randy and Kate were getting a divorce. Randy had chickens as well as dairy cattle. According to Charlie, that became a little too mundane for Kate. My mother, Charlotte Webb—yes, I’m serious, that is her name, so she went by Janie—told Charlie, “Kate was just too pretty for Randy,” then grinned with this compassionate smirk. My mother always liked to sugarcoat things. That, my friends, is sarcasm. My mother is blunt and can never understand why people get their feelings hurt. “People are just too sensitive anymore,” she was always saying.

I think most people have this view of us Southern women as being genteel, matronly belles who dress to the nines and often need naps due to our delicate natures. Scarlett O’Hara we are not. I was born into a family of very strong Southern women as role models. My mother’s mother, Grandma Jessie, was raised in Shawnee, Oklahoma during The Dust Bowl. And she survived. She was a “Rosie the Riveter” in World War II. What that translated to was a very independent woman who never feared sharing an opinion. Let me assure you, Grandma Jessie’s opinion was the only one that mattered. If she wanted to express an opinion, then I needed to listen. But I always felt she earned that right. Remember, she was a survivor.

My mother was innately very similar. We did have our rules of hospitality. So, as blunt as my matriarchal society was, it was imperative we always said it with a smile, to soften the blow, or more likely, to just confuse our audience. It can really be a vernacular talent to insult and compliment someone in the very same breath—a talent that only works for the women of the South, not the men.