I started writing this in the style of a third party professional bio, and then I thought “who am I kidding?” To the extent this is ever published, it’s going to be on a nondescript vanity-project blog site that no one is ever going to read, so let’s just cut the pretention. Plus, if I’m going to write something for the primary purpose of giving myself a writing exercise to be published in a vanity-project blog site which no one will ever read, I might as well write something really long. At some point, probably near the end of this monstrosity, I’m going to attempt to explain the title of this site, and thereby the importance that the state of Iowa plays in my overall identity— even though I haven’t actually lived there in nearly 30 years. To get there, though, and to give myself something to do this afternoon, requires working through a bit of background.

I grew up in Iowa in the 70’s and 80’s. My parents were public school teachers in a small town in the west-central part of the state. I majored in English at my little college in the cornfields [Central College is actually located in the beautiful town of Pella, Iowa.], originally thinking I’d coach football and teach English like the Old Man. Somewhere during that 4-years of explosive personal growth the plan changed. Teaching, or at least teaching just because the Old Man did it, became less compelling. I found myself thinking, “Oh shit, I’m going to have a degree in English and I don’t want to teach. What the hell am I going to do?” The answer, pretty much by default, became borrow a bunch of money and go to law school at the University of Iowa.

In the more generous version of the story, I went to law school because I wanted to help people (Yay! Public Interest!). The less altruistic, and more accurate version is that there was a really popular television series at the time called “L.A. Law”, which featured a bunch of really good-looking people who wore expensive suits and lived really interesting lives. Why not do that!

In a story almost as old as law schools, my professed dream of being a public interest lawyer conveniently faded when I found out how little they made and how much my student loan debt payments would be after graduation. So, on to Minneapolis or Chicago and the life of a sell-out large firm lawyer raking mucho mooolah. Except, inconveniently, I couldn’t find any firms in Minneapolis or Chicago who were willing to hire me. So, my incremental eastward sojourn crept onward to Davenport, Iowa, where I was able to join a really good regional law firm and, more importantly, begin learning how to hold myself as a professional and work in an organization.

One of the few drawbacks of the firm I joined was that it was filled with partners (men and women), who decided I needed a wife. I endured this quest, highlighted by a series of blind dates with clients’ unlucky daughters, for nearly three years before meeting a super-hot lawyer from a rival firm who apparently had been a law school classmate of mine. Inexplicably, we not only did not fall in love in law school, we never even became aware of the other’s existence. Anyway, long story short, soon after meeting miss Super-Hot Attorney, I found the uncharacteristic courage to ask her on a date and one thing led to another and we got married.

All was well in this idyllic perfectly-sized city on the picturesque banks of the Mississippi river. [Davenport, or more broadly the Quad Cities area, as the cluster of cities on both banks of the Mississippi are locally known, are occasionally maligned. I continue to think it’s a beautiful area, and was lucky to spend my formative 20’s there.] I had a job with the area’s premier law firm, a beautiful wife and the future seemed to be laid out in front of me. The only problem was in the back of my mind— I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer. One day in my fourth year of practice (about the time when you begin being a productive asset to a law firm), I got a call from a professional headhunter. She was friendly and charming and we chatted for nearly ten minutes before she finally asked, “I’m not allowed to disclose the identity of my client, but would you be interested in exploring a career opportunity as an in-house attorney in the Legal Department of a Fortune -100 company headquartered in Central Illinois, who is a global manufacturer of earthmoving, construction and power generation equipment?” At that point, I was no industrialist, but it was pretty hard to not realize she was referring to Caterpillar Inc. [Heretofor often referred in this piece (and perhaps subsequent posts) as “the Great Yellow Father.”]

I went home that night and asked my super-hot attorney wife, who at that time was in a highly lucrative practice with her father, how she felt about me applying for a job in the legal department of a a Fortune -100 company headquartered in Central Illinois. She shrugged, and said something to the effect of “knock yourself out”, leaving unsaid what she admitted a few days later when I actually received an offer to work for the Great Yellow Father— ‘there’s no way in hell they are going to hire you.’

So, a week or so later, she found me on the couch in the tv room of the cute little bungalow that we’d purchased just 4 months earlier wrapped in a quilt my mother made us as a wedding gift rocking slowly back and forth, apparently enraptured by an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. This was odd to her, because by the time she came downstairs in the morning, I had usually left for work. The night before we’d stayed up late with a bottle of wine talking about the future— which, we jointly decided, would be spent in Davenport, becoming pillars of the community. We had decided to politely decline the Great Yellow Father’s generous offer to pay me nearly double what I was making at that time to move 90 miles further south and east to Peoria Illinois.

We talked it out again, and decided to embark on an adventure. I called Caterpillar’s General Counsel, accepted the job, and informed the somewhat shocked partners at the firm later that morning.

Ok, things have bogged down a bit at this point, so let me deploy one of the many things I learned during my quarter century with the Great Yellow Father, a wonderful device to accelerate communication, known as the bullet-point memo.

• My super-hot attorney wife continued practicing in the Quad Cities for over a year, introducing to her boss/father an innovative concept known as the 3-day 10:00-3:00 workweek. Both she and her boss/father seemed relatively comfortable with the concept, but then children started arriving, and the boss/father seemed more than willing to trade grandchildren for his decreasingly productive associate.

• The Great Yellow Father, in an act of largesse that characterized it’s quarter-century warm embrace, paid for me to spend my Saturdays getting an MBA at the University of Chicago.

• Then, the relocation carrousel began and we rode a fairly dizzying series of job-changes— all the while remaining in the warm embrace of the Great Yellow Father:
  • Regional Managing Attorney- Singapore (2000-2002)
  • General Counsel, Caterpillar Financial Services- Nashville (2003-2005)
  • Emerging Markets Strategy Integration Manager-Beijing (2006-2008)
  • Global Director, Government Affairs- Washington DC (2009-2012)
  • President, Caterpillar Financial Insurance Services- Nashville (2013-2018)
  • VP, Latin America, Caterpillar Financial Services- Miami (2019-2021)
  • President, Caterpillar Financial Aftermarket Services- Nashville (2022)

• In 2022, after 25 years in the warm embrace of the Great Yellow Father, I retired in my mid-fifties. The next two fall semesters I returned to my Little College in the Cornfields to teach a course I developed, called “Leading a Problem-Solving Organization.” This year, I’m taking a year off to travel with the super-hot lawyer, reflect and write, among other things.

The “among other things” category includes the creation and curation of this blog. A blog, I according to my highly compensated platform vendor, needs some sort of title. Solving that problem has caused me to reflect a bit on my identity, or lack thereof, as a middle-age man without any visible vocation. I’ve thought about different elements that defined how I thought of myself in different periods of my life and realized that most of them seem to fit so well anymore. Words that captured dominant activities like “athlete”, “lawyer”, “leader”, no longer work. Similarly, descriptors of beliefs no longer seem as comfortable as they may have been during certain phases of life— such as, “liberal”, “conservative”, “capitalist”, or even “christian”. Physical places are tough— given the relocation carrousel bulleted above. Even today, the super-hot lawyer and I bounce between two residences, neither of which are in Iowa. And yet, Iowa, a place where I haven’t lived for nearly 30 years, somehow manages to cut across my identity in ways that simpler descriptors of vocation, belief or residence come up empty.

I wasn’t born there, my parents being undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota, of all places, at the time of my initial appearance. But we migrated south, to the Old Man’s home state, when I was five, and I lived there continuously until joining the warm embrace of the Great Yellow Father at the age of 30. So it feels like Iowa formed me in a lot of ways. It’s where I was educated. It’s where most of the most influential relationships in my life were formed. It’s where I became an adult. So, as I enter old-age, if I had to pick a single word that best captures my identity, I have to go with “Iowan.”

As a result, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about things like what it would be like to drink beers with Kirk Ferentz or be Caitlin Clark’s father. The Chicago Cubs, the only baseball team my grandfather could find on the radio growing up on his eastern Iowa dairy farm, also take up a surprising amount of mental space in any given day. Beyond that, though, my view on politics, pop culture, literature and pretty much every other topic I can think of has been importantly framed by my experience growing up in Iowa in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and the need, I still retain today, to continue to be associated with that community. I am, in that sense, an Iowa Diasporan.