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Alumnus Fernandes finds e-business at GroceryWorks demands faster pace

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But there are a couple differences. One is in the age of the people he works with. “I remember one staff meeting we had,” Gary tells. “It happened to be my thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. I looked around at my staff—and realized I’d been married longer than anyone in the room had been alive.”

Another is the pace. “A traditional business can be failing and not even know it,” he says. “Here, we’d know it immediately. Today I make a decision and implement it, and tomorrow I know the results.”

“Maybe we don’t get it right the first time. There’s no Harvard Business School case study on this kind of thing. We have to be nimble, and we’ve changed every one of our business processes several times.”

E-business has been volatile of late, with even the most popular of web storefronts losing millions of dollars a year. Gary says he looks for that situation to “winnow out” those companies that weren’t sound from the beginning.

‘We need to make money’

As far as GroceryWorks goes, he says the company’s growth has been “good,” but “by no stretch of the imagination are we where we need to be. We need to make some money.”

Also different from the EDS days is Gary’s attitude. “I’ve been in business a long time,” he says. “I’ve learned worry doesn’t do much good—it’s better to define and solve a problem. I’m a lot less emotionally involved. The highs aren’t as high, the lows aren’t as low. Because I’ve already fulfilled many personal ambitions, I can be more dispassionate now. I’m being extremely practical about what I do here.”

When Gary quit EDS, he needed something to keep his “intellectual energy going,” so he created a venture capital company. It was as part of that concern that he was introduced to GroceryWorks and decided to take its founder up on an invitation to come aboard.

“I’m a big believer in lifelong learning,” he says. “When you stop learning, you start dying.”

A picture is worth ... a trip to Commerce

It was learning that first led him to ETSU. Academic scholarship in hand following his graduation from high school in Iowa, Gary decided that this was the place for him.

It was a life-altering decision he made based on nothing more than a picture of the campus in a college brochure. “I could’ve gone anywhere,” he says with a grin, “but I liked the looks of it.”

It was a good call, as it turns out. “Most of my closest friends there are still my closest friends thirty-six years later.” He also met his wife, Sandra, at the University. In fact, when asked the one thing he looks back on and says, “Wow. If I’d done that differently, I wouldn’t have the success I have today,” he answers without the slightest pause to it think over: “Marrying my wife. She had a strength of purpose and character.”

In addition to having the smarts to marry Sandra, what would he say is the proverbial secret to his success? He mentions a few:

“There’s no secret,” he says. “Everybody gets by with what they were born with and what their environment gave them. I happen to be tremendously intellectually curious. I want to know about everything. I’m very persistent. If I start something, I really want to finish it. And I’m pretty self-secure. I wasn’t ever worried about my own self-worth, so I was willing to risk things. And I was always smart enough to try to have people around me who were smarter.”

Classics of children’s literature for adult’s summer reading

Nothing is as relaxing and rewarding as reading a book for the sheer pleasure of the imaginary experience itself. As a teenager I spent dreamy afternoons reading on an old quilt under a shade tree and suspenseful nights hiding a book and a tiny flashlight under the covers so my mother wouldn’t make me “go to sleep” before I had finished the adventure. And yet, as much as I loved to read, I didn’t discover many of the greatest classics for children until I began teaching children’s literature to college students about twenty years ago. Just in case you missed some of these classics, here are a few suggestions for your own summer reading.

Let’s begin with some classic examples of realism. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling is a long book, but it is well worth your time. (When I first read it, I simply devoured it—reading from late one afternoon until I finished it at four in the morning!) The book is a classic story about growing up—a story that takes the protagonist Jody Baxter from the boyhood symbolized by the flutter-mill he builds while playing hooky from his chores at the beginning of the book to the manhood that he achieves after he is forced to kill the pet deer—the “yearling”—he loves. You have probably seen the fairly recent movie version of Little Women and you probably read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a child, but both books deserve reading (or rereading). As you read, consider the context in which both books were written. Louisa May Alcott’s protagonist Jo March exhibits an independence highly unusual for a young woman in 1868—an independence that foreshadows the modern woman, and Twain’s book is written from the first-person point of view of a young ignorant boy who finds the moral courage to throw off the shackles of his society’s prejudice and to achieve his own humanity in recognizing that of the slave Jim.

As a true fan of fantasy, I find it hard to limit my recommendations in that genre—but I’ll try. Except for L. Frank Baum and his Oz books, British writers have the edge in fantasy for young people. Let’s begin with a British classic that is not too well known in the United States—Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. Exploring his aunt’s back yard on the outskirts of London, Tom finds a doorway not only into a magical garden but also into another time—a past in which time alternates between standing still and jumping forward to the present and to a startling discovery about a mysterious connection between a girl he meets in the garden and an elderly lady he befriends in the present. And finally, I must recommend J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Don’t pay any attention to the criticism and the controversy over these books. The witchcraft and wizardry in them are no more harmful than similar imaginary elements are in the Oz books and in the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. While Rowling’s books don’t equal the quality of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books or J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, they are delightful reading. Rowling has created a sympathetic and identifiable protagonist in Harry, she portrays recognizable characters and situations in a “school for wizardry,” and she uses language cleverly and humorously. Moreover, the books clearly portray the important theme of good vs. evil and even succeed in pointing out the cruelties of prejudice against those who are different from us—whether they be wizards or non-wizards (called Muggles in the books).

Several of these books have been made (or will be made) into movies, but no two imaginations are the same—so give your imagination a chance to work with the book itself. You might even try the old-fashioned practice of reading these books aloud in a family setting. Having children or teenagers in the family circle would be nice—but remember that these books are for young people of any age!

—Ann Moseley William L. Mayo Professor Department of Literature and Languages