Leadership is often defined by the difficult things we choose to face, not the easier ones we try to avoid.
RUN RABBIT RUN
There is an idea in John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run that has stayed with me for many years. When you run from your problems, you do not leave them behind. You simply exchange them for harder ones waiting further down the road. The freedom Updike writes about is not found in the running. It is found in turning to face the thing you would rather avoid and having the will to see it through.
I think about that often, because in our world it is easy to believe the real challenges are the obvious ones. The diesel price. The condition of the road network. The National Shutdown over illegal immigration. The headlines our clients read, and the things we all talk about endlessly.
Those pressures are real, and we manage them every day. But if I am honest about what actually keeps me awake at night, it is none of those. It is quieter than that, and far harder to put on a report. It is staying focused on where we are going, in a country and an industry that almost never stand still. It is holding a steady course — not only my own, but the course of the people who rely on this business — through the noise and the drama that arrive, unannounced, most days. That is the part of leadership no one prepares you for. It is also, after more than twenty years, the part I would not give up for anything. The burden and the privilege turn out to be the same thing.
Three things travel with me through all of it.
The first is the people.
There are families whose security depends on the decisions we make here. When I weigh a choice, I am not weighing a number on a page — I am weighing what it means for the person who drives our trucks and the household behind them. That responsibility does not switch off, and I have never wanted it to.
The second is trust.
Trust is the only thing we really sell. It is built slowly, over years of doing what we said we would do, and it can be undone in a single broken promise. So we set out to earn it again every morning. Every consignment that moves is a quiet commitment kept, and we treat it that way.
The third is the future.
The choices we make now — how we invest, how we lead, how we treat the people around us — will decide what Sunrise Logistics looks like long after today's pressures are forgotten. I would far rather confront the hard questions now than hand them, larger and heavier, to whoever comes next. None of this is the work that makes the news. It is the work that happens before the sun is up, in the decisions no client ever sees. But it is the work that matters most, and I have learned not to run from it.
Updike was right. The freedom is in the confronting. And we intend to keep earning it.
Kind regards,
Larry Serman
Chief Executive Officer, Sunrise Logistics