Magic of Empowerment: My Journey in Servant Leadership

By J. Derrill Rice

**TAP INTO THE MAGIC OF EMPOWERMENT **

Empowerment can come from many outside influences — your friends, family, and business associates who believe in you and support your goals. But it can also come from within, when you dare to take risks, learn how to leverage your own personal creativity, continue persevering in the face of adversity, remain open to new and energizing challenges, and allow inspiration and motivation to recharge your spirit and make progress toward your goals.

Veteran business leader J. Derrill Rice understands empowerment through and through — because he’s benefited from it his entire life. And he’s always made sure it benefited those around him as well.

Now, in his new book, The Magic of Empowerment: My Journey in Servant Leadership, Rice explores how empowerment fueled his many achievements from growing up the child of a single mom to becoming the CEO of a number of successful manufacturing companies. More than a memoir, Rice uses compelling storytelling to not only shine a spotlight on how empowerment through servant leadership has brought him a multitude of rewards but also how it can hone your leadership skills and spur your personal growth.

From his transformation from high school nerd to captain of the football team, to rising from the ranks to be recognized as an outstanding business leader, Rice explores the many ways any of us can be empowered to reach our objectives, through personal and revealing anecdotes filled with humor, wisdom, and surprises. To Rice, empowerment truly is magical — and he should know since he began studying magic as a teenager. It’s a skill that has actually added to his professional empowerment, as he once dazzled Edsel Ford, the then-head of the Ford Motor Company, by making a car disappear right before his eyes.

You’ll hear about that and more (like the time he turned a corporate presentation into his own version of The Tonight Show ) in The Magic of Empowerment. More importantly, you’ll discover how to unlock the secrets of empowerment in your own life to create meaningful progress in your personal and professional life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Advantage Media Group
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642257472

J. Derrill Rice

J. DERRILL RICE has headed up an assortment of manufacturing companies to great success over his decades-long business career, always putting an emphasis on servant leadership. Rice has been married for forty years to wife, Lori, who trains educators in the Montessori education system. They have two children, Caroline and Austin, and also share ownership and operate Grassy Creek Vineyard & Winery and the Klondike Cabins near Elkin, North Carolina, where they reside.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Early

EMPOWERMENT

No one needs empowerment more than a child.

Kids need to know they’ve got someone on their side from an early age, someone who has faith in their talents and abilities and is willing to entrust them with the responsibility to use them wisely. That’s how they develop self-confidence right from the start, as well as the motivation to want to do a job right.

I was one of those fortunate kids, because my mother always made it a point to empower me to succeed.

One way she did that was to make sure there was only one Derrill in the world—me. I’m not being egotistical about this; the plain fact is the name was her invention. My grandfather was James Alvin Rice, his son (my father) was James Alvin Rice Jr., and I was supposed to be James Alvin Rice III. My mother was dead set against that—however, she was very fond of the name Derek. So the compromise was that Derek would be somehow mushed together with Alvin to create (with a few extra letters) Derrill, which my mom encouraged me to use as my main name. I did just that, using the initial J at the front, standing for James. It gets confusing at times, going by my middle name, but, on the other hand, when I’m signing up for an online account or something like that, I can be sure I won’t be competing with any other Derrills for a username—because I’m the only one.

I grew up without a father as a part of my daily life. The story was he had bipolar disorder, a mental condition that wasn’t really dealt with back then, and his severe mood swings made for a very unstable relationship with my mother. I was told that’s why, when I was five, my grandfather came and spirited me and my younger brother away from where we lived in Virginia and took me on the train down to Georgia, where he and my grandmother lived. My mother followed in the morning. I was too young to remember much of this.

Mom became a government civil service employee at nearby Fort Benning, the largest infantry base in the country at the time. She divorced my dad and now faced the daunting challenge of raising two active boys on her own. Although my grandparents supported our family in every way they could, we still lived in a very poor part of town, and paying the monthly bills was an ongoing challenge for us. Although I would still see my dad twice a year, at Christmas and during the summer, sometimes a couple of years would go by when I wouldn’t hear from him. And I never knew of his mental health issues until he passed away and his brother (my uncle) filled me in on some of what he went through. The tragedy of his life was that he was born before a condition like his could really be effectively medicated.

The blessing in his life, however, was that he was still able to do great things, such as starting his own auto businesses. He eventually married a loving woman with two daughters whom he cared for as if they were his own. Although the Lord took him at an early age when he suffered a fatal heart attack at fifty-four, he finished life strong, in a good place, and with a wonderful family.

The Whirling Dervish of Dishwashers

As I indicated, money was tight for our little family. I did what I could to help out my mom. I had paper routes and would do odd jobs like mowing the neighbor’s lawn. Clearly, however, we needed something more substantial to add to our monthly income.

This led to me getting the job I enjoyed more than any other over my lifetime—as a dishwasher.

I’m aware most—if not all—people who have worked as dishwashers definitely would not remember their duties so fondly. But this was my first adult job (I was twelve when I started) and, as you’ll see, I definitely made the most of it. In a way, through this job, I learned how I could empower myself to excel.

What happened was my mother knew the owner of the local Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. She asked him to give me a shot, and he agreed. First, I had to go to the county and get a work permit, since they served beer on the premises and I was very far from reaching the age to legally drink. Fortunately, the permit was granted, and so I showed up for work.

Through this job, I learned how I could empower myself to excel.

Now, this was a time before there was any industrial dishwashing equipment—I had to do everything by hand. And on Friday and Saturday night, that was quite the challenge. There were three large wells lined up in the dishwashing area—the first was filled with hot water and soap for washing, the second with hot water and no soap for rinsing, and the third one just contained cold water for a final cooling rinse. To the side of the wells was the drying area for the dishes.

There was only one problem with this system, and it was a big one—I was still too short for it to work! I had to build makeshift stools to stand on in order to reach into the wells with the dishes so I could wash them. And since there were three wells, I had to set up three stools, one for each well, so I could move fast enough from one to another. In a way, I didn’t feel as though I had a choice. On Friday and Saturday nights, the place was packed, and I had to keep things moving or we would run out of clean dishes. I didn’t intend to disappoint.

So imagine a twelve-year-old boy jumping as fast as possible from stool to stool with a brush that was almost as big as he was. That was me. I was moving like the Tasmanian Devil, a blur of motion, and the staff marveled at how fast I jumped up on the stools and back down, bouncing back and forth between the wells, washing dishes faster than anyone there had ever seen before. On any one of those weekend nights, I would always end up a big soapy soaking-wet mess by the end of my shift. I guess I put on quite a show—the owner would actually bring customers into the kitchen just to watch me do my thing!

I don’t tell this story to brag about my dishwashing skills, which, to be honest, are probably no longer up to the standard I set back then. I tell it because the experience taught me an invaluable lesson: if you do a great job, to the best of your ability, people will notice and admire and respect you for your effort. I loved the recognition I received and enjoyed working there so much that, during the summers, the owner and I made a deal: I could work as many hours as I wanted as long as I never charged overtime!

By the time I was sixteen, I was the store manager on the weekends during the school year and, during the summers, due to that aforementioned deal, I sometimes worked eighty hours a week, working there from open to close every day. The hours didn’t kill me, but something else almost did. One Saturday morning, I was there by myself and mixing together all the dough in a big metal mixing bowl, when I accidentally pushed the bowl against an exposed and worn 220-volt power cord connected to the meat grinder. Suddenly, my whole body was shaking like it was made of Jell-O, and I fell to the floor, where I remained out cold for a solid half hour. The lucky part was that I had inadvertently pulled the metal bowl away from the power cord when the shock first hit me, and that probably saved my life.

It was adversity that motivated my mom to get me that job at the age of twelve, but I still think it was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. Aside from almost being electrocuted and getting the occasional burn marks on the sides of my arms from pulling hot pizzas out of the ovens, I had a lot of fun—all of us working there did. Customers could see into the kitchen through its surrounding windows, so, dressed in red aprons and wearing plastic Shakey’s hats, we would put on a show. For example, I would create smiley faces with pepperoni on the pizza tops to the joy of the football team cheerleaders looking in to see what I was up to. I would also literally hurl a pizza pie like a Frisbee, launching it from the oven to the cutting table. We worked hard and laughed loud as we got the job done with high spirits, and then celebrated when it was the end of a hard and busy weekend night.

And that taught me yet another valuable early life lesson. If you love your work, if you enjoy it, you will be motivated to be good at it. I never asked to be promoted in this first professional experience—I was simply asked to take on more and more responsibility over the years, and I stepped up accordingly.

I don’t believe you can be great at a job you hate. Passion provides a special kind of personal empowerment, and that’s something I never forgot.

Magic: An Unintended Detour, A Lifetime Gift

The tricky thing about passion, however, is that you can’t really control what just might get your engine going. That’s why it can take you down some unexpected paths, paths that might seem silly or a waste of time to others. But, again, you have to respect where your heart leads you—and in my case, it was magic. Maybe putting on a dishwashing show for the pizza parlor every weekend had given me the showbiz bug, but suddenly, doing magic was my obsession, an obsession that would pay off big in unexpected ways both as a teenager as well as years and years later.

It started when I rode the bus I had to take on weekdays, from the poor part of town where we lived to the rich part of town where I went to school (more on that later). About halfway through that ride, this other boy named Court Hamlet would get on board, and we started to hang out, because we were two of the older kids, around fifteen at the time. So we would sit in the back of the bus and play cards.

Those cards gave me an idea.

Cut back to the pizza parlor. There was a fellow employee there who walked with a limp and hinted at some shadiness in his past. He would often tell stories about his gambling. I guess I began to wonder if he had any secrets to share, so one day, I flat-out asked him, Can you teach me how to deal from the bottom of the deck? He agreed; I picked it up quickly, and I tried the trick out on Court the next time we played cards. I had it