From the Sandbox to the Corner Office: Lessons L on the Journey to the Top

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ffirs.qxd 9/13/06 11:09 AM Page iii

FROM THE

SANDBOX TO THE

CORNER OFFICE Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top

EVE TAHMINCIOGLU

JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.

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FROM T H E

SANDBOX TO T H E

CORNER OFFICE

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FROM THE

SANDBOX TO THE

CORNER OFFICE Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top

EVE TAHMINCIOGLU

JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.

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Copyright © 2006 Eve Tahmincioglu. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Tahmincioglu, Eve, 1963– From the sandbox to the corner office : lessons learned on the journey to the top / Eve Tahmincioglu. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-0-471-78883-6 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-471-78883-X (cloth) 1. Executives—Conflict of life. 2. Executives—Psychology. 3. Success in business. 4. Career development. I. Title. HD38.2.T36 2006 658.4'09—dc22 2006008028 Printed in the United States of America. 10

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In memory of my father, Yani P. Tahmincioglu, who taught me the two most important lessons of all: You have to always dream big and love is life’s greatest gift

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

Parents: Less Carrot, More Stick

9

2

First Jobs: Child Labor Pays Off

35

3

Adversity: Overcoming, the Only Option

56

4

The Immigrant Experience: Surviving, Adapting, Excelling

77

5

Mentors: Seek Out Sages

98

6

Discrimination: Don’t Let Bias Burn

118

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Paying Dues: No Chances, No Dances

138

8

Career Curves: Many Paths Lead Up

158

9

Mistakes: Trip, But Don’t Fall

183

Bad Bosses: Outlast, Ignore, or Move On

202

10 Index

219

About the Author

225

vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS WHEN I STARTED WRITING THIS BOOK I REALIZED THAT I REALLY DIDN’T have time to write this book. As a mother of two with a full-time job I was faced with the dilemma every parent faces: How do I make a six-year-old and a three-year-old-disappear? Okay, I’m kidding. But seriously, folks, I realized I needed some help to make this book a reality. Coincidentally, during my time writing the book, a familiar debate raged around the issue of working mothers, this time sparked by an article in the New York Times in September 2005 titled “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” which basically talked about how many well-educated women were planning on brushing aside careers for a life raising children. I wasn’t totally surprised with the article’s premise given the difficulty I had finding women in power to include in the book. It made me realize how far women still have to go when it comes to taking on positions of power, and that maybe it isn’t all about the “glass ceiling” phenomenon. As a mother, wife, and career-minded woman, the lesson I have come to learn is there is no single formula for growing a family despite what holier-than-thou radio or TV pundits might say. Women, as well as men, have to devote themselves to their children if they choose to bring them into the world, but women, as much as men, need to also devote themselves to making the world a better place by using their talents beyond the nursery. If we want to shape the world, I’ve come to realize, we have to be part of it in as many aspects as we can. That, however, is easier said than done. I knew I couldn’t write this book all by myself. This was when my loving husband Andy D’Ambrosio walked in—I mean that literally and figuratively. He walked into my cluttered home ix

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office one night as I rubbed my tired eyes in frustration and told me we’d work it out together, as a team. And so we did. Without my husband—who is my confidant, my inspiration, my soul mate—this book never would have seen the light. He not only helped me by giving me extra time to work in the evenings and weekends while he handled the family and the house on his own, but he also gave me undying support and encouragement. He listened to me drone on about the book, the CEOs, the writing process, and he read and reread sections of the book, offering me feedback on how I could make them better. He was a loving though honest critic, and I owe him greatly for the book you hold in your hands right now. And I’d like to offer kudos to my incredible children, my daughter Circe and my son Cheiron, for being especially good during this past year so Mommy could finish her manuscript, whatever that is. I also want to thank my mother Sofi Tahmincioglu for pushing me to get this book published, constantly yelling at me to not allow rejection to derail my efforts and pumping my ego up as only a mother can do. And thanks to my sisters, Vaso Doubles and Mary Pia, who always make me feel better than I really am. Special thanks also go to my in-laws, Patricia D’Ambrosio and Birino D’Ambrosio for their support, and their help watching our beautiful children on those many days when day care and school shut down. It really does take a village, as one leader shows clearly in this book. I would like to thank my agent, Robert Wilson, who helped me craft just the right proposal and convinced a publisher to make this book a reality, and my editor at John Wiley & Sons, Debra Englander, who was never more than an e-mail away. And finally, to all my friends who offered their input and support during the process, including my best friend Mary Monovoukas, who slaps me around when I need it; my constant cheerleader Patricia Talorico; my impromptu copy editor and “friendly” Neil Cornish, and Robyn Blumner, who offered the

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kernel that became the title of the book. And of course, a shoutout to my book club buddies, who make reading and sharing books better than TV. Also, long overdue thanks to Ignacio Goetz, without a doubt, my most inspiring professor, who helped a mixed-up kid realize how important education was; and a special cheer to my editor at the New York Times, Brent Bowers, who’s not only one of the greatest editors I have ever worked with but also a really nice guy who believed in me. Lesson: We all need a little help now and then.

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Introduction Experience is not what happens to you: It is what you do with what happens to you. —Aldous Huxley

THERE IS NO SECRET CEO GUIDEBOOK THAT TELLS YOU HOW TO BECOME a leader. So how do men and women get to the corner office? How do they become CEOs, presidents, and creators and leaders of their own organizations? How do they reach the pinnacle of their careers? Lessons. That’s it, plain and simple. It is the life lessons individuals pick up along the way, the ones that stay with them, the ones they turn to when they make decisions, the ones that keep them on track, that make a leader. They are the lessons that come out of both early and continuing experiences, from childhood to the climb up the ladder. One CEO profiled in this book struggled with stuttering most of his life. Another executive’s father used a switch from a tree to reprimand her when she was young. And yet another top dog made so many career changes he describes himself as Forrest Gump. When faced with adversity, tough punishments, or major career decisions, the leaders featured in this book went through their struggles, fears, and doubts, but in the end the question was: “What did you learn from that, buddy?” All the leaders profiled in this book have great individual stories, encompassing a broad range of experiences they shared with me, everything from losing a child to losing millions of 1


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FROM THE SANDBOX TO THE CORNER OFFICE

dollars in business deals; but what they have in common are the lessons they took away from their experiences. Many of the lessons sound strikingly similar even though they were learned as a result of such different circumstances. The individuals learned to persevere, how to obey in order to lead, and how to accept their mistakes and move on. They moved on and took the lessons they gleaned with them. Some use those lessons almost every day in their personal lives and at work. Others bring them out from time to time when needed. Still others took the lessons and filed them away, happy with the thought that those lessons were somewhere back there in their data banks, somehow having shaped them into the people and leaders they are today. The lessons you will read in this book provide a road map of sorts for how to live and lead in your life, whether you aspire to run a global organization, plan to start your own company, or want to help your children get on the right path. These leaders’ lessons become advice nuggets on getting through a host of different challenges. Just as there is no secret CEO guidebook, there is also no secret CEO club that keeps the rest of us out of the boss’ chair. Everyone reading this book can one day become a leader. What you need is the desire and the ability to brush yourself off and keep forging ahead no matter what bumps you encounter in the road, just as all the leaders in this book have done, over and over again. You can read about the habits of successful people and learn their strategies for managing others, but there is something often missing—the origins of the ideas. This book provides a glimpse at the actual life experiences that formed the foundations for those habits and strategies. This book became a journey into self-examination for many of the people I interviewed, and even for myself. One of my favorite Talking Heads songs pushes introspection to its limits with the line: “You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”


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Surely the men and women who run the world’s major organizations ask themselves that question all the time. I mean, they’ve got to sit back and wonder how they ended up with private jets and hefty spending accounts, ruling over workforces of hundreds or thousands, and deciding how millions, even billions of dollars are spent. When you think about CEOs and the like, and how they ended up in the lavish corner office, certain things might come quickly to mind—an Ivy League degree, connections, a silver spoon. While all these factors may sometimes play a critical role, they are not what has propelled many executives to the pinnacle of their careers. The CEOs say it was their life experiences, the ones these leaders believe have become the pieces of their life puzzle, yet to be completed. That is why just reading the resumes of the nation’s leaders won’t tell you the whole story of how they got to the top spot. This book fills in the gaps and reveals who inspired them, the adversity they faced and had to overcome, the challenges they encountered and learned from. None of that is in a resume, and you probably won’t get it from watching a five-minute interview with a CEO on CNBC. What if you could sit down with an executive, call a CEO on the phone, or send a president an e-mail, and ask personal questions? “How were you raised?” “Did you ever have a boss you wanted to kill?” “How did you rise above discrimination and succeed?” “Were you nervous when you switched careers?” Well, that’s just what I did when I set out during the past year to interview more than 50 leaders of all sorts—corporate, nonprofit, and governmental leaders, and even entrepreneurs. And I went beyond snippets from their life histories by asking them to sum up the lessons they learned as a result of an experience, a parent, or a mentor, to make sure I clearly understood what they took away. I started asking CEOs these types of questions in 2001, when


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an editor I worked with at the New York Times asked me if I wanted to contribute to a relatively new column called “The Boss,” which would offer readers a personal snapshot of a corporate titan, beyond the financial statements and media posturing. At first I was reluctant to take on the assignment, figuring corporate bigwigs would probably put me to sleep and be loath to share any dark secrets or interesting anecdotes with me. But as a struggling freelancer at the time, I was not in a position to turn down any assignments, so I agreed to my first interview, which was with a CEO for a major telecommunications company. To my surprise he opened up about his life experiences, telling me his mother once grabbed him by the neck and threw him up against a wall when he told her he had decided not to go to an Ivy League university and instead go to a local college where he could party with his friends. And so, five years later, I am still writing for “The Boss” columns, and during all that time, I have been amazed at the reaction I’ve gotten from readers, friends, and acquaintances. Many wanted to know more about these CEOs’ parents, mistakes, and career choices. They wanted to pick my brain beyond “The Boss” column, have me elaborate, maybe share some notes that never made it into the Times pages. Parents wanted to know if these leaders’ parents were tough disciplinarians or easygoing hippie types. Aspiring managers wanted to know whether these executives ever made mistakes along the way. A college kid I talked to wanted to know if CEOs take a direct path to the executive suite or meander around from one career to another before they hit the management track. What is it about leaders’ many experiences that mold them? All these questions and others I have often heard became the 10 chapters—parents, first jobs, adversity, the immigrant experience, mentors, discrimination, paying dues, career curves, mistakes, and finally bad bosses. Each chapter includes stories by leaders that in some ways taught them lessons about life, work, and leadership. The CEOs who run major organizations,


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as well as entrepreneurs who have made a name for themselves recount their experiences and then sum up what they have learned in bite-size words of wisdom, some complex, others simplistic, but all educational—and, dare I say, sometimes inspirational. Alas, there is no way we can walk in their shoes, but maybe we’ve gone through similar experiences and were unable to see the life lesson and move on and eventually up. You may never feel the sting of prejudice, the frustration of a disability, or the wrath of a really, really bad boss, but the lessons they learned from all these experiences are often universal and can be applied to almost any person’s career plan that includes aspirations for the helm. I’ve taken pains to include a mix of men and women, whites and minorities in order to get a picture of what different types of people have gone through and what has motivated them. This diverse approach in no way reflects what we see in boardrooms around the globe, though. Unfortunately, women and minorities still hold only a tiny percentage of the top-tier positions at organizations of all kinds. The book is intended to provide guidance and enlightenment for aspiring executives, college kids, parents, voyeurs interested in the backstory, and even human resources managers who are trying to find the meat behind resumes and standard recommendations. Maybe job applicants for managerial positions should be asked what their parents were like? I am not claiming that the stories and lessons in this book provide a statistical analysis of what makes a CEO tick, but they do offer a snapshot into the early days of learning and awakening for these men and women who somehow made it to the top of their game. “We do not know much about the impact of early experiences,” Yale University’s leadership guru Victor Vroom told me when I discussed my book with him. “A lot of people believe leaders are born, not made, that the causes are in their DNA.” But he adds, “What we know from personality research


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would suggest that early experiences may be more powerful than genetics.” Indeed, as you will see, patterns emerge among these men and women. Often they were emboldened and became stronger because of the challenges they faced; and many took chances in their careers despite admitting they were fearful of change, sometimes egged on by a spouse, parent, or mentor. These are stories they sometimes recount to their children, friends, and employees when trying to make a point or explain why they look at life and leadership the way they do. Some are stories these executives have never discussed publicly, which they summoned up from their memory banks after I asked them about people and events that made them think, that in some way created their foundation of what’s right and wrong. And in some cases, they are stories the people were reluctant to tell. Many of the executives I came across were more than willing to share lessons they learned. In fact, many of them look at doing so as their duty. It seems part and parcel to being a leader that they always want to impart the wisdom they picked up over the years in a way to help guide others. In terms of patterns, there were some concrete and even quirky threads that kept popping up. When asked whom they respected or idolized most, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln kept coming up. As for their favorite business book, Good to Great by Jim Collins (HarperBusiness, 2001) was the overwhelming favorite. (The CEO of Keane Inc. believes it’s a favorite because “every CEO dreams that his or her company will be regarded as great, not just good.”) When it came to what they feared most, failure came up quite often, as well as family tragedy and a host of small creatures like snakes and water bugs. Many pegged their dream job as teacher, while a few wouldn’t mind having David Letterman’s gig. And a large percentage of these leaders used the word “ambitious” when asked how they would describe themselves and how their parents would describe them.


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I believe what attracted me to the stories from these men and women was probably my own upbringing. My father, a Greek who grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, would often tell stories when he was trying to make a point and felt just scolding or preaching to us would fall on deaf ears. It is a gift many Turks seem to possess, as the Turkish culture is in so many ways focused around storytelling as a way to teach and guide. My dad would tell us stories about being a bad kid and always disobeying his parents, especially his father, who would wait for my dad to emerge from a bath wet and beat him with a leather belt. “What did you learn from that?” I asked my father once when I was a young teen. He said, “I learned to listen to my father.” Surprisingly, many of the leaders I interviewed said their parents often used corporal punishment as discipline, and many said they were fearful of their parents, but also loved them dearly. My father died several years ago, about the time I started crafting the idea for this book. Maybe I missed his stories and was looking for other stories to fill the void. But no matter what the reason for this book’s genesis was, I believe I’ve accomplished what I set out to do: collect an array of learning experiences from leaders from all walks of life and the lessons they took away as a result of those moments, and share them with you.


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CHAPTER 1

Parents Less Carrot, More Stick He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander. —Aristotle

SIT DOWN WITH A LEADER AND ASK ABOUT WHAT HAS INFLUENCED HIM OR her. More often than not, you’ll receive an earful about his or her parents. The early years watching their mothers and fathers live their lives and experiencing their parenting skills, whether honed or not, is what in many ways made them the CEOs, presidents, and top honchos they are today. Often their leadership styles mirror those of their first leaders—mom and dad. So what better way to start off this book than with the sandbox years? You know, the years we all look back on fondly (or not); the years when we were naive, unaware of the real world around us. We had no thoughts about careers, status, money. The only ladder we were thinking about climbing was the one connected to a rickety slide in our backyard. Somehow the men and women in this book eventually went from the path to the playground to a path to leadership, and many believe it was their parents who guided them. Their parents did this not by design or ambition for their progeny’s stature, but in how they raised them. 9


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One thing that has stood out for me after all of these interviews is the fact that the majority of the executives I have talked to about their childhoods have had tough disciplinarians as parents who didn’t, as so many parents do today, take nonsense from their kids. It may be a function of their age. The average age of the nation’s CEOs today is 56, which means many of their parents grew up during the Depression and were not coddled as children. In fact, many of these executives reluctantly admit their moms and dads were firm believers in corporal punishment. A switch from a tree seemed to be a popular sidearm. Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons surmised that a switch was preferred because it would sting but not do any permanent damage. While many leaders say they feared their parents, they stress that this fear was coupled with great respect; and for the majority of the chieftains interviewed there was never any doubt their mothers and fathers loved them intensely. One of the overwhelming themes among them was a home filled with unconditional love, a love that gave them confidence in themselves when they went out into the world on their own. For many of the parents of these leaders, their lives were filled with sacrifice, working two or three jobs, setting aside their own ambitions, and focusing on providing for their families. These sacrifices in many ways shaped their children, who are still humbled by their parents’ choices and who, in part, set out for greatness in their careers as a way to honor their parents. And sometimes it’s the lack of supportive parents that drives leaders, as the head of United Way of America, Brian Gallagher, discusses in this chapter. A surprising fact that I did not expect when I began the interviews was that many of these leaders, male and female, tended to be most influenced by their fathers or another male family member. Having written a great deal about the glass ceiling and why there aren’t more women in the upper echelons of


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corporate America, I had thought that the women who did make it probably had a strong mother propping them up. However, while moms are also mentioned, it is the dads that come up most often when these leaders talk about the lessons they learned and who inspired them to succeed and believe in themselves. IKEA’s president of North American operations, Pernille Spiers-Lopez, may have said it best: “Show me a happy, successful woman and behind her is a supportive dad.”

FRAN KEETH President and CEO of Shell Chemical LP and Executive Vice President of Shell Chemical’s Global Operations

LEADER LOWDOWN How your parents describe you: Hometown:

Night owl

Shreveport, Louisiana

Childhood hero: First job as a kid:

Elvis Presley Soda jerk in local drugstore

You just didn’t lie to Fran Keeth’s father. Somehow, says Keeth, he would figure it out, and when he did, look out. He was a man who did not scream, yell, or get emotional, but he did believe in corporal punishment—a switch from the family’s peach tree was his preferred choice of weapon. While she admits it might sound odd, she says her dad spanked her, her sister, and her two brothers in “a loving way.” He would say, she recalls, “ ‘This is going to hurt me more than it does you. Do you understand why I am going to give you a spanking?’ And you’d better not say no.” There were house rules, and you had to follow them, especially the no-fibbing


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rule. “You were better off telling my dad the truth, no matter how horrible, but it took me a while to figure that out.” Like most kids, she had a great sense of self-preservation, so she figured “if I could get away with it, I would lie. But I could never get away with it.” When she was in first or second grade, her family lived in a house on stilts and she used to crawl under that house to play. One day she took a doll she had gotten as a Christmas present that would cry when she squeezed it. Since she was always very curious, she decided to cut the doll’s head off and see what made it cry. She found a tiny diaphragm in the neck of the doll that would make wheezing sounds when air went through it. Hence, the crying. So she had this speaker-diaphragm and a headless doll, and her dad asked where she got the speaker. “I said, ‘I found it.’ When that didn’t work, I said, ‘Somebody cut the head off my doll and when I found it I took the speaker out.’ ” That didn’t go over, either, says Keeth, so “I had to finally confess that I intentionally took that doll and cut the head off.” She was spanked with a peach tree switch on the back of her legs and sent to her room. But it wasn’t all about punishment at Keeth’s home growing up. Her father also gave her exposure to ideas by sharing his work with her at a very young age. “One of my first memories is of my father bringing home schematics of the refinery he worked at and showing me the drawings, explaining them to me. I was probably eight or nine at the time,” she says. “The refinery was building a benzene unit at that time and Dad would work on the design on the floor of our house. He talked me through it: the inflows and outflows, what temperatures were, what products come off at what level. He was so excited about it.” That excitement infected Keeth, who has always looked at work as something that was fun, not drudgery, because of her father’s passion for any job he did. Her father was not an engineer by education, but he worked his way up, coming back


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from World War II and getting a job as a truck driver at the refinery. “I would think driving a truck would be boring, but Dad always left you with the feeling that it was fun and that he really enjoyed it.” He then worked in the maintenance department and went on to make the unprecedented jump to refinery manager. “He just loved his job. And he talked to me as if I knew what was going on. Maybe no one else cared and I was his only audience. But no matter what, that stuck in my mind.”

KEETH

’S

CHILDHOOD

LESSONS

1. You’ve got to enjoy your work. If you don’t, move on to something you love. 2. There are consequences to your actions. Weigh the consequences against what you are going to do. 3. Expect and demand honesty from yourself and the people around you.

RICHARD D. PARSONS CEO of Time Warner

LEADER LOWDOWN Dream job:

Piano bar player

Date of birth: April 4, 1948 Childhood hero:

Duke Snider

Thing you’re most afraid of:

Spiders

Richard Parsons’ dad was the principal disciplinarian in his house and not one to think sparing the rod was a good idea,


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even giving the New York City school system permission to spank the young Parsons. His father used a switch from a tree for his childhood misdeeds because, Parsons believes, it would sting but not cause the kind of damage a belt might, for example. “I got more spankings than the other four kids together. I was always getting spanked, mainly because of misbehavior at school, for cutting up.” He was also punished often in other ways. On one occasion, when he was 10, Parsons was caught shoplifting and his dad grounded him for a month for that offense. “Being grounded to me was terrible. I loved being outside.” When you did something wrong at the Parsons home, you paid for it. But after one particularly terrible misdeed, when most parents would probably break under the enormity of a child’s action, his dad kept his restraint. At age seven, Parsons was playing with matches and burned the family home to the ground. His mother had to go to the hospital with minor burns after rushing into the house to save his younger siblings. No one was seriously hurt, but the family had to move in with grandparents for four months until the home was rebuilt. His dad’s response: “Don’t do it again.” Parsons says his father “understood the gravity of the situation and he knew I understood it as well. You punish someone when you are trying to make a point, trying to drive it home or reinforce some sort of discipline, morality, or message. He had the sense that punishing me at the time would serve no purpose other than an expression of his outrage.” When Parsons turned 13, his dad announced that the spankings and punishments would now stop. “It was almost like a religious experience,” he recalls. “He tells me, ‘Today you’re a man and I expect you to start acting like one.’ I more or less did,” he quips. “The experience was odd. I was thinking, ‘What’s different today?’ But that was my dad’s whole orientation. He looked at life as steps on stairs. I was moving a step up in the maturation process.”


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And his father also subscribed to the “corral” method of parenting, not the lead-around-on-a-leash approach. He wanted his children to go out there and figure it out by themselves, even though they might bump into some fences now and then. For example, when Parsons was 16, he decided he wanted to go to the University of Hawaii instead of a college nearby. “My mother told my father, ‘Larry, we can’t let this 16-year-old go to Hawaii, for goodness’ sake.’ My father said, ‘Isabel, the boy wants to go to Hawaii. Let him go.’ ” Parsons looks back on his youth with fondness, and believes he’s been able to succeed in his life because his parents loved him so deeply. His mother, who was a homemaker when he was growing up, would always take a job at the Ideal Toy Company starting in late September working three nights a week going into the Christmas season so the parents would have extra money to buy gifts for the kids. “It was just clear to me that both my parents were focused on my well-being, my happiness, my prospects for success, satisfaction, contentment,” he explains. “Love is an intangible thing. There are people who think they are loved by their parents but don’t feel it. I felt it.” That feeling of love he got from his parents has helped him as a leader because, he believes, “I never needed to be revered.”

PARSONS

’

CHILDHOOD

LESSONS

1. You have to be accountable. All actions have consequences, and as you mature the consequences become greater, especially when you become a leader. There is a fundamental difference between right and wrong. 2. Guiding someone on a leash doesn’t help him or her grow and learn. But there’s nothing wrong with setting boundaries and conveying expectations. 3. If you’ve been loved unconditionally you’ll be less likely to search for reverence as you ascend in your career.


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LINDA CHAVEZ-THOMPSON Vice Chair of the Democratic Party and Executive Vice President of the AFL-CIO

LEADER LOWDOWN Childhood hero:

John F. Kennedy

How your parents describe you:

Coordinator

Colleges attended, degrees earned: First job as an adult:

None

Cleaning farm homes

Linda Chavez-Thompson, a second-generation Mexican-American and the granddaughter of Mexican cotton sharecroppers from Lubbock, Texas, describes her dad as “old-fashioned strict.” When she was young, she was not allowed to speak with boys, let alone be seen with them. “I remember this young man—he was a senior in high school and I was a freshman. He was a real Casanova. I adored him from afar. He worked bagging groceries at the local store. Once when we had gone in there, he was carrying groceries out while we were walking in. I turned and gave him what I considered my most beautiful smile. Right behind him was my uncle. My smile just literally froze on my face. I crawled to the car. My uncle told my father, and he didn’t say a word until afterward. He started calling me, in a sarcastic manner, la risueña, the smiling one. And I was grounded for a month because I smiled at that boy.” Her father told everyone in the family about the incident as if it was “the greatest sin I ever committed. He’d say, ‘Call la risueña to dinner,’ ‘Get la risueña to prepare for school.’ ” While she can laugh about it today, Chavez-Thompson recalls how traumatic the incident was, especially disappointing her father and living with his anger over the episode for months afterward. “It didn’t stop me from loving him, respecting him, but we


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feared his wrath,” she maintains. It wasn’t the punishment, she says. What wounded her “in the deepest part of my heart was that my father was not happy with me.” There was no question in Chavez-Thompson’s mind that you obey your parents, even when her father took her out of high school during her freshman year because at the time he thought girls did not need an education since they were expected to get married and have babies. Although this was devastating, she looks at what great things her father passed along to her. He was able to instill his strong work ethic into his daughter. “He always told us, ‘Be proud of what you do, whatever it is, and the best at any task.’ He was up from dawn to dusk working as a cotton sharecropper, working with pulled shoulders and other injuries. All he would do was ask Mother to put Bengay on him at night so he could be out at dawn the next morning. In my 40 years of working life, I don’t think I was out sick more than 10 times.” But she laments that her dad rarely stood up for himself when it came to work. “This one incident showed me he was proud but also a humble man. My dad wanted to show me how to put irrigation tubes together to water cotton crops, so one day he took me with him. We went out in his pickup truck to an irrigation ditch so he could show me how to use an aluminum tube where you pump water. All of a sudden we saw this boss guy coming. Dad said, ‘Get in the truck.’ The boss man, I could tell he was upset. He was yelling at my father, screaming and berating him for I don’t know what.” Her dad had the habit of taking off his hat and putting it on his chest when he felt deference to someone. “There was my dad, the hat on his chest, being berated by the man. My dad was the biggest man in my life. I was 10. There was no other man except my dad. I could see him literally almost shrinking.” Her dad put his hat back on and got into the truck. He never said a word. Chavez-Thompson also remained silent. “I was horrified then. How could someone do this to my daddy and why


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didn’t my daddy fight back? I now know that he would have been fired if he had said anything.”

C H AV E Z

-THOMPSON’S

CHILDHOOD LESSONS

1. Have an affinity for your workers. There is no reason to treat them with disrespect no matter what the circumstances are. 2. Be proud of whatever job you do and give it your all. You cannot succeed at a job without hard work. 3. Respect yourself and the people around you, especially those who are older and wiser.

LINDA DILLMAN Chief Information Officer of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.


Teaching

Childhood hero: First job as a kid:

My cousin Larry Babysitting; counter at Kentucky Fried Chicken

Linda Dillman doesn’t hesitate when asked who influenced her life and her eventual rise to a role of leader—“It was my dad, absolutely.” A longtime postman and a World War II veteran, her father made his mark on her life with his solid work ethic, strong values, and uncompromising integrity. During his 35 years as a postal worker, Dillman’s dad took only four sick days. He got to know everybody on his route by name, asking them about their kids, their ailments, and what was going on in their lives. If


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somebody didn’t pick up their mail he’d check on them. “At Christmastime he’d come home with endless amounts of candy and cookies from people on his route. With a couple of retirement homes he delivered mail to, he’d go and check on some of the residents and spend time with them.” He didn’t have a temper and tried to see the positive in almost everything. That meant all the kids would stand up and take notice when he did become angry. Dillman could recall only one instance when she was 11, during a holiday, when her mom wanted her to wear rollers in her hair for a trip to an aunt’s house. “I just pushed it to the point where I wasn’t going to go. He swatted me for that, and I sure did go,” she adds. What has stayed with Dillman most about her dad was his unflagging support of whatever she and her two sisters and one brother wanted to do. “There’s a certain freedom you get or courage when you know you are going to be supported by your parents no matter what direction you take. There were very few things that Dad would have said, ‘You should do that.’ For a long time during her youth, Dillman considered becoming a beautician, and spent hours cutting out photos of hairdos from magazines and checking out beauty schools. During all this time, her dad was supportive of her possible career direction even though she knew it wasn’t his first choice for his daughter. Without preaching to her or discouraging her choice, he subtly encouraged her to take college preparatory classes just in case. She ultimately decided to go to college. “He was happy about that,” she says. With Dillman’s father being a letter carrier, the family didn’t have a lot of money, but her dad made it clear all the kids would all be able to go to college if they chose to do so. He ended up taking out loans to help Dillman pay for college, to supplement the scholarships and grants she received. “Money was never a big focus for him. Growing up, you wish you had the things other kids had, but I had parents who devoted a lot of time to me,” she says. They came to every game


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and musical recital. Her father was all about exposing his children to different experiences. The family traveled to 48 U.S. states on vacations, packing up the car and taking a cooler in the back, AAA booklet in hand. “My dad would stop at every single attraction in the book—rodeos in Wyoming, you name it. It educated us.” Dillman believes that exposure to new places gave her the confidence to leave home after college, and it nurtured a love of exploring new places and people that she has even today.

’S

DILLMAN

CHILDHOOD

LESSONS

1. Getting to know people and really caring about what they’re about makes you a better person and leader. 2. If you don’t blow up at every problem, people will know you’re serious when you do. 3. No matter how much or how little money you have, you can always find ways to expose yourself and your family to a host of new places and people that can be a lifelong learning experience.

ERROLL DAVIS Chairman of Alliant Energy and Chancellor of the University System of Georgia

LEADER LOWDOWN Date of birth:

August 5, 1944

Childhood hero: Hometown:

My grandfather

Pittsburgh


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Erroll Davis was no stranger to tough love. His mother often spanked him, but what made it worse was he had to go out and get his mother’s weapon. “We had this tree/bush in our backyard, where you could break off a straight little limb and easily strip it of its leaves to create the perfect green switch. I’d have to go get the switch for my own spanking. Can you believe that?” he says. “I’d cry before I got in and then she’d hit me on the legs. It stung a bit.” The spankings occurred when he was late coming home, or went off to play without telling her, or didn’t come home when she called. The corporal punishment never rose to the level of abuse and through it all he loved and respected his mother, trying not to disappoint her. He believes he learned valuable lessons from her stern discipline, specifically when it came to understanding that you had to respect authority and follow rules. “That served me well in the military and throughout my life,” he says. He recalls his mother playing the traditional role of nurturer. “My memory of my mother is all of us sitting in the kitchen of our house; my sister, my father, and I would be eating at the table, and she would be sitting on a stool near the stove eating off a plate. If we wanted anything, she’d bring it from the stove. It was sort of like she was there to serve.” He never had to clean his room. His mother handled that, which, he believes, made him a neat freak when he went off to college. Unlike his school mates whose parents made them clean their rooms, which never got that clean under their tutelage, he was used to things being impeccably clean and was uncomfortable when things were messy. “She spoiled me. I wasn’t used to living in dirt and clutter so I had to clean it up,” he laments. Whereas his mother played a key role in disciplining Davis, his maternal grandfather taught him about hard work and a reverence for the work you do. Davis and his family lived with his grandparents throughout his childhood, and he


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observed how both grandparents toiled hard as live-in help for a local family during the week. “They taught me that all work was noble. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I thought, ‘Jeez, my grandfather was a chauffeur.’ But to me, my grandfather had stature; he was regal. He was a deacon in the church and held in high esteem. He owned his own home and took care of his family. To me, this was the measure of a person, not how many toys they had or how much money they had.” It wasn’t as if Davis’ grandfather lectured him on what was right and wrong. In fact, he wasn’t tremendously communicative. But, Davis adds, “He taught by example.” Davis describes his grandfather’s death as magnificent. “He was well up into his eighties. He cut the lawn at his house that day, took a shower, and then went to a church meeting that evening. He was the treasurer so he had to go to a room behind the altar to conduct business and then wait for them to call for the treasurer’s report. He gave the report, and when he was done he slammed the book closed and said: ‘That’s it.’ His head then crashed on the table. He died right then.”

D AV I S

’

CHILDHOOD

LESSONS

1. All work is noble. Be proud of what you’re toiling at no matter what it is if you expect to be respected. 2. Things work out better when you follow the rules. That doesn’t mean following the rules blindly but rather knowing when it’s time to obey. 3. Respect authority, especially if it’s reasonable. That respect will help you along the way, especially when you become a leader and expect the same.


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DARL MCBRIDE CEO of The SCO Group

LEADER LOWDOWN Hometown:

Salt Lake City

Date of birth: November 24, 1959 Childhood hero:

Father


Not succeeding

Darl McBride’s father was a real live cowboy, corralling cattle and riding horses on a ranch in Utah. But he was also an electrician by day and would tend to the animals when he got home. McBride would often join his dad. He describes his dad as having a “hard-core” work ethic and expecting the same from his two sons and three daughters. While he describes his father as very friendly and personable, he says his father also has an Old West attitude that doesn’t allow for softness or incompetence. Once, when McBride was nine, he was out corralling cattle with his dad and the horse he was on took off at a gallop. He couldn’t rein it in and ended up getting tossed into barbed wire that cut up his back pretty badly. But his dad had to round up the rest of the cattle before he could take his son to the hospital. McBride recalls giving his dad the okay to finish the job and then lying in the truck in pain for another half hour before they left for medical help. McBride admits his dad was not averse to giving a good spanking. When he was around seven he came home two hours late one time because he was hanging out with his buddies after school, and as a result he wasn’t able to do his chores. “I didn’t have a good excuse. He gave me a tongue-lashing and then


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took me in the back room, took off his belt, and wailed on me four or five times.” But it was the silence after the punishment that hurt McBride most. “The punishment was sort of like I deserved it so I was okay with that. But the other part was the disappointment. I had let him down. I didn’t know how to recover from that. I didn’t know how to get over the fact that he thought he couldn’t depend on me. I only remember the belt coming out twice in my life, but both times I had a stronger emotional reaction to the punishment than any physical pain that I had incurred.” But despite the fact that his dad wasn’t afraid to apply discipline when necessary, McBride always felt his dad was his biggest fan. “I had a warped sense growing up that I was an allstar at everything. In high school, I had 12 varsity letters in four sports, and I was student body president.” At one point, the family put in a concrete pad so the kids could play basketball, and McBride remembers his dad raving to his buddies about his son’s athletic prowess. His father compared the young McBride to Jerry West, the Michael Jordan of the day. “There I am, about seven years old, and my dad is talking to his friends about how I dribble, comparing me to a great basketball player,” he explains, half laughing at his dad’s perception. “He always believed in me.”

McB R I D E

’S

CHILDHOOD

LESSONS

1. You’re only limited by your own perception of yourself. 2. Don’t be a wuss. 3. Hard work is the greatest reward.


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BRIAN GALLAGHER President and CEO of United Way of America


Ernie Banks, Chicago Cubs

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Bad habit:

Bobby Kennedy

Fingernail biting

Brian Gallagher’s life at home with five siblings growing up in Hobart, Indiana, was anything but an episode of Leave It to Beaver. His dad had immigrated to America from Ireland and his mom came from Scotland. Gallagher describes their match as one “made in hell.” “My dad was drunk all the time, and he was a very mean guy when he was drunk. It was every day, from the time he woke up in the morning with a shot and a beer. He would, at minimum, verbally abuse you, and he treated my mother and my sisters like dirt. You were just afraid of him,” he recalls. “The words he would use and the things he would call her—you wouldn’t do that to the grizzliest animal. I remember lots of nights lying in bed crying as I listened to him abuse her.” Even though Gallagher was a good student, his father would call him an idiot and tell him he would never get into college. And money was always tight, despite the fact that his dad worked hard as a plumber and his mother taught herself trades like upholstering furniture to make ends meet. The family was on and off public assistance throughout his youth. It wasn’t one particular event that eventually sent him searching for a refuge from the fighting at home, he says; it was like a “drip, drip, drip” morning, noon, and night. “I had


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to get away from it. At times I look back and feel guilty. I should have stood up to my dad. But things seemed so different when I was 13.” Gallagher is a living example of how it sometimes can “take a village” to help a child thrive. To deal with the problems at home, Gallagher began not going home, at least not until he knew his dad would be asleep. And that meant spending day and night at two of his friends’ families’ homes. The Smars and the Harrigans became his surrogate family, and both had a hand in setting him on the right path, disciplining him, and encouraging him to go to college. They befriended him and accepted him as one of the family. Indeed, Mrs. Harrigan even slapped Gallagher once when he cursed in her house. “I do remember the message—‘You can say that anywhere you want but not in this house,’ ” he recalls fondly. At one point Gallagher and his friend Rick Harrigan decided since they both loved baseball they would apply to Arizona State. The Harrigan family jumped into their motor home with Gallagher on board and headed to Arizona to check out the school. “We got a meeting with the coach and realized pretty soon that we weren’t good enough. Then we headed back to Indiana. That’s how it was. I was just part of their family.” His own family knew how much time he spent with the other families, but he rarely talked about it with his mother, not wanting to hurt her feelings. While he views his mother Sheila as an angel who endured more than anyone should, and he maintains his dad Tom worked hard as a plumber even though he had a drinking problem, Gallagher believes it was the influence of the Harrigans and the Smars that helped him become the first kid in his family to go to college and helped him get the structure and discipline he needed to succeed in life. Their


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kindness and love, he says, “still blows my mind. In most cases, you can rise above a bad family situation, but you need someone who can help you and you can’t feel sorry for yourself.” His parents, who are both deceased, parted ways when Gallagher’s mom left his father. Looking back, he realizes his experience gave him the ability to empathize and sympathize with people from an early age, so that he is able to put himself in someone else’s shoes. “I looked at my mother and felt empathy for her. How could I complain about anything, given what she endured? And I felt incredible sympathy for my dad. I felt sorry for him because he was an angry man.” The human dynamic, he adds, is complicated. “There are people who have the inner strength but I came to understand there was also human frailty,” he says. One insight that has stayed with him, which he shares with his staff today, is when you’re in a bad situation or have to deal with a particularly prickly individual you have to “outlast the bastards” and not let them bring you down.

GALLAGHER

’S

CHILDHOOD

LESSONS

1. Understand that not everyone has it all together all the time, or even some of the time. Human frailty is a reality of life. 2. We all need help from the community around us and can benefit from finding love and understanding outside our immediate family, especially if it’s lacking on the home front. 3. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Anyone can rise above a bad environment.


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SERGEANT MAJOR ALFORD MCMICHAEL Senior Noncommissioned Officer for Allied Command Operations at NATO

LEADER LOWDOWN How do you describe yourself: Hometown: Date of birth:

Dreamer

Hot Springs, Arkansas February 24, 1952

Society labeled Alford McMichael and his nine brothers and sisters “kids from a broken home” because throughout his youth there never was a dad in the household. But they didn’t need a male role model, McMichael insists, because they had their mother, who ran the house with an iron, yet loving, fist. Stealing, cheating, and lying were all things McMichael would never think of doing. “I had enough fear about what might happen so I didn’t cross the line in any of those categories. Mom put the fear of God in my older brother and me,” he explains. Although McMichael says he wasn’t hit by his mother, he observed his mother hitting his siblings enough times that he didn’t want to incur her wrath. His mother worked three jobs every day, and all the children in the house were expected to do their designated household chores to keep the home running smoothly. It was very similar to a military command. “She held us accountable,” he says. McMichael’s two oldest sisters would be the taskmasters and in charge of the house when Mom was at work, so all the younger siblings were expected to follow their orders. One day, his brother decided not to follow the rules and even took a watermelon and burst it open on the dining room floor in clear defiance of his older sisters. When his mom came


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home from a job, she was given a full report on what had transpired. McMichael’s brother knew he was in for a spanking, so he headed up a tree in the family’s backyard hoping his mother, who was seven months pregnant at the time, wouldn’t come after him. But to McMichael’s shock, “she went right up that tree and whipped him down it with a strap. My mom didn’t play.” But while McMichael wanted to avoid getting hit, it wasn’t the punishment that he feared most. “I never wanted to let her down. She worked so hard, going to work early in the morning so she could get back for her day job, and then would go off to her night job. The last thing I wanted to do was disappoint her.” McMichael says his mom’s priority was that her sons, as young African-American boys growing up through the 1950s, be honest and responsible. And she wanted all her children to feel good about themselves. “When kids would say, ‘You don’t have a dad,’ my mom would say to us, ‘It’s not about whether you have a dad. It’s whether you have what you need to be successful in your life. Be proud of who you are and be the best at it.’ ”

McM I C H A E L

’S

CHILDHOOD

LESSONS

1. You need responsibilities from a young age to help shape you as a productive, dependable human being. 2. If you’re responsible, people can depend on you and respect you, and that gives you a chance to become a good citizen and a good leader. 3. There’s no absolute formula for what a family is supposed to look like. And if you all band together, count on each other, and each pull your weight you can succeed no matter what anyone says.


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PERNILLE SPIERS-LOPEZ President of IKEA North America

LEADER LOWDOWN Childhood hero: Date of birth:

Pippi Longstocking

March 22, 1959

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: girlfriend since second grade

Hanne Wichman, my

Pernille Spiers-Lopez has trouble pinpointing exactly why, but her father, Finn, saw something special in his daughter. “I can’t explain it, but my father saw a light in me. He treated me differently in terms of the possibilities he saw in me,” she says. She recalls her father showing off a photo of her taken when she was barely one year old, standing in a basket that hung in a tree at a local park in Denmark. “He would tell people how incredible it was that I was standing in that basket, laughing instead of crying like most children would have done,” she says. Spiers-Lopez, who grew up in Denmark, remembers that when she was in the seventh grade, her father, a theater buff, decided to direct a serious Danish fable and not just your typical high school play at her school. The fable was about a drunken farmer who ends up king for a day. Despite the fact that the lead role was for a male actor, her dad wanted her to play the part. The issue of male-female was never a problem for her father. Although he put it to a student vote, everyone knew the director was hoping his daughter would play the role, and Spiers-Lopez did snag the part. Being given a chance to play the farmer gave her a feeling early on that she could do anything she wanted even if it was considered a male position. On opening night father and daughter were nervous, but despite her doubts about playing the part, she was able to pull it


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off because she knew her dad believed in her. “No matter what I tried or what I wanted to do he supported me. But even though he was a very opinionated man he didn’t push me into what he wanted. He let me figure things out myself.” On only one occasion, she says, did he step in. “I was 18 and I had applied to this journalism school that was very hard to get into. I was a good writer and I loved talking to people, asking questions, and we both thought it would be a good career for me. Before I found out whether I got into the school, I traveled as a tour guide for a Scandinavian tour company and went to Spain and London. I was enjoying my life and then I found out I got into the school. I told my sister, who was visiting me, that I wanted to wait to go back to school, and my father called me soon after and said, ‘You’re going.’” Even though her career path went in a different direction, she was glad to have had the experience at the journalism school because it taught her to ask questions and listen to people instead of just foisting her opinions on others. One of the key qualities that both her mother and father possessed that had the biggest impact on her was their implicit trust in her, which gave her a degree of confidence that has served her well. They encouraged her when she decided to take the job at a tour guide. And, she adds, “At age 15 or so, my parents let me travel on my own. I was hanging out with friends on the weekend, going to school parties. I went on vacations on my moped. I know the risks may have been less at the time, but there was a certain level of trust there.” When she made her big decision to come to America in her twenties, again her parents were behind her. In fact, a few years after she came to the States, her father gave up his practice as an ophthalmologist and brought the family to America to live near Spiers-Lopez. “That’s how much they believed and trusted in me,” she says. It’s because of her parents, she says, “that as a leader I have been able to trust other people. I feel when you give trust to


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people, yes, you might sometimes get disappointed but it also leads to amazing things happening.”

SPIERS

-LOPEZ’S

CHILDHOOD

LESSONS

1. If you have people who trust you, you can do amazing things. And, if you trust people, they can do amazing things in return. 2. Undying support helps propel you to heights you’re capable of reaching and beyond. 3. If you’re encouraged to take on roles no matter what gender you are, that will help release you from the bondages that sometimes derail women from becoming leaders.

CHRISTIE HEFNER CEO of Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Dream job: Date of birth:

Chief justice of the Supreme Court November 8, 1952

First job as a kid: Childhood hero:

Wrapping gifts at Saks Fifth Avenue over the holidays Senator Paul Douglas

Being the daughter of the original playboy had little influence on Christie Hefner growing up in Chicago and then Wilmette, Illinois, in the 1950s. She was raised primarily by her mother, Millie, after the two parents divorced when Christie was four years old, and she saw her famous father Hugh only four or five times a year on special occasions such as holidays and birth-


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days. It was her mother’s influence that she believes made her the leader she is today, specifically when it comes to her selfconfidence. Christie downplays the influence of her stepfather, who came on the scene when she was seven, saying only that “it wasn’t a happy marriage.” The core of her values and ideals, she says, came directly from her mother. “I got both my sense of confidence that I could go out in the world and do whatever I wanted and be successful and the tempering of that self-confidence with a set of manners and sensitivity from my mother.” No matter the situation, she observed her mother being kind to the people around her and garnering respect from others as a result. And given that her mother was an English major in college who became an English teacher, she had a great love of reading and engendered that in her young daughter. Often Christie Hefner would be encouraged by her mother to read books way beyond her grade level and that gave her the confidence to read, absorb, and understand all sorts of materials. “I remember I was in fifth grade and the teacher asked us to read a book and do a report. She had suggested The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, but we were also given the option to choose a different book if we wanted,” she explains. Hefner chose The Child Buyer by John Hersey, a science fiction novel and biting social commentary on a clone-producing education system. “It was a book my mother had given me to read, and it took my teacher aback when I told her my choice. I had to get permission to use the book for the report, and I think she may have even called my mother about it. I ended up getting an A.” It was her mother’s belief in Hefner’s ability, that she could read or do anything, that shaped her self-pride. “It wasn’t about any seminal moments, but rather a lifetime of making me feel I could do anything I wanted,” she says. However, she maintains, “I never felt pushed in the sense of the proverbial stage mother syndrome, but I always felt supported and encouraged. Whether I was thinking about going to law school or going into


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politics or journalism, I never felt I had to choose a particular field to please either of my parents. It was all about finding what I wanted to do.” Hefner made Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year and graduated from Brandeis University summa cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in English and American literature in 1974. As for her relationship with her famous father, “In many ways my father and I didn’t have a typical relationship, not the least because I saw him rarely. But our mutual love of games brought us together, and the competitive streak that I inherited from my father is, in my view, a strength.” Hugh Hefner, she says, was extremely competitive and did not subscribe to the notion that you let children win at games. The two loved games, everything from pinball to backgammon, and they both loved to win. “When I beat my father, which was rare, I knew I really beat him,” she recalls.

HEFNER

’S

CHILDHOOD

LESSONS

1. A great curiosity and love of reading is invaluable when it comes to understanding the world and people around you. 2. Aim high and don’t be restricted by what some people may consider is the right thing to do, or the compliant thing to do, or the norm. 3. Don’t push capable people into taking a certain direction. Let them find their own way.


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CHAPTER 2

First Jobs Child Labor Pays Off A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. —George Santayana

WORKING DURING CHILDHOOD WAS EXPECTED WHEN MANY OF THE LEADERS featured in the book were growing up, regardless of the economic status of their families. Whether it was a paper route or a job at a local store, the impact of their first job or jobs went beyond just a few extra bucks. For many of these executives, their experiences with a “real job” early on gave them a valuable reality check about the work world. Today, many people debate the benefits of kids holding jobs while they try to juggle schoolwork and an endless stream of extracurricular activities. Indeed, the number of teenagers in the workplace has been declining for the past decade, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. However, working part-time during the teen years builds on certain characteristics that are important for leaders, says Jeylan T. Mortimer, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and the author of Working and Growing Up in America

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(Harvard University Press, 2003), which tracked 1,000 high school students into their twenties. “Work enabled them to develop interpersonal skills, and build confidence, responsibility, and time management skills,” she says. “And with respect to work values, it helped them know what they wanted to do by understanding that different types of jobs offer different types of experiences.” The CEOs in this chapter are living proof of Mortimer’s theories and when you ask the executives if they’re better off in their lives and careers today for having toiled during childhood, they offer a resounding “yes.” Many of the leaders took first jobs to a new level by creating their own entrepreneurial visions before they were able to vote. The job of paperboy wasn’t enough for one executive who added food to his route for hungry Sunday morning newspaper readers. Another about started a pizza shop in the kitchen. In many of these cases, parents tended to let their kids’ creative juices flow, even funding some quirky ventures. It was the responsibility of a job that made the difference to many of these individuals. While they had homework and chores to do around the house, doing work for a company or running a business on their own gave them a sense of confidence unmatched by what they got from teachers and parents when it came to toil and making their own money. Also, coming face-to-face with co-workers, often older than they, in the workplace and seeing how they approached work opened their eyes to how people view their jobs. One executive recalls realizing there are two types of people out there—those who love their jobs and those who hate them. No matter whether these leaders loved or hated their first jobs, they all took away lessons about the daily grind that have stayed with them to today.


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ANDREW MCKELVEY CEO of Monster Worldwide

LEADER LOWDOWN Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: How you describe yourself:

Winston Churchill

Driven


Ambitious

Andrew McKelvey figured if kids could have paper routes, why not an egg route? When his father returned from World War II in 1945, he wanted to become a country doctor so he moved his family to upstate New York where they lived on a farm and had a couple of chickens. At age 11, McKelvey started shipping eggs to his parents’ friends in New York City. And then when the family moved to Maplewood, New Jersey, he decided to start delivering cartons of eggs to neighbors for five cents more than the local grocery store charged with the thought that people would pay more for the convenience and freshness. He found an egg wholesaler in a nearby town and started going door-to-door. His parents encouraged his efforts, even fronting the venture with $50 to start out. “Since my dad was a doctor, I always started my sales pitch with ‘I’m Andy McKelvey, Dr. McKelvey’s son,’ and that gave me the credibility I needed.” He had about 35 customers on his route and brought in more than $4 a week, a lot of money in 1948 for a kid of 15. His tools were a wagon to haul the eggs and a little notebook where he kept the names of customers. But he readily admits he was not the best bookkeeper. “I would charge them once a month, but did I always collect? I can’t say for sure,” he says. When he turned 17, he graduated to a car and started making deliveries in style.


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“I have no idea how I got the idea, but I was always interested in working. I’d rather work than hang out with the guys,” he explains, adding that he always had the notion, from a young age, that he would end up working for himself. For McKelvey this first taste of entrepreneurship in some ways laid the groundwork for his lifelong aspiration to be his own boss. He recalls a conversation with one of his father’s patients who was one of his early egg customers. They discussed the benefits of working for yourself. The man was the president of Thomas and Betts, a wholesaler of electrical fittings, who raved about how great it was to be your own boss. “He told me one day, ‘You know, Andy, if you want the most secure job in the world, join the Army; but if you want the most insecure job, work for yourself.’ We were talking about my egg business and he was reinforcing my decision to start a business. I thought back then—and I haven’t even thought about that conversation for 50 years—that he was right. That’s what I wanted to do— work for myself. I was never afraid of taking risks.” When McKelvey went to college he took his entrepreneurial spirit with him. He was going to Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, and when a local movie theater shut down, he decided to run it himself during his sophomore year at age 19. McKelvey figured the theater went broke because it was playing Abbott and Costello movies in a college town instead of big movies at the time such as the thriller Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart and Lust for Life with Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh. He rented the space, started traveling an hour to Pittsburgh to rent movies from the nearest booking agency where he got big-name films for $25, way below the standard rate because they thought it was cute a college kid was running his own theater. His movie theater charged 25 cents a movie, making most of its money on popcorn and soda. The gamble paid off to the tune of $1,000 a month, which was a load of cash in the 1950s. Running the theater was a daunting job, given he was main-


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taining a full course schedule, but, he says, “I realized early on that the harder you work the luckier you get.”

McK E LV E Y

’S

FIRST

JOB

LESSONS

1. Hard work and intuition pay off. 2. If you’re afraid of risk, don’t even think about working for yourself and running your own organization. But remember, everything in life has risks. 3. There are good business ideas all around you, and you won’t know if an idea can turn into a real, profitable venture until you try. So, go for it.

MATT C. BLANK CEO and Chairman of Showtime Networks, Inc.


Mickey Mantle

How your parents describe you: Hometown:

Jamaica, New York

Dream job:

David Letterman’s

Confused

It was Matt Blank’s first job and it was the only job he ever got fired from. At the age of 16, Blank got his first summer job working for the flagship store of a now-defunct department store chain in Queens, New York, called Gertz. His job was to move from department to department handling inventory. One of his first assignments was in the lingerie department where he counted an


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array of intimate apparel. He was working seven-to-eight-hour days making about $3 or less an hour, working his butt off, when one of the managers who dispatched workers throughout the store depending on need told him he would be moving to carpets. “I went over to the department I thought I should be in and told them I was there to do inventory. They told me great, they had been waiting for the help,” he recalls. The work was backbreaking since he had to climb on shelves, pull down large remnants, and count the rolls. “I was hurting and covered with dust when the manager came over and said ‘Where were you all day?’ I said, ‘Right where you sent me.’” It turned out that Blank had spent the day in rugs and not carpets. “I don’t think I ever knew the difference,” he admits. Well, the mixup cost him his job. “He told me, ‘We’re not going to need you tomorrow, so thanks anyhow,’” Blank says. “He was pretty mean about it. He, along with other guys who sat in the basement all day long dispatching workers, practiced karate all day, so I didn’t question it.” It was a rude awakening for Blank. “I was devastated. I worked so hard and then got fired,” he says. Although he believes the manager was a bit tough on him, he blames himself for not making sure he was in the right department before he plunged into work. “I suppose I wasn’t totally paying attention to the guy,” he laments.

BLANK

’S

FIRST

JOB

LESSONS

1. It is your responsibility to make sure you are doing the right thing, not your boss’s. 2. No matter how hard you work you still can get fired for one mess-up. 3. The work world isn’t always fair.


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RICHARD TAIT Founder and Grand Poo-Bah of Cranium, Inc.


Drummer for U2

Childhood hero:

Father

Date of birth: January 17, 1964

Since the age of four, says Richard Tait, “inside my heart beat the soul of an entrepreneur.” He would dream about starting different businesses at a young child but found his calling as a paperboy. Well, not the kind of paperboy most of us think of. He grew up in Scotland where he had a paper route. Sundays were particularly tough because the Sunday Times was huge (think New York Times on steroids, he says). “I always had my intuitive antennae up to pick up on customers’ needs. One Sunday morning while delivering my newspapers my senses were going off,” he recalls—his olfactory senses to be precise. What got his nose going was the smell of bacon butties, basically a roll with bacon. Every Sunday morning in Scotland, he says, many citizens find comfort in eating a bacon butty and reading their Sunday papers. “I smelled this and started to think about providing fresh rolls and freshly cut bacon. Can I combine my newspaper business with this?” The answer was a resounding “yes” and at the age of 11 he embarked on turning the term paperboy on its ear. First, he found a newspaper store that also sold rolls and bacon and started delivering the pork breakfast treat to his customers by initially carrying them in his book bag. But alas, the butties would get squished. So he decided to build a cart that connected to his for carrying the butties. “I made it out of


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wood and old tram wheels I found,” he says. Basically, he would deliver the ingredients—rolls and freshly cut bacon—so his customers “could make them at home as fresh as possible and with the bacon crisp like it should be.” Ultimately, the butty/newspaper route brought in 10 times the money of his traditional paper route. “I trust my intuition and my antennae and being human. I always thought I had to listen to my heart. You need to have the empathy, the understanding. I knew I could bring delight to a person who comes to the door in their jammies and sees a fresh roll and bacon with their newspaper. They didn’t want to get dressed and drive to the store, and they were going to pay a premium for that.” Tait figured out what to charge by asking his customers what they were willing to pay and testing different price points with a few willing customers on his route, and he even came out with an array of newspaper and butty packages. “I became the Donald Trump of paperboys,” he quips.

TAIT

’S

FIRST

JOB

LESSONS

1. Trust your intuition antennae. 2. Being able to put yourself in another human being’s shoes and be empathetic is a wonderful trait when it comes to creating a successful business. 3. People delight in entrepreneurship and the creativity that brings something new to them. But the key is that the idea or product makes their lives better.


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ROBERT COSMAI Former President of Hyundai North America


Willie Mays

How your parents describe you: Dream job:

Respectful

Owner of the New York Giants

Having grown up middle-class in a New Jersey town with parents who lived through the Depression, Robert Cosmai always knew how important it was to work. Although his parents took care of his basic needs, if Cosmai needed something extra, like athletic equipment, a car, nice clothes, or money for socializing, he would have to come up with the cash himself. “There are no free lunches,” is how he looked at it. So at the age of 16 he took on two jobs in addition to football practice and school, and never remembers being overtaxed back then. After school he would head to his job as a stock boy at the A&P supermarket and at night it was making deliveries for one of the biggest pharmacies in Bergen County. The latter job he took under false pretenses at first, pretending he could drive the stick shift on the Volkswagen Beetle the store used for deliveries. “It worked out and I didn’t burn up any clutches,” he quips. The drugstore was open late and he found himself driving around town at 1 A.M. on some nights, often being asked by customers to come in out of the cold for a hot chocolate. He got to meet quite a few elderly folks, some quite sickly, and recalls how happy they’d be to see him show up, not just because he was delivering their medication but also because they were happy to have some company. These first two “real jobs,” as he describes them, gave him his first firsthand look at people who loved and hated their


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work. The drugstore owner thought of himself as playing an important role in helping the community. “He was at the store all the time and enjoyed what he did. And I remember him being so generous to me, giving me bonuses because he knew I worked so hard, and he’d help out so many people, especially families. He would tell them, ‘Pay when you can.’ That really stuck with me. It’s been 40-plus years and it’s amazing how vivid that still is to me.” As a result, Cosmai believes, the drugstore owner was wealthy and successful. By contrast, his boss at the A&P was sort of a Scrooge. “This guy was a complete tyrant. He’d tell you you’d have to do a job, something you’d never done before, and he’d never help out or help you understand it. And he was very punitive, always threatening to fire people if they were five minutes late, and he would constantly berate people.” With each day that passed, Cosmai began to realize that his boss not only hated his job but in some ways hated himself. “I said to myself, ‘Attitude is so much. How can a human being who doesn’t like himself be a leader of people?’ I never forgot that.” To this day, because of that early experience, Cosmai has surrounded himself with people who love what they do. “If you have a great attitude you bring the necessary enthusiasm to a job,” he says.

COSMAI

’S

FIRST

JOB

LESSONS

1. If you do not love your job, or find a way to appreciate it or move on if you want to be successful. 2. Do not think about failure. Jump in with both feet. You can do anything if you try, even if it’s learning how to do new things, like driving a stick shift. Do not be afraid to make mistakes. 3. Be independent and never expect a free lunch. It makes you feel better about yourself if you know you can rely on yourself, especially at a young age.


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TOM GLOCER CEO of Reuters Group PLC

LEADER LOWDOWN How your parents describe you:

Brilliant

How you describe yourself:

Modest


Giant water bugs

It was a brief stint, but Tom Glocer learned a lot from his one summer as a bicycle messenger dispatcher. Basically his job was to make sure packages got where they were supposed to go, dispatching bike riders to a variety of points throughout Manhattan. He was 17 and the youngest guy in the group, so that meant he had to pay his dues. When it rained and bike messengers, all independent contractors, decided to bag the job that day, he would have to take up the slack and deliver the packages himself. “The job was pretty dangerous, and the biggest fear was people opening their car doors and killing you. On nice sunny days I’m sure it wasn’t all that bad. But I had to go out during the worst times, when it was pouring rain,” he recalls. Glocer would come into office buildings around the city dripping wet and often he was not greeted with the fondest hellos. “I didn’t mind the ‘Get the hell out of here—you’re dripping on the my carpet.’ But I didn’t like the way I was treated. Here I am this young guy reading Balzac and going to Columbia University at the time with a 4.0 average, living up on Park Avenue with my mother during the summer, spoiled rotten. They assumed I was a dropout and stealing cars in my spare time.” He remembers some individuals saying, “There should be a separate entrance so people don’t have to come up in the elevator with a lowlife.”


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That experience has stayed with him to this day. It made him realize how important it is to treat people with respect no matter what position they hold in life. To that end, when he left a law practice to work at Reuters he believes he was able to lure away from the law firm a secretary who had worked for him but mainly for the managing partner. “I treated her like a human being and not just some person with typing skills,” he explains, adding that the secretary is still with him today.

GLOCER

’S

FIRST

JOB

LESSONS

1. Treat people with respect regardless of their positions. 2. Loyalty comes from building relationships and making sure those around you know you respect what they do regardless of their rank. 3. You never know with whom you’re dealing. They may be bike messengers today, but they may end up being your boss.

DANIEL GILBERT Chairman and Founder of Quicken Loans Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Childhood hero: Dream job: Date of birth:

Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise

Owning an NBA basketball team January 17, 1962

Daniel Gilbert grew up surrounded by entrepreneurs and a home environment that was pretty much laissez-faire when it came to his school and social life. “My home life wasn’t struc-


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tured. I didn’t have a routine—soccer one day, baseball the next. I went to school but no one in the household was looking at my report card really. I think my creativity came out of the free flow, that attitude that I could do whatever I wanted. I had a lot of time to come up with ideas.” His grandfather owned car washes and his dad owned a bar in downtown Detroit, and he, well, he tried to implement any business venture that popped into his mind as a young boy. Gilbert did the standard paperboy gig, but the money he earned from that helped fund some of his more unique endeavors. At age 12, he decided to start making pizzas in his mother’s kitchen. Along with his younger brother and some neighborhood kids, he handed out flyers to all the neighbors about their new venture, which included using Chef Boyardee mixes to make the pizza pies. Before they knew it, orders were pouring in from neighbors who were more than willing to give the young entrepreneurs a chance. “We got 20 pizza orders a night at one point,” he says, with a proud tone that still remains after so many years. “It was so exciting. I don’t even remember how much money we made.” He got his younger brother and his friends to deliver the pizzas and the business looked destined to explode a week into its life when it hit the hard wall of reality. A local pizzeria had heard about Gilbert’s venture after noticing business fall off, and decided to report him to the health department. “Since we were kids the health department decided not to file any charges or fines, but they made us shut down. We had violated zoning laws, we didn’t get health inspections, we were doing everything wrong. It was my first experience with regulations,” he explains, laughing. But the experience did not derail his entrepreneurial spirit. He always had an eye on trends that were hot and started a minor wholesale business at age 13, selling products such as yo-yos to kids on the playground. “I’d buy the yo-yos where I could for cheap and then sell them. It was pretty basic,” he says. And he


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recalls one popular product, called Op-Yop. The Op-Yop was made of two plastic disks with a string running through them, and when you pulled on the string the disks would move back and forth and make a whizzing noise. “They sold big,” he says. While he says he made some money with his many ventures, he insists it was never about the money. “I realized back then that the true entrepreneur is not a chaser of money. It was building an enterprise that was the thrill for me.”

GILBERT

’S

FIRST

JOB

LESSONS

1. It is not about the money but rather the thrill of building a business. Chase the skills that will make you great. 2. It is not always about the product. The key is creating something of value. 3. Have an acute awareness and focus on all the details.

TIM RYAN President of the Culinary Institute of America

LEADER LOWDOWN First job as a kid: Childhood hero:

Pinsetter at a bowling alley Roberto Clemente

How your parents describe you: Dream job:

Ambitious

Comedy writer for David Letterman

Whoever would imagine that a job as a dishwasher at age 13 could set in motion Tim Ryan’s ultimate ascension to the heights of the culinary world? But it did.


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It all started when an older kid in Ryan’s working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh wanted to go to a Pittsburgh Pirates game and had to find a replacement to do his dishwashing job at a local upscale Italian restaurant called Nino’s. Ryan decided to help the guy out, hoping to gain some peer status, so he volunteered to take the Friday night shift even though he was nervous about whether he’d know what to do. The food services industry was the furthest thing from his career ambitions. At that point, young Ryan had visions of someday becoming a lawyer, having watched Perry Mason on television. And frankly, he did not even like food that much—he was a terribly picky eater, one of those kids, he says, who didn’t want different foods on his plate to touch. And he hated gravy or anything that he could not readily identify. Despite his food aversions, he fell head over heels for the frenetic restaurant environment when he first laid eyes on Nino’s kitchen. “I just loved it. I remember how dynamic the kitchen was. Here was this ballet going on in front of me. It was controlled chaos. I had never seen chefs perform before in these white coats, flames going, knives flying. These are the kinds of things 13-year-old boys are attracted to,” he recalls, with fascination still lingering in his voice. He even got to work with a cool dishwashing machine with lots of buttons and conveyor belts. At the end of the night, the chef told him he had done a good job and gave him a steak dinner. “It’s silly to hear this now, but back then my family got steak four times a year so this was a huge treat. And I got $10 in cash. This was like hitting the jackpot. I got steak, cash—what else could be as important in life? The chef asked me if I wanted to come back and I jumped at the offer.” He dove into his new job headfirst, working until 9 or 10 P.M. after school and every weekend. Although his schoolwork didn’t suffer, he admits his social life became the restaurant as he developed a reputation for being a hard worker, coming up with ways, unsolicited, to make the dishwashing and dish-stacking process more efficient. “I repositioned some tables that were used to


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unload trays in a more logical way, and everyone said that it worked better. That was a great reinforcement for me and it just prompted me to take even more initiative. I think that experience still benefits me today. I am still not afraid to take the initiative because I got positive strokes back then. When you’re 13 and get praised for doing certain things, you want to do more.” Eventually, he became enamored with the idea of become a restaurateur, like Nino Sorci, who was the chef and owner of the restaurant, and who ultimately became Ryan’s first mentor. “I watched this guy, Nino. He was six feet three and looked like a young Tony Curtis, super handsome. He lived in a mansion in an exclusive part of Pittsburgh and had several big cars. He was the wealthiest person I had ever met. At some point I came to him and said, ‘I think I really would like to be a chef. Would you teach me how to do that?’ He said, ‘No, you don’t want to be a chef. Be a lawyer or a doctor.’ But the more he tried to discourage me, the more set I became on pursuing it. So finally he let me cook. I didn’t know anything. He was an excellent teacher and excellent chef. He taught me the fundamentals of cooking and I became a cook at age 14. I was definitely the youngest guy around, and they treated me like a little brother.” Ryan started to become a bit cocky with his newfound culinary skills. He recalls a time when he was insulted that a customer wanted a grilled cheese sandwich instead of a fancy Italian dish. “I thought it was beneath me and I didn’t handle it in a favorable way. I was pouting, sort of having a tantrum when Nino put his hand on my shoulder and took me toward the back of the kitchen. He said something to the effect that, ‘Look, don’t be a jerk. This is a customer, and we’re here to please the customer. If they want grilled cheese, do that.’ I remember his remark about being a jerk stinging me for weeks. Here was my hero chastising me. This was the 1970s when people weren’t that focused on the customer as they are now. He was a wise man.” During high school, Ryan realized he was serious about becoming a chef but he also knew he wanted to attend college, so


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he went to a local library, looked up colleges, and found the Culinary Institute of America; he graduated in 1977. “From the dishwashing table I saw a bigger opportunity, and it’s amazing what you can do when you get turned on by something,” he says.

RYAN

’S

FIRST

JOB

LESSONS

1. Do not look down on jobs that appear menial on the surface, because you never know when or where you’ll find a door to your career path. 2. Bring your brain to work no matter what you do and come up with new ways to improve productivity/ingenuity. If you don’t have the desire to try or to recommend new things, you won’t get anything done and you’ll be bored. 3. Ask people you work for to teach you about the business if you think it is something you might want to pursue. Jumping in and trying a job is the only way you will be able to figure out if you really like it.

HARRIS DIAMOND CEO of Weber Shandwick Worldwide

LEADER LOWDOWN How your parents describe you: Childhood hero: Dream job:

Not a doctor

Mickey Mantle

Teacher

It was the late 1960s and a friend of Harris Diamond, a Yankee devotee, convinced the young boy to go to Yankee Stadium


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with him and try to get a food-vending job. “My friend’s idea was we’d work a little and also get to watch the games. Obviously, it was something that caught my fancy so I went and got my working papers,” he says. When the day came, his friend was nowhere to be found, but Diamond, about 13 at the time, decided to make the two-hour trip to the Bronx on his own from his home in Brooklyn. What he found when he got there resembled a scene from an Depression-era movie, he recalls, with men of varying ages lined up waiting to get picked for jobs selling beer and peanuts. “It was like a cattle call. You showed up but there was no guarantee you’d get picked that day,” he says. So he developed a strategy to be there even for the games he knew would be short, not just the big ones, and also to get to the stadium early in order to make sure the stadium staff knew he was there and could be relied upon. His technique worked and he soon was one of the kids always picked to sell peanuts. “They never had enough people for the bad games but plenty for the good games. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t making that long commute and not getting a job.” Diamond remembers his parents being skeptical of his new vocation, especially given the long commute. But when he brought home $50 from one of his first games his dad was stunned. “That was a lot of money in the 1960s when you could see two movies and a cartoon for about a buck,” he says. Diamond says one of the plum jobs was selling peanuts because you could throw them to the customer and the process for selling them was uncomplicated compared to hot dogs, for example, where people usually needed ketchup or mustard. And he learned how to create demand for his product by shadowing the beer guy. Also, to distinguish himself early on, he’d yell out “Get your official peanuts” instead of just “Peanuts.” But the job was no walk to home base. “I’d never sweated at a job but here I lost weight and came home with my shirt yellow


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with sweat. I was a mess,” he says. However, he got some of his best pieces of advice early on in his peanut-selling career from another vendor who was in his twenties. He saw Diamond watching the game on one occasion instead of selling his wares. “He said, and I’ll never forget this: ‘There are two types of guys that come here. Those who watch the ball game and those who work. If you came here to watch the game, go get a ticket. It’s cheap and easy. If you came here to work, understand why you’re here.’” It was like a lightbulb went off for Diamond. “If you’re here to work, focus on work,” he says. When he started focusing on work, the money started pouring in.

DIAMOND

’S

FIRST

JOB

LESSONS

1. When it comes to work, understand why you’re there: to work. For some people it is called focus. 2. Sometimes work is not about building character. Sometimes it’s just about work. 3. You have to work hard to succeed.

DARL MCBRIDE CEO of The SCO Group

LEADER LOWDOWN Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: How you describe yourself: Bad habit: Good habit:

Workaholic Workaholic

Overachiever

Ronald Reagan


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Darl McBride learned the principles of capitalism early on, when he put in a cornfield at his family’s home at the age of 8. While he had tended a garden prior to that, even winning a ribbon at a local fair for the biggest squash, he wanted more than kudos for his hard work. So he decided to plant corn starting in May and continuing through August and sell his crop around town. That meant getting up at five in the morning, watering and weeding his corn. “This was my project. I ran it,” he says, still proud of his first real business. “Gosh, I had a good acre or two of cornfield.” The corn gave him a strong sense of accomplishment and he was getting quite the reputation. “People were saying, ‘That McBride kid’s corn is the best in town,’” he says, with pride in his voice. Whereas he learned about hard work and making money in his cornfield, he learned about perseverance and rejection from another of his early jobs—missionary in Japan. At the age of 19, he went off to Osaka on a two-year mission to convert as many Japanese citizens as he could to Mormonism. He went from a small town of 2,500 to one of the largest cities in the world, and he was there to convert people to a religion that basically ran counter to the entire Japanese Buddhist-centric culture and society. “At that point, you go out and work and learn fast how to deal with having a lot of doors slammed in your face. You need a fair amount of resilience,” he says. He had two months of intensive training to learn Japanese and then spent his days, usually waking up at 5 A.M., trying to communicate his religion to people who at first could barely understand him. He says he’s proud of his accomplishments there, having converted 80 people to Mormonism and having learned to speak Japanese fluently during his two-year missionary stint, and he credits the extreme focus he honed there for his success. “You set a goal and then you go out and work hard.”


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First Jobs McB R I D E

’S

FIRST

JOB

55

LESSONS

1. There is value in learning how to start and finish a project early on. 2. You have to go to work every day and keep at it. Rewards will come. 3. Taking ownership means being prepared not only to succeed but also to fail. And if you can focus on your task, failure can be overcome.


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CHAPTER 3

Adversity Overcoming, the Only Option A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner. —English Proverb

WHEN YOU THINK OF PEOPLE WHO OCCUPY THE TOP SEATS IN ORGANIZAtions, the last thing that may come to mind is that they faced any real personal challenges in their lives. What do they know about being disabled, struggling with helplessness, or falling into the depths of grief? Living at the top of their game and reaping the benefits of the leadership throne, they seem almost coated with Teflon and not subject to life’s real pains. Well, maybe some of them are like that. But many of the CEOs I interviewed had had their share of life’s personal curveballs. One CEO I had read about, and then ultimately interviewed, did a good job playing down or even hiding the fact that he had lost his leg when he was a young boy. And another mentioned as an aside that he had struggled for years with a speech impediment. Many of these leaders tried to minimize the adversity they faced in their own lives, and a few didn’t want to discuss these issues for the book. But when I told them how doing so might help some young, aspiring managers, or kids struggling with a 56


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disability or major challenge, some put aside their reluctance to share the lessons they learned. Their experiences with pain, suffering, and obstacles, they say, helped them better deal with the struggles of climbing the corporate ladder and with life’s challenges overall. The overwhelming theme I found among them, once they came to terms with their own adversities, was: “Don’t feel sorry for me.” They looked at adversity as just another obstacle in the road of their lives, an obstacle that they would endeavor to overcome despite their admitted doubts along the way. Many say the adversity did not define them. But I suspect, after talking to them at length, that it became more a part of them than they ever realized. Overcoming emerged as the main mantra among the men in this chapter. They rose above their own emotional pain, and made it their mission not to let others or themselves squash their ambitions and dreams. They weren’t supermen, but, over time, each came to accept his lot in life, work on getting to a better place, and ultimately succeed. Failure was not an option.

PAUL NORRIS Chairman of W. R. Grace and Senior Adviser with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company

LEADER LOWDOWN How you describe yourself: Childhood hero:

Persistent

Superman

Favorite business book:

Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman

Paul Norris was 11 when he tried out for his school football team. During the tryout somebody tackled him, breaking a bone


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in his leg. At the local hospital an X-ray showed what appeared to be a tumor at the spot where his leg was broken. Since his family lived in a rural area at the time they had to travel to a larger hospital 60 miles a way, the National Orthopedic Center in Arlington. A biopsy was taken and the tumor was found to be malignant. “That’s when the diagnosis was given that this was a lifeending situation,” he recalls. “The doctors told my parents I had six months to live. But my mother was persistently determined not to let one of her kids die.” She found out there was exploratory work being done at Washington Medical Center involving the use of severe radiation and amputation in order to prevent the spread of the disease. His mother’s resolve saved his life, but Norris’ leg had to be amputated at midthigh. “I think I wallowed around in self-pity for a few days and decided, for whatever reason, you live with what you’ve got,” he says. Once the surgery healed, he was fitted with a prosthetic leg that at the time was carved out of wood with a limited hinge at the knee and a significant band around his waist. Despite the loss of his leg, he says, “I was determined not to let it change my life trajectory.” Unfortunately, as he entered the work world, no matter what job he interviewed for, the issue of his missing leg always came up. Even when he applied to be a clerk at the local drugstore he was asked whether he could do the job with an artificial leg. It was the late 1960s, and the Americans with Disabilities Act had yet to be introduced, so it was not uncommon to be denied a job because of a handicap. For Norris it was a series of rejections. Although he had worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a lab technician during college, “Right out of college one guy told me, ‘You can’t be a detail man in the pharmaceutical industry because you have a prosthetic leg.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way but I’m sure I could,’ ” he recalls. He didn’t get the job. “His view was that there was a lot of driving, carrying a heavy sample case, going


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to visit doctors, getting in and out of places, and I wouldn’t be able to do it.” At that point Norris decided it was the company’s loss and not his problem. “If you decide to give up because you get turned down once or a hundred times, you’ll end up without a job. It’s easy to allow a physical disability or challenge to shape everything about your life. I was never a big participant in amputee organizations. I don’t want to be identified as being different. I want to be identified as just another person,” he says. That attitude, he believes, helped him walk into interviews with confidence. He was able to land a job as a lab technician with W. R. Grace while he was finishing up college and performed well. After a few months on the job, his boss, Harvey Rosen, a Grace chemist, confided that some in the human resources department had questioned whether to hire him, because of his disability. “He said I convinced him I could do it and he hired me,” he recalls with pride. “You have to sell people on the concept that you can do it and that you’re prepared to do whatever the job calls for.” For some people along Norris’ career path, the issue of his leg wasn’t an issue at all. One man he recalls fondly was Fred Poses, who hired Norris as president of Fluorine Products unit at AlliedSignal in 1989. “The most interesting thing about the way Fred handled my leg was to recognize it, and accommodate it when possible without anyone around really noticing what he was doing. He never asked me about it or expected any recognition, although I appreciated it and I always tried to thank him for his courteousness,” he explains about Poses, who became president and chief operating officer of AlliedSignal and is currently CEO of American Standard Companies. Poses’ approach, he says, is the best way to help someone who needs help without labeling them disabled. Sometimes the jobs Norris took on were difficult and he had to adapt. When he was marketing manager for the Engelhard Corporation in the 1980s, he had to travel up to 70,000 miles a


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year, managing airports, carrying luggage, and running up and down stairs. On one occasion a device in his prosthetic leg broke so he needed to use a wheelchair. “You compensate, do more phone work, and get the job done,” he says. “You can explain what’s happening to your manager and be honest, but never let them see you sweat.”

NORRIS

’

ADVERSITY

LESSONS

1. It shouldn’t be a pity party. Don’t dwell on lost opportunities that may have eluded you because some people thought you couldn’t handle it. Keep in mind always that it’s their loss. 2. Never work for somebody you don’t respect. Find someone you know will respect you no matter what your disability might be, and make sure you can learn from them. 3. Treat people with respect, recognizing where they are not only in their professional lives but in their personal lives as well. Companies are made up of people, and developing relationships with the people you work for and understanding their limitations and strengths is key.

JOE MOGLIA CEO of Ameritrade


Commissioner of the National Football League

Thing you’re most afraid of: Bad habit:

Stuttering

Eating occasionally with my mouth open

Childhood hero:

Mickey Mantle


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Most people who meet Joe Moglia have no idea he has been struggling with a disability since grammar school. It all started around fourth grade when he began to stutter, and the stuttering got progressively worse from eighth grade through college. “If I knew the answer in class I wouldn’t put my hand up because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get the words out,” he recalls. As he was growing up in New York City in the 1950s, his parents, who had little education, did not seek help for Moglia because, he says, it just was not something he or they thought about. His stuttering tended to be not as pronounced around his family, and he did everything he could to hide his problem at school because he was embarrassed by it. Moglia describes how he would initially go “dah, dah, dah” before a difficult word when he was talking, especially in the classroom. Eventually he decided to give up on the word after the first “dah” instead of letting his classmates know he was a stutterer. One particular word that still vexes him is “legislation. I would try to get the word started when a teacher called on me and then I wouldn’t speak when I knew I couldn’t get it out. It was like I didn’t know the answer, but I did. I just had to stand there like a jerk.” Moglia says he was a good student, but he believes his stuttering held him back in high school and college. “I didn’t raise my hand. I felt uncomfortable throughout my academic life not being able to speak up when I had an idea.” Of all the careers for someone who stutters to go into, Moglia decided he wanted to be a coach and teacher. “After I got married, still a kid myself, putting myself through school at Fordham University, I started coaching. It became apparent, as a coach, I would need to communicate well with my players—teach them, talk to them.” So he decided to deal with his stuttering head-on. “I would prepare for every meeting, every lesson. I would stand in front of a mirror and walk through whatever I was going to go over and all the points I wanted to illustrate. I would do this for hours on end. If I was going


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to give a 20-minute speech I had to practice for 10 hours,” he says. He found ways to change the tone of his speech so stuttering would become less obvious. He began to use strong inflections when he spoke, hitting certain words hard during a discussion or speech for emphasis. Although it began as a way for him to push out difficult words, he says, it also gave his speeches more passion. “When I got one of my first jobs coaching for a high school in Delaware, I was also teaching European history, political science, and economics. If I was talking about European history, even though it might not have been a favorite topic, my students thought I enjoyed it because I was using the strong inflections, more staccato in my speech,” he says. Overcoming his speech impediment was hard work, but he says he was motivated to put in the endless hours preparing because he loved what he was doing. “My philosophy in life has always been ‘whatever you choose to do in life, you want to do something you love and are passionate about.’ When I was a coach, I really wanted to be the type of coach who not only was successful, but also was the kind of coach everyone in the world would want to play for and cut off their legs for,” he explains. His next career choice, as an institutional salesperson for Merrill Lynch, was no easier for Moglia, who had to communicate impeccably given he was overseeing million-dollar trades and dealing with people’s livelihoods. “I had to be able to control how I spoke. In the beginning I used to quietly practice what I was going to say before I got on the phone, and then I would put my hand over my ear so I could block out what was going on around me and really concentrate on the conversation,” he recalls. “I remember being on the phone a few times, contorting my face so that the words would come out.” Moglia still struggles with stuttering. “Even now, I still get butterflies in my stomach before I have to give a speech,” he says. Although today if any of his children stuttered he would get them professional help, he maintains that his desire to attain


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his career aspirations helped him triumph over his disability. “In order to be good as an institutional salesperson, a member of an executive team, a senior leader, the head of an athletic organization, or a teacher in a classroom, you not only have to be able to speak but you have to speak effectively. It was difficult for me, but it was something I had to do.” And his battle helped him gain a better understanding of the people he encounters, he says, which in turn has made him a better leader. “I’ve become much more empathetic to other people’s limitations and fears. With that understanding you can help influence, motivate, and gain loyalty from the people around you.”

MOGLIA

’S

ADVERSITY

LESSONS

1. It is critical to do something you love. That gives you the ability to put in the hours of hard work necessary to overcome your limitations. 2. The preparation pays off. Pushing yourself through the difficult phase of any challenge results in huge rewards. 3. Having empathy and understanding the people around you—clients, your employees—make you a better leader.

PETER KIGHT CEO of Checkfree

LEADER LOWDOWN First job as a kid: Childhood hero: Bad habit: Good habit:

Cutting lawns, cleaning swimming pools Leif Eriksson

Red wine Never tried coffee


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Peter Kight wondered why he was so restless during his school years, always challenging his teachers and the principal, always on the go, with endless sports activities and jobs to fill the hours. What he came to realize, in the late 1970s when he was an adult, was he had and still has attention deficit disorder (ADD). “As soon as people started writing about it, I immediately knew that was it.” It was a patience issue, he explains. He recalls people, including his father, thinking he wasn’t as smart as all the other kids. “I always knew people didn’t expect much from me,” he remembers. He focused on not letting that fact his dad didn’t believe in him bring him down, finding solace in his mother’s and grandmother’s unwavering support. “And I would occasionally have the really good teacher who knew how to get me interested in things,” he adds. But for the most part he viewed his teachers as lazy, and when he wouldn’t toe the line they forced him to do rote memorization as punishment for failing to follow the rules. “I would fight back, which is a common issue with ADD and ADHD [attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder]. It was stimulating, the confrontation. I would get into verbal battles.” In two classes in particular, seventh-grade math and eighthgrade history, he challenged the teachers directly in front of the students, and not in a diplomatic way. “In both cases I ended up finishing the school year taking the class in the hall. I actually had to sit outside the classroom. The teacher said, ‘Here’s your book and chapters. Your job is to somehow pick up the work.’ ” When Kight went to college things got better. He was able to select the classes he liked, and all of a sudden he was a bit better able to concentrate. In one class where he studied California history he became being the best student in the class, stimulated by the stories of the Russians, Portuguese, and others who had settled in the area. And he began to learn how to deal with his impatience by filling the hours with work. As a young kid with ADD, he says, it was impossible for him to think of ever having a normal nine-to-five corporate job. The


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idea of it still gives him a cold sweat. “I would have had a great deal of difficulty if I had gotten into a staff job. I knew that. That’s why I started a company. I was fearful to the point of being paranoid that I would end up working in a big company.” Right out of college he was editor in chief of a fitness magazine, and started his own two years later at age 22, working from 6 A.M. to 10 P.M. on most days, stimulated by publishing’s frenetic pace. “There, I was fully engaged.” At age 23 he started Checkfree. “People talk about the spirit of entrepreneurship. It doesn’t make sense to me,” he says. His decision to start a business was mainly based on survival. It was the only way he could exist in the work world. Even at his own company he’s had to make adjustments. “I don’t let people chew on ice or click their pens. Those things annoy people with ADD.” He has to fight from letting his mind wander during meetings. If a manager came up with an interesting idea during a meeting, he would go off in his mind and think about how to execute the idea, bring it to market, and sell it. The next thing he’d know five minutes had passed and he hadn’t heard what was going on. Now he forces himself to write the idea down so he can brainstorm about it later and continue to concentrate on the ongoing discussion. Or he’ll stop the meeting so all the team can go over the idea if needed. “You have to learn to see things coming. The real trick is not to wait until it comes and force yourself to stop it.” While Kight says he wouldn’t wish his experiences on anyone, he adds, “At the end of the day, I think I was driven to achieve because of it.”

KIGHT

’S

ADVERSITY

LESSONS

1. You can’t let people’s impressions of you drag you down. Seek out people who do believe in you and understand your limitations. But the bottom line is, no one knows your true potential but yourself.


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2. Realizing that you face challenges does not change what you can accomplish or belittle what you’ve already accomplished. 3. Adapt your environment and your career choices to accommodate whatever challenges, disabilities, or limitations you have.

STANISLAS DE QUERCIZE President and CEO, Van Cleef and Arpels


Zorro

Thing you’re most afraid of: Favorite book:

Losing loved ones

Bible

Stanislas de Quercize went through every parent’s nightmare at a time when his career was burgeoning—he lost a child. It was the 1980s, and de Quercize was working for the world’s largest consumer products company, Procter & Gamble, in the capital of Europe, Brussels. He had gone from being a product manager to marketing director for Belgium overseeing P&G’s big products, including Pampers and Tide. It was in many ways a dream job for de Quercize, an MBA in his early thirties, because he saw it as a challenge for his generation in Europe to bring the diverse nations together with a global vision. “We wanted peace and economic growth in a region flagged by war for so many generations,” he says. He saw his job as a key way to help bring about unity by trying to figure out what was common within all the countries of Europe and what was different. “I was excited about being a part of the adventure,” he explains.


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Little did he realize how his life was soon to change. One day as he was eating lunch in the P&G cafeteria a co-worker came and told him his wife was trying to reach him. When he called his wife, she told him to come to the hospital, saying, “We have a problem.” “I went there and I saw my wife with the doctor, who had an awful look on his face. Then my wife told me that our son had just died.” De Quercize rushed to his son’s bedside. “I took him in my arms. He was motionless.” His son Alban, his first and only child at the time, had died from sudden infant death syndrome at just three weeks old. The thing he remembers most vividly was how “striking the silence was” at the couple’s Brussels apartment when they returned from the hospital without their son. “It was a shock. Basically there was no explanation for it. I am a rational person and I like to know why people die. Here I am with no explanation and it’s our first child. You want to give birth and life suddenly doesn’t happen. It was a terrible sense of loss as you try to understand what the meaning of it is.” For a long time, he searched for comfort wherever he could get it. He was a long-time volunteer at a crisis center talking to people who were contemplating suicide. He recalls a counselor there sympathizing with him after his son passed away, saying, “I hope you will give meaning to his life and his death.” That statement stuck with de Quercize, as did the eulogy at his son’s funeral when the priest said, “Alban has had a successful life because he was loved and he loved. I wish we could all do the same thing in our lives.” During the year after his son’s death, de Quercize says he was forced to come to terms with his emotional side and he was often anxious when the phone rang because he feared more bad news. But he also began to realize that life was all about risks and the unknown, and he came to see Alban’s death as “a call for being more alive, taking more risks.” He began to rethink his secure job at a stable consumer products


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conglomerate and looked for new opportunities. When he heard about a job at Montblanc and Dunhill, a small luxury firm, he jumped at the chance even though the job was riskier. He saw the job as more fun than his position at P&G given the types of impulse products they sold—expensive pens and high-end clothing, a far cry from diapers and laundry detergent. It was that decision to take a risk that ultimately propelled him up the leadership ranks. He ended up becoming president of Montblanc and Dunhill in France, and eventually climbed to higher posts at the firm until he was tapped to become president of Cartier in France, and then president of the jeweler and watchmaker’s U.S. operations. Looking back, he says, he never regrets the time he had with Alban and the things Alban taught him despite his brief existence. “He brought something to the world and to me even though he was unable to talk, write, or walk,” he says, adding that having three children after Alban died has helped him and his wife move on. “You have to accept the pain but the scars will remain. But I think it’s probably better that on your deathbed you have scars all over your body, because that means you have lived.”

DE

QUERCIZE

’S

ADVERSITY

LESSONS

1. Be blessed with what you have. Appreciate the here and now because it is all too fleeting. 2. You don’t control life. Sometimes you have to accept things and move on. 3. Life is too short, so take the maximum from it and take risks; move outside your zone of comfort.


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BILL LICHTENSTEIN President and Founder of Lichtenstein Creative Media

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite business book: What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, by Mark H. McCormack Thing you’re most afraid of: Childhood hero:

Lost opportunities

Bruce Springsteen

At age 30, Bill Lichtenstein had lived what he deemed a charmed life. He had reached the pinnacle of the news producing world in New York, working at ABC for 20/20 doing investigative reports, winning major journalism awards, and working with newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin on his latenight TV show. “I had never run up against a significant event, a major obstacle in my life that I hadn’t been able to overcome,” he recalls. That soon changed. In 1986, Lichtenstein’s feeling of being on top of the world ended when he began to lose touch with reality. “I stopped sleeping and started having delusional ideas. First I was suspicious, then paranoid about things. It became intense and really interfered with my work. It got to the point where my boss and girlfriend at the time walked me over the St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital and into the emergency room. They said, ‘This is our friend and there’s something wrong with him. Can you help him?’ ” “I was out of touch with reality. I thought I wasn’t in New York anymore. I thought I was in a place that looked like New York, but it wasn’t New York,” he explains. Lichtenstein was in the hospital for three weeks and was put on antipsychotics and sedatives without ever getting a diagnosis. Ultimately, he moved into his parents’ home in Massachusetts,


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where his mother took him to McLean Hospital of Harvard Medical School. After examining him, a doctor said he had good and bad news. “He said, ‘The bad news is you have manic depression, and the good news is if you take the medication you’ll be okay.’” With his diagnosis, he went back to New York and started calling friends and colleagues to explain to them what had happened and why he had been in the hospital. By that time the Breslin show had been canceled but Lichtenstein wasn’t worried about finding work given his track record and contacts. However, his phone calls to friends and reporters fell on deaf ears. “The phone stopped ringing. People with whom I had been through lengthy undercover reporting projects wouldn’t return phone calls, and close friends from college didn’t return phone calls.” He kept looking for work and took whatever jobs he could find, including a temp job doing word processing. “I couldn’t find work in the field that I had worked in at that point for 15 years professionally, and made the choice to do word processing,” he says, adding that in the mid1980s not many people knew how to use the programs, so he took training classes and was making anywhere from $15 to $20 an hour. Sometimes he didn’t take his medication for periods of time and was hospitalized twice more. “The stigma of the illness drove me to be in denial,” he says. Giving up on getting back into the TV world was not an option for Lichtenstein, but he believes he was stonewalled because of the stigma of mental illness. During an interview for a job with a local news show in New York, he was close to being hired until the person interviewing him asked about the “episode” he had while working for ABC. “I said, ‘I was exhausted and I ended up in the hospital for a few weeks. But I’m doing better now. I’m sure I could do the job.’” He didn’t get the offer. The low point came for him in 1989, after his third hospital-


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ization, when he was going through his sofa looking for change to buy toothpaste. “I had this realization that I had two choices,” he says. “I could go back to my parents’ house in Newton, back into the bedroom I grew up in, with my books and record albums, or I could find a way to turn this around.” At 3 A.M. one night, he was reading the phone book and decided to look up manic-depressive. He came across a listing for a manic-depressive support group in New York and decided to call the number. The message on the voice mail said that Kay Redfield Jamison, an author and authority on manic depression, would be speaking at a group event, and he decided to attend a meeting. That meeting changed the direction of his life. For the first time, he heard the experiences of other people who had recovered from manic depression. After months of trying to find literature at popular bookstores about his disease and coming up empty, he came face-to-face with people who had lived his illness and prevailed. “I felt really empowered by it,” he says. “The prospect that people recovered from this led me to believe I could as well. It wasn’t about a character flaw. You become a marginalized person through no fault of your own, and hearing about how these people got better was like a lightning rod for me.” Lichtenstein decided to reassess his own career. He embarked on a plan to do a one-hour radio show on public radio about the disease, with the hope that actress Patty Duke, who had come out about her manic depression, would narrate the production. “We called her and she said yes,” he remembers with fondness. He funded the project with donations from members of the manic depression support group and the National Institute of Mental Health, and launched his own production company in 1990 to produce the show, “Manic Depression: Voices of an Illness.” Out of that broadcast grew a national weekly public radio program called The Infinite Mind and what became his successful production company.


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LICHTENSTEIN

’S

ADVERSITY

LESSONS

1. If you dream something and take steps in that direction, you might not get to your exact goal, but you will be in a better place than people who don’t care to dream, or don’t dare to take steps in the direction they really want or fear taking a new path. 2. Face your illness and find people who have been able to overcome, survive, and succeed. There is tremendous power in finding out others have gone through what you are going through. 3. The people you thought you could rely on may not be there for you when things get rough. Find people who will be understanding and stand by you. 4. A mental illness is not a character flaw. It’s an illness and has to be treated as such.

JOHN FANNING CEO of Comforce

LEADER LOWDOWN Childhood hero: Bad habit:

Abraham Lincoln

Being impatient

Good habit:

Being dependable

Dream job:

Dean of a business school

John Fanning refers to his temper as a disability. It has taken him 20 years to learn how to control his temper, and he acknowledges that it’s not something he will ever totally leave


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behind. “Weaknesses are with us forever. No matter how much you work on them, they will never become a strength,” he says. But he’s come a long way since 1968 when he started the precursor to Comforce, Fanning Personnel. His temper at times was directed toward his sales staff. “I was expecting them to understand what I was doing and that they should be able to do it better. I wasn’t very understanding. These people had MBAs, good credentials, but some of them also had a bit of laziness,” he explains. To him, working from 8:30 A.M. to 11 at night, six days a week, was the way you got business, and that meant making 60 phone calls a day, solicitation calls. “There were people who would get distracted and wind up with only 40 calls. I was dictatorial about it, impatient and hard. I didn’t really yell, but it came through in my facial expression and the anger in my voice. I would say, ‘My god! What is going on here?’” Then he got a reality check. One of his salesmen wanted to try a different tack when it came to soliciting business. He wanted to do away with a honed script Fanning thought was a sales gospel, and their disagreement over the approach to use infuriated Fanning, who eventually fired the guy. “My attitude was ‘move on.’” Fanning still regrets that decision. “He went on to become a star in the business,” he says, with a tinge of regret in his voice. At that point, he realized he needed help dealing with his anger. How did he learn to control it? “I spent about five years in psychiatric help once a week. It was a good investment—made me deal with myself.” In the long run, he says, he developed a sense of gratitude and treated people a lot better. In the past decade, he gloats, the company has not lost one single key employee. “I realized I had to treat my employees like I treated my clients,” he adds.


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FANNING

’S

ADVERSITY

LESSONS

1. A bad temper only creates ill will in the workplace and can lead to the loss of good people. If your anger is impacting your business or career, it may be time to seek help. 2. Treat your underlings like you would your customers. 3. Don’t put too much emphasis on working hard and long. Some people may not work as long hours but still may be top producers.

TRULY NOLEN CEO of Truly Nolen Pest Control

LEADER LOWDOWN Thing you’re most afraid of: Dream job: Hobbies:

Wheelchairs

Stand-up comic Scuba diving, flying, sailing

Date of birth:

February 24, 1928

In 1950, Truly Nolen graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in entomology, intending to join his dad’s small exterminating company. However, he and his dad clashed, leaving the younger Nolen with the desire to strike out on his own. His plan was to go to South America to start his own pest control company, but four days before he was to leave for Colombia with his wife and baby son, he was struck with polio. He was 23 and afflicted by what could turn out to be a debilitating disease, and the treatment was almost as bad as the illness itself. “I was hospitalized and put in an iron lung for a


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month,” he recalls. “It was very depressing. I was in a tube, literally paralyzed. I couldn’t even turn from side to side, and I was fed with a tube.” To make matters worse, he eventually became addicted to painkillers, and once out of the iron lung went through severe withdrawal. “I started feeling sorry for myself, but I was able to get over it by seeing other patients that were worse off than me. I remember a guy I went to high school with who also had polio but ended up paralyzed. I began to think I was pretty lucky, especially looking at that poor devil. That shook me out of my self-pity,” he says. In all, he spent four months in the hospital, another six months in a wheelchair, and then three years on crutches. When he was 25 and still dependent on crutches, he decided to move his family to Philadelphia and look for a job doing sales for an extermination company. The crutches, Nolen believes, led to him not getting the first few jobs he applied for. The thing that got him through the rejection was undying optimism. And, he says, “I hate failure.” He finally got wise to the discrimination, and for one job he left the crutches in the car, held on to a railing, and walked as well as he could on his own into the office of the individual doing the hiring. “I got the job,” he says. Surprisingly, he also worked for a while as a door-to-door salesman, because he could make a lot of money and “anyone will hire you because there’s no training, no expenses.” So he hobbled through neighborhoods, selling everything from storm windows to Christmas ornaments, hiding the cane he now used near the doorway when he’d ring a potential customer’s doorbell. It was not his favorite job, but he worked the streets until he had saved enough money to do what he’d always dreamed, start his own company. At age 27, after seeing an article in National Geographic about how bad the termite problem was in Tucson, Arizona, he


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moved his family again, but this time to Tucson to start a pest control company. Still suffering the effects of his polio, Nolen realized early on he’d have to hire someone to help him even though he didn’t have the money to pay an employee. Nolen admits he was a bit of a “macho guy” before the polio hit, and despite his need to control the show he realized the importance of delegating responsibilities. “I couldn’t do a lot of physical work. I just wasn’t strong enough, especially to work all day. I had to become an unmacho guy.” He advertised in the newspaper for a job that offered “hard work, long hours, low pay,” and he got only one applicant, whom he hired on the spot. Within three years, the company took off, expanding into Phoenix, San Diego, and Albuquerque. The key to his success despite his limitations, he says, was “positive thinking. I know you hear about the power of positive thinking, but that really worked for me—that and persistence. When I was in the iron lung I thought, ‘If I can survive this I can survive anything.’ ”

NOLEN

’S

ADVERSITY

LESSONS

1. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride and ask for help in order to attain your goals. 2. You have to have undying optimism and a healthy fear of failure. 3. Even when you feel you’ve hit the depths of suffering there will always be people who are worse off than you.


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CHAPTER 4

The Immigrant Experience Surviving, Adapting, Excelling To get through the hardest journey we need to take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping. —Chinese Proverb

IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE HOW PEOPLE COULD LEAVE THE PLACE WHERE they were born and grew up, find themselves in an alien world with alien ways where no one speaks their language, and then ultimately end up running a major organization in their adopted homeland. But for many of the leaders in this chapter, the trials of immigration may be one of the reasons they rose up the leadership ranks. Among the executives who immigrated to the United States with their families as children or on their own as adults, their experiences as foreigners in foreign land made them more apt to persevere and do well in the American workforce because of their almost idealized understanding of the American work ethic. They seemed to also be driven to succeed no matter what, and struggling to fit it gave them an understanding of cultural differences they believe helped them excel as leaders. 77


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This particular chapter is near and dear to my heart because both my parents immigrated to the United States from Istanbul, Turkey. Looking back, I cannot believe what they accomplished with no family around to help—setting up a business and eventually sending three daughters to college. It was always a foregone conclusion that our family would succeed. There is a fire to succeed in many immigrants. I saw it in my parents, and I saw it in the leaders in this chapter. They all have it. Maybe it was lit over many years of trying to make it in an unknown country, sometimes being ridiculed or kept at arm’s length, always struggling to make ends meet; or maybe it’s their desire to find a better place that keeps their ambitions burning. Many of the executives in these pages came to America from other lands for a better life; others made the trip to advance their careers. For all of them, learning about a new culture, both the social and business aspects, gave them a unique perspective on the United States, one they believe enhanced their ability to succeed.

SPENCER LEE CEO of Roto-Rooter Group

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite music to relax to: Korean pop songs First job as a kid: Childhood hero: Favorite book:

Selling hot dogs Mom

Bible

Spencer Lee immigrated from South Korea to America with his family when he was 16. He could barely speak a word of Eng-


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The Immigrant Experience

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lish and for a long time felt like an outcast. “I was always frustrated, and being at that age, a teenager, made it even tougher.” It was hard for the young boy to make friends because of the language barrier, and he often found himself thinking people underestimated his intelligence as a result: “You know you’re not as dumb as you look.” But schoolwork in English was tough sledding. He recalled his first history class when the teacher asked all the students to read 20 pages a night from a thick textbook titled Western Civilization. At the time, the homework seemed monumental. “I remember sitting at my desk in the evening at home after school using my English-Korean dictionary. It would take me a good hour, hour and a half, to look up all the words on one page. And even when you got the words together it still didn’t always make sense.” Despite the difficulties he faced at school, he kept on trying, never even considering quitting or just walking away, even though he wondered if he’d ever learn the English language. “I persevered,” he says proudly. He read a few pages each night, looked at the pictures, listened as carefully as he could to the teacher, and made as much sense of the material as he could. For the first six months of his sophomore year he expected to flunk out of school despite his hard work. One thing working in his favor was that with no other Korean students in his high school he and his older brother were forced to speak only English. “That was the best thing that happened to me,” he says of his trial by fire. Lee made it through high school and even made it to college. His freshman year at a small private college, Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, however, was in some ways, even more harrowing than high school because he was expected to write papers and long assignments. One thing that made high school easier was the use of multiple-choice tests, but in college he had no such luck. Although he was beginning to master the art of speaking English, the written word


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was still a challenge, especially when he got to basic English literature. On the first day of the class with professor Hal Painter, Lee was asked to write something. “I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember that a few days later I got the assignment back and at the end it said, “See me after class.” When Lee got to Professor Painter’s office, the instructor gave him words of wisdom that stuck with him for the rest of his life: “Simple and direct.” He encouraged Lee to do what was actually easiest, write simply and not try to use big words. Basically, Lee’s professor stressed, “If you like something don’t write flowery words to say you like it, just say you like it.” That experience shaped how he writes to this day, and has helped him communicate clearly to subordinates and peers throughout his business career. The advice served him well, and he went on to earn an MBA at the University of Chicago. Throughout Lee’s life, especially during his school years, the people he met helped him learn and adjust to life in America, but there were a few times people perceived him negatively especially because of his being born in South Korea. Although he’s proud of his Korean heritage, he decided in 1978, during his college years, to become a United States citizen. When he went to the citizenship and immigration office after spending hours brushing up on American history and practicing the national anthem, he says he was treated rudely and asked mainly about any ties he or his friends had to Communists. Despite the experience, he was proud and “thanked God” when he became a citizen, happy to be part of a democracy after living under a dictatorship as a young boy in South Korea. Looking back, Lee believes he was able to succeed despite the language and cultural barriers because he had to. Given that his parents had immigrated to America, leaving their lives behind and struggling to start a new business running car-washing shops in Los Angeles, he was loath to complain about his struggles. His mother and father were working seven days a week,


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morning to night. How could he give up when “they worked so hard to give me the opportunity”?

LEE

’S

IMMIGRANT

LESSONS

1. Look beyond what you think you know about someone because of how they sound or their cultural differences. 2. Persevere regardless of the challenge because eventually, with hard work, you can succeed. 3. Opt for taking the simple and direct route when trying to communicate with people. Showing off with a dense vocabulary pales in comparison to telling it like it is.

BERND BEETZ CEO of Coty Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite business book: Childhood hero:

The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman

Karl Adam, my rowing coach

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: German billionaire Thing you’re most afraid of:

Ditmar Hopp Adam,

Family tragedy

Bernd Beetz has been the perpetual immigrant, traveling from country to country during his career and having to learn new languages and cultures all along the way. Coming to America was a cakewalk for Beetz, after living through his well-traveled resume. He was born in Heidelberg, Germany, and spent a big


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chunk of his early career with Procter & Gamble (P&G) as a brand assistant. The job with P&G was attractive to Beetz because it promised an international assignment down the line, and an opportunity came his way when he was in his early thirties to work in France as a marketing manager overseeing the detergent division. When the human resources people offered him the job they told him that the previous 12 people in the post had failed miserably for an array of reasons, things from not adapting to the culture and language to sheer ineptness. Despite the division’s ominous past and the fact that he spoke German and English but not French, Beetz decided to move his wife and two young children to Paris and embark on a new adventure. He was “conscious of the fact that I was taking a great risk.” But he set out right away to understand the French culture and to learn the language. Even though it was a U.S.-based company and almost everyone would speak English when he asked, he felt the only way to surely assimilate in the culture was to be able to speak the native tongue, especially in France where he knew people took such pride in the French language. “During big meetings everyone would speak English, but when we broke up into smaller groups they tended to want to speak French. Not everybody’s English was that good and I wanted to be a true part of the conversation,” he says. In order to learn the language, he took lessons and also insisted that his secretary at the time, who spoke English and French fluently, speak only French to him and not answer him if he did not speak French to her. He learned the language in six months. “It helped me understand the people better and it helped me in business,” he maintains. He also had to overcome some biases. “At the time I was the only foreigner in the organization there. There was a lot of skepticism about me. And I was always confronted with the German stereotypes and clichés: that Germans are extremely


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disciplined, tough, with no humor. People like to put you in a cast and test you,” he explains. They quickly realized he was not all about work, making sure to leave the office at 6 P.M. each day no matter what in order to go home and have dinner with his family. From France, where he spent two successful years, his next assignment was a promotion to general manager of P&G’s Swiss operations in Geneva, and then on to what would become one of the toughest moves for him and for his family—to Rome. None of the Beetz family knew how to speak Italian, and it was the first country he had been transferred to that had major issues with infrastructure such as electricity and water. And business would also prove challenging. One of his first jobs as the general manager in Italy for P&G was to figure out how to bring major beauty brands to the country. As part of the plan, he was to merge the Milan health and beauty division of P&G with the Rome operations. But in a disaster scenario, only five of the Milan division’s 200 employees would make the move to Rome. “In terms of culture, the south and the north of Italy are like two different countries,” he says. “This forced us to quickly get an intimate understanding of how the division was working, and in the end, it accelerated the merger of the two groups because we had to make such drastic changes.” At this point, languages were coming easily to Beetz, who picked up Italian in two months using the same technique— some lessons and an assistant who would communicate with him only in Italian. Here it was critical, because so many people spoke only Italian. His emerging Tower of Babel persona was going to be tested yet again. After four years running the Italian operations, he was given what would be his biggest culture shock yet—general manager for P&G in Istanbul, Turkey. It would also be one of his toughest work assignments, because he was taking over operations that were hemorrhaging financially and


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where there was a lot of ill will because so many layoffs had to be made. As in the past, he quickly learned the language yet again, but also immersed himself in the people and the culture, even joining the company’s soccer team where he got to know the managers and workers in a setting that was so important to the Turks. He also went to the homes of employees for dinner and became a visible part of anyone’s life who would allow him in. He found a hospitable culture and ultimately gained the credibility he needed to turn things around. “I needed to bring everyone on board with what I wanted to do. I didn’t go into it thinking ‘This will get me credibility.’ It just happened with each step,” he says. His work took him later to London and ultimately to the United States, but along the way his main focus was getting to understand each culture, and not only for work purposes, he says. “I also want to enjoy the city I live in, the culture. I want to understand the country. It broadens you as a human being. Professional objectives cannot be the only thing,” he says.

BEETZ

’S

IMMIGRANT

LESSONS

1. When you go into a new culture, especially if you’re up against adversity, go in and get to know the people around you and their culture. This gives you credibility, and you can get them on board to move forward with you. 2. Sometimes cities or regions within countries can be like two different worlds. Understanding that can help you if your work encompasses more than one locale. 3. The best way to understand a culture and the business world in a particular country is to learn the native tongue, even if everyone can speak English.


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UMANG GUPTA CEO of Keynote Systems

LEADER LOWDOWN Thing you’re most afraid of:

Middle seat on a plane


Brilliant

Person you most respect or idolize, other than family: Bad habit:

Mahatma Gandhi

Drinking too much tea

For much of his youth, Umang Gupta traveled every three years from one city to another, moving to places such as Bombay and Delhi with his parents, his dad a midlevel government official and his mother a labor activist. At the age of seven, he went to a boarding school in Bombay where he was the only Indian among a sea of Anglo-Christian students. But despite the exposure to different cultures and cities early on, nothing prepared him for America. Gupta earned his engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at the age of 22 in 1971, but realized quickly that becoming an engineer was not his ultimate goal. “I felt I was a leader, even from my school days when I was head of the student body and stuff like that. So I decided to go to America to get my MBA, not my master’s in engineering like so many of my friends did.” With money being tight, he applied to schools in the United States that would offer him an assistantship and also waive the application fees. One of those universities was Kent State, where he knew an alumnus, and he had heard good things about the university’s activist reputation. On his first morning in Kent, Ohio, he went to breakfast with a friend and ordered two fried eggs. The waitress asked him how he wanted them cooked and he was perplexed. In


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India, there is only one way to fry eggs, but in America he had choices—over easy, sunny side up. “I said, ‘medium.’ I figured I couldn’t go wrong with that.” Then the tea he had requested arrived, but all he got, it seemed, was a cup of hot water. He had never seen a tea bag before because in India he had used only loose tea leaves. “My friend helped me figure it all out.” Food issues were perplexing, but his biggest challenge was dealing with the opposite sex. “You don’t date in India. I was always used to the notion that men seek out women and women are supposed to be demure and they don’t show their sexual interests. That’s the way it is in Indian culture. In America, and women in the West in general, women are emancipated and there are no arranged marriages. Women seek out their mates,” he adds. But although he struggled with the dating scene initially he soon got the hang of it, and remembers enjoying an active social life on campus. Coming from what was a socialist country at the time, learning to play the game of business would also prove to be a learning experience. After Kent State, Gupta worked for a small steel company in Ohio for a year and a half until he obtained his green card. He then set his sights on getting a job at IBM, what he deemed to be the premier technology company in the world at the time. He joined Big Blue in 1973 as a sales trainee, which he says was absolutely the “best training ground one could ever imagine when it comes to getting to know the business culture in America. I learned how to deal with people at every business level.” He learned that a large part of selling industrial goods to businesses has more to do with learning the process of selling than being a natural salesperson. “It’s not just your smooth talking that helps you sell them something. The most important thing I learned at IBM is that people buy from people they trust. No matter how good a product is, in a capitalistic system there are always other choices, more than one vendor to buy from. A


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customer prefers to do business with you in terms of the level of trust you engender. The trust comes from really understanding what the customer’s needs are and how your product can help fulfill those needs.” While he was finding success in corporate America, a critical turning point came when he was faced with a decision many immigrants are forced to make at some time in their lives—do you go back to your homeland or stay in your adopted country? In 1977, Gupta went back to India with a plan to start one of the first computer companies in that nation. During the six months he tried to start a business in India he realized that the country at that time operated like no other, with rampant corruption and a socialist mind-set that was not hospitable to business. However, he persisted in his effort to start his Indian venture and even obtained a much-sought-after government license to launch his company after a personal meeting with the prime minister. “At that point I had to decide—did I want to go back permanently and live and marry in India? I felt I couldn’t make that decision while I was in the States so I had to go back and see for myself.” Eventually, though, he made the final choice to stay in America, marry his longtime girlfriend, and become an American citizen. “Once I made up my mind I felt I could go forward and never look back,” says Gupta, who got his citizenship in 1981. “I am proud of my background and go back to India often, but I am an American,” he says. And that focus, he believes, allowed him to put his energies into growing his life and his business in the United States without longing for what was left behind.

GUPTA

’S

IMMIGRANT

LESSONS

1. You have to cut the cord with your past life and never have regrets or wonder how things might have been. You can still


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maintain a connection to your original homeland, but you have to live and thrive where you choose to call home. 2. Don’t underestimate the importance of understanding cultural differences. Although people are unique individuals, you can connect with them better if you see the particular point of view they bring because of their culture. 3. Success in business is more than just smooth-talking clients and employees. You have to engender trust by knowing what their needs really are.

NAPOLEON BARRAGAN founder and CEO of 1-800-MATTRES

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite movie:

Dr. Zhivago

How your parents describe you: How you describe yourself: Childhood hero:

Traveler

Traveler

Simón Bolívar, South American revolutionary

Napoleon Barragan was born in Bilovan, Ecuador, and lived in Barranquilla, Colombia, as a young man, where he found work teaching English at a Catholic high school. That’s when the lure of America began to infiltrate his psyche. Mark Twain exposed him to the American experience through his books; and the United States culture was finding its way into South America’s consciousness via music, movies, magazines, and comics. He recalled listening to people who had gone to America telling stories about “how wonderful this country was, how everyone


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was able to succeed in many different ways. I thought, ‘Let me try, let me see, let me go.’” He got that chance when another teacher at his school agreed to help him buy an airline ticket on credit, cosigning a note to pay for three one-way tickets for Barragan, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter. “I was looking to do something better for my family,” he explains. But life didn’t get better for the Barragans right away. The family of three went to live with Mrs. Barragan’s mother, who worked in a New York factory and lived in a small rented room in Jamaica, Queens. “In that small room my mother-in-law put a convertible couch she got from a secondhand store and I slept there with my wife and daughter,” he recalls. The first job Barragan could get was in a plastics factory in Brooklyn, where he worked the midnight to 8 A.M. shift running a machine that pressed out plastic buttons for clothing. Although he remembers the job being easy, the graveyard shift was getting to him. Ultimately, stories about workers losing fingers on the button press sent him out in search of another line of work. He tried his hand at many jobs—assembling shoeboxes at a Long Island City shoe factory—doing production at a carpet factory, moving from job to job trying to make money. “Sometimes, I asked myself, ‘Why did I leave Barranquilla?’ We had a good life there, the standard of living was okay, and I was teaching. I thought about going back,” he recalls. But he kept coming back to the opportunities he saw all around him. In the United States, he explains, “You learn how to work. When you compare it to Ecuador or Colombia at the time, there we know how to enjoy life—that’s the priority. But here it’s first you work and then you have a good time.” Even things as seemingly mundane as the United States Postal Service impressed Barragan. “I remember thinking how organized and efficient the mail was. I would see people complaining about


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the post office, but I would tell them if they went to Colombia or Ecuador they would see Americans have the best system in the world. In Colombia if you got a letter or catalog once a year you would feel very important and treasure that. Here it was an everyday event.” Although he always felt he was treated well by Americans even though he was an immigrant, he struggled with communication despite his training in English. It was always the pronunciations of words that got him into trouble, he says, recalling one occasion when he wanted to write a letter and went into a bookstore to find a book that would help him to do so. “I needed something to write on so I asked the clerk for a piece of ‘shit.’ He reacted a little upset and I knew I must have pronounced the word wrong. I wanted a ‘sheet’ of paper,” he explains, still making an effort to pronounce the word correctly. The clerk was annoyed and corrected Barragan, who thought it best not to ask what he had said. “I found out later what it was,” he says. Despite the fear of embarrassment, he forced himself to speak English at every opportunity. “You are afraid of so many things in this world, and mispronouncing words is one of them. But the only way to overcome is by trying to improve.” He viewed his career goals in much the same way, pushing himself into a host of careers until he found what fit. From the remnants of a bankrupt furniture store he worked for as a salesperson, he started a secondhand furniture shop with his wife, who sold Avon door-to-door. The idea to sell mattresses over the phone hit him when he read an advertisement for selling steaks over the phone. “Why not mattresses?” he thought. The way Barragan sees it, “Everyone started from nothing. This is the leader of the world,” he says about America. “I had an idea why it was the leader. It is a democracy that’s working. I knew I was better off here. There was a future here, a better future for me and my children.”


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The Immigrant Experience BARRAGAN

’S

IMMIGRANT

91

LESSONS

1. Your first focus should be working hard, and then you can have a good time. 2. Don’t be fearful of asking for help learning the ins and outs of your adopted homeland, and don’t hesitate to speak the language if you want to end up fitting in and truly communicating. And don’t pretend you understand something when you don’t. 3. Everyone has opportunities to succeed if they work hard. Look at people who have succeeded who started with nothing. If they can do it, you can do the same or better.

PERNILLE SPIERS-LOPEZ President of IKEA North America

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite city: Oaxaca, Mexico First job as an adult:

Tour guide

Favorite business book: The Art of Possibilities, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander Dream job: Writer

As a young girl, Pernille Spiers-Lopez was always fascinated with America. Her great-grandfather had immigrated to the United States but her grandfather decided to stay in Denmark, raising his family where generations of Spiers had lived. While in journalism school Spiers-Lopez decided to do her


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dissertation in the United States. The subject of her work was comparing America’s health care system based on free enterprise with the Danish system subsidized by the government. During her six-month visit to the States to finish the project, she stayed with her extended family in Babylon, Long Island, and got a job as a waitress in a café for extra cash. There she came face-to-face with her first encounter with bigotry. She became fast friends with a Puerto Rican short-order cook at the café who had helped Spiers-Lopez learn the ropes, and she quickly realized he was treated differently from other workers. “I couldn’t believe what he faced there. Every time something went wrong at the restaurant, if there was a problem, he was always the first one accused, even though he never did anything. I saw how difficult it was for him. No matter what he did he was always struggling,” she says. She had never experienced prejudice like that in her homeland, and believes it in some ways contributed to her focus on diversity and on offering all employees opportunities. Despite this encounter with this United States brand of bias, her brief experience in America made her sure it was where she wanted to end up. She abandoned her dream of becoming a journalist after a year in the field and moved back to the United States at age 22, rooming with her brother, who already lived in Florida. “I realized my love was in the United States,” she says. She started a small business importing Danish home accessories, setting up a network in Florida and Georgia. There were cultural differences to come to terms with. She recalls her immigration lawyer helping her learn the ways of American politeness. “If someone would get a new car I would say, ‘How much did you pay for that?’ or I’d ask people, ‘How much money do you make?’ But I realized that’s normal in Denmark but in the U.S. you just don’t say that. I’m sure I offended a lot of people.” She figured out pretty quickly how to keep those questions to herself.


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Her business venture, however, did not go as smoothly. After two years, the business was clearly not working out and she realized she didn’t have the experience to make it work. “It was harder than I thought to become successful in America,” she laments. Right about this time, she was offered a job by the president of the Door Store furniture chain, whom she met when she was trying to sell him her products. She decided to take the job because it offered some security and she figured if the head of the firm offered her the position that meant she was being taken under his wing and would work closely with him, almost as a protégé. Alas, Spiers-Lopez got a dose of harsh reality when she found herself in the bowels of the American hierarchal system of business. She was put to work in one of the Fort Lauderdale chain’s stores making $5 an hour and didn’t even see or hear from the president of the company for months. “For six months I had no connection with him. I thought that was strange. I couldn’t go to my manager and say, ‘I know the president,’ so I worked hard at my job and waited,” she recalls. “It was naive on my part. I had hoped he would call and ask how I was doing. But I had to work my way up. I learned very quickly I had to accept the hierarchy. European companies are not that hierarchical.” By focusing on the job at hand and leaving politics behind, she was able to gain recognition from her manager; then she got better hours at the store, slowly making her mark. She remembers the experience was humbling. “I thought I was great, but things don’t come overnight in America. It takes a lot of hard work and staying with it,” she says. It all paid off. She finally appeared on the radar screen of the powers that be and eventually became the manager of more than 20 Door Stores.


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SPIERS

-LOPEZ’S

IMMIGRANT

LESSONS

1. You have to accept that working your way up the ladder is the American way of doing business. It’s not always about connections. 2. Understand there are cultural differences, and adapt to your newfound home. 3. The United States has its own brand of bigotry and longtime preconceived notions. You have to be aware of that when you become a leader and make sure everyone is afforded opportunities.

RALPH DE LA VEGA Chief Operating Officer of Cingular Wireless


Nothing

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Favorite business book:

Martin Luther King Jr.

Good to Great, by Jim Collins

Not many 10-year-olds go through a life-altering experience. But Ralph de la Vega is sure he did just that when as a boy he arrived in America by himself, having left his mother, father, and younger sister behind in Cuba. It was 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis, and his parents were in search of “freedom and democracy,” which they saw diminishing under Fidel Castro. But when the family arrived at the airport to fly to Miami together, only Ralph’s papers were in order. “I don’t know what made my parents decide to send me ahead. It was like a sleepover, but it turned out to be for four years.”


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In Miami, de la Vega stayed with friends of his parents whom he had never met, and at first it seemed like an adventure for the young Cuban boy. The Baez family he was staying with was poor and struggling to make ends meet, however, so quickly the adventure turned sour. As the days passed he began to think he “had done something wrong to deserve this.” From a life of comforts in Cuba where his father managed a produce business that distributed products to retail shops and the family lived in a nice house with all the trappings of a solid middleclass life, he had to adjust to walking 36 blocks to school every day in inner-city Miami trying to hold on to his lunch and keep from getting beaten up. Here he was in a foreign land, not knowing the language or anything about the culture. “I remember they gave me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and cold milk. I had never had peanut butter before, and in Cuba you don’t drink cold milk. You drink hot milk with sugar and chocolate. I refused to eat it, but they didn’t give me anything else.” After a few hours of playing and no food, he gave in and ate. “I figured I should try it. Eventually, I got to like cold milk but I never liked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” he declares. While he missed his family and life in Cuba, he realized early on that he had two choices: He could become a stronger, independent person as a result or allow the situation to create permanent damage to his psyche. He thought, “ ‘I could keep longing for Cuba, but it’s not going to change the situation. That was then. This is now.’ It changed my perspective on life.” He also chose at that time to focus on education thanks to the influence of his grandmother, who was a teacher in Cuba and later immigrated to America. In Miami, it was customary for wellwishers to come out to greet the new arrivals, offering them help to build a new life. But for his grandmother, he recalls, a huge crowd turned out, made up mainly of her former students now in their forties and fifties. “That made a huge impression on me. She had influenced so many people,” he says.


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It was education, de la Vega explains, that would help him rise above the adversity he had faced as a boy. “There was always a focus on bettering yourself. When you go through a revolution and lose everything, you realize the only thing people get to take with them is inside their heads.” And it was also about sacrifices. His father, a former business owner, and his mother, a former housewife, both took assembly jobs in a shoe factory when they came to the United States and worked there until they retired. “In many ways they sacrificed themselves for my sister and me so we could have a better future. They knew the best thing for us was that they had a steady income.” De la Vega was able to go to trade school for aviation, and while there studying to become a mechanic and learning about hydraulics he decided to go into engineering. The strong work ethic his parents displayed made an impression on him, he believes, and that gave him the drive to work hard while putting himself through college. “I’ve had to work hard at everything. As it turns out, those early lessons of sacrifice taught me not to be shy about working hard in order to accomplish your goals.” An example in de la Vega’s career where he took this to heart was when he was working as a manager of engineering at Southern Bell (now BellSouth) in 1985 and was comfortable in his job. He was offered another position within the company but would have to relocate to Chicago where he’d be surrounded with people who were much more technical than he was, in a city he knew nothing about. His family and friends thought he would be crazy to make the move but he decided to take a chance. It turned out to be a turning point in his career that would eventually lead to his ascension to a high level. He got to be at the forefront of moving the operation to the emerging digital technology. “We painted a vision for the organization of what we wanted to be in a few years and really transformed it,” he says proudly. “The way I looked at it is it was a change but a


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change that’s smaller in increment than leaving Cuba. Chicago was colder than Miami but at least the people there spoke the same language.”

DE

LA

VEGA

’S

IMMIGRANT

LESSONS

1. If you don’t take a chance and leave your comfort zone you will not be able to advance in your career and your life. 2. Wherever you go in life, because you are forced to flee your homeland or choose to make a change, the only thing you will surely have with you is what’s in your head. Given that, you need to focus on educating yourself at all costs. 3. Longing for what you have left behind will only damage your psyche in the long run. Focus on where you are now and make that the best it can be.


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CHAPTER 5

Mentors Seek Out Sages A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people. —Will Rogers

MANY OF THE LEADERS PROFILED IN THIS BOOK HAVE TAKEN A TWOpronged approach to learning about the ins and outs of leadership and the industries they found themselves in—dive in headfirst regardless of your knowledge or background, but make sure a lifeguard is at the edge of the pool. Dynamic leaders typically plunge into managerial assignments throughout their careers with little knowledge about what it means to be the boss, hoping their moxie and stamina will help them ride the wave up through the corporate ranks. However, they also keep a lookout for bosses, colleagues, family members, and in some cases long-deceased authors who might become their own personal Yodas. Without the help of a formal mentoring program, they forged relationships, either real or metaphoric, that they say propelled them to where they are today. “I’ve found the great leaders seek out individuals who they believe are smart, deep thinkers with lots of experience,” says 98


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Albert A. Vicere, executive education professor of strategic leadership at the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. While corporations of all kinds are scrambling these days to develop formal mentoring programs, even using virtual, Webbased products to bring together mentor and mentee, it is often the accidental relationships, the ones formed on the fly, that accomplish the most. Structured programs, Vicere adds, work best when an individual first gets to a new organization but then often fall apart once careers start to move along. Some executives profiled in the book say they threw caution to the wind early in their careers and approached possible mentors who showed no previous interest in being teacher or advocate to the aspiring managers. In one scenario, an executive approached his business hero at a fancy restaurant despite his fear of rejection. Another focused on asking questions, lots of questions, from a manager she respected and hoped he wouldn’t send her packing. One key phrase that keeps coming up among leaders is that their mentors “believed in me.” Over and over again, that plays a pivotal role, they say, in their success.

TERRY LUNDGREN CEO, President, and Chairman of Federated Department Stores, Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite business book: Childhood hero:


Father

First job as an adult:

Cracking oysters and peeling shrimp at a restaurant


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At 35, Terry Lundgren took a job as executive vice president at Neiman Marcus department stores, becoming the number two after the chairman and CEO. He was in charge of supervising all the stores, including store planning, design, construction, and selling merchandise. About a week after he took the post, Lundgren was heading into a posh restaurant in downtown Dallas for dinner when he saw the fashion icon himself, Stanley Marcus, walking out with his wife. “I just froze. I thought, ‘Oh my God. There goes Stanley Marcus,”’ he recalls. At that point, Marcus was not connected with the retail empire his family started, having left after a falling-out at the company. But to Lundgren, the Elvis Presley of fashion was right in front of him. Lundgren decided to approach Marcus but says he was very nervous given that to him the fashion guru was larger than life. “But I said to myself, ‘What do I have to lose? If he says, “Go away, kid,” so I have a bruised ego for a minute. If he acknowledges me or has a meeting with me,’ I thought, ‘how great would that be?’ I weighed the pros and cons and quickly concluded I should go for it.” So Lundgren walked up to Marcus and introduced himself. Lundgren recalls, “Before I could finish my last name he said, ‘I know exactly who you are and always wanted to meet you.’ I said, ‘I’d like to call you sometime and pick your brain.’ He said, ‘Why not tomorrow?’” That chance encounter led to what would become a close friendship, with Marcus offering guidance and support to the younger Lundgren during his five-year tenure at Neiman Marcus. Their first meeting was lunch at Marcus’ office where he showed Lundgren his retail memorabilia and collections of pieces he had found on various buying trips. “I was just listening to this guy, enamored, and from that point forward I met with Stanley every month.” During one of their lunches, Marcus’ fashion insights led to sales for Lundgren’s stores. The two were dining in the posh


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Neiman Marcus restaurant called Zodiac in the downtown Dallas store, and Marcus, who would always bring a new thought to the pair’s meetings, talked about his recent visit to Europe where he saw a designer who used boucle materials in women’s suits. Marcus surmised there was a market for suits in the United States that wasn’t being satisfied for upscale consumers. The right fabric, he claimed, would translate well for the designer customer. “I thought that was a good idea. We had it made and the product sold very well.” As time went on Lundgren began inviting his executive team to the Marcus lunches, and he also started inviting Marcus to “town hall” meetings he held with the department store’s staff. The meetings started with 100 people and swelled to 1,000 employees with Marcus the main draw. Given Marcus’ history with the retailer, his input gave Lundgren much-needed credibility when he took on the job of CEO for Neiman Marcus at age 37. When Lundgren pondered the idea of going after a younger clientele, ages 25 to 35, he talked to Marcus about his idea. As Marcus was leaving Lundgren’s office after the meeting, he paused, turned around, and said, “My father and my aunt and I would talk about business every night at dinner, and I remember my father said to me, ‘We have to learn to carry water on both shoulders.’ ” And then Marcus proceeded to leave. Lundgren stopped him and asked what he meant. Marcus explained, “You have to have a strategy for your core customer but alter that for your next customer.” It was important that Marcus embraced Lundgren’s strategy and Lundgren himself. “It was one thing for me to propose these strategies to the people at Neiman Marcus, but when I had him next to me saying these things, the team signed up and was ready to charge up the hill with me.”


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LUNDGREN

’S

MENTORING

LESSONS

1. It is helpful to have an elder statesman with credibility supporting you and guiding you. 2. Do not be afraid to approach an admired leader—it could lead to a key mentoring relationship and connections. You have nothing to lose. 3. Regular meetings with a mentor will help create a foundation in a relationship. You will not always hear words of wisdom you can use, but the few gems you can mine are worth all the time and trouble.

MARY CALLAHAN ERDOES CEO of JPMorgan Private Bank

LEADER LOWDOWN Dream job: Date of birth:

Full-time parent or teacher August 13, 1967

Things you’re most afraid of:

Tragedy or illness in my family

Colleges attended, degrees earned: Georgetown, BA in mathematics, Harvard Business School, MBA

When Mary Callahan Erdoes worked for Bankers Trust in corporate finance and merchant banking, she didn’t know the difference between a spreadsheet and an income statement. But despite this sparse accounting background, she forged ahead and was able to set up financial models used for corporate mergers and takeovers. Her secret: John Deal, one of her supervisors, who walked her through every question, every issue she had during her


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education by fire. “I asked for help at every turn. There is no way I would have succeeded without him and others I reached out to.” She recalls Deal having a bigger cubicle than hers, but she didn’t let his corporate stature intimidate her. It was a matter of candidly approaching anyone she thought she could learn from and not waiting for human resources to set up a formal mentoring relationship. With the fast pace of the business world she realized she needed help in the heat of the moment. She’d ask Deal if he had 10 minutes here or 20 minutes there to help an aspiring corporate ingenue, and then she’d pull her chair to his cubicle, sit right next to him, and watch him work. Some might assume Erdoes became an annoyance. But quite the contrary: Deal seemed to enjoy the short teaching stints. (“Or he was just good at never letting on otherwise,” she quips.) “Smart, intelligent, successful people will help you,” she maintains. During her career, Erdoes kept it clear in her mind that there was no way she would ever know everything. She realized that those who made such claims were liars with little hope for success. She took that approach and reached out to anyone with a particular area of knowledge who would give her the time of day, even an underling. “The problem people get into most is when they are too proud to ask for help or too proud to show the public what they don’t know—to show vulnerability and weakness.”

ERDOES

’

MENTORING

LESSONS

1. Seek out supervisors, co-workers, subordinates, and others who know more than you do—learning is constant. 2. Create your own network with mentors, managers, and people in other areas. Don’t wait for a third party to formalize the process—later is too late. Take your career development into your own hands.


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3. Realize those who don’t want to share their knowledge are better off left on the mentor chopping block. Great leaders want to teach. 4. Pay it back. Mentoring others is critical to complete and continue the learning cycle.

DAVID BRENNAN CEO of AstraZeneca PLC


Scuba diver

Favorite movie:

Groundhog Day

Childhood hero:

Mickey Mantle

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Favorite book:

Abraham Lincoln

The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman

While some people search far and wide for just the right mentor to guide them, David Brennan’s mentor found him. After working for four years as a field sales representative for Merck, Brennan got his first promotion to an inside position. At this point, he came face-to-face with a man who would become his longtime teacher. Elliot Margolis was in charge of field administration for the pharmaceutical firm, handling field sales support and training and development. “Elliot was very customer focused. He had been a physician, so he knew what it was like on the other side,” he explains. For some reason, and Brennan still doesn’t have a definitive answer for it, Margolis selected him to be his informal mentee. “I’m not sure why he did. Maybe he saw me working and thought I could do well; maybe


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he saw potential in me. It’s not something he did often, mentoring,” he adds. “I think we just hit it off.” There was no specific moment when Margolis announced, “Okay, I am now your mentor.” It was more an air of openness between the senior manager and employee whereby Brennan just knew he could go to Margolis with his questions and concerns and Margolis would help guide him. “He was somebody you could sit down and talk to about what was going on. He never had an office. He had a work area you could just go and visit. His work space was all glass. You could look in and see if he was busy or not and then just head in. He even had a partial desk set up on the wall so he could stand sometimes when he worked,” he recalls. When asked how he knew Margolis was indeed his mentor, despite the lack of structure to the relationship, Brennan says: “After a while I just realized he was one of my fans.” So he took it upon himself to constantly ask Margolis about things he was working on, but Margolis didn’t dispense advice as some mentors do. He took more of a Socratic approach, asking Brennan a series of questions that helped him find the answers himself. Brennan also learned by watching Margolis and his techniques. “He was a creative, entrepreneurial man. He was extremely innovative. I remember asking him how he came up with some of his ideas. He said, ‘David, everything I look at or take time to read, I think of how what I just took in can help our sales force.’ For example, he would read an article in the Wall Street Journal, think about it, and then use it in some way—like using the computer to send personalized letters to physicians, something unheard-of 25 years ago.” The bottom line of the relationship, which spanned not only the six years they worked together at Merck, but beyond that throughout Brennan’s career until Margolis’ death in the 1990s, was frankness between the two. Brennan was never afraid to tell Margolis if he didn’t understand something or was having trouble, despite the fact that he was his boss. “He accepted me for


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what I was, and it was easy for us to be honest because we trusted each other.”

BRENNAN

’S

MENTORING

LESSONS

1. Your mentor has to believe in you and be your biggest fan. 2. You have to trust your mentor enough to be able to show him your flaws and failings if the relationship is to succeed. 3. Find ways to use everything you read and experience to foster innovation and make not only yourself but also the people around you more successful.

CHARLES O. ROSSOTTI Former IRS Commissioner, Now Senior Adviser for The Carlyle Group

LEADER LOWDOWN Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: General George Marshall Thing you’re most afraid of: Favorite business book:

Snakes


Call him the accidental protégé. In 1970, during Rossotti’s final year as a systems analyst for the Secretary of Defense, he met David Packard, one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard, who had left HP to become Deputy Secretary of Defense. From the get-go, Rossotti was impressed with Packard and studied the way he connected with people, everyone from top government officials to the rank and file. A traditional mentoring liaison was never Rossotti’s thing,


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but he did observe Packard’s every move during the year they worked together. “He was already a hugely successful guy, probably worth a couple of million then. The thing that struck me was his focus on people and his need to understand what motivated them. There were 100 or so of us and he called us his team. In those days in government that wasn’t the way things worked. He would be inclusive and bring people into meetings. Around Christmastime he somehow got permission to use the State Department’s diplomatic room and had a party for the team with their wives, which was unusual for the time.” Years later, after Packard had returned to HP, Rossotti sought him out for a bit of his sage advice. “When I helped to start up American Management Systems, a technology consulting firm, I went back to visit him. He took me for a walk around HP headquarters. He knew everybody. We went down to the lab, and he knew all the names of the people on the bench and would give them encouragement. He’d say: “Joe, how’s that laser thing coming along?” The key, he recalls after 35 years, is that Packard reached out to employees, developed relationships, and was willing to learn. “He was actually trying to get information from people who had it,” he adds. That Kumbaya style is exactly what Rossotti went on to create at American Management Systems, and it furthered his success. The osmosis approach to the mentor-mentee relationship pops up throughout Rossotti’s career. One of his first jobs out of business school was working for Bruce Henderson, who started a consulting firm that ultimately became Boston Consulting Group. Henderson brought Rossotti in to research why a Massachusetts manufacturer of industrial products was having difficulty improving its profit margins. The CEO of the manufacturer was convinced that the company’s focus on getting smaller orders was the reason, but Rossotti’s research proved the problem was just the opposite. Indeed, it was the


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larger orders that were hampering profitability because they were priced too low. Henderson told the CEO Rossotti’s finding and then brought him into the executive’s office so he could tell him himself. Question conventional wisdom was Henderson’s motto. “But even more revealing,” Rossotti explains, “the people at the lower levels at this company already knew what the answer was when it came to profits, but they were afraid to tell the CEO.”

ROSSOTTI

’S

MENTORING

LESSONS

1. Observe the actions and techniques of astute and successful managers, or colleagues in your midst. You don’t always need an adviser to take you by the hand and proffer advice. 2. Revisit and seek advice from mentors who made an impact on you in the past, even if the mentor didn’t realize you were his or her protégé. 3. Use people with power and influence to get your message across.

TOM GLOCER CEO of Reuters Group PLC

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite book:

La Peste (The Plague), by Albert Camus


The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen

Dream job: Windsurfing pro Bad habit: Good habit:

Cutting people off when they speak Always writing a letter after a business meeting


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It was during his years at Columbia College when Glocer stumbled across a collection of counselors who remained by his side as he ascended the corporate ladder. One of his professors, KarlLudwig Selig, shared his love for literature with Glocer and encouraged him to read great writers beyond English class staples like Shakespeare and Chaucer. Glocer also discovered the intricate and philosophical writings of Balzac. Selig opened the door for Glocer to see how these writers’ theories could be applied to the business world of today. “With Balzac, ideas don’t necessarily only come from a very direct path. Often the bigger lessons in life get learned in slightly indirect or abstract ways. If you’re thinking of a problem in a narrow space, often the solution lies in reorienting in the way you approach the problem, and you end up solving a general set of problems. Balzac created a mini society in La Comedie Humaine, with its own rules. He can bend facts if he wants. It helps lateral thinking.” By looking beyond the scope of business and studying writers of the past, Glocer says, “You can bend the facts, or at least what the people around you come to see as facts.” It is about seeing the world from a different perspective and in the process remaining sane among the corporate rubble. Balzac’s writings helped him see that the answer does not always lie with managers around you or contemporary books that might be constrained by corporate customs. But he does not totally disregard business books. “I’ll read one business book a year and only if five people I respect say it’s something I should read. Most business books talk about how I did this or that, like Donald Trump or Michael Bloomberg. Those tend to be wonderful for them but you don’t learn anything deeply applicable for yourself. It has to come from within.” One business book that did make an impression on him was Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harper Business, 2000) for its assertion that corporate America is


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devoid of innovations. Any books that truly delve into innovation and look beyond convention have helped guide this CEO. Glocer’s wife Maarit has played the role of career adviser. A former beauty queen from Finland with a penchant for honesty, she helped set him straight when he took over Reuters’ Latin American operations early in his career and found a unit in disaster. It was losing money, plagued with nepotism, and in need of desperate actions. Suddenly Glocer, a former lawyer, was in over his head. He called his wife, who was back in New York, and told her he lacked the skills to pull off the monumental task. Her reply: “Be yourself. You’re good with people. Talk to them; listen to the ones you trust. They’ll help you.” The advice clearly paid off. He cleaned house and was able to turn operations around. And as for moving from lawyer to the business side at Reuters, Glocer was plagued with doubt about the change. But, he recalls, Maarit told him: “You don’t seem to like what you’re doing in the law. Don’t worry about whether we’ll be able to feed ourselves. It will work out.”

GLOCER

’S

MENTORING

LESSONS

1. The secrets of becoming a great leader may be found in the great writers and philosophers of the past. Meaningful works can change the way you look at people and the world. But don’t look for quick fixes in books that tell you how to manage. Someone else’s seven rules are worthless to you. 2. Successful leaders who share their tales are useless as mentors if they fail to disclose what truly comes from within, the real doubts and self-analysis they face. 3. Look to family and friends when you need a counselor. They know you and can provide invaluable insights and reality checks through their honest appraisals.


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CHRISTIE HEFNER CEO of Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Bad habit: Good habit:

Rushing Trying to always be kind

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family:

Katharine Graham

Christie Hefner thinks of Abraham Lincoln as a role model and someone who has inspired her and her leadership style for more than two decades. It all started in the early 1980s, when she became interested in the Civil War and started reading books by the late Civil War historian Shelby Foote. “One of the things that struck me early on in some of my readings about Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War is how painfully he learned the lesson that when communications are involved, it’s not how well you say something but how the other person hears what you say that’s important,” she explains. “One of the qualities I’ve always tried to cultivate is to be a good listener and not to confuse that with being a good speaker, and to work at being a good listener both in a group and one-on-one.” Another aspect of Lincoln’s leadership that intrigued and influenced Hefner was his propensity to bring his rivals into his cabinet, and not in a Machiavellian way of keeping your friend close but your enemies closer. It was rather his commitment and confidence to want to have the best person for the job. And he was able manage this disparate group of people and get them to do what was needed for the good of his administration and the country. Over time, those rivals came to have enormous regard for Lincoln, she explains. “It’s all about trying to hear all sides of an issue, all ideas, in order to get a


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diversity of thought. He wanted the best talent around him in times of crisis.” Hefner points out that Lincoln was someone who was self-taught, and he was self-conscious that he had almost no formal education. Consequently he surrounded himself with smart people and read voraciously, including works of Shakespeare. Lincoln’s example encouraged Hefner to always focus on “observing and getting feedback from lots of different people and listen to all sides.” However, she maintains, it was equally important that Lincoln drove those around him toward excellence, not letting them off the hook if they had opinions and no plan. “Lincoln resonated with me,” she says. He had to deal with the real world, not the ideal, when it came to management decisions; and he taught her about “understanding the impact of what you do on how you’re perceived, and trusting in your vision and judgment.”

HEFNER

’S

MENTORING

LESSONS

1. You can often learn more about leadership from history books than from business books. 2. A key to great leadership is how you listen to those around you, not how you pontificate. 3. Keep your smart, on-the-ball rivals close so you can have the best team around you and learn from their expertise.


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RICHARD TAIT Founder and Grand Poo-Bah of Cranium, Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite business book:

Orbiting the Giant Hairball, by Gordon McKenzie

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Thing you’re most afraid of:

Orville Wright

Failure

Richard Tait’s list of mentors reads like the who’s who of corporate America, people such as Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Starbucks’ Howard Schultz. During his years at Microsoft, Tait says, “Ballmer taught me all about passionate leadership and dedication to the team.” And Schultz, whom he’s gotten to know in recent years as a fellow board member of the Seattle Supersonics, helped him understand the emotional contract you strike with customers. But there is one mentor who has stayed with him for decades—Peter Neupert. Neupert was Tait’s first boss at Microsoft. “He, early on, believed in me,” says Tait. He had been working at Microsoft for three days and was still going through orientation when Neupert came up to Tait and told him he needed him to go to Boca Raton, Florida, and run the company’s OS/2 development there. “They had over 100 developers on it and he wanted me to run this project. I couldn’t say no. He was my boss and I felt a sense of dedication, so I jumped on a plane and headed down to Boca, reading OS/2 manuals on the plane all the way there. Peter believed in me. He saw the potential I had despite my lack of experience.” Tait describes Neupert as obsessed with analytics and so rigorous that he’s almost “bionic.” He recalls one document he wrote for Neupert, a competitive analysis that was 25 pages long


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and “the best thing I’d ever written in my life. I was up for three nights writing that. But Peter found a mistake. He found one mistake in that entire document and threw it back to me. I remember the pages flowing around me in slow motion. He said, ‘I don’t know how I can believe this document—there’s a mistake in it.’ ” On another occasion, Tait and Neupert were flying to IBM to make a presentation to senior managers there. Tait had spent a week of all-nighters preparing. “I was exhausted, so when I got on the plane I was sitting back, just starting to drift off to sleep when I felt a thud on my chest. Peter had dropped pages and pages of analysis in my lap and asked me to go through it so we’d be fully prepared for the meeting.” Neupert’s high standards and his knack to keep pushing his subordinates to climb higher and higher mountains gave Tait a strong sense of rigor in his own work. “He complemented fully my passion and creativity and vision,” he says, adding that Neupert now sits on the Cranium board and Tait still seeks out his longtime mentors’ guidance and leadership about three times a week.

TAIT

’S

MENTORING

LESSONS

1. A mentor who seems overly rigorous and undaunted in his or her pursuit to push you to work harder, although annoying at the time, may end up teaching you more than you ever expected. And it’s not just about working harder. A great mentor wants better results, better thinking, and a stronger focus on the best outcome given the resources available. 2. It is about operational excellence more than about making things perfect, because we all know in many walks of life


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perfection is unattainable; and it’s the combination of creativity and operational excellence that really delivers the results we hope for. 3. Finding a mentor who believes in you is invaluable.

DANNY GOLDBERG CEO of Air America Radio

LEADER LOWDOWN How your parents describe you: Childhood hero: Bad habit: Good habit:

Beloved

Sandy Koufax

Playing computer solitaire Praying

Danny Goldberg was able to make the transition from hippie fuzziness to businessman thanks in large part to Lee Solters, who was one of the leading PR people in the entertainment world in the 1970s. Solters, says Goldberg, knew more about Broadway than anybody else and had all the big names, such as Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand. In the early 1970s rock and roll was becoming a serious part of show business, and Solters wanted someone who knew the rock press on his payroll. Since Goldberg had a background working for Billboard magazine he got the gig. When Goldberg went to work for him, the former hippie had a rude awakening. “My concept of getting people publicity was calling friends and asking them for favors. That’s what press people did back then. You took someone to lunch, and asked for a favor.”


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But that’s not how Solters did it. “His thing was to come up with a good story. He’d say, ‘You only have a limited number of favors.’ The whole idea of trying to think of creating a good story was an epiphany for me.” Yet another epiphany for Goldberg was the idea of putting your nose to the grindstone. Solters, he says, was a workaholic, coming in early and leaving late, and he was relentless in pursuing any leads that might end up meaning more press for his clients. Goldberg was more laid-back about the process, leaving phone messages and waiting for people to call him back. “I remember at one point when Led Zeppelin did their first show in Atlanta, Lee said, ‘Who did you call?’ I said, ‘I called everybody, Lee—the Atlanta Constitution, the Atlanta Journal.’ He said, ‘Did you call Time magazine and see if they have someone in Atlanta? Did you call Associated Press?’ Pause. ‘Did you call UPI in Atlanta?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you call any of the TV networks that have crews in Atlanta?’ ” Goldberg had done none of that. “It was like, oh shit. I was coming from a rock hippie subculture and I just had a different expectation on how business was run.” And the message on the real world of business that Solters imparted was coming across loud and clear. “He was vehement, impatient; his mouth was always racing to keep up with what his head had to say. He conveyed a sense of regret and frustration at having to deal with such an idiot like me but it was pleasant enough that it wasn’t abusive.” It was that strong work ethic and passion that impressed Goldberg and stayed with him throughout his career. Goldberg insists that Solters hadn’t realized he had taken on the role of teacher, nor did he want it. “He wasn’t running a school. He wanted to run the business. Either that was going to get in my head or he’d get rid of me.”


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Mentors GOLDBERG

’S

MENTORING

117

LESSONS

1. A mentor might not realize he’s mentoring you or even want that role, but it doesn’t mean you can’t learn from him or her. 2. Always make a second and third effort to get things done. 3. Sometimes you have the most to learn from people who are nothing like you and who approach leadership in ways that are foreign to you.


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CHAPTER 6

Discrimination Don’t Let Bias Burn Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better. —Martin Luther King Jr.

DISCRIMINATION WAS A FACT OF LIFE FOR MANY OF THE EXECUTIVES FEAtured in this chapter. Some experienced it as children; others encountered it once they began working. Many saw discrimination as a problem, a big one for sure, but they rarely saw it as insurmountable. The overwhelming approach among these leaders: “Deal with it and move on.” Over and over again, these men and women talk about how they always tried to focus on not letting the bias they encountered destroy them or their career aspirations. Some faced biases early on, when they were growing up and trying to figure out what the world was all about. In these cases, their parents and the good deeds of others in their communities helped them overcome bigotry. The mantras among their parents, in particular, were always the same: “You can do anything you want with your life.” Discrimination in the workplace for many of these leaders was seldom blatant, but more of an undercurrent of bias that im118


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pacted their daily work lives. The key was to figure out which battles to fight and which to let slide. Many of the managers say they often had to prove themselves to the white male majority before some of the biases would begin to subside. One CEO says simple—minorities and women have to work doubly hard. Indeed, only a small percentage of women and minorities occupy the nation’s corner offices today. Clearly, the top priority for many of these individuals, as they were making their ways up the leadership ladder, was to work hard and focus on the goals at hand in an effort to gain responsibilities and wins in their careers. With that achievement, respect eventually came. But, these leaders stress, when discriminatory behavior continued, hampering their ability to move up, they went on to organizations that were better known for diversity.

DAVID STEWARD CEO of World Wide Technology, Inc.


Not saying “no” Caring about people

Favorite movie: The Color Purple

The last vestiges of segregation hung in the air like a thick, bitter smoke when David Steward was starting school in Clinton, Missouri. The Ku Klux Klan made plans to come to Clinton to stop the schools from being integrated, but Steward’s father, along with other men from the town, both white and black, patrolled the town all night before the integration was


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to begin to make sure there was no trouble. “Those men who patrolled the streets weren’t concerned about color. They were concerned about the quality of life and the next generation,” he says. Despite the successful integration of the schools, Steward’s childhood experience was anything but on an equal footing with the town’s white kids, especially since he and his family lived on “the other side of the tracks,” as he called it. One key moment for Steward occurred when he was denied the chance to join Troop 435 after his local Cub Scout pack reached the rank of Webelo, the step before becoming a Boy Scout. “It was just assumed that the only Scout troop in town, 435, was going to receive us. We were shocked that they weren’t receptive to that,” he recalled, admitting that he and his mother cried over the incident. But even during that awful moment, greatness emerged. A white man named Mr. Ross came forward and with the help of Steward’s mother and several others in the community embarked on forming a troop of their own. Since his mother, being a woman, was not allowed to lead the group, Mr. Ross volunteered to become scoutmaster, and so Troop 225 was formed. “Talk about the negative not being accepted,” says Steward with admiration still in his voice about his mother and the other people that stepped up to the plate in the face of adversity. “There are tremendous heroes out there.” For Steward, thanks to his parents, it was all about moving on and not letting life’s injustices get you down. His father, who was a master mechanic, could have worked for a major corporation on the outskirts of town making $190 a week but couldn’t get a job because of the color of his skin. Instead, he brought home about $40 a week working day and night at many different jobs in addition to mechanic, such as janitor, security guard, bartender, and trash hauler. “He could have harbored a whole lot of ill will but he didn’t. I learned about being an entrepreneur from him. Would I have learned that skill if he wasn’t


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forced to do so many things? I don’t know. But I do know my father moved on and the big word for him was forgiveness. He and my mother taught me, if you harbor anger and try to get revenge, it’s like taking a poison pill and thinking someone else is going to die.”

S T E WA R D

’S

DISCRIMINATION

LESSONS

1. There will always be things you don’t like that just aren’t right; however, you’ve got to get over it and get over it quick. 2. When a door shuts, another door opens wide. 3. Spending time wallowing in the injustice of it all is a waste of time and blinds your vision. You are so intent on looking back that you can’t possibly know where you’re going.

FRAN KEETH President and CEO of Shell Chemical LP and Executive Vice President of Shell Chemicals’ Global Operations

LEADER LOWDOWN First job as an adult:

Secretary at T. C. Morrow Industries


Snakes


Franklin D. Roosevelt

Being a woman has both helped and hindered Keeth professionally. When she worked in the tax department at Shell Chemical early in her career, the staff were considered a highly efficient


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and in some ways an elite group. The issue of race and gender was overshadowed by the group’s feeling that they were all experts in the field; they focused on that, not the differences of the staff. But Keeth admits there were some older men in the group who took a paternalistic interest in her and helped her a lot more than if she had been a male. “I was young, going to school at night. I had a small child. A lot of the men in the department were old enough to be my father,” she recalls. “At the time I wasn’t offended; I was thrilled by it.” But her years in the tax department may have insulated her a bit too much from the outside world, because when she went to a different department as a senior executive “I had a rude awakening.” She found herself in a senior position in the finance department, and at that point in time the department was “a good ol’ boys network. You knew who was going to get the next general manager’s job based on who played golf with whom. But when I got there the applecart got turned around. I came from another group and took one of their boys’ jobs, and I did well. It took some doing to get myself accepted and earn my spurs.” It was not an easy first year in the finance department for Keeth, who did not play golf and didn’t fraternize with numerous people after work. In meetings she would be talked over, and many of her suggestions were ignored. “You know how meetings go. Men in little groups drinking coffee. Nobody talking to me. I’d come home sometimes and say, ‘What the heck did I do to deserve this?’” But, she maintains, it just took time and her resolve to do the best job she could do “before people began to see me as reasonable and relatively competent. I just kept hammering away.” She held back her urges to get emotional about the situation, relying on her persistence and a smile, while she admittedly gritted her teeth.


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“I became accepted, but I was not really one of them. Still, my opinion was sought. I knew I turned a corner when I was not constantly pushing my opinion. People started asking me, ‘What do you think about this?’ I smiled and did my job. I didn’t go out with them. I didn’t learn how to play golf. I didn’t change to fit in.” Indeed, she ended up making changes for women in the department, many of whom were not generally considered for assignments that required travel or relocation. “Women couldn’t do that because the reasoning was they had families, or husbands who worked. Of if they were single, they probably were going to get married or probably get pregnant. I said, ‘You know, we shouldn’t be making these choices for these women. Why don’t we ask them? ’ ” It took some time, but eventually she was able to convince many of the managers she worked with to begin considering women as well as men for such assignments.

KEETH

’S

DISCRIMINATION

LESSONS

1. A smile will get a lot more than screaming. 2. If a situation doesn’t change, even though you truly made an effort to change it, move on. 3. There isn’t typically a grand plot to keep women down. It is really men making decisions based on their old mental models, and as a result, it is changeable. 4. Don’t compromise who you are and try to become one of the boys.


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VIVEK PAUL Partner with Texas Pacific Group and Former CEO of Wipro Ltd.


John F. Kennedy

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Favorite business book: Bruce Patton

Jack Welch

Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and


Idealistic

When Vivek Paul was doing management consulting for Bain & Company from 1985 to 1989, his boss at the time told him he had a strong Indian accent and that he needed to work on that. “I felt bad about it. That was not very inspirational,” he says. But he didn’t allow his boss’s comment to devastate him, and he also didn’t embark on an effort to sound like a regular American guy. “I didn’t appreciate his comment but I tried not to look at it as discrimination. I think he was saying this to help me. He was telling me, ‘You have a great amount of capability and if you take this rough edge off you’d be much, much better.’ ” But having said that, he adds that you have to be measured in how you react. In his experience, he has seen two common, and what he deems “wrong,” ways Indians in business deal with the issue of fitting in. Some adopt a heavy American accent that comes off as artificial. Others try to isolate themselves professionally by going into a specialty or department where they don’t interact with people often. Paul decided early on to take the nonapologetic approach and not hide who he was. For example, as a Hindu, he has always adhered to vegetarianism and made that clear to business colleagues before he met them for lunch. “I felt if I felt okay about myself then the world can open up,” he explains.


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But he admits closed-minded individuals encountered early on did get to him at times. On one occasion while at Bain, he was consulting for an oildrilling manufacturer and the decision was made to shut down plants in the wake of the big oil collapse in the mid-1980s. He had to travel to small towns throughout Texas to oversee the process and spent a lot of time with the head of purchasing for the drilling company, who constantly used racial slurs. Even though the manager did not say anything about Indians at first, Paul felt the manager was baiting him to provoke a response. He completely ignored the comments initially, but then one night during dinner he could not restrain himself. “I said, ‘Dick, you picked on pretty much every minority community. What about Indians?’ He said, ‘Aha,’ as if he was waiting for me to say that, and launched in. He called Indians lots of things, including ‘sand niggers.’ ” Looking back, Paul says, he gave this manager the opportunity to say such things because he responded to the racial comments, thereby giving them some credence. He realized he had to find a way to keep his composure and not allow this individual’s ignorance to derail the work that had to be done in Texas. His tactic: Pity him and move on. “I said to myself, ‘I’m way bigger than this guy. He was the loser, not me.’’’ Whereas Paul says he would never hesitate pushing back if someone wrongs him, he adds, “Why should I let it bother me if someone is shooting in the air to vent?” Later in his career, Paul faced another bout with discrimination, when he was running a global business for General Electric and about 40 percent of his operation was in Japan. “The Japanese have an enormous problem stomaching an Indian to be their boss,” he says. “The second time I went to Japan, my right-hand man there took me out to dinner. He said, ‘Paul-san, you don’t think or act like an Indian. You’re American.’ That was his rationalization for accepting me as his boss. I did not judge what he said, although I could have. To me, the way I looked at it is


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that ultimately we all have our own foibles. As long as you do a good job, I don’t have a problem with that.” The next time he visited Japan, Paul went to a Japanese bath with his whole team. “The fact that we were in the same bathtub was the ultimate sign of acceptance.”

PAUL

’S

DISCRIMINATION

LESSONS

1. Be yourself at all costs and people will accept you eventually. Those who don’t aren’t worth your time. 2. Take what people say about you with a grain of salt and don’t let it derail you from the task at hand, getting the job done. 3. If you have special needs for religious or lifestyle reasons, make those clear up front so as not to create an uncomfortable moment in the heat of business.

AYLWIN LEWIS President and CEO of Sears Holding Corporation

LEADER LOWDOWN Your dream job:

Secretary of state

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Childhood hero:

Abraham Lincoln

Sam Houston

Aylwin Lewis had the attitude early on that he was not going to be encumbered by any discrimination that came his way during his career, so he focused on working hard and moving up. While he acknowledges that minorities and women have to


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bring a superstar performance to work every day if they are going to succeed, his approach was simple: “I wouldn’t see that as a burden. I saw it as a different standard that I had to reach and that I would bring my best to work. Understanding that and embracing that was important to me.” Bottom line, he says, “If someone has an issue with my skin color, it’s not my issue.” But he admits he was thrown for a loop early in his career when he went to a human resources manager at his employer to seek some mentoring advice. “I told him what my goals were, that I wanted to be the president of a division someday, and this person said: ‘You probably will never achieve that at this company.’ He pretty much was telling me because I am black that ‘You’re trying to reach too high.’” For a week following that encounter, Lewis found himself devastated. “I went to this person for mentoring and this person says, ‘Your dreams are too high.’ But I had to disconnect from that and continue on. That conversation could have derailed me but it didn’t. You have to believe in yourself when no one else believes in you.” While the HR manager’s comments were clearly biased, Lewis stresses the importance of not taking everything the wrong way or of having a chip on your shoulder when comments are made. When he worked as a district manager at a restaurant chain, a finance guy in the main office, with whom he had developed a good relationship, called him once after a meeting and gave him some brutally honest advice. “He told me that there were certain things I should do during meetings if I wanted to get promoted. The general advice was ‘Control your passion.’ In my younger years I was less tactful than I needed to be. I was passionate about almost everything.” Instead of balking at his advice and taking it as a slight, Lewis realized the finance guy was genuinely trying to help him. Another tactic for Lewis was making sure the companies he joined didn’t have a history of institutional discrimination. There


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might be one bad apple, but he focused on looking at the organization as a whole. In the case of the HR manager who tried to squash his dream, it turned out his ideas were his own and not a companywide problem. Lewis went on to surpass his goal of becoming president of a division. And since then, as a leader, he’s taken care to never “take anyone’s dreams away. Who are we to say what someone can’t accomplish in their careers? I will offer advice, tell then they might have to speed up certain things to reach their goals, but I never sit and tell anyone they can’t be something.”

LEWIS

’

DISCRIMINATION

LESSONS

1. Don’t let anyone take your dreams away. 2. Don’t let one bad apple derail your achievement at a company if it looks like the organization as a whole is not discriminatory. 3. As a minority member you have to work harder than everyone else every day. But don’t let that make you resentful; work your hardest in order to achieve.

SERGEANT MAJOR ALFORD McMICHAEL Senior Noncommissioned Officer for Allied Command Operations at NATO


Mother

Thing you’re most afraid of: Favorite business book: Bad habit:

Water

Winning, by Jack Welch

Caring too much about others


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Hate was something that was not tolerated in Sergeant Major Alford McMichael’s house when he was growing up. That meant if people treated McMichael badly or differently because he was black, he was supposed to multiply that hate by love and not ever let it get him down. That was a tall order to fill in Arkansas in the 1950s and 1960s, when segregation was still rampant. “I remember we were still getting our lunch from the outside counter of a restaurant because we weren’t allowed to eat inside. That was a blow, but I never let those things set me back,” he says. “I never blamed myself for someone else’s stupidity. If you don’t like me because of the color of my skin that’s not my fault.” That attitude, fostered at a young age by his mother, helped McMichael deal with the discrimination he encountered later in his life. He spent most of his working life in the military, making history when he became the first ever AfricanAmerican to hold the position of sergeant major of the U.S. Marine Corps. But during his years in the military he faced his share of discrimination. In another milestone, in 1980 he became the first black teacher at Quantico, Virginia, instructing Marines in embassy training. He would train Marines to handle embassy duty around the world. “I had just come back from the American embassy in Denmark. I’d been a commander there for years and won all these awards. I did so well they sent me back to take on this assignment, but when I showed up and reported in, the fellow instructors sent me to the student lounge. They couldn’t accept that I was there to teach. I ended up getting all the duties that other people didn’t want. They figured they’d dump all this stuff on me and that would give them time to elevate themselves to stardom,” he says. Again his mantra of not hating kicked in, and he decided to take on everything they had to throw at him. “I figured I would


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know everybody’s job and they’ll only know theirs. I said to myself, ‘I will be the most productive person in this organization.’ If I had taken the other road, not followed my upbringing of being respectable and dependable, I would have been rebellious and accomplished nothing.” Bottom line, he says, “I saw their behavior toward me as a weakness, and with that I was able to not let hate fester and grow within me.” Thanks to his focus on the job, “I left there a legend.” And of those other instructors, he says, “many became my best friends.” McMichael doesn’t view his decision to see beyond the discrimination and not confront it head-on as a weakness. On the contrary, he says, his approach takes the ultimate amount of strength. “You have to have courage and clarity and have a vision on where you want to go. If you have that you can navigate through any situation and not get distracted. I can never allow myself to be crippled by someone else’s disease.”

SERGEANT

MAJOR

DISCRIMINATION

MC M I C H A E L

’S

LESSONS

1. Look at discrimination as someone else’s weakness and not a fault of yours. 2. Focus on the vision and goal at hand. 3. Often a person’s bigotry can be overcome if they see who you really are and what you can do.


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LINDA DILLMAN Chief Information Officer of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Hometown:

Eleanor Roosevelt

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Thing you’re most afraid of: Favorite business book:

Boredom

The Fred Factor, by Mark Sanborn

Linda Dillman has always believed in picking her battles, especially when it came to injustices she faced as a woman ascending the ranks of corporate America. During her early career, prior to Wal-Mart, she worked for a company where she was surrounded by many older men who looked at her as a granddaughter rather than a peer. “You’d be going to a meeting to work on something as a team and I’d always get relegated to the job of secretary or scribe,” she says. It’s not that she wasn’t bothered by sexist behavior, but she felt it was fruitless to protest everything she encountered. “To me, being the secretary didn’t mean I didn’t contribute or add value during the meeting,” she explains, attributing her ability to focus on the job at hand and not the put-down to something she learned in college. When she studied business administration at a small Methodist college now called the University of Indianapolis, the campus minister, Reggie Monson, introduced her to transactional analysis. “He taught me you have control over your emotions. You have control over what you do and how you feel. You can choose to be mad, but if you go into a situation like that you hurt no one but yourself,” she says.


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That approach helped propel her in her career because, she believes, when it came to a point where she wasn’t happy or not doing what she wanted she could move on. In one situation where gender could have played a role, she made such a choice. She was working for a company in an administrative role and wanted to move into information technology (IT). “My local manager and district manager wanted me to move into the role but it was blocked by someone at a higher level,” she explains. She never figured out for sure whether it was being a woman that kept her from the move, although she suspected her gender played a role. Her focus was not on the why, however, but rather “What do I do now to gain that experience?” It was the early 1980s, and Dillman decided to work for a smaller company that would let her manage their information systems. That decision played a pivotal role in her career. “I took a chance by moving to this new company. I had been with the other company for five years. I had a lot of ties there and I learned a lot there. Getting to the decision to leave was difficult, but once I decided to go it was easy. I also learned that you don’t leave people behind as you move forward.” The company she moved to was Dunn & Hargitt, and Dillman quickly realized there are things you can learn in a small company. “It’s difficult at a larger company sometimes because you can often feel out of touch. At a small company you touch everything in that environment.” From there she got a job at a wholesale club in Indianapolis, her first retail gig, and that company was eventually bought by Wal-Mart. “I could have been a victim and still be in that office today,” she quips. But it’s not that Dillman is a superwoman who never questions herself. “All through my career I underestimated what I could do, until the last few years. You build a perception of your potential based on what you see, the people who break out of a mold. I grew up in a blue-collar town in the 1960s where the


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most successful women I saw were beauticians and administrative assistants.” That underestimation of herself sometimes popped up in her career. She recalled one of her first big assignments as an IT manager at Wal-Mart in 1994, at age 38, when she spearheaded an effort to implement a new inventory tracking system. “We dramatically changed how we managed inventory in our stores and we had to change people’s minds at very high levels. There was one gentleman in particular who said he’d leave the company before he allowed us to implement one major piece of it. His team had to play a key role in its implementation, and it was a battle through the entire process.” Dillman did not enjoy confrontations with men. “The first few times it was very uncomfortable. I wasn’t very sure I should be doing this, that it’s appropriate. I thought, ‘am I killing my career?’” But she soon got over that and decided if you concentrate on having all your proverbial ducks in a row and doing things for the right reasons, “not just trying to make yourself look good or score political points, you’ll have the ability to go head-tohead with anybody.” The reluctant manager quieted down about his apprehensions in the face of Dillman’s arguments, but he never did get on board with the new system. She persevered anyway and the system was implemented to great success. “I believed we could do it and we did,” she adds with pride.

DILLMAN

’S

DISCRIMINATION

LESSONS

1. Pick your battles and don’t waste your energy on minor indignities. Your anger ends up hurting no one but yourself. 2. You have control over your emotions, what you do, and how you feel. 3. Figure out what you want from your career and if you’re not getting it where you are, move on.


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4. If you have all your ducks in a row with regard to your arguments and reasons for undertaking a certain initiative, don’t let your fear over confronting co-workers or superiors, no matter what sex, derail you. Disarm them with your wellthought-out points.

CHRISTINE JACOBS President and CEO of Theragenics Corporation

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite business book:


Thing you’re most afraid of: Dream job:

Being lazy

Teaching

Childhood hero:

Katharine Hepburn

It was one event when Christine Jacobs was a supervisor at a hospital in 1979 that in many ways set the stage for how she’d deal with gender bias throughout her career. She was in her late twenties, in her first managerial role, and her father’s boss was admitted to the hospital where she worked. As part of her supervisory functions at the hospital, she would oversee blood work and other tests being done, but she took extra care to keep an eye on her father’s boss given who he was. A few days after the boss was released from the hospital, Jacobs received a velvet box in the mail at her home from the former patient, and in it was a bottle of Nina Ricci L’Air du Temps perfume. Jacobs called the boss, who was married, to find out why he had sent her such a lavish gift. During the discussion, he made it clear that his intentions were not at all admirable. He was interested in having a relationship with Jacobs and told her


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he would take care of her by paying her bills and also ensure that her dad would have a nice, comfortable life. “The idea that this man would act this way was a shock. This business of a man holding my dad hostage was new for me and awful. It taught me that things could be pretty dirty out there and it was a wake-up call for me,” she says. She told the man she had no interest in his advances but kept the perfume, she admits. As for her father’s career, she never found out if the boss took the rejection out on her dad because he was always so private about his work. And, until this day, she never told her father what transpired. Her dad, who raised nine children, putting them all through college, left that job within the year, but Jacobs never knew the circumstances. Looking back, she says, that one incident had the potential to skew her dealings with men from then on, but she made a conscious decision not to let that happen. “I came to a crossroads. Was I going to let this affect every interaction with men, or was I going to grow an extra layer of skin and keep going?” she explains. Around this time, she recalls, “I had girlfriends who, like me, were proceeding up in the business world and they experienced equally nasty situations at work, and some of them folded up their doll dishes and went home. Others decided to play. I’m in the second group; at least I hope I’m in the group that gets more skin cells and moves on. You can’t let situations like that spin out of control and control your life,” she advises. The bottom line to Jacobs was to keep in mind that the majority of men weren’t jerks, and, instead of harboring anger to focus on feeling sorry for men who crossed the line. That fortitude, she believes, gave her the ability to handle future slights to her womanhood, like the time early in her career as CEO during a lunch at a tony Atlanta restaurant with a major investor. The investor, she explains, “wanted company information I was not legally allowed to give him. At one point, he leaned over to me, with my chief financial officer sitting there at


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the table, and put his hand on my leg. I was wearing a skirt, and when I say he put it on my leg, I don’t mean on my wool skirt. I mean my leg. He said, ‘I know how you got to the top—you slept your way to the top.’ I was calm. I’m not sure who I was at that moment. I told the man to get his hand off my leg or I would dump my plate of food in his lap. With that, I said, ‘This lunch is over.’ And the CFO and I walked out.” Jacobs says she felt she couldn’t make a scene, even though she believes she had the right to “filet the man. I represent something bigger—I am a public figure for a public company. I kept a cool head because when you call attention to yourself, even though it’s justified, that’s not best for your company or your career.” During yet another lunch, this time with the president of a local bank that Jacobs’ firm was working with and staff members from both organizations, the president looked at her and said, “Whatever qualified you to be CEO of a public company?” “I looked at him and said, ‘Why, my breasts, of course,’” she recalls, still laughing about what transpired. The president ended up getting fired, but not because Jacobs complained; his own staff at the lunch meeting complained to higher-ups at the bank. “The way I look at it,” she says, “is you have to forgive men like that. They grew up only around their mothers, wives, and women who bring them coffee in the office. They don’t know about us in business. They don’t get us, never experienced us.” But she adds that with time more doors are slowly opening for women in business. In the 1970s, when she worked at a hospital early in her career doing medical technology in the pathology department, there were women who held managerial positions but only at a department level. She decided to leave that career partly because of the lack of opportunities for women, accepting a $10,000 cut in pay to take on an entry-level sales job. Ten years later, she says, she was called to interview for the president’s job at that hospital. While she had no interest in going back into the field at that point, it proved two things to


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Jacobs—that opportunities were indeed opening up for women, and that she made the right move by leaving a situation where she saw no chance for advancement.

JACOBS

’

DISCRIMINATION

LESSONS

1. If you’re sure there is no room for advancement because of your gender, get out. 2. Leaders, and aspiring leaders, don’t have the luxury to become emotional and make a scene if they’re faced with ignorance. 3. The business world can be a dirty place. The key is realizing some men still aren’t used to women in power, so forgive their transgressions. But don’t be a pushover, either.


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CHAPTER 7

Paying Dues No Chances, No Dances Luck is not chance—it’s toil. Fortune’s expensive smile is earned. —Emily Dickinson

OF ALL THE THINGS CEOS AND HIGH-LEVEL EXECUTIVES ARE PROUD OF, many seemed to be most proud of the fact that they paid their dues along the way. Many leaders profiled in this chapter opted not to take the cushy road to the helm. Indeed, quite a few chose to get their starts in more menial jobs as a way to learn from the ground up. Others went from the executive track back to the rank-and-file trenches in order to understand the real world on the front lines. Many of the leaders I interviewed for this chapter lamented that today the idea of working your way up through the ranks has become passé. Whereas just a few decades ago paying dues was expected by every budding CEO, these executives say, the rule book appears to have changed, with newly minted MBAs wanting big jobs and big titles before they get their hands dirty. Taking a step down or sideways on the corporate ladder for these leaders came with a degree of risk and lots of worry that the move might doom their careers, but the thought of future 138


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payoff and the chance to learn more about a particular business or the business world at large helped them make the move. The jobs they took weren’t easy—one executive worked at an auto plant, another cleaned toilets, and still another stacked boxes of crackers at a supermarket. Despite the hard work, most leaders say it was these very jobs that gave them the greatest insight into the mind-set of the workforce and how companies really work. They tended to garner more respect from their employees as they rose through the ranks thanks to the youwalked-in-my-shoes phenomenon.

JEFFREY RODEK Executive Chairman of Hyperion Solutions Corporation


Pro golfer

Thing you’re most afraid of: Childhood hero: Bad habit:

Letting people down

John Wayne

Chocolate and cookies

It was a great job. Jeffrey Rodek was working in operations research at Federal Express, where he was helping to design programs and getting a great deal of visibility among the top brass. But Rodek had always wanted to work on the financial planning side of the business and was looking for any opportunities along those lines at the company. He was up for a job in systems operations, which would have given him his first chance for a promotion outside his department, but he didn’t get it. “I was devastated,” he says, despite the fact that it was not exactly the planning position he was looking for.


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Another opportunity did arise soon after, and this time it was in financial planning and the position was manager of budgets and reports. It wasn’t the most glamorous of jobs, but he took the spot anyway. The work was mundane; basically Rodek spent most of his time reconciling numbers, making sure everything added up. “My first task was sitting in a small office, like a closet with no windows, and going through four eight-foot tall stacks of printouts, ” he recalls. “I went from building models on the company’s plans for buying planes to sitting in this closet tying out two systems. I had a little calculator, the kind with the roll of tape, and I was doing these calculations by hand.” He describes the job as menial, in a low-profile kind of way, but that job helped propel him to his ultimate success. “I thought, ‘You could move beyond just tying out numbers and give the executives in the company the information they need to make the right decisions.’ I learned from the ground up how to do that because of that job. I could build a powerful system to help the company plan better and forecast better.” As manager of budgets, Rodek was given the go-ahead to hire several MBAs who understood the power of computer systems, and his department built a robust information system that was highly appreciated by top players at the firm. That not only led to promotions, including director of the whole financial planning department, but it also won him the company’s highest award, the Five Star award, and gave him a foundation in management software systems that brought him success in his present job. “I got to understand the issues managers face firsthand, and that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t paid my dues in that closet,” he quips. Now looking back, he realizes that if he had gotten that promotion to systems operations, “I don’t know if I would have progressed as much, and I don’t know if that would have led to me moving on beyond Federal Express.”


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Paying Dues RODEK

’S

PAY I N G

DUES

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LESSONS

1. Sometimes the best job is a lateral one. If you move across an organization you often gain more skills and exposure. 2. Look for jobs that will broaden your skills. 3. Sometimes the most unglamorous of positions can reap the greatest benefits if you make them yours and look for ways to fill a need.

BRIAN GALLAGHER President and CEO of United Way of America


Teacher, baseball coach




Failure

Every year, the United Way would choose 10 young people from across the country to be management trainees for the organization. When Brian Gallagher was 22 years old he wound up being number 11 on the list. But fate stepped in when one of the chosen 10 decided he didn’t want to go to Winston-Salem make only $13,000 a year handling one of the toughest divisions for a local United Way. “So I said, ‘I’ll go.’ I just jumped at it,” Gallagher recalls, about his decision to take the job in 1981. The task: doing fund-raising for a division that encompassed some of the stingiest businesses, he says, including small manufacturing companies and professional groups such as doctors and lawyers. “It’s difficult to get doctors to give,” he quips. Given his tough job, he says, “a lot of people would have


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whined about it and moped about it and thought, ‘These guys aren’t going to give anyway.’ But that’s not what I did. I started working 15-to-16-hour days talking to everyone I could, finding out why they didn’t give and setting up plans to address the problems.” He held meetings around the clock to accommodate workers at manufacturing plants that had three shifts. His work paid off, and by the end of the first year he had increased fund-raising by 63 percent among the organizations under his purview. “The motivation was the mission,” he says, not his ambition to move up the career ladder. But he advanced quickly there, taking over the coveted high-profile assignment of working with large corporations in the Winston-Salem area such as Hanes and Wachovia. His motivation to work hard and try to turn around a fundraising segment that many deemed hopeless came from an early job on a crew digging ditches for sewer lines. “I did some of the most dangerous, dirtiest jobs I ever could have imagined—digging through tar working on top of a 150-foot blast furnace tied to six or seven other men.” But he remembers working hard and impressing his boss enough that Gallagher soon was supervising the ditch diggers. “The way to get out of the ditch is to do a great job,” he explains, referring to his resolve to focus on doing whatever job is before him to its fullest.

GALLAGHER

’S

PAY I N G

DUES

LESSONS

1. Focus on the job at hand, not advancement, if you truly want to be successful. 2. Jump at promising opportunities even though initially they may seem daunting or beneath you, because someone will always be waiting in the wings to take the job if you don’t. 3. Just because a job is deemed impossible to conquer or improve doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference if you work your tail off and come up with ideas that turn convention on its ear.


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WILLIAM D. NOVELLI CEO of AARP


Failure

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Dream job:

Winston Churchill

Principal of a big city high school

When Bill Novelli was in college he read David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man, a book he says basically espoused the theory that “if you want to sell gasoline, from a marketing standpoint, you have to go out and pump gas.” Understanding and accepting that concept served Novelli well when he was struggling to pay his dues. “I was hired with a bunch of other Ivy Leaguers to go into the big detergent emporium, Unilever. In order to go into marketing, I had to go through sales training first. In those days it was 1964 you had to pay your dues,” he explains. After only a few weeks of sales training, he was given an order pad, a sales bag full of promotional materials, and a station wagon, and then sent out to do sales in a fairly remote rural area covering a big territory in New York, from Binghamton to the Catskills. If he wanted to get to the coveting marketing job in Manhattan, he had to prove himself in the trenches, and he knew his bosses were watching closely. That meant working his tail off and putting in extra hours even though he was newly married. “I remember the first night my wife made dinner for us. My boss called to take me out to dinner that night to celebrate the numbers, and I had to be there. When I came home to Fran she had cooked a huge dinner, roast beef and God knows what else. I had to eat a second dinner.”


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While juggling it all was hard, the indignities he faced as a salesman sometimes made him question his resolve. At a Grand Union supermarket in his territory, he had to deal with a store manager who had a reputation for being nasty. “He would throw salesmen out of the store at the drop of a hat. At one point, he told me I was persona non grata,” he recalls. The manager was angry with him for reasons Novelli still can’t explain. “This was a big store in my territory and I couldn’t be kicked out,” he says. “I told him I wasn’t really a salesman, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, what are you, then?’ I told him, ‘I’m a marketing trainee and I thought you’d make a great teacher.’ He said, ‘Okay, I’ll teach you retail. The first thing you can do is build a big end-aisle display with 25 cases of Nabisco crackers.’ So there I am building it and I hear my boss come up behind me. He was a regional sales manager. He said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I explained the situation. He said, ‘Are you aware that’s not our product?’ I told him I had a strategy and finished the display. My boss thought I was nuts but from then on I had the grudging acceptance of the store manager. It did teach me humility.” His 11 months in the trenches paid off and he began doing marketing for the company, but it was his experience as a trainee that helped him understand the business inside out. During one occasion when he got to work at corporate headquarters, an idea to put a free spatula on a bottle of Whisk was proposed by the marketing department but Novelli nixed the plan. Having spent long hours arranging products on supermarket shelves, he realized the design would not fit properly and the salesperson wouldn’t be able to get the facings right. And, he believes, he got the respect of the sales force because they all knew he had walked in their shoes early in his career. “There’s a long-term perspective to this. Learning retail, in my case in supermarkets, is an important metaphor for managers and leaders. You need to touch your customers. You need to get out and see what the real world is like,” he advises. “Too many people today never get out of their ivory towers. I came


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from an era when you were taught in college and business courses about climbing the corporate ladder and you’ll succeed. I never thought of quitting.” But he also cautions against staying in a bad situation where you’re being taken advantage of. It’s a balance, he says. “A lot of people find themselves in dead-end jobs.” Indeed, Novelli ultimately left Unilever because he felt he wasn’t learning anything from his boss at the time. “You have to make sure you’re not paying more than your dues,” he adds.

NOVELLI

’S

PAY I N G

DUES

LESSONS

1. You’ve got to slog through if you see the eventual payoff. 2. You have to have a certain degree of humility to succeed. Get over the fact that you’re a hot college or business school graduate. 3. You have to get out and touch your customer in order to know what an organization is all about and what it needs to do to be successful.

RICK WAUGH President and CEO of Scotiabank

LEADER LOWDOWN Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: How you describe yourself: Bad habit: Hobbies:

Winston Churchill

Humble

Stubbornness Music, especially rock and roll (son’s in a band)


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Many times during Canadian-born Rick Waugh’s career he took jobs he wasn’t quite happy about at the time, including one that slashed his income and required him to move his family away from the New Jersey neighborhood they came to love back to Canada. Waugh started out in 1970 as a teller at Scotiabank in Winnipeg, Canada, the city where he grew up. He first saw the job as a way to earn money so he could travel around Europe. The job worked out the way he wanted, but after three months the bank asked him to move to Toronto, a move he was not totally happy to make since the job they offered him seemed ambiguous at the time and he felt satisfied being the local boy. “I got the phone call on Monday to report to Toronto the following Monday,” he recalls. The job he was offered in the big Canadian city was as a portfolio manager. “I phoned my supervisor in Winnipeg and asked him what a portfolio manager was, and he had no clue. Then I called a broker friend of mine who explained the job, and so I ended up in the investment department helping to run our pension fund and investments for the bank,” he says. While moving to Toronto wasn’t his choice, the job ended up being a boon for his career because, at age 25, he was given exposure to the top executives at the bank, exposure that would prove invaluable for his career advancement. “It turned out to be a watershed moment for me,” he recalls. Many decisions in his life, he says, involved uncertainty and weren’t necessarily his first choice. “I was less inclined to make the moves, but I did anyway and they all worked out well for me,” he adds. When the company decided Waugh was needed in New York, again he had some doubts, wondering how a move to the Big Apple would help his career or his quality of life. The job as senior officer of the bank in New York turned out to be one of the best in his career, exposing him to the Forbes top 10 richest individuals and the biggest companies, and giving


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him a great life in Ridgewood, New Jersey, with his wife and three children. “In New York, between 1985 and 1993, this was the time of junk bonds and high yield leveraged buyouts and IPOs. It was great for the bank and great for me. Scotiabank made a lot of money and did well,” he explains. But it all came screeching to a halt when the president of the bank phoned him and asked him to return to Toronto. At age 44 and well established in his American suburban life, Waugh didn’t want to make the move, but felt he couldn’t turn down the offer because it was coming from on high, even if his income would drop from the 55 percent tax bracket to the 30 percent bracket to make the move. The job was as executive vice president of global corporate banking but he dreaded telling his wife that they would be moving again. “My wife tells the story all the time. I didn’t even have enough nerve to tell her face-to-face. I told her by phone. I phoned her and said, ‘Guess what? We’re moving back to Toronto.’ She wasn’t happy about it. She loved the big city, New York shopping, and the culture. But we did it.” Again, the post set him up for career acceleration, and it eventually led him to the top spot at the bank. He had wondered if staying in New York would have been the better choice, giving him access to lots of money and prestige, but as it turned out, bigger things were in store for him in his native land. “I was forced to get out of my comfort zone, and I trusted my company and myself, so I made the move and it’s been great for me,” he adds.

WA U G H

’S

PAY I N G

DUES

LESSONS

1. Force yourself to get out of your comfort zone. Some job opportunities may have uncertainty and a certain degree of discomfort, but if you evaluate all things, trust yourself and go for it.


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2. Trust the people you work for when it comes to opportunities you’re offered if it’s a company you respect and enjoy. 3. It helps to move around geographically for your career, but you can also succeed in today’s business world without the constant jumping. But, if you aspire to make it big in a multinational firm, then the best thing is to get out there and experience the world.

JOHN V. MURPHY CEO of OppenheimerFunds, Inc.


Closer for the Boston Red Sox

First job as a kid:

Bagger at a supermarket


Death

The Practice of Management, by Peter Drucker

Who goes from a secure job at one of the nation’s top accounting firms to go work for a bankrupt company with an unknown future just 10 days after his first child is born? John V. Murphy, that’s who, and he’s proud of it. Well, he’s proud today because the risky career decision to step back and pay some dues paid off big-time for the executive. In 1977, Murphy was coming to the end of a five-year tenure at Arthur Andersen & Company in Boston and decided he was tired of always looking back and telling companies how well they did rather than coming up with a plan for growth or a new direction. “I wanted to be more involved in the future as opposed to certifying the past,” he says. His sights were set on


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working for a bank holding company, since he had worked with banks at Arthur Andersen and liked the industry. He became a controller for a diversified financial services holding company called Continental Investment Corporation, a company he had heard about through a recruiter. There was one catch—the firm was bankrupt—but Murphy still wanted the job. “We had just had a child and my wife didn’t go back to work but even though she was supportive I wondered about my decision. I always wonder about every decision I make,” he explains. “People at Arthur Andersen were happy for me but some were suspicious as to why I’d go to a bankrupt company.” The way he saw it he couldn’t lose. “I was 28. My reaction was I’d give it a shot. Why not? It’s not exactly what I wanted to do but I thought it would be great experience. If it was successful, I would be in on the ground floor of a restructured company, and if it wasn’t I’d probably be the last guy to turn the lights off, and get exposure to some of the top lawyers and investment bankers in the city of Boston. This was a significant and high-profile bankruptcy.” Murphy wound up staying at the company for 16 years selling off nonprofitable businesses, focusing on growing the firm, and turning the company around. But every time they had a reorganization plan to come out of bankruptcy, the company was bought before that could happen. On April Fools’ Day of 1981, Murphy read in the Wall Street Journal that Torchmark Corporation was offering $166 million cash. This was enough to pay off all the company debt and still have $5 a share for the shareholders. “It was a huge win and we had done a terrific job of turning around that company,” he says, with a hint of pride still in his voice. After five years with Torchmark, Murphy and a seven-member management team headed up by Sam Marinella, one of Murphy’s true mentors, decided to leave the firm and launched Liberty Financial, thanks to an investment from Liberty Mutual Insurance. The company was highly successful, but by 1993, in


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his early forties, Murphy started reassessing his career again. “I started asking myself the question ‘Am I any good or am I just good because I’m with Sam and these other guys?’ We were very successful, doing well, making a lot of money, happy. But I needed to prove to myself if I was any good or not.” Then an unexpected opportunity came up to run a new company called Concert Capital Management. The financial backer was MassMutual Life Insurance. Again Murphy made a leap of faith figuring the move would be a good one for his career, even though he accepted a cut in pay to take the job. By 1997, he had launched a number of new products and made some major acquisitions, and ultimately got the attention of the higher-ups at MassMutual. During his time at MassMutual, he led various units including its 401(k), defined benefits, annuity, international, and trust businesses. Murphy says it was his success with those businesses that led to the top post at OppenheimerFunds. “It worked out. I felt if I was successful long-term it would pay off for me, and it did,” he says.

MURPHY

’S

PAY I N G

DUES

LESSONS

1. If you think you’ve arrived when it comes to your career, you need to think again because you always have to prove yourself, reach for something else, challenge yourself. You cannot ever rest on your laurels. 2. Go with your gut when it comes to making a move to something that might not be as secure or lucrative as what you have. 3. Look closely at the pros and cons of your choice. It’s not always about the money. Be sure there’s a probable payoff with regard to experience or career advancement.


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SPENCER LEE CEO of Roto-Rooter Group

LEADER LOWDOWN First job as an adult: Financial analyst, American Hospital Supply Corporation Thing you’re most fearful of:

Family illness

Date of birth: September 20, 1955 Bad habit:

Being pushy

After Spencer Lee got his MBA from the University of Chicago, he joined a holding company called Chemed in 1980. Soon after, the firm purchased Roto-Rooter, which was family owned at the time. Lee decided to move over to the new acquisition because it was a smaller company with more room for advancement. He would handle marketing and help with acquisitions, reporting directly to the president. He was 26 years old and had been working at the company’s headquarters in Cincinnati for about a year when he realized he didn’t really know the plumbing business. So when the opportunity arose he decided to volunteer for a lower-level job as assistant branch manager for Roto-Rooter’s Boston office. He recalls, “People were saying, ‘Let me get this right—you went to a renowned business school and you’re going to work as an assistant branch manager? ’ ” Even his dad questioned his decision. But young and single, Lee went for it. The company embarked on a plan to get into the portable toilet business, and once in Boston, Lee, as assistant manager, was put in charge of the initiative for his area, buying the portable toilets and renting them out. One weekend during his tenure there, the Tall Ships came to Boston, a yearly occurrence, and he rented 80 toilets to the city for the event. Little did he know his success in selling the units would get so


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messy. “It was the weekend. We were shorthanded. So I ended up with a rag in my hand cleaning the inside of these toilets on a Saturday morning. I remember thinking, ‘Is this what I went to school for?’” He also often chose to go out with company technicians on their calls to residential homes, which he was not required to do. During these visits, he saw how the company’s employees unclogged drains and fixed overflowing toilets. Lee came to realize, “It was the best career decision I ever made,” having seen firsthand what the frontline employees face every day. A number of positive things happened to Lee when he got to Boston because he was in the right place at the right time. The Boston branch turned out to be one of the most successful in the country, and that led to him being tapped as regional vice president in 1984, moving up from there. “A lot of people take the easy way out today, and don’t want to get their hands dirty, but the only way to learn is from the bottom up,” he says.

LEE

’S

PAY I N G

DUES

LESSONS

1. Take time off the career track to go to the front lines in order to understand how an organization really operates. 2. The only way to truly understand your workforce is by walking in their shoes. 3. Don’t design your career path and rush through it; you never know where unexpected turns will take you.


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HARRIS DIAMOND CEO of Weber Shandwick Worldwide

LEADER LOWDOWN Thing you’re most afraid of: Bad habit: Good habit:

Not being relevant

Impatience Impatience


The Power Broker, by Robert Caro

Working in an auto plant is probably one of the toughest and most tedious jobs on earth. Harris Diamond can attest to that. He spent a summer during his college years working at a Pinto plant in Metuchen, New Jersey, and almost got fired. His job was to put 10 screws into the car body as it passed his station using air guns that hung over his head. There was a guy on the assembly line near him who worked for the union whose job it was to put in the windows. “We made a car a minute, which is hard to believe. If the line stopped, the car would not be produced and I would watch the managers come running and the union guys stop working. One time the line stopped but I didn’t realize it was stopped from my station. I had hit the emergency off button by mistake.” Diamond was still in a probationary period and didn’t have the rights of a full-fledged autoworker, so it didn’t look good for his future. He had stopped the line for no reason, which was punishable by firing. He was yanked off the line and called into the office to be terminated, “but that guy who worked next to me rescued me.” The union representative went to bat for him despite management’s insistence that he be sent packing. “At that moment in time, I understood it. I had a sense of what it meant to be defenseless,” he recalls. But


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somehow the union rep was able to convince Diamond’s managers to give him another chance. “During those months, I learned a lot, especially about people. I was going to college, focused on the Vietnam War, and here was a place with people who had totally different views from me. Working with people with dissimilar educations from me, different aspirational goals from me, I realized that people define the world and success differently:” he says. He wound up becoming friendly with many of the assembly workers, and a few affectionately mocked him by calling him “college boy.” Diamond admits he was a bit of a crybaby when he went to work at the plant and vividly remembers the time he drilled a hole through his thumb with an air gun. He went to the foreman complaining about the injury and the foreman told him it would scab over and that he had to get right back to work. “You know, it did scab over,” he says, able to laugh about it today.

DIAMOND

’S

PAY I N G

DUES

LESSONS

1. You have to focus on the job at hand and don’t look for sympathy when faced with minor bumps in the road even though they seem like a big deal at the time. 2. Leaders have to make sure they respect and can communicate to individuals who don’t have the same aspirations or goals. 3. As a leader you have to try to be fair and listen to all sides even though rules are broken.


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MATT C. BLANK CEO and Chairman of Showtime Networks, Inc.


Procrastination I know what I’m not good at


The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell


Motivated

At the age of 25, Matt Blank left a secure job as a brand manager at American Express, where he was on a career track to big things, to become a marketing manager at a financially troubled, fledgling cable programmer called HBO because he felt the industry had potential. But he didn’t land with a cushy desk job anchored in Manhattan. He found himself spending most of his time traveling to small-towns outside of his comfort zone of New York City and convincing small town folks why they should HBO, bring then thought of as racy, to their communities. Initially it was daunting for Blank, who hated public speaking and had rarely traveled outside of the Big Apple, except for going to college in Philadelphia. “For me, a middle-class kid from Queens who hadn’t traveled much, it was one of the best business experiences I ever had going to small towns where cable was born.” And it taught him firsthand about market differences. “People in Meridian, Mississippi, don’t necessarily have the same attitudes toward television as people in New York and Los Angeles,” he explains. Blank experienced a great deal of rejection from communities he visited. “Very frequently, there were cable operators who were worried about the financial risk, and the community risk of bringing ‘R’-rated movies to their town. These people would say they had to see community members in church and didn’t want


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to make anyone angry,” he says. But he kept beating the pavement, talking to people in small towns in Texas, Montana, and central Pennsylvania about the revolution going on in TV. This was before 24-hour news shows and the Food Channel, he points out. In one town, Blank held a meeting with the town fathers who, halfway through the meeting, had to leave when the fire horns went off because they were all volunteer firefighters. He was left with the wives of these men, and was able to convince them that bringing “R”-rated movies to their town would not corrupt it. “We were offering something so much more than was on regular TV. That caused many people to embrace it.” His time traveling around the country brought him face-toface with local cable operators and even the cable installers, so he got to understand the business at its most grassroots level. And sometimes he got closer than he wanted. The company was just about to launch service in a town in North Carolina. The cable operator and Blank were looking at the transmitted picture on a TV set in the cable office when all of a sudden the picture got fuzzy and just wasn’t working properly. “We ended up going to the head end, where the signal comes from, and we found cows had knocked down the fence that surrounded the dish and were now grazing and stepping on some of the wiring,” he recalls. “I don’t think I ever was that close to a cow before, but we had to push them out of there. I was standing there in the mud in my first pair of Gucci loafers. You didn’t see that in Queens. I don’t know which I was worried about more, the picture or my loafers.” Given his experience in the mud of a rural town, he admits he got cocky about his understanding of viewers there. When HBO was launched around the country, the company offered free weekend previews so that subscribers could get a feel for the programming. He suggested, given his experience in rural towns, that the company substitute some other movie in place of The Exorcist, especially in the Deep South, because of the graphic sexual scene where Linda Blair masturbates with a cross.


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HBO went ahead with airing The Exorcist anyway and it met with a flood of complaints as Blank had predicted. But it was not over the sexual content as he thought. “They were concerned about the devil in the movie,” he says.

BLANK

’S

PAY I N G

DUES

LESSONS

1. Experience in the trenches is invaluable but it doesn’t always mean you know it all. 2. You have to get out of the safe haven of your hometown, especially if you grew up in a big city, in order to understand what people want around the country. 3. When you get out of the office you get a hands-on view of what makes business really work.


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CHAPTER 8

Career Curves Many Paths Lead Up If you come to a fork in the road, take it. —Yogi Berra

IN THE 1998 MOVIE SLIDING DOORS, GWYNETH PALTROW HURRIES TO board a train in London’s Tube and in one scenario makes the train and catches her longtime boyfriend in bed with another woman; and in another scenario she misses it because she’s not quite quick enough and is none the wiser regarding her boyfriend’s philandering. Two parallel stories about her life unfold as a result. The stories are quite different and hinges on whether she catches the train or she is left standing on the platform. Just a few seconds on a particular day impact her destiny. Does it really matter if you miss the train or bus one day during your life? Will a quick decision or action change the course of your career? How much do you control where your career path takes you? What if you don’t get off at the right career stop when offered the opportunity? Many of the leaders featured in this chapter pondered these questions during their careers. Sometimes a decision set them on the path of moving up in their careers; other times it was merely 158


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159

a dead end. But almost all of them say whatever curves their careers took offered them valuable learning experiences, and while they admit to having doubted, even worried about moving on to different work horizons, somehow they mustered the strength to make the leap. Some workplace experts warn about having too many different types of jobs on your resume for fear you’ll look like someone who just can’t commit. These executives, though, believe it was just that jumping around that helped advance them along a leadership path because of the contacts and learning experiences it provided them. Sometimes they stumbled upon a new career; other times it was a planned swerve. One CEO who had a plum job in advertising early in his career gave it all up to become a headhunter; another was an artist turned businessman and then artist again; and still another went from teacher to the priesthood. With all the unique twists and turns, one theme emerged from my discussions with these leaders: No matter what new adventure they embarked on, they gave their all to learn the ropes and did the best they could in their newfound jobs, believing that it would all pay off in some way, someday.

ALAN MILLER CEO of Universal Health Services

LEADER LOWDOWN Thing you’re most afraid of: Bad habit:

X-rays

Doing many things simultaneously

Date of birth: August 17, 1937 Person you respect or idolize most, other than family:

Winston Churchill


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Alan Miller knew early on that his ultimate goal would be running a company someday. “I’ve always been action oriented. If I see someone fumbling with a task I run over and do it. I don’t have the patience to just let things happen,” he says. Even a leadership course he took in ROTC summer camp pegged him as a leader. “I scored the highest in the regiment in that leadership course,” he says. Early on, he thought a career path toward marketing would get him the leadership position he craved. Fresh out of the Wharton business school, Miller took a job in advertising in New York City. He spent eight years in the profession, culminating in a five-year stint at advertising powerhouse Young & Rubicam. He had a number of accounts, working in the media and programming division, where he helped clients figure out how to spend their marketing budgets. Some of his clients included the corporate elite, such as General Mills and Bristol-Myers. His ambitions appeared to be on the right track. One of Miller’s first evaluations done by his manager at the ad agency raved about his abilities, and in the section about his potential, his boss wrote, “You’ll be running the company someday.” Miller was 25 at the time. But all the while, one of his old roommates from Wharton who had gone on to work on Wall Street kept bugging Miller about joining him if and when he might decide to purchase a company. “He always wanted to run a company and he always thought I was smart and wanted me to work for him. He kept after me to go with him. I kept saying, ‘I don’t know.’ ” Miller felt his job was secure and prestigious, but he grappled with his ambition to run an organization and wondered how long it would take to reach that level at the large ad agency. “They had about 2,000 people in the New York office and I thought it could take forever to get up to the top. Like the U.S. Army, it takes a long time to move up, maybe 20 years,” he says. So when his old biz school chum bought three different hospitals and launched a new hospital company, Miller decided to


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take the plunge. He was making good money at Young & Rubicam but not what he saw Wall Street types bringing in, and with a new wife, he figured the time was right to aim high. The industry was totally unknown to Miller, and his job at the new company was even more foreign to him. His task was to start buying hospitals and planning growth for the budding start-up. “I went from consumer products and wound up talking to doctors and lawyers. In fact, I’m the last person who wanted to go into this type of work. I’m not great with blood and gore,” he quips. The career transition was difficult. He put in long hours and had to be ready to travel on a moment’s notice. And to top everything off, he felt like he didn’t know what he was doing. But he concentrated on keeping his head down, listening and learning everything he could about the industry. “I remember one of the senior guys, a lawyer who was vice chair of the firm, asking my roommate, who was chairman of the company, ‘You told me this guy Miller was so smart. He doesn’t say anything.’ My friend told him, ‘It will be all right.’” Miller became president of the company in a couple of years, sold it off, and then started his own hospital company, now one of the nation’s biggest hospital holding groups. “It turned out to be a good thing,” he says.

MILLER

’S

CAREER

CURVES

LESSONS

1. Be prepared to work yourself ragged when you embark on a new career path. Focus on learning everything you can about your newfound industry or profession. 2. If you’re looking to become a leader, assess where you are and the potential for advancement. It might not be a timetable you can live with. 3. Don’t be lulled into complacency with job security. You won’t become a great leader without taking chances.


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MARSHA (MARTY) EVANS Former Head of the American Red Cross

LEADER LOWDOWN Dream job: Ethicist (I’m very interested in why people choose to do the right thing) First job as adult: Bad habit:

Lifeguard at community pool

Worrying

It’s difficult to change careers after 29 years in the military, so Marsha Evans decided to get her feelers out slowly. Evans was the superintendent of the U.S. Navy’s postgraduate school in Monterey, California, for about two years when she found out that the Girl Scouts were doing a nationwide search for a director. “I said to my husband, I had never applied for a job except for joining the Navy and I was curious about the process, so I applied, truly to find out how it all worked,” she says. Her husband bought her a book on how to write a resume and she faxed one off to the search firm. Within the hour, she had an interview. “They said they wanted to meet me, but I think it was because the person in charge of the search had never met a girl rear admiral, not because I was a match for the job.” Despite the search committee’s apprehension at having a military veteran run the organization, they offered her the job. What motivated Evans to take the job despite her lack of credentials was an epiphany she had in 1986 when she was reassigned to the Naval Academy. Although she felt being a women didn’t hold her back in her career, she realized there were indeed some issues of inequality. At the academy she saw that some women were treated inappropriately and there were disparities when it came to disciplinary actions. Evans helped spearhead funding for research to look at the inequality and


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later headed a task force after the Tailhook scandal. She had also, working in Navy recruiting, seen women firsthand who would seek out administrative jobs instead of aiming higher during their military careers. When the Girl Scouts offered her the position, she saw the opportunity to give girls a good start and “help them develop opportunities and embrace change.” She took the job and embarked on an effort to help change a nearly 90-year-old organization because she had a vision. She wanted the group to recruit more girls from the inner cities and from lower socioeconomic levels. “You have to create a burning platform for change. You may not get 100 percent of the change you want, but you can get some portion of that,” she says. Her next career curve to head the Red Cross also came from a desire to change but mostly to serve, something she learned from John Gardner, the chair of the White House Fellowship Program, a government leadership program for gifted young people, where she was chosen to be a fellow in 1979. “He inspired us with the whole idea that we have to serve when we are called. That experience changed my life,” she says. With that mission to serve she went on to a one-year assignment at the Treasury Department dealing with economics in what at the time seemed light-years away from anything she had done before. “I learned I could survive and thrive in an alien environment,” she says.

E VA N S

’

CAREER

CURVES

LESSONS

1. You can survive and thrive in a new career or position if you focus on serving something you think is important. 2. When deciding to make a change, look for something that inspires you and gives you a sense of purpose. 3. Even if you are the newbie in an organization, you can implement change if you have the passion.


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BRIAN SULLIVAN CEO and Chairman of Christian & Timbers


Owner of a professional sports team

Thing you’re most afraid of: Bad habit:

Loneliness

Vodka martinis

It was 1986 and Brian Sullivan was working in the corporate treasurer’s department at Revlon. “I was a staff guy, a big shot, when Ron Pearlman came in and took over Revlon. I was out. I was corporate staff and in money management, neither of which he needed or liked. I often say he was nice enough to let me use the elevator to get out.” So at age 33 he found himself without a job and wondering what his next career move would be. “I sat down and took a yellow pad, and wrote a line down the middle of two sheets of paper. On the left-hand side of the first page I wrote ‘what I like’ as a header and on the other side I wrote what I didn’t like. On the second page I wrote what I was good at and what I was not good at.” By writing everything down in such stark terms, he was able to cut through the nonsense and get right down to his career reality. He realized he liked working with large companies because he liked hanging out with big company people. What he didn’t like was the bureaucracy and the inability to make a major impact, and he also hated dealing with selling products to buyers he deemed unprofessional. When it came to what he was good at, sales and adapting to different types of people quickly were at the top of the list. “I could drink fine wine one night and then drink a beer and watch a game at Yankee Stadium the next. I thought I could


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build relationships with a very broad group of people and I was good at getting done what I said I would do, which was atypical for a big corporate bureaucracy.” He tried to get a job on Wall Street in the mid-80s but couldn’t, and learning about computers and technology wasn’t for him. Around this time, he had conversations with some of his friends that were recruiters and decided the profession fit into his yellow pad mold. He could sell products, deal with people who were pros in their lines of work, and still stay in touch with the corporate world but be unencumbered by its bureaucracy for the most part. The large recruiting firms wouldn’t touch him because of his lack of experience, but a small boutique firm named EJ Lance gave him a chance. “When we talked about compensation I said I had been making about $75,000 a year so I wasn’t expecting him to match that. But I said, ‘What about $50,000?’ He said, ‘$50,000? What?’ Without blinking he said, ‘I was thinking $300 a week.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what that is annually, but okay, I’ll take it.’” With the cut in pay Sullivan figured he had four months to make money in commissions at the new firm before he ran out of money and drowned in credit card debt. But Lance was the only guy willing to give him a desk, a phone, and a chance, so he took the job. “Thank God it turned out I was good at this,” he says. He worked hard, barely taking any time off and even working Sundays to learn the ropes. And he promised himself, while he learned about the ins and outs of recruiting, he would blaze his own path in the profession. Early on, other recruiters told him not to waste time schmoozing with human resources managers and employees because he’d get bogged down in red tape, but he thought otherwise. That approach ended up paying off big for Sullivan.


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He was doing a lot of work with Shearson American Express, whose HR department was centralized and powerful. “I heard that their office went out every Thursday night for drinks, so I kept showing up there every Thursday night and I would pay for the drinks. Everyone thought I was a good guy. I probably did this for two months.” In addition to schmoozing with the top dogs in that HR department, he made it a point to also be nice to their underlings, including secretaries. That glad-handing and generosity, even though he couldn’t afford it at the time, endeared him to a secretary in the HR department who also was a regular on those Thursday nights, and she recommended him to the assistant of Paul Tudor Jones, one of the first hedge fund gurus. The connection landed him an assignment to find an executive for Jones’ firm, and that eventually netted him a $160,000 commission in 1988. He used that chunk of change to start his own firm.

S U L L I VA N

’S

CAREER

CURVES

LESSONS

1. Make a clear list in your mind or on paper of what you like and don’t like, and what you’re good at and not good at. 2. Don’t say no to a job because the money isn’t right. Sometimes a cut in pay is the only way to make it. 3. Even if it’s an industry you’ve never worked in, you don’t have to be lockstep with preset rules that industry veterans get bogged down in. Try to look outside of the box and break the rules in order to be successful.


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GARY KUSIN Former CEO and President of FedEx Kinko’s Office and Print Services


High school history teacher

Childhood hero: Bad habit:

Mighty Mouse

Driving too fast


Hypodermic syringes

Gary Kusin considers himself the Forrest Gump of the business world because he has fallen in and out of careers that seemingly randomly popped up on his career path. After graduating from Harvard Business School in 1976, this Texarkana native landed a job at a department store in San Francisco, but it wasn’t a desire to become a retail maven that prompted the job choice. It was his clever ploy to get his future wife to marry him because she wanted to live in San Francisco. He quickly advanced through the ranks and in 1980 became a vice president and general merchandise manager at the SangerHarris division of the Federated Department Stores chain. At age 28, Kusin says, he was “the youngest and fastest in the history of the chain to go from being a trainee to general merchandise manager.” But soon he began thinking the department store concept was going to have to change drastically given the growing dominance of specialty store chains like The Gap. “I became concerned that the category killers—that’s what the specialty stores were called at the time—would be the ultimate demise of the traditional department store.” He started thinking about venturing out on his own and serendipitously connected with an old friend from Harvard, Jim


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McCurry, who was working for Bain & Company, and the two talked about video games and the future of personal computers. McCurry showed Kusin projections he had on the projected household penetration of PCs, and that sparked the idea to open a store that would sell software. “I said, ‘Why don’t we quit our jobs and get a first-mover advantage in the industry?’” he recalls. And that’s just what they did despite the CEO of Federated telling Kusin he was crazy to quit his job for an unknown quantity in an unknown industry. The pair opened a store in 1983 called Babbage’s, well ahead of the specialty software store explosion, taking it public in 1988, and ultimately merged with their biggest competitor in 1995. Another chance encounter that year led to his next career curve. A friend of Kusin’s from his department store days, Terry Lundgren, the future CEO of Federated Department Stores who was then at Neiman Marcus, introduced him to Janet Gurwitch, executive vice president of merchandising for Neiman’s, and the two discussed the phenomenon in the makeup industry brought on by makeup artists themselves introducing lines such as Mac. At Sanger-Harris, Kusin was once in charge of cosmetics so he had a bit of background in the industry. During his time in cosmetics, he recalls, the king of makeup at the time, Leonard Lauder, shot down one of his ideas. He was given the go-ahead to introduce Clinique, one of Estée Lauder’s lines, at one of his department stores in Dallas, and achieved the largest first-year volume of sales Clinique ever had. But after what Kusin calls a “compelling” presentation to Lauder to allow him to roll out Clinique in more stores, Lauder said no. “I thought at the time, ‘How can he be so arrogant to deny us that.’ But I realized he’s the 500-pound gorilla,” he explains. When Gurwitch talked to him about the changes in cosmetics, Kusin saw it as a chance to break the Estée Lauder stranglehold on the department store industry. And so, Laura Mercier cosmetics was born as a result of the Kusin-Gurwitch partnership. Three years later Neiman Marcus bought out Kusin’s stake


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in the company and became the controlling shareholder, and again Kusin was looking for another door to open. This time a chance lunch meeting with a real estate developer, Tom Carr, set him on yet another career path. With no experience in real estate he became a partner of CarrAmerica, a commercial property real estate investment trust (REIT) in Washington, D.C. but after three years he realized the industry was not for him. At that point, Kusin heard about a job at Kinko’s, put in a call to its interim CEO and chairman, George Tamke, and the rest is history. While his ultracurvy career path might send some into a tailspin, Kusin says, “I’ve always found enormous value in being flexible. While some things ended up not being for me, I went into everything thinking you don’t know what you don’t know, and there’s so much to learn even if it doesn’t work out.” He adds, “Everything doesn’t have to add up perfectly. Sometimes things happen that are random. I’ve gained an appreciation for not only what I do like but also what I don’t want to be around. I’m much more aware of what I want than most people.”

KUSIN

’S

CAREER

CURVES

LESSONS

1. Moving in and out of jobs and careers can give you an appreciation of what you like and what you don’t like. 2. It’s not necessary to map out your career path in detail. A lot of the times career curves can be random, falling in your lap unexpectedly. The key is recognizing them and taking a chance. 3. Sometimes the only way to know if an industry is right for you is to jump in headfirst, work hard, and then evaluate whether it flies.


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TIM BOYLE CEO and President of Columbia Sportswear Company


Supreme Court justice

Thing you’re most afraid of: Childhood hero:

Failure

Whitey Ford

It was never Tim Boyle’s intention to go into the family business. In the late 1960s, he had his sights on becoming a lawyer and was attending the University of Oregon studying journalism and political science. But fate stepped in 1970. His dad died suddenly and Boyle came home to help his grandmother and mother run the business. “This wasn’t a choice situation for me,” he says. Initially, Boyle admits he took on the responsibility relunctantly and without a lot of conviction. “I thought at that time: ‘I will now have to shoulder some responsibility,’ but even then I was quite frivolous in the way I approached helping to run the company—until the bank said, ‘You’ve got to sell the business or liquidate.’ That’s when I finally got serious about the business and making things work.” Alas, he admits, ineptness and lack of understanding of how the business worked curtailed his efforts along the way. Even though he had worked at his family’s company as a young boy, it was only in the warehouse, tagging merchandise and dealing with inventory; he never knew what went on in the front office. Under his direction, a $1 million company in 1970, when his dad died, dropped to a half million pretty quickly. “We did everything wrong. My mistakes were totally due to ignorance. If somebody disagreed with a decision my mom or I made we


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would just fire them. Within a year, we had almost a 100 percent turnover in personnel. I fired a couple of bookkeepers. I can’t believe I fired the people doing the books. We didn’t know how to keep books. Here I am, with no business background. I didn’t know how to do anything.” Another example of imprudent moves came when he decided the company should get into the footwear business and he went to a local footwear design company who designed a boot for the firm. “It was so good-looking, we sold 40,000 pair the first year. The only problem was, it didn’t fit anybody. A customer in Denver bought a pair and he went to the Bronco game and had to walk home in his socks. We’re in the apparel business and we never thought much about fit but footwear is totally different. Ill-fitting footwear is easy to make. I never thought about checking to make sure they fit right. The design firm specialized in athletic shoes but didn’t know much about making a hybrid between an athletic shoe and an L. L. Bean type boot, which was what we were looking for. A high percentage of those boots were returned. It was a disaster. I don’t even know how much we lost.” At some point, despite all the debacles, Boyle began to gain his sea legs in the business, and he credits the ability to start listening to others. His focus became mining ideas from all sorts of sources and opening himself up to advice wherever he could get it. When Boyle was considering selling the business, he spent at least several days with each potential buyer answering questions about the company. “Some of the buyers would look at the business and then suggest to me, ‘Why don’t you do this or that?’ If I thought something sounded good I’d make a mental note and use it later. And I also took the suggestion from the bank to form a board of advisers. I also turned to businesspeople in town. One of those was an early employee of Nike who did pro bono work for us. That was probably the key to the turnaround, all these ideas from people in the industry.”


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As for regrets over never becoming a lawyer, Boyle says, “I have none.”

BOYLE

’S

CAREER

CURVES

LESSONS

1. If you are dealt a set of problems, especially in an industry you know nothing about, you can either let them break you or turn them into an advantageous situation for yourself by learning as much as you can from sources all around you. 2. If you fail at a new career, at least you will have learned some things, things that might be applicable in a future environment. 3. Sometimes being derailed from a career path is not the worst thing. In fact, you could end up thinking it’s the best thing that ever happened to you.

DANA GIOIA Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

LEADER LOWDOWN How your parents describe you: Favorite book: Childhood hero: Dream job:

Dreamer

The King James Bible (even though I’m Catholic) Julius Caesar

Nightclub pianist

When Dana Gioia made a major career curve into the world of business in the early 1980s, he did not leave his life as an artist behind. “I wanted to be a poet so I thought there was no


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place for me to go but business school, in the tradition of Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot. I realized there was a tradition of American poets who had made business careers, in a way separating their artistic life from their professional life. I thought I would have more freedom as an artist, to develop under my own timetable and my own way, if I had a career on the side.” He had attended graduate school at Harvard University, where he studied literature, and then made the switch with his decision to earn his MBA from Stanford University. Eventually, he became the vice president of marketing at General Foods. Having had parents he called “quixotic,” Gioia felt compelled in some way to come to terms with his practical side and get a regular job, but he promised himself that every day he would write or read for three hours in pursuit of his art. He worked on his passion evenings and weekends, while by day he was a marketing manager for one of the biggest food conglomerates in the world working on strategies to sell Kool-Aid and Jell-O. “Business is the best possible training for an artist, if it doesn’t destroy you,” he explains. “Businesses are the primary repositories for skills in the United States. If you work for a major company, you learn how to get things done in the real world, how people think, how to manufacture things, how to price things. Business is eminently practical, making a profit and selling goods and services people want. It is training for fulfilling human needs in dependable ways. It was wonderful training for me because I learned how to operate cooperatively.” And after a rough start learning how to crunch numbers and analyze data, he became more successful in the business world than he ever thought he would, because for the most part corporate America lacked creativity, which Gioia had in abundance.


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That creativity, he believes, helped him and his team launch the “Jell-O Jigglers”—a product idea that put a 20-year decline in Jell-O products on the plus side. Regular Jell-O takes four hours to set, and busy families were increasingly using it only for special occasions. He spent 15 months reviewing recipes and serving ideas on a daily basis to turn Jell-O around, going over an endless stream of notions and ultimately pulling together a conglomeration of concepts into a product that could set quickly and the kids could make into funny shapes. “I was told by the previous person who had my job that there was nothing I could do to make the business grow,” he recalls. “We basically proved him wrong.” After 10 years in the business world, Gioia returned to the life of a full-time writer in 1992, publishing poetry and freelance pieces, but he walked away with something he says other managers did not have, creative thinking and qualitative thinking. “Most people in business have a quantitative background, usually driven by mad power needs. Business is filled with would-be kings and a few statesmen. I realized most businesspeople don’t understand how creativity works. They think it’s wild and crazy.”

GIOIA

’S

CAREER

CURVES

LESSONS

1. The business world can be great training for an artist, if it doesn’t kill you. 2. A great leader needs to use creativity in order to overcome a bad situation and make changes. Naysayers probably haven’t tried thinking outside the box. 3. No matter how smart or savvy you are, if you are out for only quantitative results and not qualitative results, you will be the king of a dying business.


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DAVID STEWARD CEO of World Wide Technology, Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite business book: Doing Business by the Good Book, by David Steward Favorite city: San Francisco Hobbies:

Charitable work, watching sports

The defining moment for David Steward came in his early thirties, when he received an award for salesman of the year. He was working for Federal Express as a senior account executive and got to meet with the company’s chairman, Pete Wilmont, and its founder, Fred Smith. His reward: an ice bucket with his initials on it and the upping of the sales target he had to hit for the next year. “What a letdown,” Steward recalls. “It was like Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and the Lion all of a sudden going behind the curtain and seeing who the real Wizard of Oz was.” Steward realized then that he didn’t want to work for a major corporation and be caught up with bureaucracy. “I thought it would kill me, snuff out the flame I had burning in me. I enjoyed FedEx and the people there but I felt stuck. I was spinning my wheels around but I was stuck in mud.” After that event, Steward became determined to realize what had been years of entrepreneurial dreams. He had two young children, a wife, and a mortgage, and he was 32 years old, so the idea of leaving a $65,000-a-year job with a car allowance and expense account scared him. But he was determined. He went out and bought a company in 1984 that analyzed and audited freight bills for overcharges. Given his background in transportation, he knew there were huge discrepancies when it came to auditing, and he convinced the owner of the company


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to sell him the firm for nothing down. “I told him I would pay him over time and I leveraged his assets and got the bank to give me money and started selling, making money within a year. It was the beginning of founding WWT.” Throughout the process he heard doubts from family and friends but tried hard to keep the negativity from ruining his resolve even in the face of bill collectors and sometimes having to buy food with credit cards. “My wife’s girlfriends would say, ‘Look at this guy—he must be crazy.’ They’d say things like, ‘You guys like living on the edge.’ Even my boss at FedEx thought I was crazy when I left. But that’s what people do—try to plant seeds of doubt and fear.” Steward remained focused, and he credits the support of his wife of 29 years as one of the key elements. “My wife and I agreed we wouldn’t listen to the fear. Fear—of the unknown and the outcome, and of what people may think of us—that’s one of the things that kept us from doing things. I was a guy who wasn’t always considered that bright. I had a terrible speech impediment and was very shy and withdrawn in grade school. I really believe people have more skills and ability than I do, but I try not to let fear stop me from doing things.”

S T E WA R D

’S

CAREER

CURVES

LESSONS

1. We are not what someone else tells us we are. We can be whatever we want to be no matter whether we think we are bright enough. 2. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. 3. Don’t let fear keep you from trying new adventures, and don’t listen to naysayers.


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CHARLIE SWINBURN CEO of RailAmerica


Duke Snider, centerfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers


Snakes

Professional golfer

Charlie Swinburn has collected career experiences like some people collect stamps or coins, and he sees his varied background very much like the pieces of a puzzle he’s been constructing all his life. After flying helicopters in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War he decided, at age 29, to go to Harvard Business School. But following graduation Swinburn decided to make a curve into a government job. After that, it was a job in corporate America, then a 180-degree turn at age 49 to become a lawyer; and ultimately a CEO gig in his early sixties. If you’re getting whiplash just listening to Swinburn’s career twists and turns it’s understandable. It was a difficult yet exciting road, especially since he admits he had no grand career plan. One of the career leaps that was hardest for Swinburn, and he still wonders where he’d be today if he had stayed, was leaving government after 12 years, where he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the U.S. Department of Transportation. “The government does reward people who are good and work hard,” he says. But he was ready to move on because his job was in some ways becoming predictable. “In government, the same problems keep coming around over and over. They never get permanently solved or resolved. There’s a tendency to deal with a problem on a temporary basis and claim a win.”


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At age 41 he was offered a job, his first in the business world, running a subsidiary of Rollins Environmental Services that cleaned up hazardous waste sites, and worked there for six years until the company shut down in the late 1980s. One of the biggest challenges was adapting to the corporate world, especially when it came to sending out pink slips. “The hardest thing I found was having responsibility for people’s welfare. In government, everybody under me had a pretty secure job. In business, people who worked for me, and their families, counted on a continuing paycheck that depended on my view of their workplace performance.” He recalled the first time he had to fire somebody, one of his regional managers at Rollins. “It was a quite difficult thing to face up to. One aspect of the decision was ‘Gee, I’m going to be putting a guy on the street who has family responsibilities. Am I prepared for that?’ I consulted with my number two guy, and I decided to fly to where the manager was based to do it face-toface. He took it pretty well. It wasn’t a total surprise. He got another job quickly. It was better having been face-to-face, getting the reaction, and seeing I hadn’t really ruined his life. I came to understand it’s necessary in business and is not the end of the world for the employee.” Swinburn again came to a crossroads and at age 48, in 1990, when he decided to go to law school because he had always been intrigued by the prospect of becoming a lawyer. His interest was in public service law. He had investments, primarily stock from his former employer, to cushion the financial burden of going back to school full-time. While in school he lost a small fortune almost overnight when the company’s shares tanked, leaving his desire to go into public service law less practical. Instead, he joined a large law firm in Washington, D.C., representing companies in environmental and business lawsuits. Soon, however, he decided the business of law was a “dog-eat-dog profession, with everything focused on marketing and where the next dollar is coming from, and less on the actual practice of law.”


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When the opportunity arose to head up RailAmerica, having already been a board member, he went for it and started a new chapter in his career at age 62. Looking back, he explains, you always wonder if you made the right choices and took the right career path. On the surface, a past vocation might have brought him more money or more stability. “If I had stayed in government I could have retired by now at full salary, playing golf somewhere with a nice house on the beach and not have to put up with the stresses and aggravations of the CEO job.” As it turned out, however, the CEO job has been one of his most rewarding. “It’s the responsibility of really running an organization; if you screw it up and the company goes under you’re held accountable.” His varied background, he believes, primed him just right for the position of top honcho. “In the Marine Corps I learned independent thinking and how to make decisions under stress. In government, I learned a lot about regulations. Running a hazardous waste company, I learned about the practical side of business. In law, I learned a lot not just about the legal system, but also about analytical ways to look at business questions and problems. Put that all together and it leads well to what I do now.” For Swinburn it has never been about where a new career would lead. “I have gone into different things because I thought they would be challenging and because I thought I would enjoy them. If they weren’t or I didn’t, I moved on.”

SWINBURN

’S

CAREER

CURVES

LESSONS

1. Don’t focus only on where a new job or career will take you on the corporate ladder. You should also make sure you like what you do. 2. Don’t be afraid to step out there and do it no matter what age you are. If you’re afraid of the unknown you will never move on or forward.


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3. You might look back and wonder if you made the right decisions, but that’s normal. Step back and look at the different choices you made/make as pieces of a whole and don’t judge each one alone.

REVEREND LARRY SNYDER CEO of Catholic Charities USA

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite movie: Dream job:

The Color Purple

Gardener


Sins of omission

Favorite music to relax to: Andrea Bocelli

“Do we choose our own career path or does someone else choose it for us?” Even though Reverend Larry Snyder is a man of the cloth, he’s not posing this question because he thinks a divine hand has led him through every career curve in his life. Indeed, he’s not even sure he has the complete answer to the question. It’s more about realizing that the path you take is not necessarily one you fully construct and control. In most cases, for Reverend Snyder, it was partly his desire to do something and partly a matter of opportunities he came across or had given to him. While in high school, Reverend Snyder was offered a chance to volunteer at a state mental hospital called the Lincoln State School in Lincoln, Illinois. It was the type of place people in the community were even scared to drive by, and he admits he was apprehensive at first. Few people volunteered at the hospital. “I didn’t know what to expect. I was very cautious. But it didn’t take a long time to overcome that level of fear.”


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He quickly found he was getting more out of the experience than he was putting in. “It was a striking contrast to my life. My family was not wealthy but we never were in need of things. At the hospital you had these folks with developmental disabilities and the main thing I remember is how little it took to make them happy. They taught me that. They were happy and satisfied with having far less than me and my peers. The important thing in life for them was relationships. They would bond quickly,” he recalls. Reverend Snyder was a child care worker at the institution taking the patients on field trips, among other things, for three summers during his college years while he was studying to become a high school teacher. He learned an important lesson about the work world during that time. Many of the staffers at the hospital were excited and motivated about working there, but there were also employees who lacked motivation. “The saddest thing was there were some people there who didn’t have a passion for what they were doing but they were stuck in a rut. I realized then that I would never do anything if my heart and soul were not in it.” During those summer months, he also gained an appreciation for the fact that “all of us in life have barriers and disadvantages. It helped me when I became a teacher and also an employer. I became less quick to judge, realizing people I work with or supervise may have some issues that are not obvious on the surface,” he explains. In the back of his mind, Reverend Snyder always thought he would someday become a priest but was waiting for the time when it felt right to make the move. After eight years of teaching, at age 34, he realized if he waited much longer he was going to be an old man. So he entered seminary with the intention of spending the rest of his life as a parish priest. However, after two years he was strongly encouraged by Archbishop John Robert Roach of Minneapolis, a bishop who inspired him to finally become a priest, to take an assignment at Catholic Charities.


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“At first I was reluctant. I probably would never have made that career decision on my own. I felt it was made for me,” he says. But today he often pinches himself over what an incredible job he has. “What are most beneficial in our lives are not always direct decisions we have made. I think life is full of opportunities. I don’t subscribe to the idea that we all have one path to go down. We just have to choose the one that is meaningful and fulfilling for ourselves.”

’S

FATHER

SNYDER

CURVES

LESSONS

CAREERS

1. Sometimes it’s the jobs no one else wants, the ones we are apprehensive about taking, that end up teaching us the most about our careers and ourselves. 2. It’s all about the relationships we nurture and value, not the fleeting career successes. 3. You might not be able to control every career opportunity you’re given, but you can control which one you choose. And that should be the path that will lead to some sort of fulfillment.


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CHAPTER 9

Mistakes Trip, But Don’t Fall Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. —Oscar Wilde

THE MOST CREATIVE AND CUTTING-EDGE EXECUTIVES I HAVE INTERVIEWED tend to be the ones who readily talked about past mistakes. Indeed, they wore their mistakes like badges of honor, convinced their foibles made them better leaders. Of course, there were those CEOs who found it hard to talk about their missteps. Several executives told me they would call back or e-mail with mistakes after taking some time to think, but alas, the messages never came. Was it embarrassment, or the sheer inability to remember? Whatever the reason, I found no shortage of high-level managers with myriad stories to tell. Oftentimes, the mistakes they made happened early in their careers, some right out of college, others during a job transition. Sometimes their mistakes cost the companies they worked for thousands or even millions of dollars, whereas in other cases it was just the costly price of sheer humiliation. But in all of these cases, their mistakes did not cost them 183


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their careers, or derail their ultimate accession to the top of the heap. On the contrary, many believe it was exactly these mistakes that helped propel them to the heights of leadership because they were able to come away from their mistakes better and smarter. Early in his career, Sears’ CEO never expected any of his workers to even think about stealing from him. This naïveté cost him big-time when he first became a manager. And the head of Quicken Loans dreaded firing workers so much, it ended up wreaking havoc on his company. In both case, these two executives learned the importance of facing the reality of life, and put in controls to manage the ups and downs of the work world. None of these leaders loved bungling situations. But I got the sneaking suspicion they were happy to have erred early in their careers and been able to learn from their experiences as they set out to hone their skills. And the lesson—admit you’re wrong and move on.

AYLWIN LEWIS President and CEO of Sears Holding Corporation

LEADER LOWDOWN Thing you’re most afraid of: Favorite book:

Losing a loved one, my wife

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Favorite business book: Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It, by James S. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner

At 22, Aylwin Lewis landed a job managing a Jack in the Box restaurant in Houston, Texas, where he got a reality check on the human condition.


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Under Lewis’ tutelage, the store began to run into a big theft problem, also known as shrinkage in the retail world. The district manager made Lewis aware of the problem when he showed him the store’s profit and loss statement, the first since Lewis took over. “My P&L was disastrous. The manager told me, ‘We’re here to make money, and you didn’t make any money this last period.’ He said I had a huge shrinkage problem. I was shocked.” Given his liberal arts background in school and a strong Southern Baptist upbringing, Lewis says, “I believed in the glory of human beings,” so the idea that one of his workers was stealing was unthinkable. He says he was raised to be honest and if you didn’t have the money to buy something you worked until you could afford it. “It could have been an accounting problem. There can be a lot of reasons you have shrinkage,” he recalls thinking at the time. Just a few days later it all became clear. It was a Monday morning, his administrative day when he handled inventory and balancing accounts, but on this day he came in a bit earlier than usual, about 4 A.M., because he had a lot on his plate that day. When he drove up to the store he noticed the back door wide open, which was a safety violation; the night crew were supposed to keep the door closed to prevent strangers from coming into the back of the restaurant. At the back door he could see his night cook Tony’s car with the trunk open, and there was Tony loading it up with cases of frozen hamburger patties. “He looked at me and said, ‘I could put a couple of these in your car.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ And I fired him on the spot.” Lewis was in shock, because Tony was one of the best night shift workers, grilling at the speed of two employees and keeping the kitchen clean and organized. “He was a valuable employee, especially since it was so hard to find good workers for the graveyard shift,” he says.


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But the blatant theft, he explains, “was an epiphany for me. I had never thought that people could do that, but I was naive. I realized that when people are together with food and money and things like that you will have a problem if there are no controls.” In hindsight, he says, he had few if any controls at the restaurant, so he quickly implemented an array of already existing policies at the chain, including counting inventory at every shift, counting the cash drawer throughout the day, and conducting surprise audits. He also locked the walk-in coolers and freezers and gave limited access to employees. With all of those safeguards in place, Lewis also realized he had to begin communicating his own value system to his employees, looking beyond productivity and reliability. “Unless you find people who share your attitude and values about work and business, you are not going to be successful,” he says. So a key part of the interview process became trying to figure out if potential employees were on the same page as Lewis when it came to integrity. “You can never totally get rid of theft, but stressing uncompromising integrity does make a difference,” he explains.

LEWIS

’

MISTAKES

LESSONS

1. Look for integrity in the people around you if you want to succeed in business and as a leader. 2. Eliminate as much temptation as possible by putting accountability and control measures in place. 3. Don’t sour on the human race but realize that not everyone will be honest in his or her dealings at work. Don’t be naive. Keep your eyes open.


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DANNY GOLDBERG CEO of Air America Radio

LEADER LOWDOWN Favorite movie: Dream job:

Searching for Bobby Fischer

Running an independent bookstore


Martin Luther King Jr.

Most of the mistakes Danny Goldberg made in his life came when he took things personally and got emotional about disagreements. “I’d end up investing too much ego into an issue without being able to understand the people involved and I’d lose sight of priorities,” he says. One particular episode has stayed with him. Goldberg, who spent the bulk of his career in the record business running his own firm, Artemis Records, before taking on the top spot at Air America, had worked for a major record company as president of a division with a staff of 150 people. He had just finished up what he thought was a solid year. But the company as a whole was going through some tough financial issues so the senior executives under him were passed over for bonuses. At least that’s how Goldberg saw it. “I thought it was a huge mistake and it demoralized the staff,” he recalls. But instead of taking a deep breath and presenting his case to his bosses in a calm and collected manner, he lost it. “It was the right thing for the company to do but I brought emotions to the situation, complaining, whining. It was counterproductive and damaged trust. The relationship with the guy I worked for was never quite the same again.” While Goldberg got what he wanted for his executives, he regrets his action because his approach destabilized the situation overall. “I made it a moral crusade because I felt like I wasn’t


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delivering to my staff, instead of looking at this as basically a disagreement on the allotment of money.” After that event he made an effort to cool off before tackling disagreements, especially when they involved money. The key, he decided, was to get into a frame of mind where he could express his side of the story in a dispassionate, not self-righteous, way. He says, “You’re always accountable, even as you get higher up and have fancy titles. That doesn’t make you king or emperor and you have to understand the limits of authority and do not undermine your credibility. Always be graceful. I realized you can’t be emotional over challenges to your authority or over disagreements.” Another lollapalooza of a mistake he made was when he decided he knew better than the marketplace when it come to picking a hit. When he worked for Atlantic Records, the company produced a Bad Religion album and Goldberg had decided on what he thought was going to be the breakout single. But a local radio station in Los Angeles called KROQ kept playing “Infected”, one of the other songs on the album. Despite that, Goldberg stuck with his choice because of what he now describes at “distorted objectivity.” In retrospect, he says, he ended up failing Bad Religion because he let his ego get the best of him and did not even listen to his underlings, who were encouraging him to take KROQ’s lead. “That could have been a national hit if I’d read the writing on the wall,” he still laments after more than 15 years. That experience, along with advice from Doug Morris, Atlantic’s chairman at the time, who told Goldberg to stop showing off his smarts to people and instead “show how smart they are,” combined to inspire him to be less convinced of his own genius.


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’S

MISTAKES

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LESSONS

1. The public knows more than we do. Trust your own creativity and gut in the beginning of the process, but when the marketplace and the people around you talk, listen. 2. You cannot take work disagreements personally. Emotion can be destructive and shift your focus from the matter at hand. 3. A cooling-off period when you get your dispassionate face on is critical when dealing with adversity.

TERRY LUNDGREN CEO, President, and Chairman of Federated Department Stores, Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Bad habit: wife

Using my Blackberry when I should be paying attention to my

Favorite movie:

Happy Gilmore

Favorite music to relax to: U2 Dream job: Point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers

One of Terry Lundgren’s first real buying assignments was in the lamp department at the Bullock’s department stores on the West Coast. He had been an assistant buyer, but this was his chance to run the entire operation as a full-fledged buyer. “It happened to be a time when that whole category was selling very well. That year we grew the lamp business from $2 million to $3 million. We were chasing business as fast as we could run.”


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During one season, Lundgren, who was 26 at the time, had his whole budget including advertising and inventory squared away. In fact, all his ads were already laid out in the Los Angeles Times so he had little to worry about. “Everything was fantastic,” he recalls. However, right after Thanksgiving his boss, a vice president, said to him, “I need another ad from you.” Lundgren responded that his ad budget had been set six months earlier, as his boss had requested, and that there was no money to do any more ads. His boss told him to just charge his largest vendor for the cost of the ad, and then after Christmas they could figure it out and tell the vendor it was a mistake. Lundgren balked at the idea, not wanting to pull a fast one on the lamp vendor who was his largest supplier and the meat and potatoes of his lamp business. His boss insisted, and that Friday afternoon Lundgren went home depressed, not knowing what to do. “I felt so bad. The next day I was at work—it was a Saturday, which I often went in on—and I got a call from my boss’s boss, Mike Steinberg. He was the senior vice president and an extraordinary guy in my life. He said, ‘How are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m not doing well.’ He told me to come to his office and asked me, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘I think I need to resign. I think I need to leave this company.’ I explained the situation and said I thought the ad probably was the right thing to do for the company but I was sick to my stomach. I just couldn’t do that to a vendor I know and respect. I couldn’t charge him for money he didn’t owe.” At that point, Steinberg picked up the phone and called the head of the lamp company, saying, “Listen, you owe your lamp buyer a big, gigantic favor. He didn’t charge you for this lamp ad but he could have charged you back but didn’t. We have to run this double truck ad but because he’s done a great job I’ll pay for one ad page and you pay for the other.” The lamp supplier agreed and that was that. The mistake Lundgren says he made was becoming para-


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lyzed over the situation and not trying to figure out how to handle the matter in another way. “I didn’t know what to do. My answer was to quit. That would have been a big mistake. It was a huge lesson for me. At that point I didn’t realize I had so many good things going for me there. You have to face the music and the problem and understand all the circumstances surrounding a situation, not just focus on one issue. I was ready to resign over one issue. The reality was that three months later I got promoted to one of the largest buying jobs in the company at the time and that boss ended up leaving the company.” That same boss also contributed to one of Lundgren’s other big business faux pas. When this boss was on a buying trip with the rug buyer in India, he called Lundgren to say he had come across some beautiful glass bowl lamps called hundis he thought would be perfect for his department. The buyer for Bloomingdale’s which, like Bullock’s, was part of the Federated Department Stores chain, was buying the lamps, and Lundgren’s boss thought he should purchase them as well. Lundgren had assumed he was getting a small shipment of the new lamps but wound up with a 40-foot container of glass bowls that had no electrical wiring or mounts to attach the bowls to the wall. It turned out Bloomingdale’s in New York had access to a manufacturer that was going to convert the bowls into working lights, but Lundgren did not have the same type of low-cost resource on the West Coast to transform his 1,000 glass bowls. He did have a local company make about 50 lamps but they were expensive to make and ended up not selling well. As for the remaining 950 glass bowls, “We had to throw them away.” The debacle ended up costing Lundgren a lot of money. He can’t recall how much, but he realized he should have asked his boss many more questions when he got that initial call. “He was my boss. I was respectful of him. I said, ‘Okay, thanks very much. They sound interesting.’ I had no idea what I was getting


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into. In hindsight neither did he. If I had said ‘Send me a photograph’ and asked him about the electricity, even my boss would have realized the issue. You need to be responsible for doing your own research before you make a decision. It was, after all, my department.”

LUNDGREN

’S

MISTAKES

LESSONS

1. Question and research every idea, even if it’s coming from your boss. 2. Don’t just cut and run when things get complicated. 3. Find ways out of prickly, unethical situations. Take time to deal with them, and, if needed, go to a boss’s boss.

VIVEK PAUL Partner with Texas Pacific Group and Former CEO of Wipro Ltd.

LEADER LOWDOWN Thing you’re most afraid of: Bad habit: Good habit:

Don’t know what I don’t know

Comfort food Always respectful of others

At the ripe old age of 24 and right out of business school, Vivek Paul got a chance to show his stuff working for PepsiCo in the mergers and acquisitions department. The soda giant owned a trucking firm that had raked in about $35 million in annual losses, and Pepsi wanted to unload it. Being the new kid on the block, Paul got to handle the deal because the task seemed impossible so no one else wanted it.


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The trucking division had a number of real estate assets— buildings and terminals—so Paul set up a unique structure that left the acquiring company with millions in revenues but a chunk of losses as well. Paul says, “The deal netted Pepsi $20 million for the unit even though they were expecting nothing.” Everybody was happy and Paul looked like a boy wonder. But not for long. “What ended up happening was the deal was too good, and the buyers weren’t very savvy. We took too much money out of the unit and they didn’t do a great job running the company.” The firm went belly-up and dragged Pepsi into court, with the buyer saying the sale was not legitimate. “I had to give a deposition in bankruptcy court. That was no joy.” He realized that he had gotten overzealous in his drive to show his stuff. “Had I done the deal for $10 million or even $2 million, I still would have been quite the hero. That would have given the deal a chance,” he recalls, but he was focused on making as much money for Pepsi as he could at the expense of the long-term ramifications. “My big takeaway at that point was that your professional reputation takes decades to mature. You have 50 years of working life. You can’t take the view that you’re going to be the hero in this quarter though tomorrow it may hurt you.” Even though he doesn’t believe the buyer company’s collapse was his fault, he realized the business world is a small world, and that “people should want to keep coming back to you, knowing they’d get a fair deal. That’s how I was going to get invited to a lot of tables.” It was difficult at such a young age to realize that there would be other deals he could be successful at in the future, says Paul about his state of mind at the time. He came to understand that tomorrow was indeed another day to show his stuff.


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PAUL

’S

MISTAKES

LESSONS

1. Don’t get greedy and take every penny out of a deal. 2. If you have the view that tomorrow is going to be even better than today, you’ll behave in a different fashion and not get bogged down by mistakes. 3. Being fair in deals you strike will always get you invited to more tables.

BRIAN KEANE CEO of Keane Inc.


Bartender



Person you respect or idolize, other than family: Date of birth:

George Washington

February 6, 1961

Sometimes too much thoughtful analysis can turn sour. At least that’s what Brian Keane found out when he was handling one of his first big acquisitions after taking over the reins of Keane in the late 1980s. The company made the purchase in the early 1990s, and Keane now says he was slow executing the after-merger process. That created an environment where all the staff was wondering when the next shoe would drop and where. Bottom line, he explains, “we were not decisive and did not make quick, good decisions and then build from there. We tried to make slow, perfect decisions.” But that slowness to act created a volatile mix. “People


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know there are redundant jobs. People know there is going to be consolidation. And they know some people are going to lose their jobs. But they don’t know when. Everybody is suspicious of everyone else. Everyone is looking at each other as their competitor for jobs,” he says. “As a result we lost key people and morale was low.” But he says he learned from that experience and decided after the dust settled to be honest to the remaining staff about his mistake, and subsequently implemented a merger and acquisition methodology so they weren’t winging it. “My dad’s father had a saying, and my dad always told it to me: ‘Your hard luck can be your good luck but only if you take advantage of it.’ Imagine being a kid and hearing that 200 times. The main point is not whether you face adversity but how you respond to it.” Being up-front with his mistakes, he believes, made him a better leader. “Acknowledging the mistake and getting it out in the open becomes a means to learning for everyone involved,” he says. “So you go and make a mistake, maybe it cost you millions of dollars. You have to look at it as a million-dollar investment in learning.” While going too slowly can be a mistake, he says, so can moving too quickly. In 2000, after a boom in business from the Y2K phenomenon, Keane realized that a large revenue stream for the firm was drying up. That meant repositioning the firm in other areas to boost sales, but the company embarked on an investment explosion, expanding into many different areas, including management consulting, overseas operations, and the list goes on and on. “In retrospect, we did too many things at once,” he admits. “That’s hard for an organization because it means you can’t do anything well. People were questioning who we are and what we were about.” In hindsight, he says, he should have looked at each decision in and of itself and then backed that up with a business


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case reviewing everything collectively in terms of how the combination of investments would impact the company’s marketing positioning and ability to execute effectively. “A series of disconnected decisions by management just rolling out through an organization can be problematic,” he says.

KEANE

’S

MISTAKES

LESSONS

1. Too much assessment and not enough action is a bad thing. 2. Waiting too long to make decisions about issues that can impact an entire organization will only lead to discontent among the workforce and potentially the loss of key employees. 3. On the flip side, jumping into every venture you come across in a mad dash to boost revenues can backfire if each decision is not thought out and looked at in terms of how it will impact the entire organization.

MARSHA (MARTY) EVANS Former Head of the American Red Cross

LEADER LOWDOWN Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Thing you’re most afraid of: Favorite book:

Eleanor Roosevelt

Scorpions

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

In 1984, Marty Evans became a commanding officer of a Navy unit, which was in essence like a CEO of the unit. She was cho-


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sen to run a naval technical training center where people came from all over the Navy to train in 35 different skill sets. One of the biggest departments within the training center was the firefighting class that trained about 22,000 people annually and included large mock-ups of simulated ships where the trainees had to evacuate everybody and put the fire out without losing the ship. Given the size, the risks, and the intricacies involved with the firefighting training, Evans allowed this particular part of the unit to take most of her time and energy. Smaller sections like the Geiger counter training unfortunately got short shrift. But that decision came back to haunt her. The Geiger training basically involved learning how to maintain the counters and make sure they were calibrated correctly, meaning the readings were accurate. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission showed up to inspect the department they found problems with the radioactive test sources used to test the Geiger counters, and Evans’ unit was cited. “I was focused on a much bigger section of my command, but I ended up getting just as much grief from a two-person office on the far side of my command,” she says, still regretful. “I neglected it.” Evans says she inherited the problem with the Geiger counter training, which was ongoing for five years. But, she adds, “I didn’t identify it.” She knew she couldn’t point fingers and had to accept responsibility. She equated it to responsibilities employers are now legally forced to take when it comes to issues of sexual harassment: “If you didn’t know about it you should have known.”

E VA N S

’

MISTAKES

LESSONS

1. Don’t let the larger, more complex issue allow you to neglect the rest of the organization.


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2. Sometimes the smaller issues may end up costing you more in the long run. 3. If you’re the leader, you can’t push blame onto your predecessor, so take responsibility when things go wrong.

BRIAN SULLIVAN CEO and Chairman of Christian & Timbers

LEADER LOWDOWN How your parents describe you: First job as a kid:

Driven

Soda fountain clerk


Ronald Reagan

Soon after Brian Sullivan launched his own executive search firm Sullivan & Company in 1988, he made a doozy of a mistake that could have derailed his business. The firm was bringing in about $200,000 annually but 40 percent of his revenues, about $80,000, was coming from one client. It did not occur to him to diversify because the client, Dave, was a friend of his and he viewed the income from that one account as locked in. Dave worked in the human resources department of a major financial services firm and Sullivan considered him “a pal.” He was younger than Sullivan, who in some ways took Dave under his wing. “I guess I had gotten a bit cocky. I was this big-shot New Yorker and he was this young guy from the Midwest looking to me for guidance,” he says. But one day everything fell apart.


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Sullivan took Dave to Yankee Stadium to see a game and noticed that the guy was beside himself for some reason. Sullivan asked him what was the matter, and Dave replied that he wasn’t sure if he should marry his fiancée. “He asked me what I thought he should do,” Sullivan explains. “I said, ‘Dave, no way. Don’t marry her. You’ll be divorced in no time.’” Sure enough, two months later the couple decided to get married, and when Dave told his soon-to-be wife about what Sullivan had advised him she forbade Dave to ever do business with Sullivan’s company again. “What a disaster,” Sullivan says, still lamenting his “big mouth. I was kicking myself up and down Broadway after that. I could have said something else, something like, ‘This is something we all have to struggle through.’” Looking back, Sullivan realized they weren’t pals after all. “And he didn’t even take my advice in the end.” He also realized that you’ve always got to continue to expand your client base and not become dependent on only a few, because a client can evaporate overnight. When it comes down to it, he says, “it’s all just business. Be happy to go out and have fun with your clients but don’t cross the line, because at the end of the day it’s still business.”

S U L L I VA N

’S

MISTAKES

LESSONS

1. Stay out of personal matters with clients no matter how friendly you think you are with them. Keep your mouth shut at all costs. 2. Find diplomatic ways to stay neutral when you’re asked personal questions or advice. 3. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify.


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DANIEL GILBERT Chairman and Founder of Quicken Loans Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Bad habit:

Always seem to be running a few minutes late

How you describe yourself: Favorite business book:

Aware

In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters

Throughout his career, it was that 20-minute conversation that Daniel Gilbert dreaded—the one where you call an employee into your office and tell him or her it’s time to hit the road. Gilbert just didn’t want to fire people, and that aversion became a major problem more than a decade ago with one particular individual he hired for the firm at a fairly high level. His reluctance to cut the cord on this hire cost Gilbert’s company a lot and led to a decline in morale and the departure of several of his well-regarded employees. “I hung on to this guy way too long. He was a yeller. He created fear in the office because he was emotionally and verbally abusive. He would intimidate the people he worked with and over time employees came to me and told me about this,” he says. “But it’s so hard to fire people, especially at a high place.” The difficulty, he explains, comes in because such situations can be very uncomfortable and he just didn’t like doing that to people. He says the individual was a charmer when he was hired, but things started to fall apart about two years into his tenure. “You have a lot of people in the world who are insecure and it doesn’t matter how successful they are. If you have someone who doesn’t work as hard or they’re initially reluctant to embrace technology, those traits can be overcome. But if you have an insecure personality, no matter what you do they will end up


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being destructive. I learned that the hard way.” The bottom line, he says, is parting ways may be the best thing for both parties involved. Keeping such employees on the payroll can even be doing them a disservice because there may be a better fit out there for the individual. Gilbert finally had the unpleasant conversation with the manager after he wreaked havoc on the company for five years. “It was like from The Wizard of Oz,” he explains after the angry manager’s departure. “Remember when the witch died. ‘DingDong, the witch is dead.’ That’s how it was at the company.” After years of holding on to people for too long, the “witch” was the last straw and from then on he terminated bad employees as soon as possible. He implemented a program to look deeply into the background of future high-level employees, having his recruiting team look way beyond the resumes and talk to people—“fifty people potential employees know and people who have worked with them, and their references’ references. My goal is to find out who he or she is, really is.” He adds, “It’s more important to go really deep and find out who a person is, not what they’ve done. Are they passionate, are they curious, do they want to grow and make themselves and everyone around them better? Those are the things that matter.”

GILBERT

’S

MISTAKES

LESSONS

1. Look beyond the resumes and charm of prospective employees to find out whether they are secure with themselves and committed to growing themselves and the people around them. 2. Don’t hold on to a bad employee who’ll turn into the Wicked Witch of the West and tyrannize all the poor citizens of Oz (aka your organization). 3. Insecurity cannot be cured.


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CHAPTER 10

Bad Bosses Outlast, Ignore, or Move On Tyrants are but the spawn of ignorance. —James Russell Lowell

ALMOST EVERYONE HAS A BAD BOSS STORY TO TELL, EVEN CEOS. CONtrary to popular thought, leaders don’t just get dropped into the executive suite by the corporate gods. They, too, have many bosses during their careers, some good, some bad, with the latter often leaving the greatest impression on the way they themselves lead. In many instances, the more they disliked their bosses, the more they say they learned from them. In some cases the bosses were downright mean, while in others they were just useless. But a theme seemed to emerge among many of the bad bosses these leaders came across—incompetence. One thing I’ve observed after two decades of covering workplace issues was a strange phenomenon of incompetent managers rising up through the ranks. I realized how prevalent it was several years ago when I wrote a story for the New York Times about bad bosses where I interviewed dozens of individuals who experienced this firsthand. Workplace dolts often rise up the ladder despite themselves and others. They may be com202


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petent at one job but become incompetent when they are promoted. This is known as the Peter Principle, after the book by the same name published in 1969 by William Morrow & Company in which authors Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull theorized that “given enough time—and assuming the existence of enough ranks in the hierarchy—each employee rises to, and remains at, his level of incompetence.” Some of executives profiled in this chapter got to see this up close and were always amazed at how often they came across such managers. But their approach for dealing with incompetence is what sets them apart from many people, who tend to let a bad boss drag them down and become almost paralyzed in their jobs and career ambitions. These leaders tended to (forgive the following cliché) make lemonade from lemons rather than sour as a result of the experience. One executive who had a nonattentive boss sought out other managers for help. Another put aside his boss’s bad qualities and focused on what he could learn from him. Another went above the head of her boss, and surprisingly, he was moved to another department. It’s all about being proactive, they say, and not letting a bad boss define your career.

STEVE BENNETT CEO of Intuit Inc.

LEADER LOWDOWN Good habit: Bad habit:

Work/life balance (100 rounds of golf a year) Too much coffee


Not being happy or successful

PGA Tour commissioner or Stanford University professor


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Bosses from hell don’t just come in the mean and angry variety. For Steve Bennett it was the indifferent and silent types who are in his bad boss hall of fame. One of his bosses when he worked for General Electric came from the company’s headquarters because corporate wanted to put him in a line job even though he had no experience. “He was a good guy but he didn’t know what he was doing. Some people can make that jump to become effective line people, but he wasn’t one of them,” says Bennett, who was 26 at the time and in his first managerial job, overseeing 12 employees and running a $5 million business. One episode with this boss involved Bennett calling the manager one day for help on an issue he was facing. While Bennett cannot recall exactly what problem prompted him to seek out his manager’s advice, he vividly remembers his boss’ response: “What you’re learning is that it’s lonely at the top.” Bennett was dumbfounded by the response. “Not only was he telling me he couldn’t help me but he was also pointing out how lonely it is. I couldn’t believe it,” he says, still shocked by what transpired. Unfortunately, that wasn’t Bennett’s last unhelpful boss at GE. In 1989, when he became a sales manager in the Medical Systems business, he was brought in to drive change, but he didn’t have the support of his direct supervisor. The division was in the midst of doing a major transaction with a state-owned hospital in California, and Bennett remembers trying to discuss it while on an airplane flight with this boss. “How were we going to work the transaction? How were we going to make it successful? My boss said, ‘I don’t get involved in transactional discussions.’ It was a $10 million transaction and he acted as if it was beneath him and wouldn’t even talk about it with me.” Bennett says he’s not sure what motivated his boss to respond in that way. “I don’t know if he didn’t want to help me or he just didn’t know what to do, but to an employee, me, that was all irrelevant.”


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In both cases with these bosses, he says, “I was looking for help and they were missing in action.” The lonely-at-the-top boss was fired within a year and a half because, Bennett says, “at GE everyone at the organization at all levels has to be adding value. If people weren’t good they’d stick out sooner or later. But the question was how long it took,” he adds. It didn’t matter that the boss who didn’t “get involved” ignored Bennett’s call for help. “I was able to oversee a successful transaction with the hospital without his help,” he says. In both cases he was able to rise above the situation by being resourceful and reaching out to people who would share their nuggets of wisdom. “When I was faced with these bad bosses I said to myself, ‘That’s not the way it should be, but I’m going to figure it out anyway even if they don’t help me.’ My mind-set was that I was not a victim and I could overcome this.” The dual experiences, he believes, made him a better boss. “It made me realize that when I was a boss, I would never do that to anyone who worked for me. It not only fortified my courage to be successful, but it shaped my whole philosophy that led to my success. I work hard to support the heck out of my team when they need it. I never wanted my team to feel about me the way I felt about those two bad bosses.”

BENNETT

’S

BAD

BOSS

LESSONS

1. Don’t become a victim of a bad boss. In a great organization they won’t be long for this world. 2. Don’t spend time trying to figure out what is motivating a bad boss; just focus on what you have to accomplish. There are always resources available around you. You just have to find them. 3. Always support your employees and help them when they reach out for advice.


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JOMEI CHANG Chairman of Qilinsoft LLC and Founder and Board member of Vitria Technology


Boredom

Person you respect or idolize most, other than family: Childhood hero: Good habit:

Katharine Graham

Kangxi, emperor of Qing dynasty in China

Deadly optimistic

One of JoMei Chang’s first bosses out of graduate school was anything but a good manager. A first job can be intimidating without adding an incompetent boss into the mix. “You’re trying to figure out what the people are like around you and if you’re up to the job,” she says. “And here I am with the worst boss anyone can imagine.” The boss, a middle-aged white supervisor who had been with the company for nearly three decades, would spend the bulk of meetings talking about football and was more into schmoozing than work. And he didn’t respect his underlings, especially those who were of the female persuasion or of any race other than his. Chang says she worked hard and completed major projects, but he would invariably give credit for the work she did to his buddies in the group. And matters got worse. Chang, an immigrant from Taiwan who was relying on the company she was working for to sponsor her visa, also started to notice that the manager was beginning to hold the visa application over her head. While she says a good working relationship includes disagreements on how a project should be done, this supervisor was averse to anyone questioning his authority or ideas. On one occasion when Chang voiced her opinion on a project, she says,


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“he announced to the whole group that ‘with her attitude I don’t think we can sponsor her immigration visa for her.’ It was a horrible experience and I didn’t want to do anything because of the visa situation. I had everything to lose.” She was able to connect with a diversity support group at the company and after about six months members of the group convinced her to go to her supervisor’s boss. Her first move was to ask the head of the unit she was working in for five minutes of his time. She told him, “I love my job. I want to work here but I can’t stay in this group. I don’t feel I respect my supervisor or he respects me.” The head manager was cordial and told her he would have some people look into it, and the next day the supervisor was transferred. She had suffered for nearly a year and a half due to an abusive manager and all it took to fix the situation was to confront it head-on. But, she insists, even though that was one of her first forays in the American work world, “I didn’t let that sour my experience. I moved on. It helped me to understand— and this is how I operate today—that I should never feel I need to be fearful of anything.”

CHANG

’S

BAD

BOSS

LESSONS

1. Do not let a manager hold anything over your head as a means to get you to do what he or she wants. 2. Although there are many bad people in this world trying to hamper you, there are even more good people trying to help you. Never lose faith in human nature, and one day provide a helping hand to others in return. 3. Do not dwell on the negative experience or it will keep you from moving on with your own aspirations. Know that you will be able to overcome any problems you have in front of you after surviving a really bad boss. Let it energize you.


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ROBERT COSMAI Former President of Hyundai North America


Leaving the toilet seat up


Realizing all of my personal goals


Twenty years ago, Cosmai, who was in middle management at a firm he’d rather not name, came face-to-face with a person who would become his worst-ever boss. A shameless self-promoter, his boss did everything wrong when it came to managing people. “It was probably the worst situation I ever found myself in,” he says, about the man who thought nothing of assigning meaningless projects that would need to be accomplished by working into the wee hours of the night as a way to exert power over the employees. Cosmai remembers working hard on many assignments, only to have his boss take credit for his work. “He would use whatever input you provided him and then say they were his ideas,” he explains. And many times, he adds, there were complex projects assigned that just didn’t make any sense. “It was infuriating but you couldn’t question him or you’d end up paying in some way. He wanted everyone to make sure they knew he was in charge. During group meetings he made it clear he was the one doing the pitching and the rest of us were doing the catching.” During his three years working with this individual things just deteriorated. Compounding his boss’s incompetence was the constant complaining by his co-workers, a fact that, Cosmai says, “started to drag me down even further.”


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Cosmai came up with a strategy to talk to his boss after hours about some of his ideas and assignments, never referring to his boss’ because he thought he would shut down. “I tried to say things diplomatically. I would make some recommendations. I would give him choices. He was receptive to it as long as he wasn’t embarrassed. He did open up to me. If I had done it in front of five or six people he would have taken my head off,” he says about his discretion. “I saw that he started to make some changes in his program, but he would never thank me for my input. I knew he liked what I was saying but I never expected to get the pat on the back.” Finally, Cosmai realized there was no way to change the situation and he also started to notice that his boss’ behavior was starting to impact the organization negatively. That’s when he decided to leave. “There will always be turbulent times in your career but you have to know when to leave,” he says.

COSMAI

’S

BAD

BOSS

LESSONS

1. You can try to make changes by addressing a boss head-on, but when things just aren’t changing you have to move on. 2. You have to give credit to the people around you. Aside from compensation, the main thing people want is feedback and recognition. 3. You have to be big enough to admit when you’re wrong. And assignments with no true goals undermine an organization.


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WILLIAM D. NOVELLI CEO of AARP


Overcommitting (need to say “no” more often)


Execution, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

How you describe yourself: Date of birth:

Ambitious

May 21, 1941

Not all bad bosses are all bad. That’s what Bill Novelli discovered when he was working in marketing at Unilever. “This boss used fear and intimidation to teach you, and from a learning standpoint he was highly effective. It’s like if you had somebody who took the wrong approach but still taught you the right things.” One day, the marketing group was having an advertising meeting and one of the company’s partner ad agencies was there to unveil the storyboards it had prepared for a new campaign. At the time, Novelli was a product manager, and his assistant and the group product manager were in attendance. The big boss, who Novelli says reigned by fear, came into the meeting and said, “What’s the strategy?” The agency guys were there to talk about the storyboards and the script, but they weren’t prepared to talk about strategy so they started hemming and hawing. “So the big boss,” Novelli recalls, “says, ‘Meeting over. If we can’t talk about the strategy there’s no reason to talk about execution.’ The meeting is two minutes old and it’s over. We’re sitting there with egg all over our faces.” While it was humiliating, Novelli says the boss made a good point and ever since, “I don’t think I’ve gone into a meeting without being clear on strategy.” In another instance, Novelli was late on finishing his quarterly sales projections and this same overly tough boss came in


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and asked for the numbers. “I said, ‘Bob, I’m sorry to be late but I’m redoing them. I’m taking my projections down.’ He looked at me and said loudly, for effect—you could hear him up and down the hallway—‘You’re taking them down. I can get a monkey to take projections down. I hired you to take them up.’” In hindsight, Novelli says he could have done a better job but he believes the way his manager handled the situation was uncalled-for. “I probably learned more from him than any other boss, but I don’t think you want to manage the way he did. I don’t think fear and intimidation work long-term,” he explains.

NOVELLI

’S

BAD

BOSS

LESSONS

1. Try not to take intimidation personally, especially if everyone around you is treated like a dog. 2. See beyond the abrasive character of a boss and learn the lesson at hand. 3. Fear when dealing with subordinates might work in the short term but don’t expect long-term results.

RICHARD D. PARSONS CEO of Time Warner

LEADER LOWDOWN First job as an adult:

Cook


Nelson Rockefeller

Favorite business book: Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee, and Richard E. Boyatzis


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Early in his career, Richard D. Parsons worked with a boss who was competent and smart, but had one major character flaw—an explosive temper, “which he made little effort to keep in check,” according to Parsons. It was Parsons’ job to be the buffer between other employees and this manager. “I was put in a situation where people would report to me and then I would in essence beard the lion and take issues to his office,” he explains. But his boss created an atmosphere of fear, and when someone creates a fear dynamic, the people around him or her never know when the boss is going to explode “and splatter all over everybody,” Parsons says. On one occasion, this boss caused a grown man in the group to cry, recalls Parsons. Even though the distraught individual did not work directly for Parsons’ boss, he found himself on the other end of the boss’ wrath getting yelled at and having things thrown at him. “Everyone was under a lot of stress, and this guy started to cry,” Parsons says. Parsons learned from this episode in his career that leading out of fear undermines the whole organization. “It tended to stifle, muffle, and impede effective communications, particularly bad news, which is what you need to know first. No one wanted to set off this manager, so they didn’t tell him things they thought he wouldn’t be happy hearing.” What was lacking on the part of the short-fused boss, who Parsons otherwise thought was a savvy executive from an operations standpoint, was a basic thoughtfulness about the work at hand and the staff. “If you’re deeply thoughtful about what you’re doing it helps no matter what you’re doing. I realized you need to develop a habit of thinking something through before you say it and commit to it and do it.” A big stick or bellowing is not a sign of a good leader. “Excessive volatility or behavior that’s intimidating derails people coming to you to share their views candidly and in a timely way.


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If they are afraid of you it won’t work. I would rather have people come to me candidly than be revered. Being a tough leader is about making tough decisions, unpopular decisions, decisions that may cause pain or disappoint. They don’t have to be tough themselves,” he adds. The experience with the angry boss reinforced things he learned early on when he attended college at the University of Hawaii at age 16, and read articles about the Polynesian leaders and how they were basically type B personalities. That resonated with him, and he’s always, surprisingly, described himself as a type B leader. “Leadership and aggressiveness have, in the modern world, achieved a synonymous state that isn’t real. It doesn’t have to be aggressive. It can be quiet.”

PARSONS

’

BAD

BOSS

LESSONS

1. A great leader doesn’t need people revering him or her. A leader needs to develop a trust with subordinates so they can readily disclose bad news. 2. Think about what you’re going to do before you do it. Spewing your anger on employees and colleagues only poisons the work environment and the organization at large. 3. Leaders do not have to carry a big stick. Toughness is all about the difficult decisions you make for the business day to day.


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PETER HANDAL Chairman, CEO, and President of Dale Carnegie Training


Architect

Bad habit:

Junk food

Good habit:

Running


Failure

Working for a parent can be a little like hugging a porcupine and Peter Handal knew that. But for a period of time during his career trek to the top, he ended up calling his dad boss. Handal was not happy with his job as a financial analyst for Exxon, overseeing Middle East and Far East operations. “I didn’t feel a personal sense of accomplishment,” he says, given the massive size of the energy giant and what he felt would be an impossible place to make a difference. So he started pondering the idea of doing something different but wasn’t sure on a direction, when his father offered him the opportunity to join his importing business. “I didn’t want to work for my father, but he said, ‘Try it. See if you like it. There won’t be any hard feelings if you leave.’ So I figured I was young and I could move on to something else if I wanted.” Handal’s dad, Victor B. Handal, had an importing business by the same name that bought a variety of products, everything from artificial flowers to transistor radios, and he would sell the merchandise he got from the Far East to mass merchants in the United States. Handal joined his dad’s firm, which was already more than two decades old, in the late 1960s. His experience, he says, “was awful. My father was one of those people who had a real instinct for business and


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he was very successful, but he did everything by the seat of his pants.” It was a large organization, based on Fifth Avenue in New York, with about 200 employees, and Handal’s dad did the thinking for everybody. “As far as he was concerned, he was always right and he told everybody what to do. It was the old topdown approach,” he says. Although Handal admits his dad was right most of time, which frustrated him even more, he believes his dad could have been even more successful he had looked at the many talented people in his company as team members. One particular frustrating moment for Handal was when he wanted to spend a good chunk of change on a management information system that was computer based. It was the beginning of the information era and Handal, having gone to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, was all about using information to make informed business decisions. “It lets everyone know what’s going on so everyone can make informed decisions. But my father’s approach was ‘Why do we need that?’ and ‘It’s a lot of money.’ He said, ‘I don’t trust the employees enough to give them all our company information, to know what’s going on.’ This was a totally different culture than what I had studied and what I wanted to do.” The father-son relationship began to get strained and the younger Handal dealt with issues as if the two were in a marriage, where he’d pick his battles. “If you fought on everything you’d lose on everything,” he says. While he loved and respected his father, Handal says the partnership would ultimately have damaged their personal relationship so he decided to quit. But grim fate stepped in when his father died of a heart attack and Handal took over. Looking back, Handal says, his dad was “a genius, very bright with good instincts, but he could have been more successful if he had seen it as a team effort.”


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HANDAL

’S

BAD

BOSS

LESSONS

1. Respect instinct, which is a lesson many of us forget about, especially when it’s backed up with years of experience. 2. Build teams and try to have people work harmoniously with each other, as a group. Groups can often be more successful than individuals. 3. You cannot overcommunicate. Share as much information as you can often so people understand the business and where it needs to go.

ERROLL DAVIS Chairman of Alliant Energy and Chancellor of the University System of Georgia


Procrastination

Colleges attended, degrees earned: University of Chicago, MBA

Carnegie Mellon University, BSEE;


Arthur Ashe

In some ways, the environment at Ford Motor Company may have nourished bad bosses in the late 1960s, according to Erroll Davis, who was a financial analyst for the firm back then, his first job out of the military. “I can only describe it as an oppressive, demeaning culture where there was no apparent respect for the individual. Your job rotated every 18 months whether you liked it or not so when you got sick another guy could step in and do your job. And if he got sick, someone else would do his job.”


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But during this time, he explains, the prizes at Ford were big because the auto industry was one of the only places you could get rich on salary. One particular boss, whom Davis would not name, epitomized the intensity and lack of respect for employees. There were many all-nighters for the staff working on financial data, so working past 3 A.M. was a usual occurrence. On one particular occasion, this boss had the team work until 10 P.M. to prepare information before a board meeting in the morning but the group’s work was held up by a delay in monthly figures coming from Ford’s German operations. Davis’ boss wanted the report to include the German numbers showing the size of that market, but at that point it was the middle of the night for Ford employees in Germany. “My boss wanted me to call a manager in Germany, get him out of bed, and send him into his office to get us the numbers. I said, ‘It’s probably four in the morning there.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.”’ To make matters worse, Davis adds, the numbers on the market’s size in Germany were meaningless without the figures on Ford’s share of the market. Those figures were due out several days later. Davis pointed out this fact to his boss, and again his boss said, “I don’t care.” “That was typical,” Davis continues. “He didn’t care what kind of imposition he made on your life.” Davis recalls one late night at the office finishing up a report, exhausted, looking forward to going home, when his boss came in and decided to give him a new project to start working on right then, at 3 A.M. “I was just astounded. I wanted to go home, see my family, take a shower, and he picks that time for me to start something new. I had to do it.” His bad boss experiences at Ford also included a female supervisor who was probably one of the toughest managers he ever encountered. But he attributes much of her display of toughness to the times. “This was the early generation of female executives. She, like other women, felt that in order to be


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successful you had to outmacho the men.” She bullied workers, he says, and did not listen to the people around her, nor was she able to communicate well with her underlings. That experience, he says, showed him that managers of either sex need to play up what we deem female strengths—empathy and listening. “I realized you won’t be successful until you have good communication skills,” he says.

D AV I S

’

BAD

BOSS

LESSONS

1. When you’re talking you are outputting, telling people what you already know. If you’re listening you have the opportunity to learn something. So shut up. 2. You have to always be logical when commanding your subordinates, especially if you want them to do difficult tasks. 3. There’s just so far you can push subordinates. Making workers work hard is different from demanding unreasonable toil with no regard to their personal life or well-being.

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INDEX AARP, CEO of: bad bosses and, 210–211 dues paying and, 143–145 Adversity, lessons learned from, 56–57 Stanislas de Quercize, 66–68 John Fanning, 72–74 Peter Kight, 63–66 Bill Lichtenstein, 69–72 Joe Moglia, 60–63 Truly Nolen, 74–76 Paul Norris, 57–60 AFL-CIO, executive vice president of, 16–18 Air America Radio, CEO of: mentors and, 115–117 mistakes and, 187–189 Alcoholism, of parent, 25–27 Alliant Energy, chairman of: bad bosses and, 216–218 parental lessons and, 20–22 American Red Cross, former head of: career curves and, 162–163 mistakes and, 196–198 Ameritrade, CEO of, 60–63 AstraZeneca PLC, CEO of, 104–106 Bad bosses, lessons learned from, 202–203 Steve Bennett, 203–205 JoMei Chang, 206–207 Robert Cosmai, 208–209 Erroll Davis, 216–218 Peter Handal, 214–216

William D. Novelli, 210–211 Richard D. Parsons, 211–213 Ballmer, Steve, 113 Balzac, Honoré de, 109 Barragan, Napoleon, 88–91 Beetz, Bernd, 81–84 Bennett, Steve, 203–205 Bias, see Discrimination Blank, Matt C.: dues paying and, 155–157 first jobs and, 39–40 “Boss, The,” New York Times column, 4 Bosses, see Bad bosses Boyle, Tim, 170–172 Brennan, David, 104–106 Career curves, lessons learned from, 158–159 Tim Boyle, 170–172 Marsha (Marty) Evans, 162–163 Dana Gioia, 172–174 Gary Kusin, 167–169 Alan Miller, 159–161 Larry Snyder, 180–182 David Steward, 175–176 Brian Sullivan, 164–166 Charlie Swinburn, 177–180 Carlyle Group, senior advisor for, 106–108 Carr, Tom, 169 Catholic Charities USA, CEO of, 180–182 Chang, JoMei, 206–207

219


220

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INDEX

Chavez-Thompson, Linda, 16–18 Checkfree, CEO of, 63–66 Christensen, Clayton, 109–110 Christian & Timbers, CEO of: career curves and, 164–166 mistakes and, 198–199 Cingular Wireless, chief operating officer of, 94–97 Collins, Jim, 6 Columbia Sportswear Company, CEO of, 170–172 Comforce, CEO of, 72–74 Confessions of an Advertising Man (Ogilvy), 143 Cosmai, Robert: bad bosses and, 208–209 first jobs and, 43–44 Coty, Inc., CEO of, 81–84 Cranium, Inc., founder of: first jobs and, 41–42 mentors and, 113–115 Cuba, immigrant from, 94–97 Culinary Institute of America, president of, 48–51 Dale Carnegie Training, CEO of, 214–216 Davis, Erroll: bad bosses and, 216–218 parental lessons and, 20–22 Deal, John, 102–103 de la Vega, Ralph, 94–97 Democratic Party, vice chair of, 16–18 Denmark, immigrant from, 91–94 de Quercize, Alban, 67–68 de Quercize, Stanislas, 66–68 Diamond, Harris: dues paying and, 153–154 first jobs and, 51–53

Dillman, Linda: discrimination and, 131–134 parental lessons and, 18–20 Discrimination, lessons learned from, 118–119 Linda Dillman, 131–134 Christine Jacobs, 134–137 Fran Keeth, 121–123 Aylwin Lewis, 126–128 Alford McMichael, 128–130 Vivek Paul, 124–125 David Steward, 119–121 Dues paying, lessons learned from, 138–139 Matt C. Blank, 155–157 Harris Diamond, 153–154 Brian Gallagher, 141–142 Spencer Lee, 151–152 John V. Murphy, 148–150 William Novelli, 143–145 Jeffrey Rodek, 139–141 Rick Waugh, 145–148 Ecuador, immigrant from, 88–91 Erdoes, Mary Callahan, 102–104 Evans, Marsha (Marty): career curves and, 162–163 mistakes and, 196–198 Experiences, importance of, 1–7 Fanning, John, 72–74 Fathers, see Parents, lessons learned from Federated Department Stores, Inc., CEO of: mentors and, 99–102 mistakes and, 189–192 FedEx Kinko’s, former CEO of, 167–169


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Index

221

First jobs, lessons learned from, 35–36 Matt C. Blank, 39–40 Robert Cosmai, 43–44 Harris Diamond, 51–53 Daniel Gilbert, 46–48 Tom Glocer, 45–46 Darl McBride, 53–55 Andrew McKelvey, 37–39 Tim Ryan, 48–51 Richard Tait, 41–42

Hefner, Christie: mentors and, 111–112 parental lessons and, 32–34 Henderson, Bruce, 107–108 Hyperion Solutions Corporation, executive chairman of, 139–141 Hyundai North America, former president of: bad bosses and, 208–209 first jobs and, 43–44

Gallagher, Brian: dues paying and, 141–142 parental lessons and, 25–27 Gardner, John, 163 Gender issues, see Discrimination Georgia, University System of, chancellor of: bad bosses and, 216–218 parental lessons and, 20–22 Germany, immigrant from, 81–84 Gilbert, Daniel: first jobs and, 46–48 mistakes and, 200–201 Gioia, Dana, 172–174 Glocer, Maarit, 110 Glocer, Tom: first jobs and, 45–46 mentors and, 108–110 Goldberg, Danny: mentors and, 115–117 mistakes and, 187–189 Good to Great (Collins), 6 Gupta, Umang, 85–88 Gurwitch, Janet, 168

IKEA North America, president of: immigrant experience and, 91–94 parental lessons and, 30–32 Immigrant experience, lessons learned from, 77–78 Napoleon Barragan, 88–91 Bernd Beetz, 81–84 Ralph de la Vega, 94–97 Umang Gupta, 85–88 Spencer Lee, 78–81 Pernille Spiers-Lopez, 91–94 India, immigrant from, 85–88 Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen), 109–110 Intuit Inc., CEO of, 203–205

Handal, Peter, 214–216 Handal, Victor B., 214–215 Harrigan, Rick, 26

Jacobs, Christine, 134–137 Jobs, see First jobs JPMorgan Private Bank, CEO of, 102–104 Keane, Brian, 194–196 Keane Inc., CEO of, 194–196 Keeth, Fran: discrimination and, 121–123 parental lessons and, 11–13 Keynote Systems, CEO of, 85–88 Kight, Peter, 63–66


222

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Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, senior adviser with, 57–60 Kusin, Gary, 167–169 Lauder, Leonard, 168 Lee, Spencer: dues paying and, 151–152 immigrant experience and, 78–81 Lewis, Aylwin: discrimination and, 126–128 mistakes and, 184–186 Lichtenstein, Bill, 69–72 Lichtenstein Creative Media, president of, 69–72 Life lessons, importance of, 1–7 Lincoln, Abraham, 111–112 Lundgren, Terry: Kusin and, 168 mentors and, 99–102 mistakes and, 189–192 Marcus, Stanley, 100–101 Margolis, Elliot, 104–106 Marinella, Sam, 149 McBride, Darl: first jobs and, 53–55 parental lessons and, 23–24 McCurry, Jim, 167–168 McKelvey, Andrew, 37–39 McMichael, Alford: discrimination and, 128–130 parental lessons and, 28–29 Mentors, lessons learned from, 98–99 David Brennan, 104–106 Mary Callahan Erdoes, 102–104

Tom Glocer, 108–110 Danny Goldberg, 115–117 Christie Hefner, 111–112 Terry Lundgren, 99–102 Charles O. Rossotti, 106–108 Tim Ryan and, 50 Richard Tait, 113–115 Miller, Alan, 159–161 Mistakes, lessons learned from, 183–184 Marsha (Marty) Evans, 196–198 Daniel Gilbert, 200–201 Danny Goldberg, 187–189 Brian Keane, 194–196 Aylwin Lewis, 184–186 Terry Lundgren, 189–192 Vivek Paul, 192–194 Brian Sullivan, 198–199 Moglia, Joe, 60–63 Monson, Reggie, 131 Monster Worldwide, CEO of, 37–39 Mortimer, Jeylan T., 35–36 Mothers, see Parents, lessons learned from Murphy, John V., 148–150 National Endowment for the Arts, chairman of, 172–174 NATO, senior noncommissioned officer of: discrimination and, 128–130 parental lessons and, 28–29 Neupert, Peter, 113–114 Nolen, Truly, 74–76 Norris, Paul, 57–60 Novelli, William D.: bad bosses and, 210–211 dues paying and, 143–145


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Index Ogilvy, David, 143 1-800-MATTRES, CEO of, 88–91 OppenheimerFunds, Inc., CEO of, 148–150 Packard, David, 106–107 Painter, Hal, 80 Parents, lessons learned from, 9–11 Linda Chavez-Thompson, 16–18 Erroll Davis, 20–22 Linda Dillman, 18–20 Brian Gallagher, 25–27 Christie Hefner, 32–34 Fran Keeth, 11–13 Darl McBride, 23–24 Alford McMichael, 28–29 Richard D. Parsons, 10, 13–15 Pernille Spiers-Lopez, 11, 30–32 Parsons, Richard D.: bad bosses and, 211–213 parental lessons and, 10, 13–15 Paul, Vivek: discrimination and, 124–125 mistakes and, 192–194 Peter Principle, see Bad bosses Playboy Enterprises, Inc., CEO of: mentors and, 111–112 parental lessons and, 32–34 Poses, Fred, 59 Punishment, 10, 11–14, 23–24 Qilinsoft LLC, chairman of, 206–207 Quicken Loans Inc., chairman of: first jobs and, 46–48 mistakes and, 200–201 Racial issues, see Discrimination RailAmerica, CEO of, 177–180

223

Reuters Group PLC, CEO of: first jobs and, 45–46 mentors and, 108–110 Roach, Archbishop John Robert, 181 Rodek, Jeffrey, 139–141 Rosen, Harvey, 59 Rossotti, Charles O., 106–108 Roto-Rooter Group, CEO of: dues paying and, 151–152 immigrant experience and, 78–81 Ryan, Tim, 48–51 Schultz, Howard, 113 SCO Group, CEO of: first jobs and, 53–55 parental lessons and, 23–24 Scotiabank, president of, 145–148 Sears Holding Corporation, president of: discrimination and, 126–128 mistakes and, 184–186 Selig, Karl-Ludwig, 109 Shell Chemical LLP, CEO of: discrimination and, 121–123 parental lessons and, 11–13 Showtime Networks, Inc., CEO of: dues paying and, 155–157 first jobs and, 39–40 Snyder, Reverend Larry, 180–182 Solters, Lee, 115–116 Sorci, Nino, 50 South Korea, immigrant from, 79–81 Spiers-Lopez, Pernille: immigrant experience and, 91–94 parental lessons and, 11, 30–32


224

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Steinberg, Mike, 190 Steward, David: career curves and, 175–176 discrimination and, 119–121 Sullivan, Brian: career curves and, 164–166 mistakes and, 198–199 Swinburn, Charlie, 177–180 Tait, Richard: first jobs and, 41–42 mentors and, 113–115 Texas Pacific Group, partner with: discrimination and, 124–126 mistakes and, 192–194 “The Boss,” New York Times column, 4 Theragenics Corporation, president of, 134–137 Time Warner, CEO of: bad bosses and, 211–213 parental lessons and, 13–15 Truly Nolen Pest Control, CEO of, 74–76

United Way of America, CEO of: dues paying and, 141–142 parental lessons and, 25–27 Universal Health Services, CEO of, 159–161 Van Cleef and Arpels, president of, 66–68 Vicere, Albert A., 98–99 Vroom, Victor, 5–6 W.R. Grace, chairman of, 57–60 Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., chief information officer of: discrimination and, 131–134 parental lessons and, 18–20 Waugh, Rick, 145–148 Weber Shandwick Worldwide, CEO of: dues paying and, 153–154 first jobs and, 51–53 World Wide Technology, Inc., CEO of: career curves and, 175–176 discrimination and, 119–121

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR EVE TAHMINCIOGLU IS A VETERAN BUSINESS WRITER AND REGULAR CONtributor to a host of national publications including the New York Times, where she is one of the lead writers on “The Boss” column; BusinessWeek’s SmallBiz magazine; and Workforce Management magazine. Her specialties include labor and management issues as well as technology, telecommunications, health care, small business, and personal finance. Her stories have also appeared in iVillage, Salon, Kiplinger’s, Time, Black Enterprise, ZiffDavis publications, and Newsday. She was a staff business writer for United Press International, Women’s Wear Daily, the St. Petersburg Times, Nation’s Restaurant News magazine, and the Wilmington News Journal. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in journalism, with a minor in fine arts and psychology, from Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, in 1985. She won a fellowship with the Economics Institute for Journalism at the Foundation for American Communications in 1995, and was awarded two certificates of merit for coverage of the economy in 1998 from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She was also part of a team that won a Jessie H. Neal National Business Journalism award for the “best single issue” category where she wrote the cover story on small business and the Internet, which appeared in BusinessWeek’s SmallBiz magazine in 2005. Book credits include a chapter on workers who slack off for The New York Times Management Reader (Times Books, 2001). and a credit as a research contributor/writer for Fit Kids (DK Publishing, 2004). Her hobbies include writing poetry and painting. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with her husband Andy and two children, Circe and Cheiron. 225

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