Protect Your Reputation At All Costs
January 13, 2010
What You Will Learn
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“A risk to reputation is a threat to the survival of the enterprise.”
-Peter J. Firestein
I read an article once about Blackstone executive David Blitzer, whose father-in-law he once charged with trying to shake him down for $7.5 million. The man was ultimately arrested after Blitzer, 38, made a $500,000 payment as part of a deal to get the harassment to stop. Blitzer’s father-in-law had originally requested that Blitzer loan him money, which Blitzer did. However, when Blitzer refused to relinquish more money than originally requested, things turned ugly. According to the article:
“In June, Ross demanded more money and began harassing Blitzer with phone calls and emails, according to the district attorney’s office. Ross allegedly said if Blitzer did not give him at least an additional $50,000, Ross would contact Blackstone executives and law enforcement with accusations he said would ruin Blitzer’s career.
In one voicemail message, Ross threatened to “commit open warfare” against Blitzer if he didn’t send money, the district attorney’s office says.”
When I read that article, a family member was attacking me in a similar way, after I’d refused to give that person a loan. The difference between what happened to me and the situation with Blitzer was the “open warfare” against me had already begun. The attacks had been going on for some time, in fact. When my relative denied the attacks, I asked him to take a lie detector test, which he took and failed.
While I cannot comment on this further, I will say you must protect your reputation at all costs from public defamation. Don’t let yourself become a victim.
Being attacked by my relative was one of the hardest things I have ever dealt with. A situation like this really goes to the core of who you are, and causes damage in many ways. People have asked me why someone would make accusations against me if they were not true. The problems the ordeal caused me, my family, and even my employees is completely unacceptable.
During your career, you cannot afford to take any chances with what people say about you. Never let lies be spread about you. Before becoming the CEO of the employment companies I work for now, most of my experience was in the legal industry. I worked in Los Angeles and saw several attorneys’ careers literally get destroyed because of rumors. While some of the rumors I heard were in fact true, most were not – and the results for the attorneys were catastrophic. Even in a market as large as Los Angeles, word got around very quickly. If you think there’s rumors going around about you, you need to react quickly to stop them. The only fight you’re guaranteed to lose is the one you back down from.
When you are searching for a job, you need to be aware your potential employers will do their homework on you. They will put your name into a search engine and look you up on social networking sites to see what they can find out about you. If you have a blog, your potential employer will look this up as well. If the people you associate with on your blog do not meet your potential employer’s approval (e.g., they are into “weird stuff”), this may cause him or her to lose interest in your candidacy. You must ensure you are protecting your reputation and controlling what others can find out about you.
I once heard someone say something I believe is very appropriate regarding professional reputations: “Never tell people you work with your biggest weaknesses because this is something that can be used against you in the future. Your weaknesses are something that gives others power over you.” While this advice may sound extreme, the point is to protect yourself. You do not want people spreading negative information about you in the workplace. This can not only cause problems with your current job, but can also potentially damage your future employment prospects. There is no quicker way to hurt your career (especially in niche professions where a lot of people know each other), than to allow rumors to circulate about you.
The best way to deal with rumors is often to acknowledge they exist and then do your best to address them. Addressing rumors is an excellent way to ensure whatever is behind them is not allowed to fester. For example, the Coca-Coca Company has an entire portion of its website dedicated to addressing false rumors. This is a priority for large companies such as Coca-Cola, and it should be a priority in your career as well.
In my opinion, one of the best ways to overcome your critics is to simply sit down and speak with some of the people whom you believe are creating the rumors. This can be challenging to do in a professional environment but, when done properly, it can put the people on notice about your concern and let them know you may suspect their own behaviors. Getting close to these people – keeping your enemies close – is often the best medicine to help quiet them.
When I was in high school, I remember another football player spreading rumors about me and a girl in our school, with whom I’d never even spoken. I walked up to the player the day I heard the rumor and asked him, “What exactly makes you feel good about spreading rumors about this girl and me?” I never heard the rumor again. Later, I heard he denied ever saying it.
In summary, if you hope to continue to grow your career, you must confront rumors early on in order to prevent them from festering. Protect your professional reputation at all costs, act with honor and don’t let petty talk from other people stand in the way of your progress.
The Importance of Sacrifice to Our Careers
February 10, 2009
Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness. -Napolean Hill
I am usually up well before 7:00 a.m. However, due to some issues I have been dealing with, today I decided to sleep a little longer than usual. According to a doctor I recently met at a conference, when you are stressed out the best thing you can do for yourself is to sleep more. He said that cancer, heart problems and other things are often caused by a lack of sleep.
I am usually up and about well before 7:00 a.m. and had I been up earlier today, I am confident I would not have seen the bloodshed I did this morning. I could have prevented it because I am sure the attack probably started around the time I usually get up. I saw her lying there in her own blood, dying in front of my door. I was frozen with fear.
I should have known this was coming.
I had heard that dog barking before but somehow believed that the barking was far away. I never knew what she was capable of. I wish I would have gotten up earlier.
Edwardo was a farm hand we hired about six months previously. My wife and I had taken an Alaskan Cruise and he had picked us up at the airport in my pick up truck when our flight came in very early in the morning. The cruise had been a lot of fun and we were in good spirits when we got off the plane.
What You Will Learn
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Edwardo’s job was primarily to take care of the goats. At the time, our little farm was raising pygmy goats (which are goats about the size of a large cat). These little goats were having the time of their lives and had a very secure existence (at least we thought). One day my wife and I were at a PetCo and there was an open house adoption. I saw a little Australian Shepherd named “Sweetie” that I started to play with.
As I played with the dog the man from the Humane Society holding the open house said, “If you do not adopt this dog today we are going to euthanize her this evening.”
These were some of the more manipulative words I had ever heard. We adopted Sweetie. Sweetie was extremely affectionate and we really liked her a great deal. I was also allergic to this dog. Additionally, the dog kept trying to go near the goats and herd them. It was instinctual. We had to keep Sweetie completely away from the goats.
“I do not know how to say this,” Edwardo said about 10 minutes into the drive back. “The dog chased all of the goats but one out onto the freeway and they are all dead.”
I could not believe it. I am sure the people driving down Pacific Coast Highway who had run over miniature goats could not believe it either. It must have been devastating for them to have run over those goats. I am not even sure what these people must have thought. We live on a small farm but are in Malibu. Most of the people driving by probably have never been on a farm in their life. It must be an omen of sorts to run over a miniature goat in the middle of Los Angeles.
We had to get rid of Sweetie, of course. Edwardo knew someone with a really big farm that had animals which actually required herding. We gave Sweetie to that farm. It was sad to see the dog go.
Over the next few months I rebuilt the farm and the animals. One evening my wife and I went to another “farm” which was right in the middle of Los Angeles, in a residential neighborhood. A guy was raising around 100 goats, 100 sheep, chickens and all sorts of other farm animals right in his backyard. It was one of the most incredible sights I had ever seen in a residential neighborhood. I wondered why the Los Angeles Health department was not involved. They should have been.
We purchased several sheep, chickens and goats. Recently, one of the sheep had a baby. The whole scene with the chicken and goats was very bucolic. My two year old daughter loved to play with them. I fed the alfalfa and goat feed every morning. The goats loved to lounge in the sun in the afternoon.
“There is a dog eating a live sheep in front of our door!”
My wife had run into our bedroom screaming. I was still sleeping, but barely so.
I was horrified. I ran out to the front of the house and lying there was a sheep on its last breaths, huffing.
I was not sure how the dog could possibly have gotten to the sheep and gotten onto our property, but it did. Wandering around the property was a giant Australian Ridgeback dog. The dog came up to me wagging its tail.
My two year old daughter was screaming and there was blood everywhere. The only remaining Pygmy goat, Jack, was looking at the dying lamb and trying to revive it by butting it with his horn. My wife was in her bathrobe and grabbed the dog and called its owner. She was crying.
“There is blood everywhere!! It killed all of our farm animals!!”
The owner of the dog must have been astonished. We live in Malibu, California and despite living on a farm most of our neighbors are people in the entertainment industry and others that have little in common with us. I cannot imagine what they must have been thinking.
Within moments our neighbor had pulled up in his Toyota Prius. We were wrapping the dying sheep in a sheet and carrying it to the pick up truck. My wife was getting ready to run the sheep over to the emergency animal care center a few miles a way.
“I’ll pay for everything!” the man in the Prius stated in an English accent as he walked towards us. None of this was about money, of course. The situation was completely devastating emotionally. The man was wearing the latest fashion of everything. I could not imagine why a 60 year man was dressed up as a hipster at 7:30 am.
“I was on this property before you bought it,” he said as we were consoling with the dying lamb. “I was here with the model Kate Moss. We have been friends for over 30 years.”
This was Malibu for you. Here we were in the middle of a blood bath with a dying lamb and this man was telling me all about how he was friends with someone famous. I was literally at a loss for words. The situation was almost beyond bizarre.
What does it mean to have a baby lamb sacrificed and killed on your front door at 7:00 am? We live on a large property and of all places I cannot understand why this sacrifice had to have occurred right on our front door. I have been puzzling over this all day. What does it mean to have a lamb sacrificed and killed on your front door early in the morning?
I found the following definition of a sacrificial lamb on Wikipedia:
A sacrificial lamb is a lamb (or metaphorical parallel) killed or discounted in some way (as in a sacrifice) in order to further some other cause. In typical modern usage, it is a metaphorical reference for a person who has no chance of surviving the challenge ahead, but is placed there for the common good. The term is derived from the traditions of Abrahamic religion where a lamb is a highly valued possession, but is offered to God as a sacrifice to obtain the more highly valued favour of God.
Sacrifice typically means to give something up of value to get something even more valuable in the future. Sacrifice always implies giving something up or doing something, or some sort of work, that is distasteful. The people in the world who achieve the most are the ones who are able to sacrifice. For example, Tiger Woods practices golf six hours a day and has since he was very young. Anyone who achieves something great is able to sacrifice.
The concept of “sacrifice” is something that is amazingly important to our lives. We need to constantly be sacrificing in order to insure that we are advancing in our lives. While I am not sure why a baby lamb was sacrificed on my front door this morning by a Rhodesian Ridgeback dog, the one thing I do know is that it is only through incredible sacrifice that our lives can change. This sacrifice has reminded me of the incredible sacrifice we need to do in order to live the lives we want to live.
There are lots of forms of sacrifice out there. Mother Theresa is someone who sacrificed by caring for the dying, the sick, the poor, the hungry and others. She took people that society had abandoned and cared for them with compassion. She stated of sacrifice:
A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.
Sometimes you too need to sacrifice in order to get ahead. Sometimes you need to move away from the familiar and what you expect in order to get the results that you are seeking in your life.
Recently, I had an experience with an employee who quit our company after working with us for several years. This person had consistently been working incredible amounts of overtime and this had ended up costing our company often double what the person’s salary was. The person had formerly been in charge of a printing operation for our company and about a year and a half ago we shut down the printing operation. Due to this person’s longevity with the company and presumed loyalty, I made the decision to keep them on and find other things for them to do. The other work this person was given was not demanding and involved simple things like filing and running errands. Nevertheless, this person continued to work incredible amounts of overtime, despite being warned on several occasions not to do so.
There was a time when this person was needed to work overtime when our printing operation was going a full bore. Nevertheless, this was no longer necessary and had not been for years. While I am not sure if I would call it a “sacrifice”, what we now were asking this person to do was to work a normal schedule in an effort to save their job.
After months of warning this person about working overtime, we decided that the only solution was to put them on salary because, try as we might, the person would not stop working overtime. We calculated their hourly wage and one of our managers sat them down and told them we were putting them on salary going forward. Right on the spot, the person quit. A few hours later I received an email from the person telling me I was a horrible person and that I had stepped all over them by trying to limit their overtime. The person went so far as to say they felt sorry for my daughter because they thought I was a horrible person.
This is an example of someone who was asked to make a sacrifice (not work overtime) and could not do it. The person is now unemployed and trying to get unemployment despite having quit their job. A simple sacrifice for this person was too much to make.
In your job and in your career you are going to be called upon to make sacrifices. It is exceedingly important that you make sacrifices. All of my life I have been fascinated with success and what makes certain people more successful than others. As I have studied the most successful men and women out there I have seen that they have all made tremendous sacrifices in order to succeed. In order to do anything and be someone of great substance you need to learn how to sacrifice.
One of the greatest causes of failure in life is the inability to make sacrifices. For example, many people spend every cent of money they make, go into debt, and never save money. The failure to save money results in them never being able to afford the sorts of material objects they would like. Saving money is a sacrifice.
When children are growing up they learn early on that if they want to get good grades in school they are going to have to not play video games or be out playing and instead are going to have to sacrifice “fun time” for “serious time” and do their school work. Notwithstanding, many children simply fail to make this sacrifice and never learn how to do so. The children who do make the sacrifice and study may end up becoming doctors or lawyers, for example. The ones who never make this sacrifice, despite average or even excellent intelligence, may spend their lives moving from job to job in fast food restaurants, or do other things that are largely insignificant in terms of the impact they could end up having.
In our careers and lives, the most important thing that we can do is constantly and consistently sacrifice so that we can achieve greater rewards. We must always be sacrificing in order to grow. We often also need to sacrifice to help other people. A 2004 article in the New York Times discusses the importance of sacrificing for another:
Matthew Berenguer’s parents sacrificed all they owned so he could get the one thing he could keep forever: an education. When his father lost his job, they lost their apartment. The family put everything in storage, and all seven of them lived in homeless shelters. If that was not hard enough, his parents had to decide how to spend what little money they had left: continue paying storage fees for their belongings or send Matthew to a summer program at Syracuse University.
His parents chose his future over theirs.
The storage company auctioned their belongings. Their beds and sofa? Gone. Their piano? Gone. His sketchbooks, which he filled with vivid pencil sketches during subway rides? Gone. His father’s library, which gave Matthew delicious moments of escape and education? Gone.
Other families now have the bits and pieces of his life. But Matthew, who got his first taste of college life that summer, insists he got something far more precious.
”I was grateful we lost everything,” said Matthew, a senior at Rice High School in Manhattan, who hopes to attend Cornell University. ”I was very materialistic. This changed what my values were. I found out I still had my mother, my father, my family.”
His parents’ sacrifices continue to pay off. Matthew is among this year’s winners of a New York Times College Scholarship, which will provide him with a $30,000 four-year scholarship, a summer job and a mentor. He and 19 other young people — some from countries around the world and others who never would have ventured much beyond the block — possess that wondrous mix of talent, determination and optimism that enabled them not only to overcome considerable obstacles, but also to thrive.
The power of sacrifice is something that can change lives and has huge meaning.
I know there is meaning in the dead lamb killed on my front door. The situation is too coincidental and incredible for it to be otherwise. In thinking about this in a state of shock for the past few hours. I came upon a definition of the word “sacrifice” from Latin. In Latin the derivative of the word “sacrifice” is “sacred office”. “Sacred office” means to hold one’s work or mission sacred and close to one’s heart. Anything sacred requires that we hold it in deep reverence and respect. What is sacred is holy and divine.
The message I want to bring to you and the message this brought to me is the importance of holding my work as holy and divine and others also holding their work holy and divine. Whether this was a message from God, I do not know. What I do know is that it has made me believe in the importance of our work and doing everything within my power to hold my work as the most important and sacred thing in the world. I have dedicated my career and life to getting people jobs and a lamb sacrificed on my front door step and a search for meaning in this has helped me realize the importance I place on my job.
The final message has nothing whatsover to do with me. The final message is all about you. You need to hold your work sacred and divine. A job is sacred. The work you do is sacred. You need to take your job seriously and you need to take your career seriously. The more you put into it the more you will become. The more you appreciate something the better you will get at it. You need to remind yourself of this every single day because it is about the most important factor in who you will become.
My Lesson From the Missionaries
January 7, 2009
What You Will Learn
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Several years ago I was working at a law firm and virtually from the moment I arrived a woman I’ll call “Linda” used to come into my office for a few hours a day to talk. Her topic? How bad things were at the law firm.
She would share one rumor after the other about how many bad things were going on at the law firm. I was treated to information about allegedly corrupt activities, affairs, who did not like who, incredible insights into who was about to be fired, what different people had said to her, and more. Most of these conversations would occur behind closed doors, and after she left I often wondered to myself what I was doing at such a horrible law firm.
Her visits would always leave me a little depressed. I wondered what I was doing with my life, associating with and being involved with such a horrible group of people. I had actually joined the law firm thinking it was a great place and in many respects, it was. I was able to push aside what Linda was talking about generally about 45 minutes after she left and continue to enthusiastically pursue my job the best I could.
When I would get back to work not more than an hour or two later the phone would ring and it was Linda.
“Guess what?” she would say. She would then proceed to relay to me another rumor of some sort.
I even made pretty good friends with Linda, and these meetings eventually turned into conversations where she started telling me about men in the office she was interested in, antidepressants she was taking, and who she had previously been involved with. On the weekends she would call me, and my fiánce at the time would hand me the phone as Linda related yet another rumor about the law firm she learned about over the weekend. I have no idea how Linda managed to get any work done at the law firm. I also had no idea why she had chosen to come to work there. She was literally spending every spare moment gossiping about how bad the law firm was.
Then Linda started going on interviews with various employers. She was very well-spoken, had gone to the #1 ranked law school in the country at the time, and was quite attractive. She very quickly got numerous job offers. She then gave notice at the law firm and if I recall correctly she “let the law firm have it” in terms of telling them everything she thought was wrong with them. Her “vent” was pretty epic and involved all sorts of observations as well as deep psychological-type analyses of her supervisors and others, which left the powers that be in the law firm stunned. After this incredible episode she still wanted me to pal around the law firm with her by sitting with her in the law firm library and walking past the offices of the same partners in the law firm she had bitterly put down when she resigned. This was all too much for me. She had really upset a lot of people.
“Linda,” I told her. “This place is not really that bad. I think you have just been making it bad by looking for all of the bad stuff. Everyone is really upset with you right now. I am trying to have a career here. I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t hang out with me all the time at work. I need to hold on to my job. I’m getting married soon and will have a wife to support, a mortgage to pay, and other responsibilities. I really cannot afford to be associated with this.”
I had reached this decision because I knew my association with Linda was really hurting me. I knew her attitude was casting a negative light on me to some extent. Looking around me at the law firm, I could see numerous people who had been there for decades. Could the place be so bad if there were people who had managed to work at the same place for so long? I knew the answer to this particular question was “no” and that much of what was being seen was simply through Linda’s eyes.
How do you think it makes you feel about your job if someone is coming in a couple of times a day and telling you how awful your workplace is? What if your phone were ringing off the hook with gossip about your co-workers? Even if these things were true, do you think this does you any good?
There are generally people in all organizations who seem dedicated to walking around spreading rumors of doom and gloom. I have witnessed it throughout my career–even in organizations that were doing well. I wonder how these people get any work done. It seems more like these people are involved in a soap opera than anything else. They are constantly doing everything within their power to spread fear among their co-workers. I certainly witnessed this sort of thing when I was working. It is going on everywhere.
Several years ago I was attending a wedding in rural Utah about 90 minutes outside of Provo. My cousin was marrying a lovely woman from this area who had moved to New York City to become an on-air news anchor at a local television station. The videographer walked up to me and started talking to me.
“I’ve done only a few weddings for 12 year-old girls, about twice as many for 13 year-old girls,” he told me. “I’ve done many 14 year-old weddings. I just did one last week,” he told me gruffly and matter-of-factly. He was referring to the fact that older men were marrying women at that age. (I would learn later in the evening that some of the men getting married to these 14 year old girls not only often had 5+ other wives, but also that many of them were in their 50s.) Videotaping the weddings of young girls to older men was a very normal thing to him. I could not believe it. You hear about this sort of stuff on television and in the movies but I did not realize how prevalent this actually was. I was mesmerized by this particular conversation and others that led me to question if I was really part of the United States. You can learn so much by talking to people, especially in rural Utah.
As the man and I continued to speak he told me that he was very involved with the county and the workforce services part of the county. In fact, he was in charge of recruiting employers from out-of-state to come to his county to hire people. He explained to me many people chose to live in this part of the country because of their Mormon faith. He said many of them actually go away to schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) then come back because family is so important in their religion. He then explained there were incredibly talented people in the county who were interested in working for sophisticated companies. This was music to my ears. I really liked the people I was meeting because they were much more wholesome than the people I was accustomed to dealing with in Los Angeles.
I had also had an experience several years ago with some Mormon missionaries that made me decide I would do whatever I could to help Mormons in the future.
I had been living in Bay City, Michigan, working for a federal judge and one Saturday while I was watching a football game and immersed in a bowl of Doritos with a bunch of empty Diet Cokes in front of me, I heard the doorbell ring. I did not have a lot of friends in Bay City and was eager for any company I could get.
Into my apartment walked two of the nicest guys I had ever met. They had name tags on, white starched shirts, and little black bicycles. I let them in and they gave me a Bible and some literature. At the time my fiance was out of town, and I was pretty bored and enjoyed the company. They told me they would stop back in a couple of days to talk to me some more.
After a couple more visits during which they related to me fascinating information about their religion, they gave me an ultimatum. I really liked these guys and Mormonism sounded great. I grew up Episcopalian and at the time I was not too happy with the religion. My uncle is actually a pretty famous Episcopal Priest and had agreed to officiate my wedding which was scheduled to happen in about six months. Then he’d told me he didn’t want to because he disliked my father. This was really a bit too much for me. I thought religions were supposed to be about peace and love. These Mormon guys were very likable. What I liked best about their religion was they promised me if I converted, after I died I would get my own planet with my wife and children. Listening to stuff like this really fascinated me. It was like playing Dungeons and Dragons–only it was real. I also liked their values, the structure, and felt it was an all-in-all great religion. I still like Mormonism to this day and feel a strong connection with it.
“We’d like to have you down to our church. However, before we can go any further with you we are going to have to ask you to have your fiance move out of the house. You are living in sin and this is impeding your spiritual development.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
My fiance and I had been together for years and she moved to Bay City with me from Chartlottesville, Virginia, and we were engaged. There was no way this was happening. I looked at these guys and realized they were quite serious. A week previously they had requested I not eat or drink anything (even water!) for a day–I obliged. They were also hinting that I should never drink coffee or my beloved Diet Coke any longer. They also told me I should be prepared to give them 10% of all the money I made. Finally, they told me I should never drink alcohol. These guys were beginning to get annoying.
I told those nice 18 year-old guys I appreciated their spiritual lessons but did not think they should continue. There was no way I was asking my fiance to move out.
About three months later the guys stopped by again. It was spring at this point, and I had brought out from storage a 550 gallon tanker I towed behind my Suburban that I filled with asphalt sealant each year. To the horror of my neighbors it was sitting directly in front of my apartment looking mean and ugly.
I had been doing asphalt work since the age of 18 and was excited to get back in business during the weekends while working for the judge. The thing about this tank is that you can never get all of the sealer out of it at the end of the season. Because it snows in Michigan you cannot apply the sealer to asphalt then. The asphalt sealer in the tank hardens up and turns into a clay-like material. You have to climb inside the tank and scrape all of the material out. There are agitators and other things inside the tank that do no work unless you do this. It typically took me about15 hours to do this each year.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” they asked after we exchanged some pleasantries.
“Yeah, you can scrape that stuff out of the tank sitting there,” I told them. “Other than that I do not have any problems I am concerned about at the moment.” I was kidding of course.
The next day I came home and apparently all the missionaries from miles around had come and climbed in the tank and cleaned it out. They did not leave me a note or anything. I never saw the missionaries again. I promised myself from that day forward if I ever had a chance to do anything for Mormons in my life I would. This was an incredible gesture of kindness and I appreciated it. They had done this expecting nothing in return.
As the videographer at the party talked I told him I was in a position to hire people. I remembered the kindness the missionaries had shown me and wanted to give back. The videographer told me how high the unemployment rate was, and I told him I would do everything I could to hire people in the town. A few weeks later I showed up with several of my managers and made arrangements to come to the unemployment office and start interviewing people. We found office space and made preparations to shift a substantial majority of our operations to this rural Utah area.
A few weeks later, we proceeded to hire at least 10-15 people from the unemployment office. We rented a truck and went to Sam’s Club in Provo and purchased computers, desks, chairs and tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment for our new office. All of the new employees helped us set up the office. Metaphorically, it was almost as if my experience with these wonderfully nice people years ago had caused this religion to create this office sitting there.
A few weeks into the process I started realizing there were problems. Most of the people whom we had hired had been unemployed for months, and in some cases years, before they were hired. The small staff I had hired on a mission of goodwill started talking like they should be unionized. An incredible number of destructive rumors started going around the office that made it back to our headquarters in Pasadena, California. The people we had hired often started disappearing for hours during the day. Absenteeism was extremely high. Errors were high. The office was sitting in the shadow of one of the largest and most significant temples in the Mormon religion. In fact, with the exception of one employee in the office, the work was the worst I have ever seen. There were other issues there going on as well. We even had an issue where a married couple was sexually harassing a young employee in our call center because they wanted her to be part of a polygamous relationship with them. When I heard about this, it was the last straw. The fact that such people were producing negative news and negative energy in addition to the sexual harassment stories was too much to handle.
I sent a couple of trucks from Pasadena and some managers to Utah and packed up everything in the office and closed the office down. The same day I decided there was one good employee there who was actually exceptional and kept her. She is still working here to this day and has risen to become one of the most exceptional managers in the company. She rebuilt the office there and it has been very, very successful. It is one of the best things I have ever done for our business.
What I learned from this, however, is that there are people who should not be hired. The people from the unemployment office were unemployed for a reason: they were cancerous to their organizations. People who spread negative energy and news are like cancers to companies and to their co-workers. One of the best hires I ever made was almost brought down by this cancer. You need to be very careful about cancerous people because they can hurt you. Stay away and keep your job. This was an important lesson I learned in Utah. Today we have a great operation there and it is filled with great people who have good attitudes. The company has learned it’s important to keep only happy and enthusiastic people around.
Most of us are put in positions where people are planting negative thoughts and ideas in our mind. You cannot afford to be associated with this at work. Negative information, rumors and so forth are like a cancer. They will spread to you and take you down as well. Positive energy is the opposite. Positive energy creates good and makes things better. The positive energy of the Mormon missionaries created the office we currently have in Utah. The spirit of giving they emphasized is something that has created millions of dollars in payroll for a community that is probably 99% Mormon. This would not have happened without their positive energy. The negative energy of the chronically unemployed I hired almost took all of that away. The rumors, innuendo and scheming could have seriously damaged the company. While good always wins out in the end, you want to be on the side that is growing and productive – not on the side that is bringing things down. If you follow this advice you will have much fewer bumps in your career.
Anything That is Not Managed Will Deteriorate
January 4, 2009
What You Will Learn
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When you look at a typical business, it doesn’t matter if it’s a McDonald’s down the street from where you live, there are an incredible number of procedures in place to keep the business running. Take a McDonald’s, for example:
Each day the restaurant will open at a certain time and people will arrive before opening to make sure the coffee is made, the ovens and grills are heated, the lights are turned on and other procedures are followed. The restaurant will have been cleaned top to bottom the night before. Outside, the parking lot will have been maintained a certain way. The lines will have been painted and repainted according to a schedule. The drive-thru will have the newest menu items on it. There will be a list of shift responsibilities posted. The bathrooms will be scheduled for cleaning several times throughout the day. The oil for the hash browns and French fries will have been changed according to a rigid schedule. Not only will the manager and the employees of this individual restaurant be responsible for all of these tasks, but regional and national managers inspect to make sure all of this is functioning exactly as it should. The books and accounting of the restaurant will all be required to be done in a certain manner and each year the taxes will also be done in a certain way. The food deliveries throughout the day will also be only from approved suppliers, who also may be forced to follow certain processes and procedures. In addition, the company will constantly keep its ear to the ground and conduct studies to see what sorts of foods and other services the public wants. This “market research” will then be used to develop new products the franchisees will sell.
From top to bottom, a McDonald’s is being managed by a myriad of processes and procedures to ensure it remains a smooth running operation. This will ensure the McDonald’s, wherever it is, offer a consistent product to the public. Moreover, this will also ensure the McDonald’s succeeds wherever it is. Very few McDonald’s go out of business due to poor sales. Most of them go out of business due to processes and procedures not being rigidly followed.
One of the greatest secrets in your own life and business is this: Anything that is not managed will deteriorate.
It is as simple as that. If a business is not managed very closely it will likely go out of business, or suffer abysmal sales. McDonalds typically succeed wherever they are, probably due more to the tight management than anything else. The most important thing an owner or a manager can do for a business is to manage it. The most important thing you can do with your life is to manage it as well.
You need to manage your own life just like a business. The closer you manage your life the better you will ultimately do and the more success you will have. You will go through ups and downs but you will almost certainly consistently remain on track and improve. Better management of your life is essential for success.
The most successful people in every realm of life know where they are going. When you start managing yourself you start setting goals about exactly where you are going. Most of the battle of managing yourself is simply setting a goal of where you want to go. When you know where you want to go you need to write it down and then you need to remind yourself of this again and again and create a procedure for doing this. You need to manage your life.
I have developed over the past several years a very simple method of managing myself and my goals. Once a year I sit down and over the space of a few days I concentrate on making several commitments for what I want to achieve over the next year. I simply write down what I call my “Top 1 Year Results” and list them out on a sheet of paper. Each year I list no more than 10 to 15 of these goals. Then I do the same thing at the beginning of each month, and week, on a separate sheet of paper.
YEARLY GOALS – Major goals to achieve throughout the year. These are big goals that could involve things like making sure I go out to eat with my wife alone at least once a week, starting a new business, paying something off. I allow myself each January to write down goals which are attainable but seem far off.
For example, a yearly goal of yours might be to increase your salary by 50% and move to a warmer part of the United States. This is something you can do but you need to constantly remind yourself of it. Writing this down is going to make you accountable and bring you closer to this goal.
MONTHLY GOALS – These monthly goals are almost always ones which bring me one step closer to achieving my yearly goals. They are related and are projects and goals that allow me to get closer to these yearly goals.
If your yearly goal is to increase your salary by 50% and move to a warmer part of the United States, the smartest thing you can do is to schedule a goal to bring you closer to this at the beginning of the month. A goal along this direction could be, for example, to apply to 1 job per day per month–or a total of 30 jobs throughout the whole month. This monthly goal is going to bring you one step closer to what you are seeking to do.
WEEKLY GOALS – These are goals I need to accomplish during the week to take me closer to my monthly goals and my yearly goals.
If you are looking to increase your salary by 50% and move to a warmer climate, your weekly goal may be to apply to 7 jobs this week, get your resume done and make 7 phone calls to companies in your preferred area of the United States to see if they received your resume the week before.
This is the method I follow in my own career and it is very simple. Once a year I sit down and write out my annual goals. Then, once a week I sit down and review my goals from the week before, my monthly goals and my annual goals. I then set goals for the following week based on what I achieved in the previous week. Each week I make myself aware of how I am doing in terms of my goals and I set my goals for the previous week based on how I did in the last week.
This method of setting goals works. If you are able to make just a 1% improvement each week the improvement you have made after 1 year is absolutely phenomenal. The improvement made under this system is remarkable and you will watch your life and career continually improve as long as you make sure you are accountable. What this simple system forces you to do is manage yourself. You need to continually be managing yourself because if you do not manage yourself, someone else will.
Most people coast through life and their careers not knowing what is going to come next. The wonderful thing is you can really have practically anything you want out of life as long as you write it down and take action on it and follow through. The most important aspect of your goal setting activity is following though. That means reviewing your goals at least once a week and seeing exactly how you are doing. The more closely you are reviewing your goals to see how you are doing the better off you are going to be. Continually watching, and readjusting, and setting micro goals to take you where you are going is effective.
The wonderful thing about this sort of goal setting activity and self management is that it works. Every week at the beginning of each year when I look at what I need to achieve I cringe. I feel like it will never be possible. But what ends up happening when you are continually and consistently reviewing your goals is that you make things happen. You figure out a way during the week to get you closer to your goals. You see opportunities where you would normally see nothing. You take advantage of so many things that normally would simply pass you by. You see people around you who have information that could get you closer to your goal and you speak with them.
You will get better at anything on which you focus. Most people spend their time focusing on the wrong things. You need to remain focused on your goals. Repetition is the mother of skill. When you set goals for yourself it is like setting a thermometer. If you check in each week and you are looking to be at 75 degrees and you are, instead, at 45 degrees then you are going to take action and do whatever you can to raise the temperature. You will find a way. This is how it is with goal setting and creating goals for your life. You are setting a temperature at which you want to be operating at and you are making sure you are there. No matter what you have done with your life in the past, when you set goals for yourself and manage your life you are ensuring the future won’t be the same as the past.
The best thing about self management is that it gives you the power of momentum. The best thing you can do is get the power of momentum working for you. This momentum will keep you going forward and ensure you are moving exactly where you want to go.
You need to manage yourself. The best businesses are well managed and so are the best people.
Consistency and Commitment Beat Brilliance and Talent
January 1, 2009
What You Will Learn
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When I was growing up in Detroit, I went to school with kids whose parents were the Chief Executive Officers of major auto companies and were in other high level roles. Sometimes I would turn on the television and see the same men I’d eaten dinner with at a friend’s house on the nightly news giving a press conference in Washington, or speaking about an issue of national importance. Another one of my friend’s fathers was the CEO of a major national bank and, by the time I was 13 or 14, I was smart enough to realize I could learn a lot from these men. I figured they must all be enormously gifted intellectually and have other skills which I could easily learn about.
In my spare time I read books such as Iacocca, about Lee Iacocca, and when the Publisher’s Clearing House mail came to my mother’s house I ordered the Forbes, Business Week and a ton of other business magazines so I could impress these nationally important men and talk to them about their careers and what they did. I remember after reading a book about Lee Iacocca, and having spent months reading business magazines, I had the opportunity to speak with one of my friend’s fathers. He used to work for President Ford writing speeches, and he now worked directly for Henry Ford writing his speeches. Because I had read so much, I realized, after about an hour, I knew much more than even he did about various aspects of his business.
When I was 13 or 14, I dominated dinnertime conversations at my friends’ homes spinning off facts and figures and entertaining major figures in various auto companies. The more I talked about business with these men, the less I realized they knew. I could not believe men who might have gotten MBAs from Harvard Business School knew so little. I figured that, based on their lack of knowledge about arcane business facts, none of them must be all that intelligent.
Most of these men were from all over the country and had joined, right out of school, automobile companies, banks and the other institutions they would one day lead. In at least one incident I recall, one man worked on an automotive manufacturing line in a factory during college. In another case, one of my friend’s fathers even went to a school called General Motors Institute (no longer in existence) which was a college run by General Motors.
Every day, these men got up early and drove into Detroit. They came home late each evening. Once a year, they took vacations for a couple of weeks, usually skiing in Colorado or at a ski resort in Michigan. At the same time, most had wives who never worked and stayed at home raising the children and providing their husbands with the sort of environment that would enable them to succeed. By the time I met many of these titans of business and industry, they had been getting up at the same time to go to work and living the life they lived for over 30 years–more than twice as long as I had even been on the earth.
And there I was sitting at their dining room tables uncovering how much information they did not know and believing they were stupid.
The more I realized these men did not know about arcane business facts, the more I read. One thing I quickly realized was none of these men were angry, and all of them seemed to enjoy learning what they did not know from a child. In addition, there was a very gentle way about them because, despite the fact I must have looked like an idiot spewing forth various facts and figures, they never sought to correct me. They were always quite diplomatic in all respects.
Just because I was aware of more facts and figures, it certainly did not mean I was more talented than these men. On the contrary, they were actually busy leading their lives and careers while I stood on the sidelines simply reading about it.
Now some 20+ years later I can reflect on what was going on:
- I certainly have never been on the evening news giving my opinions before the United States Congress.
- I do not sit in the office of the President of the United States and give him advice about what to talk about in speeches and write speeches for him.
- My actions and opinions are not mentioned weekly in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
I now look at these men with profound respect because the lesson their careers hold is something I have certainly learned from, and you can too: Work ethic and consistency trump brilliance and talent.
There are many people with a lot of talent, or who know a lot. These talented people may know more than the next person. They may be better socially. They may have a better idea of what needs to be done. They may have better educations. They may be better sales people. They may be more connected.
But when it comes right down to it, none of this really matters if the talented person cannot simply “show up” and do the same thing over and over. The people who win and become the most successful are the ones who generally put in a massive effort over the long run. Nothing is more effective than being consistent. The Grand Canyon could never have been built by one giant flood. Instead, it was built over millions of years by a consistent flow of water that applied a small amount of pressure and erosion over time. So, too, it is with your career. If you are consistent, you will achieve a lot more over time than if you are not.
Talent and brilliance have sex appeal. Talent is something that blows us away.
Several years ago, I was sitting in the living room of my mother’s house in Detroit, and in the other room was a man who was providing one of the most brilliant analyses of the meaning of the world I have ever heard. The more this man’s mind worked through an idea, the more brilliant I realized he was. At the time, I was 27 and had been through college and law school. In addition to practicing law, I was also teaching in a law school. I had heard a lot of very brilliant men speak in my career, but the person I was listening to was incredible.
As I listened to this man speak, I was firmly convinced he was the most brilliant man I had ever heard. After he left, I found out he had an extraordinary IQ and had received a PhD from Princeton. However, he had never applied his skills. Instead, he was living in a small $350 a month apartment and had lived there for years. He did not use his brilliance in his job and, instead, his talent went to waste because it was not being consistently applied. He had worked in multiple jobs in his career. What if this man had decided to spend his career writing? What if this man decided to spend his career teaching? He did none of those things and, despite incredible talent, nothing ever happened. We need to apply our talents.
Talent is fickle. Sometimes talent shows up, and other times it does not. In contrast, being consistent requires a high level of tenacity. You need to keep plowing through. You cannot give up. Anyone can be a better performer in one thing or another for a short time. What really takes skill is to consistently perform over time. This is what my friends’ fathers were all doing. Imagine 30+ years of doing the same thing and climbing within the same organization. This consistent effort is what creates the best results and enables people to win over time. Only certain people are born with brilliance and incredible talent, but anyone can exercise their option to work hard.
When we are consistent, we make small bits of progress on a daily basis. Making small daily bits of progress are what transform careers and lives. Anything you focus on consistently will make you better. Many people lack the ability to consistently focus over time, and instead believe one small flash of brilliance or talent will make a difference. This is almost never the case. Consistency and work ethic always trump brilliance and talent.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.