My attitude and focus were forever changed. My attention shifted from where I was to how I was doing, specifically how I could make the most out of my current situation. I learned quickly that although you can’t always control where you are planted—to which department or specific project you are assigned—you can control the experience while you are there. Committing myself to doing the best job possible regardless of my assignment while maintaining a positive attitude became my focus. From that point on, I can honestly say that I have always been promoted to a larger and more challenging assignment before I became bored or complacent.
During my career, I have found that the ground in which we find ourselves planted varies in composition. Sometimes it is fertile and healthy, making growth seem a part of nature’s course. At other times the soil may be dry, cracked, and rocky, making growth more challenging. I learned that I could prosper in either situation as long as I stayed focused on my responsibility to be the best that I could be regardless of where I was planted. And, if I performed at my maximum capability, I might actually leave the ground a little more fertile for the person who would ultimately take my place.
Today, I sometimes share this lesson with our young associates. I tell them to focus on what they can control—their performance and their attitude—and that regardless of where they excel, they will likely be recognized and eventually given assignments that will be more challenging and more desirable. And most importantly, I remind them, with each transplant comes another opportunity to bloom.
Bloom where you are planted
John J. MACK
Co-CEO of Credit Suisse Group and CEO of Credit Suisse First Boston
We usually think of “advice” as something that someone tells us, but I learned my most valuable lessons in life by example, by watching people around me both when I was growing up and when I was trying to stay true, in my business career, to the values they taught me. Yet, if there is one piece of advice that has been important to me, it is “Always remember where you came from.”
I was raised in a small town in North Carolina where everybody knew one another and treated one another fairly and with respect, no matter who you were. When people gave their word, you knew you could count on it. In business, I’ve worked hard to be straight with people and to do what I say I’ll do. Whether you are doing business on Wall Street or in a small town in North Carolina, nothing is more important than your integrity.
When I was growing up, my father worked long hours to run his small business, but, like my mother, he always found time for other people. They gave back a lot to the community, and while we had a big family, there was always room at our dinner table for friends and neighbors. My family was a great source of support and compassion, but they also taught me to be resilient and to keep things in perspective. Nothing teaches you to have a thick skin better than growing up as the youngest of six brothers.
I have lived in New York for a long time now, and have been very fortunate to have some success in the business world. But I try to get back to North Carolina whenever I can, because no matter what the opportunities or challenges I face, it always helps me to remember where I came from and the values I learned there.
Always remember where you came from
Brad MARTIN
Chairman and CEO of Saks, Inc.
Communicate simply, clearly, and truthfully.
Customers, employees, and investors are smart. They don’t need business people who use complicated words or who are less than candid in their communication. Tell the truth and keep it simple.
People are smart. Tell them the truth.
Jim McCANN
CEO of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM
Tough times can become opportunities for growth, for you and your business. Sometimes life pulls a Mike Tyson and chews on your ear, or throws you a curve ball, right in the eye. There are people who never get up off the ground when life hits them in the stomach, but the good ones always do. The true leaders—like The Donald—dust themselves off and move ahead, often coming back even stronger than they were before the difficult times. The ability to recover quickly, despite whatever challenges or obstacles are in your path—that is a key ingredient in success.
When life smacks you down, you must get to your feet and get back into the game. Make lemonade out of lemons. Never let them see you sweat. Smile though your heart is breaking. . . . The clichés are endless, but the principle is true: recover quickly, and you’ll always be successful.
Think of the down times that life throws your way as just other chapters in the book about your life—a book that is constantly being revised. The challenges that you face—and eventually overcome—will only make that book a much better read.
Recover quickly and you’ll always be successful
Scott McWHINNIE
President and CEO of PEZ Candy, Inc.
Choose a single-minded career goal, stick to that goal throughout your career, and stay within your chosen functional area and industry.
Selecting such a goal early in your working life will greatly ease the process of making career decisions. Of course, one of the hardest parts of this plan is to figure out in what field you will be the happiest—accounting, marketing, finance, manufacturing—and therefore probably where you will excel. This decision should be made either after some work experience in which you naturally are exposed to a variety of careers, or through business education, which can range all the way from reading business books and newspapers to entering an MBA program.
Once you choose your field, I think that, in most cases, you will be more successful in the long run if you stick to one functional area and related industry. Of course you can move around, and in some cases this could be successful; however, you can imagine a potential employer or headhunter looking at a résumé and wondering why you couldn’t make a decision and stick to it or why you weren’t smart enough to know what you wanted to do in the first place. And it is likely that if, for example, you have been in finance your entire career, you are probably better at it and can offer more to the potential employer than someone who has moved around and never really became proficient at anything. Make sure that all of the moves on your résumé have a logical progression. Sometimes it is very tempting to take a new position that is off the beaten track because it pays more, but it will probably be better in the long run to take a job that represents progression and really fits your previous career track, even at less money.
This advice has served me well. In the Harvard MBA program, I discovered that I loved consumer product marketing, and I came up with a single-minded goal to be a general manager some day. I specifically looked for and started out in an entry-level marketing position with a major consumer package goods company that was well known for its marketing training. I moved my way up the ranks, changed companies when I had to, but stuck to my field and industry until I accepted an offer to be President and CEO of another well-known consumer products company.
Set a goal and stick to it
Alfred T. MOCKETT
Chairman and CEO of AMS
In 1984, I flew from Tulsa to Boston, Massachusetts, on behalf of the Telex Corporation to bid for the assets of Raytheon Data Systems, a discontinued operation of the Raytheon Company. In the fray with fifteen would-be contenders, I raced to Lexington with our offer. The then-Chairman, Tom Phillips, stepped out of a Board meeting. I gave him the sealed manila envelope containing our bid. He didn’t open it; instead, placing it on the table between us, he turned to me and said, “Tell me, Mr. Mockett, what are you going to do for my customers and what are you going to do for my people? For if you can take care of my customers and can take care of my people, the numbers will take care of themselves”—and they did. We were the successful bidder and the acquisition played out extremely well.
I’ve spent the nearly twenty years since these words were spoken embroiled in the corporate wars, having been on every side of every possible business combination or disaggregation. Those words of To
m Phillips have served me well as the first question to ask before undertaking any M&A activity.
As a postscript, I returned to Tulsa triumphant with the deal in hand. My chairman, the crusty son of a Greek immigrant, turned to me and said, “Well, Mockett, you bought it, now you damn well go run it!” If more chairmen were to adopt this approach, there would be far fewer mergers and acquisitions in this world.
Take care of the people and the numbers will take care of themselves
Mitchell B. MODELL
CEO of Modell’s Sporting Goods
Young men and women beginning their careers should work hard, get to know every aspect of the company, and always ask questions.
And don’t be afraid to ask for help. At Modell’s Sporting Goods, we have an elite group of people, our Board of Advisors, who give us great feedback. Their wisdom and guidance has helped Modell’s grow as a company and has also helped me grow as a leader.
Work hard and ask questions
William T. MONAHAN
Chairman and CEO of Imation Corporation
Whether you run a small private business or a large corporation, the words no and free impact success every day.
No is the best word in the business vocabulary. If you are not willing to say no to bad business, no to poor deals, and no to poor returns in order to focus on better opportunities, you cannot win. Your bandwidth will be spread too thin, and losing or dying programs will take up more time and assets than dynamic, developing opportunities. It is amazing how few people can deliver a sustainable no and move on to successful investments.
Free is the worst word in business. Free offers, free samples, free trials—all have the value that the customer paid—zero. Huge amounts of investment, resources, and assets are spent on items that offer a low value for the customer. If you have value, charge for it. If the value can’t be sold, you either have poor salespeople and approaches or you really don’t have the value you think you have.
Remembering the meaning of these two words has proven accurate every time they have helped drive value creation while eliminating the influence of value destroyers like competitors, bad customers, and one-off buyers.
The two most important words in business are no and free
Alan MULALLY
President and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes Group
The purpose of business is to create value year after year, forever. Value equals discounted cash flow, which equals revenue multiplied by margins plus the change of net assets. So, create products and services your customers want, and do it more productively than your competition. To accomplish that, you need a skilled and motivated team.
Make it better and cheaper
Dennis M. MULLEN
Chairman, President, and CEO of Birds Eye Foods, Inc.
An associate whose wisdom and advice I value greatly provided me with the one phrase that’s helped me most in my twenty-five years in the food industry. Although it’s not a new or complex philosophy, I’m grateful to Kent Roberts, Vice President of Organizational Effectiveness for Birds Eye Foods, for leading me to the mantra I now embrace:
“Don’t judge me by my words alone, judge me by my actions.”
I want our associates, and any stakeholder of Birds Eye Foods, to understand that what I say, I am committed to do. This honesty in communications is a commitment we have made. It’s part of an overall Birds Eye Foods communications strategy to explain to our audiences, internal and external, why we do what we do. And, while what we say may not always be what people want to hear, we’ve created an expectation that what we say is what we will do. In other words, we only make promises we can keep—and we keep the promises we make. Many is the time when I’ve met with employee groups to explain why their facility may be reducing its production—or even closing down entirely. These are tough audiences hearing tough news. It’s uncomfortable news to hear and, believe me, even more uncomfortable to say. But a leader cannot just say things because they’re what the audience wants to hear. Or because they will make that particular group feel good at that particular moment. We must weigh our words carefully and speak the truth. We make tough decisions every day, and the reality is that they’re not going to make everyone happy. That’s business. The true measure of a leader, however, is the willingness to say the unpopular thing. To sometimes report the bad news. To speak the truth.
Judge not by words alone
John H. MYERS
President and CEO of GE Asset Management Incorporated
After working thirty-three years for General Electric, a company that many consider to be the best managed in the world, I’ve had the good fortune to work in an environment full of terrific role models and leaders, people like Jack Welch, Reg Jones, Larry Bossidy, Bob Wright, and GE’s newest CEO, Jeff Immelt. As the infamous American philosopher Yogi Berra once allegedly said, “You can see a lot by just watching.”
Watch what other successful leaders do, how they do it, and what worked or didn’t work for them. The rules of business aren’t like writing a term paper in college. Plagiarism isn’t a guaranteed F or expulsion; it’s a best practice. Copying successful people and their ideas, emulating them, and improving upon them is a strategy we shouldn’t be embarrassed about. There aren’t too many original, creative thinkers in business like Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, or Henry Ford. I know I’m certainly not one of them. There are, however, many successful business people that we can all learn from.
For example, in 1988, a friend referred a sixty-eight-year-old man to me in hopes that GE’s Pension Fund would invest in his start-up golf club company. I agreed to meet with him and I can remember thinking that I should be courteous because of the connection to my friend, but I had already decided that I wouldn’t invest. After all, who would back a sixty-eight-year-old who had been passed over for the top job at Burlington Industries fifteen years earlier and who had dropped out of the corporate business world to start a winery in Southern California? And who would invest in the golf club industry where few people, if any, had ever made any money?
All that changed when Ely Callaway walked into my office carrying a set of golf clubs over his shoulder. I proceeded to listen to his business plan and then recited all the reasons (which I had prepared before the meeting) why I couldn’t invest GE’s money in his company. Ely wouldn’t take no for an answer. He rebutted my points one by one and convinced me to do some more research on both him and his ideas. The rest is history. I gave Ely $4 million for a majority interest in Callaway Golf, and Ely went on to create the world’s number one golf club company from scratch.
He proved to be a marketing genius, attacking a market saturated with products that were branded differently but all essentially clones of one another. Right from the beginning, he priced his product at the top of the line and kept Callaway’s distribution away from the discounters to create and maintain demand. When I questioned this practice, he told me that once you establish a perception of a discounted pricing strategy, you can never change it to a premium-priced brand.
He initiated a “Distinguished Golfers Advisory Board,” consisting of high-profile, well-known people like Sam Nunn and Jack Welch, whose only responsibility was to play with his clubs and provide feedback to him on how the product performed. Of course, having Callaway clubs in the hands of these distinguished people created visibility for its products and word-of-mouth advertising for free. Soon Callaway Clubs were featured in the golf pro shops of some of the country’s most prestigious country clubs. I could go on and on with story after story about this incredible man but the biggest lesson I learned was that the most important ingredient for a successful investment is people. GE didn’t invest in a golf club company. It invested in Ely Callaway, a man with a vision, a passion to develop it, and an unwillingness to accept no for an answer. GE’s original $4 million investment eventually returned hundreds of millions to its pension fund, and some great personal lessons in business from an extraordinary entrepreneur.
Another te
rrific teacher was Dale Frey, a forty-year career GE veteran for whom I had the privilege of working in three different businesses representing more than half my total years with GE. He retired from GE as President of GE Asset Management in 1996, and I was selected to succeed him.
In 1977, however, I had just returned from three years in Italy working for a GE subsidiary. Dale was the Chief Financial Officer for all of GE’s international businesses, and he offered me a position as Manager–Business Analysis, reporting directly to him. There was only one catch to the job offer. I had to shave my mustache, cut my hair, and get rid of the cowboy boots before coming to work. I readily accepted, and Dale and I quickly developed a close and candid business and personal relationship.
Dale was an aggressive, motivated leader with great business instincts and he always encouraged an open dialogue with the people who worked for him. His tough, gruff exterior was intimidating, and he was nicknamed “The Bear” by the organization. He was proud of the nickname and thought it stood for Grizzly Bear, but I always felt it was more like Teddy Bear because of his deep compassion and sensitivity for the people who worked for him.
Shortly after I began, we debated the pros and cons of a new business policy Dale wanted to implement across the international organization. I was on one side of the issue and Dale was on the other. We debated it between ourselves, tempers flared as they sometimes did, and Dale finally made his decision and overruled my objections. He was the boss and that was that. Next subject.
The Way to the Top Page 8