by Lewis Schiff
“When I walk into a meeting with a yellow pad,” he says, “I open it to the middle and I write down three words: ‘stupid stupid stupid.’ I do that to remind myself that maybe I’m not the smartest person in the room. And to remind myself that even the least-smart person in the room may still have a really good idea.” Without that kind of disciplined humility, a lot of managers and business owners are so busy acting in command that they shut down their employees’ ideas and observations.
Brodsky illustrates the point by telling how Perfect Courier got started in the document-storage business. After declaring bankruptcy, Brodsky decided to rebuild with a culture of listening—listening to customers and listening to each other. A key part of that culture was a commitment to never say “no” to anyone. So when someone called to ask if Perfect Courier was able to store boxes of documents, she didn’t hear “no,” even though that was the truthful answer. Instead, the Perfect Courier employee took down her information and promised to get back to her. Then he passed along the information to Brodsky.
The inquiry made Brodsky curious. He made some calls, pretending to be someone who needed a place to store boxes of documents. Brodsky discovered that the big local players in the storage industry offered lousy service at exorbitant prices. In Richard Branson’s terms, they were the “big bad wolves” that signified opportunity. Brodsky also discovered that the market was growing. Manhattan law firms and other corporations desperately needed low-cost locations where their documents could be reliably stored and retrieved on a day’s notice. Brodsky envisioned his courier drivers zipping back and forth with document boxes between Manhattan’s office towers and some cheap warehouse space across the East River in Queens.
“From that call grew a business that I just sold for $110 million,” Brodsky says. “Here was a customer service guy earning a few hundred bucks a week. He’s not the smartest guy in the room, but if you trust him to do what’s right and follow through, you can build a whole business around it.”
There are certain inevitable risks involved in delegating, which is why so many people shy away from it. The most obvious issue is that when someone takes a task off your hands, that task will not be done the way you would have done it. Delegating responsibility involves trust and acceptance. You need to trust that the task will be handled well and you also need to accept that sometimes it won’t.
The reluctance to delegate can have deep psychological roots. In his book, The Decision to Trust, Fordham University professor Robert F. Hurley tells of his consulting experience with a brilliant and talented senior executive whose inability to trust his subordinates ended up ruining his career. The executive was a well-known control freak. He wouldn’t allow even his most reliable employees to proceed on a project without his approval at each stage. Projects slowed to a crawl as a result, but the executive responded angrily to any suggestion that he needed to give his people more running room.
A “contagion of distrust and anxiety” spread throughout the executive’s business unit, Hurley writes. The employees felt so controlled and devalued that they stopped trying to contribute creative ideas. The unit’s financial results began to lag, and Hurley was brought in as a consultant. Over time, Hurley learned that the executive’s upbringing had made him a miserably insecure individual. Life had been tough on the man’s parents, so they taught their son that the world is a threatening place in which even the smallest error can hurt you badly. He became a perfectionist with a pathological fear of failure and embarrassment, which helped propel his career, but only so far. In this new, high-level position, his fear of failure only guaranteed that he would fail. He could not learn how to delegate responsibility to his employees and he suffered a humiliating demotion as a result. In psychological terms, the executive’s emotional “low adjustment,” which had nothing to do with his intelligence or competence, made it impossible for him to be an effective leader.
Any time you delegate a task to an employee, a contractor, or a freelancer, it takes a certain level of emotional maturity to accept that they will make mistakes, including some dumb mistakes that you feel certain you never would have made yourself. Brodsky points out that if you really want your employees to learn and grow, you have to let them try things that you know will fail. Brodsky recalls approving a promotional program that offered free introductory rates, “even though I know that giving away stuff for free never works.” Unless an idea threatens to do real damage to the company, Brodsky is willing to let his employees try it, regardless of what he thinks. The alternatives, he says, are to try to do every job by yourself, or lay down a lot of rules about how things are done. Either way, you will put a stifling, self-defeating limit on your company’s ability to grow.
Inevitably, though, one or another employee will abuse the freedom you give them. They will betray your trust. You need to keep your eyes open, Brodsky says, but you can’t respond to one person’s betrayal by tightening the reins on everyone. He says, “When somebody is stealing from your company—and it happens to all of us—if you develop mistrust and decide to trust nobody as a result, that’s the death knell for growth.” And if you’re not growing, then you’re not really in business. Once you choose to put growth and opportunity in the backseat behind security and control, you’re just following your worst, most fearful instincts—instead of following the money.
The Retirement Trick
Norm Brodsky didn’t spend much time at home once he launched Perfect Courier in 1979. When the company was young and understaffed, Brodsky really did try to do everything himself. He wore a beeper that went off at all hours of the night and sometimes he even filled in for absent delivery drivers. Later, as the company grew and staffed up, Brodsky got even busier bringing in new clients and acquiring other companies. Then came the long hours of wrangling with creditors through the bankruptcy, followed by building Perfect Courier from the ground up all over again. He never complained about the hours he put in. “I don’t consider what I’m doing to be work,” he’d say. “Mowing the lawn—that’s work.” But Brodsky’s absence was a big problem for his family. In 1988, his wife, Elaine, wrote a magazine article called “Confessions of a Woman Married to a Man Married to His Business.”
Self-made millionaires work much longer hours than the middle class. This is true especially of millionaires in the $1 million to $10 million range of net worth. According to the Business Brilliant survey, this particular group averages 65 hours per week, compared with just 42 hours for the middle class. (The longest hours—70 per week—were reported by female millionaires in the $1 to $10 million group.) Their exact purpose for working so many hours, however, is not entirely clear. More than 8 out of 10 say that “the results I achieve are more important than the number of hours I work,” but 7 out of 10 also say “the number of hours I work is a critical factor to becoming wealthy.” So results are more important than hours worked, they say, but long hours are extremely important anyway. The richest survey respondents polled in the Business Brilliant survey were a little more consistent in their thinking. These people, with net worths exceeding $30 million, work 57 hours per week on average, and yet only 3 out of 10 say that long hours are critical to becoming wealthy. They work 12 more hours per week than the middle class not because they need to. They want to.
These figures point to something Harvard business professor Thomas J. DeLong has called “The Paradox of Excellence.” High-performing businesspeople have a tendency to lock themselves into routines on their path to success. They are so driven and motivated that, as their responsibilities expand, they keep taking on more tasks related to whatever made them successful in the first place. An article DeLong coauthored with his daughter, a psychotherapist, states that “When [executives] find themselves in over their head they’re often unwilling to admit it, even to themselves, and refuse to ask for the help they need.” They are often guilt ridden and fear failure, so they seek satisfaction doing what they know. They keep the pace even when their activities aren’t the bes
t use of their time, even when their activities exhaust and overwhelm them.
So the hours pile up. You start out following the money as a sole proprietor or with a small business on the side and you grow accustomed to the long workdays because that’s what it takes in the early phase of any business. Then, as you add employees to help deal with growth, you continue doing all the things that attracted you to the business in the first place. If you do things right, or if you’re lucky, you soon find you’ve got too much to deal with. That’s the inevitable price of success. Recall the story of guitar teacher Paul Green, in chapter 5, complaining to his dentist how he was running himself ragged, trying to operate two School of Rock locations at once. Green had reached something business coach Dan Sullivan calls a “ceiling of complexity.” Once you hit that ceiling, no amount of additional hours or diligence will produce better results. You need to spread the workload. Otherwise, you either run in place forever or you burn out and fail.
Self-made millionaires allow their long work hours to spill over into evenings and weekends, and most say they prefer it that way. More than 8 out of 10 said “I would rather have control over my time (able to participate in personal matters during the day) even if it means I have to work longer hours and work nights and weekends.” The middle class, by contrast, would rather punch the weekday time clock. About 2 out of 3 said “I would rather work only during business hours even if it means I don’t have any control over my time during those hours.”
Taken at face value, these results suggest that most of the middle class don’t care to put in the long hours necessary for financial success. But Dan Sullivan says that long hours are a symptom of wealth, not the cause of it. Sullivan’s company, Strategic Coach, is one of the world’s premier small-business training programs. It promotes the idea that business owners hurt themselves and put their companies at risk by working long, exhausting hours. The one constant in business these days is change, Sullivan points out. The businesspeople who most often fail to adapt to changes in their markets are the ones who tie themselves down to a punishing daily work schedule. To use a sturdy cliché, they can’t see the forest for the trees.
Coaches at Sullivan’s company encourage business owners to delegate everything involving day-to-day operations so they can free themselves to set strategy and deal with tasks that have a longer-term impact. Sullivan actually advocates that owners set aside 150 days a year for “free time” away from the office, which prompted one business magazine to call him “the nation’s most successful demotivational speaker.” But Sullivan drinks his own Kool-Aid. He is absent from work and unreachable by phone or e-mail for the equivalent of five months of the year. By doing that, he has built Strategic Coach into a $20 million company with offices in Chicago, Toronto, and London.
Executive coaching has become a billion-dollar industry in the past decade, precisely due to the issues raised by DeLong and his “Paradox of Excellence.” It’s not a coincidence that the field is exploding just as smartphones and other technologies make the drift into work addiction more seductive than ever. Most new clients of Strategic Coach say they are incapable of spending even a single day without phoning, texting, or e-mailing the office.
Evidence of that level of work addiction is apparent in the Business Brilliant survey. Even the members of the over–$30 million group—people who presumably have vast abilities to delegate responsibilities—are hooked on work. Only 2 out of 10 say “I know how to detach from work and rest or relax.” And although 9 out of 10 say “I am interested and excited by what I do at work,” 8 out of 10 also agree that “I find work stressful and not enjoyable.” Why do they continue to do stressful and unenjoyable work? Partly because 8 out of 10 also believe their work habits are responsible for making them successful. They expressed a stronger faith in the importance of their work habits than any other group we surveyed. Even among the millionaire strivers, the $1 to $10 million group, less than half said their work habits are responsible for their success.
Obsessive work habits might not be such a big problem if working hours were devoted to strategy and taking in the bigger picture. But among all self-made millionaires, 8 out of 10 say they spend “a lot of time putting out ‘fires.’” Among those with wealth exceeding $30 million, it’s almost 9 out of 10. Think about that for a moment. The people with the greatest resources, who are best able to hand over emergency-response duties to others, are also the ones most likely to be dealing with emergencies themselves.
In executives, this “putting out fires” approach to work is often accompanied by an anxious, distracted leadership style, something psychiatrist Edward Hallowell has dubbed “Attention Deficit Trait.” Hallowell discovered ADT while treating executives who came to him complaining that they might have attention deficit disorder. Hallowell noticed that these executives showed typical symptoms of ADD in their inability to focus their thoughts, but that the symptoms disappeared during their vacations, which would not be the case if they truly suffered from attention deficit disorder. Hallowell, writing in the Harvard Business Review, says that ADT leads to impatient, underperforming executives who have difficulty staying organized, setting priorities, and managing their time. “Executives with ADT do whatever they can to handle a load they simply cannot manage as well as they’d like,” he writes. “[They feel] a constant low level of panic and guilt. Facing a tidal wave of tasks, the executive becomes increasingly hurried, curt, peremptory, and unfocused, while pretending that everything is fine.” Some suggest that the housing bubble and the world financial crisis were exacerbated by, or even precipitated by, thousands of high-level executives functioning in this frenzied, survival mode of thinking.
A dozen years ago, Stan Doobin was one of those executives. By dint of hard work and long hours, he had grown his office-cleaning company, Harvard Maintenance, from a tiny outfit in Midtown Manhattan to a $90-million-a-year business with operations in three states. Just like Norm Brodsky, Doobin had started out as the smartest and best-educated person in his company. He was an accountant with an MBA, so he felt he needed to stay on top of all of the company’s day-to-day operations. He proudly gave clients 24-hour access to his phone number, and since office cleaning takes place at night, Doobin was regularly awakened by emergencies. He was working 14-hour days, seven days a week, when a colleague recommended that he sign up with Strategic Coach. As Doobin recalls, “He noticed I was a workaholic and that something had to change.”
It didn’t take long for Doobin to realize where he’d gone wrong. “I was trying to do everything,” he says. “I thought I could do every task better and that it was faster for me to do it myself than train and trust others to do it.” He recognized also that his company was big enough that he could start cutting back his hours by delegating all the tasks he didn’t enjoy. “I stink at the operational aspects of my business,” Doobin says. “But there are tons of people who are passionate for it. They can do a much better job than me at a fraction of the time.”
This chapter opened by discussing the commonsense idea of delegating tasks that you’re not good at. But Doobin’s workdays really opened up when he let go of tasks that, although he could do them very well, he recognized that he shouldn’t be doing them at all. “There are activities that you have no passion for and are excellent at, that you are just wasting your time on,” he says. For Doobin the accountant, this describes his oversight of the company’s nitty-gritty financial details. He has learned over time to pull farther and farther back, and now, he says, “I couldn’t even begin to tell you about the functions of the computer system. I have no clue.”
As much as he can, Doobin tries to limit his involvement in Harvard Maintenance to the few things he has a passion for, because those are the things that give him energy, make him most productive, and also yield the best results for the company. He estimates he spends up to half his time recruiting new executives, wining and dining clients, and looking for new prospective clients. He went on an African safari with his son an
d had no contact with his office for two solid weeks. “Your staff is happier when you’re not there,” he says. “They actually do a better job if you’re not meddling in functions you have no passion for.” In the 12 years since Doobin started working fewer hours and moved away from day-to-day operations, Harvard Maintenance has expanded to 35 states and tripled its revenue, to $270 million.
Most self-made millionaires tell us that early retirement is not one of their goals. Only about 2 in 10 see retirement as their reason for becoming wealthy (compared with about two-thirds of the middle class). At Strategic Coach, they know this about their clients, so they schedule an exercise called the Retirement Trick. Business owners are asked to try to envision what retirement for them might look like, if they were able to perform only those tasks in their companies that they absolutely enjoyed the most. The exercise pries their minds away from any assumptions they have about onerous daily responsibilities. It prompts them instead to identify their absolutely rarest and most valuable abilities. Many realize they wouldn’t go to staff meetings anymore, or would hardly ever show up at the office. One insurance executive was so inspired by the exercise that he started up an outdoor excursion company, just so he could spend more time hunting and fishing. For high-achieving people, the ultimate reward for great success is not the idleness of retirement. The reward is doing more of the productive things that they love the most, which, as with Doobin, often turns out to make the most financial sense anyway.
By now this book has come full circle. It started with “Do what you love but follow the money,” and now it becomes clear that the grand prize for following the money extremely well is the rarefied privilege of doing only what you love. All the synergies of following the money that were outlined in chapter 1—looking for equity, maximizing your earnings, copying what works, making friends, making deals, and getting help—can add up to an incredible level of personal and creative freedom, but only if you take up this last, crucial step of sharing the workload. Otherwise, the achievement of wealth can amount to a life sentence of work addiction, a treadmill for stamping out fires.