Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [93]
Szulevicz knew all that. When EDS fired their sales staff for losing to him, the company called Szulevicz and offered him a “treasure”—as he put it—to come to EDS as a salesman. He refused. “I love money. I love it very very much,” explained Szulevicz. “I collect beautiful objects. But here, I didn’t hesitate a second. Morally, when I shave in the morning, I like to be able to look myself in the mirror.” He added, “I never had any trust in EDS,” reminding us of his earlier observations about the company’s stifling hierarchy, which he used against them. “You accept a double or a triple salary—and others besides EDS offered them, too—but then you leave after one year because culturally you’re different and it can never work. It’s like, you know, me willing to spend a night with Miss World. But from that to marry her?”
In fact, Szulevicz’s decision to decline the offer, as well as his overall natural leadership, fit into the “rules of the game” followed by everyone at GSI. GSI’s CEO at the time, Jacques Bentz, once commented that at GSI “There are as many bosses as there are employees.”15 Jacques Szulevicz’s company provided him with an environment where he motivated himself to become such a “boss,” a natural leader in an objectively hopeless business opportunity. Indeed, GSI’s environment constantly satisfied his universal needs: full respect and trust by the company’s leaders, for example, to engage big GSI resources if he believed in an opportunity; the possibility to grow, such as allowing him to work on the company’s biggest deal ever; and self-direction, such as allowing him to make essentially all the project decisions—including the decisions to spur others to self-motivate, as he did with the team that was working in the north of France and followed him to Florida to fight for the Euro Disney contract.
“I couldn’t justify rationally why this opportunity was worth pursuing, but I had the full trust of [Raiman] and a few other top executives,” Szulevicz said. He also added that when he felt disrespected, he let his chairman know.
Raiman had a habit—when thinking deeply about something—to puff his cigar, stop talking, and look at the ceiling—instead of at his interlocutor. “You’d feel despised,” Szulevicz said. “So, one day I told him about his habit, and he was really sorry. He never thought that it might cause others to feel disrespected. He excused himself and changed it.”
Despite that—or perhaps, thanks to that and all the other experiences they had together—the two remained friends many years after both their careers ended at GSI. Szulevicz had a real admiration for his former chairman: “I venerate him totally because he’s somebody whom I love like my father, even if we sometimes disagreed,” he told us. “If he called me right now and asked me to do something for him
I’d do it immediately. First, I owe him a lot and then it’s a duty, because everything he did was not for his personal interest. He could have become a [government] minister, he could have done anything he wanted. But simply when he learned of something that seemed right to him, enriching for others in almost a biblical sense, well, he just did it, that’s it. He didn’t ask himself many questions.”
Raiman, in fact, does call Szulevicz from time to time to ask for help, for example, in gathering donations or sponsors for his foundation. And every time Raiman finishes explaining his request to Szulevicz, he adds, “I want it all!”
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IN SEARCH OF LOST
BOOTS
The Big Payoff from Letting
People Self-Direct and Grow
IF DANTE WERE