The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Update - Timothy Ferriss [82]
—WARREN G. BENNIS, University of Southern California Professor of Business Administration; adviser to Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy
Most entrepreneurs don’t start out with automation as a goal. This leaves them open to mass confusion in a world where each business guru contradicts the next. Consider the following:
A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear…. If the employees come first, then they’re happy.
—HERB KELLEHER, cofounder of Southwest Airlines
Look, kiddie. I built this business by being a bastard. I run it by being a bastard. I’ll always be a bastard, and don’t you ever try to change me.50
—CHARLES REVSON, founder of Revlon, to a senior executive within his company
Hmm … Whom to follow? If you are fast on your feet, you’ll notice that I just offered you an either-or option. The good news is that, as usual, there is a third option.
The contradictory advice you find in business books and elsewhere usually relates to managing employees—how to handle the human element. Herb tells you to give them a hug, Revson tells you to kick them in the balls, and I tell you to solve the problem by eliminating it altogether: Remove the human element.
Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to design a self-correcting business architecture that runs itself.
The Remote-Control CEO
The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.
—HENRY WARD BEECHER, U.S. abolitionist and clergyman, “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”
RURAL PENNSYLVANIA
In a 200-year-old stone farmhouse, a quiet “experiment in 21st-century leadership” is proceeding exactly as planned.51Stephen McDonnell is upstairs in his flip-flops looking at a spreadsheet on his computer. His company has increased its annual revenue 30% per year since it all began, and he is able to spend more time with his three daughters than he ever thought possible.
The experiment? As CEO of Applegate Farms, he insists on spending just one day per week at the company headquarters in Bridgewater, New Jersey. He’s not the only CEO who spends time at home, of course—there are hundreds who have heart attacks or nervous breakdowns and need time to recover—but there is a huge difference. McDonnell has been doing it for more than 17 years. Rarer still, he started doing it just six months after founding the company.
This intentional absence has enabled him to create a process-driven instead of founder-driven business. Limiting contact with managers forces the entrepreneur to develop operational rules that enable others to deal with problems themselves instead of calling for help.
This isn’t just for small operations. Applegate Farms sells more than 120 organic and natural meat products to high-end retailers and generates more than $35 million in revenue per year.
It is all possible because McDonnell started with the end in mind.
Behind the Scenes: The Muse Architecture
Orders are nobody can see the Great Oz! Not nobody, not nohow!
—GUARDIAN OF THE EMERALD CITY GATES, The Wizard of Oz
Starting with the end in mind—an organizational map of what the eventual business will look like—is not new.
Infamous deal-maker Wayne Huizenga copied the org chart of McDonald’s to turn Blockbuster into a billion-dollar behemoth, and dozens of titans have done much the same. In our case, it’s the “end in mind” that is different. Our goal isn’t to create a business that is as large as possible, but rather a business that bothers us as little as possible. The architecture has to place us out of the information flow instead of putting us at the top of it.
I didn’t get this right the first time I tried.
In 2003, I was interviewed in my home office for a documentary called As Seen on TV. We were interrupted every 20–30 seconds with beeping e-mail notifications, IM pings, and ringing phones. I couldn’t leave them unanswered, because