The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [19]
If you’ve got some lofty title on your door, the crowd of those who will disagree with you thins out pretty rapidly. That’s why I like the story about John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach. He was a man of firm convictions and he was a winner. But in his sixteenth season, while he’d made it to the NCAA tournament every year, he had yet to win a championship. In 1963, Jerry Norman, Wooden’s highly opinionated assistant coach, began to question absolutely everything Wooden had been doing. That was heresy—tantamount to fomenting revolution, yet Norman somehow persuaded Wooden to apply virtually all new tactics to his game. The upshot was that UCLA won the 1964 NCAA title and went on to win nine of the next eleven tournaments. Wooden subsequently said, “Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who’ll argue with you.”
That’s one of the reasons I am a strong believer in management teams. When teams of leaders complement and balance one another (as in the cases of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway, Tom Murphy and Dan Burke at CapCities, or Frank Wells and Michael Eisner at Disney), then one person’s shortcomings can often be offset by another’s strengths. But when there is only room for one dominant personality in the room, then watch out because what he or she is that’s what the company is; and if he or she isn’t enough, then the company is doomed.
Watch out for bright lights that surround themselves with dim bulbs!
I was very fortunate at Coca-Cola in that I had several very, very bright top executives working for me who would not hesitate to tell me they thought I was not only wrong but dead wrong! I also had some strong-minded secretaries. They were so nervy they would sometimes bring letters back to me with a sweet smile and that marvelous expression my high school paper’s editor used to use: “Are you sure you want to say this?” Usually I didn’t. That’s the wonderful thing about letters versus e-mail. You have time to think. More on that later.
Assume the whole world lives as you do. Hubert Humphrey once suggested that every member of Congress and every high public official should be required to take public transportation once a week so they would know how the world really lives. This should also apply to top business leaders. It helps to remember the old adage: “I may be the CEO at the office, but I take out the garbage at home.”
Some old-timers in the company once told me about a third-generation Coca-Cola bottler from New England who came from an old aristocratic family. He’d probably never even been inside the plant—probably hadn’t even tasted a Coke in years. Nevertheless, he felt qualified to question the company’s wisdom in advertising on the radio on late Sunday afternoons. “No one is listening to the radio on Sunday afternoons,” he said. “Everyone is out playing polo.” That’s pure isolation! That’s the way to keep your own self foremost in mind and completely lose touch with your customers, employees, and shareholders. And best of all—you don’t even know it!
If you follow Commandment Three and effectively isolate yourself, you will not only not know what you don’t know about your business, but you will remain supremely and serenely confident that what you do know is right. Isolation, carried to its most extreme form, tends to breed a sense of almost divine right. People like Henry Ford and Sewell Avery and a host of the managers of some of the highly successful enterprises that we mentioned such as Xerox and IBM became convinced that they were not only right, but even more deadly, they began to believe, at times anyway, that they could do no wrong. When the encyclicals