The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [22]
You cannot exploit any marketing advantages you may have without knowing what’s happening on the ground, what the trends are, and what matters in each location where you do business. The best source of information is from your own field force, your local team. Management policies and strategies that are simply handed down as fiat from on high are destined for failure. If you want to increase your chances of failure, deny the possibility that you are not always 100 percent perfect in your judgment. Ignore the fact that sometimes others do know a thing or two. Cast aside the wise words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Certitude is not the test of certainty.”
So, if you want to fail, pose as an infallible leader.
And if you want to fail even more spectacularly, the next commandment is just what you’re looking for.
Commandment Five
Play the Game Close to the Foul Line
THREE YEARS AFTER I was born, the family’s house burned to the ground. We lost almost everything. We had to find a new place to live and the Great Depression was bearing down. My father, Leo, forty-two years old, was literally starting over. Yet he was able to rebuild our life. We left the farm and moved to Sioux City, Iowa, where he took a job at the local stockyard, a large center where livestock were sold and traded. Gradually he worked his way up to become one of the most savvy cattle brokers in the region. He had the uncanny ability to appraise and quickly value the cattle. Ultimately, Leo would bet anyone a Stetson hat that he could look at a pen of fifty or so cattle and come within ten pounds of the average weight per head. As a teenager in the summer, I worked for him and I never saw anyone take him up on the bet. I also imagine that he never had to give away a Stetson.
But my father had something even more valuable than a savvy eye. In a business that had more than its share of con artists, he had an absolutely sterling reputation for being a straight shooter. Ranchers from western Nebraska and Wyoming and South Dakota invested their fortunes and spent months of their lives, often in terrible weather, raising a herd of cattle that they would then put on a train and call my father with the simple request, “Leo, get me the best price you can.”
They trusted him implicitly. And that was a quality I wanted to emulate, to be trusted. Not feared. Not loved. But trusted—trusted to be forthright and honest with everyone—trusted to be fair—trusted to do the right thing.
If you play it close to the line you’re not likely to inspire much trust on the part of your customers or employees. And you will fail.
“Success is more permanent when you achieve it without destroying your principles.”
—Walter Cronkite
I MENTIONED EARLIER the role that trust played in Robert Woodruff’s building of The Coca-Cola Company’s global business. Trust was then, and is now, the essential foundation of any business. Despite improvements in technology and new fads in management and marketing, all business finally boils down to matters of trust—consumers trust that the product will do what it promises it is supposed to—investors trust that management is competent—employees trust management to live up to its obligations.
In recent years we seem to have quite a few smart, energetic people who have evidenced a rather fuzzy view of the right thing.
Kmart and Wal-Mart were founded in the same year, 1962. Yet Kmart pursued a dangerous path that ultimately led to bankruptcy in 2002. Along the way there were rumors and allegations