If you have to interact with employees of other companies on a daily basis, you already know that the majority of them are incompetent and negligent. And, above all, not very responsive. So, with foot soldiers like this in charge of day-to-day operations, why are so many companies so successful?
To answer this, I’m reminded of an anecdote from Sam Walton’s biography. When he was still only a little regional guy with about 30 stores, he went to New York in the hopes of learning something from big-city discounters.
After being granted an audience with an executive at one of the country’s major discount chains, he pulled out some crumpled papers from the breast pocket of his suit and showed them to Mr. Big Time sitting on the other side of the desk. On those papers were handwritten sales-and-profit figures for his small-town discount chain the one with that local-yokel name, Wal-Mart.
The big-time exec perused the figures for a few minutes, then quickly shoved the papers across the desk to Walton. Whereupon he urged the Wal-Mart founder not to show his figures to anyone else and to not seek information from any other New York discounters. Instead, he advised him to turn around and go back to Arkansas as fast as he could get there, and to keep doing exactly whatever it was he was doing to produce the kind of results his crumpled papers revealed.
Why? Because, the executive assured him that no one in New York was even close to achieving the kind of numbers that Walton was producing in his small chain of stores. He must have been right, because in a relatively short period of time, many of the biggest discounters in New York including such giants as E. J. Korvette and Alexander’s began closing their doors. Those old enough to remember will recall that it was a bloodbath for major discounters throughout the country for a couple of decades.
In retrospect, it’s quite humorous that Sam Walton was trying to find out how the big discounters got so big, considering that most of them went broke and he ended up becoming the largest retailer in the world. Now, that’s what you call a movie plot.
It’s not just the big guys, either. During my prehistoric era, when I was a real estate broker, I had an acquaintance whom many people fondly referred to as “Black Bart.” He was a shoe-shufflin’, good ole boy from Kansas about six-feet-four who spoke with one of those disarming, affidavit cowpoke drawls.
If you didn’t know Black Bart very well, you might assume that he had succotash between his ears. And your assumption might have cost you your house. We’re talking smart here real smart.
If you’ve read To Be or Not to Be Intimidated? you may recall that one of the highlight stories in that book is about my multimillion-dollar real estate closing in Lawrence, Kansas. (See chapters 15 & 16.) The featured characters in that story were two hard-drinking, cowboy-types I nicknamed the “Booze Brothers.” I mean, these guys brushed their teeth with Scotch and took bourbon enemas to cleanse themselves.
Many years after I had put millions of dollars in their pockets by selling eight of their apartment complexes, Black Bart came blowing through town and called to ask if my wife and I would like to join him and his wife for dinner. I accepted his invitation, and, at dinner, we got to talking about the Booze Brothers.
He said that when he was an apartment developer in Kansas, he never could figure out why the Booze Brothers were able to build apartment units for $X per square foot when it was costing his company $Y per square foot. He said he chastised his top people and demanded that they bring the company’s building costs down.
Black Bart repeatedly and heatedly told them, “If those guys can build an apartment unit for $X per square foot, then we’ve got to figure out how to do it, too. We just have to sharpen our pencils.”
Guess what? The Booze Brothers went broke a couple of years after I sold their apartment units, while Black Bart still building his units for $Y per square foot managed to sell his company for $13 million! He ended the story by saying, “So the answer to my question about how in the heck those guys built their apartment units for so much less than we did was: They didn’t. That’s why they went broke!”
Moral: Whether it’s a business or personal issue, it’s good to teach your children early in life to take what others say with a grain of salt. Talk really is cheap. It’s been my experience that most people simply like to hear the sound of their own voices.
Worst of all, a high percentage of those people are guilty of nothing more than slinging bull. And the worst of the worst are those who actually believe their own B.S.
It’s a mistake to assume that the other guy knows more than you just because he talks more than you. And that includes people from the highest ranks of corporate America. They may be bigger, but not necessarily smarter.
If you mind your own store, keep up to date on what’s going on in your industry, and focus on opportunities rather than problems, it will give you the security of knowing that you’re on the right track. The trick then is to have the self-discipline to be selective about what you choose to believe, and to not be so quick to assume that the guy who pontificates on “the right way to do things” knows what he’s talking about. More often than not, he doesn’t.
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Sign up for Robert Ringer’s FREE wisdom-filled e-letter, A Voice of Sanity in an Insane World. Visit http://www.robertringer.com. Ringer is the author of three #1 bestsellers, including two books listed by The New York Times among the 15 bestselling motivational books of all time. Copyright © 2006 by Robert J. Ringer. Reprinted by permission of the author. |