Obedience Leads to Success

The Mormon Way of Doing Business: Leadership and Success Through Faith and Family
by Jeff Benedict, J.D.

(Page 3 of 6)

Mormon missionaries are expected to abide by strict rules governing personal conduct. They rise early in the morning, observe a nighttime curfew, adhere to a dress and grooming code, are prohibited from watching television, and are expected to reserve time each day for personal study. Obedience and hard work, they are taught, are the keys to a missionary's success. Those keys can lead to business success, too.

Before being named CEO of Dell, Kevin Rollins developed a reputation within the company for being a logistics and operational genius. Those abilities have a lot to do with why Michael Dell initially hired Rollins. Since moving into the CEO spot, Rollins has instilled his penchant for discipline throughout the company through his management style. Many of his personal habits that impact the way he approaches management were refined while serving a mission for the Mormon Church.

"Since I was nineteen," said Rollins, "I've gotten up at fivethirty essentially every morning, unless I'm sick. Since age nineteen I've gone to bed early. So there's a discipline of how to act. A mission teaches you to get up, get going, and do things. I also learned on a mission that if you just work really hard you'll get good results. But if you're smart and work really hard, you'll get superb results."

Adjusting to the rigors and self-discipline expected of Mormon missionaries was not that difficult for Rollins. From the time Rollins was in third grade, his father would enter his room each summer morning before 6:00 A.M. and wake him and his older brother by turning on the light. Rollins' father would then say: "Here's what you have to do today."

Blurry-eyed, Rollins and his brother would sit up in their beds and listen as their father outlined a list of chores: weeding flower beds, working in the strawberry patch, or performing work in their yard, which encompassed over an acre. "There was a constant task," said Rollins. "Yard work was just a staple. He expected us to perform."

Rollins' father was a civil engineering professor at Brigham Young University, and he had his own engineering firm. He would leave for work very early each morning and put in long hours at his office. When he returned home after work each day, he would gather Kevin and his brother and inspect their work. "He'd go out and look in the yard or wherever our assignment was," said Rollins. "He expected things to look perfect."

By the time Rollins reached high school, his father's assignments at home increased in scope and would sometimes take days or weeks to complete. For instance, one summer his father instructed Kevin and his brother to build a walkway. But his was no ordinary walkway. Rollins' childhood home was situated on a lot that had a large, steep hill that ran down the property behind the house. Rollins' father, a skilled carpenter and cement mason, decided he wanted a walkway constructed from the top of the hill to the bottom. Before construction could begin, however, the hill had to be cleared of brush and rock. The entire task-from preparation to construction-fell to Rollins and his brother. "It was tough," said Rollins. "We had to cut a walkway down that hill, then through the brush and through the soil and rock. It taught me the value of doing something every day, sticking to task orientation, which I have inherent in my management style today."

On his mission, Rollins developed other daily habits, such as studying the scriptures. As a result, he still makes time to read for personal enrichment on a daily basis. On a mission he dutifully followed the Church's instructions to proselyte, a practice that typically entails knocking on doors. Although this is not the most fruitful method of convincing people to join the Mormon Church, Rollins followed this course out of his desire to be obedient. "I believe that whether or not you are actually doing things that lead to success, through obedience you will get success," said Rollins. "There's a jump that occurs just through doing it. So I'm a big proponent of discipline, activity, never say die, really hard work, and never admitting defeat. A lot of that is mission based."

The never-say-die, hard-work approach to missionary service had a carry-over effect to Rollins' business aspirations. Rollins served his mission in Alberta, Canada, in the early 1970s. While there he noticed a very successful soft-drink franchise. After his mission he decided to set up a soft-drink franchise of his own in Utah. He had no knowledge of the industry or what it would take to create a beverage company. At age twenty-one he enrolled in business courses at Brigham Young University and married his wife, Debbie. With financing from his father, Rollins opened the Pop Shoppe, a soft-drink distributorship.

Debbie quit school immediately to work full time at the business. "We started selling our beverage before we got our plant up and running," Debbie Rollins said.

Kevin purchased bottling equipment, arranged for trucking and shipping throughout the state, and built a bottling plant. Since he was a full-time student at BYU, he had the plant constructed near the campus, enabling him to race home from school at lunchtime each day to check on operations at the bottling plant. If equipment was down, Kevin would hurry to the plant and fix it in order to keep the operation moving.

"He wouldn't even change his clothes," Debbie recalled. "He would just dive into the grease and fix whatever wasn't working. He didn't even know anything about equipment. But he had this sense of what needed to be done and he did it."

Within a year, Debbie Rollins was pregnant with their first child and Kevin was pitching his product to grocery stores in an attempt to expand sales. Little by little he convinced more and more stores until his soft drink was being distributed throughout the state of Utah. To accommodate demand, he had to create a distribution plan for delivery and contract with trucking companies to move his product. "If something needed to be done, Kevin just did it," said Debbie. "If he didn't know how, he figured it out."

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Benedict

About the Author

Jeff Benedict is an award-winning investigative journalist, a lawyer, and a best-selling author of six books. He is a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated and the Hartford Courant. His upcoming book The Mormon Way of Doing Business is based on exclusive interviews with top corporate executives at Dell, JetBlue Airways, Deloitte & Touche USA, American Express, Madison Square Garden Corp., and Harvard Business School, all of whom are Mormons.