Expect a Miracle : Part 2

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

(Page 6 of 6)

On each of the next four consecutive days, Checketts held a four-hour meeting with Speyer. At the conclusion of the fourth day, the two men agreed to have dinner that evening. When Checketts arrived at the Manhattan restaurant where they had previously agreed to dine, he told Speyer: "I am not leaving you tonight until we make a deal."

Speyer told Checketts he would have to come up to his price. "If I come up to your price, are we going to make a deal?" Speyer said he was willing to deal.

By 1:00 A.M. the restaurant was closed and no deal had been reached. Speyer said he was going home.

"I'm coming with you," Checketts told him. He followed Speyer down Park Avenue to his apartment. Inside, Speyer, who also serves as a chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, showed Checketts an impressive array of art. Then the two men sat down and continued negotiating. Ultimately, Checketts agreed to enter a thirty-five-year lease with Rockefeller Center for the use of Radio City Music Hall.

At 4:00 A.M., the two men shook hands. On behalf of MSG Corp., Checketts now had a firm grip on the property for thirtyfive years and controlled half the ownership in the production company. At 6:00 A.M. Checketts made it home and went to bed.

But he wasn't done dealing. When he reported his deal to Mitsubishi Estates, its representatives felt he had paid too much for the lease. Since Checketts and MSG Corp. now had all the leverage as the leaseholders and Mitsubishi didn't like the lease arrangement, Checketts offered to buy out Mitsubishi's remaining 50 percent ownership stake in the production company for another $70 million. Eager for cash, Mitsubishi agreed.

Now Checketts and MSG Corp. were into Radio City Production for $140 million. But on the day the sale closed between MSG Corp. and Mitsubishi Estates, the production company had $70 million in cash that had just been collected from the Radio City Christmas Spectacular ticket receipts. Checketts was already halfway out of the deal on the day he closed. The next year the Christmas Spectacular brought in another $70 million.

Meanwhile, Checketts and MSG Corp. invested an additional $70 million into restoring Radio City Music Hall back to its original condition in 1932. By the time Checketts left MSG Corp. in 2001, it was the sole owner of Radio City Productions and controlled the lease on Radio City Music Hall until 2036. And annual revenues at Radio City Music Hall had quadrupled.

"A big part of my drive is this sense of needing to prove myself a little bit more," said Checketts. "My mission gave me the confidence that I could do anything I set out to ... if I had enough faith."

The Hardest Sales Job Known to Mankind

"Missions cause you to be a better leader," said Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, who had to learn to speak Korean in order to serve his mission in Korea. "You go out there with a deep devotion and you are just convinced that your product is the best product in the world. You try to sell it and try to sell it and you get knocked down and rejected. You have to figure out how to keep your self-esteem and your motivation up in the face of all this rejection. It's the hardest sales job known to mankind."

Christensen teaches management and the development of organizational capabilities to business students at Harvard. Before arriving at HBS, Christensen was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, a White House fellow, and an assistant to two U.S. transportation secretaries. Today he is a consultant to companies such as Intel, Eli Lilly, Dell, Kodak, and others. But his missionary services for the Mormon Church preceded all these professional and academic achievements. His mission also helped prepare him. As a young missionary, Christensen served as what's known as a "zone leader," meaning he had oversight and responsibility to motivate his fellow missionaries. This leadership assignment can be an even harder task than taking religion to the doors of strangers. "It's an even harder sales management job," said Christensen, who saw the experience as great preparation for the world of big business. "If you are a zone leader, how do you keep these guys motivated when rejection is what their life is all about? Then you come into the business world and it's duck soup compared to that."

American Express' chief financial officer, Gary Crittenden, served his Mormon mission in Germany. "The thing a mission does is teach you persistency," said Crittenden. "Every day you have to get up and say 'I'm going to spend this whole day out walking the streets,' in some cases going door-to-door, and in some cases just stopping people on the street or on busses, even in the coldest weather.'"

The coupling of this persistence with other management skills can produce a powerful, unstoppable force in business. "As a nineteen-year-old missionary for the Church, you learn to advance your views in the face of significant opposition," said Dave Checketts. "If you don't, you never succeed as a missionary. That's what makes the training so valuable and so unique."

And when these men emerge from their mission experience, they have intensity and a sharp focus that cannot be taught in any business school. "We get married younger," said David Neeleman. "We have kids younger. We don't go through that phase of adolescence where men hang out with guys in bars. We come home from our missions, get married, start raising children, and get to work.

I was married seven weeks after my mission and we had a child ten months later. I didn't have time to play around. I just had to get to work. So there is seriousness and focus."

The missionary training quickly surfaces in their approach to business. "In business situations we get well prepared and we go in undaunted," said Checketts. "I don't know if this is unique to the Mormon culture. But we are individuals who have a mission and are absolutely undaunted by it."

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.