Have the Courage to Admit You Don't Know, Part 2

Lessons From the Heart of American Business: A Roadmap for Managers in the 21st Century
by Gerald Greenwald, Charles Madigan

(Page 2 of 2)

The important part about my work record is what it represents, what I learned along the way.

As I reflected on my life's work when I was preparing this book, it struck me that I learned as much about business hiking up the sides of mountains as I learned sitting in board meetings or consulting, sometimes conspiring, with my co-workers.

There is a simple clarity to mountain climbing that I think relates directly to what happens at the office every day.

There is the mountain. Prepare yourself and go climb it. You face something that seems overwhelming, then you measure it carefully, put your team together, attack it diligently, and succeed.

But before mapping out a strategy, I always knew that I had to do my homework. That meant educating myself on all sorts of topics.

The truth is, I was never afraid to admit that I just didn't have the foggiest notion of how something worked, or why it didn't work. It was better for me to find someone who knew, and open myself to the knowledge they had to offer.

Where did that lead?

Well, I knew nothing about airplanes, but I knew where to go at United Airlines to find out exactly what it was that put a 747 into the air. Now I know how many people it carries, how much fuel it uses, and where it fits into the grand design of our route and fleet plan, and how it can take anybody just about anyplace in the world. I was never shy about asking about any of that.

Even though I knew nothing about the workings of computers, I knew exactly where they fit in the world of business, how they could bring efficiency, speed, and better service to our customers, how they could help us cope with the unyielding demands of change.

I know where computers fit into the profit picture of companies, what technology can accomplish and what it cannot accomplish. I can tell right away when someone who knows everything about computers doesn't understand anything about how they fit in a business.

I know that because I asked.

Early on during my years at Chrysler, I took on information technology as one of my responsibilities. It wasn't something I knew a lot about at the time, so I went to Chrysler's IT team and I asked them to tell me who knew more about information technology than anyone else. They came up with a list of four people, and I reached out and invited them to discuss information technology issues with the Chrysler team. I sat in on the meetings. I watched Chrysler's people learning lessons from the best in the field, and I learned right along with them.

Not knowing anything about cars at Ford was of great value.

My quest to find out carried me into the company of engineers, mechanics, drivers, and designers who knew everything there was to know about automobiles and how to get them from the design board into the hands of customers.

You can collect knowledge in unexpected places.

Beyond what I had learned in high school civics and college, I didn't know much about Washington.

All of that changes when your mission is to convince a reluctant federal government that it is in the nation's interest to help save one of its most important companies, not with handouts or grants, but by creating some conditions that would allow the company to survive.

I had a marvelous education as part of the struggle to save Chrysler. I got to see government function from the inside, to know how political decisions were made and what impact they were likely to have on my company.

I was not educated in the world of high finance, but I found out about it from people who were.

The Chrysler experience amounted to a crash course in banking and finance at every level, from the U.S. Department of the Treasury to the last little bank that found itself at the center trying to decide whether Chrysler's loan guarantees would be finally approved and the company saved.

Fortunately, I have never been much of a know-it-all or I doubt I would have succeeded at any of these jobs.

If I had to label myself now at the other end of my career, I think the tag would say, "The Man Who Finds Out."

That has been my operating standard since the late 1950s.

That is what this book is all about, a career-long quest to fill in my own gaps. Knowing you have gaps is a big asset for any modern executive. People are always willing to help fill them.

I have seen plenty of folks who were convinced they had all of the answers and felt quite secure about slamming the door on knowledge and experience. That is one modern management style. I don't think it works very well, because it doesn't recognize that business has become so complicated that one mind simply can't take it all in.

Some executives brag about their golf games. I can brag about why I don't have a golf game to brag about.

My wife and I tried to learn golf in Brazil, where we were living at the time. We weren't all that interested anyway, but my attraction to the game declined even more when one of my Brazilian friends warned me never to search for missing golf balls in the rough, because there are dangerous snakes and spiders in there.

We dropped golf.

I won't have much to say about golf, then.

Mystical curses, however, I can talk about.

I was the target of a voodoo curse in Brazil, where a spider fatally bit my dog and the tile came crashing off the kitchen wall in the middle of the night.

A person with less experience might ascribe those incidents to the nature of Brazilian spiders and bad construction work. But the local interpretation was a lot more interesting and definitely made for better dinner stories.

And what does a Jewish executive say about dining in an exclusive German club in Buenos Aires with the descendants of Germans who were trapped in South America midway through World War II?

Where does sharing beer with Henry Ford II and an old fisherman one hot afternoon on a tiny isolated island in the Caribbean fit into a business history?

Sometimes, it felt as though I were cast in the role of the lead actor in a movie.

I have camped in the jungle, climbed magnificent mountains, and slept in an igloo in the Arctic with the sled dogs howling outside. One of my neighbors was kidnapped by terrorists, and somehow that led me to ponder whether it would be proper to make sandwiches for my bodyguard.

I went on a picnic in the wilds once with some South American cowboys, big, tough men who were tickled at the fact that we had brought along one of those crank-up record players so they could listen to dance music.

None of it happened in my office, but all of it was related to my work. I got to be an executive and an adventurer, too, a great privilege and an unusual combination in modern business.

I started out in a business world that was very narrowly defined by the economics and realities of mid-century America. I am finishing my formal career in a world in which boundaries are melting away and all the old assumptions about business are facing radical revision.

If I were reading this book, I would have one big question.

If I don't know how to do any of this stuff, how did I get to the top of so many different corporations? The cynic's conclusion would be that you don't need much going for you to run a business.

Wrong!

Of course it might have been better if I had taken a different course early in life, perhaps studying engineering and getting comfortable with computers as I worked my way up in my career. But I believe I was able to compensate for this abundant lack of technical skill by using a set of talents that are of great value to anyone who plans to run a company.

I am not afraid of work.

Bless my father for giving that to me. He started his business life when he was fourteen, and was proud of it.

These days in business, there are many views about what process, what strategy, a CEO might put into place to improve his situation. I have reached a surprising conclusion about that: It's still just about hard work, and it always has been.

An executive can put any idea he wants in place and it won't go anywhere unless he understands his primary mission is to get the people all around him to embrace that notion: It's all about hard work. Sometimes, people will lose sleep, miss meals, miss birthdays, miss just about everything, all in the interest of reaching a goal.

A CEO's obligation is to create the condition that encourages that kind of work, recognizing all the time that business, cut down to its most simple definition, is all about getting people to work well together to sell a product or a service.

I wrote my own career study a little over a year ago as I was preparing to leave United Airlines, and every time I look at it I reach the same conclusion.

My story is a collection of the success stories of other folks, the people I turned to for advice and counsel over the years. You take away great value from that kind of experience, not only the knowledge, but the pleasure of getting to know people who do their jobs well.

My experience carried me from the command and control style that was so dominant in business after World War II to the era of empowerment, individual responsibility, and creativity that is emerging as a new century begins.

What worked for me will work for managers in the twenty-first century, too. Keep an open mind. Learn how to ask the right questions. Surround yourself with people who know, befriend them, and recognize the value of what they have to offer.

My roots go back to Eastern Europe, Poland, and Ukraine, to Jewish communities that disappeared during World War II. The names of those places are still on the map, Lida and Shepetovka, but the people are long since gone, most of them victims of the Holocaust.

I know that is a common sadness for American Jews, that sense that their roots were clipped off and destroyed somewhere between 1939 and 1945. So my story starts where so many American business stories start, right here at home in the United States.

I was born in 1935 and raised in St. Louis, where my father, who had arrived in the U.S. from Ukraine at age fifteen, was in the wholesale chicken business. He bought the chickens from farmers and then sold them to retail stores. I went to a wonderful public school and lived the mid-century American teenager's life, full of good buddies and girlfriends, heartbreaks, hamburgers, and sports. There was never a lot of money around, so I earned my own. Because I studied hard, got good grades, and was good at sports, I had some impressive options when the time came for college.

I chose Princeton, although I had no idea what I wanted to be. I might have been a doctor. I might have been a diplomat. I might have been a labor leader. All of those fields were attractive to me, but mostly, I was experimenting, searching for something that felt right.

I had a lot of jobs at Princeton. I was a pro at setting dining hall tables. My specialty was the left-handed fork. My friends and I had worked out a system in which each worker had a specialty and the tables were set with a regimentation and efficiency that would have impressed even the British army, with the placement of that fork being my job. Nine students cleaned and set a dining hall for 250 in twenty-four minutes flat!

For a time, I felt a little out of place, the Jewish kid from St. Louis public school surrounded by a lot of academic prep school heavyweights, some of whom came from lots of old money. But I eventually met my crew, track jocks mostly, like me, and found my way of fitting in.

Starting my junior year, I was in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and later graduated from Princeton with honors.

My friends and family were surprised when I announced I would be going to work for Ford Motor in 1957. Because of Ford's background, particularly old Henry Ford's blatant anti-Semitism, the family worried whether it would be the right place for me. But I always thought prejudice was the other person's problem, and anyway, what could have been more promising than a $425 a month job in the Edsel division?

I thought it a princely sum at the time, and a job with a lot of opportunities.

The Edsel didn't last, but I did.

Copyright © 2001 by Gerald Greenwald

About the Author

Gerald Greenwald is a former chairman and CEO of United Airlines and former Chrysler Corporation vice-chairman. He has held top managerial positions at Ford Motor Company, Dillon Read, and Olympia & York.

Charles Madigan is a senior writer for the Chicago Tribune.