Book Reviews and Testimonials Read Excerpts From the Book Letters Between Jack & Sam Walton Summary of Quotations Found in the Book Buy the Book

"You did a marvelous job of integrating the elements of leadership in demonstrating and explaining the synchronistic nature of servant leadership."
- Joe Hardin, Former CEO & President, Kinkos & Former CEO, Sam's Wholesale

About the Book
Leading From the Heart

Excerpts

Contents | The Choice to Lead | Driven to Win

The Choice to Lead

(Pages 1-5)

"It is high time the ideal of success should be replaced with the ideal of service."
Albert Einstein

What makes a great leader? The answer to that question is nothing less than the Holy Grail of the twenty-first century for leaders in business, politics, religion, sports, and the media alike. Thousands of books have been written on leadership already, and thousands more will follow. As the pace of our society quickens and the demand for real leadership grows, so does our need for knowledge that we can employ in our efforts to rise to the challenge.

From an academic view, leadership is a complex topic worthy of considerable discussion and debate. Leaders are forged in a cauldron of experience as the ores of personality, circumstance, and environment are melted, mixed, and fused. Leadership is a holistic property of personality, emerging from an immeasurable set of chaotic variables. Its birth is nonlinear -it does not follow clean, predictable patterns.

As an entrepreneur and a leader, I appreciate the complex phenomenon of leadership; but I've made a career of simplifying the complex, and I think the same can be done for this topic. Despite the seemingly infinite set of ways in which leaders step forth, I think the essence of what they do is very simple. Leadership is about achieving a goal through a team. To achieve a goal, a team needs help-help to gain resources and to remove obstacles. Leadership boils down to a choice-a choice to provide the help that the team needs in order to reach its goal. First and foremost, all leaders make that choice.

The choice to lead comes from an emotional commitment to the goal. No matter the degree of rational thought that developed the goal itself, in the end, the leader must emotionally believe that the goal is worth the effort, pain, and sacrifice such a journey requires. The leader must believe in the goal with his or her whole heart, for it is there, in the heart, where the choice to lead is made.

Jesus Christ said, "Many are called, but few are chosen." In the case of leadership we could say, many are called, but few choose. Many people study leadership, but too few dig deep inside themselves and make a choice to serve their team from the very heart of who they are. I hope this book will show you how important it is to do just that.

. . .

For nearly thirty years I was the owner and CEO of Manco, Inc., now Henkel Consumer Adhesives, North America. Over the course of my career I enjoyed good fortune and endured frightening challenges. I bought the tiny, industrial adhesive tape distributor in 1971, when its revenues were just $800,000. I was a poor kid from Cleveland's public housing neighborhood, selling insurance as my first job out of college; at the time, I was too scared to realize that just buying the company was an accomplishment in itself. When I retired from the company at the end of 2000, sales topped $300 million and those formative years as an industrial supplier were a distant memory. Our revenues came entirely from the consumer packaged goods arena, with adhesive tapes as the foundation of our success. Our talented team built the company around a wide variety of categories, including home weatherization products, mailing and shipping supplies, and kitchen and bath products such as shelfliners and bath mats.

Manco was (and, as part of Henkel, remains) a product sourcing, marketing, and distribution company with strong manufacturing partners behind it. Unencumbered by fixed investments, we were able to grow the company by listening to customers and reacting fluidly to the demands of an ever-changing market. We built partnerships with suppliers that excelled at manufacturing and product R&D, which allowed us to focus relentlessly on customer service. When we had money available to invest, we put it into strengthening our customer connections-our capital was in our people, not in machines. We hired the best and demanded the most. We rewarded success generously and forbade mediocrity. Listening to our customers and serving them with great care was Manco's competitive advantage, and it was our people who gave us the edge we needed.

Our flagship product became the Duck® brand of duct tape, which we introduced in the early 1980s. By the time I retired, Duck® Tape was the market leader, commanding more than 60 percent of the U.S. market. Duck® Tape is the ultimate household servant-it's the staple item in every toolbox. It can fix or extend the life of nearly anything you can imagine: rake handles, broomsticks, windowpanes, picture frames, model airplanes, dollhouses, you name it. We used to say Duck® Tape can "fix everything but a broken heart!" Duck® Tape is tough, tenacious, flexible, easy, fun-and it's not just a wonderful product, but a wonderful metaphor, too. It came to epitomize our corporate philosophy and culture. Duck® Tape held our world together.

Manco gained its foothold in consumer products in the late 1970s. We established a system of execution and built a strong base of business throughout the 1980s, ending the decade with revenues just over $50 million. We accelerated through the tumultuous 1990s, taking Manco as far as we could on our own. In 1998, we sold the company to a partner that brought the kind of resources and synergies that could maintain the growth of what had become a very large, global business.

Ours was truly a story of "David vs. Goliath." Our main competitor was 3M-a substantial and competent company with tremendous financial and human resources. 3M is a consumer products juggernaut-known for its innovative corporate culture and low-cost manufacturing excellence. While part of Manco's growth came from developing new products, new markets, and defeating other small companies, much of it came from chiseling market share away from 3M. Size didn't matter, but size of heart did. Our distinct advantage against 3M was the speed and passion of our people. We worked faster and harder than they did. Some might say we were more unconventional than our competition. Instead of management retreats and strategic planning meetings, our executives talked and planned in the hallways and bathrooms; instead of cautious, calculated secrecy, we shouted our intentions. Here and there we may have seemed smarter than 3M, but that was probably just luck. We learned to fix our mistakes faster; and our passion for success, coupled with fear for our survival, covered our deficiencies.

We lived like the gazelle in Aesop's fable, The Lion and the Gazelle, and wove the story into our own corporate mythology. The fable tells of a lion and a gazelle involved in a high-stakes game of survival. Each morning, the lion wakes up knowing he must run faster than the slowest gazelle in order to eat that day; meanwhile, a gazelle wakes up knowing she must run quicker than the fastest lion in order to live. Like the gazelle, we treated each and every day at Manco with the stakes of a life and death race.

Yet while our story is about a small company beating the odds, we learned our lessons from what is now the biggest company on Earth: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. And what we learned was this: with the right values and the right culture, any team can beat any other team, regardless of size.

(Pages 9-11)

As some high-priced consultants call it, Manco aggressively "benchmarked" other companies, and adopted what we viewed as the best practices-except, we didn't follow a formal process or rigid framework for evaluating ideas, as those consultants would say you must. We just saw things that worked and tried them out. We called it "stealing shamelessly," and we learned the most from the greatest retailer that has ever existed. Wal-Mart is the brightest of all U.S. retail stars, and Sam Walton's leadership style as the founder and champion of that company inspired me as we fought our way through the competitive jungle.

Wal-Mart's operating system, however, stimulated our entire company and pushed our team as hard as I, or any of our other Manco leaders, could have. Wal-Mart demanded excellence from its business partners and we responded. In my final year of leading the team, Manco became the first company to ever receive three Wal-Mart "Vendor of the Year" awards in a single year. I could not have invented a more remarkable culmination to an exhilarating career.

Since I first met him, I have been an unabashed student of Mr. Sam, of the many leaders that continue his tradition of excellence, and of the remarkable culture that has fueled the greatest corporate triumph of the late twentieth century. I learned so much from this man that there is no way I could write a book on any topic-about business, life, or both-that's not anchored in the bedrock of his success. In fact, I even adopted the idea of "stealing shamelessly" from Mr. Sam. He and I exchanged dozens of letters through the years, but I'll never forget one in particular that shows his humility and willingness to learn from others. He writes about his team's ability to try ideas that they found at work elsewhere:

Dear Jack:

I don't know when I have received a letter I have appreciated more than the one you sent me. You always do so well in expressing yourself, your convictions, and your philosophy. I still contend you give me more credit than I deserve. Wal-Mart, as you well know, has taken a lot of pages out of a lot of people's books and so many of our associates-our management team as well as our folks in the stores-have made such wonderful contributions through the years ...to have brought us to where we are....

Sincerely,

Sam Walton

. . .

This book is simply a summary of what I've learned along the way-from Mr. Sam and many others whom I have either met personally or studied from a distance. It is a collection of other people's wisdom, stolen shamelessly. While there is no single leadership gene, no silver bullet, and alas, no Holy Grail, there is a collection of experiences that can be studied, understood, and applied. Every leader-no matter the gender, style, or temperament-can learn from other leaders and embrace common principles of success.

I have patched the words and ideas of many great leaders together to form a quilt of knowledge, with my own experience as the stitching. I have tried to simplify the complex into the essential personality traits that I believe define leaders: they must be trustworthy; they are lifelong students; they are creative and driven to succeed; they are courageous and caring; they are disciplined; and ultimately, they are servants to their team. To be sure, the expression of these traits varies as widely as the number of leaders out there doing their job today, but whatever the manifestation, these traits capture the essence of what it takes to lead. That said, there is still one more thing that is needed for leadership to rise. More than four hundred years ago, William Shakespeare wrote, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em." His eloquence is indisputable, yet his definition is incomplete. No matter the greatness lurking inside a potential leader, nothing will come of it unless that person makes the choice to lead.

I'm proud to pass along the leadership lessons I have learned, but don't take my word for it. Eliminate the middleman and study the many references you'll find here. Charting your own path to discovery is where the adventure and the wisdom lives. As Johann Wolfgang Goethe said, "All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."