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"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

Driven to Win

(Pages 51-56)

"The only sustainable competitive advantage is speed."
Jack Shewmaker, Director of Wal-Mart Stores and Retired President

On a late spring day in 1973, I sat down in the quiet of my usually noisy living room and tuned in to the Belmont Stakes. My wife and five kids were out and about, and I took a break from my usual Saturday workload to watch Secretariat take a rare shot at winning the Triple Crown. What I saw left a permanent mark on my psyche.

It was one thing to recognize the moment that Big Red seemed to cement his claim to the title-somewhere on the backstretch, as he neared the top curve of the track-but it was quite another to see what happened next. With his competition no longer relevant, the horse turned his ambition loose. Chills washed through my body and the hair on my arms stood on end as I saw this wondrous animal push himself to be the best. It seemed like his strength tripled and his speed quadrupled. What was more astonishing, though, is that this intensity did not come from any external threat, but rather from some hidden, internal desire to simply be the best.

The sheer magnificence of those two minutes and twentyfour seconds overwhelmed me. The thrill and excitement of seeing such an exhibition of excellence kicked off an emotional chain-reaction that moved me greatly. I was deeply struck with humility, at once recognizing that my own habits and disciplines could never measure up to the greatness I had just witnessed.

In reality, it is easy to say that you embrace Socrates' wisdom that you "know nothing," but it is quite another to feel as humble as I did in those moments. As I stood to leave the room, my reeling mind centered itself on renewed commitments. I suddenly knew that the battles I fought were not against my competitors, but against myself. For the sake of my family and my team at Manco, I knew that I had to set new and higher expectations of myself as a leader. And I knew that the only way to achieve those expectations would be to invest in my responsibility as a student so that I could learn and relearn the lessons leading to greatness. I made a choice right then to always pursue my personal best. I made a choice to let my passion for success lead my decisions. I made a choice to lead with my heart.

A long time later, well after Secretariat had died, I heard that a necropsy discovered he had the biggest heart ever measured in a horse. It had nearly twice the capacity of a typical racehorse's heart, able to pump more blood through his oxygen-thirsty body than that of any other horse. What a fitting find! Secretariat simply had the heart to win.

I suppose many effective leaders find fuel for their desire to win through a focus on external competitors, but those who rely on external fuel walk a fine line. Preoccupation with outsiders can feed negative emotions and create bad habits. While anger, jealousy, fear, and other emotions can sometimes provide useful incentives, at high doses they can be dangerous to the health of a leader's organization. Such negative emotions can cause clouded, irrational judgments. They can impair character and cause egocentric decisions. They may foster a win-at-all-costs mentality, which can, ultimately, harm the integrity of the organization.

Truly great leaders compete against themselves. Their ambition springs from their desire to be the best-not necessarily the biggest, and not necessarily the most victorious, but the best. I'm not suggesting that a leader should ignore his or her competitors. In fact, a great leader must study and scrutinize the competition. However, when it comes to defining your team's capabilities and challenging the organization to succeed, you will do yourself a disservice if you build your vision around the other guy. President Kennedy's goal might have been to set a Cold War standard by making America the first country to visit the moon, but the nation's motivation to achieve that goal came from within. It came from the inner drive to achieve our collective potential. Beating the Soviets was just a by-product of realizing the greatness inside of us.

Sam Walton once said, "Commit to your business . . . I think I overcame my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work." Vince Lombardi, one of the greatest football coaches of all time, had much to say about passion and commitment. He claimed, "Battles are primarily won in the hearts of men." He also said, "Winning isn't everything. The desire to win is everything. In fact, it's the only thing." These great leaders knew that competitive passion is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Take yet another look at Capt. Michael McKean's definition of leadership. He says a leader has "a boundless energy to put learning into practice." Energy, drive, heart, passion-it is all the same thing. At Manco, we hung signs with the words of these men high on our walls so that we would never forget that the drive to succeed comes from the inside.

But drive is not just about thoughts and words; drive is transferred to a team through sheer feeling. A leader can't just say that he or she is passionate, and ask the team to come along; a leader must light the team's fire and compel them to engage their own ambition. I remember lighting the fire in one of Manco's young marketing partners just about the time our retail business began to accelerate. Back in the mid-eighties Bill Nicholson was running our Graphics Department-in fact, he was our Graphics Department! He worked from an old drafting board and a drawer full of art supplies. Bill came to me one day and told me he was struggling. He explained that he had dyslexia, and that his poor reading, writing, and spelling skills were causing him to question his talent and lose confidence in himself. As a former Eagle Scout, Bill wasn't satisfied with second best, so he reached out to me for help. He came to me not out of shame, but with the trust that I could help him succeed. I told him not to worry about bad spelling-that's why they invented spell-check. I told Bill to forget about his challenges, emphasize his strengths, and to only worry about developing his great skills.

He soon came back to me with a proposal to buy a new tool-an Apple Macintosh computer-so that he could bring a new kind of speed and quality to our design efforts. Bill saw the worth of a relatively new technology and how it could help him keep up with the hustle of our sales and marketing teams. He fought our CFO-there was no way to justify the investment financially-but with my support he got his wish. For weeks, he stayed at the office until midnight or later learning how to use that thing. Over the next ten years, Bill built a team of artists, with a slew of computers, into a crucial center of competence for our business. Bill eventually turned the reins of that department over to someone he had hired, someone he knew could do the job even better and take it further than he had. Then he went on to blaze trails for the company in the realms of photography and video production.

Our speed of packaging design, from concept to final art, was critical to the "time trial" product testing we conducted in retail stores. I remember one situation in particular when we got a phone call from a Wal-Mart buyer who gave us an idea. Ninety minutes later we e-mailed him concept images and were on the phone talking about the opportunity. We got a $1.5 million order because of that speed. And all of it began with that investment in Bill's talent. With that passionate investment in one man, Manco got an annuity of A+ effort in return.

When Sam Walton died in April 1992, I made the somber trek to Bentonville, Arkansas, to honor his family and memory. Early on the morning of his funeral, I filled a cup with coffee in the hotel lobby and turned to leave for the church. A man, whose big, strong body stood in contrast to the emptiness impressed upon his wrinkled face by grief, caught my eye. He was wearing a Wal-Mart badge.

I walked over to him and introduced myself and asked if he worked at Wal-Mart. He told me that he did not-as it turned out, he had never been to Wal-Mart. But he knew Mr. Sam well, for he had run Sam's hunting camp for more than twenty years. His name was Walter Sheil, and he quickly warmed to a conversation about his late friend.

Walter told me that he didn't know Sam as a businessman, just as a friend and hunter. Just as a man at play. I asked him about that, about how he would describe Sam's essence from knowing him on those intimate terms. He bit his lip and his great wrinkles deepened across his forehead. He thought for a minute, then said, "Sam asked for 110 percent all the time, and he gave you back 120 percent."

After our brief chat, I thanked Walter and asked him if I could use his comments in a eulogy I'd planned to write in Sam's memory. He said that was fine, and we wished each other well. As I neared my rental car in the parking lot, I heard Sheil's voice booming behind me.

"Mr. Kahl! Wait!"

I turned to see the big cowboy lumbering toward me.

"If you're gonna write this down, I want you to get it straight," he said. "Mr. Sam didn't ask for 110 percent. He demanded it. And then he still gave you back 120 percent."

It's one thing for a leader to be driven, but it's quite another to transfer that energy to the team and expect everyone to be the best they can be. People who knew and worked with Sam always say two things about the man: He was tough, but fair; and he drove them to achieve more than they thought they could.

People need to know-clearly and unequivocally-where you, as their leader, stand. Peter Drucker said that a leader is "a monomaniac on a mission." Don't be afraid to let the "maniac" out of the closet and get passionate about your business. Sure, you might ruffle some feathers if you get mad and scream and shout now and then, but you are just as likely to find that your best people will absorb your passion and energy and convert it into action and performance. Remember that the buck stops with you, and that few people will care about success as much as you do.