Here's a Q&A between CorporateHistory.net President Marian Calabro and Scott S. Smith, author of Extraordinary People: Real Life Lessons on What It Takes to Achieve Success.
Marian: You mentioned that many executives you’ve interviewed don’t read business books anymore. What’s going on?
Scott: One thing you learn
from reading history is that Americans used to read a lot—books, newspapers,
magazines—and it’s alarming how few currently read anything more substantial than
emails or Facebook posts. Executives tell me that they scan business stories,
but many I’ve interviewed can’t even name a business book they’ve recently read
because they’re too busy. Our national attention span is shortening to the
point that it really endangers society. A couple of decades ago I would get
5,000 word assignments; now, I’m really pushing the limit of readers’ interest
at 1,250 words in my columns about leadership and success for Investor’s Business Daily.
Marian: The crux of your
subject seems to be this: What do high-achievers have in common? Which of their
attitudes and actions can be emulated to help any career? Your book addresses this
in readably short chapters.
Scott: Yes, the chapters range
from 1,800
to 3,500 words, and I think part of the interest in these figures comes from
being able not just to learn useful lessons, but to gain an appreciation of
someone they’ve heard of, but don’t really know much about.
Marian: The book includes
both contemporary business leaders and famous people past and present in a wide
variety of fields. Why include someone like Founding Father Gouverneur Morris?
Most people don’t know who he was. Isn’t he far removed from today’s corporate
challenges?
Scott: I’ve really become
passionate about the importance of understanding American and world history—and
I include corporate history for employees. First, there’s a reason medical
doctors and other specialties have to get an undergraduate degree first: we
don’t want citizens with such narrow technical education that they have no
interest in the broader issues of society. Even those with advanced degrees
often lack much understanding of what’s happening beyond their own field.
Marian: On the other hand,
there has been a boomlet in the popularity of biographies, especially the
Founders.
Scott: Indeed. It’s only
when you really dig into our roots that you gain an awesome respect for what
they did. Yes, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, all of them, were imperfect
human beings, but that makes their achievement—the first enduring democracy in
history—even more impressive. One of the great ones was Morris, who essentially
wrote the Constitution. A successful democracy requires hard work from its
citizens—and anyone who thinks politics is hopelessly corrupt isn’t aware of
how many times the country has come back from the brink of what one party or
another thought was disaster. You have a choice—you can become informed and get
involved or you can let people who disagree with you have the advantage in the
outcome. History puts everything today in perspective and no matter what aspect
you want to study—last year’s annual report, the latest biography on Robert E.
Lee, or the proclamations of Cyrus the Great—you have your mind expanded. So
I’m on a mission to encourage people to read any kind of history—I think
they’ll get hooked.
Marian: Amen to that. Let’s
take someone else from the past, Simon Bolivar. What can leaders today learn
from him?
Scott: There are a couple of
reasons every American should know about him. First of all, he liberated six
countries: Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Bolivia, which is
named after him. As citizens of the world in a country with 17% of the
population that is Hispanic, we should know this. How would we feel if we went
to Latin America and the people we were doing business with had never heard of
George Washington? If you want to build rapport with your partners, you need to
know the basics of their culture, including their history. Second, Bolivar is
the absolute best example of someone who achieved great things against all odds
by always bouncing back after disaster. He also shows what can be accomplished
with boldness and imagination—his trek over the Andes in the middle of winter
remains the greatest military surprise in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
He was also an effective speaker and a writer, with public letters that were
widely read. He wasn’t great at speaking at first, but he learned, as anyone
can.
Marian: Lest people get the wrong impression, you
do write about a number of women.
Scott: A third are women and
I would have included more, but ran out of space—I’m saving them for a sequel!
One of my favorites is Martha Harper and almost no one has ever heard of her,
but she invented franchising. She was born poor and became a domestic servant.
Along the way, she learned about a special formula to make hair lush and dressed
the hair of the woman she worked for. She told her friends and soon she had a
thriving side business and opened the first beauty salon in Rochester, N.Y., in
1888. She realized she could help women become financially independent by
letting them copy her first salon and eventually she had 500 under franchise
terms.
Marian: So why haven’t we
heard of her?
Scott: I write a lot of
stories about leaders we should know, but our poor formal education and narrow
reading habits deprive us of their inspiration. I come away from every profile
just amazed at what I’ve learned. The bigger questions that are related are,
why do most startups fail and why are most companies so poorly run, if we
really know so much about good management? Within 10 years of opening, over 90%
of businesses close. I think everyone who is a line employee or middle manager
is painfully aware that corporate priorities are not really them or the
customers—just look at the pay and perks for top management.
Marian: Jim Collins and
others have written books on the difference between the No. 1 and the No. 2 companies
in different industries. The difference rarely involves better technical
skills. It comes down to the corporate culture.
Scott: Yes—there has to be a deeply embedded belief that the
company has an important mission, and everyone has to be completely dedicated
to that. It helps to look at the great companies of the past because you can
learn from their example. I’d say it actually is better to look at those
outside your industry because familiarity blinds us.
Marian: One of the recent
top CEOs in your book is Reed Hastings of Netflix. What did you learn from him?
Scott: It’s easy to forget,
with its recent success, that not long ago Netflix almost got killed by one of
his strategic decisions. I talked with him in 2009 and by July of the next year
the stock had hit $305. Then he announced in a blog that he was spinning off
the DVD mail order service from the movie streaming business and customers
would need to pay for separate subscriptions. By November, the stock was at
$64. His blog got 39,000 comments, compared with the next most-discussed post
that had 200. Over 800,000 cancelled their subscriptions. Few CEOs would
survive that kind of disaster, but Netflix is thriving again. He is a great
example of being able to recover by being genuinely humble and learning from
mistakes. Even more interestingly, Netflix has an almost unique culture in
which corporate employees—not those working at call centers—have a very
flexible schedule. As long as they meet their goals, they can take as much
personal or vacation time as they want.
Marian: Nice. Of course,
it’s August and most of our counterparts in Europe are taking the whole month
off, fully paid. But here we are in the United States, working. One last
question: Why do a few leaders, who are otherwise successful, seem to sabotage
themselves? Often they threaten their company’s success along the way.
Scott: Watching HBO’s recent
series In Treatment can illuminate
that point, as you see really smart people with big blinders fail to come to
grips with their problems. You wonder why they can’t see themselves more
objectively—as if we, the viewers, can really see ourselves. So biography and
history let us see how someone great dealt with challenges—the enduring human,
political, or business problems. We need inspirational role models and
information to help us see our own situations more objectively and imagine better
solutions.
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