Dynamic, controlling, masters of their own economic and personal fates;
inhabitants of a world shaped to their very own liking by their very
own despotic hand. Does this sound like the business owners you know?
According to conventional thinking, it’s what entrepreneurs typically
look like: people who arrange their lives exactly the way they want
them, just because they can. But Lanny Goodman of Management
Technologies knows better. And, probably, so do you.
Over
the course of 25 years, Goodman has owned more than a few small
businesses himself – working as a jeweller, a sail maker, and a
personality profiler – and for the past 15 years he’s played consultant
to company builders who have discovered what he himself learned all too
painfully through his own personal experience: a business is a
demanding, heartless thing, and it can steal your life. It can steal
your life, that is, if you let it. And how not to let it is what Goodman
teaches.
We
met Goodman on the conference circuit where he is one of those rare
instructors everybody ends up talking about during breaks around the
coffee station – where, not infrequently, CEOs succeed at cornering the
man himself for an ardent, on-demand seminar. Even in a crowded
hallway, Goodman isn’t hard to spot. Now 49, he’s six and a half lanky
feet tall (give or take), with jar-lid spectacles, a ponytail 12 inches
down his back, and a pocket full of his own herbal tea bags for just
such impromptu occasions. He’s a missionary, so it’s not tough getting
him to talk.
His management specialty is strategic planning, but what attracts and provokes the business owners who hear him is a single
principle, his bedrock belief: “The sole reason for your company to exist is to meet your needs.” Your needs. Founders in his audiences
react as though they’ve been slapped. What does he mean?
What
Goodman means isn’t quite as plain as it sounds. Based on his intuition
and his experience – both as a company builder and as a long-time
advisor to companies he has determined that nothing nourishes a company
so much as aligning its business aims with its owner’s personal ones.
And, conversely, that nothing starves a company like keeping those aims
at odds. So he proposes a disciplined strategic-planning process that
starts with personal strategic planning – something that business
owners, he claims, are uniquely positioned to do. Unlike wage earners,
business owners can ask – and
get to act on the answers to – four basic questions: What do I need and
want out of life? How can my company help me accomplish that? What
would such a company look like? And how do we get it to look like that?
Those questions drive the process Goodman leads his
CEO clients through, a process usually commencing with two days in
Goodman’s ochre-and-sage coloured, adobe-walled offices in Albuquerque.
Although it’s possible to map out an organization’s future in a
concrete, methodical way, Goodman says that it’s the very first – and
seemingly most obvious – step that company builders don’t get. It is
when they master the art of what Goodman calls “creative selfishness”
that company builders can get on with the business of building a
company. Inc. executive editor Michael Hopkins spoke with Goodman at his offices.
Inc:
You’ve said that the sole reason for an entrepreneur to own a business
is to satisfy his or her own needs. Is that news? Aren’t these people
already better than most at taking care of their own interests?
Goodman: Absolutely not. They’re horrible at
it. Listen to what they say even if they do think they have conscious
plans and goals: “I want to grow 10% a year.” “I want to take the
company to the next level.” Who cares? Explain to me why that matters.
Ask most CEOs for that kind of explanation, and they can’t give you one.
Inc: What do they say?
Goodman:
Too often, nothing. By the time a company gets past start-up and
establishes that it can survive, most founders are so used to being
reactive that it doesn’t occur to them to reflect on their own.
Conventional wisdom would have us believe that the company has a life
of its own and we’re all there to serve it. I don’t buy that argument,
but that’s how we’re taught. We’re taught to be good soldiers – to
serve others and sacrifice ourselves. I say poppycock: it’s a bad
model. When you assume a company has an independent life of its own you
too easily fall into the trap of dedicating yourself to the blind
pursuit of sales or market share or some other manifestation of
“progress” without ever stopping to ask the question, Why?
Inc: But in some very concrete and
overwhelming ways a business does have a life of its own. There are
employees, investors, customers, and a local community that the company
is a part of – a whole range of people who have a stake in your company
and want something from it, which means from you. Doesn’t a founder
have an obligation to them?
Goodman:
Yes, but the founder’s first obligation is to himself or herself. Part
of what people don’t’ get is that if that obligation isn’t satisfied,
none of the others can be satisfied, either. Not really. Not over time.
But even before considering the consequences for others, what’s wrong
with thinking about what we
get out of the businesses we start? If it’s my ball and bat, it’s my
game. And if I’m not getting my needs met, I’m going to take my ball
and bat and I’m going to go home.
Inc: We’ve heard CEOs say those very words. You think they don’t mean them?
Goodman:
I don’t think they say them seriously. And they certainly don’t act on
them. In one way, entrepreneurs are no different from the rest of us:
we all get lost in the most mundane things. We lose the perspective of
who we are, of what our true basic nature is. And that causes
suffering. It’s tragic that our entrepreneurs – the people who put
their butts on the line every day, the people who have the
intelligence, drive, ambition, commitment, and courage – should wake up
in morning and realize that they’ve created a monster that’s devouring
their life. To have that person really take a step back and ask the
questions, Why am I here? what am I really trying to accomplish? How
can this business I’ve built help me accomplish that? The logic of
doing that is so clear and so compelling to people who find themselves
at that crisis point. It’s very easy for them to say “Yeah, I get that.
I’ve really been focused on the wrong thing. I’ve been focused on this
business instead of on my life and what I want it to be.”
Inc: So a by-product of not taking care of your own interests is that
you’re likely to wake up one morning and discover that you’ve created a monster that devours your life.
Goodman: Oh, absolutely,
and that discovery is so important.
Inc: In spite of the suffering it causes?
Goodman: It
isn’t the discovery that causes the suffering. It’s losing your way
that causes suffering. I had a client call me up one day in tears. She
runs a temp business that’s quite successful, and she said, “Every time
somebody comes in and asks me a question, I burst into tears. I can’t
make a decision. I lie awake at night.” I said, “This is fabulous.” She
was stunned into silence. So I said, “Look, you can count on one hand
the number of times in your life you’ll be at a crossroads like this.
And you’ll learn things from this experience that you can’t learn any
other way. It’s not fun but it’s incredibly productive if you’ll
embrace this. This is one of the really special times in your life. The
work is in renegotiating your relationships with your values, your
shoulds and ought-tos, and learning to recalibrate your life around your needs.
Inc: Yes, but when you’re starting a business, does it really fit to say, “My needs and legitimate interests are primary
and ought to be served first and foremost”?
Goodman:
Absolutely, I learned that way back in my first business. My partner
was older and used to say to me, “You know, we have to take care of
ourselves. Because if we go down, then our customers are going to say,
‘You know, Herb and Lanny were nice guys, but who’s going to do my
work?’” And that’s exactly what would happen. This notion that the
customer is everything is the worst kind of hogwash. Business is to
fulfill the needs of the shareholders, and not just the financial
needs. And we do that by taking very good care of our customers and
creating lots of opportunities for our employers.
Inc:
So you’d advise the company builder to fight the urge to do what he or
she thinks ought to be done and instead focus on making sure this
bilateral process is working?
Goodman:
There needs to be recalibrating from shoulds and ought-tos to our own
fundamental needs, what I call the art of creative selfishness. If you
look at the dynamics of all relationships, personal or professional,
they are vital and durable only when everyone’s legitimate interests
are satisfied. If I don’t know what my needs are at a deep personal
level and I don’t know how to build a track to the fulfillment of those
needs, then I cannot have a healthy relationship with my business. It
becomes at some level pathological and puts the relationship at risk.
The underlying importance of creative selfishness is that we honour our
own integrity and recognize that our ability to give is directly
proportional to our commitment to receive. Unless we maintain a balance
in those things, then we cannot serve at bigger and higher levels.
Inc: I understand that conceptually, but how
does it play out in the real world?
Goodman:
If you ask most entrepreneurs what they want to do with their
businesses, most will tell you that they want to build them up and sell
them. If you ask why, they’ll tell you it’s because they can’t stand
the daily hassles and the financial risk of having so many eggs in one
basket. Both of those problems can be solved with some planning. If
your company is supporting you in having a great life, why on earth
would you want to sell it?
Inc: This is business building on a very personal level.
Goodman: It’s a mistake to think that owning your own business can be anything but
personal. That’s both the curse and the blessing of the entrepreneurial
company – there’s no place to hide. When you look at your company,
you’re going to see a reflection of yourself. Clarity, coherence, and
focus are critical in the marketplace and in relationships. When you
wring the ambiguities out of the system and all the people involved are
clear about who they are and what they want to accomplish, to the
degree that that’s possible, it makes for much healthier relationships
and a much more vital and energetic company. When your company doesn’t
fulfill your needs first and balance the customers’ or employees’ needs
with them, everything unravels. Either the business will just fall
apart or you’ll wind up with this sick, codependent, very toxic
environment. The company won’t support your life on any level. And if
it’s not life supporting, why bother? There are so many other ways to
make a living in this world.
Inc: Let’s go back to that world where the
business owner has the bat and ball. How do we reconcile the owner’s
interests, needs, and wants with the legitimate interests of all the
other constituencies that are necessary to make the business really
work? Don’t they all need to be in alignment? Doesn’t there have to be
compromise?
Goodman:
Of course, absolutely. And the process is coming to the table and
saying, “I’m the entrepreneur. Look, I’ve got some legitimate interests
here,” and you as an employer say, “Well, I have my own interests.”
Then we put our heads together and figure out how to make our interests
converge. Think about it. You do this every time you have a salary
review or a career-planning discussion, and it’s implicit in every
strategic-planning meeting. If those interests can’t be made to
converge, then you have to look the employee in the eye and say, “We
don’t have a good relationship here. It’s time for you to go do
something else, and I’ll find somebody who is going in the same
direction as I am.” And we can do that respectfully and with mutual
concern and support for each other’s transition. Because the issue for
the entrepreneur ultimately boils down to leverage. How do I leverage
myself?
Inc:
What do you say to somebody who comes back to you and says, “I don’t
have the choices you think I have. I can’t act on my own real
self-interest because I have almost a moral obligation to care for all
these other constituencies out there. And they are just too powerful;
there are too many of them.” Are you suggesting that unless you care
about your own self-interest at least as much as you do about all the
others in your business relationships, that what you’re doing won’t
work?
Goodman:
A year or so ago, a client asked me to come out and spend a day with
him, meeting his people and seeing his business, and then give him my
thoughts on what he might do to make things better. Over lunch I heard
him say (for the third time that day), “Well, I chose not to take on
that battle.” I stopped him and said, “Let’s get something clear. It’s
not OK for your business to be unresponsive to your needs. It’s not OK
to be doing battle with your business over those things that you feel
strongly about. It’s your business. If it’s not responsive to your
needs, whose needs should it be responsive to?” Not being clear about
your needs puts your relationship with your business at risk,
absolutely. If you don’t know how to treat yourself like a customer,
then you don’t know how to take care of your own legitimate interests.
You don’t know how to look a client in the eye and say, “No, I can’t
meet with you Tuesday because I have a strategic-planning meeting.” And
I’ll tell you something. Your customers will respect you when they see
clearly that you’re taking care of your own business. In fact, that
will give them the confidence that you’re serious about being in it for
the long haul and taking care of them. Relationships work only when
there is a mutual fulfillment of needs.
Inc:
So you’re suggesting that a huge factor in creating a successful
enterprise rests in discovering the magic formula for pleasing all the
people all the time, including yourself?
Goodman:
The real job of leading an enterprise is understanding what those
legitimate interests are and creating a system by which, to the
greatest degree possible, everybody’s legitimate interests get
satisfied. That’s how you create alignment. That’s how you create
coherence and vitality. And that’s how you create an enterprise that’s
going to be consistently successful for the long haul. Now, in that
context where is there room for the CEO or the owner of the company to
say, “Well, I should sacrifice myself at the altar of this business so
that everybody else can get their legitimate needs satisfied”? Where
does that fit in? It doesn’t.
Inc: But doesn’t that slow down the
growth of your company?
Goodman: Look,
I think the opportunity that exists for entrepreneurs, more than
anything else, is to create really human environments. Because in the
final analysis, a sense of meaning is so much more important than just
money. Ultimately, it puts us in a position where we are better able to
serve. Because when we are emotionally bankrupt by virtue of having
burned ourselves out, then we have nothing to give. On the other hand,
when our hearts are full, our lives are full, we’ve learned to leverage
ourselves, and we’ve learned to exercise the highest capabilities that
we have as human beings, then we can give at such bigger, more powerful
levels. And that is the ultimate reward.
Inc:
But just how realistic is it for an entrepreneur, yoked to the goal of
fast growth, to be able to step back and reflect on whether everyone’s
interests are aligned? Isn’t it excruciatingly difficult to step off
the growth path for such reflection and then expect to be able to hop
back on?
Goodman:
Your question misses the point. That is precisely how you create fast
growth. And it’s hard. So what? What else are you doing that’s so
important? Also, I don’t buy this notion of either grow or die. There
are times when that’s true, but most of the time it’s not. We lose
sight of the fact that we live better than the pharaohs. Does it really
matter if we make $1 million, $5 million, or $50 million? So the real
question is, again, how can I create a life that I will look back on as
an incredible shining adventure, and how can the business be a vehicle
to help me accomplish that?
Source: INC Magazine, January 1999
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