Winning: The Answers: Confronting 74 of the Toughest Questions in Business Today (18 page)

T
here will always be office politics, but it goes too far to think that big business is “riddled” with it. Plenty of companies all over the world—winning companies—do everything in their power to get rid of it every day. In fact, they’re
desperate
to. Why? Because every manager with a brain in his or her head knows that you win when the best performers—not the people who “posture in the right way”—get heard and get ahead. You don’t think Microsoft grew into the most successful computer company in the world with a bunch of sycophantic dopes on the senior management team, do you? Or that Procter & Gamble reinvigorated its approach to innovation because it promoted a bunch of empty-headed rear-end kissers? No way. These companies, and thousands upon thousands like them, deliver results because they are meritocracies, where brains and sweat matter more than who had cocktails with the boss last week.

Office politics, in our experience, is mainly the province of just three types of employees. The first is boss haters. These are the perpetually disaffected individuals in most every organization who have a congenital disdain for authority. It’s just part of their constitution. They go to work every day
looking
for palace intrigue, and part of that campaign is muttering away that some unworthy dunderhead got ahead because of “connections.” The second type is underperformers, who use office politics to explain away their own shortcomings. They deserved the promotion, but Mary got it because she went to school with the boss’s brother, and that kind of thing. And the third type is people who are underutilized—the bored. As the old saying goes, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Idle brains too.

Given the people behind office politics, it is easy to see why it mainly affects lousy companies. Good companies work ardently to root these types of people out, or to get them back on course. That doesn’t mean they succeed completely, but they never stop trying.

W
henever we get this question, a strong image comes to mind. It’s of a friend of ours who was encouraged (she would say, “shoved”) by her parents—back in the 1970s—to become a doctor. At the time, getting a medical degree was like winning the lottery, but with a lot more respect attached. So, our friend went along with the plan. Her parents cheered; she soldiered on.

Fast-forward to the present. Our friend is taking photographs for a living—joyfully, we might add. She ditched her twenty-year career as a neurologist at age forty-five with the words “Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don’t love.”

That’s what we would advise you to tell your grandchildren.

Now, we realize that every era has its next big thing. In the 1970s, college kids were pressed to study geology, to capitalize on the growing number of opportunities in oil and gas exploration. In the ’80s, investment banking and consulting were the gold mines of the future, and in the ’90s, the collective mantra was, “Go Internet, young man.” All in all, not bad stuff. The oil and gas industries continue to flourish. Investment banking and consulting continue to expand, making a lot of people fortunes. And the Internet, after enduring a period of bust, is strong and getting stronger.

Today, all arrows point toward the biotech, nanotech, and information technology industries, and the convergence among them. That’s where the growth and greatest excitement will likely be over the next decades.

But that data matters only if your grandchildren happen to like science or technology so much that they just can’t learn enough about either or both.

If they don’t, they should follow our friend’s well-earned counsel: the only career worth pursuing is the one that turns your crank.

So, by all means, mention the next big thing to your grandkids, but tell them with more gusto that they should do what they love. Tell them to grab on to the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy.

And that, obviously, would be happiness.

I
t’s nonsense, of course, because it’s just not the way business usually works, nor should it be.

Now, obviously you’re not going to sit around wishing your competitors well. All tough-minded businesspeople want to win—they want the most sales, the biggest market share, the highest profit margins, and so on.

But tough-minded businesspeople also realize that competitors, for all their aggravation, serve a purpose. They sharpen your focus. They keep you fierce and hungry. And the best of them raise the bar on every aspect of performance, from innovation to delivery.

Without competition, companies usually get fat and lazy. Case in point: all the bureaucratic monopolies out there that have foundered, largely due to the self-satisfaction and arrogance that came with achieving the very success they were after.

So, look, you may not want your competitors to win, but unlike Genghis, you want them around. It’s good for customers, it’s good for you (albeit sometimes painful), and it’s good for business overall.

Now, taking the quote to the individual level—again, wrong, even for the most ambitious among us. We’re not going to deny that schadenfreude exists; it’s human nature to feel a small twinge of relief (or worse, happiness) when a colleague screws up. But the most successful people fight that instinct with everything in them. They know that someone else’s candle going out, as the old saying goes, doesn’t make their candle burn any brighter. It just makes the whole room darker.

The best thing that can happen at work—and in life—is to be surrounded by people who are smart and good. As with tough competitors, you learn from them and improve because of them. When they do well, so do you, either by their example or by being part of their team.

So maybe Mr. Khan was onto something eight hundred years ago, fighting other warlords on the Mongolian plain, but in today’s world, mogul or not, his advice seems ready to retire.

W
hat a question! It has to mean you see winning in purely economic terms. That’s just not how it has to be.

We think about winning another way—as setting personal goals and achieving them, and (as important) enjoying the experience on the way. Winning has nothing—or everything—to do with your job. Yes, you can win as a corporate executive, but you can win just as meaningfully as a carpenter, math teacher, or singer in a wedding band. You can win raising a family, caring for your parents, or being a good friend—as long as those are the dreams you picked for yourself. Indeed, the biggest winners in the world are those who answer yes to the question, “Am I living the life I choose?”

One of the biggest winners we know is a person who by your economic definition would probably not qualify at all. Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School. But instead of pursuing a prestigious and lucrative career, he has spent the past twenty-two years driving a van around Boston practically every night, delivering medical care to the homeless. He lives simply; money doesn’t matter to him. And yet Jim’s life is full of joy, and he is beloved by everyone lucky enough to know him, from street people to senators.

Look, winning and losing can’t be quantified. They are states of mind, and losing happens only when you give up. Seen that way, then, the world can be filled with winners, and there is room for them all.

W
e have heard this question increasingly in recent months, but perhaps with the most fervor by the high school student who posed it the way you see it here, with the added remark, “You claim business is good for society—but Wal-Mart destroys it.”

Destroys it? No way.

Look, Wal-Mart is a great company. Maybe that’s politically incorrect to say today, but it’s absolutely true. Wal-Mart helps individuals, communities, and whole economies prosper.

Yes, Wal-Mart is huge and getting more so. Yes, its business model is threatening to competitors, and its purchasing power frightening to suppliers. But all that doesn’t make Wal-Mart
bad
. It just makes Wal-Mart a big fat target for critics who, for reasons of their own, won’t acknowledge the many ways Wal-Mart improves lives.

Take individuals. First and most obviously, Wal-Mart’s prices have a massive positive impact on the quality of life of millions of consumers. No other retailer offers so many good products for so little, from groceries, to school supplies, to medicine, to home furnishings. And in doing so, Wal-Mart helps keep household expenses low in a way that no social or government program could even attempt.

In addition, Wal-Mart helps individuals in a more long-term and exciting way. It provides its employees with tremendous access to upward mobility, even those with modest educational credentials. The organization is filled with stories of employees who started on the floor or as cashiers and worked their way up to management positions. And with Wal-Mart’s international growth, you are now seeing career paths that can start in merchandising in Texas, move to logistics in Arkansas, and end up in divisional leadership positions in Europe and Asia. Only the military comes close to Wal-Mart when it comes to providing training and opportunity for individuals who have no other way to break out of a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle and into a whole new world of possibility.

Wal-Mart’s low prices and its large workforce, of course, have a cumulative effect on the local and national economies where the company operates. Low prices keep inflation down, while the employees’ purchasing power keeps demand high.

This is evil?

Now, there are critics who assert that Wal-Mart undermines America’s economy by making it impossible for small businesses to get off the ground, let alone survive. But that claim just doesn’t make sense. As a competitor, Wal-Mart really goes nowhere near the technology startups that are the lifeblood of the American economy—the burgeoning little technology ventures in Silicon Valley, the futuristic biotech labs in Boston and California, the innovative Internet “plays” popping up everywhere. As for more traditional start-ups—the kinds making products—if anything, they can be helped by Wal-Mart, which has shown it will give a chance to entrepreneurs gutsy enough to play their game. We know, for instance, of a Miami businesswoman, Tam Tran, who bootstrapped Anise Cosmetics, a nail polish and treatment company, but was able to jumpstart it into a national success
because
Wal-Mart had the resources and insight to take a chance on her unique product line. Two executives from the company helped Tam formulate a new marketing message and improve her packaging before launching her products in 1,400 Wal-Mart stores. “They were creative and proactive with me,” she wrote us not long ago. “No other retailer took the time to even consider us. They were fair and most professional.”

OK, so maybe Wal-Mart doesn’t annihilate entrepreneurs. But as other critics claim, what about communities? Doesn’t Wal-Mart wipe out mom-and-pop stores—the little pharmacies, hardware, furniture, and grocery stores—which took much better care of customers and employees?

Alas, this line of thinking is a case of nostalgia for a time that never was.

Yes, Wal-Mart has meant the end of many local stores, and yes, at some of them, customers might have been greeted by name when they walked in the door. But it was these same customers who
chose
to shop at Wal-Mart when it came to town, because low prices, apparently, meant more to their quality of life than a wave and a smile. No conspiracy; just the free market at work.

As for better-cared-for employees—nonsense. In most small towns, the store owner was the one who drove the best car, lived in the fanciest house, and belonged to the local country club. Meanwhile, his employees weren’t exactly sharing the wealth. They rarely had life insurance or health benefits, and they certainly did not receive much in the way of training or big salaries. And few of these store owners had plans for growth or expansion; their lives were pretty nicely set. That was good for them but a killer for any employees seeking life-changing careers.

Critics also lambaste Wal-Mart for being brutal to its suppliers. It’s hard to negotiate, they say, with the company that “owns” the channel. Be it swing sets or beef jerky, you sell to Wal-Mart on its terms, or you don’t sell at all.

We’d say this is pretty true. Wal-Mart’s huge market share gives it substantial leverage over its suppliers. But in decades of negotiating with them at General Electric, for example, Wal-Mart buyers were never unethical or unfair. They were just tough. GE won plenty of negotiations with Wal-Mart and lost a few. But losing had its upside. It forced GE to look inside itself to see how it could do
its
job better—to lower its manufacturing costs, for instance, or to be more flexible in how a product was designed or packaged.

Ultimately, prices stayed low and the customer won. And that is what drives Wal-Mart—keeping its customers satisfied—and why it keeps increasing its sales and profits.

Yes, there will be casualties because of Wal-Mart’s success. Some competitors will certainly fold to its business model, and some jobs will be lost in the process. But in that way, Wal-Mart is no different from Toyota in the automotive industry. When Toyota arrived in the 1970s, it too was accused of upsetting the status quo. Decades have passed, and most people now accept that Toyota simply had a better way of doing business. Its value proposition to consumers raised the standards of the entire industry, requiring many car companies that had lost their manufacturing and design edge to wake up, reinvent their ways, and start making better cars for a lot less.

Toyota was a change agent, and as such, has done more for society than any failing company.

And that’s the Wal-Mart story too. It’s a great company that helps consumers and employees win and grow, and as long as it does, it will too—deservedly so.