Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (11 page)

I wanted to really understand how a person has to think in order to win in any competitive arena, so after touring restaurants in Williamsburg, Virginia, I stopped in to see Bob Rotella at his house. Bob, one of the world’s leading sports psychologists and an expert on peak performance, really drove this point home: “If you think of yourself as able to do something, you probably will do it. If you think of yourself as incapable, you probably won’t.” But believing that you can
succeed is not the same thing as knowing exactly how you’re going to get there. It means having faith that you and your people will find a way. If you don’t already have the knowledge, you can find it. If you don’t already have the resources, you can get them. It means believing that you and your team have the capacity to figure things out. And if you don’t believe that, you need to spend some
time thinking about why you don’t. By fully examining why not, you’ll identify barriers to your goal.

Are You Focused on the Positive?
Yum! Brands sponsors a young golfer named J. B. Holmes, and in 2009 I was fortunate enough to be able to watch him play in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, as part of the U.S. Ryder Cup team. It was a tough match against the Europeans, and late in the day, Holmes was faced with a pivotal sixty-eight-yard shot over a trap. To my eyes, it looked practically impossible to get the ball anywhere near the pin.

I watched Holmes closely as he took what seemed like forever to consider his position. He opened and closed his eyes over and over again, almost as though he was in a trance, until he finally took his swing and hit the ball so it landed right next to the pin. He then made his birdie putt, which won him the pivotal match. Afterward, I asked him what he’d been thinking prior to taking the shot, and he replied, “I blocked out everything around me and thought about every good wedge shot I’d ever made. After that, I knew I was ready to hit it.”

By contrast, early the next year, after playing a fantastic round on the final day of the Houston Open to qualify for a sudden-death playoff against Paul Casey, Holmes began the playoff on the eighteenth hole where three times he approached the ball to hit it and three times he backed away looking uncertain. When he finally hit the ball,
he hooked it into the lake. Again, after the tournament I got a chance to ask Holmes what he’d been thinking, but this time he had a very different answer: “The wind was howling and I knew I had to be careful not to hit the water.” Think water and water is probably what you’ll get.

Do You Need to Change Your Perspective?
Bob Rotella also told me about Paul Azinger, who happened to be leaving his house as I arrived. If you follow golf, you might recall that Azinger was having one of the
best seasons of his golfing career when he was diagnosed with lymphoma, but that didn’t get in his way for long. After an eight-month battle with the disease, he made a triumphant return to the game.

That in itself makes for a pretty good story. But it doesn’t end there. After Azinger returned to golf, he grew frustrated by how he was playing, enough so that he turned to Rotella for help.

Rotella told me that he asked Azinger to bring over some tapes of him playing before he got sick. As they sat together and watched Azinger win tournament after tournament, Rotella turned to him and asked, “What were you thinking when you made all those shots?”

“Gosh, Bob,” Azinger said, “I was thinking that I was the best player in the world and I was going to kick everyone’s butt.”

“And what do you think when you play now?”

“I’ve been thinking that after the cancer, I’m just happy to be alive, happy that I get a chance to play again.” And that was the problem. He wasn’t thinking like someone who could win. Rotella persuaded him to move past feeling lucky and refocus on thinking, practicing, and playing the way he had when he was at the top of his game. The story went on to have a very happy ending: Azinger left Bob’s house and went straight to the Canadian Open, where he came in second. Then he won his first tournament since his illness in Hawaii a couple of months later. Instead of just being happy to be back on the tour, Rotella got Azinger to think and play like a winner again. The two go hand in hand.

Are you trying not to lose or are you trying to win? There is a difference. Rotella says it has been proven time and time again that when you see yourself a certain way, your behavior changes to suit that image of yourself.

Business and, for that matter, life are no different from golf in this way. You have to expect to win. In order to succeed, you have to be able to picture where you want to be and believe you can get there.

But how do you cultivate that belief? It’s not an easy thing to do, but
it is essential. The following are some ways that might help you adopt a more winning attitude:

Consider the Alternatives:
If you are having a hard time picturing yourself succeeding, picture yourself failing instead, and see how that feels. Bonnie Hill, who, among many other accomplishments, was the director of the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs under the first President Bush, thought very carefully about the consequences of not succeeding when, at the age of thirty, with a young child to support, her husband had a major heart attack.

At the time, she was working in a clerical position at Mills College in California and had no formal higher education. “It occurred to me that if I would end up being the breadwinner that I would really need to have a better way to make a living for my daughter,” she said, “because my flashback took me back to the times when my mother and I were on welfare, and the last thing you want is to repeat that.”

Hill didn’t know how, exactly, she was going to get to a place of financial security for her family, but she did know she didn’t have much of a choice. So she took the first step by going to the dean of admissions at Mills and asking if she could become a student. Even though she had yet to take the SATs and her high school grades weren’t that hot, she did what she needed to do to get accepted into the college. But then it became a matter of how to pay for it. “I went to the president and I said, ‘Look, I want to become a student. I can’t afford tuition, so it would really be great if you’d waive it.’ He’d never been approached by anyone like that before so he said yes before he knew what had happened.”

But Hill didn’t stop there. Everyone around her assumed that attending college while keeping her full-time job meant it would take her ten years to complete her education. But she found a quicker route. She took additional classes at two local community colleges in the evenings, four nights a week, and got the credits transferred to Mills, all the while caring for her young child and recovering husband. “I had to find a way to make a living that would support my family and I couldn’t do it without an education,” she explained. And in two-and-a-half years, she had her BA.

Hill’s path to a college degree was so unusual that no one could have plotted it out beforehand. Instead she adopted the attitude of “I’ll find a
way.” She didn’t have (or didn’t allow herself) the option of failing, and that, ultimately, is what allowed her to succeed. She went on to get a doctorate in education and now serves on our board of directors and is also the lead director for Home Depot.

If you don’t have the intention to succeed, it’s better to go do something else. It’s a drive that you have inside, and I happen to have an incredible example of that, first with my father and then with my mother. Because when my father came to America, at fifteen years old, by boat, with not more than $10 in his pocket, if he didn’t have intentionality to succeed, I don’t think we would be here. And when he passed away in 1960, my mother was thirty-eight with six children. She had never worked and was very young. She just sat at that desk and started working and was able to maintain a family and also keep a business. I just hope I can emulate one tenth of the intentionality that they had.

—
MASSIMO FERRAGAMO, CHAIRMAN, FERRAGAMO USA

There are always consequences to failure, whether it’s missing out on a promotion, losing the respect of your colleagues, or even losing your job. A little bit of fear can be healthy, as long as you use it to open your eyes to the other side: That’s what happens if you lose, but just imagine what it will be like if you win.

Search Out Inspiration:
I once had the privilege of meeting and listening to mountain climber Erik Weihenmayer talk about his accomplishments at our Yum! Restaurants International convention in Prague. Weihenmayer has climbed the seven highest peaks on the seven continents of the world, which is a pretty big deal in and of itself, but something else that you should know about Erik is that he’s blind.

As I listened to Erik describe his harrowing trip up to the 29,000-foot-high summit of Mount Everest—an accomplishment that nearly 90 percent of Everest climbers fail to realize—amid snowstorms, high winds, multi-thousand-foot drops, and worse, it occurred to me what an incredible example he was of taking people with him. Erik is a skilled
climber in his own right, there’s no doubt about that, but he also had to rely on his fellow climbers in some unique ways. The guy in front of him on the mountain wore a bell on his pack so Erik could hear where he was going. His fellow team members regularly called out warnings—“Death fall two feet to your right!” and things like that—to keep him out of harm’s way.

Our area is full of wars and problems and conflicts unlimited. And if you tell someone in a very stable market like the U. S. or like Japan, come to operate in the Middle East, they tell you, “Why? It’s quite risky!” But we see this risk as an opportunity. That’s why we invest in the Middle East and we’ll keep investing in the Middle East today and tomorrow.

—
MOATAZ AL-ALFI, CEO OF KUWAIT FOOD CO.

Before Erik could even begin to put teams together to climb mountains, he had to get over a pretty big hurdle: He had to believe it could be done. Erik wasn’t born blind; blindness happened to him gradually beginning at the age of thirteen, and, when it started, he said, “I wasn’t thinking about a vision, I was thinking about survival, just getting through the day. Blindness was like a storm that had descended upon me with such force, such viciousness, I thought I’d be crushed by it. I remember sitting in the cafeteria and listening to all the food fights, all the jokes passing me by that I wanted to be a part of. And I wasn’t afraid to go blind. What I was afraid of was that I’d be swept to the sidelines, that I’d be forgotten, that my life would be meaningless.”

What changed things for Erik was a bit of inspiration he found in a pretty unlikely place, on a television show called
That’s Incredible,
which aired in the 1980s. At first, Erik could still see a little out of one eye, and if he got really close to the set, he could watch TV. That’s what he was doing one night when a segment came on featuring Terry Fox, a Canadian man who had lost a leg to cancer. As Erik remembers it: “Now most people in that situation would have just dug in and focused on survival. Terry did the exact opposite. He was still in the hospital when he decided he was going to run across Canada, east to west.
They fitted him with this old-style prosthetic leg. I remember him limping mile after mile, the miles taking a terrible toll on his body, and the look on Terry’s face, it was an absolute contradiction. It was full of exhaustion yet, at the same time, full of
exaltation.” The desire to succeed was written all over his face.

What’s interesting about inspiration is that it can snowball. Terry inspired Erik, who in turn went on to do some amazing things, and as he talked about them, Erik inspired me. Whenever I find myself in a negative frame of mind, thinking I can’t do something, I just look around. You can find inspiring stories of people succeeding all over the place. And if they can do it, why can’t you?

Your circumstances are probably not as dire as Bonnie Hill’s after her husband got sick, or Erik Weihenmayer’s when he lost his vision, but we can all recognize the power of their will to succeed. If you really care about something and want to see it happen, you have to be determined too. And you’re going to have to communicate to others your determination by letting them know that you have taken a stake in the success of your Big Goal. My friend Bob Walter, the former chairman and CEO of Cardinal Health, once told me a story about the conquistador Hernán Cortés. It’s said that when Cortés landed in South America with the intention of conquering the area, he burned their boats so there was no way for him or his people to go back. Now that’s a guy who was intent on accomplishing his mission!

You have to ask yourself: What can I do to show people my will to succeed? What can I do to inspire in them the same belief that it can be done?

Nobody follows Eeyores. Remember the donkey from Winnie the Pooh who always thought it was going to rain? Imagine him trying to get people on his side and believing they could climb a mountain.

People want to follow leaders who believe they are capable of doing great things and who ignite that same belief in others. To be that type of leader, you have to choose a “can-do” mind-set.

MIND-SET CHECK

“I can try”

versus

“We can do this!”

Kedibone Malatji is a KFC franchise owner in South Africa. She is a small business owner doing very normal, everyday business-owner type things, trying to keep her business growing and her employees engaged. And yet Malatji has the ability to cast the most amazing shadow of positive energy over every single member of her forty-five-person team.

It’s easy to be confident at seventy-four because life is what it is and life has been good, but the important thing is to have faith in yourself and have faith in what you’re trying to accomplish. And I think if you do that and you get a little bit of success under your belt, all of a sudden one day it’s like the little engine: I can do it, I can do it, I can do it. I’m a firm believer that I was inspired by a lot of people who taught me to believe that I was capable of so much more than I thought I could do myself.

—
KEN LANGONE, COFOUNDER OF HOME DEPOT