Where Have All the Leaders Gone? (17 page)

Y
ou know you’re in trouble when the President of the United States asks, “Is our children learning?” But it isn’t just the intellectually challenged who are missing the boat on education. We’ve all got to get real—and get serious—because our ability to compete and prosper as a nation depends on our children being well educated and prepared to live in this complex world.

Year after year, the statistics show the same thing: American students struggle to hold their own, compared to students in other countries—especially in math and science. The latest international rankings in math and science just came out. Who was at the top?

1. 1. South Korea
   

2. 2. Japan
   

3. 3. Singapore
   

Where was the United States? Number eighteen of twenty-four. That’s just plain shameful.

A lot of you may not remember the last time we fell behind in math and science. It was 1957, and that year the Soviet Union (our archenemy in the cold war) launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into space. Americans just went crazy. We couldn’t let that stand. The government began pouring money into math and science education. Twelve years later, we put the first man on the moon.

I believe that most parents care about the quality of their kids’ schools. But too often they’re blind to what’s really going on. They don’t know how to evaluate quality. In a recent Gallup poll, 76 percent of parents said they were satisfied with their children’s schools. A lot of them pointed to the fact that their kids were getting good grades. But what they have to understand is that just because a kid is doing well against his peers in America, doesn’t mean he’s doing
well.
We’re not getting clobbered by Japan, South Korea, and Singapore in math and science scores because their kids are smart and disciplined and ours are stupid and lazy. They’re clobbering us because their parents and their schools demand more of them. In America our kids attend school 180 days a year. Japanese kids go to school 240 days a year. If we want our kids to catch up, you’d think we’d at least start by sending them to school for as long as the kids in Japan. The three-month summer vacation is a sacred cow. I once wrote a newspaper column calling for the extension of the school year. I got bombarded for
that
lousy idea—mostly from teachers. One of them even made her class write to the mean old Grinch who wanted to steal their summer vacation. Do you know how it feels to get twenty-eight pieces of mail from nine-year-olds, telling you in big block letters that you’re a dope?

The truth is, I’m not fully convinced that more school days equals quality education. The real key is how you introduce kids to the basics. I’ve always believed that the ten-year span from five to fifteen is the make-or-break time. That’s when the fundamentals have to be instilled. And the people we charge with this priceless task are our schoolteachers.

NO TEACHER LEFT BEHIND?

The prestige of classroom teaching in this country is pretty low. How do I know? Because while we pay lip service to how important teachers are, we don’t do anything tangible to support our words. If this were a company, and teachers were valued employees, what would the company do? It would recruit them aggressively. It would invest in training. It would compensate them well. It would provide ways for them to share their expertise. It would take note of those who really excel. We do none of those things with teachers. And how many parents are encouraging their kids to become teachers? “Are you crazy?,” they say. “Nobody can live on a teacher’s salary.”

We’re really upside down. In a completely rational society, teachers would be at the tip of the pyramid, not near the bottom. In that society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers, and the rest of us would have to settle for something less. The job of passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor anyone could have.

Too bad we don’t live in that perfect world. Judging by pay and prestige, teaching school ranks pretty close to the bottom of all professions requiring a college education. The average starting salary for new teachers is about 30 percent less than the average starting salary for all other college graduates. How can the teaching profession attract the best and brightest when there’s so little incentive?

Even our President brags about having been a C student. He ran against Al Gore and John Kerry, two extremely well-educated men, and mocked their “fancy, elite” educations. It was a bit disingenuous, since Bush attended Yale and Harvard. But he loves to play the “average” card. Bush was the cool kid who never studied, and he ran on that platform.

He also ran on the No Child Left Behind program, which he proclaimed as his proudest achievement while governor of Texas. Only after Bush managed to push the program through Congress as a federal mandate did we learn that the Texas record was not exactly sterling. An inquiry into the Texas No Child Left Behind program revealed widespread test-rigging and numbers-fudging by educators and administrators. I guess they were thinking that desperate times required desperate measures. And that’s the problem with No Child Left Behind. It promotes desperation. That’s what you get when you set up a rigid formula for judging excellence that is entirely test-based and doesn’t account for the thousands of variables that constitute learning. Oh, and by the way, it would help if the government would fully
fund
the mandate before it saddled struggling school districts across the country with the burden.

LET’S GET BACK TO BASICS

Too many teachers start out dedicated to this noblest of professions and wind up selling real estate or becoming computer programmers by their mid-thirties because they’re burned out, or disillusioned, or need more money, or are just plain tired of being at the bottom of the pyramid.

Looking back, I have to wonder what happened. I remember the great teachers I had as a kid. Everyone in town looked up to them, not just the kids. There were a few of them who had more influence on my life than anybody else outside my own family.

It wasn’t
that
long ago, but you’ve got to admit that if I still remember individual teachers, they must have really been something. When I was in the ninth grade, I had a teacher named Miss Marian Raber. She’s memorable because she taught me to communicate in writing. That lesson in organizing my thoughts and presenting my ideas cogently has been of lasting value.

Maybe the problem today is that teachers don’t have time for the basics because they’re too busy being cops and social workers and surrogate parents and drug counselors and psychiatrists. As if being a teacher weren’t hard enough!

Teachers today have a brand-new problem to worry about—getting
shot
in the classroom. As I write this, I’m looking at three school shootings just in the last week—even though most schools have metal detectors.

I think maybe a little tough love is in order—and a lot of people are going to scream, but hear me out. Why don’t we say that every kid has a right to go to school in this country—until the first time he shows up with a gun, a switchblade, or a little white bag of coke. Then we write him off. Send him packing. Think of it as a form of educational triage.

Here’s the way I see it. There are some kids who will make it no matter what you do or don’t do. Then, there’s the large majority who need a lot of help to make it. And finally, there are some who just can’t be helped, and who suck up all of the resources and attention like a black hole.

While I’m at it, here’s another idea that will have people up in arms. Let’s learn the value of failure. The word
flunk
isn’t even in the vocabulary of our schools anymore. At some point all the childhood development experts and psychologists got together and said it was emotionally damaging to tell a kid he’d failed. Their motto: “No child left behind, even if he can’t read!”

There’s a word for that in my book. It’s called malpractice. I think a teacher who passes a student who can’t do the work is no different than a surgeon who sews you up with a sponge still inside. Kids can handle flunking the fifth grade. The real killer is
not
flunking and finding out ten years down the road that they don’t have the basic skills to earn a living.

Maybe those experts could use a lesson from General George Patton, who said, “I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but by how high he bounces when he hits bottom.”

Our high school dropout rate is a tragedy. But an even bigger tragedy is the number of high school graduates who can barely read their diplomas. (I’ve got to confess that I couldn’t read
my
diploma, either. But mine was written in Latin.)

These kids will find themselves competing with high school graduates overseas who
can
read their diplomas—some even in Latin, or any one of four or five different languages. And that’s the bottom line: the ability to compete. Let’s not cheat our children and our nation out of that.

LEARNING BY READING

I can’t leave this subject without making a pitch for reading. Since you’re reading this, I want to thank you for buying my book. If you borrowed it from the library, don’t forget to return it. I hope you learn a little bit, and maybe crack a smile every few pages. But even if you weren’t reading my book, it would be fine with me—as long as you’re reading
something.

A word to parents: The biggest favor you can do for your kids is to have plenty of books around the house. Read
to
them, read
around
them, be a family that reads. (And if you’re not such a good reader yourself, it’s never too late to learn.)

Show me a kid who loves to read—I don’t care if it’s a comic book, a science fiction novel, or a book about the history of dinosaurs—and I’ll show you a kid who’s going to do well in life. My parents weren’t highly educated people. Pop made it through the fourth grade, and Mom through the third grade. But in our household, my sister and I were encouraged to read. I was voracious, and I could be a bit of a show-off with my newfound knowledge. I remember a day in the third grade when we were studying the Greeks, and our teacher asked if anyone knew the name of Ulysses’ dog. My hand shot up. For some reason I knew the answer, and I won the admiration of my teacher and the other kids—at least for that day.

I especially loved vocabulary. I got a kick out of words. I still do. I’m always looking for the best word to describe my thoughts. That’s why I went through about twenty drafts to write this book. I drove everyone crazy.

The idea of writing a book never occurred to me until I was sixty years old. But once it took hold, I realized that a lifetime of reading had taught me how to form a coherent thought and tell a story and speak my mind on the page. Reading and writing are still my favorite pastimes. Oh, and I like to talk, too.

S
ince nobody is born a leader, you need someone to teach you how to walk and talk and
be
one. You need a mentor. I was lucky enough to have three: Nicola Iacocca, Charlie Beacham, and Robert McNamara. They were my mentors. And sometimes they were my
tor
-mentors. Let me tell you what they taught me.

NICOLA IACOCCA: OPTIMISM

You couldn’t grow up the son of a man like Nicola Iacocca and not want to emulate him. My father was not an educated man, but he had an inner confidence that just blew you away.

I’ve written about my father before because he was my number one mentor in life. I can’t imagine who I would have been without his influence.

To this day, it’s hard for me to fathom how he managed—all by himself—to travel to America at the age of twelve. He came to live with his half brother in Garrett, Pennsylvania, and the first thing they did was put him to work in the mines. I guess there were a lot of stories like that—young kids sent here to become what amounted to slave laborers. But even that young, my father had a special spark of self-knowledge. He worked for one day in the mine, and he said to himself, “I left the farm and the open air of Italy for
this
?” So he ran away to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where another brother lived. He always said that his one day in the mines was the only day he spent working for somebody else.

My father was an unbelievable guy for someone who’d just been through the fourth grade. But I think he was a classic example of the way God gives some people more common sense and street smarts than others. He was gifted—a natural-born entrepreneur. He was always resourceful. By the time he was thirty-one he’d saved enough money to return to Italy to bring over his widowed mother. While he was there he fell in love with my mother, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a shoemaker, and he brought her back, too.

The voyage to America was hard on his young wife. She contracted typhoid fever on the ship. That could have been the end for my mother. Normally they were pretty strict about not letting sick people into the country. Ellis Island would have been her last stop. But somehow she made it past the inspectors. In later years I asked, “Pop, how did you get Mom through Ellis Island?” He never answered directly, just gave me a great big smile and said something like this: “I’d been here a long time. I knew this business. You do what you have to do.” In other words, he paid somebody off. I guess you’d call it minor corruption, but my father never regretted it for a minute, and I have to say that I didn’t, either. Who knows where I’d be if they’d rejected Mom. As it was, I had the luck of the draw. I was born in the U.S.A. three years after she arrived.

Soon after that my father opened a hot-dog restaurant called the Orpheum Wiener House. Pop believed the food business was a hedge against poverty because, as he always told me, “People have got to eat.” Also, there was no capital investment. He said, “You get a little grill, a little steam heater to heat the buns, and you’re ready to go.” He made a special chili sauce that he’d copied from a vendor on Coney Island. Later he brought my uncles over to help run the business. They were the hot-dog kings of Allentown, and they still are. Today the restaurant is run by their sons and grandsons. It’s called Yocco’s, which is pretty much how the Pennsylvania Dutch pronounce
Iacocca.
The family made a good living on the nickel hot dog. It’s a
dollar
hot dog now, of course.

My father couldn’t sit still for just one business. He had so many interests. He was nuts about cars, and he owned one of the first Model Ts. Even when I was a little kid, I can remember he had some cars that worked and some that didn’t. He bought into a fledgling national rental company called U-Drive-It, and at one point, he had a fleet of about thirty Model Ts. I’m sure that I inherited my love of cars from my father.

My father’s never-say-die energy and optimism left an imprint on me. You couldn’t watch him and
not
think the sky was the limit. Even during the Depression he got by. He always found a way. Maybe it’s because he never had time for self-doubt. The world was a big canvas, he always said. If an endeavor or a relationship didn’t work out, there was always something else to try and someone else to meet.

He was open to life. He’d say, “You’ve got to have adversity. Otherwise, how will you know the difference when things are good?” I didn’t inherit that gene. I was a worrier. Optimism wasn’t a natural state for me. When I was worried about something, he’d prod me. “
Lido,
you’ve got to roll with the punches more. Do you remember what was on your mind a year ago?” And I’d say, “How could I remember? A lot of things happen in a year.” He’d pull out some notes with a flourish, and say, “I have it written down.” Then he’d proceed to tell me about something that had made me unhappy a year ago, and deliver the punch line: “You can’t even remember it now.” He understood life’s ebbs and flows, and that core of optimism made him unstoppable.

My father also had the quality that these days they call self-esteem. I never saw him hang back or think he wasn’t good enough to talk to anyone. I wish I could emulate him and be more easygoing. He was completely relaxed in every situation. Henry Ford II himself enjoyed my dad. He’d sometimes come over to the house—and he hardly ever did that because he was against fraternizing with the employees. I remember how he’d arrive with Christina, his beautiful Italian wife. We’d have a big Italian meal. My mother did the cooking, and my father did the talking. He and Ford got along. I remember Ford saying to Pop, “I don’t know how I could run this company without your son.” (Later on, I guess he figured out a way.)

Of course, my father had great expectations for his only son, and the other side of his warmth and benevolence was that he was a big disciplinarian. Maybe too much of a disciplinarian by today’s standards. Verbally he could assault me and hurt me, but he never touched me.

Sometimes he was just too hard to please. When I graduated from high school, I was number twelve in a class of more than eight hundred. I was proud of myself. I said to Pop, “Not bad, huh?”

Pop said, “Why weren’t you first?” It was his way of saying “never be satisfied.”

But what made the biggest impression on me was Pop’s optimism. No matter how bad things got, he always found the silver lining. I never knew the meaning of the word
impossible.
It wasn’t spoken in our home.

CHARLIE BEACHAM: COMMON SENSE

Charlie Beacham really broke the mold. If I learned from my father that you didn’t need a fancy education to be wise, I learned from Charlie Beacham that you could have a fancy education and still be street-smart.

Charlie Beacham was my first business mentor. I loved the guy—and I have to say I’d never met anyone like him. He was a big, warm, tough-talking Southerner who had such a talent for being a “regular guy” that it was a surprise to find he had a master’s in engineering from Georgia Tech.

His expansive personality and love of people convinced Charlie to shift his ambition from engineering to sales and marketing. He was the Eastern regional manager of Ford when I got a job as zone manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

I was as green as grass. Charlie used to say about me and all the other newbies, “You boys are so green I’m worried when I send you out in the field the cows’ll eat you up.”

Charlie understood that book learning only got you so far. One of the first things he did was send me to a Ford truck center to work the showroom for three months. I wasn’t happy. I said, “I went to college. I got a master’s degree. What am I doing selling used trucks in the middle of nowhere?” And Charlie said, “Because that’s where the business is—on the showroom floor. To hell with all your book learning. You’ve gotta go figure out what happens when a guy comes in who’s willing to pay you thousands of dollars for a car or truck.”

Charlie impressed on me that in the car business there were no direct sales. Everything was sold through a network of independent dealers. Selling cars was all about the dealers. It was a lesson I never forgot.

In Charlie’s common-sense world people strove to be great, but everyone made mistakes along the way. That was part of the learning process, too. I remember once I was down in the dumps because my district had come in last in sales. Charlie saw me walking through the garage, slumped with defeat, and he came over and put a big arm around me. “What are you so down about?” he asked.

“Well,” I said dejectedly, “there are thirteen zones and mine was thirteenth in sales this month.”

“Aw, hell,” he said. “Don’t let
that
get you down.
Somebody
’s got to be last.” Then he gave me a sharp look. “But listen,” he added, “just don’t be last two months in a row.”

Charlie had that rare quality in a boss—the ability to motivate you even when you were struggling. He wasn’t like the boss who jumps on every mistake and rules by intimidation. The one thing he couldn’t stand was people who wouldn’t admit they’d screwed up. He used to grumble, “Everybody makes mistakes. The trouble is that most people won’t own up to them. They’ll try to put the blame on their wife, their mistress, their kids, the dog, the weather—anything but themselves. So if you screw up, don’t give me any excuses. Go look in the mirror, and then come to me.”

Charlie always encouraged me. If an idea was good—that is, if it passed the common-sense test—he was all for it. And that’s how I got my big break. In 1956 we were in the middle of a slump. Sales of the new Fords were lousy everywhere, but they were
really
lousy in Pennsylvania. So I came up with a plan: Any customer could buy a 1956 Ford for a 20 percent down payment, followed by three years of monthly payments of $56. I called it “56 for 56.” At the time, financing the purchase of cars for more than a year was a new idea, and our sales really took off. Within three months, the Philadelphia district went from last in sales to first. Charlie was so proud of me that he wrote a personal note to Robert McNamara, the vice president of the Ford Division. (Charlie always said, “If you want to give a man
credit,
put it in writing. If you want to give him
hell,
do it on the phone.”) McNamara adopted “56 for 56” as a national program, and the program was responsible for selling an extra 75,000 cars. I was promoted to district manager of Washington, D.C., and my future suddenly seemed a whole lot brighter.

Another thing that made it brighter was love. I’d met Mary McCleary when she was a receptionist at the Ford plant in Chester. She was a beauty—with auburn hair, green eyes, and a sparkling personality. We were planning to get married and we had purchased a house in Washington, D.C. Once again, I was the luckiest guy in the world. Then Charlie called me. He’d been promoted to car and truck sales manager for the Ford Division, and he wanted to bring me to Dearborn as his national truck marketing manager.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” I sputtered. “I’m getting married next week and I just bought a house.”

He chuckled, and then said gruffly, “I’m sorry, but if you want to get paid, your paycheck will be in Dearborn.” I may have protested, but I think Charlie knew how thrilled I was.

Charlie was my angel. He made things happen for me. He loved me, and he sold me to McNamara. I realize now that the smartest move of my career was to follow the leader—Charlie Beacham—to Detroit.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: DISCIPLINE

When Robert McNamara’s name comes up, most people say, “Oh, yeah, wasn’t he the guy who got us into Vietnam?” It’s a tough legacy, but it’s only part of the story. Robert McNamara had a life before JFK picked him to be secretary of defense, and that life was at Ford Motor Company.

McNamara joined Ford the same year I did—in 1946. The difference was that I was just a student engineer and he’d already made a name for himself. He was one of a group of army officers in World War II known as the “Whiz Kids.” He was a statistical genius who helped plan weapons strategy. McNamara had that rare gift for analyzing a situation and setting the right course—which was just what Ford needed after the war. Henry Ford II had just come on board to run his grandfather’s company, which was hobbling along and losing money. He brought in the Whiz Kids to help him do it.

McNamara quickly became one of Henry Ford’s key go-to guys. He was also kind of an odd duck in the Ford culture. He and his wife didn’t live in Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Point like the other execs. They lived in Ann Arbor, near the University of Michigan. Bob had the mentality of a professor and the soul of a liberal. And he was way ahead of his time. He was pushing for small cars, safety features, and the environment back in the fifties, if you can imagine that. He used to say that business leaders had a duty to serve society as well as their shareholders, and that a company could drive for profits and at the same time meet social responsibilities. He was guided by this principle: “There is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head.”

My first impression of Bob McNamara was pretty much like everyone else’s—the guy lacked a certain
warmth.
He was so focused that he didn’t always have time for niceties—and he hated golf. He once said, “It’s crazy. You don’t use your mind on a golf course. You take this little white ball and you try to put it in a little hole a couple hundred yards away, and you spend your whole life doing that. What’s the point?” It didn’t make sense to his logical mind.

I got along with McNamara, though. First of all, he loved Beacham and Beacham loved me. So I was in. But we also developed a strong relationship because I learned so much from him, and I took those lessons to heart.