The Mormon Way of Doing Business by Jeff Benedict

Author:Jeff Benedict [BENEDICT, JEFF]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759516694
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2007-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

FIRST THINGS FIRST

“If you let it, work will take all your time. It can absorb every aspect of your life. So I decided to bind it.”

—Kim Clark, dean of the Harvard Business School

“There’s a time and a place for everything. Therefore you can’t do all things extremely well all the time. There’s a time for family, a time for business, and a time for church.”

—Kevin Rollins, CEO of Dell computers

Gary Crittenden has made a career out of overseeing finances for a range of name-brand American companies. He has been chief financial officer at Filene’s Basement; Melville Corporation, a $14 billion parent company to CVS; Marshalls; Linens-N-Things; Bob’s Stores; KB Toys; Sears Roebuck & Co., and Monsanto Company. When Monsanto merged with global pharmaceutical and agricultural giant Pharmacia, Crittenden led the integration process. Then he called it quits in early 2001.

Three months into early retirement he and his wife, Cathy, had sold their home in Chicago and were making plans to go on a full-time, non-compensated service mission for the Mormon Church. Then he got a call from old friend Ken Chenault, who was about to be named the new CEO at American Express. Chenault and Crittenden had begun their business careers together over twenty-five years earlier at Bain & Company, where they worked as consultants and shared an office. They had remained friends ever since. Chenault asked Crittenden to join American Express as executive vice president and CFO. Crittenden accepted, deciding his church mission could wait until he got older and retired permanently.

Crittenden’s duties at the world-leading financial services firm are vast. They include: (1) providing leadership to the company’s finance group; (2) serving as key adviser on strategic and financial matters worldwide; and (3) representing American Express to investors, lenders, and rating agencies. His typical work day starts at 6:15 A.M., when he leaves his house in New Canaan, Connecticut, and commutes to his office at corporate headquarters in Lower Manhattan, arriving most days by 7:45. He leaves the office most evenings at 6:30 and arrives back home around 8:00. This amounts to fourteen hours per day, door-to-door, or seventy hours per week. Crittenden spends an additional five hours each Saturday working from his home office.

Crittenden’s title in the Mormon Church is stake president, an assignment he received shortly after accepting the job at American Express and relocating to New Canaan, Connecticut. He has oversight of seven bishops and congregations in Fairfield County in Connecticut and parts of Westchester County in New York. His church duties are performed without compensation and occupy about fifteen hours per week of Crittenden’s time.

But the titles Crittenden takes most seriously are those of husband and father. Those obligations have another set of time obligations each week.

The ability to maximize work performance while balancing family obligations is the challenge of every working professional. “Work is all about what you actually deliver and very little about just spending time,” said Crittenden. “Just putting in time doesn’t help you much. It’s about figuring out what needs to be done and mobilizing a larger organization to make it happen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.