The Ten Commandments for Business Failure by Donald R. Keough

Author:Donald R. Keough
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-06-27T18:30:00+00:00

Commandment Seven

Put All Your Faith in Experts and Outside Consultants

“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”

—James Thurber

IN MY TEENS, while working during the summer at the Sioux City stockyards, I became acquainted with a number of cattle buyers and sellers. One day one of them asked me to help him by becoming a bull buyer. Bulls were shipped in one at a time and were scattered across the complex. When bulls outlived their reproductive usefulness, they were sold for slaughter. But for most buyers it wasn’t profitable to spend the time needed to wander all over the yards in order to buy one bull here and one bull there. However, an energetic summer student willing to go around and purchase fifteen or twenty bulls a day to fill a railcar could earn a fairly tidy commission, like twenty dollars or so.

I became a summer bull buyer for Doyle Harmon, the uncle of the famous Michigan football player Tommy Harmon. After my first day on the job, he came by and asked to see what I’d bought. It turned out I’d paid too much for quite a few of the bulls. Harmon reminded me that I was among salesmen and because of my young age, they would try to flatter me, be nice to me, distract me, but he pulled out a chart and said here’s exactly what you are looking for in a bull. No matter what anyone says, never deviate from these basic requirements of conformation. He said, “Watch the bull, not the man.”

That simple advice has stuck with me through my years in business even to this day in the world of investment banking. I always tried to separate the product from the presentation. That may seem like it would be easy, but it’s not. No matter how sophisticated you might think you are, if you allow yourself to take your eyes off the bull for a moment and concentrate instead on the man, you can get drawn into the most preposterous ventures. In Commandment Six, I said you will fail if you don’t stop to think. Well, you’ll also fail big time if you let yourself be flattered, and there is never a shortage of charming con artists in just about every field who will use flattery as a sales tool.

It’s a bit unfair of me to call them con artists. Most are quite sincere in what they’re offering, whether it’s marketing expertise or management strategies or the prospects for a new venture. They often have high qualifications and pose as absolute authorities. And they come heavily armed with definitive answers that can be boiled down into flashy PowerPoint presentations. The problem with many of their answers is that they address the wrong questions.

“Watch the bull, not the man” is good advice for those who are regularly exposed to fancy management-consulting presentations.

At Coca-Cola over the years, a parade of self-styled experts came and went both as inside employees and outside

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