Bringing Out Best in People by Mcginnis Alan Loy

Author:Mcginnis, Alan Loy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fortress Press

“Applause is the spur of noble minds.”

—C. C. COLTON

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Secret of Parlaying Small Successes into Larger Gains

When Bette Nesmith, a single parent with a nine-year old son, worked in a Dallas bank, she seemed rather average, with no particular promise for big things. She was glad to have the secretarial job—$300 a month was very good for 1951—but she did have a problem: how to correct the errors she made with her new electric typewriter. Nesmith had been a free-lance artist, and artists never correct by erasing, they simply paint over the error. So she concocted a fluid that she could use to paint over her typing errors.

Before long all the secretaries in her building were using what she then called “Mistake Out.” An office supply dealer encouraged her to manufacture the paint, but marketing agencies weren’t impressed, and companies (among them IBM) turned her down cold. But the secretaries continued to like the product, so Nesmith’s kitchen became her first manufacturing facility. Orders began to trickle in, and she hired a college student to help sell the product. But it was not easy for two inexperienced saleswomen. “People will never paint out their mistakes,” a dealer would say. Records show that from August 1959, to April 1960, the company’s total income was $1,142.71, and its expenses were $1,217.35. “I don’t know how I made it,” Bette said. She worked part-time as a secretary, managing to buy groceries and save $200 to pay a chemist to develop a faster-drying formula.

With the improved product, Nesmith began taking her little white bottles around the country. She stopped in small towns and big cities. Upon arriving in a city, she wrote, “I’d get the phone book and write down the names of dealers and then call them. We’d go to each office supply store and leave 12 bottles.” Eventually orders began to pour in and the Liquid Paper Corporation began to fly. When she sold the company in 1979, the tiny white bottles were earning $3.5 million annually on sales of $38 million, and the Gillett Co. paid $47.5 million for the firm.

The most successful people are very often like Bette Nesmith. They lead rather ordinary lives until suddenly some small success occurs. Then, unlike the average person, they parlay that small achievement to larger gains. They have what one management consultant has called “a repeater tendency.” That is, once they find themselves succeeding, they set out to duplicate the accomplishment again in larger settings.

The experts at motivation encourage this snowballing of success. They study their people, looking for the strengths others have overlooked; then when small achievements begin to appear in the person’s work, they know how to transform them into larger successes. The Jewish proverb is, “When luck enters, give him a seat!”

Rule number seven, then, for bringing out the best in people is one that every leader has heard in seminars and books, yet one that is widely neglected:

RECOGNIZE AND APPLAUD ACHIEVEMENT

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