by annual schedules and deadlines called campaigns. All customers had to be contacted and all agreements signed. Advertising had to be designed and ready for the printer in accordance with schedules and deadlines. The New York division, which I managed, had just completed the Buffalo campaign. This unit had been in a downward spiral, and as the campaign ended, we hit rock bottom. There were lots of contributing factors. The economy in Buffalo was devastated as the steel industry collapsed. Unemployment reached staggering numbers and we had serious competition from the White Directory Company, which meant that for the first time, advertisers had a choice for how they spent their advertising dollars.
Internally, we were struggling as well. We had lost a number of our salespeople and managers to our competitor, and the usual morale issues that afflict an organization in disarray were mounting. The company we worked for, New York Telephone, was terribly insensitive to the plight of the advertiser as well as our ability to meet unreasonable goals.
Only many years later can I look back on this life-altering experience and realize it’s never the economy nor the competition that brings an organization down, but rather the inability to respond. That response has to start with the leader.
As division manager I was focused on three things back then: winning (which was important to me then and still is, by the way), getting ahead (or maybe a better description, climbing that corporate ladder), and pleasing my boss (preserving our culture). While all of those elements are necessary to success, I was missing the key element. What I didn’t understand, realize, or appreciate was that I was imposing my value system on a hundred and seven employees with little regard for what they believed was important to them.
So when they looked to me for leadership, what they got instead was a leader facing failure for the first time in his business career and behaving accordingly. I wasn’t winning. I was losing… and in a big way. I got my first life lesson about leadership:
The only time we realize our dreams is when we help others realize theirs.
One of the many things that makes The Berry Company an extraordinary place to work is the commitment to dialogue between senior management and all of our employees. At about the time the division was unraveling in Buffalo, the company was conducting our annual employee survey. As you can imagine, given these circumstances, when the scores got to human resources at headquarters in Dayton, red lights went off and the sirens blared. There was a crisis in Buffalo! As you might expect, human resources responded like the Kemper Calvary, and the feedback sessions were quite ugly.
On the heels of the report, I got the dreaded call to come to the home office. I made the trip fearing the worst. Would it be a transfer, a demotion, or the pink slip? Much to my surprise, it was none of the above. Enter life lesson number two: The people who care about us the most are those who stand shoulder to shoulder with us during our most difficult times.
At the time, I worked for Tom Murphy, the regional manager in Rochester, and John Berry Jr., the vice president of the east region and the grandson of the company’s founder.
They were both consistent in their opinion that while I was relentless in pursuit of results, I had created an environment in which our employees felt under-appreciated and disrespected. In short, I was hurting the people I cared about the most!
This devastated me. The good news was both John and Tom offered their support and confidence and they allowed me to be the one who fixed the problem. I went back to Buffalo, humbled but determined to earn back the trust and loyalty of my colleagues.
Upon return, I did something I had never done before. I stood in front of all one hundred and seven people, with a deep sense of contrition, and said I was sorry. There were a lot of tears in that room, mostly mine. I promised them that while we were still expected to make sales quotas and meet New York Telephone’s expectations, it would never be at the expense of each other’s dignity.
Solving life’s problems is a two-part process. First, you must realize you’ve got a problem. Second, you’ve got to figure out how to correct it. While the problem was obvious, the solution was not.
Bill Tripp, our vice president of HR and a mentor to me, suggested that I spend some time at the Center for Values Research in Dallas. The Berry Company had employed CVR as consultants to administer our attitude surveys and consult on other HR issues.
Central to my journey were Vince Flowers and Charley Hughes, partners at the Center. Both of them were heavily influenced in their practice by Dr. Clare Graves, a renowned psychologist who had done extensive research in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s on value systems.
So I spent a week with them in Dallas. The short version of what they said to me was
I needed to go back to Buffalo and create a behavior-driven organization rather than a sales-driven one.
When I arrived back in Buffalo, I gathered all my managers in my office on a Sunday night and told them I’ve been to the mountain and found the solution. That is how our leadership journey began in earnest.
CHAPTER TWO
Leaders Know the Value of Good People
When we began our journey, we asked ourselves the first critical question: “If we’re serious about finding a better way, where do we start?”
Leaders know the one constant in business and life is people. It’s ludicrous that people can too often be ignored or overlooked. How can achieving success in every organization not focus on its most critical asset—its people?
Whether an organization succeeds or fails is determined by the people who show up for work every day. It is the people with whom the customers interact who make a difference. In fact, when your company’s name is mentioned, it is the faces and performances of your people that your customers remember.
To help us with our business transformation, we hearkened back to our founder, Mr. L.M. Berry, a truly extraordinary man. L.M. came to Dayton in 1910 and started selling advertising on the back of train schedules. Eventually, he approached Dayton Home Telephone Company and offered to sell advertising in their phone number guides to help defray the cost of printing. It was this concept that led L.M. Berry to become one of the first creators of the yellow pages concept as we know it today.
Back in the ’30s and ’40s, Mr. Berry traveled the country by train, relentlessly calling up more telephone companies to sign up their yellow page directory business. By the late ’50s, L.M. Berry and Company had become the country’s largest independent yellow page advertising agency in the United States.
I was blessed with the opportunity to know L.M. for the last ten years of his life, and I heard him say many times that he named his company L.M. Berry and Company because he was L.M. Berry, but more importantly, his people were his company. Although the name was changed to The Berry Company in 1992 to become more contemporary, his belief that our people represent our primary asset continues to serve as its guiding principle.
There is a valuable lesson here for all of us. When you feel you or your company has veered off course or is searching for new identity, think back to your, or the company’s, original intentions, which tend to be straightforward, focused, and strong. Businesses can drift away from these benchmarks as the years go by.
It’s not easy for many organizations to weave together the past, the present, and the future. Kathy Geiger-Schwab, the current executive vice president for The Berry Company, created a phrase that became part of our everyday business vocabulary: “Old
