By August Turak
I was working as a consultant for a Washington, D.C.-based company called Data Broadcasting Corporation (DBC) when the CEO asked to see me. He was unhappy with the results the sales department was generating under the current vice president of sales and asked me to take the job. I was intrigued by the opportunity.
The following Monday I arrived at our first formal meeting wearing a cowboy hat. I told them I was introducing a contest. But first I told them a story.
“My friend, Pat Grotto,” I told them, “is the most colorful person and the best salesman I’ve ever met. One day he said to me, ‘Augs, what am I supposed to do? I got this reputation as the fastest sales gun in the West, and it follows me wherever I go. All these young sales punks keep coming around wanting to take me on. They wanna draw on me. Why? Why? But these young guns won’t leave me alone. I beg them, plead with them. Look at these hands! They’re covered with blood! I’m begging you, I tell them, don’t do it, don’t draw on me!’
“Then his lips curled, his black eyes flashed, and he hissed through his teeth, ‘But they won’t listen. They never listen. They gotta know…they gotta know…they go for their gun, AND I
SHOOT ’EM DOWN LIKE A DOG!’ ”
Mimicking Pat, I concluded his story at the top of my lungs, which had the desired effect of reducing the tension with humor while building it for what might be coming next. I told them that in a few moments, I was going to throw my cowboy hat into the middle of the table. One person would pick it up and put it on his head. This gesture would serve notice on the rest of the team that he was, like Pat Grotto, the fastest sales gun in the West.
This gunslinger then would approach each of the other reps individually and beg them not to “draw” on him. Each rep, in turn, would have the option of either accepting or rejecting this face- to-face challenge. If the fastest gun succeeded in shooting all his challengers “down like a dog,” he would get $500 in cash. Any challenger who outsold the gunslinger would get $50. Then I threw the hat onto the table…
All eyes were glued to the hat, but no one moved or said a word. The silence became deafening, and still no one moved. Suddenly Scott Wilkes grabbed the hat and put it on his head. Then he confronted every member of the team, and each one, despite his threat to shoot them down, accepted his challenge.
Minutes later, the phones started ringing and the reps started selling like the fate of the world hung in the balance. But though I was relieved by their reaction, I was worried about my hired gun. Scott, a high school-educated former tree pruner, was the last person I’d expected to pick up my hat. His numbers were poor, and he seemed to lack the sophistication and people skills sales requires. His underdog status, coupled with the courage it took to pick up my hat, had won my heart—not to mention that this former tree climber had quite possibly saved my butt.
Scott handily won the contest, and I don’t think I was ever happier for another human being. But it didn’t end there. Over the ensuing weeks and months—despite the fact that the extra monetary incentive was no longer in place—Scott was consistently our No. 1 or No. 2 rep. Unable to account for his performance by skills alone, I finally stopped by his desk and asked him about it. Why, I asked, had he gone from dead last to a consistent top performer in the space of a single week?
“It’s simple, Augie,” he said, peering up at me through his thick glasses, “Once you know what it feels like to be your best, you never, ever want to go back.”
All I could do was extend my arm and silently shake his hand.
The “secret” was that, just like the monks, through lots of mostly little things, I had tapped into the universal human longing for transformation. In effect, I didn’t do anything. I just allowed something always there waiting to happen to actually happen. Our final quarter results, for example, relied on my willingness to surrender control, or, as the monks would say, “Let go and let God.”
Scott Wilkes said it best. Once we know what excellence for the sake of excellence feels like, we never want to go back. Leadership’s job is to set the expectations and establish the conditions for this transformational experience to take place. Most important, it is leadership’s job to set the example.
Inculcating a value such as excellence for the sake of excellence is as much art as science, but careful examination of the DBC case study reveals a number of lessons.
- Human beings are symbolic creatures. Almost everything I did at DBC was symbolic; even the prize money I offered in the gunslinger contest was mostly symbolic.
- Don’t trade voice for leg. I didn’t just tell the reps to be on time, I showed them, by arriving for work two hours early. Never lecture. Act.
- Seize the initiative. Perceptions are reality, and nothing creates the perception of change like moving rapidly.
- Focus, focus, focus. While it may have appeared I was doing a thousand things at once, I was focused on only one thing: creating a culture of excellence.
- Follow up, follow up, follow up. I gradually changed hundreds of things at DBC, but I never introduced a change unless I had the time to ruthlessly follow it up. I followed up until the behavioral change had become so habitual and automatic that I only had to check on it once in a while. By following up on even the smallest things, I demonstrated that excellence must be the norm, not the exception.
- Take risks. My fast-gun contest and my decision to let the reps run sales were fraught with risk. But if I wasn’t ready to take risks, how could I expect people like Scott Wilkes to take them?
- Shatter the glass box. Every individual, department, or company eventually encloses itself in a glass box: a box of assumptions about what is possible. Find an individual or department eager for change and focus on them until this glass box has been broken. Everyone else then will follow. The one-time contest at DBC was designed to perform this function. By smashing the box, Scott Wilkes demonstrated that anyone could, and this inspirational jolt was crucial to changing the culture.
- Don’t change everything at once. Focus small, get a quick victory, turn it into a well-oiled template, and only then roll it out.
- You gotta care. None of these measures amounts to a tinker’s damn unless you care deeply about people. I may have come across as the adult authority figure, but I cared deeply about all the people at DBC, and they responded in kind.
- It’s all about the mission. Money played its role at DBC, but mostly as a symbol pointing at something much larger: the mission and the opportunity for transformation this mission represented.
Excerpt from Chapter 7 of “Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks: One CEO’s Quest for Meaning and Authenticity” by August Turak (Columbia University Press, 2013). Copyright © 2013 August Turak. Used by arrangement with Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
After a long corporate career with companies such as MTV, August Turak founded two successful software businesses, Raleigh Group International (RGI) and Elsinore Technologies, that eventually were sold to BMC Software for $150 million. He received a B.A. in history from the University of Pittsburgh and is pursuing a Master’s in theology at St. John’s University in Minnesota. Turak’s essay, “Brother John,” received the $100,000 grand prize in the John Templeton Foundation’s “Power of Purpose” essay contest. He is a leadership contributor at Forbes.com. For more information, visit www.augustturak.com.
