Becoming Trader Joe

 

Issue No. 494 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Nov. 11, 2021) is just an appetizer to inspire you to partake of the full meal: Becoming Trader Joe. It’s a leadership and management feast! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for the Mastering Mistake-Making webpage. (See Mistake #19 below.) Trader Joe’s founder, Joe Coulombe, organized the central management’s operation around the “skunkworks” concept popularized by Tom Peters. Coulombe’s title: “Chief Skunk.” See the Operations Bucket. (Photo credit: Becoming Trader Joe.) Chief Skunk! I’ve rarely met a Trader Joe’s customer who is not a Trader Joe’s raving fan. How about you? This past June, HarperCollins Leadership published a fascinating read by the founder of Trader Joe’s. And yes—it’s a leadership book, but you’ll also be fascinated by the delightful discoveries down every aisle of this memorable treat, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys, by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri. Joe Coulombe (he died at age 89 in February 2020) gifted us with MBA-level thinking in leadership, management, retailing, economics, history, and humor—all in 288 fast-reading pages. Imagine Renaissance Man meets Peter Drucker meets The Galloping Gourmet. (And thanks to my long-suffering wife, Joanne, I taste-tested snippets from the book with her in recent evenings—and she agrees: this is a stunningly delicious read.) Becoming Trader Joe checks the box in all 20 management buckets (core competencies) and the three arenas of Cause, Community, and Corporation: THE CAUSE #1. The Results Bucket. Trader Joe’s financial growth and results were stunning—but, as you’ll read, it was not about the money. When asked a product pricing question—“What percentage margin did you aim for?”—this inquiry launched Joe Coulombe into his “tirade about how you pay your bills with dollars, not percents.” #2. The Customer Bucket. Trader Joe’s niche customer: the overeducated, underpaid, and well-traveled person. Not “the masses who willingly consumed Folger’s coffee, Best Foods Mayonnaise, Wonder Bread, Coca-Cola, etc.” Joe Coulombe adds, “…I saw an opportunity to differentiate ourselves radically from mainstream retailing to mainstream people.” He notes, “I believe in the wisdom that you gain customers one by one, but you lose them in droves.” #3. The Strategy Bucket. Coulombe creatively names the three versions of Trader Joe’s: Good Time Charley (1967-1970), Whole Earth Harry (1971-1976), and the final version—Mac the Knife (1977 and beyond). Note: Joe Coulombe and Russia gave up Five Year Plans in the same year, 1988! #4. The Drucker Bucket. Greatly influenced by Peter Drucker, Coulombe notes Drucker’s “seminal piece in the July 25, 1989, Wall Street Journal called ‘Sell the Mail Room.’” This was six months after Coulombe left Trader Joe’s—but he reminisces about his good and bad outsourcing decisions. (“We never took mainframe computing inhouse…” Another rule: “Never buy a computer you can’t lift.”)          #5. The Book Bucket. Ironically, Joe Coulombe names the “best” book on management—but he actually lists three of them! (Even better!)    • The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I, by Barbara Tuchman – “It’s the best book on management—and, especially, mismanagement—I’ve ever read.” (p. 14)    • The Winning Performance: How America's High-Growth Midsize Companies Succeed, by Clifford and Cavanaugh – He notes his favorite quote “from my favorite book on management.” (p. xiv)    • The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. – “…one of my favorite books on management.” (p. 204)    • And one more: Coulombe said “the best economics book I ever read” was Seven Kinds of Inflation, by Richard Dana Skinner (1937). #6. The Program Bucket. Coulombe was thinking supply chain and logistics well before our current crisis! Chapter 13, “Virtual Distribution,” includes two lists of products carried in 1976 versus 1988—and the percentage of sales for each product. The 1976 list included 19 categories. The top-four sellers: dry groceries, milk and ice cream, and cigarettes at 10% each. Wine was fourth at 8%. The 1988 list: wine (22%), dry groceries (12%), nuts and dried fruit (12%), and frozen foods (11%). The 1988 list was pared down to 14 categories. Read the fascinating rationales for every yes/no buying decision. This chapter reminded me of the book, Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decisions for Financial Viability. THE COMMUNITY  #7. The People Bucket. “…the most important single business decision I ever made was to pay people well.” Coulombe adds, “At a time when the minimum wage was $4.35, we often paid $13.00 per hour because these people were worth it. A distinction between full-time and part-time is a false dichotomy when it comes to productivity.” Plus, to enrich product knowledge of Captains (aka the top manager in each store), Trader Joe’s sent every Captain and spouse to Europe “to make a three-week grand tour of the wine and cheese regions in Germany, Switzerland, and France.”  #8. The Culture Bucket. “…as Trader Joe’s became famous, the employees began earning something else: prestige. To be part of Trader Joe’s brought them instant recognition from their friends and families.”    John’s granddaughter, Emelia Pearson (18), discerned that the Trader Joe’s crew member “uniform,” was such a unique and prestigious outfit—that she wore it for Halloween this year! (Note: she is not a crew member.) All Trader Joe’s employees continue to wear Hawaiian shirts, provided by the store (different shades to match the seasons, per Coulombe). #9. The Team Bucket. Coulombe was not a silo thinker. Chapter 18, “Double Entry Retailing” is a crash course for every manager on what matters and the interrelationships of key areas. Team members influence and impact a whole system—with five variables on the “Demand Side” and 10 variables on the “Supply Side.”    • Demand Side: assortment of merchandise, pricing, convenience, credit, and showmanship.    • Supply Side: merchandise vendors, employees, “habits” and “culture,” systems, non-merchandise vendors, landlords, governments, bankers and investment bankers, stockholders, and crime. Coulombe’s vision of teamwork found inspiration from Pierre Monteux, the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony (during Coulombe’s years at Stanford University). Much later, he read this in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner: “Monteux never tried to get a performance out of an orchestra. He was always giving one with them.” #10. The Hoopla! Bucket. No surprise—it was a hoot (and still is) to work at Trader Joe’s. He writes, “There was a particular angle to the naming of our products. I wanted to create a silent conspiracy among the overeducated, underpaid people in town, so that as they moved down the aisles they would read secret messages on the products.” Examples: Brandenburg Brownies, Sir Isaac Newtons, The Bagel Spinoza, The Peanut Pascal. “My favorite of all the private labels was Heisenberg’s Uncertain Blend of coffee beans.” (I had to google it. See the “uncertainty principle.”) Another Hoopla! seasoning: “Showmanship” is defined as “the sum total of all efforts to make contact with the customer. It’s the most ephemeral, the most difficult, and the most important of the Demand Side activities.” #11. The Donor Bucket. As of 1988, Trader Joe’s was receiving 300 donation requests per year from nonprofit organizations. Coulombe had five policies that guided their giving, including: “1) Never give cash to anyone. 2) Never buy space in a program. That is money thrown away. 3) Give freely, give generously, but only to nonprofits that are focused on the overeducated and underpaid.”  In 2020, Trader Joe’s also donated nearly $345 million dollars of food and beverages, which equates to approximately 69 million meals, through their Neighborhood Shares program. Every nonprofit fundraiser should read “Promoting through Nonprofits” in Chapter 9. #12. The Volunteer Bucket. This is stunning! Joe Coulombe—personally—volunteered his time to write and record a one-minute broadcast for a Los Angeles classical music radio station. The opening line, “This is Joe Coulombe of Trader Joe’s with a word on food and wine.” He writes, “We needed the publicity in those days, and KFAC was right on our target of overeducated and unpaid people.” He recorded 3,300 unique scripts (as in…no repeats!) for “Words on Food and Wine” and he would record 50 or 60 broadcasts in a session that left him “pretty well burned out.” Oh, my. This discipline “forced me to study the field of food and wine.” #13. The Crisis Bucket. “Hairballs” is the title of Chapter 10—and the first line cautions, “All businesses have problems.” Coulombe’s favorite management quote is from Tex Thornton of Litton Industries: “If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions.” The author writes, “Early in my career I learned there are two kinds of decisions: the ones that are easily reversible and the ones that aren’t.” This must-read chapter includes the section, “The Worst Hairball of My Career: The United Farm Workers’ Secondary Boycott.” Whew! The boycott of Trader Joe’s—just before Thanksgiving in 1971—was actually organized by young seminarians from Union Theological Seminary in New York. THE CORPORATION #14. The Board Bucket. When he retired from Trader Joe’s, Coulombe served on the board of directors of several companies. He also consulted with companies, but didn’t have the highest view of consultants! He found board work and the writing of this book, “satisfying, challenging, and appropriate to my age.” His succession plan (selling the company, continuing to lead it for a few years, and then exiting at age 58) is instructive for board members and CEOs. #15. The Budget Bucket. Did you know that Trader Joe’s is the largest retailer of maple syrup in the United States? Ditto wild rice. That—and more—is from the introductory chapter, “A Trader Joe’s Sampler.” While financial steps (and missteps) are discussed throughout the book, budget-minded leaders will find the list of “Some of the Best Deals We Ever Made” absolutely fascinating. That topic was asked and addressed during a lecture he gave in 1998 for the Culinary Historians Society—“a lecture that led to this book.” (You’ll also appreciate the author’s pre-modern references to adding machines and slide rules!) #16. The Delegation Bucket. You don’t grow from one store in Pasadena, Calif., to 530 stores nationwide by being inept at delegation. I could write an entire review—just on Trader Joe’s delegation competencies, but I’ll spare you. Just this: “We fundamentally changed the point of view of the business from customer-oriented to buyer-oriented. I put our buyers in charge of the company.” See more in Chapter 11, “Mac the Knife,” and how reducing the number of products—and requiring every product to pay its own way—put the authority and the responsibility on the buyers. Fascinating. #17. The Operations Bucket. Taking a cue from the skunkworks concept by Tom Peters (see In Search of Excellence), Joe Coulombe created three major skunkworks projects in his central management: Skunkworks I: Buying, Skunkworks II: Sales, and Skunkworks III: Accounting. “I had signs made with these titles to be hung in each department." Over his door was this sign: CHIEF SKUNK! By the way, the Trader Joe’s approach to operations (especially the art and science of selecting store locations) should be required reading in seminaries for Church Planting 101. (Hint: Trader Joe’s locations are situated closest to their niche customers: the overeducated and underpaid.) #18. The Systems Bucket. Fascinating! (Have I used that word yet?) “Every full-timer was supposed to be able to perform every job in the store, including checking, balancing the books, ordering each department, stocking, opening, closing, going to the bank, etc. Everybody worked the check stands in the course of a day, including the Captain.” Note: When I met Jason Addy this week (a 21-year employee, and the new Captain at the San Clemente, Calif., store), he was working the check stands! The Trader Joe’s “system” builds upon “the medieval French verb, retailer, which means to ‘cut into pieces.’” #19. The Printing Bucket (aka the Communication Bucket). Trader Joe’s launched the Fearless Flyer newsletter in 1970 (now also online here). They synchronized promotion with purchasing—similar to one of my Printing Bucket axioms to “use publication deadlines to fine tune organizational decision-making.” Coulombe writes that “the Fearless Flyer was an educational medium and hundreds of customers kept three-ring notebook collections of the issues so they could refer back to the articles. For years, we printed three rings on the cover.” Three cheers for three-ring binders! (See my Operations Bucket and read, “Bless Bob With a Binder: A three-ring binder will usher in world peace. Almost.”)   #20. The Meetings Bucket. Your approach to meetings (with staff, board, vendors, and others) spotlights your organizational culture—but retailing is unique. When to meet? Coulombe hosted two employee parties every year (summer and Christmas), but planned two nights for each—to accommodate those who worked nights. Perhaps the focus on buyers is best illustrated with this: “Whenever a vendor claimed to be truly desperate, we offered to meet him 6:00 p.m. on Friday night. That separates the wheat from the chaff!” (For more on the culture of meetings, read Made From Scratch, written by the founder of Texas Roadhouse restaurants.) Sorry. I got carried away—this book is so good, but my review is way too long. Sorry, again! Suggestion: after you read Becoming Trader Joe, read the new book on creating superb customer experiences. Read my review of From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans, by Jon Picoult. To order from Amazon, click on the title for Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys, by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (7 hours, 32 minutes). YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) Trader Joe’s founder, Joe Coulombe, was the classic Renaissance Man. His book oozes with insights and quotations from Scientific American, Smithsonian, Albert Camus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, and others. What do you read—or who do you listen to—to inform your leadership and management decisions? 2) When John Pearson reads a killer quotation or a memorable chapter, he mentally files it under one of his 20 management buckets/core competencies from Mastering the Management Buckets. What’s your mental filing system for all things leadership and management?   Chuck Girard wrote the worship song, “Slow Down,” and notes: “Even today, this song receives more mail and comment than any other song I have ever written.” Read more. (See Mistake #19 in Mastering Mistake Making.) Mistake #19 of 25:  Experiencing Infrequent God Moments Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned John’s Mistake #19: “I believe Almighty God wants us to experience more frequent God moments, but I often moved way-too-fast on my own—and didn’t slow down for God to intervene.” When John and Joanne celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2019, they began with a family breakfast at Dana Point Harbor. But halfway through the celebration, they were unprepared for a stunning “God moment” when their son, Jason, revealed what the Lord had orchestrated that morning—seemingly coincidental, but not really!  For Mistake #19, John recommends two resources: • Option #1: The One Year Bible (the entire Bible arranged in 365 daily readings – New Living Translation, by Tyndale) – Note: this edition was just published Oct. 19, 2021, by Tyndale. (Order from Amazon) • Option #2: “Slow Down” (listen to this worship song written and sung by Chuck Girard) – Listen on YouTube   Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. For supplementary resources, click on John's  "Bucket" book and workbook below:                   JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Does your organization need a deep dive into your customer niche again—or a 2021 version of Trader Joe’s popular Fearless Flyer? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social). NEXT ISSUE! MISTAKE #20:  Trying to Fix Workaholism on My Own.  I should have asked a counselor for help much, much sooner. Order from Amazon.  MORE RESOURCES: • BLOG: Pails in Comparison • SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon  • WEBSITE:  Management Buckets • BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations  NOTICE! Effective Oct. 1, 2025, all 657 eNews issues, previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to a new website here. New book reviews will also be archived at John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. Or, click here for John’s recent book reviews on Amazon.

Collision Course - Carlos Ghosn

 

Issue No. 488 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Sept. 17, 2021) asks: is CEO Carlos Ghosn, the rockstar CEO who fled Japan, guilty or falsely charged by Nissan? And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book John wrote with his son, Jason, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #13 below. Former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn escaped from Japan in an equipment storage box, “the kind used to transport clunky but delicate audio equipment.” (Apparently, not every plan requires out-of-the-box thinking.) Rubber Stamp Boards & Lapdog Auditors Leaders and readers—where do I start? This page-turning book has it all: international intrigue, cultural and governmental shenanigans, backroom deals and self-dealing, draconian detentions, a Green Beret’s illegal scheme to whisk Japan’s most famous foreigner out of the country, allegations, indictments, hubris, boardroom dysfunction, narcissism, and dozens and dozens of even more juicy, jaw-dropping disclosures. This is a Top-10 book for 2021 and we’ll be talking about it for years to come! Read or listen to Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire, by Hans Greimel and William Sposato. You’ll remember the worldwide breaking news on Dec. 30, 2019, when Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan and Renault escaped from Japan—hidden in a large black box! With meticulous Green Beret-experienced planning, this clandestine and illegal operation loaded Ghosn-in-a-box onto a private jet at the smaller, Osaka airport. Seven time zones later, after a stop in Istanbul, Turkey, Ghosn landed in Beirut, Lebanon. (And you guessed it. Lebanon has no extradition treaty with Japan.)  How did Carlos Ghosn escape Japan? View the 6-minute video, “Carlos Ghosn's Great Escape” (CBS Sunday Morning, Jan. 12, 2020). Shocking Japan and the world (“Ghosn Shock” in the Japanese media), this high profile auto kingpin was arrested upon arriving in Tokyo on Nov. 19, 2018. Instead of facing trial in Japan for alleged financial misconduct (“Defense attorney Takano estimated the whole affair would drag on for at least five years”—typical of Japan’s reputed “hostage justice” system), today Ghosn is a relatively free man in Beirut, where he is a Lebanese citizen.  The story behind the story is skillfully weaved, colorfully painted, and sliced and diced by two Tokyo-based journalists with stunning street cred and international credentials. Why should business leaders, managers, board members, pastors, and nonprofit CEOs read this book? 9 REASONS YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK: #1. LEADERSHIP COMPLEXITY. Imagine—you’re the CEO and/or chairman of not one, not two, but three major companies (Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi). Does it really work? Was Ghosn’s rock star status a one-off risky experiment, or is this the new global leadership trend? Ghosn was “the first person to serve simultaneously as the CEO of two Fortune 500 companies.” (How many organizations, formally or informally, do some megachurch pastors lead? Does it really work? What might go south fast?) #2. AN INNER CIRCLE OF ENABLERS. In 1999, after Renault (France) gambled $5.4 billion to rescue Nissan (Japan) from bankruptcy and had a 43.4 percent stake in the company, Renault dispatched Carlos Ghosn to Nissan. The turn-around expert became Nissan’s CEO in 2001—and the two companies and two countries lived happily ever after. (Not!) Per the authors, Nissan claimed Ghosn orchestrated “a web of self-dealing, both of the illegal variety and the merely unseemly kind, because he had concentrated so much unchecked power in himself as chairman and CEO and an inner circle of enablers. No one could tell him no.”  #3. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT. Carlos Ghosn (at various press conferences from Lebanon) claims he is not a fugitive of justice, but a “fugitive of injustice.” True or False? Authors Greimel and Sposato quote a former defense lawyer in Chapter 11, “Justice Japan Style,” that “Japanese judges are very overconfident of their ability to find the truth. They are trained not to admit that they have made a mistake, even when there is a miscarriage of justice.” (Perhaps Mastering Mistake Making should be taught in Japanese law schools?) And...that “the US concept of client-attorney privilege is largely absent” in Japan.  Ghosn had been confined to jail twice for a total of 130 days (with no calls to family or friends permitted). He was facing up to 15 years in prison. And according to his attorneys, Ghosn “was questioned [without his attorney present] for an average of seven hours daily, including on weekends and holidays. Prosecutors dispute those figures.” Per the authors and other sources, this intense interrogation leads to an extreme rate of “confessions.” About just one percent of cases in Japan end in acquittal—a stat that the Japanese, apparently, are quite proud of. The authors add, “One former prosecutor said that if he were to lose just two cases, his career in the prosecutor’s office would effectively be over.”  View the deep dive video on the rise and fall of Superstar CEO Carlos Ghosn. View “Carlos Ghosn: The Rise and Fall of a Superstar CEO” from the Financial Times, July 26, 2021 (21 min.). #4. DICTATOR OR DECISION-MAKER? How does one create—and hold together—a global automotive alliance of three major auto makers—featuring 10 brands now in 2021? Click here for the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi corporate website. With national interests and loyalties impacting every decision, how would you orchestrate the governance of this alliance—termed a “strategic alliance” that in 2017 sold 10.6 million vehicles worldwide, making it the leading light vehicle manufacturing group in the world? Ghosn’s own words: “Between 1999 and 2018, you never heard about any problems, because, obviously, I was the final decision maker, I installed a spirit of cooperation against the extremes. But we knew that the extremes were always there. They were always going to take advantage of any situation to have their opinion prevailing.” He added, “They accused me of being a dictator, but I was a decision-maker.” Are you working on a strategic alliance? What’s your governance model? What’s your style? #5. CULTURE CLASHES (AND INSIGHTS). Reason #5 why Collision Course is a must-read: you’ll be reminded again that deeply held values and biases in other cultures loom under the surface to create catastrophic clashes, often fueled by basic mistrust. In Chapter 14, “Foreign Entanglements,” the authors include a laundry list of mergers and investments gone bad (Vodafone took a $8.6 billion loss) often due to “culturally insensitive expat executives who had little knowledge of the market, another classic mistake.” Hans Greimel and William Sposato humorously note what sometimes happens whenever “foreign bosses and Japanese midlevel staff are brought together, when even routine meetings run into language issues and cultural differences about expectations.” One foreign boss showed up unexpectedly at his office on Saturday “only to see the entire Japan management team holding a meeting.” They were “plotting the venture’s strategy,” they said. Yet the non-Japanese boss reminded them that they had just worked on that earlier in the week. The response: “This is the one that we’ll really be following.” Yikes. I have been in Japan and France multiple times (for business and pleasure), but Collision Course dramatically upped my cultural savvy in the nuances of competing cultural norms. In later years, I’ve been more intentional in widening my lifelong learning lanes by reading outside my culture (See Mistake #3 and Mistake #11 in Mastering Mistake Making.) Read The Great Successor (North Korea) and Money Games (South Korea). See also Leading Across Cultures.  #6. GOVERNANCE DYSFUNCTION. “Until 2018, when Nissan finally appointed its first independent outside directors, board meetings averaged less than twenty minutes long, it claimed.” In March 2019, “Nissan’s governance task force came back with its report on the Ghosn scandal.” The report “outlined how Ghosn allegedly maneuvered with few checks or balances in a world of rubber-stamp board meetings and lapdog auditors.” #7. THE VOLVO TRUST FACTOR. One former Nissan exec, who left during the tumult, targeted the trust factor—top to bottom. “If you can’t trust people on corporate governance, how can you trust them to build the car you’re going to put your family in? Do you really want to take a gamble with your family? Or are you just doing to be done with it and buy a Volvo?” (Delete “car” and insert your company’s product, program, or service. Do customers and clients trust you? Do they trust your governance?) #8. FIRED IN 15 MINUTES! In Chapter 16, “Scandalous Affairs,” the authors chronicle the stunning whistle-blower story of Michael Woodford (a Brit), who served just two weeks as the CEO of the Japanese camera company, Olympus Corp. The board fired him after just a 15-minute discussion—when “he started to question hidden losses of $1.6 billion in speculative investments” by the company. The chapter discloses the cultural implications of “the narrow viewpoint of employees who live in the world of their life-time employers.” These issues, certainly, played into Ghosn’s long run as CEO of Nissan. But no spoiler alert here. Read Collision Course to decide for yourself if the charges against Ghosn are legit or not. But more importantly—how effective is your organization’s whistleblower policy and culture? #9. NYT AND WSJ AGREE! The authors note that “Remarkably, the case and Ghosn’s escape from Japanese justice found the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in unlikely agreement.” The question: “Are foreign executives in Japan safe from capricious prosecution?” In addition to business executives, I would add: international travelers, missionaries, and tourists. As a result of reading Collision Course, I’m now thinking differently about international travel. They quote a long-term foreign exec, “It has clearly put a chill on executives from abroad taking a senior job with a Japanese company. It’s a much riskier proposition than it was a year ago." Yikes. Whew! Many commentators suggest Carlos Ghosn’s story will become a Hollywood movie (“based on a true story”). If so, I’ll watch it—but there’s no way it will be as good as the book. To order from Amazon, click on the title for Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire, by Hans Greimel and William Sposato. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (12 hours, 54 minutes). And thanks to Harvard Business Review Press for providing a review copy. YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) From his safe perch in Lebanon, Carlos Ghosn has been interviewed numerous times about his daring escape from Japan. “As the Alliance wobbled without him, Ghosn seemed to relish in sniping at its troubles from the sidelines. He derided the group’s new consensus-based approach as ‘Santa Claus’ management.” How would/should your CEO and/or board spokesperson respond to a former CEO’s sniping? 2) Check out the classic CEO bios of yesteryear like Iacocca (1924-2019), who led both Ford (the Mustang!) and Chrysler (1978-1992). Or read more about the “Peter Drucker of the United Kingdom,” Charles Handy, in my review of Myself and Other More Important Matters.      Peter Drucker’s classic, The Effective Executive, is John’s recommended book for Mistake #13. Have you read Drucker’s wisdom on mistakes and risk-taking?     Mistake #13 of 25: Every Leader Needs a Coach—Except Me! Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned John confesses, “I squandered way too many years treading water without a coach.” In Mistake #13: “Every Leader Needs a Coach—Except Me!” John notes that while he often coached others and often encouraged others to have a coach, sadly he often neglected his own counsel. He credits $1-a-year CMA (CLA) Senior Adviser George Duff with helping him over many rough patches! According to Milestone Leadership, “92% of executives who received coaching said they would be willing to be coached again.” (Milestone offers coaching at $750 for a 90-minute session. Whew! The $1-a-year compensation for George Duff was John’s bargain of the century!) George Duff told John that every year he re-read Peter Drucker’s classic, The Effective Executive (the featured book in Mistake #13). Click here to order the 50th anniversary edition (2017). Click here to read the foreword by Jim Collins, “Ten Lessons I Learned from Peter Drucker.”   Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. For supplementary resources, click on John's  "Bucket" book and workbook below:                   JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Do your communication strategies need more out-of-the-box thinking or in-the-box thinking? Need fresh messaging? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social). MORE RESOURCES: • BLOG: Pails in Comparison • SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon  • WEBSITE:  Management Buckets • BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations  NOTICE! Effective Oct. 1, 2025, all 657 eNews issues, previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to a new website here. New book reviews will also be archived at John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. Or, click here for John’s recent book reviews on Amazon. "HOW TO MAKE MISTAKES WELL" Click here to listen to “How to Make Mistakes Well” as George P. Wood interviews John Pearson, author of Mastering Mistake-Making. As host of the Influence Podcast, George poses a dozen questions to John including, “What are the top two or three professional mistakes you see pastors and other ministry leaders make on a regular basis?”

Tales From Q School - Golf's Fifth Major

 

		Issue No. 41 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting  (June 11, 2007)  reports on a fascinating golf book and a summer reading program idea.  It’s one more way to delegate your reading.  For great book ideas (or even gifts for Father’s Day), see my other blogs here.
		Make a $25 deal with your direct reports this summer.  Buy e-card, e-mail or paper gift certificates at www.Amazon.com for your team’s summer vacation reading.  Whether they buy management books, biographies, fiction or a new Bible version, just ask them for a brief verbal or written report at a future staff or department meeting.  Question: what new insight did you gain about yourself, your family, your colleagues or the world? In that spirit, my company bought me Tales From Q School: Inside Golf’s Fifth Major by John Feinstein, the bestselling sportswriter. He chronicles the agony and the ecstasy (to borrow a cliché) of the winners and the losers at the 2005 PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament, often described as professional golf’s fifth major tournament.   It’s an annual competition for the 30 new spots available each year on the PGA Tour.  In 2005, more than 1,200 already vetted golfers paid up to $4,500 each for a shot at the big time. The book is a page-turner and the management and personal insights are frequent.  Former Vice President Dan Quayle (a seven-handicap golfer) wrote the book review in the Wall Street Journal and appreciated Feinstein's “retelling of classic catastrophes like Joe Daley's two-foot putt in 2000, which somehow went to the bottom of the cup and then popped out like a jack-in-the-box (he missed getting a card by one stroke).” Q School attracts top amateurs and veterans like 1987 Masters champion Larry Mize, “who failed to finish in the top 125 money-winners the previous year and were tossed back into the Q School pool. (Mize's 10-year tour exemption for winning the Masters had long since expired.)”  The golf stories are memorable, but if you’re not a golfer, you already know not to buy this!”
		Insights from the Management Buckets Workshop Experience When the next visionary in your organization comes down off the mountain and announces that God has told him (or her) to start a new program, give that person this list of 10 questions to ask about program capacity and sustainability. Check the three most important questions for your organization: 1. Does this program align with our mission statement? 2. Does this program align with our Big Holy Audacious Goal (BHAG)? 3. Does this program have written goals that meet the S.M.A.R.T. test (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-dated)? 4. Do we have the people capacity to both launch the program and maintain it (a staff champion, support staff, volunteers, etc.)? 5.  Have we answered the five questions Peter Drucker said every organization must ask? 6.  Have we invested adequate time and money in researching “Who is the customer?” and “What does the customer value?” 7.  Does this program align with our culture and our core values? 8.  Have we conducted the due diligence to assess the program’s sustainability (including revenue and expense) over the next three to five years? 9.  Under what conditions do we agree that we will “pull the plug” on this program, if the goals are not achieved by the target dates? 10.  Have we been diligent in asking our inside circle for constructive criticism—or have we spiritually hyped it so much that all naysayers have been silenced?"
		Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions: The Program Bucket --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.In your opinion, what current program, product or service do we currently offer that experienced the most effective pre-launch due diligence? 2. What question (of the 10 above) do we need to focus on more rigorously before we launch new programs, products or services? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MORE RESOURCES: • BLOG: Pails in Comparison • SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon  •WEBSITE:  Management Buckets • BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations Note: This is the NEW location for John Pearson's Buckets Blog. Slowly (!), the previous 650+ blogs posted (between 2006 and 2025) will gradually populate this blogsite, along with new book reviews each month.

The Bomber Mafia

 

Issue No. 485 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Aug. 19, 2021) highlights the life-altering implications of leadership transitions—with another bestseller from Malcolm Gladwell. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book I wrote with my son, Jason, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #11 below. The cadet chapel at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs “is a chapel from another universe. It looks like someone lined up a squadron of fighter jets like dominoes with their noses pointed toward the heavens.” The “Mafia Label” Was Not a Compliment  “This isn’t working. You’re out.” Malcolm Gladwell’s page-turner, The Bomber Mafia, is the perfect end-of-summer read. Action! Bombs! Morality! Science! Politics! Leadership! (Did I mention leadership?) And…two very different views of war and how to win wars (Jesus or Satan?). Gladwell writes, “The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry.” He adds, “And at the heart of it all are Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay, who squared off in the jungles of Guam. One was sent home. One stayed on, with a result that would lead to the darkest night of the Second World War. Consider their story and ask yourself—What would I have done? Which side would I have been on?” General LeMay informed General Hansell. “This isn’t working. You’re out.” Put yourself in Haywood Hansell’s shoes. “Hansell could stay on if he wished, to be LeMay’s deputy, a notion Hansell considered so insulting that he could barely speak.” Gladwell continues, “The Bomber Mafia is the story of that moment. What led up to it and what happened next—because that change of command reverberates to this day.” The subtitle ignites your curiosity: "A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War." Is your organization facing a leadership change (or putting it off)? This “case study” in command reminded me of David McKenna’s wisdom in Stewards of a Sacred Trust: “Like the ripple effect of a stone tossed into a pond, the CEO’s influence will move in waves through generations. No decision of the board, absolutely no decision, is more profound.” The bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia further elaborates on this “case study in how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters. The story I’m about to tell is not really a war story. Although it mostly takes place in wartime.” Gladwell adds, “It is the story of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer. A band of brothers in central Alabama. A British psychopath. Pyromaniacal chemists in basement labs at Harvard. It’s a story about the messiness of our intentions, because we always forget the mess when we look back.” And…it’s a story about mistake-making and Carl Norden (the genius), a Dutch engineer, educated in Switzerland, who came to America in 1904. Norden “…was a true believer in blank slate, and this reveals his ego. He said, ‘I don’t want to know the mistakes other people made. I don’t want to know what they did right. I’m going to develop what’s right myself.’” And he did. I won’t spoil the story—the true account—of why the invention of the “Norden bombsight” ranks up there with vaccines, fertilizers, and air-conditioning. You’ll have to read it for yourself—all 256 fast-moving pages in The Bomber Mafia. Gladwell talks about his books in this recent interview on CBS Sunday Morning: View Malcolm Gladwell’s 7-minute interview on CBS Sunday Morning. Gladwell, as is his unique style, weaves history, speculation, and observation into another fascinating read. Example from way back: “I remember one congressman being quoted as saying, ‘Why do we have all this controversy over airplanes? Why don’t we just buy one of them and let the services share it?’” And speaking of the military services, Gladwell digresses from his plot to add Carl Builder’s color commentary about what Builder calls “the puzzling and often contradictory behavior of America's military forces.” He adds, “…powerful—and glacially resistant to change—are the entrenched institutions and distinct ‘personalities’  of the three armed services themselves.” Per Gladwell, “Builder argued that you cannot understand how the three main branches of the American military behave and make decisions unless you understand how different their cultures are. And to prove this point, Builder said, just look at the chapels on each of the service academy campuses." Compare the Army and Navy chapels to “…the cadet chapel at the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. This is a chapel from another universe. It was finished in 1962, but if I told you that it was finished last month, you would say, ‘Wow, that’s a futuristic building.’ The Air Force chapel looks like someone lined up a squadron of fighter jets like dominoes with their noses pointed toward the heavens. It looks ready to take flight with a magnificent, deafening whoosh. Inside the cathedral, there are more than twenty-four thousand pieces of stained glass, in twenty-four different colors, and at the front, a cross forty-six feet tall and twelve feet wide, with crossbeams that look like propellers. Outside, four fighter jets are jauntily parked, as if some pilots, on a whim, had dropped by for Sunday morning communion.” The Air Force, Carl Builder adds, “is utterly uninterested in heritage and tradition. On the contrary, it wants to be modern.” Thus—the culture war is first fought among the military services, and then on the actual battlefield. (Fascinating.) Why the book title? The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.” Gladwell elucidates, “Their motto was: Proficimus more irretenti: ‘We make progress unhindered by custom.’” The mafia label “was not intended as a compliment—these were the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano and shoot-outs on the streets. But the Air Corps faculty thought the outcast label quite suited them. And it stuck. “Harold George, one of the spiritual leaders of the Bomber Mafia, put it like this: ‘We were highly enthusiastic; we were starting on, like, a crusade…knowing that there were a dozen of us and the only opposition we had was ten thousand officers and the rest of the Army, rest of the Navy.” After you’ve read (or listened to) The Bomber Mafia, watch the movie, Twelve O’Clock High. Gladwell: “It was based on a book written by Beirne Lay, the pilot under LeMay. Twelve O’Clock High starred Gregory Peck as the leader of an attack on a ball-bearing factory. It’s worth watching because it perfectly captures the persistence of the Bomber Mafia’s vision. The men had failed the first time, but it didn’t matter. They would try again. Whatever evidence was slowly gathering about the limitations of the Norden bombsight didn’t faze them. The dream was alive.” View Twelve O’Clock High on Amazon Prime. Twelve O’Clock High is often used in MBA courses (Harvard, etc.). I viewed it the first time in 2007 as a guest in Connie Salio’s course at Biola University’s Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership program. Click here to view Twelve O’Clock High on Amazon Prime (2 hours, 12 minutes). Does your organization have a bold idea? Launching a new program or department—radical or revolutionary? Gladwell’s research will give you the guts to try. He notes, “The Tactical School was a university. An academy. But not many of the faculty had any experience teaching. And the things they were teaching were so new and radical that there weren’t really any textbooks for anyone to study or articles for anyone to read. So they mostly made things up—on the fly, so to speak.  “Lectures quickly turned into seminars, which turned into open discussions, which spilled out into dinner in the evening. That’s what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself.” Again—no spoiler alerts, but don’t miss these snippets:    • “Obsessives lead us astray sometimes. Can’t see the bigger picture. Serve not just the world’s but also their own narrow interests. But I don’t think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.”    • The four tenets of the Bomber Mafia doctrine (previously all bombing was done at night, but these revolutionaries tried it in broad daylight with the new invention).    • How “spitballing” (“thought experiments”) before bombers and even bombsights existed—enabled innovation.    • Why Londoners never panicked during the Blitz of 1940-1941, per a government film, “The sign of a great fighter in the ring is, Can he get up from the floor after being knocked down? London does this every morning.”    • Gladwell’s poetry: “…he’s a figure who made a novelist’s fingers itch.” And these:    • On Hansell: “…unflinchingly honest, a little naïve, but fundamentally a romantic, with all that implies.” His first date with Dorothy Rogers: she “found him tiresome. He wrote her every day for the better part of a year. She answered two, maybe three of his letters. They were married in 1932.”    • Curtis LeMay on the easy way to win the war: “…there ain’t no such animal.”    • Why Haywood Hansell “sided with Jesus” on how to end the war. “You should never do evil so that good may come. But LeMay would have thought long and hard about going with Satan. He would have accepted the illegitimate means if they led to what he considered a swift and more advantageous end.” (What’s your view?) Your theology matters. Don’t skip Chapter 9’s shocking report on the bombing of 67 (not a typo) cities before Japan surrendered in August 1945. Would you…authorize those bombings? To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, by Malcolm Gladwell. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (5 hours, 14 minutes). P.S. Need more war stories to wrap up your summer reading? Check out:    • The Tragedy of Patton: A Soldier's Date With Destiny — Could World War II's Greatest General Have Stopped the Cold War? by Robert Orlando (read my review)    • View the award-winning movie, Silence Patton, directed by Robert Orlando, 2018 (1 hour, 25 minutes) – Click here.    • Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (read my review)    • New movie coming in 2022: Operation Mincemeat And…click on these titles to read my reviews of three more Malcolm Gladwell books:      • Talking to Strangers (2020)    • David and Goliath (2013)    • Outliers: The Story of Success (2013) YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) Was it worth it? Was General LeMay’s horrific bombing campaign prudent? (It, perhaps, prevented a U.S. invasion of Japan and more lost lives.) Now imagine that you’re calling the shots. Is a shorter war your highest value? 2) The Norden bombsight had a virtuous goal: precision bombing with minimal civilian casualties. Oops. The opposite happened. What should we be learning from the study of war?       Wow! Counting this issue, John has reviewed four books by Malcolm Gladwell, but he refrained from borrowing any of Gladwell's book titles for the "mistake" book. LOL!  MISTAKE #11 of 25: Traveling Without Preparing Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned In Mistake #11, “Traveling Without Preparing,” John recommends a Malcolm Gladwell bestseller and also confesses, “I was unprepared for the intricacies and nuances of being a global citizen. I should have asked for coaching from experienced goodwill ambassadors.”  He writes, “Now with 59 countries crowding my passport, I realize an empty suitcase is preferable to an empty mind!” So with the help of coaches and just-in-time books, John learned (somewhat!) how to navigate other cultures across the globe. He especially appreciated two books:    • Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, says that your long-standing assumptions about leadership might need to change, based on a person’s ethnicity. For example, Greeks and Guatemalans are in the top five of the “uncertainty avoidance” countries (high reliance on rules), while Swedes and Jamaicans represent the top-five cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity. (Did John mention he's Swedish?) Read John's review.    • Leading Across Cultures: Effective Ministry and Mission in the Global Church. James E. Plueddemann quotes Joshua Bogunjoko, “Cross-cultural leadership is a school from which you never graduate.”  Must-read: the informative two-page vignettes, “Reflections on Multicultural Leadership.” Read John's review.   Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. For supplementary resources, click on John's  "Bucket" book and workbook below:                   JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Before you bet the farm on your next marketing blitz—slow down and invite early feedback on your innovation. Explore how to test pilot a campaign first. Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).  MORE RESOURCES: • BLOG: Pails in Comparison • SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon  • WEBSITE:  Management Buckets • BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations IMPORTANT NOTICE! Effective Oct. 1, 2025, all 657 eNews issues, previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to a new website here. New book reviews will also be archived at John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. Or, click here for John’s recent book reviews on Amazon. OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS MISTAKE #11 Book Recommendation:  Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, has vast implications for your organization. What should you consider when recruiting new team members? How might your professional development programs need to change based on a person’s ethnicity? (Read my review.)