While much has been written about the relationship between integrity, trust and profitability in the last few years, there are companies who have lived this for over 100 years, like a 165 year old, billion dollar plus, 6 generation family business in Wisconsin, Menasha Corp.  Last year, in a discussion on the paradox of integrity, trust and vulnerability with John Hagel, Saul Kaplan, Mike Waite, President of Menasha Packaging Corp. (MPC) and myself, shared how integrity is key to Menasha’s success.

Located in the Fox Valley of Wisconsin, Menasha Corp. started out making wooden pails and is now comprised of two businesses that make packaging solutions for multiple industries. How many family-held companies can you name that are 165 years old and thriving?  That’s why Menasha’s leadership story is so important. It has sustained several depressions, recessions, wars, calamities and disruptions. So, I asked Jim Kotek, Menasha Corp’s CEO, to share his view of the top leadership traits that have led Menasha’s two business’s, Menasha Packaging Corporation (MPC) and ORBIS, continued success and growth. Jim summed it up in four intertwined traits:

• Integrity: Leadership’s values are aligned with each other;
• Passion & Commitment: Leadership is passionate about the businesses they are in and committed to the success of their customers, their employees and the company overall;
• Discipline & Accountability:  Promises are kept and executed; expectations are communicated; strategic directions are established, reviewed, adapted, communicated and tracked;
• Ego-less: Leadership is driven by what’s best for their customers and company, not what’s best for them.

The “no ego” mentality is long-standing in Menasha.  Decades ago, Donald “Tad” Shepard, the great-grandson of Menasha Corporation’s founder Elisha Smith, said, “Arrogance, pomposity and self-importance don’t have a place here.” Bill Ash, President of ORBIS, and Mike Waite, President of MPC (and Tad’s son-in-law), are servant leaders and stewards of their businesses, which permeate the culture. Walk the hallways or the plant floors and you see people willing to help each other, saying “Yes” as a first response.  Those who put their ego first simply don’t succeed at Menasha.

Businesses complain about the lack of discipline and accountability.  Menasha’s leadership, because of their stewardship mentality and the leaders’ personalities, have balanced discipline and accountability with adaptability and flexibility. They are not rigid and fixed but use their strategic plans as a way to hold each other responsible from the President down to the plant floor based on a common vision and direction for growth. Their strategic plans are not cast in concrete, but are regularly reviewed, evaluated, assessed, revised and always communicated as living breathing documents that adapt with the world.  I like to refer to their plans as cast in “Jell-O” – supportable, realistic yet not rigid.

Leadership’s passion and commitment to their customers, employees and community is evident.  You see the excitement when they talk about how real customer problems are being solved and employees have opportunities for growth and impact – which is why the companies are growing and succeeding. Both leaders’ personalities and talents are aligned with their markets. Bill’s background in finance is a perfect fit for ORBIS’s markets, which are laser focused on ROI, supply chain and efficiency. Bill’s ability to identify with ORBIS’s customers’ needs, issues, and concerns and help align his organization around these with the freedom to solve problems is key to ORBIS’s success.

Mike’s background in sales and marketing is spot on with MPC’s markets, many of which are CPG (Customer Product Good) companies struggling to increase sales and brand equity at the fiercely competitive retailers. Mike’s ability to identify with MPC’s customers’ challenges in breaking through the noise and clutter of today’s markets, and aligning and freeing his team to innovate is key to MPC’s success. Did this alignment of leadership with their markets happen deliberately or by luck? A little of both, for luck is not always by chance. Lastly, Integrity. 

You can say that Menasha represents our country’s long-lost midwestern values, and that could be valid. All I know is that throughout my years of working with both companies, integrity has never been an issue and has always been a given – at all levels of the companies. Aligned values, reinforced by the daily behavior and actions of leadership in all business dealings are the nourishment that sustain their virtues-based culture.

As we were wrapping up our conversation, Jim said “If you have to spend time managing ego and lack of integrity, you’ve lost time focusing on the markets and your people.  We [Menasha] are very blessed.” Menasha is indeed blessed, but not by accident. They haven’t been willing to sacrifice integrity. They’ve held true to their values, expecting everyone to live by them no matter what the title. 165 years later they are disrupting markets, growing their facilities, hiring people, supporting their communities and giving back to the shareholders. 

That’s not a bad legacy for over one and half centuries. How about you? Did you like today’s post? If so you’ll love our frequent newsletter!

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I was 20 years old, just out of undergrad, and sitting among a group Ph.D.’s. My first boss at Bell Labs was an equal-opportunity yeller. When he shouted at me in my first-ever department meeting, I got up, told him when he wanted to talk, not yell, I’d be in my office and walked out. Perhaps this was not the best initial career move. About 30 minutes later, he walked into my office and apologized. He never yelled at me again (though he did keep yelling at the rest of the team), and became one of three manager-mentors that shaped my career at Bell Labs and AT&T — and taught me to manage others and myself. In my career, I’ve had three such memorable bosses. Today, I’ll share one story as well as the biggest lesson I learned from each. Finally, I’ll share the biggest lesson of them all that I hope will help you as you launch your career.

Lesson: Let Your People Go

That first boss, the reformed yeller, provided multiple opportunities for visibility up to the president of Bell Labs, coaching me all the way. He went out on a limb to make me the first person promoted to Member of Technical Staff (MTS) without a Ph.D. or M.S., and under the age of 25. He gave me the freedom to design my own role and the autonomy to accomplish my goals, only “interfering” to remove obstacles and create more visibility.

When I was going to quit to move to Ohio and marry my husband, who had left Basic Research at Bell Labs to teach Physics at Oberlin College, he pulled strings with HR and his counterpart at AT&T for our project (and my next boss) so I wouldn’t quit. These two men arranged my transfer to my new boss’s organization, moved me to Oberlin, Ohio and flew me back and forth for nine years…just so I wouldn’t quit. As you proceed through your career, take note of the great talent you work with and find.

Do what you need to in order to mentor, encourage and support them. Treat them justly and do what’s right for them and the organization over what’s right for you personally. Give them opportunities to excel and succeed and provide shelter when they fail.

Lesson: Light the Fire and Clear the Path

I knew my second boss already, having worked with him for a year or so with mutual respect and admiration. He fully supported my telecommuting, since it “proved” our project in action, and funded a home office with every device imaginable for 1988, including a laptop and cell phone. I commuted weekly to New Jersey and monthly to Europe and Asia. I designed my own job with my own set of outputs and outcomes — he provided the resources to make it happen. He taught me how to succeed at corporate politics without compromising my integrity and championed my work up the executive ladder. He orchestrated a “loan” of me to the president’s office for a special project that was a significant career opportunity.

And, when the project was done, he helped me choose from my available options: stay in the executive suite, go with the business I’d helped start as a result of the project, or return to my organization. I did not want to stay with the executives — there were no role models for me in the C-suite (which they interpreted as no women and I clarified as no humans). I wanted to go back to my boss and his wonderfully addictive leadership style, but he pushed me to join the management team running the new business.

Guide your people’s passion and get out of the way: the autonomy and freedom I was given to create and do my job exponentially increased my passion, excitement and success. My manager-mentors made sure my passions aligned with organizational direction, gave me some high-level boundaries, resources, and introductions to make it happen. They removed obstacles, showed me how to handle challenges, provided opportunities, and took the blame while giving me the credit.

Lesson: Remember, They’re Human

My next boss also believed in autonomy, outcomes over outputs, customer-centricity, and developing his people. The experiences, opportunities, successes, failures, and learnings during that “start-up” time were amazing and we had a lot of fun creating a separate culture. While working for him, I had my first child. In addition to the very generous maternity leave benefits, his support and communication with the rest of the team in New Jersey made it possible for me to work from home, without travel, and still have significant impact on the business. For him, the fact I wasn’t in New Jersey meant I had a politically unbiased perspective on the business’s needs.

He’d handle the politics; I’d handle getting the work done with my team. Unfortunately, AT&T was changing dramatically, and not positively. We all started leaving. But to this day, my friendship with my former boss remains strong. Many companies treat their employees as employees — nicely and kindly, even generously — but not as humans. My manager-mentors made it clear that I mattered not just for what I could do, but also for who I was.

It wasn’t just about the generous maternity leave or the work-from-home flexibility, although I was grateful for both. Boss #2, for instance, required that I take two consecutive weeks of vacation to fully relax. My assistant took care of everything and virtually banned me from checking email, even though we would still do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day — an important ritual for us no matter where I was in the world.

Lesson: Trust Trumps Everything

What else did I learn from three incredible manager-mentors? While there were many lessons, this has stood out for me over the past 30 years: trust trumps everything. And everything flows from trust — learning, credibility, accountability, a sense of purpose and a mission that makes “work” bigger than oneself. Yes, I’ve been extremely blessed and my circumstances were, and unfortunately still are, atypical. But they don’t have to be. As you look at your early career, at the people you work with and the cultures you  work with, please think about how you can apply just one of these lessons, perhaps even just one part of one lesson. The benefits last decades.

 

You know how much I believe in serendipity & random collisions (a la Saul Kaplan!). Meet Samir Rath (pictured above and bio below).  I met Samir when he was in the 2nd cohort of the IE-Brown E-MBA while simultaneously investing and starting companies all over the world, including Chile, because, doesn’t everyone? Read Samir’s thoughts on serendipity, luck and entrepreneurship – and join in!

“Innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make.” – Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web.

How often do we hear our friends and family say “Oh! She is so lucky. She moves in the right circles”. Or “He is so lucky. He is always at the right place at the right time”. Beyond the tinge of jealousy that such messages communicate, also hides a subtle ring of despair. Many people feel that no matter how hard they work or how capable they are, their spate of bad luck just keeps messing things up.

Luck is nothing but an attitude. 

Richard Wiseman, the author of “The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind”, defines luck as the outcome of how we deal with chance and that some people are just much better at it. ‘Unlucky’ people tend to be very apprehensive of the future, uncomfortable with change and want to control their circumstances. They tend to have set pre-defined expectations of how a situation should play out, often leading to disappointment. This is inevitable given how bad we are at predicting the future. ‘Lucky’ people, on the other hand, embrace the randomness of life with open arms and accept that change is the only constant in the equation of life.

Serendipity becomes a way of life…

With happenstance encounters evolving into friendships and business relationships. The ‘lucky’ ones make it much more likely that they will stumble on incredible events and be at the right place at the right time with the right people. Sometimes things work out.

Todd Kashdan, a psychologist at George Mason University, observes that getting lucky gets much harder as we get older and wiser, not because the game of life has changed but rather because how we play the game has. We get wiser with age and armed with experience, we form very strong convictions on how the world works. This applies to companies too. AT&T, which traces its origins to original Bell Telephone Company, could not anticipate a change in behavior, blinded in part by its domain expertise in telecom infrastructure.

A young startup, Whatsapp, figured out that we have changed the way we communicate and want to share images, video and audio media over the internet across multiple platforms. At the start of the year, Whatsapp had more than 450 million users, all built and supported with a team of just 32 engineers.

We will be engineering some serendipity for the launch of our forthcoming book “No Startup Hipsters”.

With the common thread of building technology companies that focus on real problems, we will be connecting tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, investors and enablers. Each person would login through a social network and a twitter style 140 characters description of what they are working on. Curated profiles from across the globe will quickly zip by in a “hot or not” style and when both sides choose to connect – Boom!. So, come create some luck by signing up atThunderClap and get the book for free too.

SAMIR RATH is a financial technology entrepreneur and angel investor working with technology startups globally from over 20 countries. He helped build the Asian operations of GETCO LLC, one of the worlds largest trading technology firms, listed on New York Stock Exchange today as KCG. He began his career as a Macroeconomist for the Monetary Authority of Singapore. He is the co-author of a forthcoming book titled “No Startup Hipsters – Build Scalable Technology Companies”. [www.nostartuphipsters.com]. Twitter: @Samir_Rath