Heart & Soul: Five American Companies That Are Making the World A Better Place
400
Heart & Soul: Five American Companies That Are Making the World A Better Place
400eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
•Mary Kay (Dallas), whose primary focus has always been to be a vehicle for women's success and independence in a world that often supports neither; the company now has more than 2 million women working toward their dreams in 37 countries
•DaVita (Los Angeles/Denver), dedicated to becoming the world's best dialysis company. America's number-one provider of dialysis treatment, DaVita treats its patients and employees like family members.
•InRETURN (Cincinnati), a company that intentionally employs those with brain injuries and other neurological challenges
•World Wide Technology (St.Louis), the largest African-American–owned business in the nation, which thrives on biblical principles of fairness and caring
•Starkey Laboratories (St.Paul/Minneapolis), whose employees travel to remote places to provide more than 50,000 hearing aids to the poor
To the employees of these companies, success is measured by the good they accomplish in the world. However, profiting and caring aren't mutually exclusive—these companies demonstrate how any company of any size can do both.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781935618522 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BenBella Books, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/07/2010 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Mary Kay's Way
Mary Kay Ash, who founded the Dallas-based cosmetics company Mary Kay, Inc., in 1963, is recognized today as one of the most successful businesswomen in U.S. history. With more than two million independent representatives in thirty-seven countries, the company's wholesale revenues today are near $3 billion. At the time of her death in 2001, she was revered by millions of women around the world.
Mary Kay was a gifted speaker. In a convention hall, she could charm an audience of thousands. One on one, she conveyed enthusiasm and genuine warmth. To know her was to love her. To this day she is strongly identified with the company that bears her name. It appears on everything from product packaging to the signage on the company's regal high-rise building. Her values, principles, and beliefs are also deeply ingrained in the company's culture. She was and is the heart and soul of Mary Kay Cosmetics. Most often a company so strongly identified with a single individual finds its future in jeopardy with the passing of its founder. Remarkably, this was not the case at Mary Kay, Inc. A seamless succession was effected by a management team that clearly understood her wishes and was determined to preserve what its founder stood for; as a consequence, the spirit of this extraordinary woman lives on today. Understanding how this transition happened requires knowing about Mary Kay, the woman. This is her story and that of the company she built.
* * *
THE LIFE OF MARY KAY ASH is a classic rags-to-riches story — the kind that inspires books and movies. The movie Rocky comes to mind, in which the underdog boxer succeeds against all odds. The contrast between Rocky Balboa and Mary Kay could not be greater. Rocky Balboa is a punch-drunk heavyweight prizefighter. Mary Kay was a petite 5'2" blond, meticulous in appearance and exceedingly articulate in speech. They do, however, share one characteristic — perseverance. Like Rocky, Mary Kay came from the school of hard knocks. She, too, was a fighter who refused to quit. Of course, Rocky Balboa is a fictitious character. Mary Kay Ash was real.
As a child, Mary Kay watched her father, Edward Wagner, come home from a tuberculosis sanatorium with his disease arrested but not cured. His wife, Lula, became the family's sole supporter. She managed a restaurant in Houston, working daily from 6:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. Mary Kay spent much of her childhood taking care of her invalid father.
"Mother was never home," Mary Kay told me years ago. "In the morning I went to school, and when I got home, I fixed the meals and cleaned the house. At age seven, I was already taking the streetcar into downtown Houston to buy my own clothes. I really had a hard time convincing the sales clerks to sell me anything. Whenever I needed my mother, I could phone her and she would say to me, 'Honey, you can do it.' She gave me a priceless gift. She would always tell me, 'Honey, you can do anything you want if you want it badly enough and are willing to pay the price.'"
In her autobiography, Mary Kay (Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1981), she wrote:
If Daddy wanted chili or chicken or whatever for dinner, and I didn't know how to cook it, I would call my mother. Thank goodness for the telephone. That was my lifeline during those years, and my main contact with my mother. Whenever I called her, she found a way to make time for me, and to explain patiently what I had to do.
She'd go through every single step, one at a time, trying to think of everything I would need to know. I hadn't been raised to be a complainer, but I'm sure she knew that this sometimes seemed overwhelming. Because when she was through with her instructions, she always added, "Honey, you can do it." As far as I was concerned, my mother knew I could do it. Her words became the theme of my childhood, and they have stayed with me all my life: "You can do it."
Mary Kay learned valuable lessons on responsibility and discipline at an early age.
At age seventeen, Mary Kay did what most young girls did in those days — she got married right out of high school. Her husband, J. Ben Rogers, was a member of a local musical group called the Hawaiian Strummers. To teenagers in Houston, he was a well-known radio star. The young couple had three children. During World War II, Ben Rogers was drafted. Upon returning from the service, he announced that he wanted a divorce.
Mary Kay recalled:
It was the lowest point of my life. I had developed a sense of worth for my abilities as a wife and a mother, and yet on that day I felt like a complete and total failure. I didn't have time to sit around feeling sorry for myself — I had three children to look after. I needed a good-paying job with flexible hours. The flexibility was essential, because I wanted to spend time with my children when they needed me. Direct sales was a natural solution, and so I became a dealer for Stanley Home Products.
Stanley Home Products dealers were originally door-to-door salespeople who sold high-quality household cleaners, brushes, and mops. The company was founded in 1931, and by the late 1930s, one of the company's dealers began giving product demonstrations to clubs and organizations to generate large orders. Other Stanley dealers also began conducting group presentations, and eventually, homemakers were encouraged to invite a few friends and neighbors to demonstrations in their homes. The "party plan" was born. At a party, a salesperson (nearly all were women) demonstrated how to use Stanley products. The hostess served light refreshments to her guests and for her participation received a gift from the company's product line — perhaps a broom or a mop.
Determined and self-disciplined, Mary Kay worked her career around her young family. Being a full-time mother and salesperson required long, tedious hours. There was little time in her day for other activities. Yet, after excelling in sales, she was soon recruiting and training other salespeople. When asked how she found time to do so much, Mary Kay liked to say, "If you want something done, give it to a busy woman." Although her performance was exceptional, she resented how the company took advantage of her because she was a woman. She was bright and innovative, yet rarely were her ideas taken seriously by management.
In 1952, Mary Kay left Stanley Home Products to work for World Gift Company, which also sold through the party plan. Once again, she moved up the ranks in sales management, but there, too, she was discouraged by being held back because she was a woman. And, typical of the times, she received far less pay than a man in the same position.
In 1963, at age forty-five and after a twenty-five-year career in direct sales, Mary Kay felt burnt out and decided to retire.
THE DREAM COMPANY THAT STARTED AS A BOOK
"Building my career and caring for my family had been everything to me," Mary Kay said in her autobiography. She went on:
I never liked those things other people seemed to enjoy for relaxation. I never had time to learn how to play games like tennis, and I absolutely hated cocktail parties. To me, work and growth were the same, and without them I had no reason to get out of bed each morning.
And so, after retirement, the only thing left for me to do was to think back over those active, productive years. During my career I had faced and solved many problems that were unique to women in business. Much of the time I was actually handicapped or held back by outdated ideas of what a woman should and should not do when working with men. "Maybe," I thought, "just maybe, I could use my experience to help other women over these same hurdles." I decided to organize my thoughts by writing down all the lessons I had learned. I was filled with memories of opportunities denied me because I was a woman. And I hoped that making my list would clear my heart of bitterness.
Mary Kay thought about all the injustices she had encountered, and not just she. It was how all women were treated in the workforce. Yes, it was discrimination, and there are laws against it today. But in those days, it was reality.
For example, Mary Kay remembered when she was a top salesperson and had been promoted to a position as the company's national training director, making a salary of $25,000 a year. She explained:
I was really acting as sales manager. Not infrequently I would take a man out on the road for training, and after I'd taught him the business for six months he'd end up being my superior in Dallas, at twice my salary. It always irked me when I was told that the men deserved more pay because they "had families to support." I had a family to support too! It seemed that in a male-run corporation a woman's brains were worth only fifty cents on the dollar.
Mary Kay also disliked the way a lot of bosses treated subordinates. She recalled that she had once taken a ten-day round trip by bus from Dallas to the Stanley home office in Westfield, Massachusetts, a reward she shared with fifty-seven other top salespeople. The group endured several bus breakdowns but happily put up with the misery to have the honor of a personal meeting with the company president. As the highlight of the trip, on the last night before heading back to Texas, they were to be guests in his home. Mary Kay could hardly wait.
Instead of socializing with other senior managers at the president's house, however, the salespeople were taken on a tour of the plant. While Mary Kay enjoyed seeing the manufacturing facility, she recalled her main purpose:
I was there to meet the president. When we were finally invited to his home, we were only allowed to walk through the rose garden, and never even had the opportunity to meet him. What a letdown!
Another time, I attended an all-day sales seminar and looked forward to meeting our sales manager, who had delivered an inspiring speech. I waited in line for three hours and he never even looked at me. Instead, as we shook hands, he looked over my shoulder to see how much longer the line was. He wasn't even aware that he was shaking my hand. He treated me as if I didn't even exist. Right on the spot I decided that if I ever became someone people waited in line to shake hands with, I'd give the person in front of me my undivided attention — no matter how tired I was.
There were other unpleasant memories. For instance, she thought about the home office people who begrudged commissioned salespeople their high earnings. She couldn't understand why they would resent the success of salespeople, because, after all, the company depended on them. Nor could she fathom why some company employees had no interest in taking care of customers, or gave the impression that it wasn't their job to serve customers. Mary Kay believed that serving customers was everyone's job. In her mind, without customers, a company would not be in business. And satisfied customers meant repeat orders. Unhappy customers went away and told their friends about their dissatisfaction.
Mary Kay also disapproved of managers who never made the effort to learn their subordinates' names, or showed no interest in their personal lives. She didn't like executives who felt superior to subordinates and showed it in their manner.
She wrote in her management book, The Mary Kay Way, which was republished seven years after her death:
The boredom of retirement caused a deepening sense of discontent. I had achieved success, but I felt that my hard work and abilities had never been justly rewarded. I knew I had been denied opportunities to fulfill my potential simply because I was a woman, and I was certain that these feelings were not mere indulgences of self-pity, because I had personally known so many other women who suffered similar injustices.
Mary Kay began to organize her thoughts. She describes it:
I began writing my memoirs. Then I decided to write a book about selling for women. I felt that my 25 years of experience should not be wasted, that perhaps I could help other women over some hurdles I had encountered. I started to write down all the good points of the companies I had worked for. Then, after two weeks, I listed the things that I felt should have been different. Then I read all my notes and the thought struck me, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if somebody started a company like this instead of just talking about it?" I decided to put my money where my mouth was. I decided to do something about this fantastic company I had written about and give women opportunities I had been denied.
For days, Mary Kay studied her lists, and the more she read, the more she was convinced she was on to something. She explained:
As a mother strives to protect children, I wanted to help other women so they wouldn't have to suffer what I had endured. I realized that those lists were evolving into a howto book about the right way to lead and motivate people. But who was I to write a book on leadership? I had no formal credentials in that area, or as an author. No matter how effective my ideas were, who would pay attention to them? Nevertheless, the Golden Rule — "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" — kept racing through my mind. It seemed to me that following the Golden Rule was such an obvious way to motivate and lead.
What started as a book became the beginning of Mary Kay's dream company.
FINDING A PRODUCT TO SELL
Once Mary Kay decided to start her own company, she began focusing on what product or service to sell. She describes it like this:
I wanted a top-quality product, one that could benefit other women, and one that women would be comfortable selling. I also wanted to offer women an open-ended opportunity to do anything they were smart enough to do.
After spending days and nights trying to think of such a product, it finally dawned on me one evening while I was getting ready for bed — my skin-care products. I had been introduced to them 10 years earlier by a local cosmetologist I had met during my direct-selling days. Using formulas created by her dad, she had developed creams and lotions for customers of her small, home-operated beauty shop. I, and many of my relatives and friends, had been using these wonderful products for several years, so when the cosmetologist died, I bought the original formulas from her family. From my own use and the results I had personally received, I knew that these skin-care products were tremendous; with some modifications and high-quality packaging, they would be best sellers!
The first products were put in a basic skin-care kit and were called Cleansing Cream, Magic Masque, Skin Freshener, Night Cream, and Day Radiance. They were packaged in small jars and bottles. On opening day, the first inventory also included rouge, lip and eye palettes, mascara, and an eyebrow pencil. The company's entire initial inventory was stored on a $9.95 steel shelving unit from Sears.
Mary Kay realized that the best way for women to get the most benefit from these products was to be taught how to apply them properly. Simply buying them over the counter and reading the instructions on the labels would result in only limited knowledge of how they worked. And a retail clerk would also know little about how to use the products. The customer would have to take the items home and figure out how to use them. And if she had any questions, there wouldn't be anyone to ask. Then there was door-to-door selling. There were many companies with armies of salespeople ringing doorbells and selling cosmetics. Here, too, customers were never taught how to use their products.
Mary Kay's intuition, based on her personal experience in buying cosmetics, told her that women were uncomfortable trying on makeup in a store. Moreover, she knew that although a cosmetics specialist could make someone look like a million dollars, most women were totally clueless about how to repeat the process.
With Mary Kay's background in direct selling, she surmised that a party-plan organization would be the best way to sell skin-care products. A salesperson would present the products to a small group of women and demonstrate how to apply them. Women could also try the lotions and creams for themselves. If anyone had questions, the informed salesperson could provide answers. Mary Kay decided to call her knowledgeable sales representatives beauty consultants, because unlike door-to-door salespeople and store clerks, they would be demonstrating skin-care and makeup techniques. This skin-care class would provide important personalized guidance.
The beauty consultants would be independent representatives, as Mary Kay had been throughout her sales career. In keeping with their function of personal consultation, however, they would be taught never to use high-pressure selling techniques. She knew instinctively that women felt more comfortable in a relaxed atmosphere with a group of friends.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Heart & Soul"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Robert L. Shook.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Introdution,
Mary Kay's Way,
THE DREAM COMPANY THAT STARTED AS A BOOK,
FINDING A PRODUCT TO SELL,
A HUMBLE BEGINNING,
WALKING IN THE OTHER PERSON'S SHOES,
AN INVISIBLE SIGN,
RECOGNITION AND PRAISE,
THE DREAM LIVES ON,
MARY KAY'S PRESENCE TODAY,
MARY KAY'S BELOVED SALES FORCE,
A FAMILY BUSINESS,
THE COMPANY CULTURE,
So the World May Hear,
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS,
BILL'S EPIPHANY,
SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS,
STARTING STARKEY,
BILL AUSTIN'S EARLY INNOVATIONS,
FIT FOR A PRESIDENT,
A FAMILY BUSINESS,
YOU WIN WITH PEOPLE,
THE MISSIONS,
THE STARKEY FOUNDATION'S U.S. PRESENCE,
PREVENTING HEARING LOSS,
Brotherly Love,
A LIFE-CHANGING ACCIDENT,
LIFE GOES ON,
ROB ENTERS THE WORKFORCE,
CARETAKING,
THE START-UP COMPANY: RESOURCE ONE,
A NEW VENTURE: THIS ONE IS FOR TOM,
GOOD RETURNS FOR INRETURN,
One for All One for All and All for One,
A BRIEF HISTORY OF DIALYSIS,
A COMPANY ON THE BRINK,
THE SEARCH FOR A CEO,
FIXING THE COMPANY-THE MBA WAY,
BRINGING IN SOME KEY PEOPLE,
A TOUGH SELL,
CHANGING THE COMPANY CULTURE,
WALKING THE WALK,
IT TAKES A VILLAGE,
ACQUIRING GAMBRO,
COMPANY CHATTER,
STAYING FOCUSED,
Doing Business by the Good Book,
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS,
EARLY BUSINESS VENTURES,
A PARTNERSHIP MADE IN HEAVEN,
WWT: THE EARLY YEARS,
A DO-WHATEVER-IT-TAKES MIND-SET,
ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CUSTOMER RETENTION,
BUILDING LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS,
WINNING WITH PEOPLE,
CORE VALUES,
GIVING BACK TO THE COMMUNITY,
Afterword,
Endnotes,
Index,
About the Author,
Copyright Page,