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MYTH: A SMART LEADER HAS ALL THE ANSWERS

I can get people to tell me anything. One time I was sitting with John Davidson, my co-host on "That's Incredible." We were having lunch in a Hollywood restaurant when we fell into conversation with two women at the next table. Within just a few minutes I had them telling us the most private details of their personal lives.

Afterwards, John said, "That was incredible!" (No connection to the show.)

I said, "But John, didn't you notice what you said? You told us everything about yourself, too. You were saying things so private that most people pay a psychiatrist good money to listen to them."

John was amazed. But he had learned something about me: I am insatiably curious. The more important point was that we both recognized something deeply ingrained in human nature: people love to talk about themselves.

When I was with the Minnesota Vikings, they used to kid me about all the questions I asked. I don't mean questions about throwing footballs or next week's game. I mean questions around the front office - about trades, gate receipts, travel costs; about the whole business of running a football franchise.

Our general manager, Mike Lynn, once told a reporter, "Fran wanted to know all about me and my business. He made suggestions on trades and told me how much people should be paid. It was outlandish. He was like an owner."

Maybe it was outlandish, but Mike never refused to talk to me. In fact, I think he loved explaining the ins and outs of the football business to me. I did not know it then, but this would help me a lot in my later business life.

What I did know then was to ask questions. I was always a successful athlete, yet I always had a healthy respect for my ignorance of a lot of other things in life.  I was no  A-plus student in high school or college, though I was no dummy either. That's why I have always asked a lot of questions. I recognized that books and lectures were not going to be the path to wisdom for the preacher's boy. It was going to be through people.

All the knowledge and wisdom in the books came through people. Somebody had to write those words. And it is a great deal more fun to get the information directly from the source than secondhand through the person's writings.  But some of the smartest people I have learned from couldn't even write their way out of a traffic ticket. Their wisdom came from experience, and they are always willing to share it - if you ask.

The man who taught me the importance of asking questions was Roger Milliken, third-generation owner and chairman of Milliken & Company of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Mr. Milliken became my first client when I went into the behavior-management business in 1971.  He made our business, and I'll never forget it.

Mr. Milliken is a very low-key man. His family has owned the business for 100 years and made it into perhaps the best textile company in the world. Mr. Milliken - that's what I still call him - is one of the world's wealthiest men, but you'd never know it. He is the kind of guy who can walk through his sixty plants and know the loom fixers and yarn spinners by their first names.

But at this time, Milliken & Company was suffering a turnover problem with its personnel. And Roger Milliken was willing to listen to this young quarterback starting up a new business.

I'll never forget sitting in his office that day. I felt like a Little League coach trying to counsel Vince Lombardi.  Mr. Milliken said to me, "Fran, here's the problem and it's killing us. What do you think you can do?" He sat there and listened to me outline our ideas. When I finished, he said, "I'm going to give you a chance. I'm going to put you in our Armitage plant over on Interstate 85. "

What impressed me the most was that a man running a multibillion-dollar business, surrounded with all kinds of knowledge and expertise, was willing to listen to a guy he had just met - to see if he might have a good idea. Apparently I did, because he later sent us into more than fifty of his plants.

One time I found myself in a golf tournament sponsored by United Airlines for some of the corporate leaders of America.  Harry Gray of United Technologies was there, and so were Jimmy Robinson, the chairman of American Express, Jack Handly, the chairman of Monsanto, Charlie Brown, the chairman of AT&T, and a lot of others.

On the plane out to the West Coast, I spotted Gen. William Westmoreland a few seats behind me. He was then president of the Citadel and had also been invited to the tournament. After the takeoff, I went back and asked if I could talk with him for a few minutes. We spent the next five hours discussing wars and battles and military policy. It was a better education than I could have gotten in a year at West Point.

One day during the tournament, I went up to Harry Gray and said, "Could I have lunch with you, Mr. Gray?"

He said, "Call me Harry." While we were having lunch, Jimmy Robinson came by. I already knew Jimmy, so I introduced him to Harry Gray and we ate together.  They launched into a discussion of mergers and takeovers.  Gray had a reputation as a successful acquirer of companies while Jimmy Robinson had just had the acquisition of
McCraw-Hill fall apart on him. I learned more about the problems of large business mergers in our country from these two men in two hours over lunch than they teach in two years at the Harvard Business School.

I knew nothing about mergers when I went in and a lot when I came out - though I did not specifically need the information. But it came in awfully handy several years later when I was invited into a consortium of Atlanta investors who came close to buying the Pabst Brewing Company. As it turned out, our deal fell through, but that does not mean I won't someday be in another situation where that lunchtime wisdom will help me in business.

But this does not make any difference; you can learn something from anyone. At all levels, in every arena, there are people who know things you don't.

Peter Grace once surprised a journalist who had come to interview him by first interviewing the reporter. When the Journalist finally had a chance to remind Peter that he had come to ask the questions, not the other way around, Peter replied,  "Of course, but I learn things by talking to as many people as I can."

That's my policy, too.

I pick people's brains wherever I meet them: on airplanes, at airports, in coffee shops. Recently I was playing golf with a local Pontiac dealer. You know what I started out asking him? "Tell me about Henry Ford and the way the American car business started." After we had talked about that for a while, he mentioned that he had just added Isuzu to his car line, so I said, "Tell me about the Japanese and how they are building cars." He didn't know why I was asking all these questions, but he was glad to answer them. People love to talk about themselves and their work.

I try never to forget the lesson Roger Milliken taught me so many years ago: You're never too big or too smart to learn from anyone. And from Harry Gray I learned: Don't just go fishing when you retire. Go hunting." Keep asking questions, listening to answers, building on your own ideas.

But you don't have to have access to the top minds in American business to get valuable information. Often, all you need to know is how to use the information at hand.  Ironically most companies have available to them too much information rather than too little, yet they seldom put it to good use. The advent of the microcomputer and productivity tools for data processing now gives us the opportunity to put all the reams of paper into a concentrated format so that we can have whatever information we need in a form we can use.

Don't underestimate the wealth of information available to you from your data processing people once you learn to communicate with them. At Tarkenton Productivity Group we concentrate on increased productivity through the effective management of information. A good data processing department helps improve productivity throughout a business organization.

FACT: Always ask, always listen.

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