CEO Bulletin

In the old days you could actually do something under your own hood.

He was 58 and I was 24. He was a senior application engineer in the Dallas office of GE’s Industrial Sales Division, and I was a neophyte sales engineer. We became fast friends.

With short cropped gray hair, straight and thin frame, squinty eyes above the ever-present cigarette, and the ability to focus like a laser on an electrical system challenge, Bob Gooch represented his employer well. He used his name as his calling card. “People just call me Gooch,” he would say. And they did. It was comfortable, and the name, the manner, and the intelligence drew our customers to him.

Gooch and I both had company cars. All expenses related to maintaining and driving the cars were paid by the company. Most employees with company cars took them to the dealer regularly for oil changes, lube jobs, and tuneups. Not Gooch. He preferred to do his own work.

Shortly after I met him, Gooch suggested I might want to join him on a Saturday morning and service my car while he was servicing his. I had done these tasks on my own car before and really had not planned to continue the practice with my company car. But I liked talking with Gooch and the offer sounded interesting, so I agreed. It went well, lots of good conversation while doing our own service work, and we saved ourselves the inconvenience of dropping our cars off for service someplace else. 

We continued our DIY car servicing on a regular schedule and one Saturday morning we ran into a problem. The details have faded from memory, but the essence was that we were attempting to remove a component under the hood of my car, and the bolted connections were so rusted we could not budge them. I was prepared to take it to the dealer and let them wrestle with this snake. Gooch commented something like, “You know, we can do this if we’re willing to spend the time.” He went on to explain that a little oil and a lot of time would probably work. So, we proceeded to squirt oil on the rusted threads approximately every 15 minutes. After waiting fifteen minutes we would apply the wrench, attempt to loosen the nuts and, failing that, apply more oil and wait another 15 minutes. We must have gone through that cycle for about two hours before the nuts finally broke free. In between nut-loosening attempts, we took our time fiddling with other minor maintenance issues, and talking about all things under the sun. At the end of the day I had learned a lesson of time and patience.

As CEO, you face a variety of difficult tasks continuously. Some are intellectually demanding, some emotionally demanding, some even physically demanding. But today I’m writing about those that are time and patience demanding…tasks like carefully reviewing that government contract, and the numerous detailed changes your attorney has recommended; challenges like researching and understanding the variety of benefit packages that you might offer your employees as you grow your organization; time drainers like preparing a few slides for that next strategic planning staff meeting – visuals that can make the meeting so much more productive than merely winging it, but that require the discipline to block off the time to ponder and prepare.

There’s the key – discipline. We’re not talking about lacking the ability to do something important. We’re talking about the willingness to invest the time and emotional energy into an important task that will take a chunk of your limited time.

I’ll bet you have an important challenge right now, one that you’ve set aside. You have other more interesting and less time-consuming projects you’re working on. That important one you filed in your “future” file may remain there indefinitely. 

Let this be your springboard to jump on it.