Dare to Prepare

THE CONSTANT PREPARER

Adjust and Learn from Mistakes

Preparation and adherence to the principles doesn’t necessarily make perfect. Why? Because we are all destined to make mistakes. You can follow the principles diligently, but mistakes are as inevitable as daybreak or nightfall. The best preparers, however, learn from their errors and further prepare by using their insights to adjust either in midcourse or for the next challenge. Use of the principles doesn’t end once the task begins. They continue to serve you when an error or unforeseen circumstance forces you to adjust your course. You re-prepare at such moments, and, by maintaining a systematic approach, you regroup more quickly and effectively.

I am the author of two other books, and people sometimes say to me, “Wow, it must be great to have accomplished enough that you are able to write books.” That’s certainly flattering, but I see it another way. I’ve made enough mistakes in my life to be able to learn from them and provide two books’ worth of insights to readers so they can be effective when faced with similar issues and problems.

Like many people, I can let my emotions get the better of me and give myself the momentary satisfaction of telling off someone who is pushing my buttons. I’ve learned over the years that when you’re in a confrontational situation, you are usually far better off thinking to yourself: “Hold your tongue. If you want to tell him to go to hell, you can do it just as well tomorrow as today.” But I learned the lesson the hard way. For example, I once represented a celebrity and helped him get his personal and financial affairs in order. On one issue he refused to pay me what I believed was appropriate compensation. I got angry. I told him that I thought he was ungrateful and shortsighted, though my actual words were a bit less elegant.

I overreacted. He threatened litigation, resulting in greater anger on my part. It even cost me money. This was a defining moment, for it made me realize that emotional reactions signify a lack of control and that preparing my emotions fosters control. So I started to treat managing my emotions as a task: I prepared them methodically. I now prepare not only for the mechanics of the transaction itself—such as the deal points I want to achieve in a negotiation—but also psychologically so that my emotions don’t undermine me. The two, the mechanics and the emotions, go hand in hand for me.

I now use a two-step process for controlling my emotions. First, I do something physical, such as putting a finger on my lip or practicing the old Thomas Jefferson method of counting under my breath. Second, that physical manifestation or trigger starts me down a psychological path that causes me to say to myself each time that I am not going to take this personally and I am not going to get personal. That little two-step process that I developed after years of emotional mistakes has allowed me to stay more true to my objectives and strategy.

I’m proud of another adjustment I made regarding the way in which my partner Mark Jankowski and I facilitate our seminars at the Shapiro Negotiations Institute. In our early years of partnership, we frequently led programs together and often were able to seamlessly hand off our presentation from one to the other in media res. It made me think of the best track relay teams beating records because of their dexterity in passing the baton.

We looked smooth in public, but acted like Felix and Oscar of The Odd Couple behind the scenes. For one of our first big presentations to a New York client, I forgot my tie and Mark forgot his dress pants. I wanted to map things out weeks in advance. Mark wanted to meet in the hotel room the night before to make sure that the pieces were all in place. I felt that my way was the right way. It’s all about preparation, I would say. But Mark naturally enough thought the opposite: we would be equally prepared and more spontaneous if we rehearsed the night before and not weeks before. By my standards then, I felt Mark underprepared, or at least that he did too much last-minute rehearsing.

I suppose you could say we both learned from the mistake of being adamant about our respective approaches. Now when we teach together, we rehearse a few days in advance and not weeks ahead of time or the night before. Our programs still appear seamless, but our satisfaction in working together has grown.

That resolution flowed into other aspects of our relationship, including the allocation of responsibilities related to the management of our business.

An example of this occurred when we had to make the strategic business decision of how much presenting we would continue to do together versus how much our team of facilitators would take on. My objective was to have the highest-quality presentations possible out there, and my mistaken perception was that Mark wanted to mass-produce presentations to increase revenues. Because I had already learned from errors I had made in dealing with Mark, I was more prone to listen to his rationale and to give him leeway in orienting the direction of the company.

Had I not learned from past missteps, the talent that Mark had for building out a business would not have been realized. I would not have had the opportunity to write books and develop new business because of my acceptance of Mark’s approach to growing the Institute and developing other strong program leaders.

The point is threefold. Good preparers keep on preparing; good preparers still make mistakes in both their preparation and execution; but good preparers use those mistakes as fodder for more preparation. The required midcourse adjustments do not mean you prepared poorly. They are inevitable. It simply stresses the importance of applying some of the same principles to midcourse adjustments and correcting mistakes as to prior preparation. Your mistakes are your best precedents.

I have found that the most successful professionals practice this sort of constant preparation. Willie Randolph, manager of the New York Mets, used multiple attempts to be named a big-league manager to improve himself for subsequent interviews, and to win one of the top jobs in baseball. Mayo Shattuck, the CEO of Constellation Energy, did not let his ego prevent him from making needed changes to a company strategy in the face of a firestorm of public opinion. From a failed program launch, Steve Mosko, president of Sony Pictures Television, learned how to reduce the risks of new shows in a whimsical and volatile industry. For each of these preparers, a mistake that requires an adjustment becomes a precedent for future preparation.

THE ADJUSTABLE MANAGER

Willie Randolph

Willie Randolph does not like to lose. He is a natural-born competitor, be it in bowling with his buddies or managing a baseball team. He has won all his life, particularly as a star second baseman for the New York Yankees and later as one of Joe Torre’s coaches for this New York dynasty. But for five or six years, he was struggling with a game at which he should have been winning—climbing the managerial ladder in Major League Baseball.

If you have ever repeatedly failed to achieve a prized objective, like winning a dream job, you’ll find Willie’s story helpful. Willie studied his repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to become a manager, and, by learning from his mistakes, he developed a preparation plan that led to the manager’s job at the New York Mets.

Willie had his first interview in 1999. He had ten or eleven more over the next several years. He kept serving as a loyal and talented lieutenant to the Yankees’ Joe Torre and kept wondering why the Reds, the Brewers, the Dodgers, the Phillies, then the Mariners, and even the Mets the first time around hired other managers.

Some sportswriters suggested that Willie was being interviewed so many times merely to enable teams to go through the motions of fulfilling commitments to consider minorities for managerial positions. Most of the interviews seemed formalities since the clubs had no intention of hiring Willie.

So here you are not only one of baseball’s great players, but you have also paid the appropriate dues in the coaching ranks. And you feel trapped in a situation where you can’t get what you want.

I had been Willie’s agent for many years and suffered with him through the rejections. But after a few failures, I watched Willie turn each interview into an opportunity for preparation. I watched him get better and better at interviewing and at coaching in the meantime. Willie Randolph dedicated himself to learning from every interview and from his preparation for every interview. He was never a big power hitter as a player, but by the time the Mets hired him, Willie had gone from hitting singles and doubles in his interviews to nailing home runs on most questions.

“It got to be very difficult,” Willie said. “There were interviews I went to that I knew going in I had no chance. A writer from Philadelphia who was a friend of mine told me that Larry Bowa had essentially been offered the job even before I interviewed. She encouraged me not to go. But I decided to go in there and try to knock their socks off. I just focused on what I could control, tried to leave them with a great impression when I walked out. I really turned every interview into a learning opportunity.”

Willie tried to learn and improve in three ways: by identifying and formulating answers to questions he was repeatedly asked; by controlling his emotions and learning to provide a focused answer to the question; and by preparing through studying each team’s players, staff, and younger talent. Each interview became an instructive precedent.

“I’ll never forget in one of the early interviews they asked me, ‘If you were a tree, what tree would you be?’” Willie said. “I was really taken aback at first. I didn’t expect questions that tricky or philosophical. So I said something like a weeping willow. I swore if I ever saw that one again I would say a strong and stable oak. Another question that I wasn’t ready for at first was ‘How would you run spring training?’ At first such a question threw me off guard. But then I went back to coaching at the Yankees and actually ran a spring training for Joe Torre. The next time I got the question, I had formulated my answer, had run one, and I hit it out of the park. The answer just flowed, and I think I even gave the interviewers a few insights into how to do it that they had not thought of or heard before. So interviewing became like baseball: the more you do something over and over, the better you get at it.”

The second area in which Willie prepared anew had to do with the way he carried and conducted himself. Willie is a passionate competitor, and sometimes during the early interviews he let his passion carry his responses beyond the framework of the question.

I am grateful that Willie points to his attendance at one of our seminars at Shapiro Negotiations Institute as one turning point. Willie had been a baseball guy his whole life. He had not had much experience in the business world, and yet he was meeting with tried and tested businessmen at these job interviews. So at the seminar Willie got a sense of negotiating techniques and interactions that he kept discussing afterward. He became a student of negotiations and applied it to the next round of interviews after that season.

“I have a tendency to get passionate about what I am talking about,” Willie said. “I learned to stick with the question and keep my answer to that small window. I also learned to ask questions back, to probe them for information, ideas, and opinions. I relaxed a bit, stepped back to focus on the question as opposed to how I would propose solving all their problems in one answer. I focused on pace and control in my response.”

Willie also became a devoted note taker, and he would walk into his session with a notepad to take notes about the interview while it was occurring. And he also decided to walk into the interviews with some ideas laid out on his pad beforehand.

“I learned to have a list of things I wanted to hit on,” Willie said. “As they asked me questions—sometimes ten guys would be firing questions at me—I would write down some of the questions and later analyze how I answered them. I figured I would see that question again down the road.”

Third, Willie realized that it was critical to impress the club with his knowledge of their personnel. No one would expect as thorough and in-depth an analysis as Willie had developed, and it started to blow interviewers away.

“The preparation that you put into knowing their team signaled to them that you would really do the preparation required of a great coach,” Willie said. “So I think that with each interview I learned how to structure my own preparation for that interview. It became much more organized and methodical.”

Now, Willie keeps applying the lessons from those frustrating days. As a manager, a good part of his day is spent giving interviews to the plentiful New York press. And he also hires the coaches on his staff and plays a part in interviews in other areas of the organization.

“Those experiences helped me to be a better interviewer of my coaches,” Willie said. “It prepared me for the press. I particularly learned how to lay out an answer in a clear and concise way. I learned from the process and keep applying the lessons to this day. I would do it all over again. I felt that way then and I feel that way now. It was all great preparation.”

Willie kept refining his preparation techniques. He learned, adjusted, and got better and better while recognizing the value of the process. The result—manager of the New York Mets—was a product of treating a challenge as an opportunity to learn and to adjust accordingly.

DRAWING POSITIVE ENERGY FROM MISTAKES

Mayo Shattuck

As a young investment banker in 1986, Mayo Shattuck made his name playing prominent roles in the initial public offerings of Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Novell. More recently, as CEO of Constellation Energy, he saved his name and successfully steered his company by deftly adjusting to the public and political attacks on a proposed merger with Florida Power and Light amid ongoing rate hikes industrywide.

While controversial, the rate increases were largely a consequence of deregulation of the utility industry and increased fuel costs nationwide. But Mayo received blame for them, too. The manner in which Mayo dealt with this situation shows how important it is to recognize your mistakes and then recover from them by preparing to go in a new direction.

I know CEOs who are so self-certain that they refuse to even consider acknowledging mistakes and then preparing to take a new direction. There was, for example, a proposal for transforming the Maryland-based health insurer Care First from a nonprofit into a for-profit company. There was a public outcry, but instead of adjusting to the concerns that were raised, the leaders of Care First kept going full steam ahead. They not only lost their dream for the company, some also lost their jobs.

In contrast, Mayo admitted mistakes and terminated the merger. He was self-confident enough to keep his ego from interfering with his need to adjust. As a result of the lessons he learned and the adjustments he made, Constellation’s shareholder value has soared since the merger was ended.

Consolidation in the utility sector is a recent trend that made financial sense for the key players in the business. Onetime monopolies that were closely regulated by state agencies now had to compete in the open marketplace. But Constellation and Florida Power’s timing was off. Opposition to consolidation was mounting. Energy prices were spiking after Katrina. Utility deregulation was leading to price increases in consumer rates. And, most important, a heated gubernatorial race was increasing tension in the Maryland legislature and making the merger a political plaything.

In short, the press tied a 72 percent increase in rates to the merger; political candidates tied their futures to stopping or supporting the merger; the state of Maryland fretted over the loss of a Fortune 500 company; and Mayo Shattuck found himself in the perfect storm.

“There was a lack of preparation on our part, or a lack of sensitivity to outside factors like politics and the media,” Mayo said. “A lot of things can be assessed in a merger. The missing factor for us was how one of the topics would turn into both a media and political storm and have an effect on voters. We knew rates were going up, and we knew the election was coming. But we didn’t tie those two variables together in the right way. They translated into wild voter dissent that politicians would react to by undermining the success of the deal. We didn’t know how big the rate hike would be because when we announced the deal we had yet to go to auction to procure the power. Then the market started reacting to Katrina and we saw a severe spike in energy prices. We didn’t connect these all together to get a comprehensive picture of the resistance. We relied on the traditional merger construct and didn’t prepare for these variables.”

But, rather than force the course, Mayo learned from his mistakes and adjusted in midcourse. Although he had prepared thoroughly to address the fear of losing a corporate headquarters in Baltimore (in fact, there was a probability that the new company’s headquarters would be located in Baltimore five years after the merger), he shifted course to focus on serving the shareholders of Constellation once the merger seemed detrimental.

“We reassessed our real strategic options,” Mayo said. “We analyzed our alternatives night and day for months trying to sort out a new direction. And we decided to terminate the deal. Our relations are almost as strong as ever with the principal legislators; shareholders are very happy; employees are still a bit unsettled but are coming around. It is true that all our preparation to deal with public sentiment was applied to the wrong issue. But we adjusted and I think the company will be better for the whole process.”

Mayo’s example is a reminder that the best leaders—be they CEOs or quarterbacks—don’t get caught in the web of arrogance that keeps them from acknowledging mistakes. Rather, they draw on their experience; as part of their ongoing preparation, they make audible calls and adjustments to deal with unforeseen developments.

HOLLYWOOD LESSONS

Steve Mosko

With regard to preparation, Steve Mosko has almost every reason to be able to say: “Frankly, I don’t give a damn.”

As president of Sony Pictures Television, he sits in a huge Hollywood office in the mansion in which the last scene from Gone with the Wind was shot. Other luminaries who previously occupied it include Grant Tinker, Joe Kennedy, and Desi Arnaz.

Steve rose rapidly from radio sales on the East Coast to studio executive on the West. He negotiated the largest syndication of a program in television history—the multimillion-dollar, record-setting Seinfeld deal for Sony Pictures Television. He is as dashing as Clark Gable to boot. When Steve walks into a room in Hollywood, he gives you the sense that he was born to be there.

But the best of the naturals among us will admit that it does not come so naturally as it seems. Like all of us, Steve has made mistakes. The lesson he offers us is the way he uses those mistakes as precedents to better prepare for subsequent challenges.

Ironically, for a Hollywood guy, Steve is more influenced by sports than films.

“Sports taught me that no matter how well you practice, you still make mistakes in the game. The best learn from them—analyze them so that they almost subconsciously don’t allow themselves to make the same mistake again.”

It was Steve’s high school football coach who best prepared him to make adjustments and learn from mistakes.

In one incident, Steve scored his first touchdown and acted like a hyperactive Terrell Owens during his celebration. Once he settled down and walked to the sidelines, his coach at John Carroll in northern Maryland grabbed him by the face mask and pulled his helmet so that they looked eye to eye.

“Act like you’ve been there before,” Coach Gray said with a scowl.

Steve took the memory of that mistake with him to Hollywood.

“You walk into your first big meeting in Hollywood and you see people you have been reading about,” Steve said. “For me, my preparation as an athlete was essential to making me feel more confident in my early days here. That mistake—my touchdown celebration—prepared me for my big meetings in a way I never imagined back then. But that is what great coaches, particularly at the high school level, are doing. They’re preparing you and correcting mistakes in the hope that it has that long-term impact.”

Steve became a Hollywood executive at a very young age. He especially impressed me with the way he realized that he still had a lot to learn even as his career took off. That openness to making adjustments and learning from mistakes has contributed significantly to Steve’s progression and general competence. Two of his mistakes, one simple and one significant, demonstrate Steve’s use of errors as opportunities to adjust his preparation.

The simple mistake is one anyone could make.

“In the early stages of the Seinfeld negotiations around the country, I made a simple but critical mistake,” Steve said. “We were sending out our salespeople with an enormous amount of material for their presentations. Binders, videos, PowerPoint, materials. One day one of our guys checked it all in at the airport and the stuff never arrived in time for his presentation. This is a multimillion-dollar deal and we almost blew it. But we adjusted quickly. We perfected a system of FedExing and verifying arrival. We learned to package everything perfectly so that the materials would not be damaged. We even negotiated a good deal with FedEx. We sold Seinfeld in 213 markets and were negotiating with four to five stations in each market. We quickly learned that organization would alleviate the anxiety of our salespeople. That adjustment contributed in a mundane but significant way to our success.”

Steve made the significant mistake in the late 1990s when Sony developed a new program that was billed as the way to attract the growing young urban audience in the late-night slot. A void for that audience had been created when Arsenio Hall ended his show. Steve had a dream partner in the legendary music producer Quincy Jones and his trendsetting magazine, Vibe. The combination of Quincy and Sony created great enthusiasm nationwide among local television stations’ decision makers. They had the entertainer Sinbad as the host. But after the program’s strong initial sales, the bottom fell out. Why?

“We made a huge mistake,” Steve said. “Rather than have one producer running the show we ran it by committee. Everything from picking the host to designing the set, from deciding where we would shoot to setting a format, was made by group decision. Everyone was being so respectful to each other. We never had a strong point of view or someone leading the charge. We picked a young host who wasn’t the greatest choice. Without a single clear vision, what could have been a major success got bogged down. An amazing idea got all fouled up. The program was off the air in a year.”

Steve, who was executive vice president of sales at the time, got a valuable lesson in programming that he continues to apply as president of Sony Pictures Television today.

“You can only have one head coach per program,” Steve said. “There has to be one person calling the shots and being held accountable. That is the only way I pursue programming ideas now. You can take ideas from many sources, but one executive producer has to make the decision.”

Mundane or monumental, lessons like these can make the difference between someone who can adapt to situations or is overwhelmed by them.

Steve’s matter-of-fact recognition that mistakes and adjustments are part of the preparation game is all too rare a thing for a top executive. But, like Mayo Shattuck or Willie Randolph, Steve’s openness and willingness to adjust ensure that the same mistakes don’t happen again.