13

PREPARE AND CONQUER

A Mantra for Effective People

Revenue growth. Batting averages. Profit margins. Yards per game. Ratings. Five stars. Safety records. Election results. Investment returns. Applause. Cure rates. Cases won. Tickets sold. High fives.

Like preparation, it is hard to define effectiveness, but there are plenty of ways to measure it. All these measurements and statistics, however, can overwhelm and even deceive.

I prefer to define effectiveness in terms of preparation: did your results fulfill your objectives?

There are people whose effectiveness is almost tangible or visible. You feel it when you are working with them. You feel it when you are around them.

I have noticed that many effective people embrace the process as much as the result. Measurements of success are great, but they do not seduce many effective people. The profilees who fill this book almost unanimously take as much satisfaction in the process of preparing as in the result. That, I think, is what really helps make them effective. Talent, charisma, and sheer energy all help. But people devoted to a process are usually people who achieve results.

         

In this chapter, you read about two people who are unusually effective. Shirley Franklin is the mayor of a sprawling city, and Don Cohan is a real estate developer who has defeated two cases of devastating cancer. Their effectiveness is so bound up with their preparation that it is difficult to determine where their preparation stops and execution begins. For them, preparation and execution blur together. So do method and instinct. And their effectiveness usually blends from work into life.

GOVERNING EFFECTIVELY

image          Mayor Shirley Franklin

I bet that many of the citizens of Atlanta, Georgia, know that Mayor Shirley Franklin, whom Time magazine called one of the top five mayors in America, is uncommonly effective. What they may not realize is how much she relies on methodical preparation as the key to her effectiveness as a leader.

Shirley has been in politics long enough to know that preparation alone does not guarantee effectiveness. Politics, bureaucracies, cities themselves are too unruly. But Shirley realizes fully that methodical preparation lets her control the only variables that she can: herself and her office. Her objective is to be as prepared, and consequently as effective, as she can be. The rest will take care of itself.

Shirley had two effective preparation mentors: Andrew Young and Maynard Jackson. She was city manager in Atlanta when each man was mayor there.

“They gave me the latitude to develop my leadership skills,” Franklin said. “I started as the commissioner of cultural affairs with a budget of $5 million and a staff of less than thirty. By the time I left government in 1990 I was managing over eight thousand people and a budget of several billion dollars. Andy and Maynard allowed me to grow as a manager of people and issues.”

Indeed, Shirley credits both mentors with her personal development as much as her professional growth. They identified her skills and helped prepare her. She had conversations with each previous mayor about their mistakes, their successes, and their approach to leadership. They willingly served her as precedents.

“Andy used to say that he preferred a no-fault analysis of problems,” Franklin said. “It is not about blaming people for a problem but finding the solution, then learning and improving if there was a mistake.”

But the greatest precedent that her mentors may have provided Shirley is their approach to the transitioning from campaigning to governing. Franklin had worked on campaigns and in various government offices since she was a teenager, but she had never run for office.

“Both men saw the potential in me to make the transition,” Shirley observed. “But it was our preparation together that really helped educate me about campaigns. And they helped guide me from the electoral process to governing with their own insights and lessons.”

Shirley directly ties her effectiveness in making the transition to her preparation for it. She gives the impression of an effective city manager as much as an elected mayor. And that, I think, is a big part of the reason for her success.

From her work as a city manager, Shirley learned that there is a direct relationship between preparation and effectiveness and between effectiveness and reputation. And so it was almost a natural decision for her to tackle Atlanta’s decaying water and sewer infrastructure as one of her major initiatives as mayor.

I was once in Jerusalem with Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke. We were chatting with Teddy Kollek, the mayor of that ancient city. These two gentlemen lived thousands of miles apart and were dealing with very different issues as mayors. They had every reason to struggle to find common ground for a conversation. But somehow they immediately started talking about sewers and potholes. They entered right into the nitty-gritty of each other’s worlds. And they were both lamenting the awesome challenge of trying to adequately maintain the infrastructure of their cities.

So I recalled that conversation when I discussed with Shirley why she would pick infrastructure as a top item on her agenda as mayor. Homelessness, affordable housing, even crime—so many challenging issues somehow seem less daunting and more exciting than tackling the multibillion-dollar task of rehabilitating miles of pipes and tubes.

“I doubt anyone ever heard of a political candidate saying that if I’m elected I’m going to tear up your city and repair the sewers,” Shirley said. “But this was a fundamental issue related to watershed infrastructure and affected the sanitation and our drinking water, too.”

So Shirley, with her effectiveness on a basic issue, achieved two objectives: she won the confidence of her constituency and set a tone for preparation in her administration. That tone was set with a strategy that we see far too little in elected office: address the basic issues and not necessarily the attention getters.

Shirley prepared for the infrastructure project according to her trusted method: assembling experts on a critical topic from outside the city. Her objective was clear: fix the problem as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. And so she picked her team according to their talents and the demands of the topic.

She summoned environmental experts, engineers, land use lawyers, and water specialists from outside of Atlanta. She wanted an unbiased education from people who had no financial or personal stake in the matter. She does this for every big topic she tackles. She assembles precedents, develops her objectives, and executes her strategy based on what she and her team learn.

“Based on their advice we learned the issues and developed a plan, but also broadened the consensus on the matter,” Shirley said. “The neutrality of the experts helps my constituency trust in the strategy. But they also see how we are really preparing to find the right solution.”

The preparation that goes into such an assembly of experts requires a lot of effort—probably more effort than many local elected officials are willing to exert. But Shirley is again merely trying to control all the variables she can control. The development of an informed and expert policy is the first step in remedying any civic crisis. Effectiveness is so much easier to achieve when the mayor and her staff are confident about their policy and satisfied that they have prepared properly.

Shirley, who laughs about her early days as a public speaker, admits that she was ineffective and poorly prepared.

“People in my office used to cringe when I stood up to speak,” she said. “I was particularly poor at extemporaneous speaking.”

So the mayor decided to prepare to be extemporaneous. She studied other great speakers, including her two mentors, on tape. She listened more closely when attending events at which others spoke well. She became a collector of great speeches.

But she also started to script.

Shirley gave one of the best of many speeches at the funeral for Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. It lasted four minutes.

“But I prepared and rehearsed for probably fifteen hours,” the mayor said.

Now Shirley scripts for speeches, meetings, and one-on-one encounters. Her scripting raises the image of preparedness that she conveys. And you can ask her staff members who used to cringe about her increased effectiveness on the stump. The visibility and accessibility of her preparation is a quality I see in the people profiled in this book. Their effectiveness as leaders—of a unique school or of a city, of a company or a television studio—is tied to the transparency and contagiousness of their devotion to methodical preparation. They cherish process as much as success. Like Shirley, they know that a process likely leads to success.

PREPARING TO SURVIVE

image          Don Cohan

You probably know someone who has had cancer. So you also know how difficult it can be to work your way through the daunting bureaucracy of medicine in America. Surviving a lethal cancer takes guts and a few breaks. It also demands a focused preparation for how to steer through an overwhelming system of doctors, tests, opinions, and delays. A systematic approach to preparing for treatment is the only effective way to deal with both a deadly disease and a mind-boggling hospital and insurance system, but too few people use one.

My stepbrother, Don Cohan, was a solid preparer all his life. His commitment to preparation won him innumerable medals in sailing, including a bronze in the 1972 Olympics. It helped him build a real estate business that gave him enough material success to fund a dormitory at his alma mater, Amherst College.

But ultimately, Don demonstrated the effectiveness that methodical preparation can bring you when he survived two separate battles with one of the worst types of cancer, a dreaded “4b” Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Don’s objective was obviously to survive and continue to spend as much time as possible with his beloved family. He methodically researched treatment centers, modes of treatment, physicians, mental and physical therapies, and engaged in just about every principle of preparation. He found precedents—not many, but enough to raise his confidence—of people who had survived his type of cancer. He canvassed his contacts and scoured the media and medical journals for alternatives. He identified and examined each possible alternative and hospital for treatment. He set a strategy based on identifying great doctors who would let Don make the decision to undergo treatments considered too grueling for someone his age.

His greatest talent as a preparer was revealed in how he assembled his team. He interviewed doctors, he went to a psychiatrist to shift his grief and fear onto a third party away from his family, and he designated his very capable wife, Trina, as the deputy in his battle.

“I said to myself, ‘Don, you may be very good in your line of business, but you know nothing about this one’,” Don said. “So I assembled this team and defined a role for each person on that team and narrowed my life to them and them only during that time. My strategy was to use my team to enable me to beat this thing.”

The confidence and effectiveness of Don’s family team rubbed off on his doctors. Because of my experiences with doctors and hospitals as an adviser and board member, I am firmly convinced that doctors sense the preparedness of a patient and a family team and respond to it. It is only human nature to raise your game to the level of the people you are interacting with.

Imagine how a doctor would respond if you as the patient walked in and courteously presented a preparation checklist to review together. That is essentially what Don did, and I am certain he achieved an attentiveness and level of collaboration from his doctors because of it.

Every morning Trina would put a list on the bathroom mirror of his medications and visits for the day. One morning Don was so sick that he just sat vomiting into the toilet bowl. Trina came in and was startled to find Don laughing almost hysterically all the while he had his head in the toilet.

“She asked me why I was laughing,” Don said. “I gargled out the line that everyone who ever thinks they are a big shot ends up with their head in a toilet bowl.”

But the ability to laugh, I think, somehow came from Don’s preparation for the fight. He was laughing at himself, maybe even laughing at the devil. But the very ability to do so had to emanate from a confidence that he had prepared for this biggest challenge as methodically as he could. He had done all he could do to be effective. A good result would be gravy. And, in a funny way, his reflexive commitment to a preparation process distracted him from thoughts of death. The process became his fixation instead of his demise.

Donald’s example taught me that something as mundane as a preparation checklist can be applied even to the challenges of serious illness. He knew he had done all that he could do in terms of preparing to be effective. He knew he had used preparation, like Mayor Franklin, to control all the variables that he could. This thorough preparation—this certainty that he had done all he could do to be effective—gave him the freedom to greet the absurdity of his situation eye to eye beside the toilet bowl.

Methodical preparation helps keep Don alive and effective to this day.