We had the honor of talking with the former President of Cola-Cola, Jack Stahl, and ask him questions about his book, Lessons on Leadership:The 7 Fundamental Management Skills for Leaders at All Levels. This book review was done a few weeks ago, and I recently have had the opportunity to talk with him and to learn from his 25+ years of leadership experience. It was invaluable and such and honor to talk with such a successful executive.

CultivateGreatness Leadership Podcast 015: Jack Stahl.

Some of the questions he answers:

• I’m here in Kansas City. We had George Brett on the KC Royals, stay with the Royals for his whole career. You spent parts of 4 decades at Coca-Cola. You rarely see that anymore. What made you want to stay at Coca Cola? And how can other companies improve their employee retention?

• Both Coca-Cola and Revlon have significant resources available to them when it comes to branding, including the ability to forge relationships with sports teams and the latest movies. What are some things smaller organizations can do to reinforce their brands?

• What advice do you have for a company that is thinking about expanding into the global marketplace?

• I was so sad when the local grocery stores stopped selling Coke in bottles and they were all replaced by 24 can packages. Do you know how much money I lost when that market was squeezed out? What was the catalyst behind moving from glass bottle to can?

• If you could give a business leader just one piece of advice, what would it be?

By John Chappelear

In my workshops on productivity and leadership, “Change the People or Change the People” is one of the most popular tips I share. It helps the attendees understand more clearly the roles and responsibilities of managers, supervisors, and executives, and the roles and responsibilities of the employees. Over the next few months I will provide a short series of articles discussing similar tips that I have developed, based on some very consistent issues, problems or challenges that appear frequently nationwide, regardless of the size of the company.

The idea behind the phrase Change the People or Change the People is that first you, as employers, must hire correctly. Then you must work to train, encourage, develop and support the people you hire so that they will perform successfully, based on your clearly defined expectations (the subject of a future article). And if you can’t get the people to change then you should change the people.

Numerous studies support the Pareto Rule of 80-20, these studies show that no matter how hard you work with employees to create positive direction, about 20 percent of the people won’t change. For a myriad of reasons they simply don’t want to learn new skills or change the way things are currently being done.

That doesn’t mean that the 80 percent are an easy fix. No, they are not. Many of them will have less than stellar attitudes or behaviors regarding the changes or the skill building you are expecting. Initially, they will be protective of the safety of “but we’ve always done it like this”. And moving them forward can be difficult, as well.

I believe that behavior and attitude are two sides of the same coin, attitude being the mental side and behavior being the physical side. Behavior is attitude acted out, if you will. It becomes ingrained in all of us, by experiences reinforced over time. If you want to make changes in behavior and attitude then you must give your staff new experiences and consistently reinforce those experiences over time.
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by Travis Wright
I’m currently reading this great book on leadership, called Executive Intelligence by Justin Menkes. This book delivers many gems, such as this quote from Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon:

“Decision-making in today’s business environment is decentralized. Decisions are made at the local level, or at a functional or operating level. You can’t grow a business around two to three good thinkers anymore, because your success depends on quality decisions from people at every level- salespeople, marketing people, strategy people, and so on. Everyone has to be able to think smart.

If you don’t have the right amount of quality thinking in a complex growth company like ours, it is going to manifest itself in terms of marginalized discussions that rely upon wrong inputs and unskilled questions. And that’s what drags down businesses. Thats’s why companies don’t have good minds throughout their ranks get stuck at 100 million in revenue and don’t get to 1 billion.”

Executive Intelligence is a book for people who are leaders or looking to become a leader. Decide to be the best you can become. Find others with a similar outlook, then move forward as a collective team. There are no lone eagles. It is a nest of eagles…. all moving in unison.

Great book. Get it.