As Alan Kalter met with his
employees on a Sunday night in August 1996, his
advertising agency’s building
burned behind them. No one
was hurt, but everyone’s hard
work at W.B. Doner & Co. was
going up in flames.
But Kalter, chairman and CEO,
didn’t let that stop him or his
company from moving ahead.
At the meeting on the lawn, he
told employees to call clients
about the fire first thing
Monday morning. Employees also told clients that they would
not miss a deadline, and
although they were out of the
building for 22 months, they
delivered on that promise.
Kalter says many competitors
thought the company would go
under, but instead, business
grew and, in 2007, Doner posted revenue of $173.1 million.
Kalter said one key to the
growth was giving people more
responsibility and giving them
the authority that goes along
with responsibility to make
decisions.
Smart Business spoke with
Kalter about how to make decisions and develop a vision.
Make a decision. You have to
be a good enough listener to
share with others and then
understand what they’re talking about before you make a
decision. But, you also have
to make the decision. Somebody’s got to make a decision. It’s part of the job of
being a leader.
I just read a book that was
the transcripts of the discussions that Kennedy had during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
… Basically, he kept saying,
‘Give me another opinion.
What about this? Give me
another opinion.’
He kept pushing everybody
to give him points of view,
sometimes based on information, sometimes based on
intuition, and, in the end, he
made a decision. He got it
from experts, meaning the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, or he
got it from people he
believed in and trusted, and
he got it from people who
had the pulse of the nation.
But, in the end, he had to
make a decision. Nobody
else made the decision.
I think, in life, people like
to give opinions, but they
like leaders who make decisions and then move on.
They’re not always going to
be right, but, at least, you
have a decision, and therefore, you have action.
No decision is a decision,
and it’s not a very good one.
You basically decide for
inaction.
In the end, every organization is a living organism that
has to accomplish something. At the top, somebody’s
got to make decisions that
allow people to do their
jobs. If you don’t make
those decisions, they can’t
do their jobs.
It’s the one thing a leader
should do is make decisions
so people can do their work.
We make a decision, we
don’t second-guess it, we
don’t have regrets, we move
forward. If we have to
change that decision, OK,
but we don’t do it with
recrimination.
Develop a vision. That’s a lot of
listening, a lot of analysis,
looking at the competition,
understanding where you
might fit in to that.
Our company, being in the
advertising business, you
have to look at where you
think advertising in general
is going, where you think
you’re going to fit in to that,
what resources you need in
order to fit in to that.
Then, obviously, you have
to share that vision with a lot
of people and get feedback,
and that’s where the listening
comes in.
You have to be honest about
what your capabilities are.
You can’t just create a vision,
then decide, ‘I’m going to do
that,’ but it doesn’t have any
reality baked into it. I think
there is the understanding of
the opportunity, but then
there is the pragmatic side of
what is possible.
Know your strengths and weaknesses. It’s critical, and that
shouldn’t be something that
holds you back. That should
help you understand where
the real opportunities are for
you to capitalize.
Why go chase something
that some other company
owns and is well ensconced
in that territory? Now, you
are going to have to try and
dislodge them or find something that you can do better
than anybody else, and
make that a point of view
and then build your
resources around that single
point of view. It’s like P&G
basically saying, if you’re
not No. 1 or 2 in the category, it’s a brand somebody
else should own.
Embrace failure. Don’t hide
from a mistake or hide from
a failure. Embrace the failure. If you embrace it, you
can learn from it. If you just
have a failure and the failure
becomes mentally debilitating, what good is that?
Every failure, there has to
be something that can be
learned from it because you
didn’t know it — if you
knew the reason the decision would result in failure,
you wouldn’t have made the
decision.
Learn from it so you don’t
make that mistake again, and
move on. I make decisions
that sometimes result in failure, but that’s the way it
goes. But, so do a lot of people here make decisions that
result in failure. Then we
learn from it. We don’t have
recriminations about it
because I think recriminations stifle inventiveness and
innovation.
HOW TO REACH: W.B. Doner & Co., (248) 354-9700 or www.wbdoner.com
