A former mentee from 3M stopped by for a dinner visit the other night. It gave me a glimpse into how things are going in my former world, and specifically into the areas I was responsible for when I retired. It made me grateful for two things: one, that there are people like him taking up the cause and helping the company face its challenges and; two, that I no longer have to work as hard as it takes to keep up with the ever increasing demands, pressures, and quickly changing landscapes of business these days.
I first met Stuart when he was assigned to my department as one of the early generations of Six Sigma Black Belts some ten years ago. A formally trained engineer, he had moved to the dark side as a sales representative in New England, and returned to St. Paul for the special experience of trying to adapt Six Sigma to sales and marketing processes. One of our projects together started the long road of marketing channel improvement for our industrial business (over $4 billion) that continues to be recognized as a business success factor to this day. Just before I left the company, he and I worked together on an updated and revamped version for application in international markets.
I've admired and appreciated Stuart's leadership qualities over the years. When he enters a room full of manure (to borrow from a joke popularized by Ronald Reagan), he starts looking for the pony that must have been the source. As the room erupts in flames, he calmly brings the temperature down with strategic blasts from his modest and unostentatious fire extinguisher. Give him a complex business problem, and he'll come back with the foundation of a comprehensive yet easy to communicate (that's perhaps where we differ) solution that's agreeable to diverse stakeholders. More importantly, he'll be capable of making it happen.
He described some very serious and surprising problems that have recently emerged in his division. As he was sharing their implications and the challenge of facing them with a brand new and relatively inexperienced Vice President boss, he did so with a smile and with the anticipation of a ball player eager to be tagged with coming up with and executing the game winning play. Instead of trying to duck the risks and stay below the radar, he was anxious to stand up, make the calls, and be held accountable for making it happen. That new boss, it seems, has been only too happy to give him that opportunity, realizing the intelligent and skillful doer that he is.
My reaction, while trying to imagine myself in that position today, was to start feeling exhausted right away. Knowing the political and change management issues that would need to be addressed, and hearing the kinds of expectations being imposed by executive management, my stomach turned. That's one way to know you retired at the right time - the time you move from wanting to be given the ball to wanting to stay on the bench.
Stuart's got an exciting future ahead of him, and will probably be running an important part of 3M some day. I'll be only too happy to watch from the stands.
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