531: How to Differentiate Yourself to Get Promoted with Stan Silverman

Pete Mockaitis
Stan, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Stan Silverman
Well, Pete, thanks for inviting me. I look forward to our discussion.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m looking forward to it as well. And you’ve got a pretty unique story, well, maybe for nowadays. But I want to hear the scoop. First of all, so you had 11 separate roles at PQ Corporation and ended at the top, so that’s pretty cool. We’ll dig into some of that. But, I guess, I want to know first, what led you to stick with one organization for such a long duration in your career?

Stan Silverman
Well, I never intended to stay with PQ for so long but I kept on getting promoted. And the hierarchy above me was very, very supportive of what I was doing and it was just a great company to work for. And so, I stayed through 11 jobs, including a stint in Canada as president of National Silicates Ltd, PQ’s Canadian subsidiary, came back as president of PQ’s worldwide industrial chemicals group, became the COO of the company and then, eventually, the CEO.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, I’d love to dig into some particular moments in which you did some things that were differentiated and noteworthy such that you were the one they picked for the promotion. So, maybe we can go back in time and let’s start semi-chronologically in terms of towards can you maybe orient us to sort of what was your role, what was your set of responsibilities, and how did you win promotion again and again?

Stan Silverman
Well, thanks for allowing me to go through some history here. So, as I look back on my career at PQ, I did a lot of firsts. I was the first one at the company to use a computer to solve an engineering problem and a finance problem versus just pushing numbers around through the accounting system. And so, way back then, and a lot of our listeners are much too young to remember this but we did a lot of work with time sharing, so we access a mainframe computer that was remote through a teletype machine that did 15 characters per second that we ran at the time on the outside computer. And I was the first one at the company to build a model for doing this kind of cashflow calculations, looking at the financial attractiveness of various projects. And I did this while I was an engineer.

And so, I gravitated from process engineering to looking into the financial attractiveness of the projects I was working on and so that was a first at the company. And from that point, I moved onto production planning, to financial analysis where I was evaluating the various alternatives for placing a plan in this city versus that city, for doing this versus that, and at the time I was getting my MBA at Drexel University at night. And so, I tied in what I was doing at work with my work at the university. I wrote a thesis for my masters’ program which was a Monte Carlo simulation, which looked at various alternatives using probabilistic estimates for inputs into a cashflow analysis. And I was able to test this at PQ on the various projects that we were working on.

And so, gradually, slowly but surely, I moved from an engineering position to a financial analyst position, to my first product manager position at the company where I moved over to the marketing side of the company. I was responsible for three product lines.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Boy, there’s a lot in there I’d love to unpack. And so, well, let’s start with some of these firsts with regard to, so you’re the first to use a computer to solve some of these financial questions using the discounted cashflow analysis. Well, what got into you that made you say, “You know what, this is what I’m going to go do because I think it would probably be more normative for engineers to continue doing their engineering.” But you popped your head up and said, “No, I’m going to check out something different.” How did that come about?

Stan Silverman
Well, I’ve always been curious about things which would allow me to grow and develop my skills in other areas other than engineering. And when I got my chemical engineering degree, I decided that I did not want to rise up through the engineering route because I thought that was too limited. I wanted to follow the business route, and that’s why I got my MBA so that I would be in positions where I would make strategic decisions with respect to the future of my businesses and, eventually, the company rather than building plants for the products that we made.

And it was just an interest in doing that, in making decisions on the strategic side of the business versus the engineering side of the business that pushed me and led me to get my MBA degree. And I’ve always been very curious. I’ve been testing new things, looking at new things, trying out things, and, really, that’s what drove me my entire career is that curiosity. And it really goes way, way back to when I was a teenager. At the age of 12, my dad got me my first chemistry set and I exhausted all the experiments probably within three months, and I got a little bored and I decided that I would try something new. So, I thought it would be really cool if I made gunpowder to pack into a firecracker and set off the firecracker, so I started up on it and learned how to do that with my chemistry set.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds like fun to me.

Stan Silverman
Yeah, it was really a lot of fun but the creative part wasn’t actually formulating the gunpowder. You can look that up anywhere and at the time we didn’t have the internet so, of course, I had to go to a library to do this. But it was actually designing the fuse to set it off so that I wouldn’t blow my hand apart, I decided that I would run wires from my Lionel train transformer to the firecracker that I built and bury these wires with a matchhead inside the powder and then set it off 30 feet away. And, sure enough, it worked.

And so, this is a future engineer at the age of 13 now, basically, in his backyard fooling around with this stuff. And, of course, in today’s world, you can’t possibly do that because you’d have Homeland Security and the local police department all over you for doing this. And so, we’ve really taken some innocence away from kids that just like to play in the basement or in the backyard or in the garage and just kind of tinker with things. And so, that’s kind of a negative to the world that we’re in. We’ve taken some innocence away from our children in terms of allowing them to just roam and develop.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I hear that theme. So, the curiosity, the testing, the exploring, trying out new things. I guess, I’m intrigued because I think that this is common, I’d say, part of the human experience, we’re curious, we want to explore and seek new things. And, yet, I think a lot of folks, in the professional setting, experience some fear or a resistance, internal and/or external, so that they sort of shut those instincts down. How do you observe the ways in which professionals kind of shoot themselves in the foot or prevent themselves from exploring and rising as a result?

Stan Silverman
Well, I think it gets down to a feeling of self-confidence in yourself. I coach and counsel a lot of students right now in my career and, of course, with the launching of my book, sort of my fourth career, which we’ll get into in a little later on in the interview. But one of the things I do is I talk to a lot of students today and I talk to a lot of professionals who are stuck, who don’t like what they’re doing, who want to know what the path is to leave what they’re doing and do something more interesting. And, of course, it’s completely up to them. They have to find their own path.

They have a safety blanket in their current position and in their current role, and for 45 years they just never do anything.

And you go to the other extreme, you have people that are constantly developing themselves, constantly pushing forward, trying things, failing sometimes, and, of course, failure is a normal part of life and we should all get used to that. And as I tell the folks that I counsel“You can feel bad that night but the next morning you get up and get back at it because it’s a new day and a new world, and you have to move forward.” I don’t know if you’re familiar with Seth Godin who is a futurist.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Stan Silverman
He wrote a book called “The Icarus Dilemma,” and he writes about Icarus who, of course, is a character in Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun, his wings melted and fell off his back, and he crashed into the sea. And what Godin says is, “Should’ve Icarus flown lower and safer so he wouldn’t crash into the sea?” And he says, “No, of course not, because it’s actually more dangerous to fly too low than it is to fly too high, because if you fly too low, you’ll never know what you’re made of, and you’ll never deliver the kind of results or contributions to society that society needs.”

And so, I added actually something in my book about that. I also said that if you fly too low and, all of a sudden, your job disappears and technology moves on, and you have to get a new job. If you fly too low, you’ll never know what you’re made of, and it’s harder to get a new job, so fly high, and if you fly too close to the sun and you fail and you crash into the sea, the next morning you get up and fly again.

And that’s what entrepreneurs are taught.  And so, that’s what drives a lot of the comments I make to folks that I coach and counsel.

Pete Mockaitis
But, you know, as you talked about that Icarus metaphor, and we’ve also been talking about finance, my mind is bringing them together as I think about sort of risk-taking and financial investments. Like, if you take no risk and just sort of do what your savings account will do for you, well, then you’re going to kind of crash in the sense of inflation is just sort of taking away your wealth. And so, in essence, in both instances, Icarus, financial investing, and career risk-taking, you have to take some level of risk because none is more dangerous than some.

Stan Silverman
Exactly. And what everybody has to do is learn how to mitigate their risks, so you try to control the risks. And the way you do an investment, of course, investing is that you diversity your portfolio, and so you don’t go after the homeruns every day. You go after the slow and steady. And the slow and steady, by all accounts, and by all the data and all the studies, wins over the long term. So, it’s slow and steady, slow and steady, so you mitigate your risks.

And in business, of course, a lot of people ask me, “Well, what do you mean by mitigating your risks? How do you mitigate risks?” And I always use the example, let’s assume that you’re a manager in your company and you need to make a decision which you have all the authority in the world to make. You don’t have to ask anybody else, you can either make it or not make it. You can go direction A or direction B, it’s up to you. But you feel that it’s risky and you want to mitigate the risk, well, what do you do? Well, you talk to people. You get other people’s opinions. You don’t have to do what they say but you get other people’s opinion so it expands your view of what you may do, or may not do, and you move forward.

A lot of people think that by asking other people their opinion, it’s a weakness. Wrong. It’s a huge strength and you should always be asking people, getting their opinions, getting their input, and you’re going to make the final decision on your own, but at least you have that input. A lot of people don’t realize that when they feel that something is very risky, or even a modicum of risk, and they want to get an opinion, it’s okay to get it. It’s okay to get an opinion before you move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I was just about to ask about some strategies and approaches if you do have some of that fear of failure, you don’t want to let go of your safety blanket, well, I guess one point is just you have to.

Stan Silverman
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
But, emotionally, there’s still a bridge to cross. How do you suggest folks do it? One is to seek the wisdom of other counsel. What else?

Stan Silverman
Well, you have to fall back on your experience and your critical judgment and common sense. And so, a lot of the decisions we make, we don’t always have all the information we would like to have, we don’t have that information, and you can’t get it or you don’t have time to get it. So, what do we all do? We fall back on our common sense, a good critical judgment. And when we do that, and when we do have good common sense and critical judgment developed over the years through our experiences, because that’s how you get that, we make a lot more right decisions than we make wrong decisions.

And so, that’s just part of life. You’re going to be making decisions without having all the knowledge and all the information you would like. So, let’s flip it around for a moment and let’s assume that you’re the leader of a group, and you have one of your employees, or many of your employees, actually, making decisions, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong. You have to allow your employees to make mistakes. It’s the only way they’re going to grow and develop.

And one of the prime responsibilities of every leader is to develop future leaders below them. The only way to do that is to tell them what your expectations are and make sure they have the right resources, and cut them loose to do their thing, and sometimes it’s not going to work out, and sometimes it will work out. But if you have good people reporting to you, and you’ve hired people with good common sense and critical judgment, and allow people to develop that common sense and good critical judgment, you’re going to win in the long term. You’ve going to have a lot more wins than you’re going to have losses, and you just have to tolerate that.

So, there are many bosses that won’t allow their people to make mistakes. Those kinds of people you don’t want in your organization if you’re the board or you’re the CEO. You’ve got to get rid of them because you’re not going to go anywhere. You’re just not going to get anywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you said common sense and critical judgment, I was just chatting with some folks about how that seems to be not so common. And I would love to get your take on are there any particular decision-making frameworks, tools, key questions, you ask yourself to bring forth more common sense and judgment to situations?

Stan Silverman
Well, let’s take a real-life example. Let’s take Starbucks, for example. They’ve been blasted, they’re really blasted a couple times a year for what the baristas or not do in their cafes, and, of course, the most important one, and the one that had huge ramifications around the world, is the one that occurred in Philadelphia about a year or so ago when the barista, at the Starbucks in Center City, Philadelphia near Rittenhouse Square, ordered two gentlemen to leave because they claim they were waiting for their friend to arrive before they ordered something, and they were just sitting there, and she said, “Well, if you don’t order something, I have to ask you to leave.”

And they didn’t leave, so she called the police, the police came and arrested these two guys, they were two African-American gentlemen. And as they were leaving, their friend shows up, and their friend says, “What’s going on?” and they tell him. And, of course, this got blasted all over the world. And, in fact, Starbucks had to shut down their cafes to do sensitivity training in this area. And had the barista exercised good critical judgment and common sense, she would’ve said, “Okay, when you’re ready, you can come up and order something when your friend gets here.” That’s how you diffuse. See, you should always diffuse a situation. These guys weren’t harming anything, they weren’t creating a ruckus, they were sitting at tables that weren’t needed by other people. So, you always diffuse, you always diffuse the situation. And so, she got blasted.

In three or four other instances around the country, baristas have refused, I can’t remember the city, it might have been Arizona where a pregnant woman came in and wanted to use the bathroom, and the barista said, “You can’t use it unless you buy something.” And then the news report claims that even after her husband offered to buy something, she wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom. Well, what were they thinking?

So, therefore, one of my prime tenets whenever I coach and counsel future leaders and current leaders, is don’t hire anybody if they don’t have common sense and good critical judgment. Do not hire them especially if they’re customer-facing. Do not hire them even internally, even if they’re not customer-facing. You don’t hire these people. And there are tests to test for this which, of course, aren’t 100% but you don’t want to hire people who don’t exercise common sense and good critical judgment because why would you want to get blasted for a mistake they make on social media which, of course, happens within minutes around the world, and it kills your reputation. It kills your reputation. And then, of course, you have to rebuild that reputation but you never really regain it back.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, when you say test for this, are you talking about commercially-available assessments?

Stan Silverman
Oh, yes. There are tests for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a fave that you lean on or have historically?

Stan Silverman
No, actually, I don’t. When I hire people, I interview them at length and I talk about I want them to explain their experiences when they’ve had to handle certain situations which were sensitive. I do it through interview but there are tests, there are commercially-available tests which can test for that. Among other things, they can test for new employees.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s interesting, and I wonder, maybe it’s just too expansive and complex to boil down and to a couple of rules of thumb because it’s sort of like you would hope that you wouldn’t have to tell somebody, “Don’t make people leave. Allow folks to use the bathroom.” And I guess, hey, some operational manuals will spell it out, and that could be helpful, certainly, if folks don’t have that critical reasoning or judgment. So, it seems like you shared one principle there in terms of when possible try to diffuse situations as opposed to inflame them. Good rule of thumb. I think that would serve 99% of us well just about all the time. Any other key principles that you come back to again and again?

Stan Silverman
Well, I have a key principle which a lot of CEOs don’t agree with me when I give speeches in front of meetings of leaders. I get a lot of pushback on this.

And I’ll give you my aha. So, I’m a 26-year old business manager for my company and we’re making a product on the West Coast which goes into pharmaceuticals, and I get a call from the plant that the plant manager just discovered that there’s some iron filings in the product that weren’t picked out by the magnet, and he gave me the lot numbers. And so, this product had to come back. It will have to come back anyway but especially for going to a pharmaceutical, it has to come back.

The problem is I don’t have the authority to order a recall. My boss and the CEO were traveling in Europe, and this is the years before cellphones and before email and before text messaging, and every moment, almost every hour, every day that we wait to recall the product it goes further and further into distribution and, eventually, perhaps, gets into one of our customers’ final products, so the costs of recalling this product goes up exponentially every day.

And so, I made the decision at my young age to recall the product, and my people are saying, “Stan, you don’t have the authority to recall the product.” I said, “It’s got to come back. It’s got to come back.” And so, I said to them, “Either I’m going to be celebrated or terminated.” So, I recalled the product. And when the two guys got back, my boss who was vice president and general manager of the industrial group and the CEO came back, I told them what I did and they celebrated me, they said, “You did the right thing.”

So, here I am, a 26-year old, just starting out my career, a couple years into my career, thinking, “Boy, I’ve just learned something.”

And so, that has governed my management leadership philosophy that I give my people permission to do so.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, I think that’s dead-on and I can understand why senior executives, that makes them uncomfortable. It’s sort of like, “I’m not fully confident that I have the people in my organization I can trust with that.”

Stan Silverman
Well, let me give you the perfect example. So, I’m not going to name the company, okay? I won’t name the company. But I’m waiting for this to happen so I can write an article about it. And so, here you have a person who greets customers at the door when they come in, and that’s the person’s job, that’s the employee’s job. And the employee sees an elderly individual pushing a cart full of product that they just bought in the store out to their car, and they’re having trouble pushing the cart. So, I’ll use the masculine, he leaves his post to help unload the cart into the customer’s trunk and returns back two minutes later, or three minutes later. And because he left his post, and that broke policy, the store manager fires that individual.

Pete Mockaitis
This happened or you’re waiting for this to happen?

Stan Silverman
No, I’m just waiting for it to happen so I can write about it, right?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s probably happened somewhere, we just don’t know it.

Stan Silverman
I’m waiting so I can write about it, right? And so, this is all hypothetical and, of course, I’m not naming any store. And so, the store manager fires this individual, and so if I was the regional manager of all the bunch of stores in the region and I found that that’s what happened, I would probably fire the store manager because you didn’t allow your employee to break policy for the good of the company. It didn’t hurt for him to be away for two or three minutes. In fact, he created a lot of goodwill by helping this elderly individual load the car. So, he broke policy, so what? Again, you diffuse the situation. There’s no harm and it was in the best interest of the company to do so.

And you wouldn’t believe how many people disagree with me. I have a lot of CEOs and a lot of senior leadership, when I speak about this, I do a lot of speaking on various topics, and when I describe this, they push back and say, “No, no, no, no , no, that person should never break policy.” Well, of course, they should.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I’m in your camp and I think it all just depends on who did you hire and how much do you trust them.

Stan Silverman
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And really what’s at stake. Is the greeter also a loss-prevention person, and if they left their post, $50,000 worth of high-electronics are going to go out the door? I mean, maybe that’s a different scenario, but most likely there’s very little downside and very much upside to helping a customer out.

Stan Silverman
So, let’s look at the extreme. I always like to test the outside of the envelope. So, let’s look at the extreme, okay? So, that’s at one end of the extreme. The other end of the extreme is that you’re running a nuclear power plant making electricity. You never, ever, ever want the operators of that plant to break policy by themselves, ever, because the downside is catastrophic. And so, therefore, if something has to be done, and it could be different than policy, you want to get that checked up, up and down the line, and have a lot of people involved in that discussion before anything ever gets done.

And so, it depends on the situation that you’re in. Look at Boeing today, Boeing was announced that the CEO was terminated by the board because of the 737 max issues of the past year. And, of course, if you go all the way back, the FAA allowed Boeing to do a lot of the quality checks and balances that were really the job of the FAA. They delegated that down to the company and to the engineers within the company.

Well, I got to tell you that is closer to the nuclear power plant example that I just gave. If I was the FAA, I would never ever delegate that down. And if I was Boeing, I would never permit us to do that. That’s the job of the FAA. So, the best friend of the CEO at Boeing is to have the FAA do their independent checks and certification of a plane and not have my people do it. I would never allow my people to do it because the consequence of a mistake is catastrophic. They had two airline crashes.

And let’s go to the other end. So, I’m the CEO of my company, and in our chemical plants, we allow the chemical operators of the plant to do quality assurance on the product they ship out and so, therefore, they have ownership in the production because they have ownership in the quality. And so, the worst that can happen is the place don’t go down, but a product is out that’s off spec, and the customer tests it, and they send it back, so it costs us some money.

And so, you have to look along the continuum where that decision gets made. For nuclear power plants and for aircraft certification, you don’t want anybody making unilateral decisions that break policy. On the other end of the extreme, when you see a customer carrying out packages to the car and they need help, or when you’re testing a chemical product where the only downside is it’s off spec, maybe that’s way over to the end, so you got to figure out where you are in the continuum.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that really makes sense and adds up, yes. I’d like to get your view, then, when it comes to kind of zooming out and thinking across these promotions, you’ve said part of it was, first, curiosity and pursuing new things, and you’re finding the self-confidence, and managing your risks and delivering value. Any other kind of core things that you tend to see over and over again that makes the difference between those who get the promotion and those who are passed over for the promotion?

Stan Silverman
Yes. In fact, I’d like to tell you a story which is my favorite story which really was most impactful to me. And I think to answer your question, people that get promoted learn lessons from everybody within the organization. So, I’m president of our Canadian company and a subsidiary of PQ Corporation, and we had a small production unit which produced a product for high-temperature refractory cements…

Stan Silverman
Okay. And so, when I was president of our Canadian company, we had a production unit which made a product for high temperature, an acid-resistant refractory cements. The unit was sold out. It was at capacity. It was a very high-margin product. The product was growing, and we were basically out of capacity. So, the one gentleman who operated this unit was working all kinds of overtime so we needed to expand the unit.

And our marketing department came over with projections that we really needed a 50% increase in capacity to handle the demand over the next five, to six, to seven years. And so, rather than give the project to one of the corporate engineers, we decided that that would not be the best thing to do. This was a very small unit. I estimated that, to expand the unit by 50%, it’s probably half a million-dollar job, and the engineers, of course, want to work on millions and 10 million-dollar projects because that’s how they get promoted because they’re very complex projects. This is a very simple project.

So, the plant manager and I decided to give the assignment to the operator who runs the unit and ask him, “Well, how would you expand this unit?” So, we called Luigi Pail, the operator of the plant, of this production unit into my office, and he looks around and says, “Am I being fired?” I said, “Well, Luigi, why do think that?” He said, “I’ve never been to your office.” I say, “No, no, no, we’re not going to fire you. In fact, we want to ask you how to expand your unit because we know that you’re working all kinds of overtime hours, it’s hard work. We want to expand the unit. So, how do you think we should do it?” He says, “Oh, I know exactly how to do it but nobody’s ever asked me.”

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Stan Silverman
“You’re the first person to ever ask me how I can expand. You know, I’ve been working over the last 10 years.” I said, “Well, would you work on it?” He said, “Yes, but I need the help of a mechanic.” And very quickly we said, “Pick your man.” He says, “I pick Don McNeil,” who probably was the best mechanic in the planet at the time. Excellent mechanic but he was terrible with respect to labor, management relationships, always filing grievances, always wanted to go on strike, bad mouthing, he was a negative-opinion leader in the plant, and I’m thinking, “This will be a huge disaster,” right?

So, we tell Luigi, “Well, you ask Don tomorrow morning and then we’ll ask him in the afternoon and see if he’ll do this.” So, we go out and see Don the next afternoon, and he says, “Oh, I spoke with Luigi this morning. I’ll do this but I’m not doing it for you. I’m going to help him expand his unit because Luigi is my friend and I’m not doing it for you. I just want you to understand that.” I said, “Okay, Don, we understand. Go to work.”

Pete Mockaitis
Noted.

Stan Silverman
Well, four weeks later, they come into my office and they present the scope of the expansion to get a 50% increase in capacity, and this is, of course, before PowerPoint. This is when you had these overhead projectors, and you had these slides that you put on the overhead projectors. So, they explained the scope, and I’m thinking, “My God, this is so creative. I never would’ve thought of this.” Don McNeil did something that we never asked him to do, he cost-estimated the project out. Well, of course, Don works with contractors all the time so he knows what it costs to do things. He comes out with an estimate of $260,000 to do the project, I’m guessing 500, right?

So, we say to them, “Okay, guys, we’re going to do it. You’re in charge of doing it. You’re in charge of managing the project.” “Well, that’s not our job. That’s a project manager’s job.” I said, “Hold up. The unit is going to be down for a period of time so you have to work in the construction along with the production. You’re the perfect people to do this.” “Well, okay, we’ll do it.”

Two months later, the plant is done, the unit comes back up on stream, withing seven days we’re at 50% increase in capacity, exactly what we asked him to do. Within two weeks they’re at 64% increase in capacity. The product is coming out much tighter within specification, perfect quality, much easier for Luigi to operate the plant and were often running, and Don brings the project in at $250,000, 10,000 less than what he told us it would be. I think he did that on purpose.

And so, all four of us changed fundamentally. Don McNeil is now walking through the plant telling his fellow union brethren, the blue-collar workers that operate the plant that, “You know, these guys in management, they’re not so bad. They trusted me for what I can do with my mind in addition to what I can do with my hands.” You know how powerful that statement is? And he’s now a positive-opinion leader in the plant. Luigi changed in this way.

And so, about two weeks after startup of his unit, I’m taking a visitor through the entire plant, we stopped at his production unit, and Luigi says, “I’ll take the visitor on tour of my production unit.” I said, “Okay.” So, he does so, and after the tour, we head off to the other six production units within the plant. The next day, Luigi talks to me and says, “You know why I did what I did yesterday?” I said, “What did you do?” He says, “I took the visitor for the tour.” I said, “Yeah, I know.” He said, “I did it because this is my plant not…” I’m sorry, “This is my unit, not your unit. This is my unit.”

We created a sense of ownership in Luigi for his production unit, and I’m thinking, “Oh, my God. How come I didn’t learn this right out of school?” You have to create sense of ownerships in everybody for what they do within the company, and then great things will happen. And that has stuck with me for the decades after that incident occurred. And, sure enough, it’s proven true every single time you create a sense of ownership in people in terms of what they do, and great things will happen.

And so, therefore, I learned something from an hourly guy, probably one, two, three, four levels below me in a production plant, and everybody realizes they can learn from everybody including the people at the bottom of the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Stan, I love it. Good stuff. Thank you. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Stan Silverman
Well, I do. But I think let’s move on and I’ll kind of weave it in as we go along if the opportunity arises.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Stan Silverman
My favorite quote is “Never lie to yourself,” So, I have a chapter in my book, Chapter 1-5 which is about the Challenger explosion and disaster which all of us are very familiar with. And it turns out that the Thiokol engineers who designed the O-rings for the solid rocket boosters, basically, advised NASA not to launch the shuttle on the day they wanted to launch because the temperature outside, the ambient temperature, was 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and they designed the O-rings for 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

And they felt the O-rings were going to be too brittle and there was a huge risk of leakage of fuel around the O-rings because they were brittle which would, of course, cause a disaster. And the Thiokol engineers lost the battle because they faced a huge, huge pressure by NASA. And I’m just going to quote two comments, I’m looking it up now, by a NASA manager. I say one NASA manager is quoted as saying, “I’m appalled by your recommendation, Thiokol.” Another NASA manager said, “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?”

So, they didn’t listen to their experts. They didn’t listen to their experts. They went ahead and launched, and, of course, we know what the result was. We lost the shuttle plus five astronauts. And that taught me a huge lesson. The lesson is you always have to listen to your experts. Always listen to your experts. Don’t discount them. That’s why you have them around you.

After I wrote my article, one of the engineers, one of the Thiokol engineers’ daughter, this is Robert Ebeling who was the Thiokol engineer, his daughter reached out to me because my email is at the end of all my articles. Now I talked with her half an hour about what her dad went through that day, and she was actually with him during that launch day, and she said, “He’s held himself responsible, personally responsible for 30 years, for the crash and the disaster of the shuttle when, in fact, he tried to stop it but the managers at NASA decided to launch anyway.”

So, I said to her, “Leslie, would you mind if I called your dad and speak with him on the phone?” She says, “He would love to hear from you.” So, I got his number, he was in an assisted-living facility, really dying of cancer, so I got him, he was very, very sick. I called on the next day and I spoke with him for a good 20 minutes, and I said, “Mr. Ebeling, you and your fellow engineers at Thiokol are true American heroes because you tried to stop the catastrophe but you couldn’t. But don’t feel that that’s your burden. You did your best.” He died five days later.

And so, that was a very, very compelling moment for me when I spoke with Robert Ebeling. And the quote that I wanted, or the author of the quote, “If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule, never lie to yourself.” It was by Paulo Coelho, a Brazilian novelist, a very renowned individual. And that’s my favorite quote because had NASA not lied to themselves, they would’ve listened to their engineers and not launched the shuttle. So, that’s a lesson for all of us. Never lie to yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Stan Silverman
Oh, “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, absolutely. It’s a book that a lot of people have written. I probably read it three times, I listened to a tape on it. And what Jim Collins says is that when you decide where to take your company, you need to pick the right people, put them on a bus, put them on the right seats, and they will decide where to take the bus. And so, you, unilaterally, aren’t going to be very successful, at least most of the time, if you decide where your company should go without your people got buy-in into it, and they have ownership in it.

And so, every time I’ve made strategic decisions and change in the strategic direction, I’ve had input from the people who work for me, who report to me. I trust them. I’ve hired them with good critical judgment and common sense, and we argue our points, we argue all the time. And I have a story to tell you about that in a moment.

And so, you have to staff your company with people reporting to you who aren’t afraid to talk to you, who aren’t afraid to say you’re wrong, and you need to listen to that. If you’re the CEO that can’t take being told you’re wrong, you’re not going to be very successful.

So, this is the story. So, when I was chief operating officer of the company, I would come up with an idea or a proposal and I would talk to the CEO about implementing it. And, more often than not, before I could finish talking about it, I would hear from him, “Well, it’s not going to work.” And I’d say, “Well, don’t tell me it’s not going to work. First, let me explain the whole thing, and then tell me it won’t work.”

And so, I started writing him memos which, of course, he would read without me in the room, and you’d have to read the whole memo, a page, a page and a half memo. He’d come in and say, “Boy, this is a great idea. Let’s get it done.” And so, that’s how we got stuff done. So, when he left the company and I became the CEO, I swore that we would change that cultural norm because he did that with everybody.

And the cultural; norm would be this. So, I would not often kind of give my opinion on how we should go somewhere and the direction, I would kind of tease it out of my folks. But, every once in a while, I would say, “You know, I think we should go direction A with a certain issue.” Well, if my CFO or the head of our chemicals group didn’t agree with me, I would expect him to say, “No, Stan, I don’t think that’s right. I think rather than go direction A, which is your direction, I think we should go direction B.”

Well, how I react to that comment will forevermore, in the future, govern the dynamic between that individual and myself. Rather than say, “I don’t want to hear it. Just go direction A,” which is bad, I would say, “Well, Bill, why do you think we should go direction B?” or, “Why, Mike, do you think we should go direction C?” And we would debate A versus B. we would bring in experts, we would bring people very knowledgeable, we debate for a day, for a week, for a month. And at the end of that discussion, one of three things would happen.

I would say, “Bill, thank you very much for suggesting B, but we beat A up against B, and B up against A, and I really think Ai is the way to go so that’s the way we’re going to go,” and we would go that direction. Or, I would say, “Bill, you know, thank you for suggesting B. After beating one up against the other, I think B is the better alternative,” and Bill would feel really good that I picked his alternative.

But more than not, and this is real live data, real live experience, more often than not, because we debated A versus B, we would find direction C better than A and B, and we would go direction C. Well, when we did that, we really made a mistake. And it’s one of the reasons why we drove earnings from $14 million to $43 million over a five-year period which included the year of 9/11 2001 plus the horrible recession of 2002. We never had a down quarter during that recession because we debated things as equals. As equals we debated things.

And that, I think, is just a huge, huge cultural norm within any company to really get great results, you debate, and then you pick the right one. Pick the right direction.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Stan Silverman
Well, they can read my book. My book is called “Be Different: The Key to Business and Career Success,” and it talks a lot about leadership, it talks a lot about tone at the top and culture, but the focus in the book is it teaches every business how to be better than their competition so that they become the preferred provider of product or service to the marketplace so that your customers, your clients, want to buy from them preferentially above any of the competition.

And it doesn’t matter whether or not you make widgets, whether or not you’re an accounting firm, whether you’re an attorney, you’re a doctor, you’re a surgeon, you’re a hospital, or whether you put roofs on houses, or you sell bicycles in a bike shop. You want to be the preferred provider so that anybody that needs a roof on their house, or medical treatment, or surgery, or wants to buy a bicycle, they want to buy from you versus the competition. And I teach how to do that.

The other part of the book is that all of us, as we all rise up through our careers, become better than our peers so that we get the next promotion or the next job on the outside the company. And so, that’s what the book is about. It’s about how to do that. And I have a lot of examples of great leaders, and leaders that aren’t so great, great companies and companies that aren’t so great, a lot of boards which are great boards and boards that aren’t so great.

And it’s really a handbook for success, future success, for your company or for yourself. And you can buy it at Barnes & Noble, or if you want to buy the Kindle version, you can buy the Kindle version on Amazon.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely.

Stan Silverman
Or BarnesandNoble.com for the hardcopy.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Stan Silverman
Well, yeah, I think you have to decide. We all have legacies. We all have to think about what our legacies are going to be. What do we want to leave this world? What do we want to leave this world when we check out? And my legacy is I want to be able to say that I created a bunch of great leaders and helped them develop and be successful. I want to help companies develop and be successful.

I start a lot of talks off, I say, “What is the holy grail of any business, of any individual? What’s the one thing everybody, every business, or what’s the one thing everybody wants? What is the holy grail?” And three or four people will raise their hand, and one of those responses is, “To make money.” I said, “Well, that’s certainly something everybody wants to do, but that’s a measurement of how well you do with something else. Money is a measurement of how well you do. It’s not the objective. Because if it’s the objective, there are other ways to make a lot more money.”

And so, I tell them that, “If you’re running your company, you want to be the preferred provider of product and service to your marketplace and give a great customer experience. Give a great customer experience, that’s what you want to do. And as you rise through your career, you want to be better than your peers, and that should be your holy grail as you develop your career. And, of course, at my point in life, my holy grail is to help other people be successful. And that’s what I do every single day by coaching and counselling and writing about this.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Stan, this has been a pleasure. Thanks so much and keep up the good work.

Stan Silverman
Well, thank you, Pete. It was really great being a guest on your show and I really appreciate having the opportunity to talk with you today.