NEW ORLEANS -- You can believe that a man who has lived a life such as Drayton McLane's has scores of lessons and bits of advice. Some are straight business tips; most are suggestions for the heart and mind, rather than the spreadsheet.
McLane, the chairman of the board of McLane Co., Temple, Texasand all its offshoots in the United States and globallyand CEO of the Houston Astros, had so many stories in his address to the final-day audience at the 2007 NACS State of the Industry Summit in Partnership with CSP in New Orleans that he kept asking CSP Information [image-nocss] Group president and longtime friend Paul Reuter for time for just one more.
As he began his leadership-themed speech, McLane, whose company made its name servicing the convenience store industry, said, This feels like coming home, and recognized some of those he grew up with, like Tom Strasburger and Dick Wood.
He urged the industry's captains to never give up, live with integrity, be humble, take chances, have mentors, set goals and to stand for something. McLane dropped plenty of names as well, citing Microsoft founder Bill Gates and General Electric's Jack Welch for succeeding wildly through unconventional paths and ideas; recounting a request to the first President Bush for help with a referendum to finance Minute Maid Field, the home of the Astros; Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, which he did business with for years and eventually merged McLane Distributing.
In every story there was a moral, some valuable instruction he carried with him. Some of the most colorful guidance came from a professor named Kenneth Wilson at Michigan State University, where McLane earned his MBA in 1959. Just before graduation, Wilson gathered the MBA students and told them that there were four things he wanted to leave them with in addition to all the theories and formulas:
Dare to dreamit's free. Operate out of your imagination, not your memory. Seek adversity. McLane remembered, [Wilson] said, The lines are short where there's problems. The long lines are over here where things are easy. Forget all that. Personally and in your business life, seek adversity. The lines are short and the opportunities are great'. Walk with elephants. As McLane recalled, the students were to visualize a deep ravine in Africa spanned by a swinging cable bridge. A flea and an elephant went across the bridge, bouncing and rocking it. When they got to the other side, the flea said to the elephant, We shook things up, didn't we?' You hang out with elephants, it will lift your life.McLane added one of his own: Discover yourself. Take time to determine who you are, what your values are, what your faith is, what's really important to you.
[For additional SOI coverage, see"Qualitative Research Also Critical" and "Bubba's New Bedfellows" in this issue of CSP Daily News].
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