Andrew Carnegie

I have two parts to the blog today.  The first part is from Seth Godin and the second part is just from little ol' me.  Both parts reference stories attributed to Andrew Carnegie

From Seth Godin’s blog…

 Losing Andrew Carnegie

Carnegie apparently said, "Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors......Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory."

Is there a typical large corporation working today that still believes this?

Most organizations now have it backwards. The factory, the infrastructure, the systems, the patents, the process, the manual... that's king. In fact, shareholders demand it.

It turns out that success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.

(http://sethgodin.typepad.com/)

Part Two of this Blog Post...

Mining Gold

I want to tell you a little story I heard the other day.  

Back over 100 years ago a reporter asked Andrew Carnegie – one of the first industrialist our country ever produced...

“You have 43 millionaires working for you.  How did you attract 43 millionaires?”

Carnegie replied, “They were not millionaires before they worked for me.” 

The other man said, “Wow! Well how in the devil did you develop 43 individuals in such a way that allowed them to become millionaires?”

Carnegie stated that you develop people the same way you mine for gold.

You move loads and loads of dirt to get to the gold.

You also must remember when mining for gold that you are not looking for the dirt – you are focused on finding the gold!

Everyone on our team has gold within them.  There may be a lot of dirt in the way of the gold but it’s there.  It is easy to get distracted by the dirt but if we focus on that dirt where is the benefit?  Where is the benefit to the team and where is the benefit to the individual?  There isn’t one.  However, if we focus on the gold and what it will take to get to it, well…there’s a lot of benefits there! 

Develop people the way you mine for gold.