Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback by David Novak Page B

it’s better to go do something else. It’s a drive that you have inside, and I happen to have an incredible example of that, first with my father and then with my mother. Because when my father came to America, at fifteen years old, by boat, with not more than $10 in his pocket, if he didn’t have intentionality to succeed, I don’t think we would be here. And when he passed away in 1960, my mother was thirty-eight with six children. She had never worked and was very young. She just sat at that desk and started working and was able to maintain a family and also keep a business. I just hope I can emulate one tenth of the intentionality that they had.
    — MASSIMO FERRAGAMO, CHAIRMAN, FERRAGAMO USA
    There are always consequences to failure, whether it’s missing out on a promotion, losing the respect of your colleagues, or even losing your job. A little bit of fear can be healthy, as long as you use it to open your eyes to the other side: That’s what happens if you lose, but just imagine what it will be like if you win.
    Search Out Inspiration:
I once had the privilege of meeting and listening to mountain climber Erik Weihenmayer talk about his accomplishments at our Yum! Restaurants International convention in Prague. Weihenmayer has climbed the seven highest peaks on the seven continents of the world, which is a pretty big deal in and of itself, but something else that you should know about Erik is that he’s blind.
    As I listened to Erik describe his harrowing trip up to the 29,000-foot-high summit of Mount Everest—an accomplishment that nearly 90 percent of Everest climbers fail to realize—amid snowstorms, high winds, multi-thousand-foot drops, and worse, it occurred to me what an incredible example he was of taking people with him. Erik is a skilledclimber in his own right, there’s no doubt about that, but he also had to rely on his fellow climbers in some unique ways. The guy in front of him on the mountain wore a bell on his pack so Erik could hear where he was going. His fellow team members regularly called out warnings—“Death fall two feet to your right!” and things like that—to keep him out of harm’s way.
Our area is full of wars and problems and conflicts unlimited. And if you tell someone in a very stable market like the U. S. or like Japan, come to operate in the Middle East, they tell you, “Why? It’s quite risky!” But we see this risk as an opportunity. That’s why we invest in the Middle East and we’ll keep investing in the Middle East today and tomorrow.
    — MOATAZ AL-ALFI, CEO OF KUWAIT FOOD CO.
    Before Erik could even begin to put teams together to climb mountains, he had to get over a pretty big hurdle: He had to believe it could be done. Erik wasn’t born blind; blindness happened to him gradually beginning at the age of thirteen, and, when it started, he said, “I wasn’t thinking about a vision, I was thinking about survival, just getting through the day. Blindness was like a storm that had descended upon me with such force, such viciousness, I thought I’d be crushed by it. I remember sitting in the cafeteria and listening to all the food fights, all the jokes passing me by that I wanted to be a part of. And I wasn’t afraid to go blind. What I was afraid of was that I’d be swept to the sidelines, that I’d be forgotten, that my life would be meaningless.”
    What changed things for Erik was a bit of inspiration he found in a pretty unlikely place, on a television show called
That’s Incredible,
which aired in the 1980s. At first, Erik could still see a little out of one eye, and if he got really close to the set, he could watch TV. That’s what he was doing one night when a segment came on featuring Terry Fox, a Canadian man who had lost a leg to cancer. As Erik remembers it: “Now most people in that situation would have just dug in and focused on survival. Terry did the exact opposite. He was still in the hospital when he decided he was going to run across