Page 73 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

54 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

I suggest that he look at its stock, follow it a few weeks, read
articles about the company history or new-product development,
and anything else he can look up. In some cases, I buy a couple of
shares of stock for him to watch. I listen to Jim Cramer, who says,
“Instead of buying five DVDs from Disney, buy one share
of stock.”
I want him to have intellectual stimulation in whatever he is
doing. We had a three-hour conversation about this last week,
and he actually stayed tuned-in with me, which is amazing since
communication among kids is so superficial nowadays. They don’t
even talk to other kids; they just text each other.
I explained that each article he reads, for instance, is like one
dot of information and that one dot may not mean much
on its own, but if you collect 100 or 1,000 dots—points of
information—patterns and cycles start to form. And I tried to
explain that understanding of cycles will give him a belly full of
instincts and insights years ahead of what others have. See, I
want my son to have experience not just one way—say when
markets are cresting—I want him to understand a bad market
too. By seeing the dots, I’m hoping he’ll learn to anticipate when
things will turn bad and what might turn it around. Every four
to five years a new bubble ends, . . . you need to weather times . . .
know that what’s relevant now is seldom relevant five years
from now . . . eras come and go. It’s like a general going off to
war. You don’t want one whose only experience has been in
peace time. You want one who’s been in war as well as peace
time to have experience in pattern recognition of what might
happen next.
I also occasionally go over résumés that are particularly
interesting with him. I showed him one from a man we’d placed
into a top job. He’d graduated from Brown, joined McKinsey &
Company, got a Wharton MBA, and joined Disney. Since my son
likes most anything Disney, it perked his interest. The candidate
got the opportunity to work alongside the company CEO, and
now, within 10 years, he’s being put into a top job.
I tell him you’ve got to work hard, and then you’ll get lucky.
And I want my son to understand all this before he enters high
school.