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Forming Your Own Board of Directors 123

letting him know I appreciated the good job he was doing. I also put
in many late-night hours learning the business so he could legiti-
mately respect me.
I knew my investment had paid off when he came to me at 6:45
a.m. (just before my line was ready to start) one morning and said
that we had a problem. Someone had sabotaged my line so we would
not be able to get it up and running. The parts that were set to start
going down the line at 7 a.m. were for another assembly line and
were somehow moved to my line, a development that would have
created mass confusion and major quality issues—an expensive mis-
take to say the least. Clearly this wasn’t an innocent mistake—some-
one had really set me up to fail, even if all they intended was to get
a few laughs out of it. I felt vulnerable, so I swallowed my pride and
asked Larry, who was in charge of the parts going down the line,
what he thought had happened. He told me, “I think someone is
playing games with you and it’s not right, so let me see what hap-
pened here.”
Larry began to ask around and managed to identify the culprit,
Bob, the superintendent. I reached out to Bob, we had a frank dis-
cussion and I was able to persuade him that it would be a bad idea
to try that again. If I hadn’t been able to admit I was in a jam, I
would have had an expensive disaster on my hands. By not trying to
do it all myself, I avoided an embarrassing moment and saved my
career from an early derailment.

Don’t Wait Until You Need a Relationship to Start It!

The incident with Larry also demonstrated to me the value of culti-
vating a relationship before you really need it. Larry knew I respected
and trusted him. If he didn’t, he might not have stuck his own neck
out by bringing the problem to my attention. And if he didn’t respect
and trust me, he might not have helped me with it so readily.