[Two weeks ago, on Mon Jan 26, I posted an interview with Mitzi Perdue at the SMR International corporate blog. It was part of SMR's "Other Voices" series, profiles of leaders in knowledge management and knowledge services. Since the profile was published, several followers of this personal blog have asked to see the post. Happy to oblige.]
In our work in knowledge management and knowledge services,
we speak a great deal about knowledge sharing. And not only in our professional
lives. For those of us working with knowledge management (KM), knowledge
sharing, and knowledge strategy, we are constantly aware of how much of what we
do for "a living" carries over into our personal lives.
The foundation of our work - telling stories and sharing what we
know - is what we do all the time, and from where I sit, one of the best story
tellers in my crowd is Mitzi Perdue. What Mitzi has done with her story about
Frank Perdue and the development of Perdue Farms is, in my opinion, in itself a
super story. When we knowledge services professionals hear this story, we
realize that we're in the company of one of the best knowledge-sharers (if
that's a word) we've come across. And the story relates to what we do.
[And full disclosure: yes, I'm referring to Mrs. Perdue as
Mitzi. This is one of those occasions where the professional and the personal
come together - Mitzi and I have known each other a long time, and even
though I'm writing about her professionally, she's still Mitzi to Guy.]
Mitzi - whom I've already asserted is an expert story-teller -
has now taken her story-telling to a new level. She written Tough Man, Tender
Chicken: Business & Life Lessons from Frank Perdue. My first reaction
is, yes - a good story indeed, and in reading the book, it becomes evident very
quickly that Frank was an amazing entrepreneur and manager-leader.
But he was more than that. In fact, as I read the book, I
am impressed with how much of what Frank did falls into that area we
knowledge services professionals think about in our work, the attention we give
to management and leadership principles as they apply to what we call "the
knowledge domain." Mitzi's describing of those "business &
life" lessons demonstrates clearly that the management and leadership
drivers in Frank's work came from his own private desire to share with others.
Mitzi puts it this way: "When you ask people to share with
you what - for them - are life's greatest pleasures, you get lots of
different answers. With Frank, it was sharing. Sharing was in his genes, it was
built in. It was the way he thought about his life and his work. He was, in
fact, a teacher, and it was his great strength that he could teach and inspire.
For Frank - although he wouldn't have characterized it this way -
Frank was a practitioner of the Socratic method. He asked questions. And
he listened."
Did he like conversation?
"Of course," Mitzi says. "He was known for his
egalitarian ways, possibly from his background of growing up as a boy on a
farm. For Frank it wasn't a case of 'I'm the boss and you'll do what I tell you
to.' Even when he knew how to get from here to there, he wanted to hear what other
people had to say, what they thought about whatever was being talked about. And
listening was his way for conveying that. Everyone was important to him, and no
matter how big the company became, he engaged in conversation. With other
executives of course, but also with people on the line, truck drivers,
distributors.... With whoever needed to speak with him. And he was teaching
then too. One of his big ideas was what came to be known as the 'Perdue model'
for education: teaching people while they are working."
It was all part of sharing, and one of Frank's techniques for
sharing was paying attention when other people were speaking with him.
Frank's role in a typical conversation, she says, was 10% speaking and 90%
listening; the person he was in conversation with was the focus of his
attention. That, from my perspective - as we think about our work as knowledge
strategists - seems to be the primary management and leadership principle that
applies to our work. If, as knowledge services professionals and as
knowledge strategists, we're going to manage and lead the
knowledge-development and knowledge-sharing framework in our organizations,
we're going to do it by listening. Then, when we've heard what our
colleagues have to say, like Frank Perdue we'll consider their advice, combine
it with our own knowledge-services expertise, and go forward with a framework
that contributes to the success of that organizational mission we speak about
so much.
Mitzi agrees. As she talks with me about Frank's listening skills,
I can't help but wonder how he put it all together: the personal life, his own
interests, the business. I want to know about Frank's vision, about how he came
to be the person he was. She explains it very well:
"Frank wasn't doing what he did for himself," she
says. "Naturally he was a businessman and that was his career. That was
how he earned his living. But he was an extremely modest person and - hard to
understand in the business world as we've come to know it - he wasn't
particularly interested in what's called the 'trappings' of success. We lived
in a fairly modest home (but one big enough to entertain Perdue staff on those
occasions when he wanted people to come over - Frank loved that!). We lived in
a middle-class neighborhood with neighbors who included a retired teacher, a
personal trainer, and a guy who sold vending machines. Even when he traveled he
didn't make a big deal about his company and his success, and he always
traveled economy. And when we went to London we got about on the tube. That's
just the kind of person he was. He was not interested in showing off how
successful he was."
Did that contribute to his sharing, sharing both his knowledge
and his success.
"Oh, yes," Mitzi says. "He had a tough job and he
knew it, and even though he was working hard to make Perdue Farms the success
it became, he was very proud that he and the company were providing jobs for
people. He truly cared about the people who worked for him. Here's an example,
coming from of his personal life, the many times he spent week-ends calling on
Perdue staff when one of them, or one of their family, was in the
hospital. Or visiting them in their homes after they had retired from the
company. Sharing who he was and talking with people about what was important to
them was critical to Frank. While I don't think he thought of it this way, one
of his greatest successes was that when he communicated with people, they
understood - they knew - that they were important to him."
Following from that was what he did for others, not just for
people but for institutions and communities as well. For many management
leaders, part of the management/leadership scenario is this idea that not only
do we manage and lead the business - or the knowledge services effort - or
whatever it is that we've been given responsibility for. Of course it's our job
to make that activity successful, and certainly Frank Perdue exceeded most
people's expectations in that respect. An equal challenge - handed down
throughout management history and given particular attention by Peter Drucker
and others a few years ago - is that managers and leaders also have a
responsibility to give back, to ensure that their organizations or businesses
contribute to the greater good. The current buzzword (one we've been using for the
last decade or so) is corporate social responsibility, sometimes just
abbreviated as "CSR."
Was Frank Perdue - the man who made Perdue Farms the success it
became - into that? With so much focus on sharing in both his personal life and
in his interactions in his business career, how did he feel about "giving
back"?
As we speak, I can hear the smile of pleasure and
recognition in Mitzi Perdue's voice.
"It was a great joy to him," she says. "Indeed,
Frank's life was truly given over to doing for others. But there was a
contradiction."
Which was?
"Frank was modest," Mitzi says. "He didn't want
attention, and even though in some situations he found himself in deep
conversation - often about books they had both read - with people like one of
our local judges, or even with Dr. Billington, the Librarian of Congress -
Frank never allowed himself to - as people used to say - 'get above himself.'
So the sharing at the personal level, interacting with his friends and his
employees, was easy for him and he was comfortable with it. Not so much the
publicity that comes with making big contributions."
And, story-teller that she is, Mitzi has a couple of good
examples.
"There was the one time, when we were first married,
when he did something terrific for the Girl Scouts, giving a
substantial contribution or something like that. I found myself caught up in
the idea of all the lovely publicity that could come from that effort and I
approached a friend who worked with the company's public relations effort.
Well, I found out quickly that it wouldn't happen. Nope, 'we don't do
that.' My idea for the lovely publicity didn't go anywhere. Frank's way of
doing what we now call CSR was not discussed because, as I was politely told,
'Frank gives quietly.'"
But isn't the Perdue School of Business at Salisbury University
in Salisbury MD named for Frank?
"Yes," Mitzi says, "but that wasn't the way it
was going to be."
It's a story well told in the book:
"Anonymous giving was usually his pattern. ....the part
about founding the school was a fairly easy sell; Frank valued education and he
particularly liked the idea that students could learn things that had taken him
years or decades to understand. The harder part was getting Frank to agree to
having the business school named after him. Frank didn't want this and resisted
it strongly. He and I talked about this, and I know that he didn't like
anything to do with 'self-aggrandizement.' However [Salisbury University
President] Bellavance persuaded Frank that if he allowed the school to be named
Perdue, the brand itself would help attract students and faculty and, perhaps
even more important, a public gift of this sort would signal to other potential
donors that investing in education in our region was a good thing to do."
So there you are. Mitzi's book is subtitled "Business &
Life Lessons" for a reason. And I will recommend the book for those very
lessons. I will particularly recommend it to people thinking about careers in
any of the fields related to our work with information, knowledge, and
strategic learning. Careers in these fields are the future of information and
knowledge sharing, and I'm going to tell people in knowledge work about it,
especially young people thinking about entering our profession. Whether we're
speaking about knowledge services as a stand-alone management methodology,
about general management and organization development principles, or about any
of the many sub-topics that make up the knowledge domain, fields like research
management, records and archives management, technology management, specialized
librarianship, or any of the other related fields, these are lessons we want to
teach. And learn.
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