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Page 2 of 3 OBEDIENCE LEADS TO SUCCESS Mormon missionaries are expected to abide by strict rules governing personal conduct. They rise early in the morning, observe a nighttime curfew, adhere to a dress and grooming code, are prohibited from watching television, and are expected to reserve time each day for personal study. Obedience and hard work, they are taught, are the keys to a missionary's success. Those keys can lead to business success, too. Before being named CEO of Dell, Kevin Rollins developed a reputation within the company for being a logistics and operational genius. Those abilities have a lot to do with why Michael Dell initially hired Rollins. Since moving into the CEO spot, Rollins has instilled his penchant for discipline throughout the company through his management style. Many of his personal habits that impact the way he approaches management were refined while serving a mission for the Mormon Church. "Since I was nineteen," said Rollins, "I've gotten up at fivethirty essentially every morning, unless I'm sick. Since age nineteen I've gone to bed early. So there's a discipline of how to act. A mission teaches you to get up, get going, and do things. I also learned on a mission that if you just work really hard you'll get good results. But if you're smart and work really hard, you'll get superb results."  Men and women on a mission: The Mormon tradition of missionary work strengthens its members abilities to overcome adversity in business later in life, says author Jeff Benedict. Photo credit: Jeffrey Shaw Adjusting to the rigors and self-discipline expected of Mormon missionaries was not that difficult for Rollins. From the time Rollins was in third grade, his father would enter his room each summer morning before 6:00 A.M. and wake him and his older brother by turning on the light. Rollins' father would then say: "Here's what you have to do today." Blurry-eyed, Rollins and his brother would sit up in their beds and listen as their father outlined a list of chores: weeding flower beds, working in the strawberry patch, or performing work in their yard, which encompassed over an acre. "There was a constant task," said Rollins. "Yard work was just a staple. He expected us to perform." Rollins' father was a civil engineering professor at Brigham Young University, and he had his own engineering firm. He would leave for work very early each morning and put in long hours at his office. When he returned home after work each day, he would gather Kevin and his brother and inspect their work. "He'd go out and look in the yard or wherever our assignment was," said Rollins. "He expected things to look perfect." By the time Rollins reached high school, his father's assignments at home increased in scope and would sometimes take days or weeks to complete. For instance, one summer his father instructed Kevin and his brother to build a walkway. But his was no ordinary walkway. Rollins' childhood home was situated on a lot that had a large, steep hill that ran down the property behind the house. Rollins' father, a skilled carpenter and cement mason, decided he wanted a walkway constructed from the top of the hill to the bottom. Before construction could begin, however, the hill had to be cleared of brush and rock. The entire task-from preparation to construction-fell to Rollins and his brother. "It was tough," said Rollins. "We had to cut a walkway down that hill, then through the brush and through the soil and rock. It taught me the value of doing something every day, sticking to task orientation, which I have inherent in my management style today." On his mission, Rollins developed other daily habits, such as studying the scriptures. As a result, he still makes time to read for personal enrichment on a daily basis. On a mission he dutifully followed the Church's instructions to proselyte, a practice that typically entails knocking on doors. Although this is not the most fruitful method of convincing people to join the Mormon Church, Rollins followed this course out of his desire to be obedient. "I believe that whether or not you are actually doing things that lead to success, through obedience you will get success," said Rollins. "There's a jump that occurs just through doing it. So I'm a big proponent of discipline, activity, never say die, really hard work, and never admitting defeat. A lot of that is mission based." The never-say-die, hard-work approach to missionary service had a carry-over effect to Rollins' business aspirations. Rollins served his mission in Alberta, Canada, in the early 1970s. While there he noticed a very successful soft-drink franchise. After his mission he decided to set up a soft-drink franchise of his own in Utah. He had no knowledge of the industry or what it would take to create a beverage company. At age twenty-one he enrolled in business courses at Brigham Young University and married his wife, Debbie. With financing from his father, Rollins opened the Pop Shoppe, a soft-drink distributorship. Debbie quit school immediately to work full time at the business. "We started selling our beverage before we got our plant up and running," Debbie Rollins said. Kevin purchased bottling equipment, arranged for trucking and shipping throughout the state, and built a bottling plant. Since he was a full-time student at BYU, he had the plant constructed near the campus, enabling him to race home from school at lunchtime each day to check on operations at the bottling plant. If equipment was down, Kevin would hurry to the plant and fix it in order to keep the operation moving. "He wouldn't even change his clothes," Debbie recalled. "He would just dive into the grease and fix whatever wasn't working. He didn't even know anything about equipment. But he had this sense of what needed to be done and he did it." Within a year, Debbie Rollins was pregnant with their first child and Kevin was pitching his product to grocery stores in an attempt to expand sales. Little by little he convinced more and more stores until his soft drink was being distributed throughout the state of Utah. To accommodate demand, he had to create a distribution plan for delivery and contract with trucking companies to move his product. "If something needed to be done, Kevin just did it," said Debbie. "If he didn't know how, he figured it out." CONSISTENCY COUNTS Missions can also be a powerful training ground to teach budgeting, time management, determination, and how to deal with and overcome adversity, all skills that are invaluable in corporate America. Harvard Business School dean Kim Clark served his mission in Germany in the 1960s. "The mission is so intense," said Clark. "You are on your own. And the stakes are high. You are dealing with life and death. It's serious." As a young missionary Clark was assigned to be the mission financial secretary. The Mormon Church has over 200 missions around the world. Each of them has up to 200 missionaries. The Church assigns a mission president to preside over those missionaries and run the mission's finances and properties. A mission president and his wife are typically called out of retirement and serve three-year terms. Kim Clark's mission president was the CEO of a bank. "I got to work with him closely," said Clark, who was assigned to work in the mission president's office after he had been in Germany for about a year. "He had a profound influence on me and my sense of what was possible in positions of responsibility and leadership if people learned to execute them very well." At age nineteen, Clark was asked to be the financial secretary to the mission president, who had oversight of all the Mormon Church's assets and finances throughout southern Germany. At the time, Clark had completed only one year of college at Harvard before leaving school to serve his mission. He had no experience with finances. Suddenly he found himself serving as a finance secretary to a bank CEO. "By being his financial secretary, I learned a lot having to do with organization, finance, budgeting, and accounting," said Clark. The experience taught Clark about management. "I saw in my mission what happens when a leader establishes a pattern of consistency and coherence across all aspects of an organization's work," Clark said. "My mission president didn't just care about the quality of the teaching by the missionaries. He cared about the way our finances were handled. He cared about the way we were organized. He cared about training clerks properly and about whether our records-financial and otherwise-were in order, and whether we had control over what was going on." Clark applied these lessons in his management style at the Harvard Business School. "I try to run HBS as a living model of the very best ideas we have about how organizations should work," Clark said. "I've tried to instill in people this commitment to the fundamental mission and help everybody understand that no matter what their role (alumni relations, teaching executive education, running the MBA program, or providing support or doing research), everybody has an important contribution to make to the mission of the school. If the school is to reach its potential, everybody has to perform at a high level. There's nothing we do that's not important, because we are educating people who are going to be leaders in the world. My mission for the Mormon Church was a very important influence in how I think about organizations." PERSISTENCE PAYS Above all, missions teach persistence. Dave Checketts, the former CEO of Madison Square Garden Corporation, had a persistent nature before he served his mission. When he was sixteen, Checketts went with his family on a vacation. It began in Seattle and was supposed to end at Disneyland in Anaheim. But while driving through Oregon en route to southern California, the family car broke down on a remote stretch of highway. Passengers in another car stopped and helped push the Checketts' car down an exit ramp to a gas station. There a mechanic determined that the Checketts needed a new fuel pump. At this point it was nearly 6:00 P.M. on a Friday leading into the Fourth of July weekend. The local auto parts store had closed, along with most other businesses. Dave's father had to return to work the following Wednesday. If forced to wait until Monday to have the car repaired, the Checketts would not have sufficient time to complete the trip to Disneyland. "I'm not going to let this happen," Dave told his father. His father insisted that they appeared to be out of options. Dave disagreed. He asked permission to go to the next town in search of a fuel pump. The nearest town was twenty miles away. Mr. Checketts asked Dave how he planned to get there. Hitchhike, Dave told him. Mr. Checketts did not like the idea of Dave hitchhiking alone on a highway. Dave persisted. Finally, Mr. Checketts consented but insisted Dave bring his twelve-year-old brother with him. Dave had never hitchhiked in his life. The first vehicle that approached-a pickup truck-stopped and the driver asked where the boys were headed. Dave explained and the driver told the boys to hop in the back. Less than a half hour later the driver dropped Dave and his brother off in Medford, Oregon. On foot, the boys walked to four gas stations seeking a fuel pump for a Buick LeSabre. They had no luck. Finally, at the fifth gas station, Dave encountered a mechanic who said he just happened to have one. Giddy, Checketts bought it. Then he and his brother sprinted back to the freeway to hitchhike back. Suddenly, a policeman from the other side of the freeway began yelling at them through a bullhorn. He ordered the boys off the freeway, saying it was illegal to hitchhike. Dave told his little brother to stay put and then ran across the freeway to the officer. Checketts explained his predicament to the officer and pleaded for permission to hitchhike back to his parents with the newly acquired fuel pump. "Hop in," the officer said. He then drove to the other side of the highway, retrieved Dave's younger brother, flipped on his lights, and sped down the highway. As the police car approached the exit where the Checketts' car had broken down, Dave spotted his father. He pointed his father out to the officer. The officer had already figured it out by the look of worry on Mr. Checketts' face. The officer turned on his siren and drove toward Mr. Checketts. He rolled down his window. "Do you know these guys?" the officer joked. "I caught them shoplifting." The following morning the new fuel pump was installed and the Checketts made it to Disneyland.
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