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Do you remember your first job? Maybe it was folding clothes in a retail store?
Or perhaps it was delivering newspapers in your neighborhood, by bicycle? Was
it scooping ice cream at a local sweet shop?
For most of us, first jobs bring to mind fond memories of summertime and,
perhaps, a few lessons we ve carried with us throughout our careers.
T Boone Pickens, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at BP Capital
and TBP Investments
Oil executive and financier Pickens got a paper route when he was 12 years old.
It was the smallest route in his hometown, he wrote in his post My First Job:
Not Getting Paid to Be Honest. Pickens had 28 houses to start, but eventually
talked his boss into letting him add in routes that came open.
Within five years my route grew from 28 papers to 156, and I had saved close
to $200, which I hid in a hole under the floor in my closet. It was my first
experience in the takeover field: expansion by acquisition, he wrote.
But he learned another lesson, too, when he found a wallet on the sidewalk
while completing his route.
Inside it were the name and address of the owner. I delivered it to the man,
and he gave me a dollar reward. It was a windfall, Pickens wrote. My mother,
grandmother, and aunt were on the porch when I got home. They didn t respond as
I d expected or hoped about the news of finding the wallet and getting the
reward. Instead they sent me straight back to return the dollar to the man.
Why? Pickens s grandmother told him he was not going to be paid to be honest,
he wrote.
Anne Toth, Founder and chief executive officer at Privacyworks LLC
Toth got her start in fast food at the age of 14. She had to lie about her
age to get the job. You had to be 16 to legally apply for a job in Virginia.
So my application for Roy Rogers Restaurants said I was 16, and I looked and
acted mature enough to make that plausible, she wrote in her post My First
Job: What I Learned as a Fast-Food Prodigy.
It was there that Toth learned five important lessons that she has carried with
her, she wrote. Among them:
Customers are often mean and demanding just deal with it. Even fast food
customers are paying customers, and I was taught at Roy's that they are always,
mostly, right. I worked to make the customer happy even if I was sure the
customer was a bone-headed Neanderthal idiot. Which I often thought. They were
still the customer. I wasn't working the women's shoe department at Neiman
Marcus, but I was going to try to act like it, she wrote.
Do a good job and you will be rewarded with a harder job. By the end of my
first week, having mastered the front line in record time, I was being trained
to do the drive-thru window. It was at about this point that I started to
realise that this was not considered a normal progression rate among the career
fast-food people there. Working the drive-thru window was considered a
promotion over the regular front line, she wrote. To do the drive-thru window
you had to be able to listen to one order while filling the prior order and
delivering/cashiering the order prior to that one. You had to be able to
multitask... I was a fast-food prodigy, and everyone there knew it. Despite
this recognition, I did not get a raise.
That, of course, was a lesson in itself, she wrote. Getting a promotion
doesn't always mean getting more money.
Brad Smith, President and Chief Executive Officer at Intuit
Smith s first real job began when he joined Pepsi Bottling Group in 1996, just
after graduating from university. Pepsi had a career track for college
graduates designed to teach the fundamentals of management, he wrote in his
post My First Job: A Lesson Learned in the Cola Wars. Upon completing a
fast-paced 90 days foundational program, I was relocated to my first official
assignment in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as a District Sales Manager.
In Michigan, Smith was in charge of six route salesman and responsible for a
sales territory with revenue targets and other responsibilities, including
securing in-store and advertising campaigns. One management lesson, in
particular, stood out, he wrote.
One of my greatest lessons came from one of these leadership concepts that we
referred to as a one better mentality , Smith wrote. In the mid-80 s, the
Cola Wars were reaching epic proportions with advertising and endorsements that
included Michael J Fox, Michael Jackson and Madonna championing the brand
promise for the Next Generation. On the ground, my marching orders for my
territory were clearly communicated I was to find the person who had my job
at Coke and apply a one better mentality . If my Coke counterpart had one
display in a convenience store, I needed to have two. If they had 13 feet of
shelf space in a supermarket aisle, then my goal was to have 14 feet.
The concept was simple and the competition was thrilling, he wrote. But, a
critical lesson emerged. In 1991, I was inspecting our execution in a key
account and nodding my head in approval as we had secured 16 feet in a major
supermarket aisle as compared to Coke s 12 feet he recalled. Then I looked to
the left and saw 24 feet of bottled water. Bottled water? Who invited them to
this fight?
The lesson: Being fixated on a single competitor can blind you to other
disruptive entrants and substitute alternatives.