Where Have All the Leaders Gone? (18 page)

Bob was a visionary, but there was no pie in the sky where he was concerned. He was the original “show me where it’s working” guy. Bob never let me get out of the room with an idea that hadn’t been analyzed a hundred different ways. He used to tell me, “Lee, you’re so effective one on one. You could sell anyone anything. But we’re about to spend one hundred million dollars here. Go home tonight and put your great idea on paper. If you can’t do that, then you haven’t really thought it out. Don’t sell me with the force of your personality. Sell me with the facts.”

It was one of the most important lessons I ever learned. From that time on, whenever one of my people had an idea, I’d tell him to put it in writing.

Bob became a great ally of mine, and he taught me discipline. You have to have a vision, but it’s got to be grounded in reality.
Put it in writing. Put it in writing.
To this day it’s my motto.

Bob had just become president of Ford when JFK tapped him for the job of secretary of defense. You can’t help but wonder about the kind of company Ford might have become if McNamara had been at the helm for a decade or so. If he’d lasted that long. I didn’t appreciate until after Bob had gone just how difficult it was to work for Henry Ford II. Ford liked to attract the best and the brightest. The problem was, he couldn’t stand to have strong leaders around who might outshine him. It increased my admiration for Bob knowing how smoothly he’d skated over the treacherous surface of Ford’s executive office.

A SPECIAL THANKS TO THE WOMEN

I started my career in an era when there were no women leaders in the car business. If you ask me, it’s still behind the times in that respect. We like to romanticize the “car guy,” but are resistant to the idea that maybe we need a few more “car
gals.
”

My mentors in business were all male, but there were two women who became my mentors in
life
—my mother and my wife Mary.

My mother taught me LOVE. And the way she did that was by
showing
love every day of her life.

We were always close, but we grew even closer when I got older, especially after Pop died. I really enjoyed my mom. When she was in her seventies, she could still run circles around me. I loved taking her along to business conventions and on vacations. There was almost no one I’d rather spend an evening with than Mom, and I talked to her on the phone just about every day.

Like everyone else in the Iacocca family, Mom always spoke her mind. She did her best to keep me on the straight and narrow. She thought I worked too hard. She disapproved when I got a divorce from my second wife. She made virtue sound like common sense. Her moral code was from a simpler time—but we could sure use more of it today.

They say that when a parent dies—even when the parent is ninety and you’re seventy—you feel like an orphan. I can attest to that. When Mom died in 1994 at the age of ninety, I was bereft. I think she knew me better than anyone—not the public persona, but the real me. It’s good to have someone around who knows the real you.

The other woman who taught me about life was, of course, my wife Mary. I’d have to say that Mary’s greatest gift to me was a lesson in COURAGE. Mary had a fiery spirit.
Nothing
daunted her. In fact, it almost seemed like she was energized by adversity. Mary wasn’t a hand-wringer. She was a
doer.

Even in the final years, when life was so hard for her, she’d just shrug and say, “You think
I
have it bad. You should see the
other
patients.” Mary never spent a moment complaining, and her thoughts in the final days were of me and the girls. “I’m so proud of you,” she said to me a couple of weeks before she died. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say how proud I was of
her.

I hope when my time comes I can face death with even a little bit of the same courage Mary showed. She was a shining light until the end.

HAVE A MENTOR, BE A MENTOR

So, I was the luckiest guy in the world. I had three devoted mentors to teach me optimism, common sense, and discipline. I had wonderful, strong women to teach me love and courage. I’ve tried to return the favor by being a mentor to others. I want to challenge everyone now—whether you’re a parent, an educator, an executive, an uncle or aunt—to find that lesson of lasting value that you can pass along. And if you’re a young person getting started today, the first thing you need to do, before you even find your desk in a new company, is to find the person who is going to be your teacher and advocate.

I admire leaders who take time out to be mentors. One example is New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. I know that people think George is just a bombastic, volatile guy, but he’s been my friend for many years, and as far as I’m concerned, he’s a big softie. George doesn’t wear his good deeds on his sleeve, but in his lifetime he has helped many young athletes achieve their dreams. He has dedicated himself to supporting kids who have the talent and drive to succeed. I’ll bet that legacy will have more long-term impact than his team’s World Series titles.

When I was thinking about how important mentors are, I realized that kids have to be guided to seek out the right mentors. In the Catholic Church, every newborn baby has a godfather (no, not
that
kind) and a godmother who promise to guide the child’s moral and spiritual development. When I was a kid, godparents took their role seriously. I think we’ve lost some of that dedication in raising our kids.

Parents have to provide some direction for their children about the people they emulate. You have to talk openly with them about the people they admire. Who are their heroes? Why do they want to emulate a particular person? We’re a celebrity-driven culture, so chances are your kids admire sports and entertainment personalities. Push them to defend their heroes. What qualities—apart from the shallow values of money, fame, and good looks—make them worthy of emulation? Ask them to name real people they actually know—teachers, merchants, coaches, pastors, neighbors—who they look up to. Keep having this conversation every chance you get. Your children may roll their eyes, but trust me, they’re listening and thinking about it. It’s a start.

Remember, leaders aren’t born, they’re made. It’s up to all of us to work at making good leaders. I, for one, can’t sit by and ask, “Where have all the leaders gone?” if I’m not ready to look to myself and say, “What have I done lately to mold a young mind?”

I
flunked retirement. If there was a handbook of the Dos and Don’ts of retiring, my picture would be on the front cover of the Don’t section. In the space of a couple years, I retired, remarried, and moved to a new planet called L.A. I pulled up my roots, said goodbye to my friends, and left behind the world I’d known for almost fifty years. Was I nuts? Well, I must have been temporarily insane to think it was a good idea.

Los Angeles was foreign to me. I didn’t speak the language or understand the customs. My friends in Detroit were all in the car business. In L.A., everyone was in the movie business. They read
Variety.
I read
Automotive News.
Almost right away I knew I was in trouble.
Holy shit,
I thought.
What the hell have I done?

I’d saved Chrysler. Now the question was, could I save
myself
?

My retirement fiasco happened more than a decade ago. Since then, I’ve learned some lessons about what
not
to do. But most important, I figured out what
to
do. It has been a revelation to me that you can be retired and still have a life of meaning. Today, at eighty-two, I’m in good health, I’m active, and I’m engaged in the world around me. I guess that’s why so many people in their late fifties and early sixties come to me asking for advice. When they get close to retirement, they start to panic. They wonder what they’re going to do with the next twenty or thirty years. Fear grabs them in the gut. For some of them it’s the first time they’ve ever been afraid of
anything.
And what is the fear? That their lives will stop mattering.

I know the feeling. Work is like oxygen. Even if you have a family you love, and hobbies you enjoy, and you go to church or synagogue every week, there is nothing that replaces work. Your work holds it all together. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

When you’re a CEO, it’s even more intoxicating—and somewhat unreal. You never wash a car, you never fill a gas tank, you never pick up a tab. When you travel, there’s always an entourage leading you around. You go to the finest restaurants. You stay in the presidential suite. People wait on you hand and foot. You live in a bubble. You go all over the world, but you don’t see much beyond the airport, the hotel lobby, and the convention center. You may be at the hub of your little universe, but you’re isolated. Then you retire, and you don’t know how to be an average Joe.

A lot of people would just as soon
not
retire. They’d like to keep doing what they’re doing until the boys in the white coats carry them out of the corner office. But you’ve got to be realistic. There isn’t a business in the world that can’t use an infusion of fresh blood at some point. And the only way that happens is for the old blood to move out.

Someone once said they had to force me to retire from Chrysler. Not true. I was turning sixty-eight, and I
wanted
to retire. I didn’t have to. I was on top of the world. I could have stayed around forever. But I felt like I’d done everything. I was getting impatient. The young guys came in to see me, and they were all full of piss and vinegar. Everything was new to them. I couldn’t help feeling impatient, and a little bored. I’d listen to their great plans, and I’d be thinking,
Yeah, we tried that about twenty times and it didn’t work.
But I didn’t want to just sit around sounding like a grumpy old man.

I was lucky. I probably could have done just about anything I wanted. I had plenty of offers. Tex Colbert, who’d been the chairman of Chrysler in the early sixties, asked me how I’d like to be president of Harvard. I don’t know how serious he was, but I never explored it. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was an old friend, was on the selection committee for a new baseball commissioner, and he asked me if I’d be interested in that. Looking back, I think maybe I should have considered that one, but at the time it didn’t appeal to me.

I almost got into politics. In 1991, Pennsylvania senator John Heinz died in a plane crash. My friend John Murtha came to me with a proposition: Robert Casey, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, wanted to appoint me to complete Heinz’s term, and then I’d have to run on my own in the fall. Murtha would see to it that I got some juicy committee assignments, and he thought it would be a stepping stone to the presidency for me.

They sent in a brash young guy named James Carville to explain things to me. Carville was blunt and fast-talking. Didn’t even stop to ask me what
I
thought about the issues. He shoved some papers at me. “Here is your position on abortion,” he said. “Here is your position on jobs. Here is your position on—”

Finally, I interrupted. “Wait just a minute,” I said. “Don’t I get to—”

“No, no,” he dismissed me, “we’ve already done all the studies and focus groups.”

“So, you want me in office, but you’ll tell me what to believe?” I asked.

Carville shrugged, and started to continue his lecture. At which point I told him where he could shove it. That was my short-lived flirtation with the U.S. Senate. Senator Iacocca was not to be.

What I
did
decide to do after retirement was work as a consultant for Chrysler for another two years. At the time, I thought it was a pretty good plan. I was relieved to have at least that. The point is, you’ve got to do
something.

IS THE GRASS GREENER ON THE GOLF COURSE?

I talk to guys who have worked sixty to eighty hours a week for fifty years, and I ask them, “What are you going to do when you retire?” They say, “I think I’ll have some fun. I always dreamed of being able to play golf every day.”

Well, I’ll tell you what. Anybody who says that is a nut—because it’ll bore you in a hurry. It’s okay when you’re working hard and you take in a round of golf on a Wednesday afternoon, like all the doctors. But if you think you can spend twenty years doing nothing but putting a little white ball in a hole three hundred yards away, you’re in for a shock.

Luckily, I never got bit by the golf bug, although it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. Henry Ford II decided he wanted to learn golf, and he had access to the greats. When I was a young executive he set me up with the best teachers money could buy. It was kind of amazing, considering I was just an amateur. For a while my instructor was George Fazio, who’d tied Ben Hogan in the U.S. Open before he lost in a sudden-death playoff. I was also coached by Claude Harmon, another great player and teacher. All of this high-level training perfected my golf swing. I guess I was the most overtrained amateur in the world.

The problem was I didn’t play much. In the auto business there was never time for a lot of golf. I traveled constantly, and weekends were for my family. If I played golf on a Saturday, the whole day was shot. You were on the course for a few hours, then you had to have a drink with the boys, and if you got a hole in one, you’d have to celebrate forever, and before you knew it, your family time was shot. That wasn’t for me. I once got some lessons from Arnold Palmer himself. He told me, “You’re pretty good, Lee, but you’ve got to
play
.”

But there was just never time. So all that great training went nowhere. Once I retired, I could have spent more time on the golf course, but as I said, the bug never bit me.

There’s nothing wrong with playing golf, but if you think golf is going to be enough to fill your life in retirement, you’re mistaken. Even if you love golf, it’s not going to get you up in the morning the way work did. You’ve got to find something
real
to do.

I wish we’d invent another word to describe the period of life after they give you the gold watch. Retirement means “retreat, withdrawal.” Actually, retirement isn’t the end. It can be a beginning. But you’ve got to approach it the right way.

NOW WHAT DO I DO?

My retirement party was held in Las Vegas in November 1992. It was
some
party. There were eleven thousand people there, including some big Las Vegas stars. Frank Sinatra was there to sing a farewell, and, unbeknownst to me, the songwriter Sammy Cahn had written special lyrics to “My Way,” just for the occasion. Too bad Frank had started celebrating early. He totally missed the lyric on the teleprompter. It was still a thrill for me, though. Frank and I had become pretty good friends over the years. My retirement party was his last public performance.

After I retired, my consulting work kept me traveling back and forth between Detroit and Los Angeles, which wasn’t the best thing for my marriage. I finally agreed to move to California full-time. I was so dumb I thought I could save my marriage by buying a big house in a fancy section of L.A. It didn’t work that way. We moved into the house in January 1994, but a house can’t buy happiness. Our marriage was over by the fall. So there I was, retired, alone, and living in a big house in a strange city. I’d pulled up all my roots in Detroit. You know, when you live in a town for fifty years, and you raise a family there, you have a whole infrastructure—doctors, lawyers, pastors, friends, neighbors. They were all gone. I was a stranger in la-la land. And that’s when I started to realize I’d made a big mistake. I should have eased into retirement, not changed everything overnight. You’ve got to have time to adapt to the new reality, and I hadn’t given myself any time.

I was flailing, and the decisions I made weren’t that great. During that time, I got involved with Kerkorian on the Chrysler buyout, which gave me a lot of grief. I tried a few other things that didn’t work out. Through friends, I got involved in Koo-Koo-Roo, a chicken-restaurant chain, but I found I didn’t really want to spend my time in the chicken business. Then I got involved in developing the first electric bike. I thought that made some sense. I’d always followed the baby boomers. I gave them the Mustang when they were young, then the minivan when they settled down and had families. Now I figured I’d give them something for retirement. But the electric bike didn’t catch on. Then I partnered with GM on a neighborhood electric car. I spent six or seven million dollars of GM’s money to learn that the country wasn’t ready for a fully electric car.

The point is, I was grabbing at things because I didn’t have a plan. If you don’t have a plan, you’re going to make mistakes.

HAVE A PLAN

So that was the big lesson. Have a plan for retirement. Obviously, the first thing you have to figure out is the financial aspect. How much do you need for your retirement? Maybe your kids are still in school. Or maybe your kids are from what they call the “boomerang” generation, and they’ve come back to live with you after college. And if your parents are living, it may be a blessing, but it can also be an expense for their care. So you have to add up the numbers. And maybe it becomes obvious that you have to work full-or part-time because you need the extra income. But even if you’re financially secure, you’ve got to DO something. You’ve got all this knowledge and experience. You’ve probably got a heck of a lot of energy if you’re in your sixties. If you retire early as part of a buyout, you’re
really
not ready for the rocking chair on the front porch. So, what are you going to do?

Maybe you’ve been so busy working that you missed out on some interest or passion that you’d like to give a whirl to. Maybe you have a business idea that’s been rattling around in your head. There’s a life out there. You can become a mental case if you don’t have some kind of plan.

Getting back to the meaning of retirement, I like to look at life as having three stages. The first is learning. The second is earning. And the third is returning. A lot of the baby boomers are still
yearning
in the third stage, because they’re never satisfied. But if you think of retirement as a time of returning—of giving something back to society—it can transform your life.

GIVE SOMETHING BACK

A few years ago, I was having lunch with Warren Buffett in Las Vegas at Steve Wynn’s Shadow Creek Golf Club. We were eating cheeseburgers, and Warren was drinking his usual cherry Coke. Buffett had made a ton of money. He was the second-richest guy in the world, after Bill Gates, worth around $44 billion. And I said to him, “Warren, I read in
Fortune
magazine that you said you were leaving nothing to your heirs.
Zero.
Is that true?”

“Well, not exactly,” he said. “I take care of education and health. I give each of them a house and a car—and they’re comfortable. But they have to make it on their own.”

I was interested. “Yeah, I’m struggling with that same issue right now,” I said. “I’m talking about a million dollars here and there.”

“Well, I’m talking about a
billion
dollars here and there,” he replied, and we laughed.

“Look,” he said, getting serious. “What do you think it would do for my kids if I gave each of them a billion dollars? They wouldn’t have to work anymore or think anymore. It would wreck them.”

Well, we all know now what Warren decided to do with his money. He gave $37 billion to the Bill Gates Foundation—the greatest act of charitable giving in U.S. history. And he didn’t wait until he was dead.

Warren has his head on straight when it comes to giving back. A lot of guys say, “Well, I deserve this money. It was
my
genius that earned it.” Warren doesn’t have that kind of arrogance. He once said, “You know, maybe I have talent, but it wouldn’t have gotten me very far if I wasn’t lucky enough to be born in a place where the stock market gives you huge rewards. So I think society has some claim on that.”