The “Undercover Boss” Who Showed That Love Works

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. There’s some of our favorites. And up next, an American dreamer’s story in our American Dreamers series, brought to us, as always, by the great folks at Job Creators Network, who work hard every day to help small business owners become bigger business owners and live their American dream. Alex Cortez now brings us the story of someone you likely don’t know, but we’ll be.

Glad to have met. Joel Manby was born into a poor family.

My mother told me when I was after my father passed away, that my father was making about fifty dollars a week for three to five years when his business was going under. So that’s, you know, call it twenty-five hundred dollars a year, three thousand dollars a year. And that had a huge impact on me because I felt it in our home. Every fight we had, every disagreement was always about money. It was about the lack of it. Why did my mom buy this?

Why did we do that?

And it impacted. Matter of fact, I’ll tell one little story. When I was in.

Little League, I was pretty good player.

And I hit a home run to win this big city tournament, and it was the first time my dad had ever come to a game because he always worked second shift in a factory job that he had later in life. And the whole team went out to A&W to celebrate, and my dad took me directly home, and the car was really quiet. I thought he was mad at me for some reason. And we didn’t go celebrate. And at nighttime, when I went to bed, I was crying and I asked my mother, “Why doesn’t Dad love me? Everybody else went out.” And she said, “Your dad loves you, but they have payroll to make tomorrow, and he doesn’t have any cash, and he can’t afford to take you guys to A&W.” That had a huge impact on me because it made me not ever want to be in a situation when my kids where I didn’t have resources to take care of them. It drove me so much that sometimes I think I have done things in life for the money, and when it wasn’t necessarily what I really love to do. And for anybody listening to this story, I would implore them not to do that, because I think money does not make you happy. And you got to do things you love, and if money comes as a result, great. But it really dominated my life for way too long—that fear, that fear of not having enough. It did drive me sometimes to really bad behavior because of that fear. If I took all the psychiatry tests of what I should do, I have a huge heart, and a lot of them said you should be a minister or a coach, and you don’t think of people like that being in business and being extremely successful in business.

But that’s exactly what Joel did with GM, making him CEO of Saab North America when he was only thirty-five years old, and they later gave him Asia and Latin America, too.

And so that was really my big business break, that I was able to run a large division of General Motors at a very, very young age, and that was a big break. We had a great season there, a great turnaround for a lot of different reasons. But at the same time, that was a period of my life where I think my work ethic and this fear of failure, and just doing whatever I had to do not to fail, and really hurting my relationships with my, especially with my wife. I was traveling seventy to eighty percent of the time, and I could feel the tension growing. My wife at the time started putting up the white flag of, “Hey, this is not what I signed up for,” and I really wanted to try to honor that. So I went to my boss, who was the CEO of all of Saab worldwide in Sweden, and said, “Look, I cannot handle physically doing Asia and South America. I wanted to just have the United States, and the United States was their biggest market. It was a big job, and that’s how I started with them, and then added these other regions. And I said, ‘I just can’t do this,’ and he said, ‘No, I’m not going to take you out of those countries. You’re doing a good job. We need you here. You know, here’s a five percent raise.'”

With the job.

I’ll never forget that. He refused that, and in hindsight, I do wish I had gone back and said, “Hey, look, I’m going to leave if you don’t make this change.” And at the same time, I was getting some huge pushback from my boss on our track record; even though it was really, really good, they always wanted more, and they wanted faster. I’ll tell one story about what happened with him and some of the treatment that taught me a lot allowed of what not to do. He calls me on Easter Sunday morning and just starts chewing me. Now, this is—remember this is—he’s two o’clock in Sweden, so it’s like 8:00 AM or so in the United States. He wakes me up, basically out of bed, and just starts chewing me out over the numbers.

For one month. We had a three-year track record.

That was really good, but because one month was way off, he starts chewing me out, and he orders me to get on an airplane and fly to Sweden that afternoon so that I could be at a meeting Monday morning. So, literally, I—I miss Easter Church. I get on that 4:00 PM flight out of Detroit, fly over to Sweden, and literally just get chewed out for about an hour and a half in front of my peers. And some of the reasons we were off were just manufacturing issues in Sweden. But, you know, be that as it may, I can’t remember what was said exactly. But I never have ever forgotten how that made me feel. It just made me feel disrespected, unimportant, unneeded. And I mentally checked out at that moment. And on the way back, I just started thinking, “What am I doing? Why am I—I’m giving?” I have stress at home; I’m traveling all the time. What am I afraid of? If he’s not going to treat me properly, it’s time to be open to other things. So that was just a real indicator to me that people have to be treated better in business.

And you’re listening to Joel Manby’s story, and my goodness, his reaction to the lack of money at his home, the searing memory of that night in Little League where he—well, he couldn’t celebrate with all of his friends at A&W, his dad took him home; here drove him more. With Joel Manby’s story here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, and we do it all from the heart of the South, Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, consider making a tax-deductible donation to OurAmericanStories.com. Go to OurAmericanStories.com. Give a little, give a lot. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Joel Manby’s story. At this point in his life, Joel is tired of the stress that travel is putting on his family life, so he decides to lead an Amazon startup called Greenlight.com. It sells cars online, and he hoped this new venture would give him a successful life, but then the dot-com crash, it. Here’s Joel.

I thought I would be at the pinnacle of “quote-unquote” success in my life and found it quite differently. Unfortunately, on my first day of work, the Nasdaq dropped by thirty-five percent, and by the end of the week, the Nasdaq had dropped fifty percent, and we were literally laying off seventy-five percent of our people. And I felt so responsible for it that I wouldn’t delegate it.

But I literally pulled people.

Into the rooms, department at a time, and told them myself. And it was so upsetting to me that I had to end these people’s livelihood that I would go into the bathroom afterwards and throw up. I think I threw up three times that morning, just the pain of doing that, because these people had depended on my leadership. And the people out there who think leaders don’t struggle with that—if anyone cares about other human beings, they struggle with that. But sometimes you have to do that so that the organization survives. But it was one of the most painful things that I ever—that I’ve ever gone through. I was just so, so distressed and depressed. I was sitting there with a glass of wine—just really a lot more than a glass of wine, probably more like a bottle of wine—and just trying to figure out what am I going to do from here, and certainly not trusting God with what’s going to happen next. And I think as a believer, that’s the toughest thing to do, because we see people like my father who didn’t end up with enough, or you see really good people have really bad things happen to them, and that’s a struggle. Honestly, I still struggle to it to this day to some degree. But over time, I just—I found out. You know, if I can say this correctly, we all start life, we want to change the world and we want to change some big issue going on, and that’s what I want to do. When I went to Greenlight, I wanted to make car buying fun and simple. And what I realized is—as the years went on—is the only person—some of the horrific mistakes I’ve made in my life that we’ll get into—the only person I can really control as myself. And I can’t worry about the outcome of income, or position, or what people think of me. All I can control is being consistent with my own set of values. To me, that’s the only way contentment really comes. You may not achieve what you want from a business standpoint, or from a media standpoint, or, but in the end of the day, on our deathbed, I think we have a set of values by which we want to live, and if we’ve mostly lived by those, I think will be the most content we could possibly be. In that hotel room in California, all of a sudden, my phone rings, and it’s Jack Herschend.

Whom, with his brother Pete, created the largest family-owned attractions company in the world, helping build Branson and owning Dollywood with Dolly Parton.

And out of the blue, he says, “Joel, I know you’re really struggling. The board and I have talked about it, and we’d like to make you chairman of our board of directors at Herschend.” And that Jack Herschend—who had been the only CEO, the only chairman of a company for fifty years—and he feels, for whatever reason, to recruit this automotive CEO who had never worked in the theme park business, who had been on his board for two years. The timing of that is just unbelievable to me. I mean, to me, that it’s an ordained thing, and it was such an incredible moment for me. It really completely changed the trajectory of my life. In essence, for the first twenty years of my career in the auto industry, I had had this huge angst that I worked in these autocratic, fear-based cultures where people weren’t really rewarded; they were intimidated into doing a good job. But I knew in my soul there is a better way to lead people. And when I went to Herschend Entertainment, literally for the rest of my twenty years in the theme park industry—it was a learning of how we lead with love and how we take love, the verb, and treat people really the way we want to be treated. And I know that doesn’t sound like rocket scientists or rocket science, but you would be shocked at how few companies really, really behave that way. Jack and Pete had a really family-oriented business, like they treated everybody like family. But that was in Branson, Missouri, where they were all from. But as they started to acquire properties and work outside of Branson, the culture had really diminished.

And so my job.

As a CEO, was to try to create this vernacular that we could teach other people to try to create this family culture that Jack and Pete had. And I was having quiet time one time, read First Corinthians 13, and it just hit me that this is what Jack and Pete are like, and I’ll read it for your audience. It’s a famous verse that Paul wrote, and we used in a lot of weddings. “Love is patient; Love is kind. It does not envy; It does not boast. It’s not proud; it is not dishonest to others. It is not self-seeking; it’s not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” And we sat down and defined it. We defined it into seven words, which were: patient, kind, trusting, truthful, unselfish, forgiving, and dedicated. But I want to say one thing now about that: in educating our organization, we had to make it clear that we are talking about a verb here. Agape is a Greek word that is represented. When Paul writes about this in First Corinthians, he uses.

Agape: sacrificial love.

And the Greeks, which the New Testament is written in, have four words for love. There’s Eros, which is what Americans think of love. That’s the romantic love. There’s orgae, which is the family love. And there’s also Philia, which is the Greek word for friendship. And that’s what Philadelphia is named after, which we all know doesn’t really represent that that name.

The city of brotherly love.

So the most common problem with love is people misinterpreted as Eros because Americans have one word where…

The Greeks had four.

So a lot of it’s a language barrier, but this is not a feeling; it’s a behavior. And I can dislike you, or I could distrust you, or I could have had a really bad meeting with you yesterday, and I should still treat you with Agape love. That’s what Jesus and Paul are talking about here, and that’s the magical difference. We took those seven words; we put behaviors to them. So it wasn’t just you need to be patient; it was, “What does patience mean?” It means praise in public but admonish in private. But what we did so differently than what most other companies do is—a lot of people put their values on a wall, you know. Stew Batchelor calls it the “plaque problem,” where people just put it up on a plaque and they leave it alone. But what Herschend did—and other successful companies, I think, do this—is we defined it, then we taught it, and then we reinforced it. We would literally ask our employees, “Are their leaders behaving to these seven words?” And then the last thing we did that was really important is, we would always reinforce through pay and bonuses. And this is really interesting, actually. Like, think in your head of a two-by-two matrix where you have Do Goals vertically. So Do Goals are what everyone has in business, right? You have to increase profit, increase margin, increase attendance. Those are the Do Goals. The horizontal axes are the Be Goals. “What kind of leader do I want to be?” Those were the seven words of love. If you did great in both top-right box, you got the biggest raise. If you didn’t do either, well, you probably weren’t around very long. And then most of the leadership work was in those other two boxes. You’re either hitting the Do Goals and not the Be Goals, or the Be Goals not the Do Goals. That’s where all the time I spent mostly trying to get our leaders into that upper-right-hand box.

And when we come back, more with Joel Manby, his story, one of our American Dreamers series. Here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Joel Manby’s story of leading Herschend Family Entertainment, the largest family-owned attractions company in the world, and cultivating a culture of leading with love. Let’s return to Joel.

Every month in our financial reviews, we would also talk about our employee scores, which would include the definition of leading with love. And in fact, we would talk about our values and how people are adhering to it just as much as we would talk about the financial performance. And I guarantee you, very few companies in America do that.

We doubled cash flow.

We doubled. And this is, by the way, in the middle of that was two thousand seven, two thousand eight, so we went through the greatest recession other than the Great Depression, and we still more than doubled. Even through that period, we remained profitable. Our return on investment was north of twenty percent on a consistent basis, which is really good. And, you know, when you think about for the Herschends, they wanted a great place to work for great people. So that’s the engagement scores. If they love it, they’re going to show it through higher engagement scores. They also—owners are going to want a great financial investment, and so that has to happen. And at the same time, we were from a guest standpoint, we wanted to create “memories worth repeating” for our guests. Now, there are absolutely tensions between those three principles or those three circles, and any idiot—I shouldn’t say, idiot—but anybody can increase one of those circles, give great financial results, or have a great place to work for great people, or have the third circle, which is “memory worth repeating” for our guests. What’s really hard is managing all three of those so all three numbers are headed in the right direction. I think that’s what great leadership is. And I’ll give you another stat that’s really interesting. Gallup has measured employee engagement for fifty years. The average over that fifty-year period is about thirty-five percent of employee.