From the Sandbox to the Corner Office: Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top:Excerpts
From BookJive
BRIAN GALLAGHER
President and CEO of United Way of America
LEADER LOWDOWN
Dream Job: Teacher, Baseball Coach
Favorite Business Book: Good to Great by Jim Collins
Things you're most afraid of: Failure
Every year the United Way choose 10 young people from across the country to be management trainees for the organization. When Brian Gallagher was 22 years old he wound up being number 11 on the list. But fate stepped in when one of the chosen 10 decided he didn't want to go Winston-Salem make only $13,000 a year handling one of the toughest division for the local United Way. "So I said, 'I just jumped at it," Gallagher recalls, about his decision to take the job in 1981.
The task: doing fund-raising for a devision that encompassed some of the stingiest business, he says, including small manufacturing companies and professional groups such as doctors and lawyers. "It's difficult to get doctors to give,"he quips. Given his tough job, he says," a lot of people would have whined about it and moped about it and thought, "these guys aren't going to give anyway. 'But that's not what I did. I started working 15-to-16-hour days talking to everyone I could, finding out why they didn't give and setting up plans to address the problems. "He held meeting around the clock to accommodate workers at manufacturing plants that had three shifts.
His work paid off, and by the end of first year he had increased fund raising by 63 percent among the organizations under his purview. "The motivation was the mission," he says, not his ambition to move up the career ladder. But the advanced quickly there, taking over the coveted high- profile assignment working with large corporations in the Winston-Salem area such as Hanes and Wachovia.
His motivation to work hard and try to turn around a fund raising segment that many deemed hopeless came from an early job on a crew digging ditches for sewer lines. "I did some of the most dangerous, dirtiest jobs I ever could have imagined--digging through tar working on top of a 150- foot blast furnace tied ti six or seven other men." But he remembers working hard and impressing his boss enough that Gallagher soon was supervising the ditch digger. "The way to get out of the ditch is to do a great job, "he explains, referring to his resolve to focus on doing whatever job is before him to its fullest.
GALLAGHER'S PAYING DUES LESSONS
- Focus on the job at hand, not the advancement, if you truly want to be successful.
- Jump at promising opportunities even though initially they may seem daunting of beneath you, because someone will always be waiting in the wings to take the job if you don't.
- Just because a job is deemed impossible to conquer or improve doesn't mean you can't make a difference if you work your tail off and come up with ideas that turn convention an its ear.
(From the Sandbox to the Corner Office, Chapter 7, pp. 141-142)
