HOW TO BECOME A TOTAL FAILURE

I spent the weekend in Scottsdale, AZ attending a restaurateur’s convention. That’s an odd place for a printing professional to go, isn’t it? What does printing ink have to do with sauce? Or presses with ovens? So why was I there? I went at the invitation of Kevin Hall whom I’ve written about before (see link). Kevin was there to introduce his brand new book, Aspire. You can get a preview of Aspire by following this link, (the Power of Words).

Heaven and Earth was moved to make sure he received finished copies of the book for the convention. And to make it happen we had to toss out these five failure rules: 1) Always look out for Number One (Rule #4); 2) Do the least that’s necessary for success (Rule #9); 3)Don’t share what you know (Rule #2); 4) Promise things you have no intention of doing (Rule #6); and 5) The customer is someone you have to put up with (Rule #10), and turn them inside-out to make them the five rules for success.

Before I was called in, the book had already missed several deadlines. Kevin was adamant that Aspire be as perfect as he could make it before printing. Many people cooperated to bring it to fulfillment from editing, art, and design. There were revisions, upon revisions, upon revisions.  When we finally got it to press there was a last minute correction to be made on the dust jacket. We, and I’m speaking of me and Brad Airmet, with FC Printing (formerly Franklin Covey Printing), reached the point where we had to pull the trigger or miss the deadline. The remaining steps for book completion could no longer be pushed–so we told Kevin that if there was a hiccup in any of the last stages there wouldn’t be enough time to fix it. Anyone involved with manufacturing of any product knows full well to expect the unexpected. Things go wrong. Even those things that have been right a million times before, will head south. I don’t know why, I just know that it is true. We tempted fate with a no room for failure.

The books were finished barely on-time and were ready to load into the car of a driver taking them overnight some 660 miles away, just a mere 10 1/2 hour drive. This is where the last challenge bared its sharpened fangs. The appointed driver’s car went kaput, and believe it or not, the backup driver’s car was having trouble as well. It looked like all of the effort put into pulling off this miracle was going for naught. Luckily Kevin had an acquaintance Todd England of England Trucking fame. Kevin asked if they had a truck going to the conference destination. “Yes,” he was told, “But, the company wouldn’t allow loose boxes in the trailer.” It took some quick outside-of-the-box thinking and the books were put in the cab instead.

Would this have happened without the team efforts of many people working for a common goal? No way. When you buy and read the book How To Become A Total Failure (link) you will see that there is one guiding principle behind the ten rules. Failures marginalize themselves and by so doing alienate the very people they need to help them become a success. The successful printing of Kevin’s Aspire happened through cooperation. Through cooperation it will become, I’m sure, the next best seller. No one could have pulled this off by themselves–not in a million years.

Written by Bill Ruesch blog author of Talking Through My Hat, A Print Broker’s Ruminations www.billprintbroker.com