You probably wouldn’t think farm work translates very smoothly into an accounting firm. But Rodney Kinzinger credits his country upbringing for teaching him the discipline necessary for leading Deloitte LLP’s St. Louis office.
The managing partner keeps a yellowing, wrinkled copy of an article called, “Everything I Learned, I Learned Growing Up on a Farm,” in his desk, although most of the lessons it lists are already inherent to his character.
“One of the first principles is: Work comes before play,” says Kinzinger, who stepped into his position in June 2008. “What that gets down to is the self-discipline of getting the really important things done first — prioritizing those things and then having the focus and drive to just get them done.”
Kinzinger’s methodical approach to organizing his day — including setting aside time for his 215 employees — keeps him on top of the tasks he has to tackle.
Smart Business spoke with Kinzinger about how to prioritize with discipline.
Keep track of tasks. I put everything in my Outlook as a task. So if I’m on a phone call, I may scribble it on a piece of paper, but I have a pretty good discipline then on making sure that piece of paper gets into Outlook. Otherwise, you forget about doing it. Every morning, I look at that long laundry list of things, and I go through a mental process of: All right, which are the ones that are going to make a difference? For me, the ones that make a difference are those that are touching either our current clients or our prospective clients. Those are the ones that I address first. From there, it’s internal things related to people or other [issues] that we would have with running the business. So that’s the mental process I go through: clients, people and then administration.