Keep yourself challenged
Gores knows a horror story that scares him more than any challenge he can have his people take.
“I worked with this guy a long time ago that had this word processing company worth $500 million,” Gores says. “Along the way came personal computers and this guy was so stuck in his technology that he was not open-minded to other technology. One of his engineers even saw the PCs coming along and he played around with putting their software on a PC. This guy, with his ego, basically fired him.
“Well, the rest is history. They went out of business a year or two later because the PCs came along, and that one mistake, not being open-minded and listening to your people, stays with me. If I get stuck in my way, thinking we’re the best instead of thinking, ‘Jeez, this business is changing, and we need to continue to look at the challenges and competitors and make it better, then I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do.”
Gores is constantly working to take on a bigger challenge than he’s ever met before to keep himself from getting complacent. He doesn’t go beyond the reach of his company’s financial capabilities, but he’s always looking for something that his competitors aren’t doing.
“Once you get successful, you’re stuck in this mindset and you think you have the best toy,” he says. “You are very close-minded because you think the world is never going to end, so it’s that fear that you have to have that this world is going to change, and you better be ahead of the game, and you better think like a start-up.”
To do that, Gores has to be the one leading the charge when it comes to taking risks. He constantly listens to pitches from managers on things the company has never done before.
“Status quo doesn’t exist for me,” Gores says. “I’m always keeping it challenging, I never want to do the same thing I dida year ago. We have to continue to challenge the people that are here so that they’re reaching to a point where it really hurts.”
That means that Gores tells himself something every day that most leaders don’t want to think about: He’s not the smartest guy on the planet.
“I don’t let that get in the way and start making a lot of assumptions that may not be true,” he says. “That’s a challenge because you almost are too smart, and you’ve been through too much, and that can keep you from going to the next step. But if you’re always challenging people to continue to take risks and reach and get better to make the company better, you have to do the same.”
When you are willing to hear those new pitches or sign off on something that the company has never done before, Gores says you don’t have to send out company memos every week telling people not to be complacent. When people see the senior leader producing challenges, it breeds more creativity.
“Whether it’s buying a company bigger than we ever bought or more broken than any before it, it’s always pushing, and that’s done by action,” he says. “I’m pushing the organization to do bigger things every day, so that’s the culture that exists here without me saying, ‘Gee, I want you guys to go out and do this.’They just know they have to do it. My job is to create these opportunities that push people.”