Thursday, April 16, 2009

Recent Wall Street Journal Cartoon Purchase

" I love business cartoons. Having come from building and eventually being President my own Electrical Sign Company for 26 years ( with 32 employees ) in the nation's capital, I learned a lot about people. Besides being an expert in your craft, you almost have to be a psychiatrist to run a company successfully like this. The Company, Roy Delgado & Associates was sold in 2001 to a foreign holding company who kept it going for 2 years than elected to get out of the business. In my employ, I had PhD.s, College graduates with degrees in Marketing, Art History, Business administration and average people. It was THEM who made me look good. I had a skill in motivating people and bring out the best in them. The simple way is very basic. FIRST, you have to like people. Before you can like people, you have to like yourself. You must help people reach THEIR goals. ( after all, they are helping you reach YOUR goals )
I learned one thing. You can pay a psychiatrist $400.00 an hour for 30 sessions, and eventually you will learn that it is UNWISE to humiliate a collegue in the public or in front of somebody, or in a public forum. ( This is stuff your parents are supposed to teach you before you leave home ). It usually comes back to bite you in the ass.
The business was started in October, 1975 in Fall Church, Virginia.

Amazingly, the first 10 employees I hired stayed with me for a term of 13 years to 26 years, the entire length of the enterprise!
It was a combination of luck, hard work, loyalty, good people and more luck.

The more complete story is in the book: " A Funny thing happened on the way to the New Yorker " Softback. 107 pages Ten Bucks, Interesting Forward/Bio, includes 100 cartoons from major magazines, available everywhere or from this blog.
In the previous blog, I tried to be magnanimous. I learned something a long time ago, ( Actually it was my first day in the Marines). It goes like this, I'm paraphrasing it; " There are times in life when a certain modicum of abrasiveness is necessary to elicit an appropriate response from someone. "

I got it.



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