FORT WORTH, Texas—You can’t believe everything you think.
And yet many credit union executives do just that both in their professional and personal lives, never challenging that thinking, often because they are successful.
That, in turn, is costing them in ways they can’t see, one person told credit unions here, in the process challenging them on everything from why measuring member satisfaction doesn’t really matter to the key to raising successful children.
Although Andy Andrews is the author of several New York Times’ best-sellers, including “The Traveler’s Gift,” and a frequent speaker who has been consulted by numerous sports teams and companies, Andrews described himself to the Cornerstone Credit Union League’s annual meeting here as a “professional noticer,” that is, he “notices the little things that make a difference in people’s lives. I hear what others hear and see what others see, but it just means a little something different to me.”
While he now works with multi-billion-dollar companies and the likes of University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban, his beginnings were admittedly modest. Both of his parents died when he was 19, and Andrews said he was homeless and living under the Gulf State Park Pier in Gulf Shores, Ala., when he had a discussion at age 23 with an old man in his small town known only as “Jones.”
“Rarely do we sit down with people who tell us things that make us mad,” observed Andrews. “I knew everything at 23. I could have solved every problem you had. One day he said, ‘You need to be careful with that.’ I said what. He said, ‘That thinking thing.’ He said most people live their entire lives and never really understand you can’t believe everything you think. That really flew over my head at that moment, and I’ve been unpacking that one for 25 years. It led me to a place of continuing to unpack things that people already knew were true, because things can be true and not be the truth.”
That isn’t to say that even faulty conclusions can’t work. “And because it’s working most of us stop there,” Andrews said. He added his audience didn’t have to take just his word for it. He cited an observation made by Winston Churchill that “No matter how beautiful the strategy, occasionally, it’s important to stop and look at the results.”
Competing in a Different Game
In his professional career helping organizations to succeed and grow beyond just average expectations, Andrews said he was forced to produce “real, serious, believable results.” A 20% improvement in sales, for instance, isn’t sufficient, he said.
But how to do that?
“What I do is I help people compete at a level where the competition doesn’t know there’s a game going on,” Andrews explained. “It’s easier than you might think, because everybody competes the same way. They don’t think about it. People generally compete with product or price, or they compete with rules. There isn’t a coach in America who at some point doesn’t say some version of this: ‘I want everything you’ve got today.’ But the truth is the coach on the other sideline just said the same thing. But if you can figure out how to legitimately compete from the whistle to the next snap while everyone else is just standing around, you’ll run them off the field.”
The field in which a company or organization competes is irrelevant, according to Andrews, because every company or organization has just one product: You.
“You are the product. This customer satisfaction thing; you let everyone else go for that,” said Andrews. “Customer satisfaction is not where the win is. There are companies that use that in their branding: ‘The home of the truly satisfied customer.’ Of course, you have to pay attention to it, but the truth is customer satisfaction is the lowest bar you can possibly hit and still stay in business. Anything less, and you are in trouble.”
Instead, the real reward is found in the greatest advertising of all, word of mouth, Andrews told the Cornerstone meeting. “It overpowers everything. If your word of mouth is great, your competition cannot traditionally advertise against you and make a dent. And if you’re word of mouth is horrible, you cannot throw enough money at traditional advertising to turn it around. Word of mouth is everything.”
What makes for lasting impressions with consumers is value, said Andrews, polling the audience for how many shop at certain places even though the prices are higher.
“It’s value that makes a lasting impression. But value does not necessarily connote money,” he stressed. “The vast majority of the people you see every day, for them, it has been years for where any of them--including in their own homes--had people outwardly enthusiastic that they were there. And you don’t think you can’t make a lasting impression with the look on your face?”
Good News & Bad News With Nick Saban
Andrews said that when he sat down with Alabama Coach Nick Saban and Ohio State Coach Urban Meyer for the first time, he knew both were prepared not to listen to anything Andrews had to say. And why would they, really, acknowledged Andrews. “Neither is arrogant, but they are extremely confident.”
“Sitting down with Nick Saban the second time, I knew what I had to do and I knew I had to say something that would release his thought process just a little bit,” recalled Andrews. “And said something I’ve used ever since. I said, ‘I can give you good news and bad news with one little sentence: You know what you know.’ That’s good news and bad news. The good news is you know a lot. Look at you (credit unions) and what you’ve done and the success you’ve had. You’re here because of what you know. The bad news is you only know what you know. So, does the possibility exist that right now you know something that could be wrong or your information is incomplete? The point is, we don’t know what that is or how many subjects that may cover. There is a wide world beyond what you know that will allow you to gain ground and make a lasting impression in the lives and communities of the people with whom you come in contact every day.”
Andrews stressed he is not a motivational speaker, and questioned the value of motivational talks. Motivation, he observed, “has a statute of limitations. It is determined by your emotions, your mood at the time. I’m into proof. The kind of proof where you hear something you hadn’t heard before or you hear it in a way and you go, ‘Well that makes perfect sense. I never thought of it that way before.’ If I could prove something to you beyond a reasonable doubt, you can harness that truth for the rest of your life and you would never need to see me for the rest of your life. You don’t need to listen to my tapes over and over and over again.”
True, But Not the Truth
Repeating that things can be true but not be the truth, Williams said those who want to achieve unbelievable results with their families, lives, or businesses need to dig deeper. “Most people in your life will stop at what is true. The truth connotes a bottom line, going as deep as we can go.”
As an example, he pointed to every parents’ goal of “raising great kids.” People have often approached him for advice and thoughts on raising children, especially kids who were causing trouble or who had reached adulthood unprepared for the world.
“I would always ask, ‘What is your MO, your process, what are you trying to do?’ And over and over again I would hear people say, ‘Bottom line, we want to raise great kids.’ And then I finally realized one day, there’s the problem. Because the truth is you don’t want to raise great kids; you want to raise kids who become great adults,” said Andrews. “And that’s two different destinations and a different pathway will lead to each. You can make a kid be a great kid because you are bigger than they are and have all the money. But a king once wrote, ‘Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is an adult he will not stray from that path.’ And you won’t believe how many people have come to me and said we did that and look what we got. It’s sad. They didn’t dig. They didn’t understand what the man said. The man did not say make a kid do everything you want him to do and when he’s 18 he’ll do it the rest of his life. If you tell the kid what to think, he will immediately test the validity of everything he was taught to think. But if we train a child in the way he should go, it requires long conversations. By 18 or 19 he or she has quietly made all of the decisions that young people at that age are about to make. And they are grounded in how to think and how to make the decisions that are knocking the legs out from under a generation of people right now.”
That child-raising advice, said Andrews, is a great metaphor for running credit unions. “If you can understand how things happen inadvertently, you can understand how lasting impressions can happen in your favor over the years. And we do that by being valuable to other people.”
Addressing an industry that is full of peer-group analysis data, Andrews observed, “Hugely successful people and high achievers are different. Average people compare themselves to other people. Average businesses compare themselves to other businesses. That’s why they’re average. We’re letting our methods determine our destination. Extraordinary achievers compare themselves to their potential. And any time they get close to it, that potential goes up.”