Docility
Other names:
Teachability
Love of Learning (CSV)
Definition:
Ability to be taught by others; to receive guidance
"being well disposed to acquire a right opinion from another" (II-II q49 a4)
Advice:
“Whatever your position, reach out to those who know more than you do, and have been around longer than you have. Find those people. Listen carefully.” (Rumsfeld)
Read a lot (Corley #2)
Empirical Research:
People who exhibit love of learning tend to "have positive feelings about learning new things; have the ability to self-regulate efforts to persevere, despite challenge and frustration; find connections to the content to be learned, generate strategies for approaching this content, and then take the time to rethink their understanding and strategy selection; feel autonomous; feel challenged; have a sense of possibility; be resourceful (e.g., find models for themselves)" (CSV).
Case examples:
Gifts of the Spirit
Further reading:
https://catholicexchange.com/the-virtue-of-docility
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/28/9-habits-of-highly-successful-people.html
Vices opposed:
Precipitateness, not taking good counsel
Vices opposed:
Precipitateness, not taking good counsel
Case Study 1
ReplyDeleteRobert Luddy is president of CaptiveAir and author of Entrepreneurial Life: The Path from Startup to Market Leader. In his book, he explains that the virtue of docility is an essential leadership skill.
"The process of entrepreneurial management requires a continuous flow of new information, discussions, challenges, experience, and review. It is important to mine every possible source of wisdom. Perhaps the best instruction is taken from those who have been there and have become the masters in their fields. As I like to say, 'Learn from the masters.'"
Amongst the early mentors with whom Luddy learned to cultivate the virtue of docility were Jim Crouse of Crouse and Company, and James Maynard and Bill Cark of Golden Corral.
"Jim Crouse was the founder and CEO, and I reported directly to him. He was a great teacher and thinker and he took a personal interest in my career. Through his influence, I learned how an effective entrepreneur thinks and executes. Mr. Crouse began as a heating and ventilation contractor and eventually became a prime contractor building nuclear power plants. Jim was known as a shrewd trader, because he knew how to drive a hard bargain. I only worked for him for a short time, but the lessons he taught me were long-lasting.
"Golden Corral, which now has over 200 locations, is a major customer of CaptiveAire. Co-founders James Maynard and Bill Carl were vital mentors for me, particularly in the early days of my company. The opportunity to observe their fast-growing operation and learn about entrepreneurial business from them was invaluable. Mr. Maynard always stressed the importance of every person’s success and the value of incentives, making us all winners." (Luddy, Entrepreneurial Life, ch.5)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Pizza Tiger, Domino's founder Tom Monaghan offers an example of docility. Early in his career, Monaghan conducted extensive research while determining how best to grow his franchise. "Perhaps the most important thing I learned on these research trips is that everyone is convinced that his pizza is the best in town. It didn't matter what kind he was making - thin or deep-dish - and it didn't matter how appealing or awful the pizza was. He thought it was great. 'Why is this?' I asked myself. Then I figured it out. These pizza people were getting their feedback from their own customers. If you only listen to people who like your product, of course you're going to hear good things about it.
"That was an important turning point for me, because it taught me that I'd better examine my own product carefully, using unbiased subjects. That's what led me to taste tests. At one time, we had a panel of blind people as tasters. I'd read somewhere that a blind person's sense of taste and smell are sharper than those of a sighted person. Our taste tests were fascinating and led to a major improvement in the blend of spices we use in our secret sauce." (Monaghan, Pizza Tiger, pp. 98-99)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteCaptain Abrashoff of the U.S. Navy explains the importance of openness to learning from one's subordinates as well as one's superiors in his book, It's Your Ship. "It didn’t take me long to realize that my young crew was smart, talented, and full of good ideas that frequently came to nothing because no one in charge had ever listened to them. Like most organizations, the Navy seemed to put managers in a transmitting mode, which minimized their receptivity. They were conditioned to promulgate orders from above, not to welcome suggestions from below.
"I decided that my job was to listen aggressively and to pick up every good idea the crew had for improving the ship’s operation. Some traditionalists might consider this heresy, but it’s actually just common sense. After all, the people who do the nuts-and-bolts work on a ship constantly see things that officers don’t. It seemed to me only prudent for the captain to work hard at seeing the ship through the crew’s eyes." (Captain Abrashoff of the U.S. Navy explains the importance of openness to learning from one's subordinates as well as one's superiors in his book, It's Your Ship. "It didn’t take me long to realize that my young crew was smart, talented, and full of good ideas that frequently came to nothing because no one in charge had ever listened to them. Like most organizations, the Navy seemed to put managers in a transmitting mode, which minimized their receptivity. They were conditioned to promulgate orders from above, not to welcome suggestions from below.
"I decided that my job was to listen aggressively and to pick up every good idea the crew had for improving the ship’s operation. Some traditionalists might consider this heresy, but it’s actually just common sense. After all, the people who do the nuts-and-bolts work on a ship constantly see things that officers don’t. It seemed to me only prudent for the captain to work hard at seeing the ship through the crew’s eyes." (Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship, p.65)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn her book, Tough Choices, Carly Fiorina explains how she practiced the virtue of docility early in her tenure as CEO of the Hewlett-Packard company. "I tackled my new job in the same way I had always approached a new assignment: I met with as many people and asked as many questions as possible. I studied the details of our numbers and our plans. I traveled extensively and met with customers, partners, employees. All throughout my tenure at HP, I met constantly with customers. I could help open doors and close deals but I also always wanted to know how our customers thought we were performing. If you want to know what has to change inside a company, ask the customers. One of our most important customers at GM said to me: 'Carly, you have the best people in the industry; whenever I ask them to solve a specific problem, they always respond with dedication and excellence. But I never know whom to call; and if I can’t find them, they never find me.' Many customers reiterated this frustration that we were reactive rather than proactive, and difficult to do business with. Every one of them said we were too slow. Whenever I asked them to pick one word to describe HP, they would say 'nice' or 'engineering driven' or 'technically excellent.' Not one of them said 'focused' or 'effective' or 'leading edge.' All of them said we were being outmarketed by our competitors. All of them said we were too expensive. Our largest customers said we weren’t investing enough in new products or features to keep up with our rivals. Many complained that in a networked age, HP products didn’t even work with one another. Others said they thought our engineers started from scratch every time they designed a new product; one customer said in exasperation, 'Can’t you at least put the on/off switch in the same place?'" (Fiorina, Tough Choices, ch. 20)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Made in America, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton recalls his first experience as manager of a Ben Franklin variety store for Butler Brothers in Newport, Arkansas. "Only after we closed the deal, of course, did I learn that the store was a real dog. It had sales of about $72,000 a year, but its rent was 5 percent of sales - which I thought sounded fine - but which , it turned out, was the highest rent anybody'd ever heard of in the variety store business. No one paid 5 percent of sales for rent. And it had a strong competitor - a Sterling Store across the street - whose excellent manager, John Dunham, was doing more than $150,000 a year in sales, double mine.
"For all my confidence, I hadn't had a day's experience in running a variety store, so Butler Brothers sent me for two weeks' training to the Ben Franklin in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. After that, I was on my own, and we opened for business on September 1, 1945. Our store was a typical old variety store, 50 feet wide and 100 feet deep, facing Front Street, in the heart of town, looking out on the railroad tracks. Back then, those stores had cash registers and clerk aisles behind each counter throughout the store, and the clerks would wait on the customers. Self-service hadn't been thought of yet.
"It was a real blessing for me to be so green and ignorant, because it was from that experience that I learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years: you can learn from anybody. I didn't just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street." (Walton, Made in America, pp. 28-29)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his autobiography, Made in America, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton explains how his company was able to thrive by learning from its competitors. "We decided that instead of avoiding our competitors, or waiting for them to come to us, we would meet them head-on. It was one of the smartest strategic decisions we ever made. In fact, if our story doesn't prove anything else about the free market system, it erases any doubt that spirited competition is good for business - not just customers, but companies which have to compete with one another too. Our competitors have honed and sharpened us to an edge we wouldn't have without them. We wouldn't be nearly as good as we are today without Kmart, and I think they would admit we've made them a better retailer. One reason Sears fell so far off the pace is that they wouldn't admit for the longest time that Wal-Mart and Kmart were their real competition. They ignored both of us, and we both blew right by them.
...
"At first, we only butted heads with other regional discounters, like Gibson's and the Magic Mart discount division of Sterling. We didn't compete directly with Kmart. To put things into perspective, compare Kmart and Wal-Mart after they had both been on the street for ten years. Our fifty-plus Wal-Marts and eleven variety stores were doing about $80 million a year in sales compared to Kmart's five hundred stores doing more that $3 billion a year. But Kmart had interested me ever since the first store went up in 1962. I was in their stores constantly because they were the laboratory, and they were better than we were. I spent a heck of a lot of my time wandering through their stores talking to their people and trying to figure out how they did things.
"For a long time, I had been itching to try our luck against them, and finally, in 1972, we saw a perfect opportunity in Hot Springs, Arkansas - a much larger city than we were accustomed to moving into but still close to home and full of customers we understood. We saw Kmart sitting there all alone, really having their way with the market. They had no competition, and their prices and margins were so high that they almost weren't even discounting. We sent Phil Green in to open store number 52, which, you may remember, is where he stirred up all the fuss with the world's largest Tide display and all his other outrageous promotions. He cut prices to the bone and stole a bunch of Kmart's customers." (Walton, Made in America, pp. 242-43)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteHeinz Ketchup Founder H. J. Heinz was a keen observer and a meticulous note-taker. As Quentin Skrebac explains in H. J. Heinz: A Biography, he was constantly looking for ways to improve his own business, even while traveling abroad with his family. One trip to Europe in the 1880s would prove particularly consequential. "In Germany, Heinz studied a wide range of German factories and their paternal approach to management. The Stollwerck Brother chocolate factory changed many of Heinz's approaches." (99)
The factory, Skrebac notes, "had a lunchroom, coffee house, and store. The lunchroom had music for the employees. There was a 'social' manager to help employees with a variety of problems. There were large employee picnics and dinners. The exceptional treatment of the women in the workplace was another principle stressed by the Stollwerck brothers. The factory was particularly interested in the health of its employees, making doctors available to them. Small hospitals were also associated with German factories." (100)
Heinz still remembered the riots in Pittsburgh following the nation-wide Railroad Strike of 1877, and feared that poor working conditions in American cities would push the country towards socialism. His study of German industrial practices would influence his own management philosophy when he opened his new factory in Alleghany City a few years later. (Skrebac, Jr., H. J. Heinz, pp. 99. 100)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteComing of age in the early 20th Century, industrialist and earth-moving machinery inventor R.G. LeTourneau lacked formal education and was largely self-taught, working first as an apprentice smelter, then as an amateur, ultimately unsuccessful gold-miner with his uncle and father in California. LeTourneau was a man who learned from experience and applied those lessons to his later endeavors, as he explains in his autobiography, Mover of Men and Mountains. "I was more than a year on the gold mine-farming venture, an important year in many ways. In hand-shoveling an irrigation ditch from the river to Dad's fig sprouts, I learned how to calculate the lay of the land practically to the ounce of earth moved. Equally valuable was my experience cutting oak with an axe. Maybe you don't have to move earth with a hand shovel to learn how to make earth-moving machines, and maybe you don't have to cut oak with an axe to learn how to make jungle crushers, but I've never stopped being grateful for the experience." (LeTourneau, Mover of Men and Mountains, p. 53)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War and Life, Donald Rumsfeld explains the importance of being ready to learn from unlikely but pivotal sources. “When I worked for a time as a stockbroker in Chicago in the early 1960s, I’d start at the top floor of a building and knock on every door before I made my way down to the next one. I also made a point of visiting with the front office people in the companies I called on. I learned quickly that the folks in the front office, who at the time were usually women, were the first line of defense. They could help get people in the door to see their bosses or, just as easily, keep people out. They were a font of information and could be of enormous assistance if they wanted to be.
“[Former employer] Congressman Dennison’s office similarly was run by several women who made it function smoothly. Helen Wangness, Anne Drummon, and Fran Minter each had many years’ experience on Capitol Hill. They taught me the ropes. Together we made the office work.
“These key people can be found in any organization. In a hospital, it’s nurses who often end up teaching interns and residents many of the important practical lessons of caring for patients. In a manufacturing company, it may be the foreman. In the military, it is the chief petty officers and the sergeants. They have seen managers come and go. They are the repository of institutional knowledge, and more often than not, they are willing to share it.” (Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld’s Rules, p. 6)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War and Life, Donald Rumsfeld recalls an example of how willingness to learn from others is important for leaders as well as followers. “As President, George W. Bush had a trait often underrated in a good leader. He was an unusually attentive listener. This made meetings useful for him. He caught subtle points and asked precise questions that cut to an issue’s core. Because it was clear that he was paying close attention, those in his meetings tended to take special care in the information we presented. It encouraged us to be at the top of our game.” (Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld’s Rules, p. 26)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War and Life, Donald Rumsfeld discusses the virtue of docility. “Seek suggestions at all levels. When he was chairman of the board at Home Depot, Bernie Marcus used to visit their stores and walk through the aisles to see how things were operating. My former congressional colleague the late Ed Koch rode the subway and walked the streets of New York City when he was mayor, asking a question that became synonymous with his tenure: ‘How’m I doin’?’
“At Searle, a few times every month I would eat in the employee lunchroom instead of at my desk or with senior executives. And at the Pentagon, I walked through the building frequently, at lunch in the cafeteria, played squash in the athletic facility, and held town-hall meetings where any private or corporal could ask a question or make a comment to the Secretary of Defense. Only if you get out of your office can you find out how the troops actually feel, ask them about their families, and listen and learn.” (Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld’s Rules, p. 201)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, Thinking Outside the Box: The Wine Group Story, Arthur Ciocca, founder of Wine Group, Inc., recalls how associate Tim Rocha exemplified the virtue of docility early in Ciocca’s tenure as CEO. “Tim Rocha, who managed the Ripon Bottling Pavilion… communicated well and set high standards within his department, but he also reached across departmental lines and top management to encourage a more coordinated effort to improve value by lowering cost, mainly bottling room cost.”
…
“I’ll never forget the day he cornered me as I was walking the bottling room floor. He told me the marketing department was making him crazy and his labeler operator on Line #8 was so upset, she was about to walk off the job.
“When we talked to her, she showed us how a few hardly noticeable changes to the shape of the label would eliminate 15-20 minutes of down time per shift and result in the production of about 600,000 extra bottles annually at no extra cost. As soon as the marketing department understood the issue, they agreed that the production economics far outweighed the marketing considerations. A few weeks later, more ideas surfaced to improve line speed. Some were agreed upon in the interest of production efficiency and some were rejected in order to protect the integrity of the marketing programs. The walls between departments were down and communications were flowing. Decisions were being made in the best interest of the overall company. People felt good about this whether their department was at an advantage or not.” (Ciocca, Thinking Outside the Box, pp. 29-30)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, Thinking Outside the Box: The Wine Group Story, Arthur Ciocca, founder of Wine Group, Inc., explains how Franzia developed its signature “bag-in-a-box” strategy in order to work around the high cost of purchasing glass bottles and the infeasibility of manufacturing bottles themselves. “We soon discovered a revolutionary form of packaging that would become the key link in reinventing the Franzia brand. We had been tracking a concept that had been introduced in Australia several years earlier. It was called a ‘bag-in-a-box’ and was simply a plastic bladder inside a cardboard box that had a spout enabling wine to be poured...The bag-in-a-box monopolized the three and four-liter size market because Australia’s small population made it economically unfeasible to produce glass bottles larger than a one-liter size.”
Other companies were also tracking the bag-in-a-box phenomenon, but concluded that it would be an inefficient strategy in U.S. markets. “We knew we could make wine more efficiently than most, but we needed to learn how to buy, package and ship the new package efficiently. There was no better place to learn this than Australia where they had already been doing it for years. Carlyse and I had already scheduled a trip there so after our visit to Melbourne, we toured dozens of wineries, three of which specialized in bag-in-a-box. The Australians were incredibly accommodating and generous with information. It was an accepted practice throughout the worldwide wine community at the time to share technical information that would improve overall wine quality. The Australians knew what they were doing. This trip set a high standard for our performance and advanced our knowledge by years.” By exploring new possibilities outside the ordinary channels, Franzia was able to create a distinctive and recognizable brand that offered superior value and convenience. (Ciocca, Thinking Outside the Box, p. 78)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Thinking Outside the Box: The Wine Group Story, Arthur Ciocca, founder of Wine Group, Inc., describes how his management team learned to tackle company problems. “We approached board meetings with the same candor that we approached one another in our management brainstorming sessions. We were there to debate issues and learn, not to guard prerogatives or dazzle anyone with accomplishments. In spite of the fact that we had outside investors involved, who at times had different agendas than ours, we never approached an issue with anything but sheer objectivity. The board meetings, just like the company, focused on performance not politics.”
…
“Our board worked because everyone learned, grew and contributed. Today, over 25 years later, we are all very good friends. We see each other regularly and still seek each other’s points of view. Some of us are still together on one board or another and we are having even more fun brainstorming and solving new and different problems–most of which have little to do with business.” (Ciocca, Thinking Outside the Box, p. 65)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, It’s Your Ship, Michael Abrashoff describes an early lesson he learned in the virtue of docility while working for Secretary of Defense William Perry before becoming captain of the U.S.S. Benfold. He had to learn, he says, to think like his boss. “One of my duties was to plow through a four-foot-high stack of paper every day and recommend which matters were important enough to be sent to Secretary Perry for his personal attention. I’d come to the office at 5:30 every morning and stay until 8:30 in the evening, poring over the papers, and then I’d send my summaries for Dr. Perry’s attention to the two-star Army general who was the senior military assistant, and he would make the final cut. I thought I had a pretty good eye for what was important, but I soon became frustrated and demoralized. For the first two months, the general was passing on only 10 percent of the papers I had chosen. He was throwing 90 percent of my output into the burn bags that go to the shredder.
“There were days when I wanted to quit—I absolutely hated the job. To make matters worse, the general never gave me any feedback or suggestions. But he was brilliant, a genuine intellectual, and I respected him. So I realized that what I needed was to train myself to think the way he did. I would study the papers he sent on as well as the ones he threw out, and try to figure out why he made those decisions. In essence, I mentored myself. And within three or four months, perhaps 80 percent of the material I sent him was being passed on to the secretary. I was becoming more efficient, which meant he could spend less time reviewing my recommendations. I found that hugely satisfying, and I was gaining confidence—I could think like a two-star general.” (Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship, Ch. 2)