Virtue:
Restraint
Other names:
Definition:
The ability to resist evil or wasteful desires
Advice:
"process emails only a few times a day. Ultra-productive people don't check their email throughout the day. ... Instead, like everything else, they schedule time to process their emails quickly and efficiently"
Avoid time-wasters (Corley #9)
Empirical Research:
Case examples:
Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Further reading:
Vices opposed:
Incontinence
Case Study 1
ReplyDeleteJohn Abbate is an independent franchisee owner and operator of McDonald's restaurants throughout the Central Valley of California, and author of Invest Yourself: Daring to be Catholic In Today's Business World. In his book, Abbate notes the importance of restraint.
"In my experience, I have found [restraint] to be one of the most challenging and uncommon characteristics of leaders. It takes a good deal of confidence and humility to restrain oneself from being verbose. As a parent and business leader, I have to admit that I have failed to do this more often than I care to remember. But the fact is that over-lecturing simply does not work in parenting, business, or faith! We are all masters at tuning each other out very quickly." (Abbate, Invest Yourself, p. 129)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his autobiography, Eat Mor Chikin: Inspire More People, Chik-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy offers some examples of how restraint and the openness to opportunity that follows from it are indispensable to success. "The Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich itself was born in the wake of an unexpected opportunity. When one of my first two restaurants burned to the ground, I found myself with time on my hands and the availability to develop a new recipe.
"A boom in mall development in the 1970s and '80s gave Chick-fil-A the opportunity to expand our business quickly while minimizing real estate costs and identifying ourselves with a quality shopping experience.
...
"A chance encounter with a teenage boy who had lost his parents led to opportunities that have resulted in the establishment of the Chick-fil-A WinShape Centre Foundation, which supports foster homes, summer camps, and college scholarships, touching the lives of thousands of children and young adults - and literally saving some of them.
"The lesson that is continually reinforced in me is that to take advantage of unexpected opportunities, we must leave ourselves available. If we had set lofty long-range goals for our company's growth, our capital might have been so tied up in construction that we would have been unable to respond to these opportunities.
"Many successful people I know set magnificent goals for themselves, then let nothing stand in the way of their achievement. I don't engage in that kind of long-range planning. Instead, I leave myself and my company available to take advantage of opportunities as they arise." (Cathy, Eat Mor Chikin, p. 4)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Eat Mor Chikin: Inspire More People, Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy explains the importance of practicing restraint while growing one's business. "A man presented me with a business proposal for a restaurant company. He had opened five restaurants that were doing pretty well, and he considered his moderate success to be a green light for raising capital and expanding at a rate of 500 units a year.
"I wasn't interested. He might be able to raise the money he needs, but to hire and properly train the thousands of people necessary to serve customers in 500 restaurants across the country would be a monumental undertaking and eventually lead to disaster.
"In all my years in the restaurant business, I have tried never to overextend. I'm satisfied stepping from one plateau to the next, making sure we're doing everything right before moving on. Financial experts tell me our strength would allow us to open restaurants at a much more aggressive pace than our current seventy per year. But I'd rather have seventy restaurants operating efficiently and professionally than 500 restaurants where half are run well and the other half are not." (87-88)
According to Cathy, the virtue of restraint is key to a business' eventual success. "The most common reason companies fail, I believe, is their desire to grow faster than they can manage. This can be particularly true with companies that make a public offering and find themselves staring at a pile of money. All they want to do is grow. But you have to digest growth as you go.
"Companies may set goals, and if all goes according to plan everything works out well. But if they have extended themselves to the limits of their finances and their talent, even a slight economic downturn can force them to lay off employees to salvage the company. You don't build a good reputation by discharging people, but rather by developing people.
"Throughout the 1990s, American corporations grew at astonishing rates. But as soon as bad news appeared on the horizon, tens of thousands were dismissed. I cannot run a business that way. I never want to fire someone simply to save money. I want everyone who works at Chick-fil-A to feel secure that we will not resort to layoffs because we have overextended." (89) (Cathy, Eat Mor Chikin, pp. 87-89 and 89)