Trust Your Instincts

Sometimes you can't explain why you're not comfortable with the decision or comfortable with the direction and your gut feelings tells you that this is something you shouldn't do I'm going to tell you a quick story a number of years ago my father believed that we should go out and seek and higher somebody from a large company very knowledgeable individual to take over our food operation and on paper the individual could do anything his CV was very strong on paper it said he could do anything however when he came out to be interviewed there was something in the relationship that I didn't feel totally comfortable with and the reason why I couldn't explain it but something in his gut told me that is he the right person for us now certainly he was very knowledgeable and he could probably do what we wanted to be done but at what price would we pay to have him do it and he came and started to work for us and over the course of the next year he accomplished what had to be done by basically destroying the culture that had made us successful for the last 75 to a 100 years and it was a very painful lesson but at the end of the day we agreed that no matter how confident his CV was that he failed to be able to adapt to a private family company and in effect he was destroying everything that had been made a very successful over the last 50 to 100 years and we had to part company and I guess the lessons to be learned sometimes is you should always trust your gut or you should not discount your own gut feeling and secondly you have to understand that a family company has very different cultures than a large public company and sometimes that culture is what has led to a very successful operation for a very long time and you should be very careful when it comes to transitioning leadership that the new leaders have an understanding of that culture and understands that perhaps destroying that culture in the process of making some short term changes are not the best overall for the long term.