Bill Canady shut down his coal business's Ohio facility without visiting it or asking questions, destroying supplier relationships and nearly destroying the entire company. He learned the hard way that leaders must see operations firsthand before making strategic decisions.
Now let me tell you what happens when you skip that. And every single time I've gotten it wrong, it was because I didn't go see for myself. We had a business in coal, 2 major locations. One was in St. Louis, one was in Ohio. I sat down with the president of that group, terrific guy, and I said, what do you want to do? And he said, well, let's shut down Ohio and we keep St. Louis. And I said, all right, makes sense to me. The math all worked out, but I never went. I spent all my time in St. Louis because that's where he sat. I did not go to Ohio and walk that building and ask anyone anything. We shut it down and it just about killed us because nearly everything we had, all of our suppliers were coming out of that Ohio piece. I hadn't gone deep enough. I hadn't asked the right questions. It took us a couple years to recover from that. It made the business worse and it made everything else worse. That was a poor decision and it was totally my fault.
