Unusual Habits of the Richest Man in History

Hi there, Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast and a business growth coach. I want to talk to you today about what we can learn from the habits of the richest man in modern history, John D. Rockefeller. Now, Rockefeller wasn't born rich. He wasn't well educated. He, in fact, born in 1839 in upstate New York, he was born into a very large and very poor family to a largely absentee father. And in fact, those experiences led him to develop the habits that made him the richest man in modern history. Taken in today's dollars, Rockefeller was worth 336/billion dollars. And that would make him more than four times richer than Bill Gates. That's an astonishing accomplishment in an era before things like the Internet and mobile phones and that kind of thing. But those habits and lessons that he developed still apply to us today. So let's go back and look at his life. As I said, he was born to a poor family in upstate New York with an absentee father. In fact, his father was kind of a dirtbag. His father ran around all the time. He was a known bigamist. He was widely believed to be a scam artist. And he would come and go and Rockefeller wanted nothing to do with his father. He looked after his mother, who was self disciplined, self managing, looked after her family. Rockefeller became a man of faith and self discipline, self control. And those habits he applied to business. Faced with the prospect of having to go live with his father, he dropped out of high school and and joined a trade school. So the richest man in modern history is a high school dropout who learns to be a bookkeeper. But he applies a zeal and discipline to this pursuit and it soon leads him, by the age of 25, to controlling about the largest oil refinery in the United States. Now, oil was just coming to its prominence at that time, and Rockefeller begins to seize on this. He develops kerosene and moves on to other fuels and so on. But he applies a number of habits to this, the first of which are priorities. So we've all got big to do lists in baskets, in boxes, on our email, and people want us to do things in addition to interruptions. Rockefeller realized we've got to set priorities on a regular basis with ourselves and our management teams if we really want to focus on the most important things. So priority is number one. The second is having good metrics, metrics about what's happening within the company, metrics about what's happening out of the company. So we look at and we develop metrics around customer information, employee information, business Performance and so on. We develop them for all the key people and we put them into dashboards and we run them through the company. The third thing is rhythms. So he established communication and meeting planning rhythms throughout the company that you could set your watch on. So Rockefeller was disciplined in that unlike many of the companies that just start working with us that really struggle to set priorities around key rhythms, we set annual planning, quarterly updates, weekly meetings, monthly meetings and daily huddles. We schedule those things and then we plan everything else around them, not the other way around. So three core things in the world of execution, and then there's the whole world of strategy. Rockefeller went after strategy in a particular way. He did have values and purpose alive in his business, but he was focused on eliminating constraints. And today we call this work X factor. The first constraint that he realized he wanted an unfair advantage in was the transportation cost for fuel oil. So he locked up transportation contracts with railroads so that he had a remarkably unfair advantage over his competitors. And. And then he went after a horizontal integration where he bought up competitors and that allowed him to stabilize oil prices and began to drop them. That made him the dominant source of fuel oil and allowed him to put whaling oil as an industry and in fact contribute to saving the whales. So those are some of the core of the Rockefeller habits. And Verne Harnish, the. The originator of the Rockefeller Habits book and the scaling up work, discovered all this in reading Chernow's book on Rockefeller's life Titan, which you can read as well. It's a pretty big book, but it's an extraordinary read for people trying to learn and understand how best to grow a business. So we put all of those things and we've developed them and expanded them in ways that you can apply into this Rockefeller Habits checklist. Now, this checklist is a diagnostic tool and a roadmap for you to begin to apply in your business. When you first read it, it will seem overwhelming to most people. However, if you'll score yourself on these items and have your leadership team score themselves as well. Bring your scores together then, and pick the bottom two and decide on just one of these habits to work on. Pick one habit, work on that for three months until it's really well accomplished in your company, then score yourself and move on to the next one. Over one year or two, you'll have accomplished a number of these things and you'll find that your company is growing faster, is producing more cash, is more profitable, and you have time for the most important things, not only in life, but the strategic things that will really help you grow your company. Now, if you've got questions about how to do this, how to use this tool, like to talk about it more, you could of course put them here in the comment section and we'll monitor that and answer them back. But you could also email them to us and we'd be happy to interact with you. Of course. You can download the Rockefeller Habits Checklist here if you'd like to learn how to run the meetings. We've got a growth kit that's free and downloadable on our website. It tells you how to run your planning sessions and how to schedule those things. It has a whole bunch of other forms you can use to get started in doing the scaling up work and applying the Rockefeller Habits in your business. Of course. We post tutorial videos like this all the time. You can listen to our weekly podcast on itunes or Stitcher wherever you get your podcast. It's called Scaling Up Business, the Scaling Up Business Podcast. Subscribe to that, please like and share this video. Like and share it if you haven't done that. And we have public workshops if you'd like to register, there is a cost for that. But if you'd like to register and attend one of our public workshops, we probably have one coming up. So look for the link right here and see what's available if that's of interest to you. And then if we can help you in any way, we'd love to do that. Please just let us know. Again, Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and Growth Coach, thanks so much.