From the “This Ain’t Just Capital Deployment” files:
What did you do at your job yesterday?
Me? Oh, I negotiated and then personally oversaw voluntary move-out by a guy who had been arrested for threatening his neighbors with an ax.
Of course, I brought along two armed guards, plus a crew to help move his stuff.
He turned out to be a pretty reasonable, decent guy.
He lived up to his word and I lived up to mine and I’d like to think we both came away from the deal happy.
You might ask why I did this, rather than having one of my employees do it:
- I’m not going to ask an employee to take on physical risk, particularly if I wouldn’t take it on. Sometimes being a leader means putting yourself out in front; and
- Getting this done was very important from a deal perspective. And we take that kind of thing EXTREMELY seriously… if we were going to fail at this, it was not going to be because I sent someone else.