Taking Mom's business advice

Your mother was right.

If you don't eat your vegetables, you won't get dessert. You can't judge a book by its cover. Sharing is caring.

It turns out that a mother's intuition makes good sense in business as well. (She could have told you that.) But it took Rhonda Abrams, a small-business consultant and author of Wear Clean Underwear; Business Wisdom from Mom (Villard Books, 1999, $22.95) to point it out to us. When Abrams, who writes and consults out of the San Francisco Bay area, first became a manager herself, she went looking for role models on the business bookshelves. There she learned she had to swim with sharks and be part Attila the Hun if she wanted to succeed in business. "It was dog eat dog," she said. "But I'm not like that." Still, it took her a few more years to figure out she needn't look any further than her own mother for a management mentor. When Abrams opened her management consulting practice in the mid- 1980s, she began dispensing advice to entrepreneurs as they formulated their business plans. They would come to her saying they wanted to do something meaningful with their businesses, do something good for the environment, or otherwise make a difference. "My first reaction was, save that for your private life," she said. But she was wrong. After a few years of watching some businesses succeed and others fail, she figured out the difference: "The best values make the best companies," she said. That's where moms come in. Mothers are the first teachers of values, and what they teach works equally well in life and in business. Abrams uses business case studies to illustrate the various mom-isms in her book. "Wear clean underwear," for example, was one of the most commonly cited sayings that people she interviewed remembered hearing from their mothers. (In fact, this saying came up even in different cultures, which just proves mothers are the same the world over.) But wearing clean underwear is really a lesson about doing the right thing, even if no one is going to see it, Abrams said. If you have that integrity, and you suffer a business setback, it will hold you in good stead. Doing the right thing, even when it isn't obvious to others, has myriad other benefits. Nordstrom, for example, has only one rule in its employee handbook -- "Use good judgment in all situations." It also has some of the highest returns per square foot of any department store. "Say you're sorry" is another piece of advice from mom that can pay off in business. McDonald's learned this the hard way after a jury awarded an elderly woman $2.9 million for the burn she suffered when she spilled her McDonald's coffee. McDonald's had already settled more than 700 other claims for coffee burns stemming from its extra-hot coffee, Abrams said. And yet they hadn't warned consumers, or planned to change the temperature of their coffee. In other words, it didn't seem like the company was sorry, so the jury sent a message that it should be. Odwalla, on the other hand, did say it was sorry when its apple juice was linked to the 1996 E. coli outbreak in Washington. Not only did it do a public product recall, even before the link was definitive, it also publicly apologized for any illness or suffering and offered to pay medical bills for anyone who had gotten sick. That move made a huge difference in restoring public trust in the company, she said. Moms are a never-ending supply of good business tips.

Copyright 1999
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