In Spain, a few years back, a tragic but true story was reported. It was in a remote part of Spain, where hitchhiking and picking up hitchhikers is very common. A man driving a pickup truck stopped to let a young man jump in the back of the truck. The young man quickly realized that he had jumped in a truck carrying a coffin! Upon quick inspection though, he realized that the coffin was empty.
A short time later, it began to rain, so the young man crawled inside the empty coffin to stay dry. He then fell asleep…which is reasonable…what else would you do in a coffin? As chance would have it, forgetting that the first guy was still asleep in the coffin, the driver picked up two more hitchhikers. After a few miles, the napping hitchhiker woke, raised the lid of the coffin, and said, “Hey, it finally stopped raining.” Both of the other hitchhikers were so scared that they jumped out of the speeding truck. Unfortunately, one was killed and the other was seriously injured.
The sad part was, there really had been nothing to fear. It was a guy, just like them, waking from a nap. But fear was their downfall. Even though the guy in the coffin was no threat at all, the fear created by their imaginations caused their demise.
As I reflect on this story, I cannot help but think about the fear that is becoming somewhat pervasive concerning our short-term economy. Sure, there is plenty of evidence that we could be entering an economic slowdown. The stock market is experiencing volatility as the bears and bulls battle, and for the last few months, the bears seem to be gaining the upper hand. Housing starts, employment figure, interest rates, earnings reports…you name it…the signs are there. Oldsmobile closes its doors and Chrysler, well, who knows? It is no wonder that a sense of “fear” seems to be gripping the Detroit area right now. But is fear always a bad thing?
For hundreds of years, people have recognized that the two greatest motivators are greed and fear. I believe that of the two, fear is a much safer motivator than greed. Greed often creates a series of bad habits that, in the long term, can create weakness. Greed can cause people to take excessive risks, without planning and research, and it often accompanies an attitude of arrogance that can turn people away.
Fear, on the other hand, does just the opposite. Fear causes us to be very cautious and calculated about decisions. It prompts us to challenge ideas and decisions that could hurt our companies. And perhaps most important of all, fear keeps us humble, and I am convinced that humility is the first and primary key to customer service. Excessive fear, like that experienced by the two hitchhikers, can be crippling, if not deadly. For example, Ann Landers has reported that, of the 10,000 letters she’s received every month, almost every letter deals with a fear of something. The mighty Stalin was so scared of personal attack during the night that he had eight separate bedrooms built that were similar to bank vaults. Each night he would sleep in a different room, and not even his closest aids knew which room he was in. And then there was a Japanese soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, who fled the war in 1944 and exiled to a cave in Guam. For 28 years, he lived on frogs, rats, and snails because he was fearful that the war was still going on.
Who knows for sure? Maybe all the rumors and press about the economy will result in the failure of us all. And maybe we should be scared into paralysis. My guess though, for what it’s worth, is that these are just warnings that things have moved too fast for too long. We need to take a breather and implement a bit of care and caution into our decisions for the next year. And, we probably need to take a humble look at how we provide service. We definitely shouldn’t assume that the “voice from the coffin” is a skeleton sent to create disasters within our companies. In fact, that voice might just be a friendly wake-up call to remind us of who we are and how we got here in the first place.