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The Power of Dyslexic Thinking
How a Learning DisAbility Shaped Six Successful Careers
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932778
ISBN-13: 978-1-934454-34-3
ISBN-10: 1-934454-34-6
Copyright 2010 by Robert W. Langston
Chapter 3
Paul Smith
and the Power of the Charismatic Adult
Paul Smith is the former president of the Kroger Company’s Atlanta division. Kroger is one of the nation’s largest grocery retailer chains, with store formats that include grocery, convenience, and multi-department stores. Paul joined Kroger in 1962 as a clerk/management trainee; he went on to hold the positions of Senior Marketing Manager and Director of Merchandising. During Paul’s tenure as president, the Atlanta division benefited from unprecedented growth, with the number of stores jumping from 87 to over 160. Kroger also increased its community outreach efforts under Paul’s leadership, partnering with the IRS to provide a free tax relief program to Georgia customers. Paul retired in 2000 after thirty-eight years with the Kroger Company, including fifteen as president of the Atlanta division. Currently, Paul is Senior Partner of the Oxford Learning Group; he also serves on the Board of Councilors for the Carter Center, Board of Trustees for Mill Springs Academy, Board of Advisors for Coles College of Business, and on the Partners of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Advisory Board. Paul graduated from Western Michigan University.
Today it is easy for me to look back on my life and acknowledge that the majority of my success in getting through school and embracing my dyslexia was the direct result of the influence of special mentors. My mother, Dr. Ron, and Dr. Phillips were three such mentors, without whose help I would have never made it through the education system with diplomas in hand and my self-esteem intact. However, I didn’t fully appreciate the crucial impact these figures had on my life until I met Paul Smith. He introduced me to a concept Dr. Robert Brooks refers to as the “charismatic adult,” which is a person who takes an interest in and cares about a young person.
Paul’s charismatic adult was a Kroger store director named Jim Johnson; he helped Paul shape a part-time summer job bagging groceries at the local Kroger into a wildly successful forty-year career with the company, fifteen years of which Paul spent as president of the Atlanta division. Jim Johnson saw potential in a flighty kid with an undiagnosed learning disability and took him under his wing. After hearing Paul’s story, I was able to reflect on my own life and recognize all the charismatic adults who helped shape my success with new appreciation. It was another pivotal moment in my understanding of how the dyslexic mind works and, perhaps more importantly, what often determines whether a kid with a learning disability will end up with a successful career or a low-end job.
Computers Don’t Run Companies; People Do
About the same time in 1996 that I was starting to get involved with Vistage, my dad approached me with a business prospect. He had the great idea to pitch bagged salad to the Georgia grocery market. Today you can enter any grocery store in America and find all kinds of packaged salad, but at that time my dad’s decision to market this product in Georgia was a novel idea. However, to make packaged salad a success, he had to convince the Kroger and BiLo food stores to buy it.
Fortunately, my father is a master of the value-added sale and knew just how to win Kroger over. At the time, Kroger was working on consolidating all of its outreach efforts under one umbrella program, which it dubbed Krogering for Kids.[1] The new program would incorporate all Kroger’s previous charitable efforts with a new focus on promoting child education and wellness. When my dad came to me with his proposal, he said that as part of his pitch to Kroger he wanted to offer my services as a speaker for Krogering for Kids. If Kroger bought bagged salad, as a value-added bonus the company would also get fifty speaking commitments for the year, to dole out to local schools as it pleased.
Acquiring Kroger as a sponsor had the potential to springboard my fledgling speaking career, so I was really excited about the project. I called Dian Stevenson from Krogering for Kids, and she came out to preview one of the programs as part of the negotiation process. She loved it, and Kroger said, “Okay, let’s do it.” Not only did the packaged salad take off, but the Krogering for Kids program took off as well. The next year, my speaking engagements doubled from fifty to one hundred. Krogering for Kids also helped build the non-corporate half of my speaking career; I worked with Kroger for six years and came away from the relationship with numerous contacts for the Langston Company, as well as fully developed programs for elementary schools, middle schools, and parent-teacher groups. I also came away with a friendship with a genuinely great person and business leader whom I doubt I would have had the privilege to meet otherwise.
A couple years into the program, I was told that Paul Smith wanted to meet me. “Who’s Paul Smith?” I asked. It turned out that Paul Smith was the president of Kroger food stores for the Atlanta Kroger marketing area. Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina were all included in the Atlanta KMA at the time, and it was about a three-billion-dollar division of Kroger-the crown jewel of the Kroger company from what I understood. Needless to say, I agreed to meet him.
When I scheduled the appointment with Paul’s secretary, she asked where I’d like to meet with him. I figured his office was as good a place as any and told her so. She scheduled the meeting, and on the appointed day I went to Paul’s office in the main Atlanta corporate office. It was the quintessential president’s office: two walls made entirely of glass, a big mahogany table for meetings, its own executive washroom, and a huge, impressive desk.
But what really stood out to me when I walked in were two things. One was that there was no computer on the huge, impressive desk. I thought to myself, “How do you run a three-billion-dollar-a-year division of a company with 24,000 employees and 160 stores without a computer? That’s ridiculous.” Two, I noticed there were no plaques or awards on the wall. Now, by then I had done my homework and knew who Paul Smith was, and he was very active in the community and very successful in the company. I knew that people had to have given him something-accolades, honorary certificates, something. Why wasn’t he putting them on his walls?
A few minutes later, Paul came in and we sat down to talk. The first thing I asked him was, “Paul, why don’t you have a computer?”
He said, “Rob, I learned early on, based on my learning disability, that computers don’t run companies. People run companies.”
I thought that sounded like a good philosophy to have; you can’t run a good company if you don’t have good people working under you and good people working under them and so forth. So I nodded and told him that was a smart way to look at business. Then, I asked why he didn’t have anything on the walls. “I was expecting to walk around while I was waiting for the meeting and learn a little bit about you from the plaques and awards on your walls,” I told him.
He said, “The reason there are no plaques and awards on my walls is because I don’t ever come here!”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He replied, “Well, my secretary said you wanted to meet in my office, so here I am. But normally I don’t ever come here.”
I was baffled. I asked him what he did every day if he didn’t come to the office, and he replied, “I get up every morning and I drive to my stores. I go to as many stores as I can a day, and I talk to baggers, I talk to cashiers, I talk to managers, and I talk to my customers. From that, I try to get a feel for what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong, and then I call the office and tell them what to fix.”
Later, I would hear a similar philosophy from Paul Orfalea, but at the time I was floored by his very hands-on, anti-office approach to his business. In my mind, I had built a picture of what defined a successful business leader, and that included the fancy office with a computer on the desk and reams of papers and files to go through every day. Paul told me he just couldn’t be that type of leader because of his learning disability. He has ADHD and an undiagnosed reading impairment. He developed his aversion to the office because it was filled with paperwork that he couldn’t do, and that frustrated him. He chuckled and told me, “I never did those kinds of things. And fortunately, being president, I really didn’t have to, and I think it made me a better president.” Paul knew what he wasn’t good at, so he focused on what he could do well. “I didn’t know I had disabilities,” he said, “but I knew I didn’t like to read or study. I knew it wasn’t effective. So I had to find a different way to accomplish what I was going to accomplish.”
Like Paul Orfalea, Paul Smith surrounded himself with people who could make up for the skills he lacked. His secretary, Margaret, did most of his letter writing for him. “I won’t say I’ve never written a letter,” he told me in another interview, years later. “But you can’t believe how long it takes me and how much paper and scratching out and scribbling it takes to write one.” So, he would tell Margaret what he needed to communicate with his employees, and she’d produce eloquent letters “from Paul” for distribution. “Margaret knew me,” he said, “and knew what was in my head. And she could put it down on a piece of paper, but I couldn’t.”
People at every level of the company rave about Paul Smith’s people skills, but he says he wouldn’t have developed them without his learning disabilities. His disabilities made him get along with people because he had to. Being in his stores, he said, was the only way he could be effective. His method was a lot like Orfalea’s. He went out and steeped himself in the big picture of his business without getting too caught up in the day-to-day busywork. Paul himself noted that this approach to management is popular among leaders with learning disabilities. “They’re always getting along with people, being out and looking and watching and seeing things. And you know what? If you really said, ‘What’s the best way to run a business?’ this is probably it.” He wholeheartedly believes that a lot of the management methods people develop to compensate for a learning disability are very positive, effective methods-whether someone has a learning disability or not.
Self-Diagnosis
From that first meeting, whenever I met with Paul, we had coffee or breakfast at the store that he was starting his day from-usually the one closest to his house. After our meeting, he’d continue on his round of stores. He told me that growing up he didn’t realize he had a learning disability; it was only after he was an adult and started hearing about things like ADHD and dyslexia that he was able to reflect back and self-diagnose.
He hates to read and study, but he knows it’s more than just a preference. “A guy doesn’t say ‘I can’t do it.’ He says ‘I hate it,’” Paul told me. He hated school because all the little failures brought on by his learning disabilities weighed on him. No matter how hard he tried, his grades just wouldn’t reflect the smarts he knew he had. But when he was in school, learning disabilities “were just never diagnosed. I went to a Catholic grade school with the nuns and priests. Sister Paulita didn’t diagnose any learning disabilities. She’d roar at ya. You know, slap you upside the head. That’s just what it was back then.” But fortunately, Paul is one of the lucky ones who made it through school and graduated, something he attributes to “the grace of God.”
Paul finally realized he had learning disabilities when he started comparing his own experiences to his son Paul Jr.’s troubles. Paul said that his son could run as fast and jump as high and pretty much do anything as well as his friends. Then, he went to school and sat next to those same friends and faced schoolwork. His friends got it; Paul Jr. didn’t. “Paul [had] never failed at anything,” his dad explained, “and he didn’t understand it.” Paul said that from there, everything started to spiral downward for his son, which “can be just devastating in a child’s life.” Becoming educated about learning disabilities helped Paul diagnose himself and understand what his son was going through. But while Paul’s son was diagnosed with severe learning disabilities and found a lot of support in his parents, Paul Sr.’s success was due in large part to one role model.
A Determined Mentor
Paul’s first job was bagging groceries at the local Kroger. “I was standing on a corner in Gary, Indiana, in 1962, and on one corner was a Gulf Oil Station and on the other corner was a Kroger store. I was going to go to one of them and get a job, as I’d turned sixteen, and traffic was kind of bad one way, so I ended up going to the Kroger store.” Luck must have had a hand in traffic that day because it led to Paul’s introduction to Jim Johnson, the store manager at the time.
“I was a challenge for him,” Paul says. He didn’t take the job very seriously at first, but Jim Johnson was determined to turn him into a good employee. Paul’s most vivid memory of their time working together was on one occasion when Paul wanted to take his girlfriend to a school dance. He asked Mr. Johnson if he could have the night off, but was turned down because he hadn’t put in his request on time and the schedule had already been set. Paul “gave him some static” about it and hauled off and quit right there. “I walked out of the store, and I got about halfway home, and I thought, ‘What did I do?’ I had a great job and I just lost it.” Then he looked up and saw that Jim Johnson had pulled up beside him in his car. “I’ll never forget it,” he said. They talked, and then they went back to the store, and Paul kept working for Kroger. That summer job turned into a forty-year-long career. As Paul explained to me, he attributes that success in large part to Jim Johnson’s influence and guidance.
He stayed close to me, and he showed an interest in me. I only worked for him about a year, but we often don’t realize what that first job means. I really learned work ethics from him. I also learned how to treat customers and how to treat employees. And I really think that that influence stayed with me all forty years. There are people that are mentors for you-many of them, hopefully. Some of them are in your life for just a very short time, but they really end up being a mentor for you the whole rest of your life. He certainly was one of those.
So I think today, when kids get that first job, especially in today’s world with all the challenges these kids face, we’ve got a responsibility to realize that this could be their first experience with work ethic, and the impact that we could have on them the rest of their lives.
The Charismatic Adult
Paul Smith isn’t alone in thinking that having a mentor is important and can have a dramatic impact on a learning disabled child’s life. Dr. Bob Brooks is a highly respected child psychologist and speaker whose goal is to educate adults and children about the importance of fostering self-esteem as a way to make children more resilient. I first heard Bob speak in 2007 at the Prentice School in Santa Ana, California. He was facilitating a panel and receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the school, and I was giving the luncheon keynote and receiving the Child Advocacy Award. In his program, Bob talked about the impact a “charismatic adult” can have on a child’s life.
“Charismatic adult” is a term he borrows from Dr. Julius Segal that describes an adult a child can draw support and strength from. These “charismatic” figures usually play a significant role in determining whether a child grows up to be resilient or not. He writes in one of his articles, “In numerous studies, when resilient adults were asked what they considered to be of the most importance in assisting them to overcome adversity in their childhood, invariably the first response was ’someone who believed in me and stood by me.’”[2]
Of course, when I heard him talk about the importance of a strong adult figure and the impact that person can have in shaping a child’s self-esteem and future, it immediately made me think of Paul Smith and Jim Johnson.
Dr. Brooks sees a strong correlation between self-esteem and resilience. Most of his research and speaking points center on ways for parents, teachers, and other charismatic adults to foster self-esteem in the children they interact with. “This is especially important for children with school difficulties,” he says, “since their self-esteem and confidence have often been weakened by numerous experiences of frustration and failure.”[3] The best way to do that, he says, is by focusing on a child’s individual strengths, or what he calls “islands of competence.” He coined this metaphor “while listening to the words of youngsters in my clinical practice, many of whom were struggling with learning problems and had experienced a great deal of frustration and failure in their lives.”[4] He works with his patients to identify and build on their strengths, their islands, when they feel like they’re drowning in a sea of inadequacy.
I was immediately struck by this metaphor because it echoes what Sally Shaywitz says about children with dyslexia. The child’s lack of phonemic awareness is “a circumscribed, encapsulated weakness” that is “often surrounded by a sea of strengths,” like problem solving, critical thinking, and concept formation.[5] In helping children cope with dyslexia and learn to read, Shaywitz advocates parents using her “sea of strengths” model to help identify and emphasize what a child is good at: “The goal is to make sure that the strengths and not the weaknesses define the child’s life.”[6] Drs. Brooks and Shaywitz aren’t the only experts in their fields who are focusing on emphasizing strengths as a way to cope with weaknesses. According to Dr. Brooks, “the emergence of the field of positive psychology reflects a growing recognition among mental health professionals that individuals must not be narrowly defined by psychiatric labels and pathological traits but instead by their assets, skills, and strengths.”
Whether they’re conscious of it or not, charismatic adults usually do just that: focus on a child’s strengths rather than on his or her weaknesses. I consider Dr. Ron one of the charismatic adults in my life; his approach to helping me deal with my frustrations was to focus, piece by piece, on what I could do to improve myself. Dr. Phillips at West Georgia was another charismatic adult; when we’d face off against school administrators, she wouldn’t just tell them what I couldn’t do. She would tell them the ways I learn best, my strengths. But a charismatic adult doesn’t necessarily have to help you hone your strengths to be a positive force in your life. He or she just has to be there to support you and accept who you are. This kind of support is important for all children, but especially for kids with learning disabilities. As Bob Brooks says, “We should never underestimate the impact that one caring adult can have on the lifetime of a child with school problems.”[7] Having that charismatic adult can mean the difference between a child growing up to be the next Paul Smith or another prison statistic.
The Level Five Leader
Several years ago, Jim Collins, another resource consultant for Vistage and TEC, wrote a book called Good to Great, which discussed what allows some companies to make the jump from being just good to being great. Kroger was one of the companies profiled in Jim’s book. The funny thing about that is that the time Kroger was at its best was also when the Atlanta division-with Paul Smith at the helm-was the feather in Kroger’s cap. According to Good to Great, a large part of a great company’s success is due to having what is called a “level five leader” at the head of the company.[8] Of course, the book focused on the then CEOs as being Kroger’s level five leaders, but I think Paul Smith should get some of that credit, too. Paul is definitely a level five leader-a leader with a humble, company-first attitude, a constant willingness to adapt and innovate, and a strict focus on trusting what the numbers are saying.
Jim Collins spends a whole chapter in Good to Great talking about the importance of a company being able to face the “brutal facts” and trust what data and research results are saying. That chapter immediately came to mind when Paul told me one of the ways he adapted to a big jump in the number of stores in the Atlanta division. At the beginning of his presidency, he was able to make it into every store in his division at least a couple of times a year; however, by the end of his presidency, there were just too many stores. But since Paul is such a visual thinker and prefers a hands-on approach to management, he knew he had to come up with a better way of crunching the data than just reading pages and pages of sales statistics.
As he later explained to me, his answer was to take a three-ring binder and put in a piece of graph paper for every store in his division. Each store’s page had fifty-two weeks lined up across the top, and at the end of each week, when the sales numbers came in, Paul would go someplace quiet and map out the sales figures for every store.
Every year I used a different colored pencil so I could tell what the trends were. I could do it even with a learning disability because it was just drawing a line with a colored pencil. Somebody said, “We could print that off for you. That comes off the computer every week.” But when I would sit and look at store 344 and look at the trends and chart them, I would visualize that store. I would think about who the manager was. I would think, “Is there anything going on around there? When was the last time we remodeled it? Are there any opportunities?” It literally took me back to each one of those stores every week. And many times something would happen, and I’d make a note for someone to follow up and check something at that store. It was a very important part of me being able to run the business.
Hearing his strategy is just more evidence of the power of dyslexic thinking. Paul found a way not just to confront the data, but to actually see it in a way that both compensated for and took advantage of his natural way of thinking-all without a computer. He joked that during a meeting to solve the Y2K problem, he said, “You know what, y’all? You figure this Y2K thing out; I can’t help you with it. The only thing I know is last year I used a green pencil, the year before I used an orange, and the year before I used a red, and I’m really struggling with what color pencil I’m going to use next year. That’s my Y2K problem.”
Six years after the start of the Krogering for Kids program and my association with Kroger, Paul Smith retired. As best I can figure, Kroger turned to a different style of management, which was more micromanaging. If you read Good to Great, you’ll see that level five leaders tend to nourish people and get out of their way rather than micromanage them. Kroger basically asked Paul to quit being a level five leader, and he decided to retire rather than change his personality and his management style.
You Have to Know People
If children with learning disabilities don’t find a charismatic adult to take them under a compassionate wing, it’s hard for them to get through school without feeling like failures. They need their teachers and parents to step up and be charismatic adults, to take an interest in building up their strengths instead of focusing on their weaknesses. All the men I talk about in this book who are successful and have a learning disability have surrounded themselves with people who can fill in for the skills they lack. In fact, they’re better leaders in large part because they need others to help compensate for their learning disability. They understand the power of having the right people in the right place-one of the attributes of a level five leader. This is because they wouldn’t have gotten where they are in life if it hadn’t been for the right person in the right place to help them through their toughest moments.
The charismatic adult does more for a child with a learning disability than just offer support, foster good self-esteem, and help discover the child’s strengths. The charismatic adult teaches that child the power of human relationships. That child realizes that to make it, he or she will have to continue to partner with other people. That’s why Paul Smith’s philosophy about business is so powerful; he knows that to be a success in life, whether you have a learning disability or not, you have to know the best way of interacting with others. I make the same reference when I talk to kids in my programs. I tell them, “I’ve never seen a dollar jump into my pocket. Someone’s always handed it to me.” Whatever you want in life-money, love, happiness, power, any of those things-comes from interacting with people.
The ironic thing is, the learning “disabilities” that hamper kids so much in school end up being great assets to them in adulthood. As Paul said in my first book, “Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity is a learning disability in school, but in business, it’s multi-tasking with energy.” My speaking groups always get a big kick from that quote, but I find it sad because it underscores just how backward our thinking about learning disabilities is.
Our education system expects all children to be able to sit still in their seats and pay attention for hours at a time and get the majority of their schooling through reading and writing. But if you’re ADHD, sitting still and paying attention for that long is pretty much impossible. If you’re dyslexic, you just don’t absorb knowledge through reading and writing. But these “learning disabilities” are only truly problems within the sphere of our school system. Children with ADHD and dyslexia are just as smart as children without those learning disabilities; they just don’t learn in the same way. And furthermore, those quirks in learning style that make them an uncomfortable fit for the current teaching mold make them better adapted for certain types of careers later in life. Where’s the “disability” in that? To me it seems like we need to stop putting negative labels on children who don’t fit the system and start figuring out ways to make the system fit our children.
[1]. While the program name “Krogering for Kids” no longer exists, many of the charitable programs that developed under that umbrella still exist and continue to be funded by Kroger.
[2]. Robert Brooks, “Education and ‘Charismatic’ Adults: To Touch a Student’s Heart and Mind,” Robert Brooks, Ph.D., Resilience, Self-esteem, Motivation, & Family Relationships, (September 2000), http:// drrobertbrooks.com/writings/articles/0009.html.
[3]. Robert Brooks, “The Search for Islands of Competence: A Metaphor of Hope and Strength,” Robert Brooks, Ph.D., Resilience, Self-esteem, Motivation, & Family Relationships, (April 2008), http:// drrobertbrooks.com/writings/articles/0506.html.
[4]. Ibid.
[5]. Sally Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 57.
[6]. Ibid., 93.[7]. Robert Brooks, “Self-Worth, Resilience and Hope: The Search for Islands of Competence”
[8]. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t (New York: Collins Business, 2001).