Relaxing still doesn't come naturally for him, though. The first day of every vacation, usually beginning on the airplane, Brodsky experiences terrible headaches. Stripped from his corner office, his body often rebels -- and then submits. He slips into what his wife calls his "vacation personality." In small but telling ways, this alter ego has changed his business.
Along with his personal vacation policy, Brodsky has added a rule that applies to everybody at the company: the "everything's fine" rule. To keep people from calling the office while they are on vacation, the same message always goes out. "The rule applies to me, too," Brodsky says. "I call up, there could be massive disasters here, we could have lost our 20 biggest accounts, and 'Everything's fine.' Really, when you're away, there's not too much you can do, and you only get aggravated. I used to call five times a day. I don't call much anymore -- and neither does anybody else. It's contagious."
Brodsky admits that he couldn't simply pack his bags and watch his passport stamps pile up. He had to have a good management team in place. Then, he says, "I had to revamp my position in the company, take a step back from the day-to-day routine. I'm doing a different job now. I don't even sit in on half the meetings anymore. I do more long-range planning, things I formerly didn't have time to do when I never took my eyes up. Some of the investors who come here say, jeez, you work only three weeks a month. I tell them that I can run the business more effectively by doing this."
Sure, he misses his old ways. He used to pride himself on knowing everybody's name and "what they had for lunch yesterday." But he knows, too, that delegating more responsibility to his lieutenants is not only better for them, and better for the business, but also better for Norman Brodsky.
"You've got to have the guts to let go. That's the hardest thing you've got to learn," he says. "To put it in simple terms, I work up one morning and said, 'What am I doing with my life?' I'm 42 years old. I like what I'm doing, but I'm living in a glass shell. There's me, and that's it. I've got a great wife and a terrific family, and there're other things I want to do with my life."
Brodsky's key test of his new workstyle came earlier this year. He failed miserably. Like a recovering alcoholic who instinctively reaches for the bottle in a moment of crisis, Brodsky admits he retreated to his old ways last January after one key employee was terminated following a serious dispute. Brodsky canceled that month's trip to England and grabbed for the reins. "Maybe I should be doing more things myself," he thought, quickly drifting back into more of the day-to-day management. To everyone's dismay, he reached into the dispatching operations and started supervising again. He even did some hiring. No doubt wisely, his wife and his staff let him be for a couple of weeks, then they intervened. His wife told him, listen, you've changed a lot. There's no reason to fall back just because of one incident. His staff reassured him: trust us. We're good.
Brodsky loosened his grip, let go a second time. He promises no more canceled vacations. "But don't be deceived," he insists, the grit of the street in his voice. "Last year we did $23 million in business. This year we should do about $80 million. My goal is to build a $250-million company in four years -- and I'm going to do it."
He is working now at two jobs. Job One is running the company. That's the easier one, now that he's pulled back from day-to-day management control. Job Two is more difficult because it has required changing his value system in some major ways. Admits Brodsky: "I've got to work harder at not working hard."
And what happened to Everett Jewell, whose burnout made him unproductive for three months?
In Jewell's line of work -- manufacturing pre-engineered light-gauge steel buildings and houses -- one way to certify the structural integrity of a newly designed steel joist is to pile on concrete blocks until the steel crumples. Short on manpower, same as he's been short of capital for most of the 10-year existence of his company, Jewell often did the lifting himself, oblivious to the irony that he, too, was being stresstested. It's not hard to trace the roots of his inevitable collapse all the way back to childhood.
"Proud poor" is his term for his New Hampshire upbringing -- the oldest of five children raised in a two-room house with a sleeping attic. Shovel in hand, Jewell helped move a hillside to level the land for the house. He was 5 years old at the time. At age 9 he was washing dishes at a restaurant for 25? an hour. By the time he was 16, he was managing a local Chevron service station, pulling in $125 a week.
He bounced from job to job, never landing in what you'd call glamour industries. Even while in the Navy, he sold encyclopedias, and later on, Fuller Brush Co. products. He proved so adept at selling educational filmstrips ("You and Your Community Bank") that he was made vice-president of special projects. His territory: everything east of the Rockies. Generally three Sundays a month he would start by driving all night, pull into a territory the next morning, shave and shower in an unmade-up hotel room, work all day Monday, drive all night to the next stop, work all day Tuesday, and not see bed until Tuesday night. Thus did South Dakota blur into West Virginia. "Twelve hours at 75 miles an hour, you can drive more than 850 miles," Jewell says. "I did it many a night."
By the early 1970s he was rising fast in the mobile-home industry, first selling, then troubleshooting as president of ASM Industries, and moving on to vice-president of the southeastern region for the Homes Group of Bendix Corp. He was still stuck in overdrive. His role model? The protagonist in the Harold Robbins novel The Betsy. "Those were my goals at the time -- jet airplanes at my fingertips, Cadillacs, power. I told myself that one of these days I'm going to walk down the street and people will say, 'There goes Mr. Jewell." Trouble is, Jewell never slowed down to a walk. His neglected marriage failed, and he fell into debt. He took to selling insurance, burglar alarms, even cemetery plots.
