The Education of an Educated CEO

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With DeWilde's help, the salespeople decided that it's OK, when a customer knocks on the door after closing time, to let him or her in; customers could sample anything in the store; and if a customer was unhappy with something, staff should replace it free of charge and without question. "That did take a lot of anxiety out of seeing someone walk through the door with a Koeze bag," Huber says.

Upon meeting DeWilde, she says, "At first we were intimidated by his education." But over time, she adds, "I felt very pleased that the company would put forth that much effort. It built our confidence."

Still, change was often coming too slowly to suit Jeff Koeze.

SOMETIMES, THE BOSS NEEDS TO CHANGE

By his sixth or seventh year at Koeze Co., Jeff says, he felt "a great deal of personal frustration." Being a boss, he realized, often meant delegating to people with skills inferior to your own. It also meant much of your own company is hidden to you, because workers don't share a lot of what they know. Those problems, of course, no boss can fix. He wondered if he should sell.

"I was not well suited to this or any business," Koeze remembers thinking. "There were things that had to be fixed about me. I was probably rational to a fault." As an undergrad at North Carolina, he had flourished at Chi Psi, the school's nerdiest fraternity. For his blunt debating style, his brothers voted him "most obnoxious Yankee" seven semesters in a row.

"He relished earning that distinction," says Donald Beeson, a Chi Psi brother. "He was very direct."

As a professor, among colleagues, Koeze operated under the assumption that the best argument wins any given point. "Formal authority is rarely used," he says. Inherent in that approach is the belief that people shouldn't be told what to do. Rather, they should be taught to decide what to do.

But the approach was foreign to the workers at Koeze Co. It took the help of Schwarz, DeWilde, and others, but Koeze eventually came to see "how unlikely it was that I was going to be able to argue people into doing things my way. The other piece of it is my own reluctance to use authority."

Indeed, he sometimes had to simply give orders. He had to stop researching and just make a decision. "He'll get so anal on numbers, he'll overanalyze it," says Paul Bernhard, an accountant who advised Scott and Jeff Koeze on succession issues.

So, Koeze did change. He took some of the Roger Schwarz medicine he had been prescribing for others: He began to share his thoughts, and that put people at ease. At DeWilde's urging, he also became more patient. And Koeze listened to and changed his own speech. He realized he confused people by verbally debating with himself the very issue on which he was about to give an order. "It's made worse by a habit I have of thinking out loud," he says. "Somewhere in here, there's an order. That's all they're listening for. 'When are you going to tell me what to do?' "

And Koeze stopped yearning for workers he couldn't afford and instead invested in the ones he had. "We can't afford to hire fancy folks," he says. "But we need them." He learned to spot traits in his existing workers -- compulsiveness, curiosity -- that translate into business skills. His dissatisfaction, he decided, "was mainly just me getting snippy with people."

HOW YOU RUN YOUR LIFE AFFECTS HOW YOU RUN YOUR BUSINESS

As he settled into Koeze Co., Jeff Koeze got heavily involved in outside activities, some that too closely resembled running a business. He was serving on the board of an antitobacco group, and he was on his church's vestry. His creative director, Martin Andree, convinced Koeze he was overextending himself. "People's livelihoods and families are depending on you," Andree told him. "You've got to take care of yourself."

Mike Redman, a former Steelcase executive who met Koeze on the church vestry and then came to work at Koeze Co., also warned his new boss, "If you want to grow this thing, you're going to have to give up some of these outside things."

Koeze listened. He relinquished his board seat with the antitobacco group in 2002 and scaled back other commitments. He took up mind-clearing hobbies such as skeet shooting and beekeeping (still allowing himself a stack of books on such topics). The change gave him more energy to tackle projects that had seemed too difficult. He relaunched the peanut butter business, but as a premium brand, Cream-Nut, sold at high-end retailers. He finally got a strategic plan written, in 2007.

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