Page 31 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
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BRAND AMBASSADOR PETERSON’S CULTURE REVOLUTION
It’s 8:30 on a Tuesday morning, 2013. A crowd of fifty employees gathers in an off-site room, antsy to see what the day will hold. They know little except that they’re here for a two-day seminar and they’re sup- posed to keep an open mind. Nervous energy percolates through the room as they settle into their seats.
Today nobody is boss—just a roomful of regulars with a common purpose. They don’t know what that is yet. But they’re about to find out.
Once most of the morning jitters have been worked through, the company owner walks to the front of the room, steps up on stage, clasps his hands together, and begins.
“We’ve all just been through the Great Recession. But none of us in this room lived through the Great De- pression, although we’ve all heard stories about it. Back in the late 1930s, a young man and his young family lived in San Francisco. The young man, Ed, owned an automobile repair shop. But the business went broke and he lost everything. He had to figure out how he was going to provide for his wife and two young sons, and how he was going to make ends meet. So he went knocking on the doors of people he knew.
One guy had an auto parts business where Ed used to buy his parts. So Ed kept going back day after day asking for a job. And the guy kept telling him, ‘I don’t have any work for you.’ But Ed persisted. He went back again and again, until the guy finally said, ‘I guess the only way I’m going to get rid of you is to hire you’. So he did.
“Fast-forward a few years. Ed and his wife are now living in Oakland, and he is a salesman for the Gates Tire & Rubber Company traveling throughout California, Oregon, and Idaho. Ed is on the road all week and only comes home on the weekends. Back in those days, people had incinerators in the backyard and they burned a
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