Flipping through channels at midnight, I paused at the face of Warren Buffett on Charlie Rose. The sage of Omaha is always worth a listen, but this time the show wasn’t about him. It was a about Don Keough who had recently died at 88.
The name was vaguely familiar, but by the time the program ended I felt I knew him well thanks to reminiscences by Buffett and several others. Theyincluded Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola who Keough mentored during his nearly 50 years with the company, and Father John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame where Keough’s daughter matriculated the first year it admitted women. Thanks to Keough’s belief that an Irish-Catholic school ought to have a department of Irish studies, it does now — The Keough-Naughton Institute.
According to Buffett, the proper epitaph for Keough was “Everybody loved him.” They lived across the street from each other when Keough was a young businessman and Buffett was working from home. Their kids played together. Decades later the president of Coke was on the board of Berkshire. I also learned Buffett had furnished the introduction for Keough’s 2008 book, “The Ten Commandments of Business Failure.”
That seemed like a pretty good recommendation, so I got a copy. The title is a witty reverse spin on business self-help books like “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” It is a brief 190 pages, but it does tell how Keough succeeded in life and how you might too. Many examples are drawn from the business where he spent his life, but it isn’t really a business book at all.
Keough wasn’t an MBA or numbers cruncher. He was the son of a depression era Iowan who was in the cattle business. He served in the Navy and went to Omaha’s Jesuit Creighton University on the GI Bill. His major was philosophy and this little book is actually a sort of handbook of ethics.
In passing, he dismisses the notion that students should have a course in business ethics. There’s no such thing, just ethics. He was a man who said he tried never to make a decision that he couldn’t defend to his wife, children and mother. In short, he was more than just a really successful soft drink salesman.
His message is bracing in an age of pessimism, trimming, avarice and egotism. Keough argues that if you want to succeed you should behave with honor, intelligence, passion, decency and respect for others. Not surprisingly, along the way, he quotes philosophers high and low with something to say about how we behave including Schiller, Oscar Wilde, Machiavelli, Blake, Socrates, Yogi Berra, B.F. Skinner, Hegel, John Le Carre, and Fred Allen.
It’s a funny,light-hearted, profound, moving little book in which he suggests that in order to fail in business or in life, all you have to do is quit taking risks, be inflexible, isolate yourself, assume you are infallible, act before thinking, farm out hard decisions to others, bog down in process, send mixed messages, fear the future and cut corners ethically.
By implication, the reverse should be your goal. Take a chance, be flexible, engaged, modest, thoughtful, and value clarity, simplicity and honesty. It’s a lovely read and Keough must have been a lovely man. The origin of he book is instructive.
Buffett many years ago organized what he called the Graham Gang in honor of his business professor, legendary investor Benjamin Graham. Every year or two he invited peers — people like Keough and Bill Gates — to a confab to discuss problems common to all business owners or managers. Originally the plan was to have a different person give a little keynote speech at each meeting. But after Keough’s first, the consensus was to make him speak every year. The matter in “The Ten Commandments” started there.
If, like Buffett, Keough was incurably American optimist, it was surely because he was a product of a family of immigrants who made good in this bountiful country, a man of honor and a child of his times — the second two thirds of the 20th Century. War, Peace, Boom, Bust, Prosperity and Progress. Two little facts he offers speak volumes. In 1900, the average family spent more on funerals than on health care. By the mid-1950s, the weekly allowance of teenagers was greater than the average family income in 1940.
Keough’s little primer can be read in a couple hours. It’s a humane reminder that man does not live or thrive or prosper by data and logic and ambition alone, but by character, intuition, heart and wisdom. And a reminder that what goes wrong in institutions isn’t caused by faceless the institutions themselves but by the actual people who run them or work in them. The buck stops with them. What they screw up can be fixed.
Finally, it’s a reminder from a man who reached the top of his profession from humble beginnings that, despite a surfeit of gloomy news each day, this is a pretty good world and an incredibly fortunate county that we’re lucky enough to inhabit. It’s not perfect, but whose fault is that?
Keough’s answer is to quote St. Augustine who said, “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.”