In baseball, a guy hits a home run, goes around the bases, and all his teammates come out and they give him a high five, and that’s awesome. And then every time somebody hits a home run, they do that.
In private equity, people tend not to do that enough, so when Loewen & Partners achieves a goal, we have to go celebrate. When I did my MBA, we had a third of our mark based on a proper Masters' thesis, which was the best part of the MBA for most of us. I wrote my Masters' thesis on Total Quality Management, TQM, which the Japanese had embraced to leap frog themselves ahead of the Americans. I discovered the writing of Deming and his 14 points to achieve TQM. The last point stunned me - celebrate!
And there are two reasons why we need to do just that - throw a party. As human beings, we’re not emotionally and anthropologically different from who we were on the plains of Africa 100,000 years ago. We need to feel that "hey, I’m in a community."
The second reason is that out of everything that I could be focused on during a year, the thing that gets rewarded with a party will be the thing that I really focus on. So I’ll tell everyone, if we hit this mark or we hit that mark, we’re having a party. Then it’s been concretely expressed to the employees that that must be the important thing. So it’s a way to double and triple underline the really important goal.
