The Eagle and the Dragon

by Chris Duffin

  During almost the entire time period described in this chapter, I had no television in my house. In fact, the same is true when I lived in Klamath Falls. It was only when I got married that my wife and I purchased a TV and occasionally set aside time to watch movies together. Television is a perfect example of a device that feeds on boredom, filling the holes with entertainment while simultaneously preventing people from taking action to improve their lives. When you stop distracting yourself, you’ll be amazed at the impact you can have, not only on your own life, but also on the lives of others.

  I look back now on the time described in this chapter and I realize that the actions I took had a positive influence on the lives of many people. For example, I showed my sisters how to take responsibility for themselves, providing them with a supportive environment and expecting them to meet high standards of behavior. Without this platform, I think it’s unlikely that my sisters would be living the healthy, productive lives they live today. They would have followed in the footsteps of Pat, John, Stoney, or Mark. I didn’t do the work for them, however. I insisted that they do the heavy lifting.

  When I worked at the automotive supply company, it was intimidating to be charged with the responsibility of reconfiguring their most successful department. It was the largest division of any company I’d ever led, with huge downside potential. If my initiatives had failed, the company would have lost a significant albeit depreciating asset. Although not everything I did was perfect, my work made a significant impact on both my colleagues and the company as a whole. Even today, I’m still in touch with people who worked under me at that time.

  If you want to reinvent yourself, put in the work and master the skills you need to be successful. You may not even know which skills will be useful to you down the line, and in what context. If it feels like the right move, jump in anyway. It’s the only way to learn.

  Coming Back to Crazy

  After five years with the automotive supply company, I found myself complaining about work a lot. I complained to my wife. I complained to my best friend, Ben. I wasn’t frustrated because work was too tough. Quite the opposite. I was bored out of my mind. With no new divisions to turn around, day-to-day maintenance wasn’t providing me with the stimulation I needed. I had created a stable life. The life I thought I wanted. A stable job. A stable marriage. And I was bored senseless.

  My only outlet for other aspects of my personality was my lifting, competing, and off-road fabrication projects. I’d built my home gym up to the point where I hosted at least twenty people each day. I trained each day and it provided me with a little relief, but not enough to prevent me from feeling that I needed to forge a new path for myself.

  I started applying for different jobs internally, in the hope of finding a role that would challenge me. I applied for positions in product development, and also in marketing, neither of which I got. Although I was respected within the company, I was known as the manufacturing guy. When I attempted to broaden my horizons, I was told that I didn’t have enough relevant expertise to qualify for the positions I wanted. I argued that, as someone who used the company’s products, I was in a great position to understand our consumers, but my protests fell on deaf ears. After punting ideas back and forth for a while, it became apparent that there was little chance for further development in the automotive supply company, so I decided to leave.

  I began talking to recruiters about roles around Portland, partly for my own entertainment. One company, an aerospace manufacturing company, reached out to me about a plant manager role. When I interviewed, I spoke to a representative of an investment firm involved with the company. I also spoke to the company’s British owner, who seemed highly eccentric. He told me that he wanted me to come in and perfect the plant in Portland, then move on to opening multiple plants around the United States, each one supporting a location where Boeing manufactures airplanes. In addition to all of that, he owned a software firm with which he wanted me to get involved with as well.

  It all sounded wild and exciting. Although I didn’t understand exactly what was behind the owner’s enthusiasm, I could tell that there was something unusual afoot. There were a lot of moving pieces and a lot of challenges. I could stick with my secure job, in an industry connected with my hobby, or I could go out on a limb and take a partially defined role in an aerospace manufacturing company, working under a weird boss. Without much hesitation, I chose the latter.

  Chapter Eight

  10. Transformation

  2008–2015 (Age Thirty-One to Thirty-Eight), Portland, Oregon

  It was a Saturday morning in Portland. A little overcast, but I didn’t mind. I had plans. Summer was almost over, and fall was fast approaching. The infamous Pacific Northwest rainy season could kick in at any time, so I knew I needed to wrap up my outdoor projects for the year.

  Following a light breakfast, I stood in the garden of the property Lisa and I had bought together several years earlier. My objective for the day was to fix several sections of the fence and extend it across the front of the property.

  I had two main reasons for the project. The first was to protect the young family we planned to grow. The second was to keep dogs inside. We had lots of friends with dogs, and when they came over there was nowhere for them to run around safely. I decided it was time to change that.

  Once I have a project in mind, I like to get started as quickly as I can, and I hate to stop halfway through. This fence-building endeavor was no exception. I had bought all the lumber the day before, and it was sitting on my truck, along with the concrete I needed to set the posts. I was determined to get through all the work in a day.

  My first task was to dig post holes. I had borrowed a gasoline-powered, post-hole digger from a friend in the hope that it would speed up the process. Unfortunately, the Portland area used to be a river bed. The soil looks normal on the surface, but just below ground are large, round stones. The post-hole digger wasn’t a lot of help. I ended up using a crowbar and my hands to remove the stones manually.

  The day rolled on and I refused to take a break. I didn’t even want to stop even for five or ten minutes to grab a snack or drink some water. All I wanted was to finish the project. Lisa usually took it upon herself to watch me when I started on a project and force me to stop before I exhausted myself. On this particular Saturday, she was out of the house, so she wasn’t there to make sure I took care of myself. Without her direction, I kept pushing myself.

  Around twelve hours in, I was close to finishing the fence. That’s when the skies opened and the rain began to pour down. Until then, the overcast weather had kept me cool. In comparison with working in the summer, it was relatively pleasant. I was sweating without overheating. Working in the pouring rain was a different story.

  I could have called it a day and come back in the morning. But I was determined to finish the task I’d set for myself. I still had dirt to move, rocks to dig out of post holes, and lumber to carry from the truck. The finish line was in sight. I wasn’t about to give up.

  In an effort to get through the rest of the work, I started running. I was pushing a wheelbarrow full of wood, rocks, and dirt, running as fast as I could across my garden, trying to finish building the fence. I sprinted with a full wheelbarrow in the pouring rain, stopping every thirty seconds or so to forcefully catch my breath. I was putting the same intensity of effort required by a powerlifting competition into building a fence. Drenched to the core and exhausted, I started to dry heave. It was so intense that it stopped me in my tracks.

  Even then, I refused to back down. In between dry heaves, I finished the project and wandered inside, about the time my wife returned home. By this point, I had been working outside for around twelve or fourteen hours. I was shivering from the cold and close to collapsing from the fatigue. My wife took one look at me and started laying into me for pushing myself so hard.

  She told me I had to stop pushing myself beyo
nd my limits. That I needed to think about what I needed to do to stay healthy, without the need for her to babysit me. That I needed to take breaks for food and water before I made myself sick.

  I had to admit she had a point. I approached almost everything in life with the same gung-ho attitude, and it wasn’t serving me well. The whole winter, I would go from one cold to the next because I was so drained, and I never gave myself a chance to recover. I was entering my mid-thirties, working an executive-level job, training, and starting a second business on the side. I was also a new parent.

  I sat in the kitchen, trying to get some fast-acting food into my body, and I gave my wife’s words serious consideration. “She’s right,” I thought. “I can’t keep burning the candle at both ends during the week, then come home and do the same on the weekend.” I realized it wasn’t sustainable and I couldn’t continue running at the same pace.

  Theme: Transformation

  In this chapter, you’ll read stories about how I put in the work required to turn my vision into reality, on a large scale. As my focus grew laser sharp, both the impact and the consequences of my actions were amplified. As Winston Churchill once said, “the price of greatness is responsibility.” As I zeroed in on my true path, I felt the weight of both my successes and my failures deep in my bones.

  You’ll read stories of painful change, heartbreak, drama, and despair. Equally, you’ll encounter stories of deep purpose, perseverance, and victory, of which I am immensely proud. A thin line separates the man who thinks he’s perfect and the man who recognizes both his flaws and his achievements. I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my time, but I’ve also learned tremendous lessons from those mistakes. You will hear me speak boldly of my accomplishments because I know who I am, and what my purpose is.

  Together, these changes cohere into a narrative of intentional transformation. Change has been a common thread throughout this book. In this chapter, you will see me take even greater ownership of the changes I chose to create, building on those foundations and experiencing profound victories and defeats in my personal, professional, and competitive life.

  As we enter the last quarter of this book, I hope to challenge you to live powerfully and do the hard things that are necessary to build the legacy you will leave, brick by brick and day by day. I will share the psychological tools that I’ve used and refined during my life and push you to take the practical steps necessary to attain true transformation.

  Turning around and Selling a Failing Company

  I left the automotive supply company where I had worked for five years around the time my first child was born. I handed in my two weeks’ notice, spent a couple of weeks at home with my wife and son, and then returned to work and a brand-new challenge. My new role was with an aerospace company that supplied critical components directly to Boeing. I was hired as director of operations. My time with the company was an incredibly challenging, yet incredibly rewarding period of my career. I was looking for relief from boredom, and I got it in spades.

  Due to the essential nature of the components we supplied, any delivery hiccup longer than a couple of days would lead to disruption in the production chain and a delay in the production of 737s. These airplanes sell for between sixty and eighty million dollars, so failing to meet expectations was a serious matter. When I was hired, the company’s owner told me that the firm was performing at an exceptionally high level and that the supply mechanism needed a few tweaks before we could move on to building multiple plants around the country, supporting Boeing operations nationwide.

  Within my first couple of weeks in the job, however, it became clear that he had lied to my face. The company was losing money. It was also underperforming—both in terms of quality and in terms of timely delivery—and was in danger of losing its contract with Boeing. If that happened, the organization would go bankrupt and every employee would lose their job. I quickly realized that the owner was purposely attempting to drive the firm into bankruptcy so that he could write off the debt he had accumulated, walk away, and start another business. He was a very unethical individual.

  He was also a terrible manager, who directed me to do things I couldn’t possibly agree to. Once, he told me to ask everyone in the company to name someone whose job they could do. He wanted me to fire everyone who was named, transferring their responsibilities to the person who named them and doubling the salary of the remaining employee. Then, after six months, he wanted me to reduce the increased salaries back to their original level, in the process halving the size of both the workforce and the company’s wage bill.

  Even more seriously, his interactions with Boeing were totally counterproductive. By the time I started with the company, we were on probation, meaning that they could decide to terminate our contract at any time. I set up meetings with senior members of staff at Boeing and laid out a plan to improve the situation. They told me that, while they recognized that I was smart and they liked my plan, they had seen the owner sabotage the company’s progress time and time again, and then fire the person responsible for boosting productivity and reliability. Understandably, the people I spoke to at Boeing doubted I would be able to implement my plans with him in charge.

  Fortunately, I had a plan and was able to turn the tables on him. I detailed the owner’s interactions with Boeing in a letter issued both to the investment firm with a stake in the company and to the board of directors. The owner was quickly removed from the board and fired from his own company. Without him creating problems, I spent the next four years turning the company around and was promoted to become general manager of the plant.

  There were enormous problems to address. When I began to get a grip on the situation, we were still losing money, which meant we lost our access to credit. A multimillion-dollar company in the aerospace manufacturing industry is extremely expensive to operate, and we had very limited funds available. One of my first jobs was to ensure that employees were paid on time and payment obligations to suppliers were met.

  Over the course of four years, I overhauled the process management side of the business, turning chaos into order and generating metrics that allowed us to measure and improve performance. Additionally, I rehabilitated the company culture so that the process changes we had made could take root and flourish. As a result, our performance increased by leaps and bounds. We went from delivering components on time 75 percent of the time to achieving that feat upwards of 99.8 percent of the time. We attained best-in-class status for both the quality of our work and our reliability, placing the company in the world-class bracket.

  When I started working at the company, we operated two plants. One in Portland, with over one hundred employees, and a smaller facility in Seattle, Washington, with about twenty employees. While I was able to create tremendous change in Portland, the process improvements had less impact in Seattle. After three years, I made the decision to shut down the Seattle operation. We consolidated the two facilities, moving all the equipment down from Seattle to Portland and giving any employees who wanted to remain with the company the opportunity to relocate.

  Financially, we moved from losing millions of dollars per year to making profits to the tune of millions of dollars per year. Unfortunately, the departed owner’s financial mismanagement had consequences even after he was removed from the company. About three years into my tenure, we were seeking to renew and renegotiate our contracts with Boeing. By this time, we were the best supplier in the world of our type, which you might think would have put us in an iron-clad negotiating position. The substantial debt remaining from the company’s years of failure, however, weakened our hand and ultimately meant that Boeing’s finance team wouldn’t renew our contract. This forced the sale of the company.

  I put together a presentation, set up meetings with our suppliers and with potential buyers, and started working on a management buyout. The plan was for me and the rest of our senior team—there were four of us in total—to become pa
rt owners of the company. At the last moment, a finance company that had invested significantly in the company changed hands, and the new owners chose to divest from the manufacturing sector. They held the board positions, so when they walked away, the original owner returned to the company.

  As you can imagine, the owner was extremely unhappy with me. I had tactically engineered his removal from the company. I sent a letter to both Boeing and the company’s creditors, explaining that he was ignoring his fiduciary responsibilities in an effort to deliberately bankrupt the organization. In this letter, I told Boeing and the bank that if they didn’t help us sell the company, the management team would walk away, leaving it vulnerable to the owner’s depredations. Angry though he was, however, the owner couldn’t fire me. My profile in the organization had risen too high.

  Boeing decided to accelerate the process, by bringing in an outside firm to determine whether the company should be sold or liquidated, and to follow through quickly on that decision. Boeing hired a high-powered New York firm, with whose representatives I and the rest of the management team met. Their first day on the job, one of them pulled up the letter I had sent explaining that the owner was neglecting his fiduciary responsibilities. He read through it, looked right at me, and said, “We have a serious issue here.” The implication was that he suspected I was a major root of the problems within the company and that he would need to deal with me. With a few days of research, however, the representatives of the firm concluded that I was telling them the truth. Their biggest task was to keep the owner out of the process while they prepared the sale of the company.