Ron Clark - Move your bus: an extraordinary new approach to accelerating success

ALSO BY RON CLARK

The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educators Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child

The Excellent 11: Qualities Teachers and Parents Use to Motivate, Inspire, and Educate Children

The End of Molasses Classes

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Copyright 2015 by Ron L. Clark, Inc.

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First Touchstone hardcover edition June 2015

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Illustrations by Philippe Petit-Roulet

Jacket Illustrations by Philippe Petit-Roulet/Riley Illustration

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clark, Ron, 1971

Move your bus : an extraordinary new approach to accelerating success / Ron Clark.

pagescm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1.Organizational behavior.2.Organizational effectiveness.3.Teams in the workplaceManagement.4.Leadership.I.Title.

HD58.7.C5196 2015

658.4'09dc23

2015006675

ISBN 978-1-5011-0503-6

ISBN 978-1-5011-0504-3 (ebook)

For Ryan M. Marshall

I know you are running with the angels, my son.

As business professionals, every day we are faced with challenges. Maybe its a new manager or customer who we cant seem to please. Or perhaps its a colleague who seems to be disrupting our best efforts to work together. If youre the boss, youre trying to help your team do more, better, faster, smarter. If youre an employee, you want to do your best workand get noticed and appreciated for a job well done.

So much of this can seem out of our personal control. But in fact each of us holds the tools necessary to improve ourselves and to help others along the way to, as Ron Clark says, move our own bus. Thats why I found this book so crucially important: Ron and his work are propelled by the same spirit of personal accountability and excellence that fuels everything we do at FranklinCovey.

My company has worked with Ron for several years. Hes one of the leading educators in the United States and was named Teacher of the Year in 2000. Ron has gone into classrooms all across the country to talk about his innovative approaches to teaching, which are aligned with FranklinCoveys Leader in Me school transformation process. Hes a world-class educator with a worldwide reputation. But why should we listen to an educator about matters of business? some may ask. Can his lessons from the classroom really inform those of us whose work is usually set in a boardroom or office?

To that I answer a resounding yes. For one thing, Ron is a remarkable businessman. He runs a multimillion-dollar organization, the Ron Clark Academy, considered to be one of the top schools in the world. Every year, he oversees administrative duties large and small and also teaches in the classroom each and every day.

But that doesnt begin to scratch the surface of the work Ron does as the founder and CEO of the Ron Clark Academy. Hes constantly fund-raising, organizing events and soliciting donations that bring in millions each year to support his Atlanta school and its students. Hes also teaching other education professionals how to do their jobs more effectively, not just his own employees but those at other schools as well. To date, more than twenty-five thousand teachers and principals have gone to the Ron Clark Academy to witness his remarkable teaching methods in person. To put that into perspective, each day in America, there are one million students sitting in classrooms led by a teacher trained at the Ron Clark Academy.

Business leaders have taken notice. Every year, Ron is invited to share his leadership methodsthe same concepts he offers here in Move Your Bus to Fortune 500 companies and other businesses all across the United States and the world. Corporations like FedEx, Xerox, Verizon Wireless, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, BB&T, YP, Turner Broadcasting, Great American Financial, eVestment, and the Federal Reserve have brought Ron in to share his methods with their employees about how to innovate, change, and accelerate success. Somehow, he fits all this work into the same twenty-four hours a day we all have. If that doesnt define a multitasking, multitalented business leader, I dont know what does.

In other words, Ron Clark (in the parlance of this book) is a Runner. His whole life is lived at a flat-out sprint. And he inspires those around him to pick up the pace and run alongside him. Ultimately, this insightful book is all about the relentless pursuit of excellence, in whatever role you may play. If you want to learn how to motivate those around you to run just a bit faster every dayor if you want to learn how to pick up the pace yourselfyou must read this book.

The last thing I wanted to do was write this book. I run a world-renowned school that serves as a model for schools and businesses around the world. I teach full-time at the school, with thousands of individuals visiting to watch our staff in action each year. I fund raise to keep the school in operation, and I travel across the globe speaking to schools and businesses about our model of success. I am busier than a centipede at a toe-counting contest. I honestly didnt have time to fit this in, but, while this wasnt a desire, it was certainly a calling. I had to share something we discovered at our school that has the power to transform an organization.

Years ago, I developed an approach to running a business that has electrified leaders and the schools and businesses they run across the country. It started as a simple story about a bus, but it has grown into a massive concept that has led to improved results, morale, and production wherever it is implemented. Before I share this jewel of a story with you, allow me to take a step back and give a frame of reference for what you are about to experience.

Let me tell you an anecdote about a young man in his first job out of school. Well call him Andy and say he worked for the 3R Organization. Like many people in the business world, Andy had stumbled into a career not really knowing what he wanted to gain from a job or what he hoped to contribute to the organization for which he worked. But as he got started, he was fairly appalled at what he saw. The 3R Organization did not serve its customers very well; it did not provide them with high-quality products and services. And whats worse, the customers had become so used to the shoddy product they paid for that they didnt demand any sort of improvement. Through no fault of their own, they were not very savvy about the goods they were investing their time and money in. They simply didnt know what was possible and had stopped expecting anything better.