Clark - Move Your Bus: An Extraordinary New Approach to Accelerating Success in Work and Life

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

Touchstone
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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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Interior design by TK

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Ron, 1971
Move your bus : an extraordinary new approach to accelerating success / Ron Clark.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Organizational behavior. 2. Organizational effectiveness. 3. Teams in the workplaceManagement. 4. Leadership. I. Title.
HD58.7.C5196 2015
658.4'09dc232015006675

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

Foreword

TK

Introduction

What does a bus have to do with my business?

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 me 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 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.

Andy didnt yet know a lot about business, but he gradually developed a clear sense that many of the other workers around him were not engaged in their jobs. They came in to work every day and put in their hours, doing the minimum possible to get paid. It was easy for them to coast toward quitting timeand pedal slowly toward retirementbecause the customers put so few demands on them. Oh sure, there were customer service issues to work out from time to time, but nothing the average 3R Organization worker couldnt brush under the rug before it was time for a coffee break.

Andy could see that the workers were dragging down the organization. And despite his youth and inexperience, he could look down the road and predict that dire consequences were likely to befall many of these consumers, in ways that could have terrible effects on the entire community. It was a business model that served no one very well. It was a toxic feedback loop of negativity, a crisis just waiting to happen.

So Andy stepped up his game. He had many wild ideas about how better to engage his customers and improve the product they received, and he experimented with implementing even the most farfetched of them. Although his methods were unorthodox, he started to see results. Andy didnt know it at the time, but he was dabbling with a process that the business world today calls disruptive innovation.

However, to Andys mind, his efforts at 3R Organization were just a tiny pinprick of light in the darkness. What he really wanted to do was to light a huge, raging fire under all of the lethargic workers there, not only to inspire them to wake up, but also to shake up the 3R Organization entirely. He dreamed of an organization that hummed with energy and innovation and a culture of excellence. But he was just a midlevel worker himself: he did not have the tools or the power to effect the change he dreamed of for the entire organization. In fact, that would have to wait for another fifteen years, until Andy was at the head of his own organization.

As you may have already guessed, Andy is really me, Ron Clark, and the 3R Organization is a stand-in for the troubled school system I found myself in when I first began my teaching career.

I used these metaphors here not because I want to mislead my readers, but as a way to illustrate that we all face the same high-stakes challenges , no matter what business sector we work in or what our roles are within an organization. The world moves at lightning speed these days, and we have to keep up as everything evolves around us: technology, culture, consumer preferences, the regulatory environment, societal valueseven the climate. As the landscape changes outside of our organizations, we all have to be able to effect change within them. In this book, Im going to show you how you can do just that.

Two worlds that are not so far apart

Believe it or not, there are many parallels between running a school and running a business. In fact, I often speak to high-level executives at Fortune 500 companies about my strategies for successin the last few years, Ive given talks at Turner Broadcasting, Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, BB&T, YP, and Georgia Power, just to name a few companies. Why do these corporate high-flyers want to listen to a teacher? Stay with me as I explain.

Early in my teaching career, I pioneered innovative teaching methods in rural North Carolina that met with great success. This inspired me to pack up my car and move to New York City, where I had heard that the inner-city schools were plagued by low test scores and a critical shortage of skilled teachers. I took on a class of low-achieving students and looked for ways to motivate them: by the end of the year, their test scores were higher than those of gifted students in the same district. This led to recognition as Disneys American Teacher of the Year in 2000, an appearance on Oprah , an invitation to the White House, and a New York Times bestselling book, The Essential 55 , in 2003. With proceeds from the book, I founded the Ron Clark Academy, which opened its doors in 2006 in inner-city Atlanta.