Reflections: Of A Businessman

By Alan Slavich

Reflections of a Businessman is a look at business effectiveness from an employee's perspective versus the teachings in a traditional business school. There are many successful businesses in the world today, and there are also many unsuccessful businesses in the world today. What are the things that separate the successful business from the unsuccessful business? Obviously there is more than one answer to that question, but employee participation and contribution can greatly affect the performance of the business.

First of all, a business must be profitable to stay in business, and the economic structure of the company must be sound if the business is to succeed. Part of the economic structure of the company is the cost of producing the product and the cost of selling the product. The efficiency of the operations within the company has a dynamic effect on these costs. A large part of the productivity of an organization is affected by the employee's attitude and performance on the job, and these postures can be affected dramatically by a supervisor.

This book analyzes and views the effectiveness of management on the productivity of the workforce. Over fifty-five years in the business world provided the experience of a wide variety of supervisory styles within three different companies and provided insight into the effectiveness of the various management styles. This book is a look at the various management styles that one person observed after all those years in the business world and documents what was learned from each experience. This experience was then analyzed and was used to develop a profile of what constitutes a successful business model. The model was then used to create a high involvement organization with resultant world-class credentials.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886543759

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Reflections

Of A Businessman

Alan Slavich

Copyright © 2022 Alan Slavich

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 979-8-88654-374-2 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88654-376-6 (hc)

ISBN 979-8-88654-375-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Childhood

Grade School

Junior High School

High School

College

Ford Motor Company

Nashville Glass Plant

Ford Float Glass Engineering

AFG

Cardinal Glass Company

Improvement Review

Final Thoughts

Conclusion

About the Author

Introduction

There are many successful businessmen in the world today. There are also many unsuccessful businessmen in the world today. What are the things that separate successful businessmen from unsuccessful ones? Obviously there is more than one answer to that question, so I decided to look into this issue in regard to my own experience as a businessman. I worked in the float glass industry for fifty-five years when I retired. With my experiences in various capacities in the industry, I was able to observe many different management styles and successful and unsuccessful managers. But I do not want to get ahead, so I will start at the beginning and analyze what I learned as I grew up and worked with three different companies in the industry.

Childhood

Iwas born in Tacoma, Washington, on July 13, 1940, the second child of John and Dorothy Slavich. There were four children, three boys and a girl, of John and Dorothy Slavich. Dan was the oldest followed by Alan, Judy, and Neal to make the family total of six. Dad only finished the eighth grade since his father died at age thirty-seven, and he needed to work to help support the family, so he was able to find work at the Defiance Lumber mill. He worked at the mill for many years before he became a longshoreman, and he worked as a longshoreman until he retired. He acquired the nickname Hooks because of the hook he used to work with the bundles of lumber at the mill, and he was called Hooks for the rest of his life.

Mom graduated from Stadium High School and was a good student. She would have loved to go to college, but her family did not have the means for that, so she also started working. After marriage, she settled into the role of a housewife and was a very supportive mother. She basically managed the house and controlled what finances we had as a family.

We never had much money as a family, so mom also worked outside the home-cleaning houses to make a few extra dollars which she gave to us for some of the simple pleasures. The old man always had the ability as a longshoreman to work more than he did, but he only seemed to work enough to pay all the bills, so mom made up a little of the needed money by working outside. She wouldn't have had to work if the old man had worked a few extra hours, but he made what he felt was needed and did not think too much about the future.

We lived in a small home with two bedrooms that was heated by a wood stove as we grew up. Eventually the old man added a third bedroom for Judy when she got older. So all through our growing-up years, the three boys slept in the same room, and Judy had her own room. As a consequence, we called her Queenie even though she hated us for calling her that. I guess we were poor, but we really never thought a lot about it since we were never hungry, but we did have some envy of a few friends who were able to do such things as travel to other areas. Our travel was limited to car trips to the ocean in the summer. This experience and other experiences did provide us with a mindset to enjoy what we had and gave us a solid sense of the importance of remembering who we are. I will discuss many of these experiences later in the book as I look at the things those times taught me as I grew up.

I am sorry that I never asked my parents how they survived the great depression and how they were able to care for us four children without the resources for medical insurance. During the years, both Danny and Neal had suffered burst appendixes that required hospital care. Obviously things weren't as expensive as it is today, but any hospital stay was out of pocket. Just paying for childbirth also was not free, so I do not know how they did some of that. Then there was Alan and some of his troubles.

It was always explained to me that somehow I had a broken right hip while I was a baby in the hospital. Some people thought I was dropped, but I am not sure how it happened. At any rate, my mother said that when I came home, I cried and cried, and they weren't sure why I was crying so much. I do not know when they discovered the truth, but at one point I guess the doctors said I wouldn't live too long. I can't imagine what my parents thought when they were told that news, but lucky for me that prediction did not come true. Eventually when I was five years old, I was taken to the children's hospital in Seattle to have hip surgery. After the surgery, I was in a cast that covered my left leg completely and my right leg down to my knee. My mother had to carry me around if I needed to go anywhere, and there was an opening around my bottom that allowed me to go to the bathroom.

I obviously do not remember too much about this time, but I do remember laying in a bed in the living room and playing with a balloon that dad hung from the ceiling. I could hit the balloon and watch it go back and forth. Remember, this was 1945, and we didn't have TV or video games, but we did have the radio to listen to some programs. The other thing I remember vividly was when the cast came off, I was able to crawl to my tricycle and get on it and ride. It was so great to ride after being cooped up for so long. Strange what you remember sometimes.

Grade School

So I started going to kindergarten after my operation. One of the things that happened due to my operation was my right leg ended up being two inches shorter than my left leg. I was therefore fitted for a shoe for my right foot that was built up on the sole and heel that allowed me to walk level. I would wear this type of shoe until I was thirteen when I had another operation in an attempt to even out the length of my legs. The operation turned around the growth plate in my left knee which was a method whereby it would stop the left leg from growing. The operation was pretty successful since my right leg eventually ended up being about one-half inch shorter than my left leg. The doctors told me that my height ended up about three inches shorter than I would have been had it not been for this issue.

So what did I learn about myself from these early experiences that helped to define who I am and how I think and react? Obviously how one reacts to problems in our life is shaped to a degree by your early life experiences. We never had abusive parents, although we learned about discipline and doing chores around the house. The old man was not afraid of using a strap to reinforce a learning situation. All of us at one time or another felt the strap on our behinds. It certainly helped us to remember that something we did wrong was not going to be tolerated. This respect for authority and obeying the rules was ingrained at an early age and certainly shaped my thinking along those lines as I grew up. I think it helped that Mom was a homemaker first, and we did not have a lot of time without adult supervision. I am not saying that we never tried to get away with some things, but we always seemed to be found out, and that also stuck with me as I grew up.

I think that is one thing that is a problem today. Too many households have both parents working, and kids are not learning the basic ideas of responsibility and authority at home but on the streets. The streets do not think much about those things, but use the rule of being strong to survive, so a person's mindset thinks differently about authorities and responsibility. Honesty is a vital component of a successful businessman, and this early learning certainly ingrained the honesty trait in my makeup. I never was in the military, but many young men get their first learning about these things when they go into the service.

Some people insist that we should force a couple of years of service in the military to learn these important values in our population. If everyone truly did get training in these basic disciplines in the service, I suggest there would be a lot less crimes in the country today. But of course, the greed factor is always going to drive some people to a life of crime, simply because they have a desire for more wealth and power and crime often brings those things to them.

As I started grade school, I was always one of the smaller kids in the class. I don't remember being bullied or anything, and I seemed to get along fairly well with the other students. We didn't hear much about bullying in those days, and we played outside at recess without a lot of the protective things that kids use today. We drank out of the hose and never wore a helmet when riding our bikes. I guess I am not saying that kids shouldn't do the safety things, but we didn't in those days, and we did survive. I always liked school because it exposed me to the world and learning new things was always fun for me.

Point Defiance Grade School was in the north end of Tacoma and was a small school