Ian Heller

When the pandemic cast many people out of their workplaces and into their home offices, dining rooms and kitchen nooks, an argument began to spread that it was impossible to develop a strong culture remotely. This was news to me, since I’d worked for various branch-based distributors and we’d enjoyed strong cultures despite being clustered in small groups miles apart. We enjoyed phone contact but no video calls back in those days. We shared a lot of humor, though.

Back in the 1990s, one of the perks of being a VP at Grainger was that the company provided summer jobs for your offspring. I was the branch manager of the Arlington Heights, Illinois, branch, which was close enough to the Grainger corporate offices that we’d occasionally have the college kids of senior executives work for us between school years. So, when Jimmy Ashton (some names have been changed) sauntered into my branch to interview for a summer position, he knew he was getting that job.

I went to an executive program for my MBA, so the class was made up of experienced executives. We thought we were pretty good, as in, “I wonder what these business school yahoos think they can teach us?” The very first week, we had a seminar taught by Max Bazerman, author of “Negotiating Rationally” and other books. He organized the class into several teams and then paired them up, so my team of five people had to negotiate against another team of five.