Relationships

By Jeff Long

Never dismiss the importance of a relationship.

A word of clarification here. There are two basic kinds of leaders in the world today: transactional leaders and relational leaders.

Those who follow the first model can find early success but tend to burn their bridges quickly because in the end, they don't care about people.

Those who follow the second paradigm may find it takes longer for success to find them, but when it comes, it is more enduring.

In my first career, long ago, I worked for a transactional leader, the owner of a radio-station group. As it happens, he was Jewish -- which is only relevant to this column because of the paragraphs that follow this one. He treated me well. I wish he had given the same treatment to others.

My old boss would receive an invoice from a vendor for the price previously agreed to and would hold onto the bill for months. The vendor would call (there was no email or texting in those days) and call again, looking for his payment.

The transactional leader of my past finally would tell the office controller to pay the vendor a third of what was owed, and that's all. The vendor wrote off the unpaid amount and never did business with the station owner again.

How the owner did business got around. He never attempted to build a relationship with anyone and continually had to deal with new suppliers. Every business deal was a one-off: Pay the least amount regardless of the agreement -- that was his standard operating procedure.

It works, I guess, but it leaves you with no friends when times get tough.

Transactional leaders often become wealthy but have terrible reputations.

The Old Testament character of Esther had a cousin named Mordecai who always looked out for her.

She trusted him; their relationship was strong. So when the day came that Mordecai asked Esther to intervene with her Gentile husband, the king of Persia, to save her people, the Jews, she did it -- at great risk to herself, it should be noted, because the king had a standing order that anyone who approached him without first being summoned would be summarily executed.

This particular monarch had no compunction about putting away wives; he had done it before.

Esther's courage, aided by the strong relationship with Mordecai, is celebrated each year in Judaism with Purim, the most joyous festival in Judaism.

Eddie Jacobson had built a long-standing relationship with Harry Truman, still the only U.S. president to hail from Missouri.

They met in 1905, had served in World War I together and later had been partners together in a failed haberdashery business in Kansas City.

Eddie Jacobson was a Jew. He knew Truman long before the plain-spoken Missourian was anyone famous.

So when Jacobson called his old friend at the White House in March 1948 on behalf of the fledgling state of Israel, created by United Nations mandate in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, Truman took the call.

Truman was not at all inclined to look favorably on the new nation-state. General George Marshall, the most influential member of Truman's cabinet, was firmly against the Zionist movement and urged the 33rd president to withhold American blessing; however, in no small measure because of an old friend's call, Truman formally granted U.S. recognition of Israel two months later in May 1948.

The United States was the first country to do this. In some ways, Eddie Jacobson could be called the 20th century version of the Old Testament Esther.

Seeing other people simply as transactions will get you to tomorrow but not much further. A relationship can last a lifetime, and the benefits may well be enormous.

May those who have eyes to see, let them see.