It is easy for people to forget what they’ve accomplished. One of humility’s dangers arises when successes occur without being noted. Radiant does its best to recruit humble people, which means there may be a lot of us who fail to take proper inventory of the successes within the company we work for.

I stopped into one of my favorite steak restaurants in Chicago without a reservation last Wednesday night, and there were no available tables. Every time I walk into a packed restaurant in the middle of the week, I ask myself if I just woke up from a long, bad dream about A Great Recession. I digress. Anyway, there was an empty seat next to a 70-something guy at the bar. I asked him if it would be ok to sit next to him and he said it would be.

The Cubs baseball game was on the television and trivia questions were bouncing around the bar, so it was easy for me to get into a dialog with the man. I found out two hours later that his name was Bob. When two strangers who are walking their dogs bump into each other, there is immediate comfort for each owner to ask the other dog’s owner its name. People don’t do that with people, which is why it took Bob and me two hours to properly introduce ourselves as said we said good-bye.

Bob was a retired sales and marketing guy who was openly passionate about his former trade. When I told him the company I worked for, he asked me what kind of business Radiant was in. I pointed at the Radiant POS terminal which encased the floating Aloha signature and said, “We do that.” He asked me how many of those were out there and I told him several hundred thousand.

He was amazed. “I’ve never even thought about where my order goes after the waiter takes it. I guess I just figured he went to the kitchen and put the piece of paper in front of the cook.” I assured him that was what most people think who have never been involved in this business. He asked me how old Radiant was and who owned it and all those kind of questions. I asked him a lot of questions about his former work as well. He spoke with great pride about his career, but the pride he took in his grandchildren kind of dwarfed his reflections about work.

When the ball game ended, I said good-bye (“Good-bye, my name is Andy.”) He said that he hoped all 1,200 people at Radiant understood how amazed he was at this company that started 22 years ago with nothing and built it into a $300 million business with several hundred thousand points of sale around the world. Radiant helps make it easier for consumers to get what they want while enabling businesses to make more money in the process. I told him I would do my best to make sure they knew that. It was amazing to me how this 15-years-retired man who had never used a Blackberry summarized our success story. I don’t know how much humility is in us, but I hadn’t thought of our success quite like how he put it until he put it the way he did.

This entry was posted by Andy Heyman on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 9:09 am and is filed under Executive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.