“There is no limit to what you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit!”

To a large degree, the survival of our republic rests on the people in the tea party movement. It must not be allowed to fail in its mission to educate the public with truth and support the Constitution without compromise.  Leaders of the various factions must be willing to share success as well as failure. The slogan above served me well from 1974 until 1980 when I was given a task that many thought was impossible. During the following decade President Ronald Reagan placed the slogan in a frame behind his desk in the Oval Office. I borrowed it from an old retiring Congressman a decade earlier. It is a great motivator in times of stress and success. 

Richard Nixon was president and a decision had been made to end the draft and build an all volunteer Army. One of the greatest benefits provided soldiers and their families was the Army Commissary (grocery store) System that provided military families a savings of about 30 percent on grocery purchases. At that time, some 138 stores were operated by local commanders at Army bases throughout the world.  General Emmett Bowers came by my small cubicle in the Pentagon and informed me that he had requested me to reorganize the Army Commissary System.

I was relocated to Ft. Lee, Virginia, and given an office, desk, chair and telephone and orders to build an organization to standardize administrative procedures and centrally manage all the Army stores, improving efficiency and effectiveness, providing better service to customers while reducing the number of employees and the operating costs.

The first challenge was to visit the commanding general of each of the commands and assure him that we could operate the stores more efficiently and provide better service that he was providing. They were all skeptical, but allowed us to proceed. My neck was on the line.

The existing organization consisted of about 100 military personnel and some 14,000 civilians assigned to the stores. Some were foreign nationals. I was able to recruit and select candidates for senior management positions. I searched the globe for people I had worked with previously and knew were up to the task.

We established a headquarters staff of about 30 people. We established 5 regional field offices. All were in the Continental United States except for one in Germany that managed stores in Europe and the Middle East. Stores in the Pacific were managed through a field office at Ft. Lewis, Washington.

We were the second grocery chain in the world to use scanning at checkout in all stores. The first was Giant Supermarkets with 8 stores in Washington, DC.

We provided improved service to customers at a lower cost to taxpayers. The civilian labor force was reduced by 4,000 to 10,000 employees. Many of the positions   were converted from full-time to part-time.

Each manager, supervisor and employee was made aware of the organization’s slogan: “There is no limit to what you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit!” The slogan was printed on the cover of every directive that was issued by the headquarters and it became a way of life for the organization.  Supervisors   rewarded their subordinates who performed above minimum requirements, and it brought honor to   the supervisors as well as the employees.

During the third year of operations we invited the CEO of the nation’s largest grocery chain and his principal staff to come down from Chicago and visit us for several days of briefings and visits to our stores. General Bowers had suggested the visit thinking we could learn something from them.

At the exit meeting, the CEO announced that he had learned much more from us than he had been able to provide. He was amazed that we had converted large warehouses to retail stores and with relatively few employees were providing quality service and producing volumes of sales the grocery industry had always thought impossible.

The CEO returned to Chicago and immediately became known as an innovator in the industry by constructing the first “super store” that is now the standard for the industry.

We used large warehouses as retail stores because that is what was available. Our employees performed so well that the Army example became the standard for the American grocery industry because: “There is no limit to what you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit!”

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