The greatest company on the planet, in my opinion, is textile giant Milliken & Company, based out of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Since winning the World Championship of Public Speaking for Toastmasters in 1978, I have had the privilege of addressing thousands of audiences in some 20 countries throughout the world. Milliken is my favorite group because they think differently and that is what makes them a champion in the textile business.

Milliken requires all its employees to complete 40 hours of continuing education per year, just to keep their jobs. The company pays for their employees and offers a variety of choices from Toastmasters to their famous POE weekends, an acronym for Pursuit of Excellence. For years, I had the opportunity of addressing dozens of Milliken's POE conferences throughout the Carolina's and Georgia, working alongside speaking giants Tom Peters and others.

By industry standards, Milliken is not the highest paid workforce in the textile industry. However, some would argue, they are the best trained in the world. Why? Milliken believes you have to teach people to think differently and creatively. Their mantra is simple: to do it better, you have to do it differently. Champions think differently!

When I was first introduced to Milliken, I learned of their now renowned ECR Program, another of their famous acronyms for Error Cause Removal. Unlike most of their peers in the industry, Milliken encourages creative thinking, and they back it up with cash on the barrelhead. Milliken managers prowl the floors of their plants encouraging their employees to find a better way to do a project, in other words- to think differently.

When an employee steps up with a new idea, it does not go into a suggestion box to be opened three years later. Employees are encouraged to step up and voice their ideas on the spot. If the idea has merit, it is implemented immediately. The employee immediately receives a cash bonus, which the manager is empowered to reward. The net result is that Milliken has one of the most innovative work forces in the worldwide textile corridor. Their employees are the envy of the international textile community. Milliken decided that you get the behavior you reward. The longer it takes to recognize and reward good behavior, the less likely it is that the employee will step up.

As a motivational speaker, I have learned three incontrovertible facts about motivation:

1. You can not motivate anybody to do anything they do not want to do. Motivation is internal, not external. It comes from within.
2. All people are motivated. Even the person who stays in bed in the morning rather than going to work is more motivated to stay in bed. They might be negatively motivated, but they are nevertheless motivated.
3. People do things for their reasons, not for yours. The trick is to find out what their reasons are. You can do that by encouraging creative thinking and rewarding all ideas, no matter how silly they might appear and by asking the "who, what, when, where, why and how" questions that managers so rarely ask.

Milliken believes that people will be more creative if they are encouraged and rewarded for the behavior. Thus the reason for the ECR Program. ECR was designed to reduce or remove margins for error. The net result of the program is that it has saved Milliken millions of dollars over the years, and not just because they caught an error here of found a better way to do something there. Therefore, it stands to reason that if the program worked so well for Milliken's internal customers (their employees), then it should follow that the same kind of thinking should apply to the external customer (the end user of the Milliken product).

So this imaginative and resourceful company, which battles foreign labor forces that pay their employees pennies per hour, took its idea of continuing education to their clients. Among the thousands of Milliken customers worldwide is the Chrysler Corporation. Chrysler buys the fabric that ultimately becomes the bucket seat cover in a Chrysler automobile. That fabric is produced in the form of reams of material that looks much like the diagram below.

That material is ultimately cut and trimmed and then becomes a bucked seat cover in a Chrysler automobile looking ultimately like the oval below.

Milliken brought Chrysler into their Spartanburg, South Carolina customer training facility and basically challenged the Chrysler engineers to talk back to them. "Tell us how we can do our job better in order to serve you better," was the Milliken edict to Chrysler. "We want to teach you how to be a better customer by having you show us how we can produce a better product for you." Frankly, no one had ever spoken to Chrysler's buyers this way. This was totally innovative and creative thinking- actually asking the customer what they wanted and then giving it to them.

Chrysler said, "Okay Milliken, you want us to talk back to you--- here you go. If we could get this material from you looking like the diagram below, it would save our engineers 19% - 21% in labor costs."

The cost of trimming the product, perforating it and then producing it into a bucket seat was costing Chrysler a significant amount of money. By pre-trimming the product before it left the Milliken plant it immediately saved the Chrysler people a significant amount of time and money. So the program was working and here was living proof. The ovals were already pre-cut so that all Chrysler had to do was cut the oval in half and produce a Chrysler bucket seat.

Milliken said, "No problem. We can have our engineers tool it up that way." However, that left Milliken with an interesting dilemma of their own--- what were they going to do with the "floss" in between the teeth of the bucket seat covers? Milliken turned that into a $50 million per year rag industry… simply by listening to the customer.

Good listening skills no doubt played into this story, but make no mistake; creative thinking is the fuel that drove the engine. Milliken teaches its people to think differently. No one had ever heard of training a customer how to be a better customer. No one had ever heard of Error Cause Removal programs. But champions think differently and Milliken & Company is a champion in the textile world.

In fact, in most corporate environments, when an employee comes up with a better or a more creative way of doing something, he or she is called a "whistle blower" and they have to run for their professional lives. No wonder they keep their mouths shut when they witness a problem that could be fixed with a tweak here or a new idea there.

Milliken says, "Nonsense. We want to hear any and all ideas no matter how silly or unfeasible they might be." That kind of imaginative thinking allows this textile giant to pay their employees a good wage and still compete with foreign textile companies that pay pennies per hour for what amounts to slave labor.

Some textile companies can actually ship their product over to third world countries, have them assemble it and ship it back and still save money. Despite the cost of shipping the product, they can make it up with cheap labor. Not Milliken. They compete head-to-head and they do in on their terms and on their turf. That is a champion thinking differently!

Back in the mid-eighties, I had the pleasure of doing a speech for a company called New United Motors (NUMI). They were a cross between Toyota and Chevrolet. Who would have ever thought those two would be in bed together producing an automobile called the Geo Prism?

The most pioneering thing of note here is that the Geo was built under a Japanese (Toyota) management system with an American (Chevrolet) workforce. On the face of it, this is water and oil, but champions think differently, and that was the key to their success.

NUMI did a very novel thing. They decided to bring their sales people in from all over the world to actually see how they were going to build a new automobile called the Geo Prism. They brought in thousands of sales people into their plant in Freemont, California.

There were so many sales people that they could not get them all into the auditorium where I was speaking at one time, so I had to give the same speech four different times that day to accommodate the sales force.

Throughout the course of the day, I kept hearing some Japanese music ringing out arbitrarily from what sounded like different sections in the plant. At the end of the day, I asked the plant manager what the music represented.

"That was our 'mayday' you heard," he explained. "The music identifies exactly where in the plant we were experiencing a problem. Everyone in that area drops what they are doing and they go and solve the problem."

That is pretty ingenious thinking, I thought to myself, but I had to ask the next question. "What does the union think about that?"

"They thought that was amazing," he exclaimed with pride. "They had never heard of that before!"

New United Motors is another champion that thinks differently. Why? Because they were not afraid to throw out the traditional thinking and try something new. The answer is right there in their name- "new" and "united."

I noticed an acronym on the wall as I left the plant that day. It said simply: T-E-A-M… together everyone accomplishes more!

Both these stories are remarkable because they deal with huge corporations that do business with thousands of customers worldwide. Some would say these champions think differently because of their huge size.

I disagree. One of the most creative thinkers I ever met was my own grandfather, Elias S. Mack, Sr. He was a Lebanese immigrant who came to this country with a third grade education. Like so many uneducated refugees, by necessity, he became an entrepreneur and went into business for himself, principally because no one would hire him.

When he arrived on the shores of Ellis Island in New York, he was told he needed to change his name. His birth name was Elias Skaff. "Look Mack, you need to consider changing your name," said the immigration officer. So, like many other immigrants, he took a new name-- Mack.

I called my grandfather "jiddo," which is Arabic for grandfather. He called me his "hyetti," an Arabic word, which, roughly translated, means "my heart" or "my life" or the "breath of my life."

My grandfather ran a corner grocery store called Mack's Cash & Carry Grocery. Like all small merchants, he built his business on being creative with his customers. "When they come in and buy a dozen apples hyetti, you always give them an extra one because one might not be up to standard. Always give them a 'baker's dozen.' That way you will never disappoint."

My grandfather was a resourceful man in so many ways. I recall when I was 11 years old, he gave me a book. "This book will be very valuable to you one day hyetti." I opened the book to see what was in it and saw it was empty. It contained nothing but blank pages. "The book has nothing in it jiddo," I observed. "It has no value."

His response was simple: "What you put in it will make it valuable." That book was the first of over 250 journals I now have. At the age of 11, an uneducated immigrant started the process of making me think in a different way. He knew that champions think differently.

He would say to me, "Hyetti, if you want to be great, you must walk hand-in-hand and side-by-side and in the shadows of people who are great… and greatness will come unto you."

He was telling me that in America, you have choices. "You can be an eagle or a buzzard," he would often say. "The difference is that one bird kills his own lunch and the other picks at the remains. You choose which you want to be."

Jiddo told me that I needed a journal for the journey. What journey? The journey called life. He told me that I would want to recall certain moments later life and that a journal would be the best way to do it.

My first task was to put something in the journal. I was only 11 years old, so I really did not know a lot about life. "What do you want to be when you grow up hyetti?" jiddo asked rhetorically one afternoon when I was visiting him at his home which was next door to ours.

At 11, I had not given it a lot of thought. All I had ever done in my life was go to school, work in my grandfather's grocery store as a bag boy and play sports like football and baseball. I had also been in the Boy Scouts so my view of life was fairly narrow, to say the least.

Since I had absolutely no idea, the sky was the limit for me. That is one of the keys to champions thinking differently. To be a champion, you have to look beyond the customary boundaries. In fact, you have to remove all borders. That is exactly what jiddo did with me.

He quizzed me, "What do you think about hyetti?" Face it; I'm 11 years old and I have not given much thought to anything.

"Where do you get your inspiration?" he asked.

"Msgr. Joseph Bernadin is a great speaker at Mass," I quickly responded. My Catholic priest who gave me my first Holy Communion was Father Joseph Bernadin, who was later made Monsignor and ultimately rose to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic faith as Joseph Cardinal Bernadin. "He is a great speaker," I told jiddo. "I like the way he tells stories."

"Then perhaps you wish to become a priest when you grow up," observed my grandfather. And I actually gave some thought to that process for a number of years until I learned about celibacy. There went that goal. But let me quickly add, I think my driving force to ultimately become a professional speaker got its roots from that Roman Catholic priest at St. Peter's Catholic Church in Columbia, S.C., who himself was a powerful and yet humble speaker.

Jiddo told me to take my journal to church on Sunday and write things down that Father Bernadin would say. He taught me to keep a daily account of things that happened in my life.

My jiddo became deathly ill shortly after he introduced me to my first journal. I recall the summer of 1960 as if it were yesterday. I was only 11 years old, but I helped take care of my dying grandfather that summer. I would fetch him figs off his favorite tree in the back yard or a drink from the kitchen.

I would sit with him as we would watch television together. He hated commercials and insisted that I turn the television off during the commercial break. We would time it and turn it back on two minutes later. Those old television sets took 45 seconds to warm up, so I finally convinced jiddo just to turn down the sound and leave the picture on.

During those television commercials, we would talk about my journal. One of jiddo's first challenges to me was to make a list of 500 things I wanted to do in my life. At 11, I did not know 500 things.

So we would sit with The Columbia Record, our afternoon daily newspaper and The State newspaper, the morning daily as well as the Lexington Dispatch-News, a weekly newspaper in the town of Lexington owned by the Bruner family. We would page through those papers and find articles about different things. We would discuss them.

I was 11 and interested in sports. So naturally, I put sports related things on my list of goals. Not only did I want to play high school football, I wanted to play college ball and be in the Nathanial Football League. I never made it to the NFL, but I probably would not have excelled at high school sports had I not put the pros on the list.

When I wrote down that I wanted to be a priest on my list, it was not the priesthood to which I aspired, but rather the thrill of motivating an audience like my local priest Msgr. Joseph Bernadin had done so well. That's what gave me the stimulation to ultimately become a speaker. He was such a wonderful storyteller. His speaking acumen is why I ultimately joined Toastmasters in 1976 and eventually went on to compete in the World Championship of Public Speaking.

I am one of the few winners that made more than one trip to the finals of the competition. I made it all the way to the International Speech Contest in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1977, only to be disqualified for going eight seconds over my allotted time limit. I ultimately lost to Evelyn Jane Davis (Burgay), a blind Washington lawyer who captured the hearts and minds of that audience in Toronto that August day in 1977.

Frustrated at beating myself for going overtime, I went back through the arduous process again in 1978 and again made it to the International Speech Contest finals, which were held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada that year. That year I won the title.

I am fond of telling my audiences today that you have to go through Toronto to get to Vancouver. You have got to experience defeat before you will ever appreciate victory. Champions that think differently must think that way. It was not about winning or losing for me; it was about the process of not beating me. That is why I went through it again.

Today, I rarely speak about the victory in Vancouver. I prefer talking to my audiences about overcoming the defeat I suffered in Toronto.

The roots of this entire story were borne in the embryo of a journal I had started 17 years earlier in the small town of Lexington, South Carolina at the encouragement of a Lebanese immigrant who thought it important enough to encourage his grandson to write things down. How blessed was I to have such a mentor in my life!

A mentor will tell you two things:

1. What you are doing right, and
2. What you are doing wrong.

My mentor was my jiddo and he taught his hyetti how to set goals in life. For that, I will be forever in his debt.

I recently had the opportunity to review that first journal. I chuckle at the way an 11 year old wrote. I am amused at the way I tried to spell difficult words, but the goals were crystal clear to me. Of the original 500 goals that jiddo had me write down of the list; I have accomplished (or scratched off as "not accomplishable") some 487 of the things.

No, I'm not going to be a priest, but I would not be a professional speaker today had I not originally put priest on the list.

No, I'm not going to be Governor of South Carolina, but I would not have run for the House of Representatives in 1980 if I had not put Governor on the original list. I learned that defeat is the process by which we succeed, and God knows I have experienced enough defeat in my life, including that race in 1980. I got beat so bad that a friend of mine came up afterward and told me "If I didn't have any more friends than that, I'd carry a gun if I were you." I told him "I do!"

I have since found it is cheaper to buy a politician than it is to be one (just kidding).

Your goals drive you. Champions think differently because they establish goals that have no borders, no ceilings, no boundaries, no limits.

Today, my list of goals has grown to several thousand, most of which I have accomplished. I submit to you that champions think differently because of goals.

There are four reasons we do not reach our goals in life.

1. We have been told about setting goals, but not sold on setting them. In the bible, there is an interesting line: "If the eye be single, the whole body is full of light. If the eye be evil, the whole body is full of darkness." What that means to me is simple: if you have a goal and are focused on accomplishing it, your process is immediately improved. You are half way there. Goals must be challenging, yet accomplishable. They must have deadlines and you must be accountable in the process.
2. We have not been shown how to set a goal. If you will simply answer the questions "who, what, when, where, why and how" you will know how to set a goal of yourself. In answering those questions, you clarify the process. Champions are crystal clear on process. It is their roadmap to success.
3. We are afraid we are going to fail. No one likes to fail. It is the singular biggest obstacle to setting a goal in life.
4. We are afraid we might succeed. Despite the fact that we fear failure, the social scientists tell us the greatest reason we do not set goals is we are afraid we do not deserve the success that comes with accomplishing them. In fact, if you put number 1, 2, and 3 and one stack, number 4 "the fear of success" outweighs the rest combined. We truly fear success!

When John F. Kennedy was running for the Presidency in 1959, a reporter posed a rather challenging question to him. "Senator Kennedy, if you could be guaranteed to be the next Vice President of the United States, would you accept that guarantee as opposed to running for President and possibly losing?" I never will forget Kennedy's response: "Why should I accept number two when number one is available?"

John F. Kennedy did not fear success at all, yet most of us do. We tend to think we do not deserve to be the best. We accept second best simply because it is available.

What if Kennedy had listened to his peers that had encouraged him to take the vice presidency? He might never have been elected to the top office in the land. How many times have you listened to the criticism of others? Jiddo gave me a wonderful piece of advice during that summer of 1960 prior to his death: "Hyetti, listen to the criticism of others, but do not support them." "I don't understand what you mean jiddo," I responded.

"Hyetti, there is no such thing as constructive criticism," he explained. "Most criticism is destructive, because more often than not, the person doing the criticizing is criticizing the performer and not the performance. You have to separate the two."

I was standing in line at my local bank one day behind a young woman who had her little son Henry with her. How did I know his name was Henry? She called him down 15 times while we waited for her to reach the teller cage. "Henry, stay in line." "Henry, get back over her boy or I'm going to pop you one." "Henry, you better get right and I mean right now."

She half turned to me and said, "Henry, if you don't straighten up I'm going to give you to that man!" I didn't want him, but I would have taken him after what she said next. "Henry, if you don't straighten up, you're going to end up in jail one day." Would you be at all surprised to read about little Henry going to jail in 10 of 15 years? Garbage in, garbage out.

I recall when our twin sons Cory and Jason were in the first grade, the teachers decided to separate them, putting them in different classes. I am convinced they did this because they just did not want to be bothered at figuring out who was who, but we went along with the experiment, which interestingly gave us an opportunity to compare teachers.

Mind you, all teachers have their own style. I won't say one was negative, but she had been weaned on a pickle. The negative teacher would send home the child's assignments: "Dear parent, see that your child does this, and this and this. Signed, the teacher" The positive teacher would write, "Dear pumpkins, this week we're going to work on this task, this task and this task. It's tough, but you're smart. I've seen your work and I know that you can do this. Signed, With Love, Mrs. Casey."

Which teacher would you rather have? Mrs. Casey, of course!

Jiddo taught me many different values. One of his favorite expressions was "Hyetti, find out what the poor people are doing… then don't do it."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Find out what the successful folks do and emulate them." Good sage advice from an uneducated immigrant.

His advice has carried over into all aspects of my life today. I think differently because that was how my mentor taught me to think. He began that teaching process with me as early as I can remember. I recall bagging groceries in his grocery store at the age of five. I was not yet even in school. He taught me about a work ethic. We all worked from early ages because that was the belief system in our family.

We never believed in allowances because we were too poor to have them. Consequently, I never gave my children allowances either. In fact, I went totally in the opposite direction. I actually charged my children for living in my home. The allowances in our home worked like this: "If there is enough food left over, you get to eat. If there is an empty bed, you get to sleep." I actually charged my children $228 per month to live in my home. They had to pay their life insurance (I sold them the policy). They had to set some money aside for their college education and they had to give a little back to God (that's how we did it in our house).

We started them with checking accounts when they were six years old. When Quicken came along, they learned how to manage their money on a computer. I would challenge them to invest their money. In fact, if they got over $500 in their checking account and they did not invest it, I threatened to confiscate it. Christopher, my youngest son, looked up the word confiscate and nearly went ballistic. "Dad, you aren't taking my money," he exclaimed. "I will if you don't invest it. Just think of me as the government. I'm like a black hole. Once your money goes to me, it's gone forever."

So Cory and his twin brother Jason come to me one day and tell me that they have money they need to invest. "What do you want to buy?" I queried. "We want to buy stocks," they explained.

Now these guys are 11 years old and can't know much about money. I asked them, "Where did you hear about stocks?"

"We were watching CNN and were reading your Wall Street Journal." I don't even read my Wall Street Journal, I thought to myself.

"What kind of stock do you want to buy?" I asked. "How about Wal-Mart?" they quickly responded. "Why Wal-Mart?" I had to ask. "Two reasons," said the 11 year old twins. "First, the toy department is always well stocked; and second, the parking lot is always full." Is perception not reality?

When I was growing up, my perception was simply: you had to work hard to be successful. The money I earned working at my grandfather's grocery store was turned over to my mom and dad to help run the home. When I got older, I began working at a service station for my little league baseball coach, Ralph Corley. I earned a dollar an hour changing tires and doing pumping gas and would sometimes work 80-90 hours a week during the summer. I turned all the money over to my parents to help feed my ten brothers and sisters. All of the children in our home worked and we all kicked in financially to help feed the family.

In high school, I worked at the service station and helped my uncles in jiddo's grocery store, which they took over upon his death. I also wrote for three newspapers part time and drove a school bus, which surprisingly paid me $35 per month, but, more importantly, gave me wheels.

I mention all of this because champions are forced to think differently when you aren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth. I never got to go to college because my dad became deathly ill when I was in high school. I went to work in his construction business. I had an older sister, Mary Delle in the convent and an older brother, George who had just entered the military. I was third in line and had to work to help feed and educate my eight younger brothers and sisters. I'm proud to say that all of them have degrees or multiple degrees. I'm the only one who doesn't have a formal education and yet, I think I received the best education of all from that so-called school of hard knocks.

I have written five books and thousands of articles and yet I have no formal training in writing. My children kid me about it all the time: "Dad, you've written more books than you've read."

Champions find different ways to solve problems, and they challenge others to do the same. They think differently. When I competed in the finals of the 1978 World Championship of Public Speaking in Vancouver, British Columbia, I was the ninth speaker out of nine on the dais that day. Two profound things happened.

Jeff Young, the 1979 winner of the World Championship, also competed in 1978 against me in Toronto. He spoke before I did and used a quote that I was going to use in my speech. I realize it was just a coincidence, but I was beside myself. If I used the same quote, I surmised some might perceive that I was copying Jeff, even though we had to write and send our speeches in well in advance to allow the judges to determine that we were not repeating a previous speech. We were required to write a totally new speech and send copies of the ones we had used on the climb to the world finals.

So I changed my speech on the spot and did not use the quote. Till this day, no one knew that I extemporaneously changed the speech that August day in 1978.

The other thing I noticed was that every speaker stayed at the lectern. No one moved. It never occurred to me not to move, but from what I gathered, no one had ever moved from behind the lectern at a Toastmasters International finals competition. To my knowledge, there was no rule against it and I had already requested a lavaliere microphone.

To make a long story short, I won the competition that day and I believe it was because I had the courage to be different on the platform. I needed to stand out. I needed to capture the imagination of the judges and the audience.

An audience member came up to me afterward and begrudgingly offered his congratulations but advised me that "If I was judging today, you'd have gotten a big goose egg." I asked why and he simply stated, "You aren't supposed to move from behind that lectern."

"Boy I am glad you were not a judge," I responded. I was later told by Toastmasters International Executive Director Terrance McCann that to his knowledge I was the first contestant in the history of the competition ever to move on the platform.

Is that why I won? I don't know. All I know is this: if you want to be a champion, you have to think differently.