John Deere Ain't Your Mama

Want to send a message to your business partners that you're just as cold-blooded as they suspected you to be? What better way than with a page-one story in the WSJ?

Consider the money-quote from Deere & Co. CEO Robert Lane.

"For years we talked about Deere as a family. The fact is, we are not a family. What we are is a high-performance team....If someone is not pulling their weight, you're not on the high-performance team anymore."

Deere apparently has remarkably strong contractual advatanges over its dealers, relative to most franchise systems. In particular, Deere can even block a dealer from handing ownership down to the next generation, an incredible motivator for small, family-owned businesses.

So, Lane likely feels there is little risk with an approach that is all stick and no carrot, particularly with a strong farming economy and a stock price that's nearly doubled in two years. But such situations rarely last forever, and kharmic paybacks can be hell.

Jack is not going to jump to conclusions that Lane burns candles every night at an Ayn Rand shrine in his rec-room. But reporters Ilan Brat and Timothy Aeppel showed great skill in allowing the CEO to paint himself as a classic capitalist villian.

Lane may well be saving the Deere dealer system by playing hardball to get it to evolve. But Jack suggests that the best CEOs usually find a way to turn the necessary screws without blatantly hammering on the long-time values of the business. In fact, most of them work hard to convince their dealers that they are part of a "family."

How does Jack know that reporters didn't simply have it out for Lane, cherry-picking unflattering quotes and details?

Because often you can tell a lot about a person's sensibilities and lifeview based on the stories they tell. Lane tells us one about teaching his then 10-year-old son how to spot and exploit weaknesses in others.

Nice story. Maybe Deere is simply becoming a different kind of family?