Do your best

Early in my career I was working the second shift as a supervisor in a paint manufacturing plant. One of my crews was assigned to fill five gallon buckets of paint. It was a small crew of three men, one of which happened to be a very radical union member; in fact he was the union representative and had a reputation of constantly trying to stir up trouble.

I assigned one of the men in the crew to fill an empty five gallon bucket with paint; he would then slide it on a conveyor to the next man, (the union rep), and he would place a lid on the bucket and slide it to the final man who would crimp the lid onto the five gallon bucket and stack it on a pallet. It was a fast paced assembly line type operation and worked efficiently.

I got them started and then left them and went on to get my other crews started on their respective assignments. Later I made my rounds and noticed that this crew was moving at a snail’s pace. I quickly determined that it was the union representative that was creating the bottleneck. He would take his own sweet time in placing a lid on the five gallon container. He would adjust it several times and look at it from different angles for several minutes at a time with a smart aleck look on his face while the other men waited for him. I went up to him and asked him why he was delaying the production. He sneered at me and said, “Who is to say how fast I should put these lids on these containers?”

Hmmm I realized he just wanted to be a union jerk and possibly create some sort of grievance, so I got another employee to relieve him in order to get the line moving and productive again and I told the union rep just to come with me. The facility that we worked in was huge; it entailed some seventeen acres. If you stood in the main aisle of this location of the plant and looked from one end to the other, it appeared to be a mile long and perhaps twenty feet wide. I grabbed a broom and handed it to the union rep and told him to begin at one end of the aisle and sweep his way all of the way down to the other end of the aisle, and when he reached the end just go ahead and to sweep his way back, and then I looked him right in the eye and told him, “And be sure to just sweep at your own pace” and then I walked away. After an entire night of solitary sweeping, he did not ever pull another stunt like that one on my watch.

I founded all of my various companies upon Biblical principles. When I came up with our mission statement I tried to make it a mission that Jesus Christ Himself would want me to adopt. A mission statement should be the cornerstone of any company and should be the foundation upon which it is built. Our mission statement states that we should provide “outstanding customer service”, state of the art products of the highest quality, fair prices, and that we should all work together in a spirit of honesty, integrity, and pride. Regrettably I cannot say that we always achieve our mission, but I do sincerely believe that we try every day to achieve it and the closer that we come as a company to living up to that mission statement the more success we all enjoy. We have been very successful through the years, and even though we are far from being perfect, we are making good progress towards our goals.

As you ponder this mission statement, think about the example of Jesus Christ. He taught us that we should “serve” others and that is what He did; even washing the dusty dirty feet of His disciples; hence the first statement in our mission statement about providing “outstanding” customer service to our customers. We should “serve our customers as best we know how. Business is all about the customer and not about us.

As for offering our customers only the highest quality and best state of the art products, again I believe that is exactly what Jesus would do if He were involved. Jesus would want to give people their money’s worth and I do not believe for a minute that He would offer inferior quality products.

The same logic would apply to His pricing model. Jesus would offer His products at fair prices, (fair to the customer and fair to Him). He would never try to take unfair advantage of someone, or sell something to a customer that they did not need thereby ripping them off for a quick sales commission or undeserved profit.

We all know that Jesus would be totally honest, maintain the highest integrity, and He would be proud of His Company and His team as it fulfilled His mission. As I have thought about it through the years I would envision Jesus having a mission statement similar to ours and of course He would want to give back at every opportunity.

Does it not stand to reason and make sense that we should apply the same tenants to every aspect of our lives and not limit ourselves just to trying to fulfill the mission statement of a business? We should never act like that idiotic union representative. I believe it would prove helpful to adopt this same mission to our personal lives on a daily basis. Demonstrate your mission not just at work in giving your employer your best, but when dealing with family,friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. Give it your absolute best, asking yourself constantly, “What would Jesus do in this situation?” Jesus came to this earth not to be served, but to serve and His ultimate expression of this concept was offering His life for you and me. He gave His very best for us giving up His very life and suffering grievously as no one has ever suffered in order that we might live. Serve others well!

Matt. 20:28
Just as the Son of Man did not
come to be served, but to serve, and
to give His life a ransom for many.