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Being general manager is like being the de facto owner. It's like wearing the crown of 'Restaurant Man' without being 'Restaurant Man.' You're trying to run the business, but you're running the ranch without riding the big horse.

My first job at General Motors was as a quality inspector on the assembly line. I was checking fits between hoods and fenders. I had a little scale and clipboard. At one point, I was probably examining 60 jobs an hour during an eight-hour shift. A job like that teaches you to value all the people who do a job like that.

A little secret - I'm the child of a shrink. I am; my mom's a shrink, and my father's a lawyer. So believe me, I analyze and negotiate. That is a huge amount of the director's work, especially when you're working with people who - such a variety.

And I think being a good director is being able to be completely tyrannical and you've got to be an absolute dictator while at the same time, you have to listen and see everything because it can all change on a dime.

I knew if I wanted to be a general manager, I was going to have to leave to work for another organization.

Obviously, I've been very lucky in general in my career, but I feel that I've been very lucky in terms of having directors come along at the right times who have taken me to the next level of where I needed to be.

When you ask people about what they enjoy doing, time spent with the boss is even worse than time spent cleaning the house. So this suggests that there are a lot of leaders out there who are not doing an adequate job.

Different directors offer you different things, and it's not necessarily the most obvious things.

By the time I got to be director of product management at Thomas-Conrad, I was in a better negotiating position, as I had accumulated more accomplishments and gained a reputation for having a great work ethic.

If you know where you stand, and your minus and plus points as a director or as a human being, you will never go wrong. You will always be successful.