Training to Work

Charles Katz

Cofounder
1stUp.com
San Francisco, California

What did my first job teach me? That through hard work and determination you can shovel even the largest driveways. That's a metaphor, of course. It also taught me that if you're going to stay out really late, you should definitely call your mother to tell her. My first job -- and my first entrepreneurial venture -- was shoveling snow in the suburbs of Washington, DC when I was about 10. I would go house to house with a friend, trying to convince people that it would be better for everyone concerned if they paid us to shovel snow, instead of shoveling it themselves.

I laid out a simple cost-benefit analysis, demonstrating that their time was probably worth more hour-for-hour than what we were charging them. Once a price had been set -- we charged $3 an hour per person -- I generally said, "Look at that driveway over there. We'll make your driveway look like that." Different customers have different expectations, so it's important to be clear from the start about how to measure success. Sometimes we had a team of four or five kids from the neighborhood helping us. Teamwork was important, of course. It was a lot more productive -- and a lot more fun -- to shovel snow with a bunch of people than it was to do it alone. One of the most important lessons I learned was that after any hard day of work, a good cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows will cure what ails you. So now I make sure to keep an ample supply of it around.

Charles Katz (ckatz@1stup.com), 25, is a cofounder of 1stUp.com, which was acquired by CMGI last year for $60 million. 1stUp provides free Internet service to more than 3.5 million subscribers and has service deals with AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos.

Nathan Baxter

Dean
Washington National Cathedral
Washington, DC

When I was 12, I worked in a neighborhood grocery store in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The store was in an "economically challenged" area -- back then we just called it a ghetto -- so the store was the economic center of the community as well as a social hub. People cashed checks there and bought groceries on credit. Women would meet there and catch each other up on the news. Retired men would buy tobacco and then sit out front. My family attended church regularly, so I knew that people there often gathered for religious fellowship. But working with the general public, I realized that everybody has a human need for community. Subsequently, I've worked with such corporations as IBM and Intel, and more and more, I've found that work culture is not conducive to human engagement or to building relationships. People have fewer and fewer places where they can meet their emotional or relational needs.

I think it's incumbent upon business leaders to honor such needs by creating work cultures that are caring and frank, and that encourage people to grow both emotionally and socially -- if only because such cultures create employee loyalty and increase productivity. Work should be a place of community, where people can be honest and genuine in their interactions. If you want people to care about carrying out your company's mission, create a workplace that cares about them through policies as well as through relationships.

As dean of the Washington National Cathedral, Nathan Baxter is the chief priest and executive officer of the world's sixth-largest cathedral. The Washington National Cathedral was chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1891.

Tom Brokaw

Anchor and Managing Editor
NBC Nightly News
New York, New York

My first job was mowing lawns. I had a push mower, and I said to my father, "I could make a lot more money with a power mower." My dad was a Mr. Fix-It type, so he went into the garage and built me one -- out of a little old motor, some black plywood, and a few pipes. I was embarrassed when I saw it. I thought, I can't be pushing that around. All of my friends are going to have slick-looking machines. Kids did tease me at first -- until they realized that my mower could go through anything. So I got the toughest jobs in town, and suddenly I was making more money than I could count. The experience was a real lesson for me. It showed me that what counts above all is the excellence of your work.

And the lessons went deeper than that: I learned that it only takes one person and a little bit of courage to move a whole crowd. When I was in junior high school, there was a lot of horseplay going on in the locker room, and one of the guys broke through an exit door that had been nailed shut. All of the kids had to contribute $2 to pay for the shattered door. But my dad said that it shouldn't have been nailed shut in the first place and that I shouldn't pay the money. Everybody was kicking in their $2, and I had to stand up in class and say, "My family is not going to pay $2, because the school's at fault here." That was hard to do as a 12-year-old. But everybody saw that I was right, and the school ended up paying for the door.

Tom Brokaw has been the sole anchor of the weekday editions of NBC Nightly News since 1983. He is a contributing anchor for Dateline NBC and a program anchor for MSNBC. He is the author of two books: The Greatest Generation (Random House, 1998) and The Greatest Generation Speaks: Letters and Reflections (Random House, 1999).