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Winning Ways

Former Pro-life Candidate Emerges as Popular Author, Leads Local Legatus

By Robert Kumpel

Local Catholic Dick Lyles wrote the bestseller Winning Ways as a guide for helping anyone walk his faith in the workplace. Lyles, 55, is the former president and CEO of the Ken Blanchard Companies and co-founder with his wife, Martha, of Maric College. A Poway resident, Lyles spends much of his time as a public speaker and consultant.

Winning Ways tells the story of Albert, once a high-achieving college student now struggling with corporate life. His supervisor decides to have him meet with the football coach of a local university, hoping that Albert will learn how to work on a team. The coach teaches Albert four "secrets" for successfully working in groups.

During a recent appearance at Thomas Aquinas College, Lyles told his audience that his bestseller was based on Gospel principles. "The whole idea [of the book] was to teach people how to influence people positively without relying on formal authority and doing so in a way that builds self-respect and self-esteem. The first secret is to make people feel stronger than weaker. It's actually based on the idea of subordinating yourselves to one another out of respect for God, which comes straight from Scripture."

The second secret Lyles offers is "Camels Are O.K." -- work done by committee is not a bad thing. "There's that old joke that said, 'What's a camel? It's a horse that was put together by a committee.' The reality is that if you integrate your goals and priorities with the goals and priorities of other people, you have a much greater chance of getting it all accomplished, rather than each putting their own champion racehorse on the track and competing with each other. What we're living in today is characterized by the need for collaboration and respect rather than competition and tearing people down. If you look at the Gospel principle that we are all one, this tells us that we should support each other. We are put on earth to recognize our gifts and work together for the glory of God."

Lyles' third secret, "Avoid Two-Valued Thinking Traps," warns against seeing the world in terms of "my way is right and all other ways are wrong." "Some choices are clearly two-valued choices. Certainly there is a difference between right and wrong and good and bad, but when you're in organizations, those decisions are throw-aways. Most people don't struggle with those decisions. There's never really a legitimate argument over what's right and wrong. But most management decisions and decisions that affect operations are really open-valued decisions and we need to look at them from a number of different perspectives. I'm certainly not saying that we should live in a world of moral relativism -- I'm trying to make a distinction between the decisions that are right and wrong and those that have multiple perspectives. In my book I use the example of a purchasing decision for equipment based on the cost, shipping schedule, and trying to make the decision based on the product that best fits the company's needs. There are a lot of legitimate decisions that people get hung up on because they think they're right or wrong decisions, when in fact, they're situation-specific; they don't necessarily have moral underpinnings."

The last secret, "Influence for the Future Rather than the Present of Past," directly reflects on Jesus' own style of forgiving sins and points to the futility on focusing on the past. "He didn't go try to find fault with this and 'who do I blame' and all that kind of stuff.

"A lot of people see books like these and think that they are overly simplistic. But not only are the principles in Winning Ways consistent with Biblical teaching, if you look at all the research that has been done on interpersonal influence skills and personal power and influence, you'll find the research corroborates all that, too. It's really good thinking made simple, not simple thinking. I told the people at Aquinas College who are interested in writing books that their goal should not be just to write a book. What you want to do is write a book that is going to change people's energy in some way. If you can get your readers thinking or excited or mulling it over, then you've probably got a book that's got 'legs.' If people read it and say, 'Oh, that was interesting' and put it down, then I don't think you've done justice to your gifts."

Lyles found out quickly from an expert that his book had "legs." Lyles first sent the manuscript to Spencer Johnson (his friend and co-author of The One-Minute Manager) for his opinion, hoping Johnson would write a testimonial for the book if he liked it. Johnson, living in Hawaii at the time, agreed to read the manuscript but was adamant that he never wrote testimonials and was not about to start. "I sent it to him, and he got it on a Friday afternoon about one o'clock and by three o'clock he calls me and says, 'Why did you send me this book?' I told him again that I wanted his feedback. When I asked him what he was getting at, he said, 'I'm Albert, aren't I?' I was dumbfounded. When I said that all of us have a little bit of Albert in us, he said, 'No! No! That's O.K. I'm Albert. You wrote this book about me. You wrote this book for me!' I knew then that I was probably on to something. Then on Sunday morning, at three o'clock San Diego time, my phone rang. At first, I thought, 'Who died?' So I answered, and it was Spencer. He said, 'Why did you send me this book?' I said, 'Look, Spencer, I've told you...' and he said, 'Well, I haven't been able to put it down. I've got six pages of notes and critiques, and I've decided to go ahead and give you a testimonial, and I've never done that for anybody before. He gave me a testimonial, and it's the first one on the back cover of the book."

Aside from writing, Lyles acts as president of the local chapter of Legatus, a club for Catholic CEOs founded by former Domino's Pizza boss, Tom Monaghan. Members meet once a month for Mass and have a dinner with an orthodox Catholic as a guest speaker. Slated to speak in March is Barbara Nicolosi,, a former nun and founder of Act One, an organization devoted to infiltrating the Hollywood establishment with Christian writers.

"It's an organization of Catholic CEOs who want to live their faith in the workplace. There are close to 2000 members nationally with about 29 chartered chapters and another 10 or 20 in development. Monaghan is really the driving force behind it. Besides founding Ave Maria College in Michigan, he's starting another one near Naples, Florida and building an entire town around it. He's a billionaire who's trying to give it all away before he dies."

One of the things Lyles likes about Legatus is that it is not a "good old boys club" for executives. "It's really a couples organization where CEOs and their spouses operate on an equal footing. One of the things that Martha and I like about it so much is that it's the only one of those organizations that has a couples focus. Everybody participates equally in all the activities. We have about 33 couples locally; we'll probably add a half-dozen more this year."

Past speakers at San Diego Legatus chapters have included Deal Hudson, publisher of Crisis magazine; former US ambassador to the Vatican, Frank Shakespeare; and Father Benedict Groeschel. "I've also been the keynote speaker in other cities. I usually talk on leadership and walking your faith in the workplace."

In 1989, Lyles ran for 76th state assembly district seat against pro-abortion Tricia Hunter in a special election. "A lot of people asked me to run and I thought it was an arena in which I could make a contribution. I was the pro-life candidate, and that was clearly a big issue at that time, because it was just a few months after the Webster decision (which broadened the restrictions that could be placed on abortion) was handed down by the Supreme Court, and it was the first legislative election anywhere in the country after that decision. It really became a nationally-focused campaign and everybody dumped money into it. In eight weeks, we were outspent by $350,000. It was also the first election under new campaign donation limits that limited individual giving. Even though she was a Republican, Tricia was backed by Art Agnos, Willie Brown, and the California Nurses Association with a half-million dollars that they had been stockpiling to sort of steal that seat. Nobody got 50 percent of the vote, so there was a special election runoff eight weeks after that first initial election. In the first election, I lost by less than 200 votes. I was then encouraged to run in the runoff as a write-in candidate, which I did, and we both got over 20,000 votes. She ended up with 49 point-something, and I ended up with 49 point-something percent, even though my name wasn't on the ballot."

"The one thing I learned from it was that I really don't like politics. We were under the microscope nationally because of the Webster decision. I got misquoted -- and I mean deliberately misquoted -- in the press so many times that I quit counting. It was a huge disappointment. That was the first setback that I think I've ever experienced. It was devastating because of the loss, but also devastating because of the views that I thought would not be represented in the legislature, particularly the pro-life views. She was pro-abortion and all kinds of other stuff too. She was really a liberal Democrat in Republican clothing, and that proved to be the case. Two years later, the district was so disgusted with her that they voted her out."

While losing the election was disappointing, Lyles believes that pro-lifers have a lot to feel hopeful about in the current political atmosphere. "I think we should be optimistic about a couple of things. President Bush is going to be making some judicial appointments, and I think we're real close to having a pro-life majority on the Supreme Court as well as getting a lot of pro-life people in judgeships around the country. I also think that the evidence is becoming more clear on the evidence of abortion and pro-lifers are telling the story in a more persuasive way and people are changing their minds. I think we should also be optimistic that you can find tremendous evidence that our country is undergoing a spiritual re-awakening that probably started about two or three years ago. I think that it is gaining momentum, and as it gains momentum and people look at all of their beliefs, I think they'll be much more likely to come down on the right side of life issue."

When asked if he had advice for pro-lifers, Lyles suggested, "One mistake that pro-life people have made in the past, is that they have believed, 'My message is the right message, so I don't have to think about how I influence other people and what influence strategies I use.' I think they would be much more effective if they said, 'My goal is not to state my pro-life position as much as it is to change other people's thinking, so how can I be more influential in ways that make a difference?' A lot of times we carry the message in ways that satisfy us personally. We say, 'I carried the banner' or "I fought the tough battle,' but at the end of the day, you have to ask, 'Did it change anybody's mind?' It's more important to change one person's mind than it is to shout at 10,000. We have greater opportunities to reach people than we've ever had in the past. We have to show responsible stewardship for those opportunities."

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