Irv Grossbeck

So it seemed to me there were two significant shortfalls, both arising from a lack of top management breadth.

Yeah, and it's continued on in current years as well.

Kevin's amazingly skillful along many dimensions, but certainly one of them is he's the best kind of conflict avoider.

He knows where he wants the company to go, but it's, this is my view from outside, is that he's very graceful in his assertions and very respectful of other people he's working with and

There's no top-down sense, although it's clear that Kevin's in charge and has the tiller firmly in his hand and is directing the direction of the company.

It's all done in a very elegant fashion, and that's really stood him in wonderful stead, and it's a quality that a lot of people don't have.

Well, they say one of the hardest jobs of great managers is to terminate ahead of the curve.

It's hard enough to hire ahead of the curve, but it's really hard to terminate ahead of the curve.

In terms of the managers they hired, they were unafraid to say they had made a mistake.

That's a very subtle point, and it's not talked about in management literature to any degree that I've seen, not that I'm a comprehensive reader of management literature, because I'm not.

People just don't talk about it, and the reason is obvious, which is it's unpleasant.

Who wants to talk about letting somebody else go?

But it's so essential.

The biggest thing that stands out at me is the absence of dead wood at Asurion versus other companies where managers are inclined to be kinder to people in the sense and reposition them elsewhere.

And I mean, that's how fat builds up in companies and walking the line between

being careful about this and being ruthless is not that easy.

But they found a way to not be ruthless, but to really make performance-oriented decisions, coach where they could, but then not spend time working on what they consider to be lost causes.

And that's probably the single biggest difference I see in their management style.

Yeah, I don't have a real inside look as to how he and Kevin divided things up and how they work together.

I know that the chemistry and mutual respect between them is very deep.