Shane Parrish

It just isn't going to be my cake.

We finally concluded that we would not break the basic set.

We decided we would rather face a customer's initial ire than having her fail to get the desired results."

Mary Kay experimented constantly in those early months.

She did sales presentations herself.

She conducted facials in customers' homes, and she loved it.

Relationship building had been her bread and butter for 25 years.

But she discovered her presence was setting the wrong tone.

Customers would say, you own this company and you're at my house giving facials?

Must be an awfully small company.

And rather than being impressed, they'd assumed that the company was tiny and the products couldn't be very good.

And this was a really painful lesson for her because she loved being close to customers, but her presence was hurting the brand.

So she stepped back and left demonstrations to her consultants, focusing instead on training them to be as excellent as she was.

She turned her energy to designing the business model.

And here's where her genius becomes truly visible because every single policy and principle that she created and followed was a direct response to something that she'd experienced.

Mary Kay's business model inverted everything that had been done to her over two and a half decades.

But more fundamentally, it was built on what she called golden rule leadership.

Treat people the way that you want to be treated.

She'd been treated unfairly, disrespectfully, and dismissively.

So she built a company that treated women with dignity.