April 24, 1998
[The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition]
A Banc One Executive
Finally Masters Dyslexia
By THOMAS PETZINGER JR.
DON WINKLER has a brain for the 21st century. A dyslexic brain.
As other managers struggle to think "outside the box," Mr. Winkler has
no other way of thinking. Unable to form mental images naturally, he
is incapable of taking things for granted. On top of that, much of his
perception is peculiar. "I see almost everything backward," he says.
Yet far from holding him back, these traits have propelled the
50-year-old Mr. Winkler forward. In five years he has built the
finance arm of Banc One Corp. in Columbus, Ohio, from an industry
also-ran to $26 billion in assets. How he did so says a lot about Mr.
Winkler and the value of quirky thinking in a chaotic business world.
Dyslexia defies easy description. Though usually diagnosed as a
reading disability, it comes in more than 100 forms. It's often
associated with poor concentration, confused associations and the
inability to think graphically without deliberate effort. Growing up
in an apartment over his father's grocery in Phillipsburg, N.J., Mr.
Winkler suffered all these afflictions. He still feels the sting of
his older brother bringing college friends home and purposely
confusing him into saying silly things. His choir director, mistaking
him for a cut-up, threatened to bounce him for singing the wrong
words.
But Mr. Winkler also received encouragement. His mother hired tutors.
His minister, impressed with his precocious grasp of the abstract,
trusted him to keep a church hymnal at home for studying the lyrics.
After struggling with the graphics of geometry, he thrived on the
abstractions of calculus. He fixed every television and toaster in the
neighborhood, earning college money. His aptitude for electronics won
him a management job at a General Instrument Corp. semiconductor
plant.
THOUGH READING, writing, and even telephone conversation came with
difficulty, human contact didn't. So instead of managing from his
office, Mr. Winkler spent his time on the shop floor, where his close
contact with workers and machines helped him drive down the cost of
making a chip from several dollars to a few cents.
In 1976 he was recruited by Citibank in a binge of hiring from outside
the banking industry. He soon found himself in Greece, where a
Citibank affiliate was sinking fast on poor customer service. Mr.
Winkler moved the president's desk from an upper-story office into the
middle of the lobby, where service problems were in plain view. Profit
soared 5,000% over the next five years. Later Mr. Winkler was running
a Citibank operation in Italy when a new tax law threatened a bank
run. He drained the vaults of cash and piled it high at every teller
station, inspiring such confidence that deposits swelled instead of
declining.
Media
Along the way he discovered that with special effort he could become
uncommonly skillful in some of the very tasks that had held him back.
Scattered by nature, he began meditating, which took his thinking to a
higher level. Often anxious, he trained himself to slip into a deep
yet brief relaxation that refreshed him between meetings. Through
years of effort he built his reading speed to 1,000 words a minute,
far above average -- and found that the faster he read, the deeper his
comprehension grew. Though unable to create mental pictures naturally,
he spent so much time doing so deliberately that he became skilled at
metaphor and visual design, worthy talents for complex times.
What others do automatically, in short, Mr. Winkler accomplishes
purposefully, directing himself on the stage of his own mind. "I am
constantly thinking about thinking," he says.
Five years ago he drew the notice of Banc One, which hired him to run
a sleepy consumer-lending affiliate here called Finance One. Mr.
Winkler vowed that profit would grow fivefold before 1998. "I thought
he was a little crazy," recalls Steve Alonso, a top Finance One
official. "No, I thought he was a lot crazy."
BUT SEEING things backward yielded deep insights. Like any lender,
Banc One rejects a proportion of personal-loan applicants as
substandard. Mr. Winkler recognized that these unqualified bank
borrowers were perfect candidates for the debt-consolidation and
home-equity loans that his unit provided. So he set about turning Banc
One's rejects into Finance One's referrals. At another point, a group
of office workers complained their backlog was too big. "Let's create
a front log!" he answered. Find out what the customer really wants, he
urged, then work front-to-back creating a new process that answers
those needs first.
As Finance One's assets and profits have swelled, Mr. Winkler's ideas
have spread elsewhere in Banc One (whose proposed merger with First
Chicago NBD Corp. may spread his ideas even further). Mr. Winkler
instructs colleagues in "breakthrough thinking," with backwardness at
its heart. He tells people that failures are stepping stones to
success, that breakdowns can lead to breakthroughs, that they should
substitute the word "and" for "but" to recast negatives in a positive
light. He sometimes asks for questions at the beginning of a speech
instead of at the end.
The most essential element: Asking the most ridiculous questions
possible, a practice he encourages by passing out clown noses. As he
puts it, "The dumber the question -- the more people laugh at you --
the more likely it will lead to breakthroughs."
Copyright © 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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