Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “any organization or institution is the length and shadow of one man. Great words. Thomas Jefferson wrote a lot of great words.

As one of my favorite mentors once said to me, “You wanna know the real culture of a company? Just spend a day with their CEO!”

(Preferably on the golf course…that’s my own aside.)

I often characterize people, especially company leaders, as either “Brake Pedal” people or “Gas Pedal” people.

Those of you who listen to my radio show a lot probably have heard me use that term. I use it a lot in my classroom at Duquesne University.

“Brake Pedal” people or “Gas Pedal” people….

Rarely have I seen amalgamations of these two personality types. They either tend to go one way or the other.

“Brake Pedal” people are pretty much what you’d imagine them to be. They’re people who, quite simply, love to “ride the brake pedal.” They tend to be very slow to react to new ideas…especially ideas that are brought to them by unfamiliar faces.

A “Brake Pedaller”, for want of a better term, likes to see the numbers, and he/she wants to see the numbers UNDER the numbers, and that person will want to know who did those numbers, and they’ll want to see some numbers that the numbers person did before.

Conservative? Yes, absolutely. Cautious? No question about it.

Then, there are “Gas Pedal” people…..

“Gas Pedal” people are the opposite. They get out of bed in the morning and push the accelerator down to the floor, and it’s “Go! Go! Go!” all day long.

Their big thing? Revenues. Top line. Drive . Activities. Make sure that something is happening all the time.

Real short attention span. Kind of a modest attention to detail. Just want to ignite the fire. All the time.

You might say that entrepreneurs are only “Gas Pedal” people. Not true at all. More on that in a second.

I only met him once, but I suspect that the late Mayor Bob O’Connor was a “Gas Pedal” guy. I don’t think too many people would disagree with that.

You could tell. First off, he rarely, if ever, sat at his desk. He was always out and about. If you knew “Bobby-O”, you knew he was in the streets. He was action. He liked to deal with people, all the time.

“Brake Pedal” people are not, generally, “people people”. They are people that would just as soon slip a memo under someone’s door. A “Gas Pedal” person is someone who is out there and wants to know what people think.

At the end of the day, the “Gas Pedal” person is going to make his or her own decisions, but for the most part, are aggressive.

“Gas Pedal” people make their decisions based on gut instinct. Not entirely, of course (you couldn’t do that), but in fact, most “Gas Pedal” people will tell you that they form their opinions about others, and even determine the value of others, within about 20 minutes of meeting them for the first time.

If that sounds like you, you’re probably a “Gas Pedal” person.

“Gas Pedal” people drive “Brake Pedal” people NUTS!...and vice versa.

I think the Great Creator must have really enjoyed setting this whole thing up, because the only way that these types can really succeed in the long run is by cooperating with one another. It’s like the Great Creator said, “Hey, we’ve got ‘Brake Pedal’ people over here, and ‘Gas Pedal’ people over there, and you’re not going anywhere unless you cooperate.”

Since it invariably takes a very strong and successful person to rise to the top of an enterprise, neither one of these people are pushovers, and so the battle begins.

Take a look at your own company. Are the leadership ranks filled with a certain “gene pool” of players? Most likely, they are, and most likely, these people are direct descendants of the founder and his or her philosophy of building a business.

So, if your company has a sales culture, you should probably lobby pretty hard to turn that more in the direction of a product culture, and vice versa. For only when you have this balance will all aspects of your business mesh harmoniously. At least that’s how I see things.

-Took a recent vacation, and read “An Innocent Man”. Have you read it yet?

It’s John Grisham’s latest book…the first thing that he ever did that was non-fiction, and boy, is it riveting!

You know about his page-turners that are fiction, but as you read “An Innocent Man”, you forget that you’re reading the truth. It’s about a guy named Ron Williamson, who was falsely accused of rape and murder and is actually ON death row. He comes within just five days of lethal injection in an Oklahoma prison.

Boy, if you ever thought you were safe….

(Especially given the recent story in the Post-Gazette, about the gentleman who was falsely accused. He wasn’t on death row, but he was still falsely accused.)

It happens all the time, folks!

I love the police, and they do a good job, but from time to time, if they’re short on a victim, they will manufacture one.

(Don’t misread that….there’s a lot of pressure to catch the bad guys, and sometimes those bad guys can be squeezed to the surface with very little evidence.)

-Also, I just wanted to take a minute to mention the recent passing of Edward Lewis. He was one of the last maverick developers in this area.

I can remember at the age of 15, riding out from my home turf in Dormont to South Hills Village Mall. The site of the mall had been either a “Pitch ‘n’ Putt” course or a nine-hole golf course.

But the first time I had ever walked into South Hills Village, which was the first time I walked into ANY mall, for that matter, I remember thinking to myself, “Man, this is really freaky.”

I was used to walking up to Brookline or Dormont and heading up the main drag. You hit the bakery, then you hit the clothing store. (For me, it was Michael’s on West Liberty Avenue). But I had never seen anything like this. It was new. It was fresh. And of course, it was the place for kids to hang out in no time.

He was quoted in the paper by a colleague as saying he was a “gunslinger.” Man, I agree with that. There will always be “gunslingers”, because there will always be smoky, new niches to play in. There will be new industries coming up. High tech has always been smoky.

By “smoky”, I mean that “the sheriff hasn’t shown up yet” and the rules haven’t been made yet. You can play a little looser. The government hasn’t yet figured out how to tax you. And a lot of great entrepreneurs LOVE that playing field. None of us like to play in areas that are well established.

And especially in the development game, where you tend to roll the dice more often than during other times.

Case in point: Eddie Lewis’s development of Oxford Center. He put up Oxford Center WITHOUT ANY TENANTS. Imagine that. $100 million of his own money (not counting his leverages), without anybody signing on the line.

That just doesn’t happen. Not on that big a scale. (It does happen on a much smaller scale, though.)

-Last week, I had lunch with a Carnegie Mellon student. He’s a member of CMU’s “3 & 2” program. (you get your engineering degree in three years, and your MBA in an additional two).

He’s a very impressive guy. He’s graduating this year, and he’s very excited about the prospect of starting a new business. He told me about his idea, and I listened patiently.

At the end of the discussion, I simply said to him, “If I were you, I would not do that.” He looked at me and asked why. I told him I would not jump out of college/graduate school and start my own business.

I told him he’d probably end up getting his butt kicked. (He’ll probably end up getting his butt kicked anyway.) I suggested that he take a few years to work IN an entrepreneurial environment. Try to get next to the “heat source”. Work closely with the entrepreneur, somebody who can’t resist the urge to start another business even though they have more than enough money than they’ll ever possibly need.

I told the student that he’d be learning on the nickel of the company in question, rather than learning the hard way. Working with a mentor is like working in dog years. You could work for a corporation and learn nothing. Or you could start a business and learn at a ratio of 7 to 1 (again, dog years). You’ll probably fail, and you’ll probably burn a lot of money that belongs to your family and friends.

Who knows? If you find the right entrepreneurial environment, you might pick up a few stock options. I even suggested to him to walk into a company and say, “I’ll work for free…as long as you let me sit in on the high level strategic meetings.”

He looked at me and said, “That doesn’t make sense.” I told him, “It HAS to make sense. It’s what you have to do.”

When you’re young, you don’t need the money. You should be willing to trade money for experience. Too many kids leave college, and read these apocryphal stories (many left over from the dot-com era) where people write a business plan, then sell it for a million dollars.

That’s insane. That doesn’t happen.

You need to show a revenue stream. (Note that I didn’t even say that you should show “profits”….just a simple revenue stream.)

That’s my advice to him. That’s my advice to any young person who wants to start his or her own business. It’s like your first construction job on the interstate. You could get run over really easily.

You should instead get next to somebody who can tell you what’s going on and “narrate the play-by-play,” if you will. It’s going to happen really fast.