The darkish historical past behind the chief to-do checklist

There’s only one drawback. Ivy Lee was a paid adviser to the Nazis.

That is the darkish historical past of the Ivy Lee methodology, and the way we forgot its creator supported Hitler.

Ivy Ledbetter Lee’s father was a Georgia Methodist preacher and his mom was a self-educated mental who gave delivery to Ivy when she was simply 13 years previous, solely 12 years after the tip of the U.S. Civil Warfare. 

Their son turned a good-looking New York Occasions reporter who stored his hair neatly combed, favored three-piece fits, and maintained a Georgia drawl and the courtly manners of the Previous South. Lee went on to pioneer the rising discipline of company public relations within the early twentieth Century. He rose to fame–and wealth–as an adviser to the Rockefellers and their Customary Oil empire. He coined the phrase “inform the reality as a result of in the end the general public will discover out anyway.”

The legend behind Lee’s methodology goes like this: In 1918, Charles M. Schwab was the president of the Bethlehem Metal Firm and already one of many richest males on the earth. His public relations adviser on the time was Lee. Regardless of his success, Schwab was casting about for tactics to make his Pennsylvania metal mills extra environment friendly. Lee proposed a bet: He agreed to work on the issue for 3 months, with no charge, so long as Schwab agreed to pay no matter he thought the outcomes have been price on the finish.

Lee demanded solely that he be allowed to spend fifteen minutes with every of Schwab’s high managers. Schwab agreed. Lee gave all of them the identical recommendation: “Write down the six most necessary duties that you need to do tomorrow and quantity them so as of significance. Now put this paper in your pocket and the very first thing tomorrow morning take a look at merchandise one and begin engaged on it. Then do merchandise two, and so forth. Do that till quitting time. Don’t be involved when you solely end one or two. You’ll be engaged on an important ones, all the time. In the event you can’t end all of them by this methodology you couldn’t have by every other methodology both.” 

That is the Ivy Lee methodology.

On the finish of the three months, productiveness at Bethlehem Metal elevated a lot that Schwab fortunately paid Lee $25,000–about $457,000 in at this time’s cash.

After I found the Ivy Lee methodology, I wished to incorporate it in “Say Thank You for Everything,” my new ebook of recommendation for managers. So I researched the historical past of Lee.

Within the late Nineteen Twenties, Lee turned an advisor to I.G. Farben, a conglomerate of German chemical corporations often called “the German Dye Belief.” Additionally that decade, he met Mussolini when the longer term fascist dictator was only a senator in Italy, to ask him “what ideas he want to get throughout to america public,” according to the archive of Lee’s personal papers now stored at Princeton.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler turned chancellor, abolished democracy in Germany, and made himself an absolute dictator. I.G. Farben turned a direct conduit of Nazi financial coverage.

The U.S. Congress regarded the rise of the Nazis as a disaster and imposed a boycott on German items coming into America. Needing recommendation on the menace to its enterprise, I.G. Farben raised Lee’s retainer to $4,000 a yr and gave him a further charge of $25,000. Lee’s Berlin-based son was granted a $33,000 wage, in accordance with The New York Occasions archive. In at this time’s cash, that may be price about $1,378,827.

In January 1934, Lee was launched to Hitler by I.G. Farben officers. They “have been anxious for me to fulfill him simply as a private matter, simply to measurement him up,” Lee later stated. Lee additionally met propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s minister of overseas affairs, in accordance with historian Scott Cutlip’s account of the early days of PR, “The Unseen Power.”

The persecution of Jews had begun. There have been arbitrary arrests and assaults on synagogues. In Could 1934, the Home Un-American Actions Committee carried out an investigation into Individuals who supported Germany, and Lee was interrogated. Beneath oath, Lee admitted he was advising Berlin. “I’ve instructed them that they may by no means on the earth get the American individuals reconciled to their therapy of the Jews; that it was simply overseas to the American mentality, and will by no means be justified within the American public opinion, and there was no use attempting,” he stated.

When the testimony was unsealed, the lead story on The New York Occasions entrance web page was “Ivy Lee, as Adviser to Nazis, Paid $25,000 by Dye Belief”. The New York Mirror went with: “ROCKEFELLER AIDE NAZI MASTER MIND”.

By that point, Lee had been identified with leukemia. He handed away in November 1934. These near him consider the strain of the hearings contributed to his demise.

After the struggle, I.G. Farben’s high executives have been prosecuted at Nuremberg. A part of their protection was “that this exercise of the late Ivy Lee in the united statesA. is unobjectionable and didn’t within the least have the tendency and the scope the prosecution needs us to consider,” Cutlip wrote. 13 of Lee’s German shoppers have been sentenced to jail.

Amazingly, it isn’t clear that Ivy Lee truly believed he was serving to the Nazis. From his standpoint, Lee felt that if he may persuade I.G. Farben–and Hitler– that their actions have been abhorrent to the remainder of the world, they may reform themselves.

Lee’s son defined his father’s logic to Cutlip in 1991: “They considered hiring the world’s main worldwide advisor [Lee,] and Hitler would pay heed to what he stated. Naive, sure, however the reality. … if his recommendation had been adopted, the world might need wound up a distinct type of place.”

Cutlip wasn’t keen to let Lee off the hook: “To provide such recommendation to a German large already enmeshed within the Nazi struggle machine carries naivete to the purpose of absurdity.”

Time handed. Within the Sixties, a collection of self-help writers found the story of Bethlehem Metal and Lee’s six-point to-do checklist, re-branded it “the Ivy Lee methodology,” and apparently forgot in regards to the struggle crimes. The tactic is rediscovered each few years by private success gurus.

To state the plain: Nobody who recommends the Ivy Lee methodology is in any approach endorsing the Nazis. The tactic is merely widespread sense. It has completely nothing to do with Hitler, per se. Very, only a few individuals keep in mind the total historical past of Ivy Lee. 

Nonetheless, the information that this massively fashionable methodology of rating your to-do checklist has a direct hyperlink to Hitler could depart you queasy, if, like me, you’re a believer in to-do lists.

So right here is a few excellent news: There’s a totally different however equally efficient rating methodology you need to use as a substitute of Lee’s. On this system, you rank your duties based mostly on whether or not they’re “necessary” or “pressing,” favoring significance over urgency, thus:

1. Pressing and necessary.

2. Vital however not pressing.

3. Unimportant however pressing.

4. Unimportant and never pressing.

That is known as the “Eisenhower Matrix.” It’s named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who deliberate the invasion of Normandy in 1944, which gained World Warfare II. 

Jim Edwards is the creator of Say Thank You for Everything: The secrets of being a great manager — strategies and tactics that get results.

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