Remembering My First Mentor

Join Alex as she speaks with Tom Lemanski of Chicago Executive Coaching about his first mentor, Max Klein, a Detroit businessman who saw potential in everyone. Tom shares how Max’s generosity, genuine curiosity, and focus on building relationships shaped his leadership journey and offers advice on recognizing and appreciating the mentors in your own life.

Tom Lemanski is an executive coach and leadership advisor at Chicago Executive Coaching. If this conversation sparked something for you, visit https://chicagoexecutivecoaching.com to learn more or get in touch.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:04

Welcome to Leadership Breakthroughs, where we explore the experiences that shape who leaders become. I'm your host, Alex, and today's episode is a little different. It's a tribute. Tom Lemanski sat down to remember Max Klein, the man who first mentored him, and the stories he shared are worth telling. Tom, welcome.

Speaker 0:21

Thanks, Alex. This one is personal.

Speaker 1 0:24

Let's start at the beginning. How did Max Klein come back into your life in such a vivid way?

Speaker 0:29

It started with a book, HBR's 10 Must-Reads on Leadership. A colleague recommended it, so I bought the audio version. I'm driving through Wisconsin Dairy Country on my way to a first meeting with a new coaching client at Kimberly Clark, which is already a strange coincidence since the book opens a section on a Kimberly Clark CEO. And then a second section starts. Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas writing about mentorship. They tell the story of a young entrepreneur named Michael Klein, real estate millionaire by his teens, lost it all by 20, started over. His mentor through all of it was his grandfather, Max S. Klein. And I'm sitting in my car thinking, Max Klein mentored me.

Speaker 1 1:08

That's a remarkable thing to hear coming through your speakers at that moment.

Speaker 1:12

It felt like a tap on the shoulder. Here's this Harvard Business Review book talking about my mentor. It's the reason I sat down and wrote the piece.

Speaker 1 1:20

So who was Max Klein? Listeners may not know the name, but they know his work.

Speaker 1:25

Max Klein invented paint by numbers. He had an ownership stake in Palmer Paint Company in Detroit. They sold washable children's paints, limited market. Adults who couldn't draw had no use for paint. Max looked at that obstacle and asked the right questions. He said, What if adults didn't need artistic talent? How might we let people who can't draw create something they're proud of? He worked with a package designer named Dan Robbins and they invented the paint by number kit. His slogan was Every Man a Rembrandt. It launched in 1951 and swept the country. Millions of kits sold to people who would never have touched a paintbrush otherwise.

Speaker 1 2:03

That's such a clever inversion. Instead of teaching people to paint, you eliminate the barrier entirely.

Speaker 2:09

That was Max's mind. He didn't fight obstacles, he found his way around them. And he never stopped doing it.

Speaker 1 2:15

Because that was only the beginning.

Speaker 2:17

Fortune number one was paint. Then he turned his attention to Kmart. Kreske, which became Kmart in 1977, was a place Max knew deeply. He'd built relationships with the executives and buyers going back decades. When Kmart became a dominant retailer, Max became the plastic housewares king of the chain. When you walked the housewares aisle at Kmart, one side of the aisle was all rubber made. The other side was the Max Klein brand. Wastebaskets, dustpans, salt and pepper shakers, baby baths, everything. He built a manufacturing facility in Baraboo, Wisconsin. That was fortune number two. Fortunes three and four came from selling his plastic companies, buying them back, and selling them again, including a partnership with Royal Little, the legendary father of conglomerates at Textron. And mixed into all of it, the stock market, it was nearly impossible to meet with Max on a weekday because he was constantly on with his broker.

Speaker 1 3:12

A serial entrepreneur before that phrase existed.

Speaker 3:15

A Detroit engineer who decided early on he didn't want to work inside a big corporation and spent the rest of his life proving that was the right call.

Speaker 1 3:24

How did he end up in your life specifically?

Speaker 3:27

I'm still not entirely sure. Our companies had a business relationship. My family's manufacturing business was producing his line of non-housewares plastics. But Max just started calling me at home in the evenings out of nowhere. An hour at a time. No formal proposal, no arrangement. He never asked me if I wanted a mentor. I never asked to be mentored. He simply began calling.

Speaker 1 3:48

What did you talk about?

Speaker 3:50

Business philosophy, creative approaches, ways we might collaborate. He asked possibility questions, same instinct he'd used with pain. Instead of here's the answer, he'd pose the question, what if we could how might we? He'd push you to think around corners. And over time, the relationship between our companies deepened significantly. We weren't just manufacturing his products anymore. We were doing his warehousing, his distribution, even invoicing his customers directly. This level of integration, this kind of partnership, it was unusual at the time. The word partnering wasn't really in business vocabulary yet.

Speaker 1 4:24

What was he like to be around in person?

Speaker 4:26

Always impeccably dressed, a signature bow tie, always. He was the first person I knew with a car phone. He'd bring it into meetings, which told you something about how he operated. And he would show up at Kmart headquarters in Troy at six in the morning before most people had arrived. While every other vendor needed an appointment and a visitor badge, Max walked freely. Buyers came looking for him. As people moved up through the ranks, merchandise managers becoming VPs, VPs becoming C-suite, they were Max's close friends. He'd been there the whole way up with them.

Speaker 1 5:00

That kind of access takes decades to build.

Speaker 5:03

It does, and he built it by genuinely caring about people. He didn't just learn names, he understood what people needed, what challenges they faced, and he found ways to help them. He used to bring a camera to meetings and then mail the photos afterward once they were developed. In the days before cell phones, that gesture meant something.

Speaker 1 5:22

And yet you said you didn't fully understand the depth of what he built until after he was gone.

Speaker 5:28

That's right. When Max passed in 1993, the business integration we'd built over the years led naturally to my family acquiring his consumer products business from his successors. We'd already been doing so much of it, the acquisition was a natural next step. And while I was going through the files that came with that acquisition, I found something that stopped me cold. Drafts of ghost-written speeches for the chairman of Kmart. Max had been writing the chairman's speeches, the ones meant to communicate the chairman's vision to Kmart employees and stakeholders. He wasn't just a vendor, he wasn't just a friend. He was mentoring the chairman of Kmart.

Speaker 1 6:07

He was the advisor behind the curtain.

Speaker 6:09

And I hadn't known. None of us had. At his funeral in Detroit, as the mourners were filing out of the cemetery, I recognized the chairman. He'd been in Kmart TV commercials. I slipped in behind him and his colleagues and heard him say, we lost much more than a vendor today. We lost a good friend. Finding those speech drafts later, that put the whole picture together.

Speaker 1 6:29

Let's go back to Michael Klein for a moment. You discovered his story in that HBR book. And you mentioned that Max and Michael spoke by phone for an hour every night.

Speaker 6:39

Every night until Max passed. When I read that, my first thought was, that sounds familiar. I used to joke that after he hung up with Michael, he called me. Or maybe the reverse, given the time zone difference. But after Max died, I was curious about Michael. I looked him up. He had gone on to do remarkable things. He'd founded companies, become president and CEO of e-groups, at its peak, the world's largest group email service. Yahoo bought it for $450 million in 2000. It later became Yahoo Groups. I was briefly struck by the thought that I was one degree away from a half-billionaire. And then I learned that Michael was killed in a plane crash in Panama in 2007. His 12-year-old daughter was with him.

Speaker 1 7:22

That's devastating.

Speaker 7:24

It is. And it left me feeling something I didn't entirely expect. With Michael gone, I felt like I was one of the last people who could tell Max's story properly. That sense of obligation is part of why I wrote the piece.

Speaker 1 7:36

What do you miss most about him?

Speaker 7:39

The calls. In the later years, he'd phone occasionally from the Mayo clinic. He'd say he was just there for a routine checkup. We found out later he was fighting cancer the whole time. He never told us. He just kept calling, kept asking questions, kept pushing you to think bigger. When those calls stopped, I felt the loss in a way I hadn't fully anticipated. I remained grateful for every hour he gave me. Time is truly our most scarce resource, and he chose to share his with me.

Speaker 1 8:07

Tom, if someone is listening today and thinking about the Max Kleins in their own life, or the person they could be for someone else, what do you want them to take from this?

Speaker 8:18

Two things. First, if there is someone who shaped who you are, reach out and tell them. Don't wait for the right moment. Max never waited for a perfect moment. He just started calling. We don't always know when a relationship will end. Second, if there is someone younger you could be calling, just start. You don't need a program or a title. You need curiosity and a genuine interest in another person's success. You may not understand what it means to them until much later. I know what those calls meant to me.

Speaker 1 8:46

That's leadership breakthroughs. Thank you to Tom Lemanski for sharing the story of Max Klein, a man who built four fortunes, mentored a chairman, and still found time to call. You can find Tom's writing and coaching programs at Chicagoexecutive Coaching.com. We'll be back next week.