Blair Franklin on workplace behavior, hiring excellence, and company legacy

"I've made some business cases that were absolute just flops. So... I'm here to tell you, past mistakes are good, you know, if you can get unentangled from them and move on and don't let it scare you from getting back up to bat." ~Blair Franklin Twenty-five years after receiving an MBA from Pepperdine University, Blair Franklin, president and CEO of AmeriPipe Supply, Inc. headquartered in Dallas, TX, is picking up where he left off, returning to Pepperdine to complete his applied doctorate in workplace behaviors. Beyond the satisfaction of personal achievement, Blair hopes his post-graduate work will guide executives to make better decisions and enhance their leadership skills. "Can we do a better job of not only deciding who we bring into our family culture but, once they are there, how do we do the very best job we can at encouraging good behavior or mitigating bad behavior?" As head of a family-owned pipe, valve, and fittings distributor, Blair asks those questions in real-time, ever mindful that his answers directly affect the bottom line as well as the company's legacy.  *** Distribution Talk is produced by The Distribution Team, a consulting services firm dedicated to helping wholesale distribution clients remove barriers to profitability, generate wealth and achieve personal goals.    http://www.distributionteam.com This episode was edited & mixed by The Creative Impostor Studios. Find out if creating a podcast is right for your business at their upcoming Launch Your Podcast online class: http://www.thecreativeimpostor.com/DTLaunch Connect with Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbader Connect with Blair on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sbf44 *** As a doctoral candidate in the field of workplace deviance with 20+ years in distribution leadership, he's got a wealth of personal experience from which to draw. Ultimately, his role in the C-suite and his role as a researcher are two sides of the same coin; both involve observation and analysis of personality traits. "The thing that really fascinated me the most about our environment, at the end of the day, is understanding how people behave in the workplace."  In the quest for hiring excellence, many inexpensive evaluation tools already exist. Taken on their own, however, these tests often provide limited information. "They just haven't been combined and analyzed in the way that we're going to do," Blair says of his research. He's striving for a more thorough assessment to find out how a candidate's personality - their moral identity, ethics, and views on workplace justice, etc. - impact their likelihood for deviance? And, how can employers use this robust data to better staff their organizations for the future?  This inquisitiveness extends to his company and his personal life as well, with Blair seeking new hires with a hunger for knowledge and instilling an ethos of life-long learning in his children. CONNECT WITH AMERIPIPE SUPPLY, INC AmeriPipe Supply, Inc. LinkedIn