Then the massacre began. Ironically, only a few weeks earlier I’d been hailed in the local paper as the “Maestro of Growth.” My wife had just had twins, a boy and a girl, our seventh and eighth children, and the paper’s photographer actually came to the hospital to photograph us with the babies. Employment had swelled past five hundred, and with the rumors finally behind us, we were told new financing would come shortly. Just as my family was growing, I told reporters, so would IDT’s workforce. Now this. I was going to look like a worse liar than Nixon. I couldn’t understand it. My grandmother always said, “Every baby brings its own luck.” I had believed this. Having kids was not only the best part of my life, it always seemed to bring good luck. Not only the luck of having the kids themselves, but even unrelated, personal upswings as well.

Whenever I hear someone in the office is having a baby, I think, great, now we’re really going to succeed. Even my management style is predicated on fatherhood. I try to give all my managers and employees, like my kids, as much freedom as possible to make it on their own. I try to “courage” them to act on their own, without me. In retrospect, it seems the twins really did bring luck; they saved us just at the brink. At the time, though, it seemed like Dad had gone nuts and was about to start randomly shooting the kids.

My whole management style is based on deferring to my managers’ judgments and trying to come to consensus decisions. This is not just to give the managers independence by letting them think that their own judgment is usually right. The fact is, in most instances, I actually do value their judgment over my own. I deliberately set out to hire people who are smarter and more talented than I am, and in many cases I’ve succeeded. Howie Balter, our COO, is not only a better hands-on manager than I, but far smarter and more analytical. If I have a new idea and he shoots it down, the great odds are it deserved to be shot down. In a few minutes of conversation, he’s usually able to persuade me I’m wrong. Only occasionally can I persuade him that I’m right or that the idea’s at least worth trying. Over the years we’ve watched competitors lose millions trying out the very ideas we came to realize through debate and consensus weren’t valuable. Paradoxically, we’ve also had the opportunity to be first with more new ideas than anyone else.

The same process that goes on between Howie, Jim, Hal, and I also goes on between us and our senior division managers, and between them and their managers. In most cases, the junior guy winds up winning. This isn’t only because we try, as I stated, to hire brilliant junior guys, but because the junior guy is usually closer to the situation and is in a better position to see exactly what will happen in a given instance. He knows better than the “ivory tower” senior manager the current temper of the market and the employees. He knows the particular stresses and balances in the operation and what may have to be sacrificed in one place to succeed elsewhere. I’ve come to have almost total faith in our senior managers. If they say something absolutely won’t work, I can be sure it won’t.

The heart of our consensus management style is our Tuesday senior management meetings. Here the top twenty managers gather, report on their divisions’ progress, and we all discuss what actions to take or how to make things better. Later, we’re joined by the next twenty senior managers. We tell them the consensus we’ve come to and then get their input on situations before all coming to a final consensus.