Hand It On
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Twelve Operating Lessons from My Father’s Papers
Built from Jim Cosman Sr.’s operating papers and Jeffrey S. Cosman’s experience applying, testing, and sometimes failing those disciplines.
The documents are real. The disagreements are left visible. Each chapter ends with a practice designed to be used in the work.
Publication and ordering details will be added when the book is ready.
Jeffrey S. Cosman with his father, Jim Cosman Sr., his mother, and his wife, boarding a private aircraft.
From his papers. From our work together.
Hand It On began with the papers and operating lessons of Jim Cosman Sr. Some documents were preserved by the family; others were given directly to Jeff while father and son were working together.
The book carries those lessons forward without turning them into nostalgia: what worked, what was challenged, and what remains useful to leaders responsible for results.
Read a page
From Chapter 3, “The Triangle.” Every chapter pairs Jim Cosman Sr.’s own papers with a story from his son’s working life, and closes with one page you can use on Monday.
On an accounting road show in Las Vegas, a regional vice president asked me a question I have never stopped using.
How do you think this city was built — on winners, or on losers?
I was an accountant and I answered like one. Losers. You can see it in the cash. Every dollar in the drawer came from somebody who lost it, and the operating cash flow of a casino is not a subtle document.
He let me finish and then told me I had the arithmetic right and the business wrong.
Think about the man who goes home a winner, he said. He tells everybody at work. He talks about the run he went on, the dinner, the show, how much fun the whole thing was. And every man listening to him starts thinking about a trip.
Now think about the man who goes home a loser. He does not tell that story. And if he did — if he stood up at work and described losing his money and drinking too much and the months it was going to take to get right — nobody in that room ever comes to the desert again.
The losers pay for the building. The winners fill it.
I have carried that into every operation I have run since, because it is the retention argument and almost nobody states it that way. Your revenue this month came from the customers who paid you. Your revenue two years from now will come from the ones who told somebody about you.
Those are not the same people, and only one of them appears on the statement.
I did not learn to hear that in Las Vegas. I learned it in the back of a car on a Sunday afternoon, being shown which buildings nobody was serving. Las Vegas is only where somebody finally said it out loud.
The rest of the chapter follows the same lesson through an industry that buys its customers and then loses them: the five-year cycle, the old owner who honors his paper and waits it out, and the three words Jim Cosman Sr. ranked in order and drew as a triangle.
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