An ESTJ man’s faculty starts after the question of whether has been settled somewhere else. That is a division of labour every organisation depends on and then disowns, because when an institution revises itself the revision needs a body, and the only part of a decision anybody can see is the man who carried it out.
The first thing Sherman Tice ever said to me was that my new-hire paperwork was incomplete, and he was correct, and he said it in a way that made it clear he had already worked out which form and where to get another one.
That was 2001. I was in the elevator at the office in Calder with a box.
“You’re the new lawyer.”
I said I was.
“Two of your I-9 boxes aren’t filled. Nobody in that office will catch it and it’ll sit in a file for six years and then it’ll be a fine.” He held the door. “Third floor, ask for Hettie, she’s got a stack.”
I went and got the form. That elevator has been on my mind all year, because everything about Sherman Tice is in it: he saw the defect, he knew the remedy, he knew who had the remedy, and none of it was about me.
Sherman came to Pallman’s in 1991 as a store detective. He was twenty-two, with two years of criminal justice at a community college behind him and a stretch as a night stocker. He is a big, flat-voiced, extremely orderly man who arrives nine minutes early to everything and considers that on time. He has kept the same brand of notebook since 1994. He has never in thirty-five years missed a deadline, lost a document, or told anybody a thing that was not so. Of everybody at this company he is the one who has read the employee handbook all the way through, and he has read every version of it.
Pallman’s is forty-one stores across four states — apparel, home, sporting goods — headquartered in Calder since 1946. Rutherford Pallman was the third generation and ran it until 2018. Tobias Renk has been chief executive since 2020 and is not a Pallman.
I came in 2001 as staff counsel. I have been general counsel since 2013 and chief administrative officer since 2022.
This company had a sentence for Sherman Tice and ran it for a quarter of a century. I put it to work myself, in the room where doing so decided things, more than once.
Nobody ever had to wonder whether it got done.
He is fifty-seven. There is an agreement on my desk with his name on it. I drafted it. It has a release in it, a non-disparagement clause, and a cooperation clause that runs three years, and the reason for the cooperation clause is a lawsuit I cannot describe here.
Ward Simek, who ran the northern district for twenty years, said a thing at a retirement lunch in the spring that everybody at the table understood.
“Sherman’s the last of that era.”
Shrink
Everything in this industry hangs on one number that does not tell you anything.
Shrink is the difference between what the books say you have and what is actually on the shelf when you count it. You count it once a year — physical inventory, a third-party crew, a night, a store closed and every item scanned — and the difference between that count and the perpetual record is the number, and it gets expressed as a percentage of sales, and every retail executive in this country can tell you theirs.
Here is what the number does not say. It does not say whether the merchandise walked out under a coat, or was thrown in a dumpster with a damaged box, or was received as twelve and rung as ten, or was marked down wrong, or never arrived at all, or was taken by somebody who works here. Those are five completely different problems with five completely different remedies and the number is one number.
For about thirty years this industry read that number as theft, because theft is the part of it with a person in it. If your shrink is up, somebody is stealing from you, and if somebody is stealing from you, you catch them.
That is not a stupid inference. Some of it is theft. But an entire discipline was built on treating an aggregate with no attribution inside it as a headcount, and I was the lawyer for that discipline for twenty years and I never once said that sentence out loud until 2019.
Every store in this chain gets counted once a year and the schedule for it is built nine months out and has not slipped since 2004, which is Sherman’s, and which nobody knows is Sherman’s.
Physical inventory night is the closest thing this company has to a holiday. The crew comes in at ten, the store manager buys food, somebody always gets locked in the receiving dock, and there is one aisle in the Fentress store — housewares, aisle nine — that has not reconciled since 2007 and that four different people have investigated.
My husband and I foster greyhounds. We have had nine. I can tell you the racing name and the career record of every one of them and I cannot tell you my own cholesterol.
Getting It Done
What Sherman has is not diligence, which is a word for people who try hard. It is a faculty and it is rare and this company was built on it.
Hand him a decided thing and he converts it into an actual state of affairs. He works out what has to happen, in what order, by when, and who is accountable for each piece, and then he goes and gets each piece, and then it exists. Not approximately. Not mostly.
I have watched him roll out a new key-control standard to forty-one stores in six weeks with a two-page memo and a lot of phone calls, and at the end of six weeks every store had it, which anybody who has ever tried to make forty-one locations do the same thing will tell you is close to a miracle.
I rode with him on a store visit in 2015, in Ryeland, because there was a wage-and-hour question I needed to see.
He walked the back room first, which nobody does.
“Your trash compactor’s fourteen steps from the receiving door and there’s no camera between them.”
Hettie Nadeau, who managed that store, said the camera had been on the list.
“For how long?”
She said since the remodel.
“That’s twenty months.” He wrote something. “I’ll have it in three weeks and you’ll get an email when the work order’s cut and another one when it’s installed. If you don’t get the second one by the fifteenth, call me.”
She got both emails. I know because she forwarded them to me eight years later, out of nowhere, when she heard he had been moved, with nothing in the message but the two forwards.
And the second half of it is where the content comes from. He does not invent the standard. He knows the standard — from precedent, from the way it has been done, from the nine previous times something like this came up and what happened. His memory for what this company actually did in 1998 is better than the records.
So the faculty has a shape, and the shape matters: it begins after the question of whether has been settled somewhere else. Execution starts downstream of a decision. That is a division of labour rather than a defect in him, and every organisation on earth depends on it and cannot function without, and it is also the division that lets everybody upstream of it stop thinking about what they have decided.
Rosalind Cabe did the same job in the southern district from 2006 to 2012 and was, by the numbers, better at it. What got said about Sherman was that nobody had to wonder whether it got done. What got said about Rosalind was that she was rigid, and then that she was hard on her people, and then that she did not have the temperament for a district, and she runs asset protection for a national grocer now. What the identical thoroughness earns a woman in that department, and how much sooner she is asked to leave it, gets counted on its own page.
Forty-one stores. Nine people at officer level. Two are women and one of them is me.
Rosalind called me in 2013, after she had gone, about a reference.
I asked, because I thought I should, whether there had been anything.
“Sherman was fine,” she said. “Sherman was completely fine. It was everybody who kept telling me to be more like Sherman.”
Two a Week
In 1999 Rutherford Pallman told a room that he wanted every store detective producing two apprehensions a week.
There was no memo. It was said in a meeting and repeated at the district meetings, and within a year it was simply the standard, and for nineteen years it was how a store detective’s performance was measured at this company.
I want to say plainly what that is. A quota on apprehensions is a quota on stopping human beings, and the pressure it creates runs in exactly one direction: toward stopping people you are not sure about. Every retailer that used one has since abandoned it and most of them have paid for it in court, and there is a body of literature on who gets stopped under a quota and the answer is not surprising and it is not evenly distributed.
Sherman ran that standard for nineteen years. It was never his standard. He did not propose it, he was not present when it was set, and he was a district manager when it started. He ran it correctly, which means he documented everything, trained to policy, audited the reports, and fired two officers I know of for stops that did not meet the standard of proof. Under him, this company’s rate of unsuccessful stops was the lowest in our peer group, and I have that from defending the suits.
He also ran it, and the number of people who were stopped in a Pallman’s store between 1999 and 2018 because a nineteen-year-old with a quota needed a second one that week is a number I have never seen and would not want to.
Both are true and I will not arrange them so that one cancels the other.
Ward Simek put the standard to me once in a district meeting in about 2006, when I asked how it was going.
“Nobody’s got a quota,” he said. “There’s an expectation.”
I wrote expectation on my pad and underlined it, and I knew exactly why I was underlining it.
Terrell Ivie
In 2009 a sixteen-year-old named Terrell Ivie was stopped in our Calder store and detained for thirty-one minutes and had not taken anything.
The officer was a kid, two months in, one apprehension that week. The stop was bad. Everybody involved has agreed since that the stop was bad, including the officer, who left the industry.
Sherman investigated it himself. He terminated the officer inside nine days, which is fast for this company. He rewrote the detention time standard and re-trained all forty-one stores. He drove to the family’s house and sat in their front room and apologised, without me, I learned about it afterward and it nearly gave me a heart attack.
And then we settled, and the settlement had a confidentiality provision in it, and I wrote it.
Here is my part. In the internal review I ran, I put the question of whether anything in the department’s practices had contributed. Sherman said the officer had not followed the standard. I wrote that down. I did not ask the next question, which is whether an officer under a two-a-week standard in his second month is likely to follow the standard, and I did not ask it because I already knew the answer and because asking it in a document that could be produced in litigation would have been, in the language I actually used in my own head at the time, unhelpful.
The Ivie family has a son who is thirty-three now and who does not shop in this chain and has said so publicly, once, on a local radio programme, in 2021, without using anybody’s name.
I listened to it twice, sitting in the lot with the engine off, and then I went inside and had a meeting about a lease.
Put It in Writing
In 2011 Sherman brought a two-page draft to my office and asked me to help him get it signed.
It was a policy statement. Purpose, scope, definitions, the productivity expectation stated as a number, the conditions under which a stop may be made, the training requirement, the audit requirement, and a signature block for the chief executive.
He wanted the standard written down and signed.
I asked him why.
“Because everybody’s operating off something nobody’s ever put a name on,” he said. “If it’s the company’s expectation, the company should say so in a document. If it isn’t, I’d like to know that, because I’ve been enforcing it for eleven years.”
That is the whole of it. That is what an objection looks like when it comes from him, and fifteen years passed before I could see it as one.
And I told him not to file it.
I told him — accurately, professionally, and in the exercise of my actual judgement as the company’s lawyer — that a written policy establishing a numerical expectation for apprehensions would be produced in discovery in every false-arrest suit filed against us for as long as it existed, and that it would be read to a jury, and that it would be worth a great deal of money to the other side.
He asked what he should do instead.
I said to keep training to the standard of proof, which he was already doing, and to document his audits, which he was already doing.
He sat with that for what I remember as a long time and was probably nine seconds.
“So it’s the company’s expectation,” he said. “It just isn’t the company’s policy.”
I said that was a fair way to put it.
He said all right, and took the draft back, and put it in his notebook, and enforced the unwritten standard for another seven years.
I still have his draft. He gave me a copy that day and I kept it in the file because keeping things is what I do. It is the only document in this company’s possession in which anybody asked whether that standard was the company’s or not, and it is unsigned, and the reason it is unsigned is that the general counsel advised against signing it, and the effect of its being unsigned is that there is now no policy and there is a man.
The New Model
Tobias arrived in 2020 and by the second half of 2021 we had changed the model.
No pursuit, no detention for merchandise below a threshold, no apprehension metric of any kind, officers reassigned to a service-and-deterrence function, more staffing on the floor, better receiving audits, and a real investment in the four causes of shrink that are not theft.
Shrink went down. It went down nine per cent in the first full year and it has kept going down, and Tobias has spoken about it at two conferences, and I have spoken about it at one, and the case study is genuinely good and everything in it is true.
Sherman implemented it.
He came to my office when the direction was settled and put a page on my desk with the sequence on it.
“Two questions. Are we telling the officers this is because the old model didn’t work, or because it was wrong?”
I said we were telling them the data supported the change.
He looked at that for a moment. “Second question. Do they keep their jobs?”
I said most of them.
“Then I’d like the list before it goes out,” he said, “because some of those names are people I hired at twenty and told to make a number.”
That belongs on the page too. The man who ran the apprehension model for nineteen years is the man who rolled out its replacement to forty-one stores in a quarter, correctly, with a two-page memo and a lot of phone calls, and he did not sulk and he did not brief against it and he did not tell anybody that he had asked for the old thing to be written down in 2011.
In 2024 he was moved into a special projects role that reports to me and has no department under it.
Nobody said the word era to his face. It is what people say once he has left a room, and it is what Ward said at the lunch, and it is not unkind, and it is the way an institution disposes of a policy: it finds the body the policy was in.
The Binder
In 1998 the company sent everybody in loss prevention to a behavioural interview certification. It was a real course from a real training firm and it is still a real firm and this is not their fault.
The 1998 curriculum had a module in it on communication styles. Sixteen boxes, four letters, a page each. You took it on the first afternoon.
The purpose of that module, as it was taught in 1998, was to help you read the person sitting opposite you in an interview room.
I want to be plain that I find that repellent and that the current version of that curriculum does not contain it and has not since about 2014, and that nobody ever told the several thousand people who took it in the nineties that the module had been withdrawn.
Sherman’s page says ESTJ.
He still has the binder. He brought it to my office this spring when I asked him about something else entirely, because he still has everything, and the back of it is where the material is: a methodology page saying the letters are a rank — which habit does the work, which supplies it, and which two a man has to go looking for and will not find quickly. The order in his case is written up wherever this type is treated on its own, out of the sixteen the course was printing from.
First in that order is the ordering of the world outside him — turning a decided thing into an actual state of affairs. Sequence, assignment, measurement, accountability. It is the rarest useful faculty I have encountered across a quarter century of corporate practice and it is the reason forty-one stores ever do anything at the same time.
The second supplies the content: what the standard is, where it came from, how it was done before, what happened the last nine times. The version of this man who leads with that store of precedent and puts it outward second is a different animal; the order matters, because in his case the machinery comes first and it will run on whatever standard it is handed.
The bottom pair are the two that were needed.
One is the faculty that generates the alternative frame — the ability to look at a single aggregate number and think this might not mean what everyone in this industry says it means. He does not have it. Nobody in his generation of this discipline had it. The people who eventually had it were consultants and plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The other is a private standard, held independently of the institution, from which a person can say I will not do this without a rule to point at. He has none of that, and this is the part worth sitting with, because it is the part I got wrong for two decades. He was not indifferent to whether the thing was right. He had no way to raise it except by asking whether it was authorised.
That is what the 2011 draft was. It was a conscience written in the only grammar available to him, and it arrived on the desk of a lawyer, and the lawyer read it as a compliance question, and answered it as one, correctly.
The plain part is mine, since I gave the advice. If you are being held to a standard that exposes you personally — to litigation, to a licensing body, to anything with your name on it — ask for it in writing, keep the request, and keep whatever comes back, because the absence of that document is not a neutral fact. Somebody decided it, and its effect is that you are the only signature on the practice. And detaining, questioning or searching a customer or an employee has legal limits that differ by state and are not what most people assume, and company policy is not a defence when there is no policy. Temperament is not the subject of any of that. The people for it are your own lawyer — not the company’s, and the difference matters more than anything else in this paragraph — and whichever agency licenses or regulates the conduct.
The training firm’s own materials said even in 1998 that the questionnaire existed to tell you about yourself and was never meant to be turned on another person, and that of people who sat it a second time four weeks later, about a third came out somewhere else on the grid.
It was taught, in that room, as a way of reading the person across the table.
I asked Sherman this spring whether he remembered the module.
He said he remembered all of it and that he had never used it, and when I asked why not he said, “Because it’s about what somebody’s like. What I need to know is what they did.”
The Agreement
The agreement is nineteen pages and the number in it is fair. I made sure of that, which is the smallest thing I have ever been proud of.
Drafting it took two things apart.
The elevator in 2001, first. That elevator has been an orientation story of mine three times — a charming introduction to a man who notices everything — and the I-9 is always the laugh. What actually happened is that a stranger identified a defect that would have cost this company money in six years, produced the remedy and the location of the remedy inside eleven seconds, and then went to his floor. He did that for thirty-five years, on everything, and this company’s entire ability to do anything uniformly across four states was that faculty, in that man, unremarked.
Then my office in 2011. In my own account of myself that has been a routine piece of legal advice, and it was a routine piece of legal advice, and it was correct. It was also the only time in nineteen years that anybody at this company asked, in writing, whether that standard was ours, and the answer he got was that we would prefer not to say so on paper, and he heard it as an answer and went back to work. I have re-read those two pages perhaps twenty times this year. There is nothing in them about right or wrong. There is a signature block.
What the binder left out. He has been fighting the man behind his house since 2011 over eleven feet of ground, and has spent more on it than the ground is worth; he has a daughter in another state he sees twice a year and about whom he has never volunteered a sentence; and he sat with a family in their front room in 2009 without a lawyer and without telling anybody, which was against every instruction he had ever been given, and I have never once asked him what he said.
Zaid Halabi, who runs asset protection now and is thirty-one, asked me last week whether Sherman would be willing to record something for the training library — the history of the department, how the old model worked, why it changed.
I said I’d ask him.
Zaid came back two days later and said he had asked him himself, in the hallway.
I asked what Sherman said.
“He said yes, and asked how long I wanted, and whether I wanted it chronological or by topic.” Zaid was standing in my doorway. “And then he asked whether legal was clearing it.”
The cooperation clause says he will make himself available.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.