Ford Credit CEO Don Winkler shares his own experience with dyslexia to help others.
Don Winkler glided across the stage at Ford Credit's call center in Tampa, displaying the buoyant confidence and winning humor of an experienced motivational speaker.

Peeking only occasionally at notecards, he coaxed his audience into sharing their favorite ways to relieve stress. And he confided that he vents by putting on a red clown nose and gazing into a mirror.

Employees at the call center cheered an inspirational performance by their company's visiting chief executive. The crowd never would have been able to tell that Winkler was so nervous before the speech that he needed a regimen of breathing exercises to get through it. Nor did they know that he had recruited five people to stand in the back of the room and nod supportively when Winkler looked at them.

And in the enthusiasm of the moment a lot of them may have forgotten that Winkler -- who runs a company that earned $1.5-billion last year and serves 10-million customers in 40 countries -- has dyslexia.

Mention dyslexia and most people think of a child struggling to learn reading. But dyslexia hasn't stopped the careers of high-ranking business executives including Winkler, Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea, discount broker pioneer Charles Schwab and cell phone billionaire Craig McCaw.

"Work with your strengths," Orfalea said. No longer with Kinko's, he devotes time to helping kids work through their difficulties. Schwab and his wife have a foundation that serves as a resource for parents and educators involved with kids who have learning differences.

Winkler is using his experience to back programs to increase awareness of learning differences in the workplace and help employees with learning disabled children.

People who are dyslexic have trouble reading, spelling or understanding the language they hear, although their hearing and eyesight are normal.

"It's not that traditional view that you see the letters backward or reverse the letters," said Tom Viall, executive director of the International Dyslexia Association. "It's when the signal gets to the part of the brain that does the decoding, that's where the breakdown takes place. They're concentrating so hard on decoding each specific word. Instead of reading an idea, they've read 15 different words."

Winkler was not diagnosed with dyslexia until he was 19 years old. "Most of my life I felt like a dummy," he said in a telephone interview after his visit last month to the Tampa call center. He was always in the slowest reading group in school, and some adults thought he was just trying to get attention. He remembers the humiliation, which is why his speechmaking routine includes recruiting those five people to stand in the back of the room and offer affirmative nods.

But he also remembers the people who gave him hope in his youth. When he joined his church's choir, Winkler said, he misread God in the hymnal and sang "Praise dog from whom all blessings flow."

But a minister figured something was wrong. So he gave Winkler a hymn book to take home and put him between two strong singers. "I became a very good singer. There's the example of taking misery and turning it to success."

Winkler began to focus on his strengths. Although a poor reader, Winkler was very good in math.

"It's not hard for me. I got into a love of electronics. Here I was 12 years old and could take TVs and radios apart and could put them back together," Winkler said. "My parents would encourage me. The teachers all wanted me to fix their stuff for free." That inspired him to become an electrical engineer, which he pursued before getting into banking.

As a young engineer, Winkler developed what would later become his Breakthrough Leadership motivational program, a series of seminars he gives at Ford and in a graduate course he teaches at the University of Michigan.

In one of the engineer positions he held before coming to Ford, he spent time with a production department that was responsible for turning his ideas into products.

The normal product development cycle was 32 weeks, but "mine would get done in three weeks. My boss loved me. The engineers hated me," Winkler said. "I was out there Saturdays and Sundays with the people who could actually make something. I ended up spending my time with the people." He was working at Pennsylvania-based General Instrument Corp. when his supervisors saw he had a talent for working with people. Once they spotted his potential, they promoted him to operations manager.

He moved into finance in the 1970s when Citibank officials told Winkler they were looking for "anybody but bankers. . . . (who) understand that Sears, AT&T, Merrill Lynch, they're all going to be our competition," Winkler recalled.

"I didn't even know what banking was," he said. He enrolled in the executive MBA program at Wharton Business School to get some of the basics. He became a key senior manager at Citibank and in 1993 was named chief executive of Finance One, the financial arm of Banc One Corp.

In October 1999, Winkler joined Ford Credit, an indirectly owned subsidiary of Ford Motor Co. that lends money mostly to car buyers, as chairman and chief executive.

But how does he run a multimillion-dollar operation with dyslexia? He adapts.

Sure, he mixes up digits when dialing a telephone number so he uses an automated directory. Writing long memos? Forget it. Winkler dictates into a computer. His meetings are either face-to-face or by video conference. Maintaining eye contact during a conversation is crucial to keeping his concentration. If he is conducting business over the telephone, he looks at himself in a mirror as a substitute.

Viall of the International Dyslexia Association remembers how Winkler coped at a retreat soon after joining the organization's board.

"He had an artist there," Viall said. "We had to try to describe the (association's) vision, and the artist was making a pictorial representation of what it was we were talking about so that all the time we were in these discussions, it was also imagery. His brain could comprehend that more easily than sitting down and decode the words."

It's a creative approach to compensating for a learning difference, and that's part of the message he passed on to employees at the Tampa call center in terms of dealing with the company's challenges.

"That's called motivation," Winkler said in recalling the visit. "That's where it begins. That's why I look so comfortable."

- J. Nealy-Brown can be reached at nealy@sptimes.com or at (727) 893-8846.

Don Winkler

AGE: 53

POSITION: Chief executive of Ford Credit.

EDUCATION: Graduated in 1972 from Northrop University with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Attended an executive MBA program at Wharton School of Business from 1979 to 1980, before leaving for an overseas assignment.

WORK EXPERIENCE: Sprague Electronics, General Instrument Corp., Citibank and Banc One Corp.

FAMILY: Wife, Deborah; two children.

OTHER: Teaches graduate course at University of Michigan business school, sits on the board of the International Dyslexia Association and Financial Services Roundtable. Has his own Web site, www.cyberwink.com.

Words that move

Don Winkler's program involves what he calls Breakthrough Language to help change how people think and act. Some examples:

Change view of situation. Don't say: Our plane is delayed eight hours; the first day of our vacation is trashed! Think: Let's enjoy this beautiful day in this wonderful city and get our vacation off to a relaxing start!

Replace "but" with "and." Replace "Joe is a hard worker, but he doesn't have the skills we need in the next decade with "Joe is a hard worker" and "with training he will be a major contributor to our future."

People don't fail, events fail. It took Thomas Edison more than 6,000 tries to make a working light bulb.