Behind the Mask

About the Book

“The actual is limited; the possible is immense.” Meet Don Hastings—the man who took the above slogan at the Lincoln Electric Company literally. Hastings shattered conventional thinking as he literally dragged an old line manufacturing company kicking and screaming into the future. As CEO, in the most daring move of his career, he and his team wrangled Lincoln back from the brink of financial ruin, shocking the industry by transforming near disaster into record sales and profits. Although technically a memoir, Behind the Mask is chock-full of out-of-the-box ideas and shrewd business wisdom cleverly disguised as Don’s forty-four-year odyssey into one of the most unique manufacturing companies in the world. Whatever you call this book, its pages will make you think. Hastings’s vastly unorthodox techniques will challenge your creativity and ignite your imagination. Above all, Don Hastings’s book will dare you to be better. As Hastings stated, “I didn’t write this book to teach but to inspire.”

About the Author

Donald F. Hastings, Chairman Emeritus, The Lincoln Electric Company, was dubbed the Silver-Tongued Mesmerist by his customers. Blessed (or cursed) with extraordinary creativity and exceptional daring, he scrambled his way from sales trainee to CEO and Chairman of the Board. As CEO, his ingenuity, audacity, and bold ideas ignited the one hundred year old company to rise from the ashes, converting catastrophe into The Miracle on St. Clair. Leslie Anne Hastings, a graduate of Stanford University and the voice Behind the Mask, writes of her father’s exploits with a wry wit. “If James Bond infiltrated the manufacturing world, this would be his story.”