The Real-Life MBA: The no-nonsense guide to winning the game, building a team and growing your career. Suzy Welch
Читать онлайн книгу.
We alluded to her whacking, in fact, at the beginning of this chapter.
She called us right afterward. “I’m just sitting here in my car. I can’t bring myself to go back to the office and tell everyone. It’s too humiliating,” she said. “I’ll do it tomorrow.” We weren’t going to suggest otherwise. Whacks, as we said earlier, can hurt like crazy.
Nor did we want to remind her of her midnight email. But she brought it up. “I told you I was worried,” she said.
Yes, she had. But not worried enough to worry the right way—the way that chases worry down and catches it. After all, it’s far better to own your worry than own your whack.
We saw Julie recently. Harry is gone as a client, but getting blown out the door by him that fateful day was a great learning experience. She and her company, she says, are better for it having happened.
That’s the way whacks usually work.
Joe DeAngelo would agree. “I wouldn’t want to do it again,” he says of HDS’s near-death experience, “but it allowed us to refine and hone everything we were doing. A crisis does that. It gives you the speed and the urgency to fix what’s broken a lot faster.”
In 2014, HDS had a very successful public offering, giving its employees and owners a great opportunity to celebrate what surviving a whack really feels like.
The facts are, a whack can hit any size company, from a multibillion-dollar conglomerate to a one-person show. That’s life. That’s business.
Just remember this. If one comes your way, a whack is a terrible thing to waste.
Remember the old advertising slogan, “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”? It became an instant classic. First, because it was so charming and catchy. But second, because on some visceral level, it made you realize how few things there were in life upon which everyone does, indeed, agree.
Growth is one of those rare topics. Everyone likes it. Especially in business, where most everyone loves it.
In fact, with the exception of a professor who once submitted an article called “What’s So Great About Growth?” to the Harvard Business Review, we don’t believe we’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t get that growth is the elixir of life in organizations of every size and ilk. A new product, a new service offering, a big new customer—ring the bell! Things are getting exciting around here.
Now, there was a time that some of us (fondly) recall when growth was part of the natural order of things. From World War II until 2008, the economic cycle, generally speaking, had its usual ups and downs. Bumping up revenues and profits each year wasn’t exactly a slam dunk in this period; global competition was robust in many sectors. But you know the old adage about the rising tide. A lot of ships, some seaworthy and some not so much, got lifted.
Then came the financial crisis. No need for a history lesson in these pages. We all know what’s happened in the past several years, and we all know what it’s meant for business. Growth has been tough to come by.
You can debate where the fault lies for the stagnant growth environment, but look, that’s the way it is. You can’t just roll over. You can only push back. Or in the case of business, you can step up. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO of a major corporation or the manager of a six-person team. When something is challenging, as growth is these days, it’s your job to rally the troops.
The fact is, growth is a mindset. It’s an attitude—an attitude that starts with the leader, and then gets passed through the organization, like one candle lighting the next in a darkened room, until the whole place is ablaze. Remember Joe DeAngelo, the CEO who took HD Supply out of the deep stuff to success? He puts it this way: “Every person has to come to work every day knowing you’re a growth company. Growth just doesn’t happen any other way. If you don’t think growth every day, and say growth every day, it won’t happen.”
Amen to that.
And amen to the reason why. Growth is great because growth is what gives people job security, pays for a child’s college tuition, buys a home, and all the while builds meaningful careers. Growth is a huge part of what makes business fun.
But how, right? How do you grow even in slow-growth times?
Much of the answer to that question, as you might have surmised, lies in the first two chapters of this book. Aligning mission and values. Embracing the kind of leadership that inspires performance and innovation. Maniacally crunching the data to drive performance, using fast, agile strategy-making. Installing modern social architecture. Worrying productively. Of course those activities promote growth!
So if you’re starting The Real-Life MBA with this chapter because growth feels like it’s your chief challenge, we respectfully suggest you start at the beginning.
But if you’ve been with us since page one, we’ve got some additional levers that we know to be powerfully effective catalysts for growth, six to be exact. Bring in fresh eyes. Whatever you do, don’t sprinkle resources. Redefine innovation so that it’s everyone’s job. Put your best people on your growth initiatives. Make sure you’re compensating people for the right things. And finally, co-opt growth’s resisters—by any means necessary.
Eyes Wide Open
If you’ve ever endured a hospital stay, or cared for someone who has, you’re probably familiar with the world of home health care. Released from the hospital though not feeling 100 percent, suddenly you’re back in your own bed, loaded with instructions about how you can now do all the things the nurses were just doing for you. All you need are the supplies.
Enter a company like AssuraMed. One of AssuraMed’s divisions is called Edgepark Medical Supplies, a mail order business that exists to sell you, the consumer, everything from rubber gloves to diabetes pumps, and handle your insurance claim while it’s at it. Its other division, Independence Medical, sells the same products to medical supply stores, some 10,000 in number.
AssuraMed is, in many ways, the archetypal American success story. Founded in 1928 as a corner pharmacy, it expanded into the home sale of products in 1968, went regional, then national, and was logging about $4 million in revenues annually when an Ohio family named Harrington purchased it in 1990. The Harringtons continued the business’s growth trajectory for 20 more years before selling it to private equity in October 2010.
Unlike many PE acquisitions, AssuraMed wasn’t a mess, or even close to it. RGH Enterprises, as it was called before being sold, was profitable, with low-double-digit revenue growth. Its managers were competent and content.
Enter new CEO Michael Petras. Michael had been the CEO of the lighting business at GE, an industry where even incremental growth was brutally hard. Suddenly, all around him, he saw so much opportunity—heaps of it, just waiting to be seized. And so he fired up his team with a “faster, faster” growth message. It became, in fact, the company’s new, overarching theme. It became its organizing principle and daily rallying cry.
Michael would tell you he and his team simultaneously pulled all the levers we’re going to look at in this chapter. That’s true. But for the purposes of discussion, let’s look at them one at a time, starting with a tactic he calls “fresh eyes.”
As in, “hire new people.”
Don’t panic. We realize that if you’re reading this, you probably feel as if you’ve already tried everything to spur growth and pushed every one of those efforts to the wall. Your customers wanted faster delivery; you embraced lean Six Sigma techniques and cut door-to-door times in half. The advertising revenue supporting your website was contracting; you moved to a subscription model. You’ve added every new service imaginable; you’ve taken the term “best practice” to the limit. And the results have been OK. You’ve gotten the business up to a 2 percent real-growth top line in a 2–3 percent economy, and with a nudge from enhanced productivity, you’ve leveraged that “growth”