The Real-Life MBA: The no-nonsense guide to winning the game, building a team and growing your career. Suzy Welch
Читать онлайн книгу.
Similarly, they offer buyout packages to anyone who will take them, and of course, too often, the highest-paid, most qualified people tend to snap them up and leave, as they get the best terms and have the best opportunities elsewhere.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this behavior is the epitome of weak, cowardly, demoralizing management. Why on earth would you want to incentivize your best out the door and risk setting off a mass talent exodus?
Getting out of a hole is hard enough. But you are never, ever going to get out of a hole without your best people. That’s why in hard times, you must do something counterintuitive and even courageous, which is give your best people more in current pay and long-term, performance-based equity, going so far as to err on the side of too many participants rather than too few.
We say courageous because, in the darkest days, bringing such an idea to your boss, or in some cases the board, can feel like walking into moving helicopter blades. Your boss is often paralyzed and the board is worried about proxy optics. It takes guts to say, “Let’s compare our proxy noise embarrassment about pay with the pain of bankruptcy headlines, shall we?”
But guts are required. Indeed, more than guts. If there was ever a time to unleash the generosity gene we talked about in the last chapter, it is now. In hard times, your best people become your best role models. “If Sam and Sarah are staying,” other employees think, “things can’t be that bad and they’re definitely going to get better. I’m in.”
Or put another way: your best people are your best hope for survival—and success. Do what it takes not to lose them.
Get Maniacal About the Drivers of Performance
With the right people on board, you can turn to the next part of fixing your whack. That is, meticulously searching for ways to improve every part of the business.
Meticulously? Hello, that does not mean slow. It means intelligently and deliberately, and in particular, it means driven by the vast stores of information about markets and consumers now available for free or for a price. Some people refer to this new ocean of facts and figures as big data, and we suppose that’s fine (if a bit jargony). For us, the imperative around big data is not necessarily getting more information; you could drown in it all. The main issue is discerning what information matters to your organization and crunching it to determine the true drivers of cost and growth. Ultimately, it is as Sir Terry Leahy, the former CEO of Tesco, has so famously (and wisely) said: the only data that matters is the data that is actionable.
It was just such analysis that allowed HDS to quickly decide which businesses to divest because they had no clear path to a leadership market position. “The diagnostics allowed us to see what we needed to see,” Joe says. “We looked at every external market. Is there a way for us to make money there? What are the customer needs, which of them is most important, and how do we compare to our competition?” Similarly, the data pinpointed the best opportunities for investment.
As a result, HDS sold off lumber, plumbing, and industrial piping, redoubling its focus on facilities maintenance and upping its technology investment to improve its delivery logistics. At the same time, again using a heavy dose of data analytics as a tool, the company launched a program to reward and spread process improvement. Its Los Angeles operation, for instance, was scoring much better results than other HDS outposts on numerous measurements. A headquarters team was assigned to find out why, and make sure its superior practices were disseminated across every branch of the organization. Meanwhile, every member of the HDS field team was hitting the streets with a new iPad loaded with Salesforce.com software, with its reams of information about which products to promote to each customer for the best results.
“We were maniacal about performance, basically,” Joe says. “In a life-threatening event, you have no alternative.”
Fortunately, today, due to advances in data gathering and analytics, maniacal can mean meticulous and fast at the very same time.
Reinvent Your Strategy Process
Let’s move on to something else critical to HDS’s recovery: the way the company handled strategy, post-whack, which for our purposes also illustrates how strategy and tactics should be increasingly integrated today, regardless of circumstances.
Because the truth of the matter is, strategy-making—at least as those of us over 40 used to know it—is dead. It’s irrelevant. Big, staged biannual sessions with elaborate presentations about “trends” and “core competencies” and the like? Meetings before the meetings to establish buy-in with “internal constituents”? Forget it. Markets move too fast for any of that old ritual. They move too fast, and they change too fast.
Now, we’ve long been proponents of a much simpler, more flexible approach to strategy that we call the “Five Slides,” because the process can basically be boiled down to, obviously, five slides. These slides, incidentally, should not be created by some sort of “SVP of Strategy” or outside consultants. No, they should be created by a team led by the CEO and comprise an organization’s best minds, engaged, knowledgeable, curious, and original. People who are likely to debate, and even disagree, drawn from any and every part and level of the organization that makes sense. And, importantly, people with a propensity for paranoia—not just what-if-ers, mind you, but worst-casers. Strategy today demands that kind of mindset because in business today, virtually anything can happen, and it does. A tech start-up comes in the side door and topples an industry giant. An offhanded comment by a senior executive offends a huge category of customers. Oh, the list goes on and on.
Which is why the Five Slides are so paranoid and externally focused in their approach. Their objective is singular, actually, as it should be in any strategy process: to get the organization outside itself—a huge challenge! A review:
The first slide provides a nitty-gritty assessment of the current competitive playing field. Who are our competitors? What’s their market share; what are their strengths and weaknesses? What does it look like inside their organizations? For the process to work, please understand that these kinds of questions cannot be debated at 10,000 feet, like some sort of white-glove, intellectual discourse. We’ve seen that too many times, and it’s a waste of energy. You have to wallow in the detail—as if you’re in each and every competitor’s conference room. Does that sound hard? Well, it is, absolutely. It takes rigor and discipline to really dig into the competition’s head. But if there is one thing we’ve seen time and again, it’s that strategy-makers underestimate their competition in the present time frame—for instance, dismissively opining, “That company’s crazy with their prices—they’re going to go out of business,” rather than asking, “Whoa, are our costs too high?” To make matters worse, they also imagine the competition as stagnant when predicting the future. Sorry, but we just can’t hammer this one hard enough. People can’t seem to help themselves. In their analysis, they’re moving forward while their competitors are assumed to be standing still. It’s nuts. The antidote can only be: when it comes to market analysis, be afraid, be very afraid.
On the second slide, you put together an assessment of all your competition’s recent activity in terms of products, technology, and people moves that changed the competitive landscape. On the third, you outline what you’ve been up to in the same regard over the same time period. The fourth slide identifies what’s around the corner, in particular what worries you to pieces, such as a competitor’s new product, an M&A deal that could really shake things up, or a disruptor from another industry showing up to play in the space. And the fifth and final slide identifies what you see as your big, wow-worthy, winning move to change and dominate that same space, filled with old, new, and potential competitors alike.
The Five Slides approach obviously reflects our belief that strategy is not a particularly high-brain endeavor, but far more a matter of coming up with the big aha for your business, putting the right people in the right jobs to drive the aha forward, and relentlessly seeking the best practices to achieve the aha. (For the record, we define “big aha” as a smart, realistic, relatively fast way to gain a sustainable competitive advantage.)
Now, when we first started talking about the Five Slides approach to strategy about a decade ago, it was received as somewhat