The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too. Adam Bryant
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tasks. Team smarts refers to this ability to recognize the type of players the team needs, and how to bring them together around a common goal. Susan Lyne, the CEO of Gilt Groupe, said the ultimate test of team smarts today is being able to bring together a group of people, including those who don’t report directly to you. Lyne described how she grew to appreciate team players, and what they can and should bring to the table.
“I think that now I have a very strong antenna for someone who is going to be poison within a company,” she said. “I think that early on, I was wowed by talent, and I was willing to set aside the idea that this person might not be a team player. Now, somebody needs to be able to work with people—that’s number one on the list. I need people who are going to be able to build a team, manage a team, recruit well, and work well with their peers. And that’s another thing you learn over time. Somebody may be a great manager of a team, but incapable of working across the company to get things done because they’re competitive, or because of any number of reasons. Can they manage down? Can they work across the company and get people to want to work with them and to help them succeed? And are they going to keep you well informed of everything that’s going on?”
Lyne said this skill is so crucial today that business schools should be teaching it in more courses.
“There are a lot of great courses on managing or developing a strategic agenda, but there is very little about how to work with your peers where you need to get X done, and you need these other three departments to give you X amount of time in order to succeed at that. The people who truly succeed in business are the ones who actually have figured out how to mobilize people who are not their direct reports. Everyone can get their direct reports to work for them, but getting people who do not have to give you their time to engage and to support you and to want you to succeed is something that is sorely missing from B-school courses.”
Chapter 4
A SIMPLE MINDSET
Here’s a hypothetical test that can speed the process of identifying who has what it takes to move up in an organization.
Imagine giving one hundred vice presidents the same task: take a month to search out a new business opportunity for their company, and then present the idea to a group of senior executives during a weekend off-site meeting. The month passes, they have their ideas, and the day arrives to start their presentations.
The ideas are all pretty good, but the presentations vary enormously in length. One by one, the young vice presidents come in. Some want to take forty-five minutes, using a thirty-slide Power-Point deck to pitch their idea. Other presentations are shorter, with only ten slides. Still others have three slides or even two, and they’re done in five minutes or less. One person doesn’t use Power-Point at all. She simply talks, giving a short pitch for her idea, backed up with three key facts.
The executives are impressed by how concise she was, the simplicity of the idea, and that she respected their time. Later, she gets a call. The executives want to sign her up for the company’s leadership development program for high-potential employees.
There is a stubborn disconnect in many companies. By all accounts, CEOs—and most senior executives—want the same thing from people who present to them: be concise, be brief, get to the point, make it simple. Business is not always as complicated as it sometimes appears to be, nor should it be.
“I’ve tried to do less of the things that make business more complex,” said Eduardo Castro-Wright, a vice chairman at Wal-Mart Stores. “I really like simplicity. At the end of the day, retailing—though you could apply this to many other businesses—is not as complicated as we would like to make it. It is pretty logical and simple, if you think about the way that you yourself would act, or do act, as a customer.”
Yet few people can deliver the simplicity that many bosses want. Instead, they mistakenly assume the bosses will be impressed by a long PowerPoint presentation that shows how diligently they researched a topic, or that they will win over their superiors by talking more, not less.
Few things seem to get CEOs riled up more than lengthy PowerPoint presentations. It’s not the software they dislike—it’s just a tool, after all. What irks them is the unfocused thinking that leads to an overlong slide presentation. There is wide agreement it’s a problem—“Death by PowerPoint” has become a cliché.
If so many executives in positions of authority are clear about what they want, why can’t they get the people who report to them to lose the “Power” part of their presentations and simply get to the “Point”?
There are a few likely explanations. The first is that a lot of people have trouble being concise. Next time you’re in a meeting, ask somebody to give you the ten-word summary of his or her idea. Some people can do a quick bit of mental jujitsu, and they’ll summarize an idea with a “Here’s what’s important . . .” or “The bottom line is . . .” Even if they take twenty-five words, they at least understand what’s being asked of them.
Others will pause for a moment and then launch into a lengthy discussion of the idea, because they have trouble identifying the core point. Granted, it’s not easy—a point that’s been captured in many sayings through the ages. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” said Leonardo da Vinci. And in words attributed to Mark Twain (and many others), “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Another possible explanation is that a lag exists in the business world. There was a time when simply having certain information was a competitive advantage. Now, in the Internet era, with oceans of data available to all with just a few clicks of a mouse and keyboard, others can get easy access to the same information. That puts a greater premium on the ability to synthesize, to connect dots in new ways, and to ask the simple, smart question that leads to an untapped opportunity.
“I’d love to teach a course called ‘The Idea,’ ” said Dany Levy, the founder of DailyCandy .com. “Which is basically, so you want to start a company, how’s it going to work? Let’s figure it out—just a very practical plan, but not a business plan, because I feel like business plans now feel weighty and outdated. It seems, back in the day, that the longer your business plan was, the more promising it was going to be. And now, the shorter your business plan is, the more succinct and to the point it is, the better. You want people to get why your business is going to work pretty quickly.”
“Schools could do a better job teaching the value of brevity,” said Guy Kawasaki, the co-founder of Alltop, a news aggregation site, and managing director of Garage Technology Ventures.
“What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world,” he said. “In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach twenty pages or have so many slides or what ever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, ‘I have to have a minimum of twenty pages and fifty slides.’ They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with ten-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off. No one wants to read War and Peace e-mails. Who has the time? Ditto with sixty PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting.”
Steven A. Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, said he understands the impulse to share all the underlying research that led to a conclusion. But he changed the way he runs meetings to get to the conclusion first.
“The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call ‘the long and winding road.’ You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion. That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill Gates used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: ‘What about this? Have you thought about this?’ So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.
“I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient.