The Real-Life MBA: The no-nonsense guide to winning the game, building a team and growing your career. Suzy Welch

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ as we said earlier, but a lot of it. And that’s why, if you’re a leader, permitting a workplace to be a bastion of “quiet desperation,” as Henry David Thoreau so famously put it, is awful. Forget about how detrimental it is to productivity and results (which it is).

      Hello, fun is great. It’s healthy and energizing—for organizations and individuals alike. We bet 99.9 percent of all managers would agree with that, too—in the abstract. But then, some number of them—again, too many—get to the office and suck the fun out of the place. Some do it with their negativity or lack of candor or politicking. Some do it because they think fun isn’t serious, and work needs to be serious. Some do it simply because they don’t realize that fun is their responsibility.

      It is. Your people give their days (and sometimes their nights) to you. They give their hands, brains, and hearts. Sure, the company pays them. It fills their wallets. But as a leader, you need to fill their souls. You can do that by getting in their skin, by giving the work meaning, by clearing obstacles, and by demonstrating the generosity gene. And you can do it, perhaps most powerfully, by creating an environment that’s exciting and enjoyable.

      How? The options are numerous and many are wonderfully easy. Celebrate milestones and small successes. Embrace humor and candor. Let people be themselves. Smite bureaucratic behaviors every time they creep in. Banish jerks. Do stuff together outside the office. Whoever said bosses and employees shouldn’t be friends was crazy. Why wouldn’t you want to be friends with the people you spend all your time with?

      Look, we know work has its moments of difficulty and stress; of course it does. But a leader cannot let that be the status quo. Even in the hard times, work has to be a place where people want to be. Making it so is part of what leaders do.

      At the beginning of this chapter, we made the point that private equity provides a storehouse of examples about how companies can escape no-man’s-land through the combined power of alignment and leadership.

      But let’s be clear: these same tools exist to transform floundering companies or divisions in every variety of business, from a family-owned restaurant to a global tech giant. Stagnation is all too common because people are all too human, and their organizations will pay the price.

      We’re not going to claim that taking the grind out of work is a layup. It’s not. But it’s certainly achievable, and probably more quickly than you think.

      Alignment and leadership: put them together, and it’s game on.

2. Getting Whacked— and Getting Better

      The other day, one of us—not the one who fell asleep during the concert in Vegas, OK?—was in the garage looking for a favorite old golf club. The prospect wasn’t promising, frankly, in that our garage is mainly a place where boxes go to die.

      Surprisingly, however, one such box did hold the missing club. And it was just after locating it that our protagonist stood up and did a complete head slam into a shelf that was jutting out from the wall.

      It was the ouch heard ’round the block, although perhaps it wasn’t exactly an “ouch.”

      Look, getting whacked hurts like crazy. First there’s the true, “I-see-stars” kind of pain. And then, right along with it, there’s the shock. “How in the world,” you wonder, “did I let that happen?”

      It’s only later, usually long after the bump is gone, that you come to say, “You know, getting clobbered actually taught me something. I won’t let that happen again.”

      Business is full of whacks.

      A major client uses your monthly update meeting to fire you while lodging a litany of complaints. The new product that was supposed to launch at 1,000 units a week sells 500, or 250, or 10. Your biggest competitor buys your second-biggest competitor, and starts coming after your best customers with their combined sales team. You learn that your secret-sauce marketing channel is going to be “retired” by your biggest digital partner in two weeks. A customer’s bout of bad service in one of your stores sets off a hailstorm of hate on Twitter.

      And then there’s the kind of whack that’s more like a wallop—the market you serve collapses because of a regulatory or natural event, or a disruptive technology outright kills your industry, or there’s a staggering recession, the likes of which, say, comes ’round every 80 years.

      Surprise!

      Surprise—sometimes. In Silicon Valley, disastrous and sudden “disruptions” are so much a part of the fabric of everyday business, there’s even a popular acronym for them, WFIO, which stands for, “We’re F—, It’s Over.” Technology businesses, almost by nature, are whack-magnets.

      By contrast, whacks can happen out of nowhere or with very little warning. Think of the businesses in New Orleans that were wiped out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

      But such outright calamities are rare. Far more often, we get whacked because our organization was not prepared; we didn’t see something coming. A competitive threat, a cultural change, a new technology, the list goes on and on. It’s as Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: “The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.”

      Look, why your organization got whacked isn’t all that important for our purposes here. Something bad happened. This chapter is about making repairs—about fixing things so that the organization rallies back as quickly as possible, and in the best-case scenario, is functioning in a way that makes another whack a lot less likely.

      To that end, we’ve got six pieces of whack-recovery advice we’re going to explain and explore in the coming pages.

      1. Own your whack.

      2. Hang on tight to your best.

      3. Get maniacal about the drivers of costs, performance, and growth, using data as your guide.

      4. Reinvent your strategy process.

      5. Reality-check your social architecture.

      6. Worry more productively.

      Ready? Great. Because we love talking about these tactics. They belong at companies in the throes of recovery, and, we would go so far as to say, at all companies, whacked or not. Any coach will tell you the best defense is a good offense. Same’s true in the game of business.

      Code (Almost) Blue

      If Hollywood ticket receipts are any indicator, everyone loves a good horror story. Watching a good horror story, we should say, because living through one is another matter.

      Just ask Joe DeAngelo and his team at HD Supply (HDS). The company got its start in 1975 as a regional, California-based distributor to the building trades called Maintenance Warehouse. By 1997, it had grown substantially, and Home Depot, seeing all sorts of product synergies, snapped it up, establishing it as a division, and investing heavily in online ordering and logistics. HDS customers remained highly fragmented—plumbers, contractors, apartment building superintendents, facility managers, and the like. That fragmentation had never been a problem with the real estate market booming, however, and HDS had enjoyed a long stretch of success over the decades. (Its revenues in 2005, for instance, were around $12 billion, with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization [an EBITDA] of $1 billion.)

      But СКАЧАТЬ