Читать книгу The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too - Adam Bryant, Adam Bryant - Страница 7

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. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: ‘I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.’ That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.”

Some CEOs put strict limits on PowerPoint slides. The rule, of course, is a way to force people to put in the time and energy to sort out what’s truly important and what’s extraneous. Sometimes this work is most effectively done away from a computer. A blank piece of paper. A pencil. These are the only tools that really matter for what is often the most difficult step: thinking.

“I say, ‘Three slides, three points,’ ” said James Schiro of Zurich Financial Ser vices. “You really can’t manage more than three or four things at the most, but I like to see it in three slides. I hate Power-Point presentations. If you’re working in an area, and you are running a business, you ought to be able to stand up there and tell me about your business without referring to a big slide deck. When you are speaking, people should focus on you and focus on the message. They can’t walk away remembering a whole bunch of different things, so you have to have three or four really key messages that you take them through, and you remind them of what’s important.”

Simplifying the complex is the CEO’s job, and CEOs do it all day long. They are paid to create order out of chaos, to identify the three or five things employees need to focus on rather than twenty things that will send people off in different directions. They want to avoid the corporate equivalent of that expression frequently heard on the golf course – paralysis by analysis.

“Even before I go into a company,” said Greg Brenneman of CCMP Capital, “or even if we’re looking at a business here at CCMP, I’m constantly asking the question, ‘What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business?’ Then I take that and put it into a one-page plan. If I can’t simply put what needs to be done on one page, I probably haven’t thought it through very well. I learned back in the days when I was consulting at Bain & Company – and before that when I was at Harvard Business School doing case studies – that they give you more information than you could possibly read. So you needed to quickly step back and say, ‘What are the two or three things that really matter?’ And I find in the world that people don’t really do that often. They just dive into all this detail and start using acronyms and buzzwords and they don’t step back. When one of our guys is presenting an investment, you always kind of know they have it if they can explain it very quickly. And if it takes a really long time and you’re into the square root of the price of oil in Uzbekistan, you probably know that it’s gotten too complicated, and that’s when I start asking questions – when people start having trouble simply saying, ‘Here’s the idea.’ ”

William Green of Accenture offers a telling example of the art of simplification. He shared the story of how he once sat through a three-day training session for new managers. He said he counted sixty-eight things that the managers were told they needed to do to be successful—“everything from how you coach and mentor to your annual reviews, filling out these forms, all this stuff.

“And I got up to close the session, and I’m thinking about how it isn’t possible for these people to remember all this. So I said there are three things that matter. The first is competence – just being good at what you do, what ever it is, and focusing on the job you have, not on the job you think you want to have. The second one is confidence. People want to know what you think. So you have to have enough desirable self-confidence to articulate a point of view. The third thing is caring. Nothing today is about one individual. This is all about the team, and in the end, this is about giving a damn about your customers, your company, the people around you, and recognizing that the people around you are the ones who make you look good. When young people are looking for clarity – this is a huge, complex global company, and they wonder how to navigate their way through it – I just tell them that.”

Tachi Yamada, the president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, said that this ability to spot the key levers in any project or plan is vital for executives as they get further away from doing the work itself, and more into a management role where they must delegate. Yamada advocates for an alternative approach to micromanagement: what he calls “micro-interest.” A prerequisite for that is being able to quickly figure out the two or three things that matter in any project.

“I think the most difficult transition for anybody from being a worker bee to a manager is this issue of delegation,” he said. “What do you give up? How can you have the team do what you would do yourself without your doing it? If you’re a true micromanager and you basically stand over everybody and guide their hands to do everything, you don’t have enough hours in the day to do what the whole team needs to do.

“Learning how to delegate, learning how to let go and still make sure that everything happened, was a very important lesson in my first role in management. And that’s where I learned a principle that I apply today – I don’t micromanage, but I have micro-interest. I do know the details. I do care about the details. I feel like I have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do. Every day I read about a thousand pages of documents, whether grants or letters or scientific articles, or what ever. I have learned what the critical things to read are. If there are ten tasks in an overall project, what is the most critical task among those ten? What is the one thing that everything else hinges on? And what I’ll do is I’ll spend a lot of time understanding that one thing. Then, when the problem occurs, it usually occurs there, and I can be on top of what the problem is. It’s just having enough experience to understand when problems do occur and how they occur, why they occur, and being prepared for that particular problem. Problems can occur in the other ten areas, but they won’t determine the outcome of the overall project. But there may be one or two points where the outcome of the entire project is at stake, and you’d better be on top of it.”

Meridee Moore of Watershed Asset Management looks for that ability to simplify when she’s assessing job candidates.

“We give people a two-hour test,” she said. “We try to simulate a real office experience by giving them an investment idea and the raw material, the annual report, some documents, and then we tell them where the securities prices are. We say, ‘Here’s a calculator, a pencil, and a sandwich. We’ll be back in two hours.’ If an analyst comes in there and just attacks the project with relish, that’s a good sign. After two hours, two of us go in and just let the person talk about what he’s done. The nice thing about my being trained as a lawyer, and never going to business school, is that I’m able to ask the basic financially naïve questions, like: ‘What does the company do? How do they make money? Who are their customers? What do they make? How do they produce it?’ That throws some people off.

“Often, analysts go right to the financials and forget to think about the company’s business model. If the person avoids answering the basic questions and instead changes the subject to talk about the work they did, that tells me the person is a bit rigid. Instead of trying to respond to what’s being asked, they’re trying to get an A on the test. Also, if they’re a little too worried about pleasing me, that’s not good, either, because it’s not a please-the-boss competition. The point of the exercise is to make sure that we’ve thought about the issues critically, so we are in a position to make a good investment decision. The other quality we look for is whether the person can distill a lot of very complicated information down to its essence. Can you figure out the three or four issues that are most important for understanding this investment? Or do you get distracted by aspects of the company that really have nothing to do with making an investment or determining value?”