Читать книгу The Obvious: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed - James Dale - Страница 9

Did you ever wonder how overnight business sensations get to be overnight sensations? One thing is for sure, it isn’t overnight. It’s over a lot of nights and weekends and years. Most of them were number 2s or 3s, after being division heads, after being in field offices, after coming out of training programs, after graduate school. They don’t call it a ladder of success for nothing. There are rungs. Climb them.

Case in point: the bio of Alan (A.G.) Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s most successful companies. All he did was his job, over and over, all the way to the top.

1977 – Brand Asst, Joy

1978 – Sales Training, Denver

1978 – Asst Brand Mgr, Tide

1980 – Brand Mgr, Dawn & Ivory Snow

1981 – Brand Mgr, Special Assignment & Ivory Snow

1982 – Brand Mgr, Cheer

1983 – Assoc Ad Mgr, PS&D Division

1986 – Ad Mgr, PS&D Division

1988 – GM, Laundry Products, PS&D Division

1991 – VP-Laundry and Cleaning Products, Procter & Gamble USA

1992 – Group VP, Procter & Gamble Co/Pres, Laundry & Cleaning Products, USA

1994 – Group VP, The Procter & Gamble Company/Pres, Procter & Gamble Far East

1995 – Exec VP, The Procter & Gamble Company, (Pres, Procter & Gamble Asia)

1998 – Exec VP, The Procter & Gamble Company, (Pres, Procter & Gamble N. America)

1999 – Pres, Global Beauty Care and N. America

2000 – President and Chief Executive

2002 – Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive

Sure, now and then someone skips a few rungs by inventing a product, starting a company, or inheriting the family business. But you still have to perform. Ask all the dotcom geniuses whose venture capitalists replaced them with veteran CEOs. Or how about the case of the three partners, John, Paul, and George, who squeezed out the fourth, Pete Best, in favor of a guy named Ringo for a musical start-up called The Beatles. Or Edsel Ford who came within a breath of being forced out of the family automobile business by his father, Henry. In the end, nothing matters but results.

There are no shortcuts. It just seems like there are if you’re looking in from the outside. If your job description is “respond to and resolve customer care issues,” if you actually do it effectively every day, pretty soon you’ll be in charge of hiring and training, then setting up an out-sourced customer care unit in Bhopal, India, then overseeing global Customer Relations, then Sales and Marketing, then …