Читать книгу Stacking the Deck - Pottruck David S. - Страница 12

Breakthrough change never, ever stops while the world progresses. Competition, the marketplace, and technological advances make it necessary to keep growing and changing. In my own career, I experienced firsthand what happens when you stop leading bold change. I weathered a number of storms during my two decades at Charles Schwab, but the burst of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s caught me by surprise. Suddenly, my job as Schwab's CEO became entirely about finding new ways to downsize, new places to cut. I did what I had to do: I downsized a 25,000-person company by 10,000 people. But I was slow and uncertain, and had trouble coping with this new reality of my job. I was emotionally paralyzed by the prospect of waking up every day and thinking about the men and women – people I knew well and who had been instrumental in making the company successful – whose jobs would be eliminated. And it was my job to direct these firings, by the thousands.

I think the Schwab board could tell that my heart was not in it. And they could certainly tell that I had stopped scanning the horizon for breakthrough transformative change. I left the company in 2004 due to a combination of my own inability to continue innovating and my board's shrunken patience. Being fired was devastating, and is still painful to this day. Much as I wish I had responded to the downturn differently, Schwab needed more than I was able to deliver. I had stopped leading change, and instead I became a change that someone else needed to make.

I tell this story to make it very clear that the strategies and plans described in Stacking the Deck are not easy for me, or for anyone, to implement. Overcoming emotion (your own and others'), convincing people to follow you, maintaining an extraordinary level of tenacity and resilience, conceptualizing change, and realizing it successfully: these are all tremendously difficult. Every leader I interviewed emphasized the inherent difficulty of breakthrough change. Over and over, they told of struggles that tested people to their very core and how they persevered through grit and determination.

This book is not intended to convince you to make breakthrough changes. The world will convince you to do that! Instead, it is designed to help you make those necessary changes as effectively as possible.