Читать книгу The Real-Life MBA: The no-nonsense guide to winning the game, building a team and growing your career - Джек Уэлч, Suzy Welch - Страница 9
ОглавлениеRemember the old advertising slogan, “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”? It became an instant classic. First, because it was so charming and catchy. But second, because on some visceral level, it made you realize how few things there were in life upon which everyone does, indeed, agree.
Growth is one of those rare topics. Everyone likes it. Especially in business, where most everyone loves it.
In fact, with the exception of a professor who once submitted an article called “What’s So Great About Growth?” to the Harvard Business Review, we don’t believe we’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t get that growth is the elixir of life in organizations of every size and ilk. A new product, a new service offering, a big new customer—ring the bell! Things are getting exciting around here.
Now, there was a time that some of us (fondly) recall when growth was part of the natural order of things. From World War II until 2008, the economic cycle, generally speaking, had its usual ups and downs. Bumping up revenues and profits each year wasn’t exactly a slam dunk in this period; global competition was robust in many sectors. But you know the old adage about the rising tide. A lot of ships, some seaworthy and some not so much, got lifted.
Then came the financial crisis. No need for a history lesson in these pages. We all know what’s happened in the past several years, and we all know what it’s meant for business. Growth has been tough to come by.
You can debate where the fault lies for the stagnant growth environment, but look, that’s the way it is. You can’t just roll over. You can only push back. Or in the case of business, you can step up. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO of a major corporation or the manager of a six-person team. When something is challenging, as growth is these days, it’s your job to rally the troops.
The fact is, growth is a mindset. It’s an attitude—an attitude that starts with the leader, and then gets passed through the organization, like one candle lighting the next in a darkened room, until the whole place is ablaze. Remember Joe DeAngelo, the CEO who took HD Supply out of the deep stuff to success? He puts it this way: “Every person has to come to work every day knowing you’re a growth company. Growth just doesn’t happen any other way. If you don’t think growth every day, and say growth every day, it won’t happen.”
Amen to that.
And amen to the reason why. Growth is great because growth is what gives people job security, pays for a child’s college tuition, buys a home, and all the while builds meaningful careers. Growth is a huge part of what makes business fun.
But how, right? How do you grow even in slow-growth times?
Much of the answer to that question, as you might have surmised, lies in the first two chapters of this book. Aligning mission and values. Embracing the kind of leadership that inspires performance and innovation. Maniacally crunching the data to drive performance, using fast, agile strategy-making. Installing modern social architecture. Worrying productively. Of course those activities promote growth!
So if you’re starting The Real-Life MBA with this chapter because growth feels like it’s your chief challenge, we respectfully suggest you start at the beginning.
But if you’ve been with us since page one, we’ve got some additional levers that we know to be powerfully effective catalysts for growth, six to be exact. Bring in fresh eyes. Whatever you do, don’t sprinkle resources. Redefine innovation so that it’s everyone’s job. Put your best people on your growth initiatives. Make sure you’re compensating people for the right things. And finally, co-opt growth’s resisters—by any means necessary.
Eyes Wide Open
If you’ve ever endured a hospital stay, or cared for someone who has, you’re probably familiar with the world of home health care. Released from the hospital though not feeling 100 percent, suddenly you’re back in your own bed, loaded with instructions about how you can now do all the things the nurses were just doing for you. All you need are the supplies.
Enter a company like AssuraMed. One of AssuraMed’s divisions is called Edgepark Medical Supplies, a mail order business that exists to sell you, the consumer, everything from rubber gloves to diabetes pumps, and handle your insurance claim while it’s at it. Its other division, Independence Medical, sells the same products to medical supply stores, some 10,000 in number.
AssuraMed is, in many ways, the archetypal American success story. Founded in 1928 as a corner pharmacy, it expanded into the home sale of products in 1968, went regional, then national, and was logging about $4 million in revenues annually when an Ohio family named Harrington purchased it in 1990. The Harringtons continued the business’s growth trajectory for 20 more years before selling it to private equity in October 2010.
Unlike many PE acquisitions, AssuraMed wasn’t a mess, or even close to it. RGH Enterprises, as it was called before being sold, was profitable, with low-double-digit revenue growth. Its managers were competent and content.
Enter new CEO Michael Petras. Michael had been the CEO of the lighting business at GE, an industry where even incremental growth was brutally hard. Suddenly, all around him, he saw so much opportunity—heaps of it, just waiting to be seized. And so he fired up his team with a “faster, faster” growth message. It became, in fact, the company’s new, overarching theme. It became its organizing principle and daily rallying cry.
Michael would tell you he and his team simultaneously pulled all the levers we’re going to look at in this chapter. That’s true. But for the purposes of discussion, let’s look at them one at a time, starting with a tactic he calls “fresh eyes.”
As in, “hire new people.”
Don’t panic. We realize that if you’re reading this, you probably feel as if you’ve already tried everything to spur growth and pushed every one of those efforts to the wall. Your customers wanted faster delivery; you embraced lean Six Sigma techniques and cut door-to-door times in half. The advertising revenue supporting your website was contracting; you moved to a subscription model. You’ve added every new service imaginable; you’ve taken the term “best practice” to the limit. And the results have been OK. You’ve gotten the business up to a 2 percent real-growth top line in a 2–3 percent economy, and with a nudge from enhanced productivity, you’ve leveraged that “growth” into solid single-digit earnings improvements. Not what you’d hoped for, given the resources invested, but the most you could expect today.
The problem with that line of thinking is, you probably haven’t tried everything. You’ve been too accepting of the circumstances. And to break out of that place, you need new brains in the game.
Now, when you’re not growing very fast, the last thing you want to do is go on a hiring spree. You like your team, even if it’s just four of you. They’re experienced; they’ve been with you shoulder-to-shoulder, trying out new initiatives. We empathize. But here’s reality: you and your team don’t know what you don’t know.
At AssuraMed, Michael Petras was surrounded by people who had “grown up” at the company. They knew the industry down to their toes. Michael didn’t want to let them go, because like you, he knew their value, but for the sake of fresh perspectives, he moved some of them into different roles and brought in six new leaders from companies outside the medical industry, including Hewlett-Packard and Grainger. And in perhaps the most startling move, he brought in a new marketing manager from Lean Cuisine, a frozen food division at Nestlé. Her name was Kristin Gibbs, and she took one look around AssuraMed and, like Michael, saw a veritable gold mine of growth possibilities. The company had long segmented customers by product, for instance. Kristin wondered what could be learned—and improved—if they were segmented by “disease state”—urological, insulin-dependent diabetic, and so on. Similarly, she noticed the company had not aligned its marketing programs with those of its manufacturers. What would happen if it did? Nor had the company ever spent much time promoting itself to nurses. What if it started showing up at their conventions, sponsoring luncheons, and telling the AssuraMed story?
The impact of Kristin’s various marketing initiatives was immediate and profound. Not because she was a new manager who introduced new managerial techniques, but because she was a new manager who saw the organization with new eyes—for what it was and what it could become.
If you want growth, no matter the size of your company or where you sit in it, be it leading a team or a department, don’t delay in bringing in a pair (or two) of your own fresh eyes.
Concentrate, Don’t Dilute
Most businesses have only so much money to spend on growth initiatives each year. And most of the time, whether the budget is $100,000 or $10 million, it’s not enough; again, that’s just one of those facts-of-life things.
But too often, the problem with growth isn’t the number of dollars available, it’s how managers allocate them.
They sprinkle. A little money on this initiative, a little on that, a bit more over here, some over there, until each initiative gets a dusting of funds, and everyone is unhappy. At least they’re equally unhappy, right? Or so goes the thinking of weak leaders practicing the age-old, favorite corporate pastime of CYA (covering your ass).
Such an approach, common though it may be, is a losing game. If you want growth, don’t hedge your bets. Go big to get big. That’s our second lever.
Michael Petras had lots of ways to allocate his resources toward growth at AssuraMed; indeed, within his first year, his top team (those fresh eyes again!) brought him more than a dozen investment options. They all had some merit—that was exciting. And so Michael and his team debated them for days. If you’d been there, the intensity at times would’ve reminded you of a good old-fashioned food fight. Ultimately, for maximum payback, they decided to fund only two. One was Kristin’s segmentation initiative and associated marketing projects. The other was a significant departure for the company—pushing aggressively into the urology market, where the company had a negligible presence.
Not surprisingly, expanding the urology business was met with skepticism by AssuraMed’s old guard. “We’ve tried that already,” they said. “Our competitors have it locked up.” But Petras argued that AssuraMed had never gone after urology with resources and commitment. And that’s what the company did in 2012, investing heavily in leadership, a dedicated sales force, and expanded billing capabilities. By the end of 2013, the business had doubled in size.
Who’d-a thunk it? Not anyone accustomed to sprinkling.
One last thought on growth and resource allocation. As we said, it can seem as if there’s never enough money to fund growth the way you know it “has” to be funded. “To get this new product off the ground, we need at least $150,000 in advertising,” you might tell your boss.
“I hear you. Here’s $50,000,” might come the answer.
Sometimes $50,000 is all there is to spare in the budget. Sometimes $50,000 is all you get because of the sprinkling going on.
Regardless, in such situations, your only hope is to innovate around the problem. Unleash creativity instead of dollars.
Like WestJet Airlines did.
It happened like this. In December 2013, vastly outspent by competitors and facing a lack of awareness in their target markets. WestJet picked two flights traveling from Toronto to Calgary and installed a present-shaped kiosk with a digital screen in the waiting area. An interactive Santa Claus greeted customers before they boarded. Ho-ho-ho, he said, who are you and what would you like for Christmas? It all seemed harmless enough; most people were game and answered. A camera, one customer replied. Socks and underwear, said another. A blender. A warm scarf. And on and on.
