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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Transform your organization into a dynamic catalyst for success Accelerating Performance is not just another "warm and fuzzy" change management book--it's a practical, comprehensive, data-driven action plan for picking up the pace and achieving more. Co-written by one of the authors of Beyond Performance, this book draws on a combination of empirical research and decades of experience advising global companies to show you how to reduce time to value by building and changing momentum more quickly than your competitors. The META framework (short for Mobilize, Execute, and Transform with Agility) offers advice for leading change at four levels: strategy, the organization, teams, and individuals. In addition to step-by-step guidance toward assessment, planning, and implementation, the book offers: * A diagnostic tool for leaders, teams, and organizations to assess their starting place, and highlight the specific areas needed to improve the ability to accelerate performance. * A detailed look at the factors proven to create drag--and drive--at each of the four levels: strategy, organizations, teams, and individuals. * An exploration of the 39 differentiating actions that organizations can combine as dictated by their strategy and context into a winning recipe. * A closer look at the practices of 23 "superaccelerators," a global (and perhaps unexpected) mix of companies that have demonstrated a consistent ability to accelerate performance. A single taste of success is all it takes to spark change, but the hard work of following through requires constant vigilance--and a plan. Learn how to capture that drive, bottle it, and use it to sustain motivation, inspiration, and achievement. Deliver at the highest level, and then turn around and do even better next time. Accelerating Performance gives leaders a step-by-step framework for taking action and transforming their organizations, teams, and even themselves--starting today.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Praise for Accelerating Performance
“Some business books excel at data-based analytical rigor, others at strategy, leadership, or soft skills. Accelerating Performance integrates all these vital components and teaches leaders how to drive fast with vision.”
—Tom Glocer, founder of Angelic Ventures LP, director of Merck & Co. and Morgan Stanley, and member of the supervisory board for Publicis Groupe
“An ambitious, breakthrough book! Who wouldn’t want their company to be in Colin and Sharon’s group of super-performers? Drawing on original research, illuminating cases, and practical advice, they show us a surprising—even unfashionable—route for companies to get there: not by reinventing themselves but by becoming significantly better versions of who they already are! Smart, funny, with a very high ‘PIPSI’ (provocative ideas per square inch).”
—Robert Kegan, Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development, Harvard University, and coauthor of An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization
“Delivering sustainable, standout performance is the holy grail for business leaders. Colin and Sharon present a compelling agenda to help leaders increase the metabolic rate in their business, thereby creating the conditions for long-term success. Boards and CEOs should take note—and take action.”
—David Roberts, chairman, Nationwide Building Society
Accelerating Performance
How Organizations Can Mobilize, Execute, and Transform with Agility
COLIN PRICESHARON TOYE
Cover image: © iStock.com/jmcreation
Cover design: Wiley
Leadership Signature® is a registered trademark of Heidrick & Struggles.
Copyright © 2017 by Colin Price and Sharon Toye. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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ISBN 978-1-119-14749-7 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-119-16359-6 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-1-119-16358-9 (ePub)
For Cameron and Jodie and the love of knowledge
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Introduction
Section I move fast or die faster
Chapter 1 The Soft Stuff Really Is the Hard Stuff
Chapter 2 How to Increase Your METAbolic Rate
The Need for Speed
Disruption
META
Chapter 3 A Learning Laboratory
Atento
Nets Holding
NXP
Chapter 4 Our Journey to META
The 23 Superaccelerators
The Journey
Chapter 5 What’s Your Current Pace?:
A Diagnostic
Section II The acceleration imperative
Chapter 6 Accelerating Strategy:
Less Plan, More Planning
Mobilize: Embrace Uncertainty
Mobilize: Pressure-Tested Decision Making
Mobilize: Shared Vision
Execute: Future Core Competencies
Execute: Adaptive Playbook
Transform: Balanced Portfolio
Transform: Fail Fast
Transform: Rapid Response
Agility: Foresight
Agility: Learning
Agility: Adaptability
Agility: Resilience
Chapter 7 Accelerating Organizations:
Turning Drag into Drive
The 13 Drag and Drive Factors
The 39 Differentiating Actions
Chapter 8 Accelerating Teams:
Capability Equals Ability Minus Ego
Mobilize
Execute
Transform
Agility
Caution for Senior Teams
Final Insights from Nationwide
Chapter 9 Accelerating Leaders:
The Leader Sets the Pace
How to Accelerate a Leader’s Performance
Execution Rhythms
Core Mind-Sets
Shifting Mind-Sets
Section III How to start
Chapter 10 Finding the Right Recipe
What the Right Recipe Can Produce
What a Confused Recipe Can Produce
How to Find the Right Recipe
A Journey in More Detail
Chapter 11 The ABC of Behavior Change
The “Any Behavior Change” (ABC) Model
The ABC Model in Action
Chapter 12 Change the People or Change the People
When You Can’t Change the People, You Have to Change the People
Hiring the Right CEO
What Makes a CEO Successful
Getting the Best out of Your New CEO
Shaping the Executive Team
Facing the Ugly Task
How to Ensure That You Don’t Have to Exit Executives (As Often)
Chapter 13 The Board as Catalyst
The Emerging Research
Four Types of Boards That Drive Acceleration
How to Accelerate Board Performance
If You Do Nothing Else, Do These Five Things
Section IV The four key skills
Chapter 14 Ripple Intelligence:
Join the Dots
Develop a 35,000-Foot View
Embrace the Power of Doubt
Train, Train, Train
Form the Right Teams
Test and Learn
Chapter 15 Resource Fluidity:
Match Resources to Opportunities
Fluid Reallocation of Capital Resources
People Mobility
Resource Sharing and Reuse
Chapter 16 Dissolving Paradox:
Reframe the Issue
The Four Levels of Thinking
An Application
Five Actions
Chapter 17 Liquid Leadership:
Connect Beyond Hierarchy
Leading Across Boundaries
A Focus on the New Workforce
How Liquid Leadership Looks in Practice
Chapter 18 Conclusion:
It’s More than a Program
The Five Steps to Acceleration
Lessons Learned
Research Appendix
1. Strategy Acceleration
2. Organizational Acceleration
3. Team Acceleration
4. Individual-Leader Acceleration
5. Board Acceleration
6. Superaccelerators Interviewed for This Book
7. The 23 Superaccelerators
Index
EULA
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Part
List of Tables
Chapter 4
Table 4.1
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
Chapter 6
Table 6.1
Chapter 7
Table 7.1
Chapter 9
Table 9.1
Chapter 13
Table 13.1
Table 13.2
Chapter 16
Table 16.1
Chapter 18
Table 18.1
Table 18.2
Table 18.3
Research Appendix
Table A.1
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Technological change is accelerating
Figure 2.2a
Execution trumps strategy: Industry view
Figure 2.2b
Execution trumps strategy: Geographic view
Figure 2.3
Why drive factors matter
Figure 2.4
META
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
The paradox of growth
Figure 4.2
Superaccelerators’ stocks outperform
Figure 4.3
The superaccelerators
Figure 4.4
Scores on organizational drive factors
Figure 4.5
Team performance
Figure 4.6
The clear benefits
Figure 4.7
Teams at the top struggle
Figure 4.8
Teams close to customers do better
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Revenue CAGR 2013–2015, industry averages
Figure 5.2
Revenue CAGR 2009–2015, industry averages
Figure 5.3
The five categories of acceleration
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Half the business is left to fate
Figure 6.2
The SAQ model
Figure 6.3
A shift toward greater ambiguity
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
The OAQ model
Figure 7.2
Drag factors for organizations
Figure 7.3
Drive factors for organizations
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
Drag factors for teams.
Figure 8.2
Drive factors for teams
Figure 8.3
The TAQ model
Figure 8.4
A sample TAQ heat map
Figure 8.5
Differentiating actions for teams
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1
The LAQ model
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1
Recipes, actions, and acid tests
Figure 10.2
Setting the agenda
Figure 10.3
Customer Intimate recipe
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1
The ABC model
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1
How to evaluate chances of success: An example
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1
The power of doubt
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1
Four levels of thinking
Research Appendix
Figure A.1
The SAQ model
Figure A.2
The OAQ model
Figure A.3
Measuring acceleration
Figure A.4
Revenue trend
Figure A.5
The TAQ model
Figure A.6
Sample team assessment: Focus on two sets of factors
Figure A.7
Figure The LAQ model
Figure A.8
The LEEEDS competency framework
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Foreword
One of the great pleasures of writing this book is that we had the opportunity to spend time with the CEO or other senior executives at so many of the 23 companies around the world that our research identified as the most successful in recent years. These 23 “superaccelerators” have cracked the code. They have managed to be both big and agile, pulling away from the pack through the sort of disciplined approach to acceleration that we lay out in this book.
The stories these executives told us give life to many of the concepts in the pages to follow. For example:
HDFC Bank can provide customers with a “10-second loan.” Paresh Sukthankar, the bank’s deputy managing director, told us that a profile can be developed in the background based on the information a customer provides online, and the subsequent loan can be processed and granted for a modest sum within seconds. We talk in the book about the need for “digital dexterity,” and the Indian financial services company provides a shining example.
While we talk about the need to “speak truth to power,” MasterCard has a pithy saying that addresses that need: “Good news takes the stairs, and bad news takes the elevator.” President and CEO Ajay Banga told us that he gets tired of all the self-congratulatory e-mails that are common in business: “So I’ve told everybody I don’t need good news.” Instead, he asks to hear first about the problems that need to be resolved.
Cigna, the huge health insurer, provides examples of two key points. First is the need to generate a strong sense of purpose, because it can make sure that everyone is pointed in the same direction and can get employees to provide their “discretionary effort”—the effort that they don’t have to provide to get by but one that turbocharges performance when employees can be motivated to provide it. Cigna president and CEO David Cordani said he stresses that employees aren’t just processing insurance policies. Instead, he says: “We exist to improve the health, well-being, and sense of security of the individuals we serve.”
Second, Cordani provided a vivid description of the benefit that comes from having a real dialogue with employees, viewing change as something you do with people, not to them (the traditional approach). Cordani said that his frequent meetings with employees allow him to connect face-to-face: “For example, are [employees] thinking and acting like owners—or renters? Are they looking forward and setting the bar higher, or looking backward and trying to justify what happened in the past? Seldom do you come away with a singular ‘aha’ moment. But you can get a lot of pearls, and when you string them together, you have a lot of value.”
Starbucks provided a great illustration of the value of reducing priorities to a handful, to avoid the kind of complexity that strangles so many businesses. Scott Pitasky, executive vice president and chief partner resources officer, notes that Starbucks’ focus “is on our partners [what the company calls its employees], on our coffee, and on the experience that we create in the store for our customers.”
Explaining the power of working outside the hierarchy (while not ditching it entirely) and of the need to create space for innovation, Matt Brittin, president of EMEA business and operations at Google, described how the company lets innovation bubble up from the bottom. Engineers can start to work on projects or ideas and try to rally support. If others join the effort, demonstrating potential, then Google starts to provide a little structure, partly by arranging for groups with similar ideas to work together. Brittin says Google has become big enough that it can no longer really go on letting “a thousand flowers bloom.” Instead, the company aspires to more “coherent bouquets” of innovation efforts.
For its part, BlackRock, the global investment firm, exemplifies a dedication to good old-fashioned execution—a quality that our research found to be a competitive differentiator in organizations more broadly. Speaking of the connection between talent management and success, Jeffrey Smith, BlackRock’s global head of human resources, told us: “I don’t think the magic for us is tied up in seeking out the most innovative, new talent thing that somebody can think of. Instead, the key is executing. We would rather support, drive, reinforce, and actually do the things that companies all know they’re supposed to do but frequently overlook.”
BlackRock’s pragmatism also extends to how it supports collaboration. “We spend a lot of time talking about what it means to ‘be a good peer,’” noted Smith. “That really matters around here.”
Jeff Sprecher, founder and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, told us that he encourages collaboration outside hierarchy, even to the point of designing his headquarters to make chance meetings likely. Among other things, he puts only certain soda flavors on each floor, so someone wanting a certain type might have to go to a different floor—and bump into someone interesting along the way.
He also provided great examples both of how crucial it is for leaders to be aware of how they’re thinking and acting and of the importance of leaders’ role-modeling behaviors (including humility) for the rest of the organization. Sprecher told us: “I’m a terrible manager. I am just a terrible manager. And so you say, ‘Okay, how does a terrible manager manage an organization?’ The only thing I could come up with is to lead by example, to run my own behavior the way I would want my employees to run their behavior, and do it in a way that is quite obvious and transparent and hope that people will try to emulate the leader.”
We talked with our interviewees about the need to see the world through customers’ eyes—we believe, like Peter Drucker, that solving a customer problem should be the core aim of any business. Connie Ma, vice president of human resources at TSMC, takes this attitude to heart when she maintains: “[Customers’] success is our success, and we value their ability to compete as we value our own.”
Natarajan Chandrasekaran, CEO of Tata Consultancy Services, epitomizes this customer-focused outlook: “Whether you are in the front office, the back office, or the CEO of the company, every employee should know how what they do affects the customer.” Thyagi Thyagarajan, an independent director at TCS, echoed this view, telling us that employees there “have no fear of being fired by the company” but that they do fear “being fired or rejected by the customer. If the customer is unhappy, that’s what employees fear.”
There’s more, actually much more, but those quotes should give you a taste of what is to come. We hope you appreciate the insights from these leaders as much as we do.
Acknowledgments
A book is a team effort. The players on this team were a delight to work with. Ruben Hillar, our chief researcher, applied boundless curiosity matched only by his inexhaustible energy. Becky Hogan mined the data with a ferocious intensity. David Turnbull was the bass player of our little band; his cool logic and unflappable calm kept us on track. Toomas Truumees and Camelia Ram led the charge on Chapter 6. Krishnan Rajagopalan, Jeff Sanders, and Samantha Smith brought decades of executive search experience to Chapter 12. Carolyn Vavrek and Bonnie Gwin took the lead role on Chapter 13 and brought us invaluable insights. Susan Moore was tireless and painstaking in her editorial efforts, and Heloisa Nogueira, with the assistance of Thomas Fleming, Rachel Swift, and Melissa Haniff, managed the publishing process with aplomb. Paul Carroll took our words and made them readable.
Thank you.
About the Authors
Colin Price is an executive vice president and the global managing partner of the Leadership Consulting Practice at Heidrick & Struggles. He has advised many of the world’s largest corporations, several national governments, and a number of charitable institutions. His books include Mergers (with David Fubini of McKinsey & Company and Maurizio Zollo of INSEAD), Vertical Take-Off (with Sir Richard Evans, former chair of British Aerospace), and Beyond Performance (with Scott Keller of McKinsey & Company). He holds degrees in economics, industrial relations and psychology, and organizational behavior. He has presented at many prestigious conferences, including the World Economic Forum and the Harvard Roundtable series. He is an associate fellow of Saïd Business School at Oxford University and a visiting professor at Imperial College London.
Sharon Toye is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ London office and a member of its Leadership Consulting Practice, where she heads up the global service line for accelerating team performance. An organization development expert, qualified psychotherapist, and highly skilled consultant, she has more than 20 years of experience as an executive and top-team coach. She has served as a leadership advisor to many top global companies in a range of industries, including investment and wealth management banking, engineering, and telecommunications, as well as to the top teams of PE-backed market leaders. She holds an MBA from the London Business School, an MSc in organizational psychology from Birkbeck College at the University of London, and an MSc in integrative psychotherapy. She has been published in Business Strategy Review and strategy+business as well as in Managerial Forensics.
INTRODUCTIONWhy We Wrote This Book The Data Sets You Free
When companies talk about “big data,” they’re talking about how to better understand the great, big world out there, beyond their corporate walls. What happens inside those walls has historically been seen as too fuzzy, too qualitative, to lend itself to rigorous research and management of big data. The internal workings, especially where people are involved, have been seen as “the soft stuff” and shielded from hard science. Certainly, there have been employee morale surveys and the tracking of retention rates, but organizations haven’t done the kind of work that would allow them to understand what really works and what’s folklore when it comes to managing organizations in ways that will win in the marketplace. People bring a lot of intellect and common sense to management, but common sense isn’t always enough—witness what behavioral economists are teaching us about the quirks of customer behavior versus the old approach to economics that assumed that all actors were perfectly rational.
It’s time to recognize that “the soft stuff” is really the hard stuff and to bring hard science to management.
Moving organizational behavior into the realm of science is the core mission of this book. We prefer facts over fiction. We think HR, for instance, needs less PowerPoint and more Excel. We’re not saying all the facts are easy. Markets and businesses are ecosystems, not machines, so interactions can be hard to discern. But we have to get beyond generalities and form “rebuttable presumptions,” clear hypotheses that can be tested and potentially disproved. To quote Lord Kelvin, the physicist known for determining the value of absolute zero: “When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it, but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” It’s time that our understanding of organizational behavior moves beyond the “meager and unsatisfactory.”
We do that by building on the work that led up to Colin’s 2011 book with Scott Keller, Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage. That book also took a strong research focus, drawing on 600,000 survey responses, including from 6,800 CEOs and other senior executives, at more than 500 organizations. The book largely focused on how to improve organizational health. For this book, we have broadened the scope of the analysis to look at all organizational behavior issues that drive performance at all relevant levels—strategy, teams, and leaders, in addition to the organization level. We have done so through many thousands of additional surveys and interviews, including in-depth interviews at many of the 23 companies that we identified (based on methodology described in detail in Chapter 4) as the world’s most successful over the past seven years.
As Alan Mulally said when he took over at Ford as CEO in 2006 and began an epic turnaround of the company, “The data sets you free.”1
The research for this book pulls together numerous strands of work, notably those represented by our decades as consultants and advisers. Colin comes at the problem from a background in economics—he taught at Oxford—and in management consulting. He was the fourth consultant hired at Price Waterhouse, right before In Search of Excellence was published in 1982 and sent interest in management consulting through the roof. As the practice grew at Price Waterhouse, he ran the organization in England, then in Europe, and then worldwide. He then spent 15 years at McKinsey, where he became a director (senior partner) and led the Organization Practice globally; he drove the development and use of McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index, the tool that was used as the empirical basis of Beyond Performance.
Sharon began in organization development at National Power and further developed her experience in organizational transformation at Accenture. During this time, she collected an MBA from the London Business School, an MSc in organizational psychology from Birkbeck College at the University of London, and an MSc in integrative psychotherapy. She is also a licensed psychotherapist and a master certified coach (ICF MCC). She founded Co Company to apply her expertise in organizational change and leadership development to performance enhancement in companies. When Colin left McKinsey in 2014, he joined Co Company, which Heidrick & Struggles acquired in 2015. Colin is now the managing partner of the Leadership Consulting Practice for Heidrick & Struggles; Sharon is a partner in the Leadership Consulting Practice in the London office, where as the developer and author of the team accelerator methodology she leads the firm’s work in this area. She has published on the topic in a number of books and journals, including Managerial Forensics, Business Strategy Review, and strategy+business.
We think of our work as a living combination of the hard stuff and the soft stuff—economics, management consulting, psychology, and therapy.
We have, of course, also greatly benefited from the decades of experience of our colleagues at Heidrick & Struggles, who have seen what works and what doesn’t at the senior-most levels of corporations.
In many ways, the argument we make should be easier for people to accept now than it would have been in the “pre-Lehman” era. Lehman Brothers was the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States before going under in 2008, essentially signaling that the dam had burst and that the U.S. federal government was no longer going to stand in the way of a financial collapse that wiped out $14.5 trillion of the value of companies on the world’s stock markets, or a third of the total. Lehman Brothers employees were earning gobs of money by engaging in incredibly risky behaviors, but, in the pre-collapse days, warning signs weren’t spotted because those overpaid employees were as happy as could be.
The hard stuff hadn’t yet come to the soft stuff, so it was hard to see the effects that a toxic culture would have on Lehman Brothers and then the whole global financial system. In the “post-Lehman” era, by contrast, the need to go well beyond traditional measures of financial performance should be evident.
The answers won’t all be in this book. That’s not what science does. Besides, there’s so much uncertainty in the environment these days that a certain amount of good fortune will always be required.
But we believe the saying that “luck is the residue of design,” and we intend to equip you so well on the design piece that you will be in a great position to capitalize on opportunities for luck.
We, and many others, will continue to build on what’s here by constantly testing what’s working and what isn’t and quantifying how to proceed.
Let the science begin!
Note
1
Bryce G. Hoffman,
American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company,
New York: Crown, 2012.
SECTION IMove Fast or Die Faster
As promised in the Introduction, this section follows the data and fleshes out the core argument of this book: that organizations can generate enormous benefit by taking an empirical approach to management.
In Chapter 1, we set the stage by showing why the current approach to managing institutions isn’t working—and can’t work. At fabled institution after fabled institution—BP, the British Army, Parliament, HSBC, and on and on—major failures have occurred because of dysfunctional cultures. But current approaches to management don’t adequately address the issues that would have prevented those disasters. We’re doomed to repeat them unless we greatly update our thinking, recognizing that the soft stuff really is the hard stuff and taking the series of actions that the data shows will help today’s institutions achieve breakthrough success.
Chapter 2 covers the basics of our META approach, which stands for Mobilize, Execute, and Transform with Agility. We start by showing how two of the mantras among executives today—the need to go faster and the need to look for disruptive business models—can take organizations into blind alleys. Businesses can land in an “acceleration trap,” where they aren’t discriminating enough about their search for speed and actually go more slowly. Our research also found that there is more opportunity for improvement by being more effective in the markets where you already operate rather than by taking the more disruptive approach and moving into different industries or new geographies. That’s a key point that many businesses miss. They may spend so much time looking for the next big thing that they miss the even bigger opportunities that are right in front of them.
Chapter 3 shows in living color how important META can be, by detailing how Bain Capital Private Equity has become a catalyst for acceleration. We walk through three case studies of companies in the Bain Capital portfolio to see how principles from META have unlocked enormous potential. For instance, Nets Holding, a payments processor in Scandinavia, has gone from declining revenue to organic growth of 6 percent in recent quarters. It has seen profit margins increase by 14 percentage points since Bain Capital, Advent International, and ATP bought the company from a consortium of 180 banks in 2014. Nets has explicitly followed many of the META principles we lay out in this book. It developed a detailed plan anchored in a thorough understanding of its markets, customers, competitors, and profitability. It quickly got alignment among its top team, partly by hiring new talent and capabilities for the 60 percent to 70 percent of roles where moving fast was especially important. Nets Holding also generated quick wins that produced momentum and freed up cash and identified 10 operational issues that had to be fixed immediately.
In Chapter 4, we describe the research journey that took us to META. We dove into the details of the management at half of the FT 500 companies, interviewed senior executives at many of the top-performing companies we identified in our research, surveyed 20,000 global leaders, conducted in-depth interviews with 150 of them, analyzed data from 3,000 teams, drew from our library of more than 10,000 executive assessments using our latest tool and from our experience of placing more than 4,000 executives a year—and more. Research rarely makes for great reading, but we felt the need to demonstrate the extraordinary amount of work that went into META, as long as we’re arguing for a data-driven approach to management—and we certainly hope that you find our journey interesting.
Chapter 5 provides a baseline for you as you approach the rest of this book. It gives you two quick ways to see where you fall on our acceleration scale, one based simply on the compound annual growth rate of your organization and your industry, and the other based on answers to 16 questions. Armed with the answers, you can start to see how much work, and what sort of work, you have ahead of you.
CHAPTER 1The Soft Stuff Really Is the Hard Stuff
It’s a pleasant evening in central London, and we just finished our last meeting—a wide-ranging discussion at Chatham House about some of the changes that could occur in the global political climate. We decide to walk to our dinner appointment.
Walking around St. James’s Square takes us past BP’s global headquarters, and a bad memory surfaces. BP, founded more than a century ago, has been a revered institution in the United Kingdom and has positioned itself for the future with aggressive moves into renewable energy. But there’s that memory of April 20, 2010, when the Macondo oil well erupted below BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, killing 11 workers and injuring 16 others. The explosion caused the massive rig to become engulfed in a fireball and sink into the Gulf of Mexico. A sea-floor oil gusher flowed for 87 days, and more than 200 million gallons of oil and 225,000 tons of methane gas spilled into the ocean and along more than 1,000 miles of coastline of all the Gulf states—the catastrophe is described as the largest accidental marine oil spill in the world and the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. The toll on local businesses is still being calculated, but it appears that in claims, cleanup efforts, fines, and victim compensation, BP will pay out more than $65 billion.1
How could this happen to such a great company? The investigation into what went wrong blamed “a culture of complacency.” William Reilly, co-chair of the commission that investigated the disaster, said there was “emphatically not a culture of safety on that rig.”2
As we continue our walk to dinner, we carry on to Trafalgar Square and then head down Whitehall, sticking to the streets rather than walking through St. James’s Park, as we’re looking for a cash machine. We pass the Old War Office building on our left and the Household Cavalry Museum on our right. We’re reminded that all isn’t right with the military, either.
It seems the U.K. Army had become a bloated bureaucracy, especially at the top levels. As reported in The Times [of London], the new head of the army, General Sir Nicholas Carter, decided to reduce the number of colonels, brigadiers, and generals to “stop the rise of ‘yes men.’” He also wanted to curb the widespread tendency among officers to “put the interests of their ‘tribe’ before those of the wider force.” The article places the blame on “flawed leadership” and “an institutional malaise in which commanders are rarely held to account. . . . [B]ureaucracy takes precedence over common sense and people are not encouraged to take risks.”3
Hurrying down Whitehall, still not having found a cash machine, we pass a throng of demonstrators—taxi drivers with signs protesting that Uber is unfairly putting them out of business. In reality, their industry is yet another great London institution that didn’t keep up with the times. London’s black cabs are famous, and its drivers are arguably the best informed in the world. They have to pass “The Knowledge,” a test about routes and landmarks first administered in the mid-1800s; it is so exhaustive that drivers need an average of 34 months to succeed. Today The Knowledge has to compete with its lowercase equivalent—the knowledge drawn from satellite navigation systems and embedded in every smartphone—and with the new business model represented by Uber, Lyft, and others. And the taxi industry didn’t adequately prepare.
Pushing our way through the protestors, we pass on our left Richmond House, the headquarters of the Department of Health, responsible for one of the treasures of the modern British state, the National Health Service (NHS).
Ahhh, the healers. Arrggh, the healers.
In March 2009, problems were exposed at Stafford Hospital, run by the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. Based on investigations, press reports suggested that between 400 and 1,200 more patients died between 2005 and 2009 than would have if the proper actions had been taken by hospital staff. The public inquiry cast grave doubt on those numbers, saying they were the product of flawed statistical methods and finding against the hospital in only four deaths, two of which occurred in the years at issue. Still, the inquiry uncovered “an insidious negative culture involving a tolerance of poor standards and a disengagement from managerial and leadership responsibilities. . . . There was an atmosphere of fear of adverse repercussions; a high priority was placed on the achievement of targets.”4
Eventually, we get to Parliament Square, where the BBC is taking advantage of the pleasant weather to interview politicians on the green outside the Houses of Parliament. The BBC is such a symbol of integrity, except that . . .
In January 2014, The Guardian reported that “[s]enior BBC figures are facing calls to reform the corporation’s ‘culture of secrecy,’ as an internal inquiry is expected to reveal Jimmy Savile sexually abused up to 1,000 children while working for the corporation.”5 Savile, who died October 29, 2011, at the age of 84, was a media personality best known for hosting a BBC show called Jim’ll Fix It, which featured letters from children making wishes that the show then granted. The show ran for almost 20 years. In October 2012, 18 years after the show ended (and after Savile’s death), allegations of child abuse were made against him, including claims that he devised some episodes to gain access to potential victims. The BBC had previously been warned about problems and spent six weeks investigating but, in December 2011, dropped the probe and, instead, aired programs over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays that year that paid tribute to Savile. However, the police opened an investigation (“Operation Yewtree”) and, in January 2013, confirmed that there were 450 alleged victims of sex abuse by Savile.6 An inquiry into the BBC’s dropped investigation of Savile found that “crucial information . . . was not shared” inside the BBC and that “no-one seemed to grasp what should be done with the information. . . . Efforts were hampered in part by an apparent adherence to rigid management chains and a reluctance to bypass them.”7
Turning away from the interviews, our eye falls on the somewhat dilapidated Palace of Westminster, home to Parliament. Still more problems there . . .
In May 2009, The Daily Telegraph published the first in a series of articles that exposed a scandal involving the abuse by many British Members of Parliament (MPs) in claiming their business expenses. It was front-page news for more than a year, and the upshot was that more than half of all 646 MPs (at the time) had been claiming outrageous expenses—so much so that this particular group of MPs were dubbed the “rotten Parliament.”8
Worrying about MPs’ expenses reminds us again that we need to find a cash machine, so we hurry into the Tesco Metro Express next to Westminster Station. Tesco, we now recall, was itself the subject of an accountancy scandal, when it was discovered that it had overstated its profits by hundreds of millions of pounds.9
Now in search of light relief, we look among the Sunday papers for the News of the World to laugh at the celebrity gossip, before remembering that it folded a few years ago.
In the summer of 2005, complaints arose about probable voice mail hacking, implicating the British tabloid publication News of the World (NoW). Over the next 10 years, more and more information was released, with the end result involving more than 1,000 victims—ranging from Prince William to 9/11 victims and including a missing teenager, whose phone messages were allegedly deleted to free up space, causing her parents to believe she was still alive (the teen was later found to have been murdered). The investigation also revealed the hacking of phones belonging to J. K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter books), actor Hugh Grant, Sarah Ferguson (the Duchess of York), an MP, the U.K.’s former deputy prime minister, and many others. Former News of the World journalists claimed that phone hacking was “a common practice at NoW.”10 Though Andy Coulson, editor of NoW, claimed to have no knowledge of the hacking, he resigned from his position in 2007. News of the World folded in July 2011, ending 168 years of publication. Several high-level executives of its parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News International, resigned, including the CEO, the head of the Dow Jones division of News Corp and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and James Murdoch (son of Rupert), who was chair of U.K. satellite broadcaster BSkyB. Coulson, amid the fallout of the scandal, also resigned from his subsequent position as British Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokesman and spent five months in prison. Millions of pounds in fines were paid to the victims, and several people were arrested and convicted, with jail time, of conspiracy to intercept phone messages. A formal inquiry found “a failure of systems of management and compliance. None of the witnesses were able to identify who was responsible for ensuring compliance with an ethical approach to journalism.”11
We finally find a cash machine at Barclays Bank, in business for 325 years and the very image of security. But Barclays summons its own bad memory. In 2012, Barclays was fined £290 million (almost $500 million) by U.S. and U.K. regulators for attempted manipulation of the Libor and Euribor rates (i.e., the average interest rates at which banks borrow funds from one another).12 The bank’s stock price declined more than 15 percent, which wiped out about £3.5 billion from the bank’s market capitalization, and both the chair and CEO of Barclays resigned their positions. The investigation into the scandal found that “the business practices for which Barclays has rightly been criticised were shaped predominantly by its cultures” (plural, because there were multiple subcultures). The report added: “[A]cross the whole bank, there were no clearly articulated and understood shared values—so there could hardly be much consensus among employees as to . . . what should guide everyday behaviours.”13
A broader study, by New City Agenda and London’s Cass Business School, indicted the whole industry for its “near-death experience” and noted: “The banks have paid out £38.5 billion [over $60 billion] in fines and customer redress relating to their retail operations since 2000. Banks have also received 20.8 million complaints between 2008 and the first half of 2014.” The volume of complaints about banks lodged to the Financial Ombudsman Service more than quintupled between 2008–2009 and 2013–2014, going from 75,000 to more than 400,000. The report found that one of the most important causes of this extreme situation was the aggressive sales culture of many banks, which rewarded employees for selling financial products that customers didn’t necessarily want or need.14
All right then. Moving on.
We can’t use our card at Barclays because the machine is out of cash, so we head down the street to HSBC, the U.K.’s largest bank. HSBC does business in 80 countries and employs 240,000 people (44,000 of them in Britain). But, oh yes, in 2012 HSBC was fined $1.9 billion for helping drug cartels to launder money;15 the ensuing investigation revealed—surprise, surprise—that the root of the problem was the organization’s culture.
Given how many institutions have been fined throughout the banking industry, it’s clear that these settlements actually settle little, and the details of the poor cultures that lead to them are being swept under an already lumpy carpet.
That reminds us that poor organizational health is a problem of not only individual banks but the U.K. banking system overall. The Bank of England (which functions in much the same way as the U.S. Federal Reserve) was revealed as woefully unprepared for the financial crisis that occurred in 2007: “Bank directors did not properly challenge executives, while managers often failed to give members of its court—or board—a full account of the breakdown in the U.K.’s regulatory regime, particularly the dysfunctional relationship between the Bank and the Financial Services Authority, then the City watchdog.”16
And who knows what will happen after Brexit? Will the Bank of England and other institutions handle the departure from the European Union any better than they have past convulsions in the market?
Oh, enough already. We decide to stop this walk. It’s depressing. Let’s find a pub so we can stop in before dinner and have a stiff drink or three.
■ ■ ■
We aren’t intentionally picking on the United Kingdom here. Every country has its list of institutional scandals these days. Germany’s Volkswagen has acknowledged a broad cheating campaign designed so that its diesel cars could pass emissions tests. Japanese carmakers have also been caught cheating on mileage tests. In the United States, financial institutions—including blue-chip firms such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase—have paid more than $110 billion to settle charges related to their role in selling mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them and feeding the Great Recession. Boeing’s chief financial officer illegally offered a job to a U.S. Air Force official while the official was negotiating with potential suppliers for a $23 billion contract for aerial refueling tankers; he was sentenced to four months in prison in 2005.17 The Air Force official pleaded guilty to favoring Boeing on four contracts and was sentenced to nine months in prison.18
We’re making a broad point, about institutions in every country, and felt it was worth taking that rather long walk to do so. We have deliberately offered an almost obsessive repetition to make our point that, no matter where you look, the same dynamic is revealed. The culture of these organizations is driving their behavior. The soft stuff drives the hard stuff—as in, the numbers in the financial results that tend to draw our focus.
Why do so many institutions fall down? We believe it is because the actors become more important than the audience. In other words, the people in the institution place greater value on their own well-being than on the people whom the institution is serving. BP’s managers were more concerned with profitability than with the safety of the drill operators. Executives in several banks looked after themselves rather than their customers. Members of Parliament were also looking after themselves, rather than their constituents, when they fiddled their expenses. News of the World was more interested in publishing gossipy stories that would appeal to readers than it was with protecting the privacy of the people whose phones it hacked to get those stories. The Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was more concerned with keeping costs down than with taking care of its patients. There is a psychological term called the iron law of oligarchy, which says that, as soon as you give an institution power, it will begin to obsess about itself rather than the people it is supposed to serve. People see the world as divided between the have-nots and the have-yachts—and decide they’d like to join the latter.
These cultural failings fit in a larger context because they aren’t generally seen as being as important as some of the other dynamics driving business these days. The emphasis everywhere is on disruption, not on the fundamentals of managing a business as effectively as possible, taking what could be drag factors and turning them into factors that drive the business forward. Disruption wasn’t the issue with these failings. BP didn’t have a well blow up because its market was being disrupted by, say, fracking. HSBC didn’t launder money and Barclays didn’t fix interest rates because of pressure from start-ups such as Lending Tree. People didn’t die at Stafford Hospital because of new molecular therapies. These institutions—and so many like them—had problems because they didn’t pay attention to the soft stuff that drives the hard stuff.
There is no doubt that any leader has to have one eye on disruption. Look at digital photography, the move to online retailing, the reinvention of the music industry, and all the other changes we read about. But to read the news these days you’d think that the whole game is to find a new business model or at least new markets. In fact, as we’ll prove in this book, moving into a new industry or geography generally isn’t the best answer. You should be ready for any disruption but will miss an awful lot of opportunities in the meantime if that is your primary focus.
The fear of disruption leads to an indiscriminate emphasis on speed. Every part of the organization has to go faster, faster, faster, all the time. In fact, while we all feel that we’re going faster, based on the deluge of information that fills our in-boxes every day and that we have at our fingertips through our smartphones, much of that feeling is an illusion. The rate of consumer product launches has changed little for years. The same is true for the rate of production in factories—in fact, productivity in general has improved so little, despite all the technology being deployed, that economists are puzzled. A U.S. think tank, the Conference Board, actually projected a decline in productivity for 2016, the first drop in three decades.19 The period over which a company could achieve sustainable competitive advantage, as measured by return on capital in the S&P 500, hasn’t changed since 2000.20
Some change is even slowing down. The median tenure of a CEO increased to 5 years in 2014, from 3 years in 2007, and the average S&P 500 CEO retiring in 2014 had held the position for 10 years, the highest number since 2002.21 A survey of 2,000 project managers at more than 60 companies around the world found that, in 2015, it took an average of 63 days to hire an employee, up from 42 in 2010, and the time to complete an IT project rose from 9 months to 10, on average. The process by which one company sells something to another takes 22 percent more time because five or more people now have to approve a deal, up from one or two.22 Yes, the world is speeding up in many ways, but it’s important to separate reality from the feeling of speed.
The right answer—the one that will deliver the most return, most reliably—is to increase the metabolic rate of your organization through a process that lets you increase speed, but only in certain places, in certain ways, at certain times, designed for maximum effect. We call this process META for two reasons. First, META is an acronym for Mobilize, Execute, and Transform with Agility. Second, as economist Paul Romer observes, “Perhaps the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas—ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas.”23
This metaphoric process isn’t about finding a single breakthrough of the sort that would lead to the next Airbnb. It’s more about taking a series of threads, each not especially strong, and weaving them into a fabric that is very strong. Let’s use one more analogy: In thinking about how to solve problems, people often talk about getting rid of the bad apples. We think that the issue isn’t just the apples; it’s also the barrel makers. We will help you build better barrels so you have better apples.
We will spend the rest of this book showing how we arrived at META and then explaining in detail how to implement it. We do so based on our personal work with clients over decades and on definitive research done specifically for this book. We seek to be rigorous, empirical, and evidence based. Too many organizations are managed by “anecdata,” a sprinkling of data used to justify personal opinions. The recommendations that you will find here are based on thorough analysis.
If you can increase your corporate metabolic rate, you will accelerate your business, and you will win. Even if the world isn’t all disruption and unmitigated speed, there are still enormous opportunities to make your business more profitable.
You know the opportunities are there. You can see them and feel them. We’ll help you find them, explore them, and exploit them.
In the spirit of that optimism, let’s briefly remind ourselves of the progress that the world’s organizations have enabled in the past century-plus, rather than risk leaving you with a depressive hangover after the walk that opened this chapter. Observe the following:
Mortality among children under the age of five in the world has dropped by half just since 1990, to 46 per 1,000 live births, thanks to the collaboration of research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and health systems. In 2015 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation predicted that the rate can be cut by half again by 2030.
24
The adult literacy rate has nearly quadrupled, from 21 percent of the world’s population in 1900 to 83 percent in 2010, thanks to the spread of education.
25
At the time of this writing, we had either just passed or were about to reach the point (methodologies vary) where more than half of the world’s population has access to the Internet and, thus, essentially all the world’s knowledge and each other. That figure was less than 1 percent in 1995.
26
The change will drive a new era of transparency and accountability.
The number of people living in extreme poverty (with an income of $1.90 or less a day) fell below 10 percent for the first time, in 2015.
27
The figure was 44 percent in 1981.
28
The decline means that some 1.2 billion people climbed out of extreme poverty in those three and a half decades, and the World Bank pledges to end extreme poverty by 2030. Some 700 million people are still living in extreme poverty, and we as a global community should surely set our sights higher than an income of $1.90 a day, but the progress is enormous.
Organizations made the progress happen, despite their many flaws. Although there is no doubt a dark side to failing organizations, the drive that organizations can provide for our species and our planet holds the promise of more progress in the next 100 years than we can possibly imagine.
Notes
1
National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling,
Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling
, Report to the President, January 2011.
2
Suzanne Goldenberg, “US oil spill inquiry chief slams BP’s ‘culture of complacency,’”
Guardian
, November 9, 2010,
theguardian.com
.
3
Deborah Haynes, “Army chief takes axe to ‘bloated’ top brass,”
Times
[of London], January 24, 2015, thetimes.co.uk.
4
Robert Francis, Chair,
Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry
, Executive Summary, February 2013, gov.uk.
5
Jason Deans, “Culture of secrecy blamed for BBC’s failure to stop Jimmy Savile’s crimes,”
Guardian,
January 19, 2014,
theguardian.com
.
6
David Gray and Peter Watt,
Giving Victims a Voice: Joint Report into Sexual Allegations Made Against Jimmy Savile
, a joint Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) report, January 2013,
nspcc.org.uk
.
7
Nick Pollard,
The Pollard Review: Report
, ReedSmith, December 18, 2012, bbc.co.uk.
8
Robert Winnett, “More than half of MPs guilty of over-claiming expenses,”
Telegraph
, February 5, 2010, telegraph.co.uk.
9
Caroline Binham and Scheherazade Daneshkhu, “Serious Fraud Office launches Tesco accounts probe,”
Financial Times
, October 29, 2014,
ft.com
.
10
“UK phone hacking scandal fast facts,”
CNN Library
, updated April 24, 2016,
cnn.com
.
11
Lord Justice Leveson,
The Leveson Inquiry: An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices, and Ethics of the Press
, Executive Summary, November 2012, gov.uk.
12
Harry Wilson, “Barclays hit with £290m fine over Libor fixing,”
Telegraph
, June 27, 2012, telegraph.co.uk.
13
Anthony Salz,
Salz Review: An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices
, April 2013,
euromoney.com/downloads/2013/Barclays-Salz-review.pdf
.
14
New City Agenda and Cass Business School,
A Report on the Culture of British Retail Banking
, Executive Summary, November 2014, newcityagenda.co.uk.
15
Jill Treanor and Dominic Rushe, “HSBC pays record $1.9bn fine to settle US money-laundering accusations,”
Guardian
, December 11, 2012,
theguardian.com
.
16
Harry Wilson and Philip Aldrick, “Minutes reveal Bank in chaos as financial crisis hit,”
Times
[of London], January 7, 2015, thetimes.co.uk.
17
Peter Pae, “Ex-Boeing CFO gets jail for tanker scandal,”
Chicago Tribune
, February 18, 2005,
chicagotribune.com
.
18
Renae Merle and Jerry Markon, “Ex-Air Force official gets prison time,”
Washington Post
, October 2, 2004,
washingtonpost.com
.
19
Sam Fleming and Chris Giles, “US productivity slips for first time in three decades,”
Financial Times
, May 25, 2016,
ft.com
.
20
“The creed of speed,”
Economist
, December 5, 2015,
economist.com
.
21
“The creed of speed,”
Economist
, December 5, 2015,
economist.com
.
22
Tom Monahan, “The hard evidence: Business is slowing down,”
Fortune
, January 28, 2016,
fortune.com
.
23
Paul M. Romer, “Economic growth,” in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Second Edition, ed. David R. Henderson, Library of Economics and Liberty, 2007,
econlib.org
.
24
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
2015 Gates Annual Letter: Our Big Bet for the Future
, 2015,
gatesnotes.com
.
25
Max Roser, “Literacy,”
Our World in Data
, 2016,
ourworldindata.org
.
26
“Internet users,”
Internet Live Stats
,
internetlivestats.com
.
27
“World Bank forecasts global poverty to fall below 10% for the first time; major hurdles remain in goal to end poverty by 2030,” press release, World Bank, October 4, 2015,
worldbank.org
.
28
Poverty overview, World Bank, April 13, 2016,
worldbank.org
.
CHAPTER 2How to Increase Your METAbolic Rate
Lots of management advice taken as authoritative is actually anecdotal. Some of it is explicitly so, such as in the currently popular books by Richard Branson and Mark Cuban on the lessons that they draw from their successful careers (and that may or may not be applicable to yours). Some is so breezily anecdotal that readers can peruse the material for pleasure but know not to take it seriously, such as in books on the wisdom to be drawn from Winnie the Pooh, the crew of the Starship Enterprise, or Genghis Khan. But a great deal of management advice is in the dangerous middle ground: based on a certain amount of experience with reality, but not so much so that the lessons drawn can be broadly applied.
