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Sign up to subscribe to email alerts and you'll never miss a post. The opinions expressed here by Inc. In fact, Bank of America recruited so many Wells Fargo executives during its turnaround that people inside began to refer to themselves as "Wells of America. What's new about that? But what stands out with such distinction in the good-to-great companies are two key points that made them quite different.
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When Maxwell became C E O of Fannie Mae during its darkest days, the board desperately wanted to know how he was going to rescue the company. Despite the immense pressure to act, to do something dramatic, to seize the wheel and start dri- ving, Maxwell focused first on getting the right people on the Fannie Mae management team. His first act was to interview all the officers. He sat them down and said, "Look, this is going to be a very hard challenge. I want you to think about how demanding this is going to be. If you don't think you're going to like it, that's fine.
Nobody's going to hate you.
I5 The same standard applied up and down the Fannie Mae ranks as managers at every level increased the caliber of their teams and put immense peer pressure upon each other, creating high turnover at first, when some people just didn't pan out. Dick Cooley and David Maxwell both exemplified a classic Level 5 style when they said, "I don't know where we should take this company, but I do know that if I start with the right people, ask them the right questions, and engage them in vigorous debate, we will find a way to make this company great.
In this model, the company is a platform for the talents of an extraordinary individual. In these cases, the towering genius, the primary driving force in the company's success, is a great asset- as long as the genius sticks around. The geniuses seldom build great man- agement teams, for the simple reason that they don't need one, and often don't want one. If you're a genius, you don't need a Wells Fargo-caliber management team of people who could run their own shows elsewhere.
No, they first got the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus and then figured out where to drive it. C K'L Rather, the process resembled relentlessly pushing a giant heavy flywheel in one direction, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar. We debated the point for a few minutes, with Wurtzel continuing his preference for attributing much of his success to just being in the right place at the right time. The Knowing-Doing Gap is the first book to confront the challenge of turning knowledge about how to improve performance into actions that produce measurable results. Why do some companies fall from greatness? In one series of events, the company opened a new store called The Golden Key, a separate brand wherein it could experiment with new methods and models to learn what customers wanted.
No, you just need an army of good soldiers who can help implement your great ideas. However, when the genius leaves, the helpers are often lost. Or, worse, they try to mimic their predecessor with bold, visionary moves trying to act like a genius, without being a genius that prove unsuccessful.
Eckerd Corporation suffered the liability of a leader who had an uncanny genius for figuring out "what" to do but little ability to assemble the right "who" on the executive team. Jack Eckerd, blessed with monu- mental personal energy he campaigned for governor of Florida while running his company and a genetic gift for market insight and shrewd deal making, acquired his way from two little stores in Wilmington, Delaware, to a drugstore empire of over a thousand stores spread across the southeastern United States.
By the late s, Eckerd's revenues equaled Walgreens', and it looked like Eckerd might triumph as the great company in the industry. But then Jack Eckerd left to pursue his passion for politics, running for senator and joining the Ford administration in 7 Washington.
Without his guiding genius, Eckerd s company began a long decline, eventually being acquired by J. Whereas Jack Eckerd had a genius for picking the right stores to buy, Cork Walgreen had a genius for picking the right people to hire. Whereas Jack Eckerd failed utterly at the single most impor- tant decision facing any executive-the selection of a successor-Cork Walgreen developed multiple outstanding candidates and selected a superstar successor, who may prove to be even better than Cork him- self.
Set a vision for where to drive Build a superior executive team. Develop a road map for driving the bus. Once you have the right people Enlist a crew of highly capable in place, figure out the best path "helpers" to make the vision to greatness. The "genius with a thousand helpers" model is particularly prevalent in the unsustained comparison companies.
The most classic case comes from a man known as the Sphinx, Henry Singleton of Teledyne. Single- ton grew up on a Texas ranch, with the childhood dream of becoming a great businessman in the model of the rugged individualist.
Armed with a Ph. Through acquisitions, Singleton built the company from a small enter- prise to number on the Fortune list in six years. At one point, he said, "I define my job as having the freedom to do what seems to me to be in the best interest of the company at any time. After all, why worry about succession when the very point of the whole thing is to serve as a platform to leverage the talents of your remarkable genius?
Once Singleton stepped away from day-to-day management in the mids, the far-flung empire began to crumble. From the end of until its merger with Allegheny in , Teledyne's cumulative stock returns imploded, falling 66 percent behind the general stock market. Singleton achieved his childhood dream of becoming a great businessman, but he failed utterly at the task of build- ing a great company.
With all the attention paid to executive compensation- the shift to stock options and the huge packages that have become common- place-surely, we thought, the amount and structure of compensation must play a key role in going from good to great. How else do you get peo- ple to do the right things that create great results? We were dead wrong in our expectations. We spent weeks inputting compensation data from proxy statements and performed separate analyses looking for patterns and correla- tions. We examined everything we could quantify for the top five offi- cers-cash versus stock, long-term versus short-term incentives, salary versus bonus, and so forth.
Some companies used stock extensively; oth- ers didn't. Some had high salaries; others didn't. Some made significant use of bonus incentives; others didn't. Most importantly, when we ana- lyzed executive compensation patterns relative to comparison companies, we found no systematic differences on the use of stock or not , high salaries or not , bonus incentives or not , or long-term compensation or not.
The only significant difference we found was that the good-to- great executives received slightly less total cash compensation ten years after the transition than their counterparts at the still-mediocre compari- son companies! You have to be basically rational and reasonable I doubt that Colman Mockler, David Maxwell, or Darwin Smith would have worked for free , and the good-to-great compa- nies did spend time thinking about the issue.
But once you've structured something that makes basic sense, executive compensation falls away as a distinguishing variable in moving an organization from good to great. It is simply a manifestation of the "first who" prin- ciple: It's not how you compensate your executives, it's which executives you have to compensate in the first place. If you have the right executives on the bus, they will do everything within their power to build a great com- pany, not because of what they will "get" for it, but because they simply cannot imagine settling for anything less. Their moral code requires building excellence for its own sake, and you're no more likely to change that with a compensation package than you're likely to affect whether they breathe.
The good-to-great companies understood a simple truth: The right people will do the right things and deliver the best results they're capable of, regardless of the incentive system. We were not able to look as rigorously at nonexecutive compensation; such data is not available in as systematic a format as proxy statements for top officers.
Nucor built its entire system on the idea that you can teach farmers how to make steel, but you can't teach a farmer work ethic to people who don't have it in the first place. So, instead of setting up mills in traditional steel towns like Pittsburgh and Gary, it located its plants in places like Crawfordsville, Indiana; Norfolk, Nebraska; and Plymouth, Utah-places full of real farmers who go to bed early, rise at dawn, and get right to work without fanfare.
In one extreme case, workers chased a lazy teammate right out of the plant with an angle iron. In a good-to-great transformation, people are not your most important asset. Nucor illustrates a key point. In determining "the right people," the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience. Not that specific knowledge or skills are unimportant, but they viewed these traits as more teachable or at least learnable , whereas they believed dimensions like character, work ethic, basic intelligence, dedication to fulfilling commitments, and values are more ingrained.
As Dave Nassef of Pitney Bowes put it: I used to be in the Marines, and the Marines get a lot of credit for build- ing people's values.
But that's not the way it really works. The Marine Corps recruits people who share the corps' values, then provides them with the training required to accomplish the organization's mission. We look at it the same way at Pitney Bowes. We have more people who want to do the right thing than most companies. We don't just look at experi- ence.
We want to know: Who are they? Why are they?
We find out who they are by asking them why they made decisions in their life. The answers to these questions give us insight into their core values. If you don't have what it takes, you probably won't last long. But they're not ruthless cultures, they're rigorous cultures. And the dis- tinction is crucial.