How - Dov Seidman [138]
Methodist is a fairly small company, as corporations go, and concentrated on serving a single locality. So I asked Douglas Lankler of Pfizer how he would go about pursuing his vision of “the holy grail” in a large, multinational organization. “I think it’s easy,” he immediately replied. “You ease it in. Let’s say we have a cap on the amount of money that we will let a particular regional sales force give to a group of doctors for educational speaking events, say $100,000. The law doesn’t require it, but we put that cap in place because we feared that without it there would be anarchy and people might just pour money at the doctors. That would put us in a situation where we’re essentially paying for prescriptions, and we can’t have that; we can only fund education-based speaking programs that are designed to get medical information out to doctors and patients who need that information. So you say to that region, ‘We’re going to move that cap to $200 grand, but at the same time we’re going to help you see the right way to use these funds, and trust you to do so in accordance with our values.’ You make them more self-governing. If they can do that, their sales are going to go up because more information is getting out to the communities, to the physicians and patients, and compliance is going to go up also because the sales reps know they are being trusted to do the right thing. Then we reward them when they do.”
Leadership is key to this process. “We have a lot of leaders who have turned around difficult markets,” Lankler said. “For example, the area president of Asia, a region that is wracked with corruption, took over a situation where, from 2000 to 2003, we were having 90-some-odd compliance issues per year, and got it down to one or two. He really drove the notion of values and integrity and his expectation that first and foremost you do it right. ‘We can sell like there’s no tomorrow and surpass our numbers,’ he told his team, ‘but if we’re doing it in an improper way that’s unethical or illegal, then we haven’t achieved what we need to achieve.’ He was able to back it with his own well-grounded and well-demonstrated integrity.”
Increasing self-governance means moving values to the center of your efforts and making it clear—in how you reward, celebrate, communicate, and pursue—that those values form the guiding spirit of the enterprise. This is not just an effort for appointed leaders and managers. Everyone has the opportunity to do something about culture, to evolve it, make it better, and make it more responsive to the needs of today. Corporate culture, after all, is not monolithic. A board can have a culture, a team can have a culture, and a unit can have a culture. The culture of GE/Durham differs dramatically from cultures of other GE units, but the fact that it embraces and sustains the core values of its parent keeps it congruent with its sister parts.
HOW leaders beget HOW leaders, like our fictional caveman Ook begat lots of collaborative little baby Ooks. Self-governing cultures grow as people begin to see, model, and then adopt the HOWs that build strong synapses. To be more self-governing is to realize that culture is something that you do, not something that does to you. Everyone needs to engage in the cultural dimension of what they do. Like oarsmen on a boat, we can all pull together to