Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [131]
In answer to Mrs. Shapiro, I observed that I had not set my salary; the Searle board of directors had. I added that I was confident the board would have many opportunities to review my performance over time to determine whether I deserved that level of compensation. And I told her I would do my best to earn it.
It had not escaped my attention, or the Searle family’s for that matter, that I had no relevant business or pharmaceutical industry experience. But I had been involved in managing large, complicated, international enterprises. Perhaps the deciding factor for the Searle family was my disinclination to shy away from making the tough choices that would be needed to get the enterprise on an upward path. The family knew me. Back in early 1962, not many people thought a twenty-nine-year-old with no experience in elective office could win a seat in Congress against a large field of more seasoned opponents. But Dan Searle did.
I, in turn, believed in Searle. Taking the reins of the pharmaceutical company was an opportunity to help develop products of value to people. My father, in particular, would have considered it honest and worthwhile work. There was some press speculation that I might be considering a run for the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 1980. To signal the seriousness of my commitment to the company, and to refute the speculation, I signed a five-year contract with Searle, even though the board of directors had not asked me to do so.
My time at Searle was a formative experience for me, unlike any challenge I’d ever faced before. It is in essence the story of a former government official unfamiliar with the daily workings of the business world finding his way. With the help of a superb team, I took the reins of a troubled company with great potential and developed a strategy to turn it around. We moved quickly to tighten budgets by reducing staff. We sold off entities not related to what we decided were our core businesses. We decentralized decision making and rigorously measured our progress against our goals.
Setting goals was the most important task we faced, because it forced us to decide what our priorities were. We also needed broad agreement on the priorities among the directors and senior managers so that everyone was pulling in the same direction. It was critically important to ensure that those goals and priorities were known throughout the organization.
When I arrived at Searle, one of the first things we did was to put together several task forces with a mix of employees, board members, and thoughtful people from outside the company to examine what I had decided were the key problem areas of the company’s operations. They then offered specific recommendations. I knew Searle needed changes, but I didn’t want change for change’s sake. I needed to make sure the changes we were considering were the right ones. And I needed to make sure we could achieve broad support in the company to move forward with the changes.
After the review was complete, Searle’s senior management and I agreed on our top priorities: focusing the company on its core businesses and laying the foundation for future growth. To achieve our goals, we decided we would trim excess layers of management and sell off subsidiaries that either were peripheral to Searle’s mission or were unlikely to produce significant results. We resolved to work with the federal government to try to determine the fate of one especially promising product, aspartame. And we would invest significantly in research and development to ensure there would be more products in the pipeline in the years ahead.
Over my eight years at Searle, I became a believer in the rule that “What you measure improves.” A corollary rule in the military is that