Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [27]
Zia Yusuf had gone from being a banker to a senior leadership role in a large software company and a possible chief executive in a high-tech company in less than a decade—with no degree in engineering and never even having run an engineering or sales organization. In late 2009, Yusuf announced he was leaving SAP—as he told me, to find a COO or CEO role in a smaller company. His resignation prompted calls from the most senior SAP executives, including Plattner and Apotheker, who assured him that if he stayed, he would soon be on the executive board, one of the top seven people in the company.
Zia Yusuf’s successful career had followed the trail developed decades earlier at the Ford Motor Company—leveraging an analytical staff position into a power base. Right after World War II, a small group of highly trained, very smart young men who had worked together in the Pentagon providing analytical support for the war effort moved as a team to one company where they felt they could have a substantial and immediate impact. The company they chose, Ford Motor, was led by a young and inexperienced Henry Ford II and was a mess, with rampant internal corruption, union troubles, and lax to nonexistent financial controls.7
The so-called Whiz Kids gravitated to the finance, accounting, and control functions. Their analytical bent was not well suited to the backslapping, hard-drinking world of sales and was particularly out of place in the tumult and grime of the factories. Plus, none of them knew anything much about manufacturing or, for that matter, cars. While Tex Thornton, their informal leader, left for Hughes Aircraft and later founded Litton Industries, others, including Robert McNamara and Arjay Miller, eventually rose to the top of the company and influenced a whole generation of management in many large corporations. People from Ford, protégés of the finance group, eventually held senior positions at Xerox, International Harvester, and other leading companies.
The career success of the Whiz Kids at Ford, and particularly McNamara, who became the first non–Ford family member to be named president of the company, depended on several factors. First, they had advanced degrees and elite credentials from leading universities. Henry Ford II, who had not finished college and was facing the very difficult task of turning around a faltering Ford Motor Company, was impressed with the Whiz Kids’ pedigree. Second, the analytical orientation and the numbers the group produced provided at least the appearance of rationality and certainty to a troubled company. Third, the finance people talked the language of Wall Street and the financial markets, which, even in the 1950s, with Ford becoming a public company, seemed important. Ed Lundy, vice president of finance and a McNamara ally, would speak authoritatively on what would happen to the stock price if a certain decision were made and that argument would invariably carry the day. Fourth, the finance people were conservative when it came to spending money, and the money they weren’t spending was Ford money. Cutting out waste and internal corruption, McNamara and his colleagues increased profits, and with this initial success, Henry Ford II became increasingly risk-averse.
But perhaps the most important source of the finance group’s success was their centrality in consequential decisions. Was money needed to modernize plants or invest in new product development? Finance was not only involved in such decisions, but its criteria and data were the most important considerations. Finance had staff people ensconced in every plant, gathering information and seeing what was going on, and to ensure loyalty to finance, those people were regularly rotated back to headquarters, where, they were told, their careers would be made. Finance moved talented people into other areas of the company to extend its