The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [40]
In exit interviews, the answer to the question Why are you leaving? was often the stifling burden of bureaucracy.
One of the major challenges at any big company is always to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy. As president of The Coca-Cola Company, I always described myself as a high-priced janitor. My job was to keep the aisles clear so that our brightest associates could get their jobs done, which was creating and serving customers and adding to shareholder value.
Very early in my business career I came to the not so startling conclusion that every business is mainly about serving present customers effectively and creating new ones. Whether your business is cars or cosmetics or computers, you’re really in the customer business. Even if your business is something rather arcane, like putting out oil fires, you must market your expertise in the putting out of oil fires before anyone will even consider availing themselves of your special service. Red Adair, who did put out oil fires, marketed his reputation around the world so that his name—his “brand” name—became synonymous with this particular skill.
The Coca-Cola brand is synonymous with good feelings, pleasant times, refreshment. “Things go better with Coke,” the advertising proclaimed, and while at the company, our job was to keep everyone and everything focused on making sure that every person with whom we came in contact would be convinced that things really did indeed go better with Coke. From the people who answered the phones to the men and women of the Coca-Cola bottler system to the chairman’s office and even to the board of directors, while we all may do different things, our real job is marketing Coca-Cola.
The legendary story around the company was that once Mr. Woodruff and the company’s general counsel were in a gathering of several people who were acquainted with both men. At one point Mr. Woodruff asked the lawyer to tell the group what his job was. Without a moment’s hesitation, the general counsel responded, “Mr. Woodruff, I sell Coca-Cola.”
That role was always at the top of my list of responsibilities. I encouraged strong sales-oriented thinking throughout the company and the entire Coca-Cola system worldwide. Every expense we made, every department we created, every project we took on had to answer the basic question: Will this help to create and serve customers? If the answer was not a ringing and positive “Yes!” whatever it was we were spending or undertaking had to be eliminated. Once you decide you have fifty things to do that are unrelated to your customer, soon you have fifty bureaucracies composed of individuals doing things extremely well that they shouldn’t have been doing at all because it didn’t serve the customer in any way.
Many companies lose their way. When they get off the ground they are lean and mean, watching cash flow and waiting until the mail comes in on Monday to see what they can spend on Tuesday. As they become successful, it’s easy to become more casual and as a result they sow the seeds of failure. The sense of discipline slips. The breeding of assistants to assistants to assistants takes over and pretty soon there is a new reality. People are looking at one another, asking, “How on earth did we get this big? Who are all those people down the hall?” It happens.
Dell Computers started out as a very lean company. Over time they grew larger and larger with more and more layers of management. They became unprofitable and lost their number-one status to Hewlett-Packard. At that point, the founder, Michael Dell, stepped back in as CEO. One of the first things he did was to write an e-mail to all employees: “We have great people… but we also have a new enemy: bureaucracy, which costs us money and slows us down. We created it, we subjected our people to it and we have to fix it!”
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