Winning - Jack Welch [47]
The domestic competition was tough enough to make change necessary. Just look at the price of a refrigerator today. That’s why the appliances business continues to cut costs and still hasn’t hit bone. It is now a business characterized by continual productivity improvements, modest innovation, and a team that understands that change is a way of life.
One lesson from the Appliances story is that you don’t always have, at the outset of a change initiative, every bit of information you’d like to make your case. Regardless, you need to get out there and start talking about what you do know and what you fear.
Communication about change does get a lot more challenging as a company gets larger. It’s one thing if you are the owner of a two-hundred-person machine tool company to walk into work one day, call a meeting, and say, “OK, everyone, I just got back from a sales trip, and guess what, we’ve got brutal competition from a really innovative new company in Hungary. Things are going to have to change around here.” It’s another thing entirely to make the case for change to a company with a hundred thousand people in multiple business units in multiple countries.
In big companies, calls for change are often greeted with a nice head fake. People nod at your presentations and pleasantly agree that given all the data, it sure looks like change is necessary. Then they go back to doing everything they always did. If the company has been through enough change programs, employees consider you like gas pains. You’ll go away if they just wait long enough.
This pervasive skepticism is all the more reason that anyone leading a change process must stay far away from empty slogans and instead stick to a solid, persuasive business case.
Over time, logic will win out.
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2. Hire and promote only true believers and get-on-with-it types.
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Everyone in business claims they like change; to say otherwise nowadays would be career suicide. In fact, it’s quite common to see someone describe himself as a “change agent” right on his résumé.*
That’s ridiculous.
By my estimate, real change agents comprise less than 10 percent of all businesspeople. These are the true believers who champion change, know how to make it happen, and love every second of the process.
A significant majority—about 70 to 80 percent more—may not lead the charge, but once they are convinced change is necessary, they say, “OK already, get on with it.”
The rest are resisters.
To make change happen, companies must actively hire and promote only true believers and get-on-with-its. But with everyone claiming to like change, how can you tell who is for real?
Luckily, change agents usually make themselves known. They’re typically brash, high-energy, and more than a little bit paranoid about the future. Very often, they invent change initiatives on their own or ask to lead them. Invariably, they are curious and forward-looking. They ask a lot of questions that start with the phrase “Why don’t we…?”
These people have courage—a certain fearlessness about the unknown. Something in them makes it OK to operate without a safety net. If they fail, they know they can pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on. They’re thick-skinned about risk, which allows them to make bold decisions without a lot of data.
This description makes me think immediately about Denis Nayden, a managing partner with Oak Hill Capital Management, whom I’ve known for more than twenty years. Denis joined GE Capital in 1977, right out of the University of Connecticut, and by 1989 was second in charge, helping Gary Wendt expand the business from a few hundred million dollars in net income to more than $5 billion in 2000. The best way to describe Denis is intense, but extremely smart and fanatical about growth also work well. He never saw a deal