Winning - Jack Welch [57]
Second, put the right people in the right jobs to drive the big aha forward. This may sound generic; it’s not. To drive your big aha forward, you need to match certain kinds of people with commodity businesses and a different type entirely with high-value-added businesses. I don’t like to pigeonhole, but the fact is, you get a lot more bang for your buck when strategy and skills fit.
Third, relentlessly seek out the best practices to achieve your big aha, whether inside or out, adapt them, and continually improve them. Strategy is unleashed when you have a learning organization where people thirst to do everything better every day. They draw on best practices from anywhere, and push them to ever-higher levels of effectiveness. You can have the best big aha in the world, but without this learning culture in place, any sustainable competitive advantage will not last.
Strategy, then, is simply finding the big aha and setting a broad direction, putting the right people behind it, and then executing with an unyielding emphasis on continual improvement.
I couldn’t make it more complicated than that if I tried.
SO WHAT IS STRATEGY?
Before we look at each of the three steps in some detail, a few thoughts about strategy in general.
At the time I retired from GE, the company employed more than three hundred thousand people in about fifteen major businesses, from gas turbines to credit cards. It was a complex, wide-ranging company, but I always said I wanted it to operate with the speed, informality, and open communication of a corner store.
Corner stores often have strategy right too. With their limited resources, they have to rely on a laserlike focus on doing one thing very well.
In our Boston neighborhood, for instance, within a block of each other on Charles Street, two little shops have constantly ringing cash registers and a nonstop flow of satisfied customers. One is Upper Crust Pizza. Its space is cramped, completely unadorned, and noisy, with self-service paper plates and a limited selection of soft drinks. Customers can eat either standing up or sitting at one large, benchlike table. The staff isn’t exactly rude, but they’re noncommittal. It is not unusual for your order—given at the cash register—to be greeted with a bland “Whatever.”
But the pizza is to die for; you could faint just describing the flavor of the sauce, and the crust puts you over the edge. Investment bankers, artists, and cops start lining up at eleven in the morning to see the “Slice of the Day” posted on the door, and around lunch and dinner, the line can run twenty deep. A fleet of delivery people work nonstop until closing.
At Upper Crust, strategy is all about product.
Then there’s Gary Drug, about half the size of a New York subway car. A large, newly renovated, twenty-four–hour CVS pharmacy is a short walk away. No matter. Gary Drug, with its single, narrow aisle and shelves packed to the ceiling, is always busy. Its selection ranges from cold remedies to alarm clocks, with tweezers and pencil sharpeners mixed in. There is a personable pharmacist tucked in back, and a wide selection of European fashion magazines in a corner up front. Everything the store sells matches the mix of the neighborhood’s quirky residents. Salespeople greet customers by name when they walk in and happily give advice on everything from vitamins to foot massagers. The store offers instant home delivery and a house charge account that bills you once a month.*
At Gary Drug, strategy is all about service.
Look, what is strategy but resource allocation? When you strip away all the noise, that’s what it comes down to. Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete. You cannot be everything to everybody, no matter what the size of your business or how deep