Winning - Jack Welch [85]
My main message was, I suppose, “Swallow your pride, prove your worth, and start again.”
A year has passed, and my friend has never been happier professionally. He carved out a new position for himself overseeing the integration of three overlapping businesses, took on the responsibility of advising the new head of marketing, and finally found a great, high-impact role working with the organization’s new advertisers on a branding campaign.
“I don’t know why I took it so hard,” he said recently. “I’m always telling people that change is good, and then I let change freak me out. The hardest part was talking myself out of the hole. In truth, I had to fake it for a while, but one day I finally got over myself and stopped being a pain in the ass.”
That’s good advice to remember next time you want to bitch about the deal, your new bosses, and the tragedy of your fate. You and your bad attitude can be replaced—and will be if you don’t learn to love the deal like the acquirers do.
Mergers mean change.
But change isn’t bad. And mergers, in general, are very good. They are not only a necessary part of business, they have the potential to deliver profitable growth and put you in a new and exciting strategic position at a speed that organic growth just cannot match.
Yes, mergers and acquisitions have their challenges, and all kinds of research will tell you that more than half don’t add value. But nothing says you have to fall victim to that statistic.
Don’t let deal heat get you, and avoid the seven pitfalls—then reap the rewards of what happens when 1+1 = 3.
15
Six Sigma
* * *
BETTER THAN A TRIP TO THE DENTIST
IN THE PREVIOUS TWO CHAPTERS of this book, we’ve looked at one of the more exciting aspects of business—growth—both through starting something new and through mergers and acquisitions.
In this chapter, we’re leaping to the other end of the spectrum to talk (briefly, I promise) about what can be one of business’s most dreary topics, Six Sigma.
Now, I am a huge fan of Six Sigma, the quality improvement program that GE adopted from Motorola in 1995 and continues to embrace today.
Nothing compares to the effectiveness of Six Sigma when it comes to improving a company’s operational efficiency, raising its productivity, and lowering its costs. It improves design processes, gets products to market faster with fewer defects, and builds customer loyalty. Perhaps the biggest but most unheralded benefit of Six Sigma is its capacity to develop a cadre of great leaders.
Simply put, Six Sigma is one of the great management innovations of the past quarter century and an extremely powerful way to boost a company’s competitiveness. These days, with Six Sigma being increasingly adopted by companies around the world, you can’t afford not to understand it, let alone not practice it.*
And yet, Six Sigma causes enormous anxiety and confusion.
Over the past several years, in virtually every Q & A session in country after country, someone in the audience has asked me a tortured Six Sigma question. You can see the interest level in the audience plummet and eyes glaze over, as people brace themselves for a long-winded technical lecture, complete with several graphs and charts.
I’m exaggerating a bit, of course, but it is fair to say that for many people, the concept of Six Sigma feels like a trip to a dentist. But Six Sigma couldn’t be less like a root canal or any other awful procedure. Done right, it is energizing and incredibly rewarding. It can even be fun.
You just have to understand what Six Sigma really is.
There is nothing technical in what I am about to say. If you want to learn about the statistical premise behind the concept, or learn what it takes to become qualified in Six Sigma, an industry of books, videos, and training programs eagerly awaits you.
But for our purposes, I’m going to be very simple about what Six