I watched these very successful companies, and I saw that they did experimentation coupled with decentralization. Companies that kept the "headquarters knows best" mentality weren't moving anywhere. And I wanted to move very, very fast.
ALLAN KENNEDY
45, author, Corporate Cultures; founder/CEO, Selkirk Associates Inc.
A couple of years before I started writing Corporate Cultures, if I'd had any idea I was going to contribute to spawning this huge industry of people who think you can manage culture and therefore affect the world, I'd probably have tried to suppress the book!
People working on culture -- the informal side of a company, the behavior of people in organizations -- well intentioned as they are, see it as an end in itself, rather than as a by-product of productive economic activity. It makes me shudder. I mean, I've had people say, "You can't fire so-and-so. He's important culturally in the place." And I say, "But the guy's a dodo, and he's threatening the livelihood of 5,000 people. He's got to go." It's as if you're doing something sacrilegious when you say that.
The cultural side of organizations is only one aspect you have to be aware of. When push comes to shove, you have a productive economic entity only if -- when you add up the expenses and you add up the revenue -- you end up with a positive total.
That was very much reinforced for me when I started my own company in 1983. In many ways, running that company has been a seminal experience. It has pointed up the glory of making a buck, and my admiration for people who manage to pull that off, however improbably, is greater than ever before. Not so much because of how hard it is to do -- I always knew that -- but because they create jobs, they move society forward. It's so important for the long haul.
We used to spend an awful lot of time at McKinsey talking about how elegant a particular strategy was. Almost to the point where we would denigrate people who were in a dumb industry that just happened to make a lot of money. If it wasn't elegant, something was wrong with it. I don't feel that way now.
At McKinsey, we also gloried in the competitive game, in people who did something really clever to beat out the competition -- not in the end result of the game, which was making money. Now, I have an entirely different viewpoint. Only a damn fool would try to beat out competition -- the purpose of business is to avoid it altogether. Supply a real need that nobody else is supplying. God forbid you should have competition; it only makes it that much harder.
Once I started running Selkirk, my concerns went from a bunch of theoretical concepts to being very practical: what do you have to do this week to make sure that you have positive cash flow at the other end of the week? Before, I would have been more impressed by perceived barriers to change. When people said, "Oh, we can't do that," I would have said, "You're right. Turning this whole business on its ear is unthinkable because of the amount of disruption." Now, I'll say to clients quite routinely, "Look, you've got it wrong. You have to tear this place apart and start all over again, because you're not focused on how to make money in this situation."
Brings it right down to basics, doesn't it?
"I remember I'd been in California some number of months, and I returned to the East Coast and saw some of my old friends, and they said, 'Well, how is it out there?' And I said, 'It's great. They've got this idea that work ought to be fun.' And they all looked at me like I'd lost my mind. And they said, 'How can it be fun? Work's supposed to be productive, not fun. You must have been in the California hot tub too long.'
"What I learned is that when the world takes a tilt from being left brain to right brain, which is what's happening in business today -- where you have to really focus on the creative side of the job if you want to gain productivity -- people are going to be most creative and most productive when they'redoing something that they're really interested in. I mean really interested in. So having fun in not an outrageous idea at all. It's a very sensible one."
-- JOHN SCULLEY, 50, chairman/CEO, Apple Computer Inc.; former president, PepsiCo Foods
LEONARD SCHLESINGER
36, lecturer, business administration, Harvard Business School; former executive vice-president, Au Bon Pain Co.
Ten years ago I swore there were no absolutes. I used to tell people that any manager who saw the world in blacks and whites was deluding himself; you needed to understand the complexities of why things did or didn't get done, which meant you had to see the shades of gray. But when I went into business, I saw that I was wrong.
In the restaurant business, we had a lot of service problems. Employees would input orders incorrectly and customers would end up with the wrong sandwich. They would be absolutely furious, and if I happened to be there, I'd try to intervene. I'd apologize and explain how the problem occurred. I'd say, "You have to understand, there's a labor shortage. We can't get personnel." But I discovered that customers didn't care how it happened. They wanted things right or they wouldn't be back.
When you permit people to see shades of gray, you provide a whole series of opportunities for excuses as to why something doesn't get done. Our customers didn't want to hear my rationalizations. If I had to come up with a universal law of business, I'd say that every organization needs to have a few critical areas of focus that are not subject to compromise.
ROBERT B. REICH
42, professor, political economy and management, Harvard University; formerly director of policy planning for the Federal Trade Commission
I guess my views have changed less than U.S. business has changed, although there is an irony when I look at the stages of my life.
