Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (21 page)

Cristina on “Tell It Like It Is”

I came from a company—I won’t mention the name—where you absolutely didn’t talk about bad news and where you would never admit your mistakes. If you did, you could lose your job; it was that simple. So when I came here, I had a hard time telling it like it really was, because I had been conditioned to sugarcoat things. But then, several times in meetings, someone would call me out, ask me if what I was saying was really the whole story, and if it was, could I back it up with real data? It made me uncomfortable at first, but it also made me think differently. Gradually I began to understand the power of being up-front and honest, of laying the problems out on the table
before
someone confronted me about them. Admitting to these things, though hard at first, gave my team much better focus. Besides, I believe people learn better from mistakes than they do from successes anyway. Instinctively, I think I knew that.
But I had to make my behavior match what I knew. I’m glad people felt comfortable enough to bring what I was doing to my attention.

Al on “Creating a Vision”

My team was responsible for taking a new food concept national, but we were really at the nuts-and-bolts stage. It was going to take a
lot
of
work, and it was going to be a pretty long timeline. So in order to get people motivated and emotionally connected to the idea, I presented them with this vision of what success might look like: “Imagine that, in two years, you’re at a Super Bowl–watching party with your friends, and a commercial for our new food concept comes on. We’ve done such a good job of making this thing happen that it’s worthy of a Super Bowl commercial. How would it make you feel to turn to your friends and say, ‘I was part of that. I helped make that thing happen.’” They started picturing what the commercial could be like, who might be in it, what the hook would be. It really got them fixated on the result, and then it got their minds working on
how to achieve it.

Steve on “Resources, Organization, and Process Enable Execution”

I’m a great motivator of people, but I’m not a good process guy. I’ve had to learn this the hard way. If I were in the business of building buildings, for example, I think of myself as the kind of person you’d call to oversee the workers and keep them on track. But unless you want that building to fall down, someone else is going to have to come up with the plan for the structure itself. I can follow plans as well as anyone, but I’m not so good at creating them.

As a result, I’ve worked for years in partnership with someone who is great on process and organization. I firmly believe that my career would not be where it is today if I didn’t have him in my corner. In fact, I’d even sacrifice a promotion in order to stay on the same team with him. I know what my weaknesses are, and that has allowed me to appreciate someone like my partner, whose own strengths are so different from my own.

Our company did a study of the capability of our top three hundred leaders a few years back, and the area in which they overwhelmingly had the biggest shortfall was in their follow-through. I don’t think our organization is unique in this way. Most people like the excitement of new ideas but then lose interest, get sidetracked, and fail to execute them to the fullest. But I’ll tell you a secret: If you’re one of those people who loves to start things but loses energy toward the finish, you’re missing out on some of the most fun and some of the biggest joys you’ll ever have in business. If you’re doing this right and taking people with you, then when your team sees your Big Goal through to the end, you will have the privilege of being a part of other people’s success. Sure,
you
will have succeeded, but so will everyone you brought along with you, and the pride on people’s faces
when they accomplish something they weren’t sure they could is an undervalued reward in the business world.

To get the results you want, you’re going to have to follow through with daily intensity. Jack Welch talked to me about “the relentless drumbeat for performance.” A constant awareness of what needs to be done and the energy to make it happen are essential for any leader. What’s also essential is that you hold people accountable for their part.

When I used to work for Steve Reinemund, who hired me to be the head of marketing at Pizza Hut, he had this little pocket notebook that he carried around with him everywhere he went. He wrote down in it every single thing that he wanted to remember, and when he took out that notebook and started writing after I’d said something, I knew I was going to get a follow-up call or note from him within the next few days. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is another leader who blows me away with his tenacity for action. He doesn’t have a little notebook; he has an eight-by-ten sheet of paper that he carries around. On one side, it lists what he needs to accomplish that day; on the other, it lists things that people owe him. It’s kind of funny to watch him when he accomplishes something on his list. He doesn’t just draw a line
through it; he murders it by completely blacking and blotting it out.
Follow through is clearly something that matters to these guys.

Andy Pearson used to have a great technique for driving follow-through. At the end of any presentation, first he’d ask, “So what?” which was meant to get to the heart of the matter and clarify the main purpose of what had just been discussed. Then he’d ask, “Now what?” There were no purely informational presentations as far as Andy was concerned. That “now what” was his way of saying that you needed to follow up with action on what you had just presented, and he wanted to know what those actions would be. Andy understood that it was his job as leader to spur people on with challenges like these.

Larry Senn taught us something called the accountability ladder to drive a sense of personal responsibility. At the bottom of the ladder is the person suffering from complete obliviousness; he or she doesn’t even know what’s going wrong or what needs to happen. You move up from there to blaming others for what’s not working. The ideal rungs are at the top, where a person takes responsibility for finding solutions to a problem and then gets on with executing those solutions. This is a great way to think of your role as leader: You always want to be moving yourself and your people up that ladder (see opposite).

When I took the job as chief operating officer at PepsiCo, I had held only marketing positions up to that point, so I knew very little about operations. In fact, I asked for the position because I wanted to learn more. I knew I wanted to be president of a brand one day and in order to get there, I’d need some operating knowledge and experience. So when I started out, I had to rely, not on my operating know-how, but on my people know-how. I was good at listening to people, at diagnosing problems when I heard them, and at finding the expertise necessary to fix them.

One way I learned was to visit our bottling plants and talk to the people there; not just the management, but the route salesmen and the warehouse guys too. One such plant was in Baltimore. We called it Fort Apache because it was located in the middle of a really tough neighborhood. It was the kind of neighborhood where, when you drove up, you could see bullet holes in the Pepsi sign out front.

I went in and had my usual meeting with the crew. I started off by asking what was going well there. “Nothing,” they said. “OK,” I responded, “then how can this place be more effective?” Well, the floodgates opened after that. Some guys said they didn’t have all the equipment they needed; others said it took too long to get the route trucks out in the morning. They just went on and on, until one finally piped up: “You seem like a pretty good guy. What are you going to do about all this?” That shut everyone up. They all turned to me and waited.

“Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing. You’re the ones who are going to fix all this. I’m going to bring the plant manager in here and together we’re going to make a list of all the things that you talked
about. In fact, I’ve already started.” Then I showed them the pages of notes I had taken. “The only thing I’m going to do is, I’m going to come back, in six months, and you all are going to show me what sort of progress you’ve made when I get here.”

Six months later, I did go back, and it was as though I had entered a whole new plant. They were waiting for me at the door and led me around, showing me all the various improvements and talking about their plans. They still had more work ahead, but they had done a lot. And what’s more, they were darn proud of themselves for doing it. You could just see it on their faces.

Sometimes the worst thing you can do as leader is try to solve all the problems yourself. You’ve got to assign responsibility where it really belongs. Even if I had known everything there was to know about operations, I still wouldn’t have been around that one plant long enough to fix everything that needed fixing. But those guys could. And they did. Follow-through, like a lot of the things I’ve talked about, is leader led. You have to keep people climbing up that accountability ladder, and don’t let them stop until you’ve accomplished all that needs to be done.

What makes a good ad good and a bad ad bad? This is something that people in marketing think about all the time, but really, in this day and age, all of us are exposed to so many advertisements over the course of our lives, we all have a pretty good idea of which ones we like, which ones we don’t, and why.

Good ads are emotional and memorable. They are relatable and address a need in those they target. They also drive their audience to action, to go out and buy that product. You want to see a good ad again and again.

Bad ads are forgettable. They feel irrelevant or out of touch with their target audience. They don’t make clear what they’re selling. Sometimes they’re even so annoying that they make you want to do the opposite of what they want you to do. You never ever want to see a bad ad again.

As a leader, do you want to be a good ad or a bad ad?

Have you ever worked your tail off on something, only to have it fail? I hear this complaint all the time: I had the best of intentions, I worked hard, but it just didn’t happen. To which I respond, “Did you market the idea or initiative? And not just once—did you keep reinforcing it until you accomplished what you set out to accomplish? Were you a good ad for your goal?”

KFC’s founder, Colonel Sanders, understood the importance of being a good ad for his goal. As his chicken became more popular, he and his wife, Claudia, would travel around to different towns and put on
Kentucky Fried Chicken demonstrations in local restaurants. But they didn’t rely just on the Colonel’s tasty chicken recipe to make a good impression. Claudia greeted customers in an antebellum-style dress that cost the Colonel a whopping $135. And whenever he had the chance, the Colonel himself would come out from the kitchen in his distinctive white suit, which became his trademark, to do “a little coloneling,” as the Colonel described it in his autobiography,
Life as I Have Known It Has Been Finger-Lickin’ Good.
“I’d take off my apron, dust the flour off my pants, put on my vest, long-tailed coat and gold watch chain, and go out into the dining room and
talk to the guests. Usually I had some cards printed up with recipes that had been favorites in our restaurant in Corbin. This would give me the chance to talk to the people and ask them how they liked the chicken.”

You need to market your goal or your initiative in the same dynamic way you would a new product. You need to keep that goal front and center in the minds of your target audience. That means you need to get their attention, convince them of its importance, and
keep
convincing them. After all, you wouldn’t show an ad for a new product just once and assume it had enough impact to go the distance. You’d replay the ad multiple times, then maybe do a new version of the ad to regain attention. I talked about how to create a vision in the last section. In this chapter, I’ll talk about how to continually reinforce that vision—how to market that vision—in order to make it work.