Winning (21 page)

I
N 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.
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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 Sigma means and what it does. I call this “Six Sigma for Citizens,” meaning those people—like myself—who’d like to hear the “elevator speech” version of what Six Sigma is all about and why it matters so darn much. This explanation is not meant to satisfy scientists and engineers, who actually
do
need to know about the statistical basis of Six Sigma in order to incorporate it into the design of experiments and complex equipment.
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Here goes:

Six Sigma is a quality program that, when all is said and done, improves your customers’ experience, lowers your costs, and builds better leaders.

Six Sigma accomplishes that by reducing waste and inefficiency and by designing a company’s products and internal processes so that customers get what they want, when they want it, and when you promised it. Obviously, you want to make your customers more satisfied than your competitors do, whether you run Upper Crust Pizza or manufacture the most powerful jet engines. In the strategy chapter we talked about customer loyalty, and we used the word
sticky
to describe what you want. Well, a huge part of making your customers sticky is meeting or exceeding their expectations, which is exactly what Six Sigma helps you do.

One thing that is sure to kill stickiness is inconsistency in services or products.

Consider this hypothetical. You make spare parts and promise ten-day delivery.

Over the course of three deliveries, your customers receive their parts on day five, day ten, and day fifteen. On average, ten-day delivery.

Over the course of the next three deliveries, they receive their parts on day two, day seven, and day twelve. An average of seven days, a seemingly big improvement in the customer experience. But not really—you might have had some internal process or cost improvements, but the customer has experienced nothing but inconsistency!

With Six Sigma, your customers would receive all three of their deliveries on day ten, or in the worst case, on day nine, day ten, and day eleven.

Six Sigma, in other words, is not about
averages.
It’s about
variation
and removing it from your customer’s interface with you.

To remove variation, Six Sigma requires companies to unpick their entire supply and distribution chains and the design of their products. The objective is to wash out anything that might cause waste, inefficiency, or a customer to get annoyed with your unpredictability.

So, that’s Six Sigma—the elimination of unpleasant surprises and broken promises.

SIMPLE, COMPLEX, OR NOT AT ALL

From 20,000 feet, Six Sigma has two primary applications. First, it can be used to remove the variation in routine, relatively simple, repetitive tasks—activities that happen over and over again. And second, it can be used to make sure large, complex projects go right the first time.

Examples of the first kind of application are a multitude. Call centers from South Dakota to Delhi use Six Sigma to make sure the phone is answered after the same number of rings for each incoming inquiry. Credit card processing facilities use it to make sure people receive accurate bills on the same day every month.

The second application of Six Sigma is the territory of engineers and scientists involved in multipart endeavors that sometimes take years to complete. If you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a new jet engine or a gas turbine, you cannot afford to figure out process or design inconsistencies late in the game. Six Sigma is incredibly effective in discovering them on the drawing board, i.e., the computer screen.

Obviously, the amount of Six Sigma training and education required depends on where and how you intend to apply it.

For the first application—simple, repetitive activities—the level of training and education is certainly manageable. In order to discover the root causes of inconsistencies, people need to know what kind of information to gather and how to analyze it. The rigor of this type of training has a terrific side effect. It builds critical thinking and discipline. That’s one reason why we noticed that every time a business dove into Six Sigma, not only did its financial performance improve, so did its management ranks. They all became better leaders.

The second application is different. It involves a sophisticated level of training and statistical analysis. I myself have never had this kind of training, but I know from GE’s very positive experience with jet engines and turbines that it works.

Make no mistake: Six Sigma is not for every corner of a company. Jamming it into creative activities, such as writing advertising copy, new marketing initiatives, or one-off transactions like investment banking, makes little sense and causes a lot of wheel-spinning. Six Sigma is meant for and has its most meaningful impact on repetitive internal processes and complex new product designs.

SO WHY THE PANIC?

At this point, you might be wondering: if Six Sigma is so straight-forward, why does it cause so much anxiety and confusion?
*

Probably because of the way it is initially presented to people. In many cases, senior management hires outside experts—scientists, statisticians, engineers, or Six Sigma consultants—to preach the new gospel. These experts, well-intentioned though they are, proceed to freak everyone out with complex PowerPoint slides that only an MIT professor could love. To make matters worse, they often present Six Sigma as a cure-all for every nook and cranny of a company. No activity is spared.

Several years ago, the CEO of a well-known consumer goods company visited me to get my take on Six Sigma. “We’re off to a good start,” he said. “We’ve hired several statisticians from places like Carnegie Mellon, and we’re looking for more.”

I thought to myself: This poor guy has really drunk the Kool-Aid!

Not using those words, I told him as much. The statisticians might be great, I said, but for the relatively straightforward projects he was looking at, he needed everyone in the company to understand Six Sigma. The brand-new experts were only going to scare people.

He said he’d think that over, but I think he was just being polite. He saw Six Sigma as the purview of experts, not in the blood of his company.

In time, most people come to understand Six Sigma and where to use it—and not use it—in an organization. Most of all, they also come to appreciate its competitive power after they’ve seen it in action for a few months. At which point, they usually become Six Sigma missionaries themselves.

So next time you hear Six Sigma mentioned, don’t run for cover. Once you understand the simple maxim “variation is evil,” you’re 60 percent of the way to becoming a Six Sigma expert yourself.

The other 40 percent is getting the evil out.

16. THE RIGHT JOB

Find It and You’ll Never Really Work Again

17. GETTING PROMOTED

Sorry, No Shortcuts

18. HARD SPOTS

That Damn Boss

19. WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Having It All (But Were Afraid to Hear)

I
T
’
S SAID
that you can only live life forward and understand it backward. The exact same thing is true about careers.

Every time I ask successful people about their first few jobs, the immediate reaction is almost always laughter. The chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble, A. G. Lafley, thought he was going to be a professor of Renaissance history. That career plan evaporated when he dropped out of grad school to join the navy for two years, and then spent six more running grocery and specialty stores near a navy base in Tokyo.

Or take Meg Whitman. She started her career as a management consultant, then joined Disney to open its first stores in Japan, then moved to Stride Rite to revive its Keds brand, then took over the ailing floral company FTD, and then moved to Hasbro to run its PlaySkool and Mr. Potato Head divisions.

It makes perfect sense that Meg Whitman would end up as the CEO of eBay, the retailer of absolutely everything, doesn’t it? But you know there was nothing specifically
planned
about her career. EBay didn’t even exist until a few years ago!

The point is: it is virtually impossible to know where any given job will take you. In fact, if you meet someone who has faithfully followed a career plan, try not to get seated beside him at a dinner party. What a bore!

Now, I’m obviously not going to tell you to let fate take its course. A great job can make your life exciting and give it meaning. The wrong job can drain the life right out of you.

But how do you find the right job?

The first answer is simple: you endure the same gummy, time-consuming, up-and-down, iterative process that all working people go through. You take one job, discover what you like and don’t like about it and what you’re good and bad at, and then, in time, change jobs to get something closer to the right fit. And you do that until one day you realize—hey, I’m finally in the right job. I like what I’m doing, and I’m making the trade-offs I’m willing to make.

Yes, trade-offs, because very few jobs are perfect. You may love your work with every fiber of your being but wish the money were better. Or you may only like the work, but love your colleagues. Regardless of its dimensions, the right job for you exists.

My goal in this chapter is to make finding that job a somewhat shorter and, hopefully, less mysterious process.

How?

Luckily, most jobs send out signals about how right they are for you—or not. Those signals apply to jobs at every level of an organization; you can be right out of school, a middle manager trying to move up, or a senior executive looking for a top job. Of course, there are special situations in the job search process that require separate consideration—finding your first job, finding a job if you’re stuck in a situation, and finding a job after you’ve been let go. We’ll consider those at the end of this chapter.

But first, let’s look at the general signals—both good and bad—of job fit.

IMAGINE YOU ARE CONSIDERING A NEW JOB…

The “stuff” of the job turns your crank—you love the work, it feels fun and meaningful to you, and even touches something primal in your soul.

A WORD ABOUT PAY

Before we talk about each of these signals in more detail, a few thoughts about money, the elephant in the middle of the room during any job discussion.

There is nothing worse than a guy who has made some money along the way opining that money shouldn’t matter to people who are picking a job. So I won’t do that. In fact, I’ll tell you that
of course
money matters—it matters a lot.

When I took my first job, I had several offers, but the one from GE was $1,500 a year more than any other. Coming out of graduate school, I was broke. That $1,500 felt huge, and it made a difference in my decision. A year later, I got my first raise from GE. When I found out that it was exactly the same amount as everyone else in my unit, my fanatical belief in merit pay made me say, “Forget this place!” But I didn’t quit until I found another job at a chemical company in Skokie, Illinois, which was going to pay me 25 percent more. I ultimately ended up being persuaded to stay with GE, but I wouldn’t have if the company hadn’t matched my salary offer in Skokie.

Because there is no way to disentangle money from decisions about job and career, the best you can really do is come to terms with how much money matters to you. Just remember, it can feel very noble to say that you don’t care about being rich; it’s another thing to live with that decision over the years, especially as mortgages and tuitions start to pile up.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting money or feeling indifferent to it or anything in between. But if you’re not honest with yourself about those feelings during the first years of your job journey, you’ll end up doing a lot of second-guessing later.

Now on to the signals of job fit, which have been listed in no particular order, since they all count.

PEOPLE

That said, the first signal concerns people, because everything else about a job can be perfect—the task, pay, location—but if you do not enjoy your colleagues on a day-to-day basis, work can be torture.

This may seem obvious, but I am surprised how often I meet people who have taken jobs in companies where they do not share the organization’s overall sensibilities. By that, I mean a range of values and personality traits and behaviors, from how intense people act, to how comfortable they are with confrontation, to how candid they are about performance, to how much they laugh at meetings.

If you join a company where your sensibilities don’t fit in, you’ll find yourself putting on a persona just to get along. What a career killer—to fake who you are every day.

I know a woman—we’ll call her Claire—who is an MBA who became a manager for a nonprofit after graduation. At first, Claire thought she had the perfect job—she could use her business skills to run an organization and still “make the world a better place,” to use her words.

But several years later, Claire was at her wit’s end. Her colleagues made every decision at a snail’s pace. “It doesn’t make any difference if we are picking where to have lunch or coming up with a marketing plan,” she recounted. “Nobody can ever feel ‘not heard.’ Everybody has to reach consensus. It’s driving me crazy! This organization has all the right intentions, but nothing ever gets done.”

Finally, Claire decided that she could no longer tolerate the sensibilities mismatch she felt in a nonprofit environment, and she began to search for a consulting job in the private sector. She identified one firm in particular that was known for its pro bono work, and she consoled herself with the notion that she could work there and still keep one foot (or toe) in the “virtuous” world.
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The problem was, the firm wouldn’t hire her. “You haven’t worked at the same speed or with the same kind of intensity we require,” they told her. “We need someone who can hit the ground running.” Basically, they said, “We need someone like us.”

Claire is still at her nonprofit job, resigned to stay there and make the best of it. The sad thing is, she said, “I found ‘my people’ at that consulting firm,” but it was too late. “They just didn’t see I could be like them.”

You too need to find “your people,” the earlier in your career the better. Even if a job seems ideal in every other way, without the presence of shared sensibilities, it’s not ideal for you.

OPPORTUNITY

The second job-fit signal concerns opportunity, as in, how much does the job offer you to grow and learn?

Without doubt, it can be very appealing to take a job where you suspect you will have no problem hitting it out of the park. Surefire success has its rewards—in the soul and the pocketbook.

But any job you take should feel somewhat challenging going in. It should make you think, “I can do most of the work, but there are certainly skills and knowledge this job requires that I don’t have yet. I’m going to learn something here.”
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In other words, any new job should feel like a stretch, not a layup.

Why? Because stretching, growing, learning—all these activities keep you engaged and energized. They have the effect of making work more interesting, and they keep your head in the game.

Yes, a stretch job increases the possibility of you screwing up. That’s why you should also make sure you join a company where learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.

Incidentally, stretching doesn’t—and shouldn’t—just happen at the beginning of a person’s career.

Take the case of Robert Bagby, who runs the brokerage firm A.G. Edwards. Bob says that he has twice taken on real stretch jobs—twenty-six years apart. The first time was when he began as a broker for another firm in Kansas City. The second time was in 2001, when he was named chairman and CEO of A.G. Edwards.

“At first, being a broker—my God, I had no idea what I was doing or why I had taken the job,” Bob said recently. “The phone was like a dangerous weapon. I was afraid to touch it.” Within a few months, though, Bob had learned enough new skills to start to excel. He came to love the brokerage business, and soon enough, his territory expanded and promotions started rolling in.

He didn’t feel out of his element again until the A.G. Edwards board picked him for the top position.

“It was that same feeling again,” Bob says. “There’s no pretraining to be a CEO. All your past history, and all your past successes, they don’t really matter anymore. You have to earn your respect all over again.”

Bob’s promotion to CEO couldn’t have come at a more challenging time. The Internet bubble had burst, and the market was collapsing after 9/11. Bob had to oversee the firm’s first workforce reduction and redirect its culture.

“I’d say it took a year for me to get on solid footing again,” he said. “Things are really back to normal—it’s fun now.”

Bob’s story, like so many others, illustrates that you shouldn’t be afraid of a job that feels too big at the outset. If you’re any good—which is why you were hired or promoted in the first place—you’ll grow into it, and be better for the experience.

OPTIONS

If the opportunity signal is about finding a job that allows you to grow and stretch while you are there, the options signal is about finding a job that helps you if you leave.

Working for some companies is like winning an Olympic medal. For the rest of your career, you are associated with great performance and success. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company is like that. Because it is known to hire the world’s top MBAs for their intelligence and intensity, and because of its reputation for intensive training, its alumni always get attention in the job market. By the same token, when I was in my early days of hiring in Plastics, we were always trying to hire people away from DuPont, and we considered it a real coup when we did. It may not have been true, but we had it in our heads that if you got a DuPont engineer, you were getting the most cutting-edge knowledge of processes and techniques.

Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Johnson & Johnson also have enormous “employee brands,” which is to say, their people get a real credential just by working there for a few years. Even putting my biases aside, GE is also in this category. Today, five of its former employees are CEOs in the Dow Jones 30. Many more are currently CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and thousands more are executives at companies around the world.
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Obviously, you cannot let the employee brand phenomenon totally drive your job decisions. You could end up at a highly respected company only to discover your boss is terrible or your job responsibilities are limited. But these kinds of situations are less likely at the kind of good companies we’re talking about.