HOW I DID IT
Lessons From The Front Lines of Business
Edited by Daniel McGinn
Harvard Business Publishing
304 pages; Rs 695
The answers are all there in the 34 essays in How I Did It, taken from the pages of a popular column in Harvard Business Review. These first-person accounts of how the CEOs involved handled these challenges are divided into six sections - picking the right people, building the right culture, telling the right story, growing around the world, doing smart deals and finding a strategy that works. Their candour and level of detail yield useful insights into how Western multinationals (as well as a few other companies around the world, including India) are managed.
Among the most absorbing essays is an account of how Anne Mulcahy, the CEO of Xerox from 2001 to 2009, spent almost her entire eight-year tenure orchestrating (with the active support of the board) a smooth transition, giving her hand-picked successor, Ursula Burns, a series of increasingly more responsible roles. Ms Mulcahy writes, "Succession is very difficult, which is why companies so often fail at it. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline, focus and support to do well."
Ms Burns became CEO of Xerox in July 2009 but three other candidates had been in the reckoning, with whom Ms Mulcahy had kept up an honest dialogue until the end to give them a realistic idea of their status. "I don't believe in having people face off against each other for the CEO job in a classic horse race" (which she calls "the General Electric model"), she writes, because she didn't want to lose the three players who weren't going to get the job. She didn't - at the time she wrote the article, one had retired and two were still at Xerox.
Bill Marriott, who headed Marriott International, had a far trickier situation to deal with. He realised it would be best for the hotel chain if his eldest son did not succeed him as chairman and CEO. He groomed a lawyer named Arne Sorenson over the better part of a period of a decade to take over as CEO, all the while planning to have his youngest son eventually succeed Mr Sorenson.
Few challenges could have been greater than those faced by Doug DeVos, the president and co-CEO of Amway. In 1998, when the Chinese government outlawed direct selling, Amway China chose not to pull out, but demonstrated that it was taking a long-term view of the Chinese market by creating physical stores and going in for brand advertising - two things Amway had never done in any other market - and was rewarded with a licence that allowed it to return to its direct sales business model in 2006.
Then there is Vineet Nayar, who roused HCL Technologies from its slumber and transformed it into an end-to-end global information technology services solutions provider; and Pramod Bhasin, who created an entire industry - business process outsourcing - from scratch, spun it off from GE Capital and turned it into a publicly traded company.
The articles in How I Did It also offer fascinating insights into the differing practices and cultures at Western multinationals. Ms Mulcahy, for instance, writes that "generally you shouldn't be CEO for more than a decade. You do a disservice to the company if you don't rotate the leadership". Bill Marriott, however, headed Marriott International for 48 years, while Bill Johnson, chairman of HJ Heinz, is proud of the fact that "Heinz is a 142-year-old company that's had only five chairmen".
Such examples abound. Bart Becht, CEO of Reckitt Benckiser, makes much of the fact that "we're a truly multicountry company" in which most of the company's top managers haven't held jobs in their countries of origin for several years. The company has no expatriates in the traditional sense: "Now in every country we have people of many nationalities as well as local citizens." HJ Heinz, on the other hand, prides itself on relying on local managers, because, Mr Johnson writes, "they bring in a deep understanding of local consumers and employees. Typically, we have only one or two expat managers in any market."
Reckitt Benckiser depends on the same set of 17 "power brands" in all markets; Heinz believes that in emerging markets, products must be tailored to local tastes, sold through channels that are relevant to the local population, at affordable prices and in small package sizes. Mr Johnson gives the example of Complan - the protein supplement - in India, which is offered in flavours that may have been unsuitable outside India.
These essays give the reader a good idea of what it takes to be a CEO. In particular, they show that CEOs have to be ready to embrace the bold and the unconventional, and take a long-term view - in picking people, pursuing growth, doing deals, or fashioning strategy.
Lessons From The Front Lines of Business
Edited by Daniel McGinn
Harvard Business Publishing
304 pages; Rs 695
More From This Section
How do CEOs groom a successor without losing those who are overlooked for the top position? What does the boss of a family-managed company do when he realises he will have to look outside his family for a successor? How do CEOs build a truly global culture in which talent is fungible across borders? How do they reinvent their business model when it is outlawed in the country they are operating in?
The answers are all there in the 34 essays in How I Did It, taken from the pages of a popular column in Harvard Business Review. These first-person accounts of how the CEOs involved handled these challenges are divided into six sections - picking the right people, building the right culture, telling the right story, growing around the world, doing smart deals and finding a strategy that works. Their candour and level of detail yield useful insights into how Western multinationals (as well as a few other companies around the world, including India) are managed.
Among the most absorbing essays is an account of how Anne Mulcahy, the CEO of Xerox from 2001 to 2009, spent almost her entire eight-year tenure orchestrating (with the active support of the board) a smooth transition, giving her hand-picked successor, Ursula Burns, a series of increasingly more responsible roles. Ms Mulcahy writes, "Succession is very difficult, which is why companies so often fail at it. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline, focus and support to do well."
Ms Burns became CEO of Xerox in July 2009 but three other candidates had been in the reckoning, with whom Ms Mulcahy had kept up an honest dialogue until the end to give them a realistic idea of their status. "I don't believe in having people face off against each other for the CEO job in a classic horse race" (which she calls "the General Electric model"), she writes, because she didn't want to lose the three players who weren't going to get the job. She didn't - at the time she wrote the article, one had retired and two were still at Xerox.
Bill Marriott, who headed Marriott International, had a far trickier situation to deal with. He realised it would be best for the hotel chain if his eldest son did not succeed him as chairman and CEO. He groomed a lawyer named Arne Sorenson over the better part of a period of a decade to take over as CEO, all the while planning to have his youngest son eventually succeed Mr Sorenson.
Few challenges could have been greater than those faced by Doug DeVos, the president and co-CEO of Amway. In 1998, when the Chinese government outlawed direct selling, Amway China chose not to pull out, but demonstrated that it was taking a long-term view of the Chinese market by creating physical stores and going in for brand advertising - two things Amway had never done in any other market - and was rewarded with a licence that allowed it to return to its direct sales business model in 2006.
Then there is Vineet Nayar, who roused HCL Technologies from its slumber and transformed it into an end-to-end global information technology services solutions provider; and Pramod Bhasin, who created an entire industry - business process outsourcing - from scratch, spun it off from GE Capital and turned it into a publicly traded company.
The articles in How I Did It also offer fascinating insights into the differing practices and cultures at Western multinationals. Ms Mulcahy, for instance, writes that "generally you shouldn't be CEO for more than a decade. You do a disservice to the company if you don't rotate the leadership". Bill Marriott, however, headed Marriott International for 48 years, while Bill Johnson, chairman of HJ Heinz, is proud of the fact that "Heinz is a 142-year-old company that's had only five chairmen".
Such examples abound. Bart Becht, CEO of Reckitt Benckiser, makes much of the fact that "we're a truly multicountry company" in which most of the company's top managers haven't held jobs in their countries of origin for several years. The company has no expatriates in the traditional sense: "Now in every country we have people of many nationalities as well as local citizens." HJ Heinz, on the other hand, prides itself on relying on local managers, because, Mr Johnson writes, "they bring in a deep understanding of local consumers and employees. Typically, we have only one or two expat managers in any market."
Reckitt Benckiser depends on the same set of 17 "power brands" in all markets; Heinz believes that in emerging markets, products must be tailored to local tastes, sold through channels that are relevant to the local population, at affordable prices and in small package sizes. Mr Johnson gives the example of Complan - the protein supplement - in India, which is offered in flavours that may have been unsuitable outside India.
These essays give the reader a good idea of what it takes to be a CEO. In particular, they show that CEOs have to be ready to embrace the bold and the unconventional, and take a long-term view - in picking people, pursuing growth, doing deals, or fashioning strategy.