Friday, September 26, 2008

STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH!


I found myself on the top roulette table at Wynn, the leading casino in Macau [now the world’s largest gambling centre by revenues, larger than Vegas], wondering whether to bet on the next roll of the dice being even, or odd. The last four rolls had been odd, and I had lost all the past bets. Though the laws of averages – and my wife – were screaming out ‘even’, my intuition was screaming harder to be the ‘odd’ one out. Well, my intuition had almost always seen me through such crucial life-threatening situations [my wife, remember?!], and then, don’t even the top CEOs of the world depend mainly on gut feel and intuition?

Fred Smith received a ‘C’ grade [just escaped failing] in his college economics paper where he gave an overnight delivery business idea. “C was a very good grade for me,” he later explained, as his gut told him the idea would work. He started FedEx! Eric Bonabeau in HBR says “the stories are certainly seductive,” with Disney’s Michael Eisner [who, “knowing in his heart,” pumped in millions into the killer show ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’], George Soros [who sensed “in his bones a big shift in currency markets and... made a billion-dollar killing”] and R. Pittman [who “had a vision...while taking a shower,” and created AOL] leading the gut-wrenchers gang! A. Hayashi, Senior Editor, HBR, writes, “Obviously, gut calls are better suited to some functions [strategy, planning, PR, marketing...].” Surely, as Chuck Porter, creator of the historic BMW Mini campaign, comments, “When it comes to creating advertising, we don’t research it!”

But it is not that intuitions are purely figments of irrational imagination. Professor Smith [Surrey] and Erella Shely of the most respected Academy of Management Executive prove that intuitive decisions are viewed by executives as “expertise that has been built up... and influences conscious thought and behaviour.” The Burson Marsteller CEO Survey, 2006, shows how “no effective CEO is driven solely by numbers.” The survey further proves that 71.4% of high-revenue-company CEOs believe that “intuition and gut feeling” are very influential in guiding their decision making [compared to 54.8% who depend on “analyst reports”]. The PwC Global Data Management Survey 2004 amusingly shows that globally, companies in fact feel low level of confidence in their own data, and “an even greater degree of scepticism over outside data.”

In his commencement address to Stanford students, he revealed how his mother [“a young, unwed college student”] rejected him and put him up for adoption, how the folks who were supposed to adopt him backed out at the last moment, how even his ‘final’ parents weren’t graduates, how he himself dropped out after joining college, how he would later sleep on dorm floors returning Coke bottles “for 5 cent deposits” to buy food, how he would “walk 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.” And how he loved it all, as, much of what he “stumbled into” by following his “curiosity and intuition, turned out to be priceless later on.” He says, “You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny... This approach has never let me down... And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition... Stay hungry, stay foolish!” On Fortune’s March 17, 2008 issue [where his company is ranked The World’s Most Admired in 2008], he says, “We do no market research. We just want to make great products.” He’s Steve Jobs, my hero! I went against the law of averages and bet on ‘odd’. I walked away from that hall resolute in what I had learnt from that one man... I’ll stay hungry, I’ll stay foolish! Yes, even though I lost...


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Friday, September 12, 2008

LOSE IT LIKE GOIZUETA DID!


Unlike me, Goizueta wasn’t bald! But like me, it’s reported that even he had only one wife (!!!). Unlike me, that imp of a daredevil has already [in 1997] kicked the bucket (I mean, come on, I’m still alive... Right?!). Like me, the poor devil was, is and will continue to remain infinitely unknown through eternity. But unlike me, this impoverished Cuban immigrant – who escaped to Miami with his wife and $40 (not necessarily in the order of importance) to escape Castro’s political influence – became the best performing CEO globally in the history of mankind during his incredible 17 years at the top. Since the time he took over the CEO’s mantle in 1981, he created more shareholders’ wealth than any CEO in history – a mind numbing 7,100% share price increase – more than Lou Gerstner, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and even what the neutronic Jack Welch, could ever achieve in that time period!!! And ironically, this top performer’s biggest motherlode of a contribution to the management fraternity has been formalising the art of ‘losing it all when at the top’... in other words, ensuring that he was thoroughly replaceable and could be kicked out lock, stock and barrel, anytime – what we today know as ‘succession planning’!

The world’s most excellently performing CEOs believe religiously in finding their replacements. The ground-breaking 2006 research (In Search Of Excellence: In CEO Succession) on the world’s top-most corporations quotes the Harvard research that “merely announcing who your next CEO will be, can move [up] the market value of your company by 15% or more!” Global research displays unprecedented backing for CEO succession plans, with share prices of companies with planned successions over-performing those of companies without planned successions. And yet – according to National Association of Corporate Directors, US – only a pathetic 16% of directors “reported that their board is effective at CEO succession planning.” The noted Wharton management professor Dr. Katherine Klein comments, “The ideal scenario is careful succession planning that grooms people internally.” The famed 2007 Hay Group Study confirms that almost 80% of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies preferred an internal candidate as a CEO successor! Booz Allen’s 2008 CEO research confirms that around 80-83% of new CEO recruits globally are insiders! Booz Allen also proves beyond doubt that operationally and statistically, ‘insider CEOs’ outperform ‘outsider CEOs’!

And it’s clearly the current CEO’s job to shortlist future replacements [‘The Job No CEO Should Delegate’, Larry Bossidy, HBR]. From GE, where at any given moment there are 5 people battle-ready to become CEOs [Immelt (current GE CEO), Nardelli (current Chrysler CEO) and McNerney (current Boeing CEO) worked under Welch for years before Immelt was chosen], to Warren Buffet who has already identified his successors [in a secret envelope, with the lines, “Yesterday I died. That is unquestionably bad news for me; but it is not bad news for our business!”], top CEOs fire themselves out!!!

To end where we started, my hero, Goizueta had four people ready to takeover his throne at any given moment, and ten more to fill in their posts! Roberto Crispulo Goizueta died of lung cancer on October 18, 1997. For 17 sparkling years, this Cuban ‘revolutionary’ was the world’s best performing global Chairman & CEO of a Fortune 500 company we now know of as Coca-Cola! And nobody’s ever ‘lost’ it like he did...


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