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| I have always been a fan of John Chambers, CEO of Cisco. For a lesson on how a master leader builds a responsive structure in what may be the most competitive and complex environment that a technology company has ever faced, check out the article entitled "Cisco's Display of Strength" in the November 12, 2007 issue of Fortune. Chambers reinvented the company after the 2001 tech collapse, and today it is a hotbed of innovation, a powerful player in Web 2.0 and seemingly well-positioned for Web 3.0. |
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Yahoo's new president, Susan Decker, has a lot of supporters, including Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, and Craig Barrett. They think she has what it takes to turn Yahoo around and restore it as a meaningful competitor to Google. Skeptics say she is as much to blame as Terry Semel for the company's woes.
On her plate: reworking a 12,000-employee organization that has become highly bureaucratic and suffers from morale problems, a way to share in the social networking phenomenon that is not going away (I'm sure Decker wishes they landed Facebook last year, even if they had to pay a healthy multiple of their spurned $900 million offer), and ways to boost its search and search advertising businesses. My money goes on her succeeding. She is exceptionally bright, highly analytical, and a straight-shooter. People in the company, as well as on Wall Street, like her a lot. |
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| Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon, had it great for a while. Six years of strong earnings growth and stock gains up to 2005. And then earnings and the stock price plummeted. Jung rolled up her sleeves and went deep to figure out what had gone wrong. After 18 months, her hard work is beginning to pay off. She rebuilt the company's structure into one that is much more responsive to markets across the globe. She eliminated seven layers of management (yes, seven!), terminated 25% of her managers, and implemented systems to ensure the company stays very much in tune with all the forces driving its business. Today, the stock is up nearly 40% since last summer, and revenues are again climbing. Congrats to Ms. Jung! It ain't easy steering a big ship and she seems to be doing it well. |
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At Netflix, the online movie retailer, CEO Reed Hastings allows salaried employees to take as much time off as they want. He says vacation and face time requirements are "relics of the industrial age." Best Buy is doing the same thing at its headquarters. The lawyers, of course, had to be convinced. They believe the company's legal position and remedies will be compromised in cases where an employee takes a lot of time off and doesn't produce.
But I am all for a lot more of this. We Americans take very little time off work when compared to other industrialized nations and I think we pay for it in a number of ways, including higher stress, discontent, less productivity, and less creativity. As leaders, we have come to expect those who are really committed to our mission to work 60, 70, and even 80 hours per week. The reality is a majority of people putting in those kind of hours are suffering in productivity, creativity, contentment, and ultimately health. Netflix and Best Buy are basically saying, "Here is what we need you to produce at work. Produce it any way you want, but deliver it on time and as we want it, and we'll all be happy." It takes a leap of faith, indeed courage, but I think this is the kind of organizational culture that is increasingly needed for capitalism to thrive as our existence continues to increase in velocity and complexity. |
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