Day 32 & 33: Food...Food...Delicious Food!

Yummy lobster! Looks great, smells great and best of all tastes great!

Delicious Food

This has been a weekend of gastronomic delights. Friday night was a Boston dinner prepared with tender love by the Advanced Management Program (AMP) Office of Harvard Business School (HBS). It was a delight to behold and it certainly was even more delightful to eat it. And devoured it, I did. It tastiest crustacean that I have eaten since I arrived in Boston.

HBS feeds its students great food. Three times a day, every weekday, we trek to the Kresge Hall, where the Board Room is located, and enjoy the delicious meals they prepare for us. On top of that, the service is fabulous. The service crew is very polite and attentive to our service needs.

Penang Restaurant with its succulent selection

Saturday, was all about Singaporean cuisine. One of our group mates who used to be an F16 pilot of the Singapore Department of Defense, treated us to a hearty Singaporean dinner. Having lived in Malaysia from where I provided support to the Singapore market, I am quite familiar with Singaporean cuisine - and I must say that I missed it bad.

That's one more thing about the AMP. Since the participants come from all over the globe you have the great opportunity to sample and experience a variety of cultures.


Class Notes

Leadership

• Being customer-centric is not just a feel good exercise, companies that have a strong customer service strategy have outperformed the S&P 500
• Always know what are the real factors that motivate the customer, and what are the hygiene factors (the bare minimum support that is expected)
• Innovators of customer service grow at a much higher clip than companies that provide "good enough" service

Leadership and Accountability

• Avoid the "slippery slope" by taking care of the small stuff and nipping undesirable behavior in the bud
• Foster debate and responsible action
• Assign responsibility and hold people accountable in order to stimulate thinking and "ownership" of issues or process

Marketing

• Manage markets, segments and customers
• Different customers play different roles for the business and need to be managed differently
• Customers fall into 4 core categories: true loyals, switchers, strategic accounts and product innovation partners

Finance

• What the market does not fully understand, it undervalues
• Some companies engage the "puffer fish" defense in order to discourage take-overs - they grow liabilities, but this adversely affects the company in the long-term

This ends another day in HBS.

Special Session with Jack Welch

Mr. Jack Welch (right) greets the class as he enters the room, while Prof. Ranjay Gulati (left) looks on. 

Jack Welch

Jack Welch served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Electric (GE) from 1981-2001. During his tenure at GE, the company's value rose 4000% from $13 billion to more than $410 billion at the time of his retirement, making it the most valuable and largest company in the world. GE recorded revenues of roughly $26.8 billion; in 2000, the year before he left, they were nearly $130 billion.

Because of this success, Mr. Welch's management skills became legendary. He had little time for bureaucracy and managers were given free reign as long as they delivered results and adapted to change. The Financial Times recently named him one of the three most admired business leaders in the world today and Fortune named Mr. Welch the "Manager of the Century," in 1999.

A man with a commanding presence, Mr. Welch is very candid and his one-liners are both witty, meaningful and rich with learning. Below are his thoughts on the various subjects that he shared in the course of his interactions with the class.

Career / Performance

• At work employees naturally differentiate themselves, even among children differentiation occurs
• Work on a candid and honest appraisal system, get the biases out; the problem is that people go through the motions and go on with real work - the evaluation is the real work
• The only way you can get real performance from a person is if he knows his standing in the organization
• A rigorous system of performance appraisal is the best way for an organization to ensure its continued growth
• Role model management remains the best way to energize employees, don't be afraid to make heroes, call out the good that others do - talk about it and make a big deal about it
• You want people with the right behaviors - performance metrics will get you there
• Spend more time talking about the top 20% than the bottom 10%
• Do battlefield promotions - push good deeds, excite people and highlight and set up as role models
• Always try to impact on people

Advice to CEO's on Opportunities Today

• Disrupt any business right now with technology
• Disrupt different aspects of the business, the more ideas you get the better
• To be a disruptor, you need to think out of the box
• Disrupt commoditized and mature markets with service, new products and new ways of doing things
• Get sticky customers by asking yourself how you can make your product more sticky
• Do anything to keep a customer rather than going around finding a new one - the cost of getting a customer is 1,000 times that of keeping a loyal one
• The whole game that you are in is about exciting others, turn people on - customers, new markets, make them feel better than they are now

Success and Luck

• The harder you work, the luckier you get
• You need to get a lot of breaks
• Your results will be your brand
• Your team's performance will be your brand
• The day you promote your achievements is the day you need to say goodbye

Leadership & Values

• Ability to articulate a vision and excite everybody
• Getting everybody to follow that vision
• Values can take as much as two years to create and finalize
• Values are something that an organization should embrace
• Leaders should always display these values and not just pay lip service to it
• People always watch and they know
• Public hanging is worth more than 1,000 CEO speeches on values - be as transparent as you can be
• Don't be a manager - managers are a bore!
• Leadership is about promoting others - it is no longer about you
• Your success is achieved by seeing others achieve
• Leaders who promote themselves lose the respect of their subordinates and should be shot

Team

• You cannot spend enough time building a great team
• Always let people know where they stand
• Let every moment be a teaching moment
• Want people who are passionate about winning
• Create an atmosphere where leaders want to be - you want to be the hottest place in the company
• Be the pied piper

Bottom 10% Performers

• We don't shoot people
• Get rid of the bottom 10% of your performers in order to renew the organization and be fare to those who will not advance
• There should be no surprises, people should always know where and how they stand and this stems from a good appraisal system
• This takes time and people need to get used to this