Ruthless Execution: What Business Leaders Do When Their Companies Hit the Wall Reviews
Ruthless Execution: What Business Leaders Do When Their Companies Hit the Wall
Today’s business leaders need a radically different skill from their recent predecessors: they must know how to know how to manage through adversity while preparing their companies for a new rebirth of success. In Ruthless Execution, Amir Hartman, author of the bestselling NETREADY, identifies the central ingredients that help certain companies to get beyond the wall and thrive–and show how to instill these ingredients in your organization. You will learn when and how to recalibrate the balance between performance and growth; how to define a coherent, tightly-drawn business philosophy that maps to specific actions; new ways to promote accountability and business alignment; and how to use performance metrics without burying people in meaningless trivia. Also discover how to promote real discipline: the ability to get the job done quickly, efficiently, and effortlessly–without bureaucracy. Next, you learn how to develop stronger “critical capabilities” for understanding and managi
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Not just “Me-too” advice,
Hartman presents trenchant analysis and documentation of an endemic problem in business: hitting the wall can happen to an enterprise anywhere, anytime. Discussions of the case studies are compelling. More importantly, the revealing of the many dimensions of what needs to be done to turn things around and how to do that are the core contributions of the book. Highly recommended read for senior and top managers…especially for those who think they are enjoying success.
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|Familiar stories, great execution strategies,
What do you do if your company has been a high performer but then hits the wall? The economy may have slowed down, your product innovation has dropped off, growth has been too fast, or execution has been ineffective. According to Amir Hartman, what your company needs is ruthless execution (a term Hartman coined with John Sifonis while working with Hewlett-Packard). This consists of the method and strategies that Hartman’s research suggests business leaders have employed to break through performance walls.
Ruthless execution consists of strategies organized into three categories: leadership, governance, and critical capabilities, each of which contains several practices. Hartman does not guarantee success in breaking through the wall if you use any of these strategies. But these approaches are common to those who have succeeded in the past and were used in the order presented in the book.
When troubled or uncertain times arrive, leaders typically but fruitlessly adopt either the “Run-and-Gun strategy” or the “Slash-and-Burn” strategy. According to Hartman, a third approach of ruthless execution works far better for most business leaders. In this book, he has no interest in identifying the major causes of companies hitting the wall. No matter what the cause it is an inability to focus and execute that is at the core of the problem.
By studying a diverse set of industries and companies of all sizes, using surveys, company documents, research reports, publicly available financial data (10-Ks), and interviews with key business leaders, Hartman believes he has discovered the practices used by those companies who succeeded in breaking through the wall. Much of the book consists of overviews of these efforts, many of them familiar to business readers, including Jack Welch’s time at GE, Louis Gerstner’s turnaround of IBM, Larry Bossidy’s famous execution at Honeywell, along with Baxter, Novartis, and Cisco.
Ruthless execution proceeds through the stages of leadership, governance, and critical capabilities. The first part of the leadership aspect is strategic recalibration: the act of validating the direction and focus a company is going to take. This involves rearranging the portfolio of business initiatives (Hartman offers four rules for portfolio management), assessing how resources are allocated to initiatives, and setting a course while finding a healthy balance between performance and growth efforts.
After strategic recalibration, the second leadership practice is devising a business philosophy. Hartman prefers “business philosophy” to “organizational culture” because a culture may endure over generations but he is referring to the view that comes from the top and typically is identified with the CEO. He holds up Jack Welch as exemplifying the creation and promulgation of a business philosophy.
The second part of ruthless execution is governance. This consists of: Accountability – using a set of “alignment” strategies; Performance management system – using a small number of critical financial, strategic, and operating metrics (10 principles are offered); Discipline – communicating messages that are consistent, straightforward, and easily comprehended.
The final part of ruthless execution is critical capabilities: These are the specific actions that executives drive to break through the wall. They are the three critical skills and delivery capabilities with which business leaders need to be equipped: Productivity management – cost and working capital management, productivity management inc. technology-driven productivity improvement (which is aimed at optimizing, reconstructing, inventing and for which Hartman outlines six principles); Talent management – hiring the best talent and getting rid of underperformers; Focused corporate transactions – mergers and acquisitions, and divestitures.
The final chapter introduces a Ruthless Execution Index intended to help executives who want to understand where to improve their ruthless execution. While some executives will find much of the material familiar, the book gathers and organizes many aspects of the execution so vital to continuing and recapturing success.
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|Mirror, Mirror on the Wall….,
Ruthless Execution
Ignore this book’s somewhat overheated title and concentrate on Hartman’s core concepts which he develops with meticulous care. He suggests a number of strategies and tactics by which business leaders can respond effectively when they encounter what Hartman calls the “rude awakening that occurs when a company has enjoyed consistently high-level performance, but comes up against some new factor: a downward turn in the economy, a lack of product innovation, growth that occurs too rapidly, a missed market opportunity, or as is most often the case, ineffective execution.” Hartman organizes his material within five Parts which consist of a total of 12 individual chapters: Managing Through Tough Times, Leadership: Dealing with Rude Awakenings, How to Play the Game, Breaking Through the Wall, and What It All Means. The focus of Hartman’s book is on “business reversals and the need to shepherd business leaders through those reversals because, quite frankly, corporations are passing through a new, more complex, more worrying age. The long and short of it is that it’s far more difficult to be a successful business leader today than ever before.”
The statistics support Hartman’s last observation. In 2001, for example, 257 public companies (with a total of $258 billion in assets) declared bankruptcy. In 2002, another 67 did so. Go back even further to the 43 companies which Peters and Waterman quite properly praised in In Search of Excellence (1982). Most no longer qualify according to the criteria by which they were selected…and several do not exist at all. Scary? You bet.
In Chapter 8, Hartman offers a “Ruthless Execution Checklist” which can be of substantial value to all organizations, regardless of size or nature:
1. Do you have a cost and working capital management program that is driven through the business?
[NOTE: For small companies, the more appropriate question is “Is there a sound reason for the expenditure of each hour and each dollar?”]
2. Do you have a proactive and disciplined approach to identifying and assessing potential acquisitions and divestitures?
[NOTE: For small companies, the more appropriate question is “What should you add to what you now offer? What should you eliminate?”]
3. Do you regularly assess whether the corporate center is adding distinctive value to each business unit?
[NOTE: For small companies, the more appropriate question is “Does everything you do add value to each customer relationship?”]
4. Do you effectively and swiftly manage out non-performers?
[NOTE: Extensive research indicates that, on average, each mishire costs 24 times her or his annual salary. Hire slowly but fire FAST.]
Most organizations now face serious challenges. Many of those organizations will not survive. For their decision-makers, what to do? To his credit, Hartman does not propose a series of specific (one size fits all) answers to that question. Rather, in the final chapter, he includes a “Ruthless Execution Index” with instructions as to how to use it. It remains for each reader to provide correct responses to the 54 statements which comprise the “Index.” Once this exercise has been completed, the far greater challenge — obviously — is to take appropriate action. Hartman can assist with that process. I also recommend a careful reading of Bossidy and Charan’s Execution, Hammer’s The Agenda, Collins’ Good to Great, and Kaplan and Norton’s The Strategy-Focused Organization.
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