Business Insight Zone

A 3-minute clinic in management excellence is the effect of this short Adam Lashinsky article on Hurd, whose tenure leading Hewlett-Packard has been like a 3-year clinic in excellence:

Hewlett-Packard CEO: We can do even better

Excerpts from the article read more or less like a highlight reel for several of the key themes I try to articulate on this blog:

. . . the CEO who may be the best big-company operator in the country is all about making uncomfortable observations that so far have ended up being the right call for his company: Market share isn’t the best goal to shoot for; even good businesses need to be examined carefully (especially their cost structures); and strategy and execution trump vision any day of the week.

To me, these “uncomfortable observations” mesh well with the idea of “naive questions”: you can unleash some real transformative power when you start asking questions like “How important is market share really?” We think we know, but often what we “know” is just a sort of unexamined conventional wisdom — not the best path to success.

The observation that “even good businesses need to be examined carefully” ties to this quotation from the article:

What you see after watching Hurd for a few years, as I have, is that part of his style simply isn’t to be satisfied. Despite nearly three years of focusing on improving the selling process at HP, Hurd says the company is still not good enough at sales. “It isn’t in our DNA,” he says, echoing past comments.

Extensive research has shown that the very best performers refuse to be satisfied with where they are now. They may appreciate the success they already have, but they don’t find it a sufficient reason to slack off in their efforts to improve. The Tiger Woodses and Mark Hurds of the world are acutely aware of how much room they still have for improvement.

Hurd is also clear on which areas of focus are the steak and which are the sizzle for the CEO — and he has no interest in the sizzle.

He boils down the CEO’s responsibilities to three tasks: setting strategy (not offering a vision); aligning operations and modeling ways to execute on the strategy; get the best team to help the CEO. “There are a thousand distractions that keep you from doing that,” he says. But that’s where the focus needs to be.

Execution, execution, execution. I don’t have a documented source for this, but the other day a friend told me about a figure he had seen that stuck in his mind: whatever he was reading said that 85% of business failures (botched projects, failed product launches, etc.) could be traced to internal issues within companies, not market forces or other external factors. I can well believe it — and apparently Hurd does, too.

Sure, market forces will shape your approach. They must. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the keys to success lie anywhere outside the reach of your and your company. If you take Hurd’s approach, you can drive results through the roof simply by focusing on the most important nuts and bolts of business — even when they’re boring, even when they’re unsexy.

Hurd has HP winning “the boring way” — but it beats the heck out of failing the flashy way.

(Image by bugdog.)

Category: Executives,Management