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1-Page Summary of Winning
Overview
Running a business is like playing professional sports. Just as athletes must train hard, work together, and adapt to the game’s unpredictability, you need to build an effective team, pay attention to your surroundings and employ tried-and-true strategies in order to succeed. You can learn these lessons from Jack Welch (former CEO of General Electric) and Suzy Welch (a journalist), who have 81 years of combined experience in business. In this book summary, you’ll learn how leaders at Hertz Rent a Car Company, Home Depot Supply Chain Management, and other organizations used these strategies to solve tough problems and win big.
Aligning Your Mission, Behaviors, and Consequences
Athletes show up to practice every day and do difficult exercises even though it’s hard. They also give up things like staying out late, drinking alcohol, and smoking cigarettes so they can be the best at their sport.
Business and sports share some similar characteristics. They’re both tough, fast-paced environments that require a lot of strategy, teamwork, persistence, and surprises. If you have a strong vision in business like the way teams do in sports, you can win together. But if your team loses focus on its mission or goal it will become difficult to fulfill it because meetings seem endless and overwhelming.
If you want to get off the grind, you need to align your organization’s mission with its behaviors and consequences.
A mission is a destination, a place where you’re going and why. It should be specific enough to inspire your team members but not too specific that it becomes mundane. A good mission can motivate people and help them focus on their work in order to solve problems they may face along the way.
The behaviors of a team are how they think, feel, communicate and act. If you’re the leader of that team, your behavior should include connecting with others in a meaningful way, inspiring them by your actions and words, and providing them with resources to contribute to the mission. You also need to clearly explain what behavior is expected from each member so they can work well together.
Consequences are the rewards or punishments you put in place to encourage people to follow your mission. They shouldn’t be the main driving force, but they should exist so that employees can see how committed you really are.
Alignment is easy in theory but difficult to do. If you are a leader, you need to research and figure out what’s driving your business so that you can align missions, behaviors, and consequences. Erik Fyrwald learned this when he became the CEO of an industrial company called Nalco. When Nalco was first bought out, it had $4 billion in revenue and strong cash flow but negligible growth. Its mission was uninspiring; basically it amounted to “We work in the water industry.”
Fyrwald spent his first 90 days as CEO traveling to different Nalco business units and customer sites. He found a water-usage quality-optimization system that was loved by customers, and he quickly realized that it was Nalco’s competitive advantage. With this in mind, Fyrwald led an initiative to rewrite the company’s mission and align behaviors with it. The new mission of the company was much more inspiring than “working in the water industry.” Employees had something they could be excited about when coming into work each day. However, just having a better mission wasn’t enough: Fyrwald also promoted new behaviors across all business units, such as measuring progress and efficiency, identifying incremental growth targets for every team member within their department, forging new relationships with partners around the world in countries like Kazakhstan and Angola, etc. It is never pleasant to dish out negative reinforcement, but without consequences that are tangible ( i. e. people losing their jobs) or relevant (i.e., getting fired if you don’t achieve your goals), it’s nearly impossible to get everyone on board with the same vision of success.
