|
Q: Change is tough. Where does one, as a CEO, get started? A: The place you start is this: You talk to your organization, you tell them everything has to change. You set the stage for a cultural shift. You don't talk about this as an initiative, or as a new set of initiatives that enable other activities. You instead tell everyone that everything about their work life is going to change -- and that the changes need to happen together. And most importantly -- you, yourself, have to change. This time a year ago, I was plowing through 150 faxes a day. Today, it's 150 e-mails, PowerPoint presentations, and I'm now included in everything suppliers and salespeople and the rest of the organization sees, so that we're all jumping into the pool. We're a flatter organization as a result. We have to be, or we're not using the Net. And we've all got kids to mentor us. Q: Meaning, you've got the Web-savvy mentoring the Web-challenged? A: Yes. The meek shall inherit the earth, so we've got the kids mentoring us. My mentor is crazyman John Rosenfeld. John is the marketing guy at GE Aircraft, and he's an evangelist. He and I were on the phone every other day for a month, he tracking me and sending me e-mails teaching me how to get in and out of PowerPoint. And I'm stuck in a hotel in Japan and can't access some database, so I'll call him in the middle of the night. Rosenfeld is in his early 30s, and I'm 50. So this reverse-mentoring stuff, when it comes to the Web, is very real at GE. And it does more than teach the old guys new tricks. It helps enable new relationships between the young and the older, the top guys and those further down in the organization, and ultimately, makes us all smarter, and our culture is made flatter and more cooperative and engaged with each other. Q: How important is that? A: It's everything. If you don't merge your business requirements of the Net with the cultural changes internally required as a result of working with the Net, you don't get there -- you won't be able to cash in and change to thrive in the future. As hard as we worked on culture and individual change, we worked just as hard at extracting value out of this. This is not a nonprofit organization. The Net has enormous productivity and growth potential for us, so we're driving our business to extract additional productivity and growth, and we're demanding they use this new world creatively to take GE to the next level of serving customers better, driving profitability to a greater degree. It's a hard-edged initiative, and yet it's driven by us all stepping into a wholly different cultural environment. It's all about speed, results today, and customer satisfaction. We can't be there unless we, too, change inside the company to get there. Q: Part of that, in your case, was accomplished by converting an old warehouse into an idea lab, complete with foosball tables and open work pods. And you've also appointed "e-belts" -- the cultural equivalent of karate black belts -- to lead change. A: Yeah, we took an old warehouse and made it into the new center of our company, and put the renegades that were going to take over the company [in there] and told them to come take us, the old company, over. We've got 490 people now whose total lives are driving e-business into us. And in order to achieve the changes as quickly as we want to do it, we realized we had to set up something that would come after us. Otherwise, corners would get cut, old thinking would mitigate bright ideas. We had to create a place where new ideas could be treasured and driven and valued. And you have to have these types of idea labs report directly to the people at the top to make it work. If the guy driving your cultural and business changes -- your e-business initiatives -- doesn't have as much power as anyone else in the organization, change isn't going to happen. You won't be successful at it. Q: Any new recruits, from outside the company? A: Yes, it's important to make them part of the mix, too. New people don't have a stake in the old FE Aircraft Engines. They only have a stake in creating new. They haven't been here long enough that the past is more important to them than the future. It's important to find a mix of characters, give them power, get them off-site, and pay them for results. Q: You mean, give them incentives to bring about changes? A: Exactly. We don't go after cultural change for only cultural change's sake. We do it with an edge. The people running our e-business initiatives here share profitability targets with the operations guys. They're both on the hook for it. Otherwise, they could be having a lot of fun over here at the idea lab, having pizza parties, and not be accountable for the business results. Q: It's sort of like everyone having to buy in to the results. A: Yes. In the past, you'd have to manage the old and the new in a way where everyone felt like winners. Not now. Now, if you pound down long enough, everyone understands the new is more important than the old. We've reached that point. Q: Surely this wasn't easy? A: I think the most difficult thing was that I had to change myself, my personal way of doing business, before I could appreciate the power of what it could do for the rest of the business. When I personally made [a successful eBay transaction] one weekend nine months ago, I really understood the power of business transactions over the Web. See, I bought and bought and bought and bid and bid and bid, and all of a sudden saw the power of marrying every seller with every buyer, cost, quality -- and all the opportunities inherent in that. It struck me then. And so in sum, I think every business is a bit different, but you cannot afford to take the chance of not getting it. There will be some businesses more insulated than others, but I wouldn't want to explain a year and half from now that I didn't take the risk -- and lose the business. I'd much rather jump in and overestimate the impact of the Net than to underestimate it. But it all must start with you, personally. Once it does, you need to lead it. |
