I like the idea of a new CEO coming into a company and deciding to make his or her mark from day one, being dramatic and aggressive in shaking up management practices, especially when the need for it is “glaringly obvious.”
When Bill McDermott and Jim Hageman Snabe became Co-CEOs of SAP in February, they decided that they were going to use their first 100 days to bring the company closer to the customer at blitzkrieg speed, according to an article in Businessweek, May 21 2010.
First of all, on May 12, McDermott and Snabe killed a big sacred cow—the resistance to make acquisitions—with the $5.8 billion deal for the California -based Sybase, a maker of mobile-computing for Smart Phones and business finance software.
The Co CEOs then began a market-driven business incubator project designed to make SAP an innovator and drive organic growth. “There has not been a shortage of innovation at SAP,” said Chief Technology Officer, Vishal Sikka, who joined the executive board in the February shakeup. “There has been a problem with bringing it to market rapidly.”
Yet to get SAP executives to focus on such things, McDermott and Hageman felt they had to bring about a fundamental shift in mindset—from being internally focused to externally focused.
McDermott, an ex salesman, and Hageman, an engineer, almost instantly killed off a long running project that had many executives in the company focused on the examination of corporate values. “Companies that are too internally focused are sick,” McDermott said.
“There’s nothing healthy about being obsessed with your own internal nonsense. If there was a project that built bureaucracy into the company or required people to think about our internal stuff, we’ve killed those projects.”
McDermott, who used to be head of global sales, has been reducing bureaucracy with a vengeance. In April, he combined SAP’s 9,500-person field sales force with 14,000 consultants who customize its software for clients and a group of several hundred people who handle relationships with partners including IBM and HP. Now account reps can keep an eye on all facets of a sale “without having to navigate through a complex system,” McDermott said.
About two weeks later, he ordered SAP’s 200 top managers to gather with their reports at “coffee corners” where SAP employees at branch offices refuel and explain their agendas in a conversation without using PowerPoint slides.
He’s told managers to stop calling meetings to review data they can look up in the company’s computer systems. “We no longer have an interest in this upward cascade of information,” he said. “Managers who can’t get comfortable with that won’t do very well.”
If you are a new CEO or executive, there ought to be a lot you can learn from the bold moves of Mc Dermott and Hageman in their first 100 days. Take a moment to think about what you could do to bring your company closer to the market or shake up management practices.
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