Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (23 page)

When these things happen—and if you’re taking risks by pursuing Big Goals, they
will
almost surely happen—the best thing to do is simply acknowledge and explain. I explained what happened with our multibranding strategy to investors before they even asked me about it. But an explanation in situations like these is not enough. You also have to answer the question, “What are you going to do now?” In this case, I talked about our intent to focus 100 percent on our stand-alone brands and build new incremental sales layers with beverages and new day-parts, like breakfast.

If you fail, that’s part of business, just as it’s part of life. Don’t sweep it under the rug. Talk about it with your team and diagnose the problems. Come up with a new plan, and then go public, both about why the last idea didn’t work and about how the new one will be different. It’s the best way to save your credibility.

Self-reflection

Exercise

Shock the system! Consider the ways in which you will communicate your vision and write them down. The questions below may prompt some ideas:

•   What is a common set of key messages that you can build into all communications?
  
•   How can you provide regular updates to everyone on your People Map?
  
•   How can you encourage others to spread your message?
  
•   How can you link your message to other initiatives?
  

In the last section, I talked about how to gain the alignment of your target audience, but in order to see your Big Goal through to the end, you can’t just gain alignment once and be done with it. You have to keep sniffing out that conflict and come to terms with the fact that there may be some people who will never be fully convinced of your vision, no matter what you say or do.

I’ve had some learning to do myself in this area, even after I started giving my Taking People with You program. At this point, I used to talk about how you have to have courage and stick to your guns to see something through in spite of all the naysayers. But then, during one of my programs, someone raised his hand and asked me, “But what if the naysayers are right?”

It was a good question, and it brought to mind some of the biggest failures of my career, like Crystal Pepsi. If I had listened to the voices telling me the product wasn’t ready yet and addressed their concerns, Crystal Pepsi could have had a real shot and might even still be on store shelves today. Those naysayers could have been my most important advisers back then, if I had just paid closer attention to them and adjusted my plan as a result.

The best thing about the Crystal Pepsi debacle is that it made me a better and more open-minded listener. People have saved me from myself over and over again during the course of my career. They have told me things I didn’t know, stopped me from doing or saying the wrong thing, and helped me see where I needed to make adjustments to my thinking
or course of action. In fact, I rely on certain people, like my chief legal counsel, Chris Campbell, to tell me things that I don’t want to hear, and he does our company and me a world of good almost every time he does. I even changed this entire section of my program as a result of that one guy’s insightful question. And the program, as well as my leadership abilities, are better as a result. Because, guess what? That guy was right.

I still believe it’s important to have the courage to move forward with intentionality to achieve your Big Goal, but it’s just as important that you don’t do it until you’ve listened to everyone’s concerns and considered all the potential barriers to success. This requires patience, maturity, and confidence in your own judgment, but if you do this step right, opening yourself up to the possibility that the naysayers might be right shouldn’t lead to self-doubt. Instead, it will expand your knowledge and perspective, which, in the end, will make you even more confident about the path you’re on.

The thing you
don’t
want to do when someone expresses doubts is to plow ahead as if it never happened. But sometimes we do this without even realizing it, because we’re so sure of ourselves, so sure that we have a good idea. The following is a checklist of what you should do to make sure you really are seeing all sides and considering all valid opinions and objections.

1. Listen and understand why:
   Take each concern seriously and get to the bottom of it. Why do they think the way they do? Could they be right? Remember how our general manager in France, Ivan Schofield, kept hearing that his plan for growing our business there was too ambitious? When he really dug into it, he understood that the doubts stemmed from the fact that they didn’t have the right people in place to execute his plan. It was a valid criticism that made him rethink things and hire some new talent. It’s important to adopt the attitude that if I listen to people, I might learn something new. After all, they might end up being right.
   
2. Incorporate valid objections into your plans:
   If you decide that the objections have merit, then it’s time to adjust your plan. Doing this may take a bit more time and effort, but the result will be better for it. For example, when Taco Bell was launching its Frutista Freeze line of frozen beverages, we first tested the new products in three markets. Our customers told us they loved the taste, but our restaurant general managers in those markets told us they were encountering a significant problem with equipment capacity during rush hours; they simply couldn’t produce the drinks fast enough to meet demand. As a result of their feedback, we delayed the national rollout we had planned in order to fix the problem. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but if we hadn’t listened and adjusted our plan, we surely would have encountered bigger
   problems down the road when the equipment failed to produce
   in many more restaurants.
   
3. Listen, then lead:
   After you’ve heard and considered all the different viewpoints, you can’t get paralyzed with indecision. It’s up to you as the leader to make a decision about what to do next. No one wants to get mired in the debate forever, so commit to a course of action and move forward with conviction. When Bob Walter was taking his company, Cardinal Health, public, he came up with a very simple goal for the organization that they called the 20/20/20 rule. It described the straightforward financial benchmarks the company needed to reach. “You’ve got to grow your earnings at 20 percent, you’ve got to have a 20 percent return on equity, and then you’ll have a 20 P/E [stock price to earnings ratio],” Walter explained. One of his most trusted advisers was elected by the management team to approach Walter and persuade him to lower his objectives. Walter heard him out, but then
   decided to stick to the plan. And it’s a good thing he did. That simple but bold goal became an obsession for his team that they consistently achieved, which helped them build the nineteenth largest company on the Fortune 500 list.
   
4. Do the right thing, and the right thing will happen
   : Follow your instincts. If you know you’ve done right by your team, listening to their concerns and doing your homework on your initiative, then have confidence in your decision. Believe that if you’ve gone about making the decision in the right way, the right outcome is likely to happen. In fact, this is a good guiding principle for any aspect of your business. Nordstrom, for example, is famous for having a 100 percent return policy, no questions asked. This has to cost them a lot of money, but they reap the rewards in terms of customer loyalty. Doing right by their customers has made them legendary for their service.
   

When someone says, “It can’t be done,” Scott Bergren, CEO of Pizza Hut, uses a technique he calls the flip. After listening to the person’s objection, he asks, “What would
you
do to solve that problem?” This question drives home the idea that doing nothing is not the answer; instead people should work together to find solutions.

I once heard a story about architect I. M. Pei’s using this same technique to get the unusual, triangle-shaped East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., built just the way he envisioned it. He designed the museum with such an acute angle in one part that the engineers and stonemasons working to construct it told him that an angle like that had never been done before because it just wasn’t possible. So Pei did the flip on them and asked how
they
would solve the problem. They didn’t have an answer offhand, but they did work together to figure it out. Now that angle is one of the most notable aspects of the museum, and visitors frequently walk over just to touch it. What’s more, the building has won numerous awards as a result of the team effort.

You need to listen to the concerns of your target audience with your mind open to the possibility that they might be right, but when making a decision about how to move forward, you also have to consider the fact that they might
not
be. A few years ago, I read David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman and learned more about the fact that practically no one thought he would win his bid for reelection in 1948 against the popular Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey. Every media outlet that mattered predicted his loss, and one respected sampler of public opinion announced that his organization would stop polling, because the outcome was such a sure thing. Famously, the front page of the
Chicago Tribune
even sported the banner headline D
EWEY
D
EFEATS
T
RUMAN
in big bold letters on the day after the election
because they had had the paper printed
before all the results were in. Of course, they were all wrong. The story makes me think about what a loss it would have been if Truman had not followed his own gut instincts.

The idea here is to not cave in to people’s ideas to make them feel validated or to avoid conflict. Instead, you need to seriously consider what people are saying and then make the right call. My great friend, my mentor, and the cofounder of Home Depot, Ken Langone, found himself in this sort of position in 2003 when he became entangled in a lawsuit brought by New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer claimed that the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, Dick Grasso, had received excessive compensation when he was paid $187.5 million for his position and that Ken, as head of the exchange’s compensation committee, had played a role by misleading the board about Grasso’s pay package.

Many people close to Ken encouraged him to settle the case, especially as it dragged on for nearly five years, but Ken stuck to his guns against tremendous pressure. He did it, first off, because he believed Grasso had been an exceptional leader. Just a couple of years before the lawsuit, Grasso had been widely praised for his quick reopening of the exchange in the aftermath of September 11. Second and more important, Ken simply believed he’d done no wrong. As he explained to me, “[Grasso] was part of a system that was created twenty years before I, or that board, showed up. It turned out that Dick was there for thirty-seven years and by virtue of that longevity, his formula kicked in big time for him. But there wasn’t a person that sat on that board that wasn’t apprised extensively on his pay. And every single time that Dick Grasso’s pay package was voted on, it was always a unanimous
vote.”

People may have different points of view about whether Grasso was overpaid, but there’s no doubt that Ken followed his conscience. When it was all over and the claims against him and Grasso had been thrown out by an appellate court, he told me, “First of all, I had to live with myself. I had to look at myself in the mirror every morning and say, at a point in time when the bullets were flying, did you stand up to be counted? Now that sounds altruistic, but that’s the way I am.”

Ken Langone knew instinctively what he needed to do despite advice he was getting to the contrary, but it’s not always the case that we’re so sure of ourselves. If you
don’t have full faith in your decision, then you have to do whatever is necessary to gain confidence. Before Indra Nooyi became CEO of PepsiCo, she made the bold decision to do a major overhaul of the company’s IT systems. It was a $1 billion project, and there were a lot of skeptics. People weren’t just saying it couldn’t be done; they were saying she was downright crazy to even attempt it.