This interview with
Joseph Jimenez, chief executive of Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, was
conducted by the New York Times:
‘Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve
learned?
A. One occurred when I was a division president of another
company. I was sent in to turn the division around after four years of
underperformance. It was a declining
business. And when I got there, I
completely misdiagnosed the problem. I
said: “Look. We’re missing our forecast
every month. What’s wrong?” I brought in a consulting firm, and we looked
at what was wrong. And the answer was
that we had a bad sales and operations planning process, where salespeople,
marketing people and operations people were supposed to come together and plan
out the next 18 months and then forecast off of that. So I said: “O.K. We’re going to fix this. We’re going to have the consulting team come
in and help us make that a better, more robust process, with more analytics.”
And it turned out it wasn’t at all about analytics. Because once we did that, and we put that new
process in place, we still continued to miss forecasts. So I thought, “Something’s really wrong
here.” I brought in a behavioural
psychologist, and I said: “Look, either I’m misdiagnosing the problem or
something’s fundamentally wrong in this organisation. Come and help me figure it out.” She came in with her team and about four
weeks later came back and said: “This isn’t about skills or about process. You have a fundamental behavioural issue in
the organisation. People aren’t telling
the truth. So at all levels of the organisation, they’ll come together, and
they’ll say, ‘Here’s our forecast for the month.’ And they won’t believe it. They know they’re not going to hit it when
they’re saying it.” The thing she taught me — and this sounds obvious — is that
behaviour is a function of
consequence. We had to change the
behaviour in the organisation so that people felt safe to bring bad news. And I
looked in the mirror, and I realised I was part of the problem. I didn’t want to hear the bad news, either.
So I had to change how I behaved, and start to thank people for bringing me bad
news.
Q. That doesn’t mean letting them off the hook, though.
A. Right. It’s more a chance to say: “Hey, thank you for
bringing me that news. Because you know
what? There are nine months left in the
year. Now we have time to do something
about it. Let’s roll up our sleeves, and
let’s figure out how we’re going to make it.”
It was a total shift from where we had been previously. So after that experience, I always ask all of
my people, and I always think to myself: “Are we really fixing the root cause
of this problem, if there’s any problem?
Or are we fixing the symptoms?”
For more, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/business/joseph-jimenez-of-novartis-on-finding-the-core-of-a-problem.html?_r=1
