Turnaround

How to Change Course When Things Are Going South

Lisa Gable

• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 978-1940858708
• eBook ISBN: 9781646870769
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Is your once-thriving organization stuck? Is your team on life support, unable to deliver on its potential? Is your initiative or campaign limping along instead of sprinting ahead? Lisa Gable, turnaround mastermind, offers a clear-headed, straightforward method for getting you back on track.

For more than 30 years, Lisa Gable has been called to turnaround failing organizations—businesses, teams, nonprofits, political campaigns, and government projects—and solve seemingly intractable problems. From Silicon Valley to Washington DC, she's seen it all. Over time, she's learned the key to course-correct when things go South is applying the discipline of process engineering—carefully reevaluating everything your organization does and how it does it—with diplomacy and humanity, taking care of relationships and forging strong partnerships.

In Turnaround, Gable shares her simple but powerful method for breathing new life into the most troubled ventures:

• Visualize the future—don't fix what's there; start from scratch.
• Break down the present—ditch what isn't working; keep what does.
• Create a path to your future—map out critical decision and actions needed.
• Execute with confidence and diplomacy—speed up by partnering well with others.
  

At a time when dizzying innovation cycles, hyper competition, and a global pandemic have made survival more challenging than ever, Gable's time-tested and industry-proof method will give you the tools to turn your ship around and a chart a course to success.

STEP 1

VISUALIZE THE FUTURE

Stop Thinking about the Problem and Focus on Where You Want to End

In 2008, Indra Nooyi, then CEO of PepsiCo, stood on stage at an industry event, frustrated by a brewing political battle that threatened her company and others in the food and beverage industry. One-third of Americans were overweight or obese.¹ Skyrocketing health care costs were being traced to medical issues exacerbated by weight: hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease, to name a few.

Nooyi knew that U.S. food and beverage makers had already changed their recipes, reducing sugars and fats across many products. However, there was no mechanism in place to track these changes, so no one knew what good work they were doing. As a result, skeptical government officials and key public health influencers blamed them for the looming health crisis. Hints of regulation, taxation, and litigation dominated conversation in Washington, D.C., and state capitals.

As she stood in front of her peers, Nooyi went off script. She demanded that other companies join her in coming up with a solution. She not only warned companies that they would face increasing backlash if they didn’t, but also reminded them that they owned part of the responsibility to help solve the obesity crisis. Fifteen of her peers heard the call and joined PepsiCo in creating a committee to work on the problem.

These sixteen CEOs held long planning meetings, but for eighteen months, they struggled and argued. They poured millions into small-scale ideas that failed. They hired the famed McKinsey consulting firm, which came up with an idea too complex and expensive to scale. When they decided to hire someone to lead the effort, the CEOs brought in people from public health and industry, but all their conversations were about tweaking the existing solutions. If we just did this a little better, then maybe our political opponents would back off. If we put a lot of money into getting kids to exercise, then we would solve the problem.

Finally, they reached out to me. I did not come from public health. I knew nothing about the food and beverage industry. However, I came with an open mind and a blank slate. I simply asked these exhausted executives, “What is the most important problem you need to solve? What do you want your perfect future to look like?”

The answer was clear: The CEOs wanted a cease-fire with public health and regulators. The discord between the two had grown increasingly acrimonious since the late 1990s and needed to end. These two groups despised each other. Instead, they wanted to engage directly with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), one of the most respected organizations and leaders in public health. Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, the foundation’s CEO, had made it clear that consumer products companies could no longer ignore, tweak, or lobby their way out of their responsibility: After all, they made the food that people were eating.

As I talked with them over the next few weeks, it became obvious that they needed to commit to an “Apollo” project, a big, bold plan with measurable results. They needed to establish a well-defined goal, a time frame, and a commitment to fund their efforts. The time for tweaks was over.

That Apollo project would turn out to be the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), a large-scale public-private partnership that I would lead. It was set up with a five-year timeline to realize these companies’ perfect future and with an upfront budget of three years. HWCF would have the power and flexibility to negotiate with allies in the public health community without the engagement of the sixteen member companies—the ability to be independent from market motivations and to be 100 percent transparent was critical to its credibility. By focusing on a bold future, HWCF would fundamentally rethink how food and beverage companies could gain the trust of the public and the public health leaders that had eluded them for years.

As things are going south on a project or organization, we often get stuck, even obsessed, on specific issues or problems. We think that if we could only fix this or that, we would be able to turn this ship around. So we tweak what’s already there to make it work better. When that doesn’t work, we tweak another thing. The churn continues.

Although it is always good to pinpoint what’s not working, focusing on fixing existing problems is not the best starting point for a successful turnaround. You can become so focused on resolving the issues in front of your nose or pointing fingers at each other that you never resolve the underlying issues affecting your results. If your project or organization has coded a few times on the operating table, something is either fundamentally wrong with its overall design or position in the marketplace, or the economics of your business no longer work.

Stop thinking about your present problems and start imagining where you want your project, organization, or team to end up in the future—then design a path to this new vision. To visualize the future, you must:

• • Describe your perfect world scenario.
• • Identify Job 1 (…and 2 and 3).
• • Reframe success.
• • Evangelize your future vision.

By taking these four steps, you will sidestep existing operational assumptions that are cluttering your mind. You will break free from the distractions of the daily grind and any restrictive parameters in current operations. You will be able to reflect and redirect your abilities to designing around a future that maximizes your team’s or organization’s expertise and creativity.

Whether you are managing your first turnaround or your third, it is likely that your capabilities and expertise placed you in a position to effect change in a positive way. Someone either chose you to solve the problem, or you had some bad luck and are now stuck with it. No matter the reason you find yourself in the driver’s seat, it’s your moment to step up and show your leadership skills. Your first task: to picture a “perfect world scenario” for your project, organization, or team.

DESCRIBE YOUR PERFECT WORLD SCENARIO

When I meet someone who is struggling with a project or an organization, I ask him or her, “If you could wave your magic wand, what is the future you would want to see?” In other words, describe to me the perfect world scenario you want as your end point. This scenario can be as bold as you’d like.

Over the years, I’ve learned that this scenario typically leverages and maximizes a core competency that your project or organization is uniquely qualified in and that drives your position of strength. The first step to describe a future perfect world scenario is, paradoxically, to go back to the past. Understanding your project’s or organization’s genesis can be the key to rediscovering its core competency.

Your Core Competency

Your project, organization, or group came into existence for a reason. Whoever founded it came together around a particular purpose. Probably they did not believe that other organizations or competitors were providing an effective offering or solving a particular problem, so they started something new. Go back to the charter, the meeting minutes or emails, the original business plan, or the past board books of the project, organization, or group you are tasked with turning around to understand the purpose behind its creation. If that purpose or that big problem is still relevant today, then you are still in business.

That’s precisely what Steve Jobs did in 1996 when he returned to rescue Apple. The company had lost its edge, unable to deliver breakthrough products since its Macintosh line of personal computers debuted in 1984. When Jobs came back, he knew there was a market for easy, accessible computer products. He immediately centered the business around Apple’s “special sauce”: exceptional design focused on simplicity. That focus resulted in industry-changing products, from the best-selling iMac (favored by first-time PC users) to the iPod, iTunes, and of course, the iPhone.

You too must find the special sauce or core competency that will enable you to reposition yourself as the market leader or become the internal project, team, or program that can solve a big need or problem. Evaluate your competitors. Outline what they do, what you do, and which has a higher probability of success. Then identify overlaps between you and them. You may have a particular technology, partnerships, or existing infrastructure that would be costly for others to replicate and be competitive. You may have an expertise or access to a treasure trove of data that makes your project unique. Zero in on what you can do that others cannot. This is your core competency—and the key to your perfect world scenario.

Your Perfect World Scenario

With your core competency in mind, you can visualize a fresh future for your organization, project, or program. This perfect world scenario might be one where you leverage your core competency to mitigate a rising risk that has a negative impact on your customer base, constituency, or community. Or it might be one in which your core competency allows you to solve a problem that threatens your position in the market. Or perhaps your core competency (say, a breakthrough technology) will transform the way people live or work.

To visualize a new future, it often helps to focus on your customers’ or constituents’ pain points. Often in an effort to build something great, we fail to appreciate what they truly want and need—and therefore what will lead to our success. It’s like a software developer who keeps updating one of its products, now in decline, to “make it better.” Sure, every update optimizes the product’s performance or adds bells and whistles to it. But it also leads to error messages or prompts the end us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Early Praise for Turnaround
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: The Turnaround Method
• STEP 1. Visualize the Future: Stop Thinking about the Problem and Focus on Where You Want to End
• STEP 2. Break Down the Past: Figure Out What Still Works and What No Longer Does
• STEP 3. Create a Path from Present to Future: Map Out Critical Decisions and Actions Needed
• STEP 4. Execute with Speed, Confidence, and Heart: Set Aggressive Goals and Foster Effective Partnerships
• CONCLUSION: End on a High Note
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index
• About the Author
• Bonus Material: A Conversation with Lisa Gable