The other day I read a very interesting post that was written by John Chen, a corporate executive. Mr. Chen has the reputation of being a corporate “turn around” artist. He has demonstrated his skills to recover a failing company and make it profitable. Some time ago he was brought into Sybase, at the time a struggling software company, to turn it around. He was successful in saving the company, even though it was widely believed that he could not do it. The company was eventually sold to SAP for $5.8 billion, 14 times it’s value when he was hired. Not only did he saved the company, he grew it, and he eventually made a substantial profit for the shareholders.
Mr. Chen is now the CEO of BlackBerry Ltd, another company that was in trouble. Within a year he has stopped the money bleed and made the hardware division profitable. With the turn around portion secured, he then focusing on growing the company just like what he did with Sybase.
In Mr. Chen’s post, he listed his procedures for effectively turning around a struggling company. What made his post so interesting to me is that portions of his strategy are very similar to what I have written in several of my posts. The question you may ask, is productivity and organisation turnaround the same thing? Partly, yes. Productivity improves the performance of an organisation while “turn around” produces favourable fortunes for an organisation. Think of productivity as a set course towards a goal or a quicker means to reaching that goal. A turn around would be a change in direction towards that goal. Productivity itself would be one aspect of the turn around process. When you look at John Chen’s keys to executing a successful turn around, they are identical to several of the productivity aspects I have mentioned in my previous post.
The first important key he mentioned was a focus on innovation. He then talked about creating a Problem-Solving culture, where the process operators are the subject matter experts. Within this Problem-Solving culture he talked about the importance of the mindset. A sense of urgency was the next key he mentioned, along with the importance of knowing yourself and empowering employees to take risks.
Does all of this sound very familiar?
I would like to go into more detail and the similarities between what we have written but that will make an extremely long post. Instead I’ll discuss them in the following posts.
Until the next time!
Productivity Aspects 