Carol Bartz has outlasted most CEOs of big companies. She has been chief executive of Autodesk for the past 14 years, when the median tenure is just five years. She led the Silicon Valley software company through economic ups and downs. In May, Ms. Bartz will relinquish her CEO post and become executive chairman. But her longevity as CEO gives her a rare perspective on what it takes to weather mistakes and business cycles and to be an agent of change.
Don’t rest on your honeymoon-period laurels.
When she first became CEO, Ms. Bartz joked that her task was “playing Wendy to the Lost Boys of Autodesk.” The company had one product, profits were sagging and employees, who brought their dogs and cats to the office, weren’t used to answering to anyone. Even by Silicon Valley standards, the atmosphere was chaotic, choking creativity.
Category: Careers
Ford’s New Way
I sat there listening to the Ford Motor Company press conference Monday morning – as first Bill Ford, Jim Padilla and then Mark Fields outlined the “Way Forward,” confirming the elimination of up to 30,000 jobs and the closings of 14 manufacturing facilities over the next several years, while basically admitting that the company was culturally bankrupt, bureaucratically paralyzed, and woefully and relentlessly clueless about how to function in the modern automotive world – and the first thought that came to my mind is that it’s a flat-out miracle this iconic American company has managed to survive this long.
Monday morning’s presentation, designed to take us under the tent with Ford executives thinking and talking out loud for the assembled media, financial analysts and a worldwide Ford company audience, was a lurid combination of multiple mea culpas and a blatant pep rally – and the net-net of it was that it exposed Ford to be a company so far out of touch and so far removed from being a competitive force in the U.S. market that I was literally stunned at what I was hearing.
I have to agree with Peter. Reading the blowback from Ford’s Monday announcements, I, too wondered where the company is heading, and, if indeed it has been so rudderless, how has it survived?
The Lives We Live
Changing planes at O’hare recently, I stood next to an early 20’s woman trying to fly standby to Dayton, Ohio. I discovered that she structured work to support her travel wants.
My fellow traveller said that she joined the Air Force out of High School to “see the world”. The Air Force promptly sent her to Dayton, Ohio for the length of her tour. Now in the AF reserves, she works part time for United Airlines loading bags at the Dayton Airport and for the local Marriott hotel (also part time). These jobs provide incredible travel benefits – unless one cannot obtain a timely seat.
The recent fruits of her work?
- 7 Days skiing in Switzerland while staying at a local Marriott.
- A few days on Oahu, again at a Marriott
- Hong Kong, checking out that city’s Marriott
I assume these benefits make up for the cold nights loading bags on to 737’s at DAY.
Merry Christmas!
Barry Ritholtz says stuff doesn’t make us happy.
Leadership/Decision Making: Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep
The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz’s view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the “midlevel schools” in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech’s numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation’s highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach’s first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior – like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie’s 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.
Un-Retirees Are Happier if they are Self-Employeed
A substantial portion of older Americans now in the work force chose to return there after retiring, and how well they’re enjoying their labor now depends a lot on whether they’re self-employed, according to two new reports.
About 10% of workers 40 and older are retirees who’ve returned to the work force, according to a recent survey that screened more than 17,200 workers to find retirees who went back to work, conducted for Putnam Investments by Brightwork Partners, a research firm.
The Next Revolution in Interactions
Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee:
In today’s developed economies, the significant nuances in employment concern interactions: the searching, monitoring, and coordinating required to manage the exchange of goods and services. Since 1997, extensive McKinsey research on jobs in many industries has revealed that globalization, specialization, and new technologies are making interactions far more pervasive in developed economies. Currently, jobs that involve participating in interactions rather than extracting raw materials or making finished goods account for more than 80 percent of all employment in the United States. And jobs involving the most complex type of interactions—those requiring employees to analyze information, grapple with ambiguity, and solve problems—make up the fastest-growing segment.
This shift toward more complex interactions has dramatic implications for how companies organize and operate. In the mid-1990s, McKinsey studied the growing impact of interactions on the way people exchange ideas and information and how businesses cooperate or compete. In 1997, “A revolution in interaction” presented the findings of that research.
WSJ on GM Janesville
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial pens a useful, cautious note:
There are no guarantees that GM will succeed with its turnaround plant. That means there are no long-term guarantees for the Janesville plant.
But in today’s rapidly changing economy, there are few guarantees for anyone.
The lesson for Wisconsin is that knowledge is vital. The knowledge-based economy is transforming all industries, from auto makers to software developers to genetic engineers. The state should invest in its knowledge assets its schools, colleges and universities. They will not only produce the educated work force we will depend upon but also the research that will generate many new businesses.
Families should also invest in knowledge the education and re-education that will be required to prepare for the changing job market.
RIP: Peter Drucker
Many links. Mark Baker has more.
Flexible Working: Half of All Women Want to Pack it All in For An Easier Life
More than half of female workers have already left or are seriously considering escaping conventional nine-to-five working in a bid to invent their own working patterns, according to a new report.
The survey by recruitment and HR consultancy Hudson of more than 1,000 UK employees and 500 employers has found the majority (84 per cent) of professional women believe the nine-to-five routine is being spurned by their gender.
They are instead preferring to follow a career path offering flexibility and professional autonomy rather than fit in with the demands of the corporate world
Getting Things Done
All must be corralled in one place and then processed using Allen’s core mantra of “Do it, delegate it, defer it”. If the action takes less than two minutes, do it there and then. If longer, you either hand off to someone else or defer it into your pending tray. Otherwise it is trashed or filed. The in-tray thereby becomes sacrosanct. You never put stuff back into “In”. Never.
On the web, for example, Getting Things Done (GTD) has gone supernova. Web and IT professionals have taken Allen’s core ideas and refined them into ever more effective tips called “life hacks”. Adherents swap these across a broad network of blogs, wikis and websites such as 43Folders.com – all amid a considerable amount of one-upmanship over who has the biggest and best system.
Getting Things Done by David Allen