Vikrama Dhiman's Blog

In his seminal work, Good to Great, Jim Collins and his team highlight 3 key people decisions that universally helped companies transition from Good to Great (exceptional performance much above the industry standard they were in for 15 years in a row). They used quite a strict criteria to not only select who made the cut but also whom to compare with.

Why did these 3 things stuck with me?

• When I coach teams and organizations on Agile Frameworks, invariably the question of people management comes. These 3 points are broadly what I have been recommending.
• The likes of Google, Facebook and more recently Flipkart in India, have been following these principles and, talking about them. It was good to see support from empirical research driven findings.
• Finally, the recommendations themselve make sense.

Here are the 3 key people decisions you can 'choose' to make:

1. When in doubt, keep looking. And keep looking could take several weeks and months. Hence, companies like Google, Facebook, Flipkart and Directi (where I had an opportunity to work) are always hiring. Bhavin Turakhia, the CEO of Directi has "Always Hiring" in his email signature and unless the entire interview panel is sure of the candidate, the person is not brought on board. Always Hiring means 'Always keep looking'. 
   • So, what happens if you find a great person but there is no opening? Simple. Create one.
   • Jim Collins and his team concluded that while to be good, your business performance can outpace your rate of acquiring good people; to be great, your rate of acquiring good people should outpace everything else in your business. Else, you'll not only hit a plateau but actually decline.   
2. When you need to make a people decision, act. Good is the enemy of great. Colman Mochlar, the ex-CEO of Gillete said, "Every minute devoted to putting the proper person in the proper slot is worth weeks of time later". Not only should you get the right people on board, you should also make sure that you put them at right place as well. When you realize that the fit is not happening, try to move honest and able people around. You don't have an option but to let go off others. 
3. Put your best people where your best opportunites are, not where your biggest problems are. The 'right' people should be solving the 'right' problems and not dousing fires. That is one key difference I see in companies that are ranked great to work at, and those that burn people out -> the more productive you are, more you focus on something classified as extremely important for the company / team and not solving urgent issues. Take the case of Marlboro. At a time when Joe Cullman was at Philip Morris, international revenues of Marlboro were 1% of company revenue. However, Joe and his team saw a major opportunity there. What did they do? Rather, who did they entrust? Their top performing person : George Weissman. At that time it looked like punishment to be handling something so insignificant after handling a major revenue line. However, quickly, Weissman developed markets like Europe and Marlboro became the best-selling cigarette in the world three years before it became number one in the United States. 

How important are these people decisions?

Well, Jim and his team again go back to data and bring out an hypothesis. They also test the hypothesis to see if it worked in all the cases of "good to great" and was absent in all the cases of "good to average" or "good to poor". The hypothesis is this ->

Decide who you want onboard before you decide where you are headed. What does that mean?

The book uses the analogy of a bus (a lot of CEOs used that too in their interviews). Before deciding where to take the bus, first get the right people on the bus [1], shuffle or remove people so that they are sitting on the right seats [2] and have them debate where to go, and then go [3]! That is correct. Don't decide your strategy before you have the right people on board.

P.S. Agile goes a step further. It recommends that you evolve continuously as "right" people and "right" knowledge comes along. 

We can round off with a quote from Walter Bruckart, VP, Circuit City during the good-to-great transition years. When asked what were the top five factors that led to the transition from mediocrity to excellence : "One would be people. Two would be people. Three would be people. Four would be people. And, five would be people."

How do you know whether or not you have found the right person [1], or a person is not working [2]?

For [1]:

According to Jim and his team, would you hire that person again?

According to me, if you did not have an open position, would you create a position for that person? 

For [2]:

According to Jim and his team, if a person came to you and said, "I am leaving to pursue an exciting new opportunity", would you be terribly dissappointed or secretly relieved?

According to me, same :)