New York Times
Published: November 20, 2010
This interview with Geoff Vuleta, C.E.O. of Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consulting firm in Manhattan, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Excerpts:
Q. Talk more about that list.
A. It’s made up of really simple things. What were the things that went wrong in the last 100 days? Let’s get rid of those. You want to nail your pain points and go, “O.K., what needs to be done to make sure that doesn’t happen again?” So that’s part of it.
And what do you want to do about your brand? How are you going to advance “thought leadership?” Not all projects are born equal — there are some that are grander than others. What are you going to do to invest in those? Who’s going to take responsibility for them?
And then there’s all the personal growth stuff, which everybody includes on their list. You want to advance. You want to grow as a person. There are things you want to get better at. But the thing that’s material about the list is that the company has agreed that those things are important.
Q. That’s not an easy list to write.
A. It’s a bit goofy to do it the first couple of times because people obsess over how they’re going to do something or what they’re going to do. It isn’t about any of those things. It’s only about an outcome. It’s only about what will have been achieved within the 100 days or at some point during the 100 days.
So the 100-day plan meetings start off with you actually reporting on yourself. You stand up with your 100-day plan, and there’s no wiggle room on it. They’re outcomes. You did them or you didn’t do them. You’re enormously exposed because you offered to do it, and you’re going to do it. Fahrenheit has only had to fire three people because the 100-day plan sorts it out beforehand.
Q. What’s the thinking behind that list?
A. As I said earlier, people want to be led, they want to know what they have to do, and they want to know that what they do is important. You need a mechanism for that to be there and to totally trust it, so that it’s not just words.
There’s nothing that I’m doing that anybody wouldn’t understand or appreciate, because everything’s exposed to everybody else. Everybody can see what everybody else is doing. If stuff happens that prevents you from being able to do it, you lean in quickly and either take it off your list or replace it with something else.
One of the truisms about life is that if you’re working in a void for any period of time, human nature says you’ll view it negatively. You get scared; you begin to believe that what isn’t there is probably bad. Never give people a void. Just don’t, because instinctively they’ll think something is awry. So at no point does anybody in the company not know what everybody is doing in the company, what they’ve committed to, and what the company thinks is important.
Q. And why 100 days?
A. It works brilliantly, because you can never be more than 100 days wrong as a company. You’ve got to allow time for people to feel the pain of getting something wrong. And when you create a competitive environment that has total transparency like we do, you won’t do it twice. You just won’t.
Access Content Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/business/21corner.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.
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