The challenge of making everyone buy in.
Question: What is the difference between leading a smaller company and a Fortune 500 company?
Jim Hackett: Well having the great pleasure of doing both, when I got our business client that are working for very small company Chamber Massachusetts, it ultimately did the same thing again as part of the private partnership, again in my life as I think the differences is that, we can’t sit around a room the owners and talk about where to take the business, we where able to do that in this partnership I used to be with and it is a very powerful concept, it is something you try to replicate within a corporation as often as you possibly can and as many places you can within the organization. We would try to make people big enough owners through equity grants, that they are sitting at the table saying “you know with my wealth, I am not sure I want to go do that” and then they reflect your investors as well as most of your employees and they really do provide creative tension, therefore in the top ranks of the leadership, that is what you actually want to create as part of a bigger company in often times it is not done where you don’t create an imperial CEO, you don’t create an autocratic management style, you actually have people with various levels of the organization being encouraged to give feedback that is not popular, send bad news up the chain more quickly than it would otherwise come, if it was done on a different mentality. Also to provide a feeling to [Inaudible] about we are in this together and we are sink or swim together as well. Obviously, the basic question of what value you shouldn’t run the company by our in different to what size it is, that is as transparent a big corporation isn’t a small corporation. I have been in small companies who will horribly run from the values perspective, one that was run wonderfully well, I have been in big companies where it is been horribly run from the values perspective and well run from values perspective and I bet is, is that most companies that actually try to live by there values and especially in terms of leadership they end up doing a lot better.
Recorded On: 3/24/2008
