Ishita Dewan
The world is changing, the customers are changing, the meaning of health is changing, what we eat is changing, how we dress is changing, purchasing environments are changing — It is always a volatile environment. Companies adapting to the changes, survive. Yes…Just Survive… Some businesses keep running all the time but they stay in the same place… just on the verge of survival. But few leaders make their businesses swim against the tide and keep it moving forward.
Let’s have a look at such leaders and what we should learn from them:
1)Be the Customer
Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsico herself visits retail stores as a typical customer and would experience the business from a consumer’s mind.
2)Commitment
Carlos Ghosn, CEO Nissan announced a “Nissan Revival Plan” in 1999 and gave one-year, Two-Year, and Three-Year plans. He went ahead and publicly announced that he would resign if the company did not turn profitable within one year. His public commitment made many employees believe in him.
3) Freedom and Responsibility
Sam Walton, Walmart’s CEO, considered people working in his stores, warehouses as partners and called them ‘associates’ rather than employees. Sam shared every information about the business to his associates and involved them in business decisions, planning, and execution. He gave his associates freedom, authority, and responsibility.
4) Attention to Details
While designing packaging for Doritos, Indra Nooyi and her team came across an important observation that when a user gets to the bottom of the Doritos bag, men would take the bag and empty in his mouth whereas women would not do like that as many of them would try to be very decent. Women would put their hand inside the bag and try to take out all the Doritos. Unfortunately, they would leave some of the Doritos inside the bag. So, the Pepsico packaging team redesigned the pack in such a way that women could take out all the Doritos down to the last 5 percent. Fascinating right?
5) Do more of the right
When Lou Gerstner became CEO of IBM, the company was struggling. Everyone was of the opinion that IBM had to be broken into small business units. But Gerstner saw IBM’s strength was its size and breadth. Due to size, IBM could provide solutions to big corporates on a global scale and also provide better service and support to the clients. So he took this strength to maximum advantage.
A strong leader makes a lot of difference in the business. Leadership is not just about profits, clients, mergers but about building a sustainable internal culture and creating future leaders so that the company would keep moving even if the present leader leaves the organization.
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