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It’s the people, Stupid.
That’s the basic message one business leader is trying to get across to
managers. You can be running the best technology and coming up with
top-notch marketing plans, but if your workers aren’t passionate about
what you’re doing, you’re just spinning your wheels.
And this is one man who has put his own philosophy to the test.
Peter Schutz joined Porsche AG as its CEO back in 1980 when the high-end
auto maker was struggling. Porsche had been losing money for years when
Schutz arrived, leaving him the daunting prospect of turning the company
around in a small window of time. And by revving up the company’s
employees, that’s exactly what he did.
During the eight years that Schutz was leading Porsche, he got employees
excited about their jobs — not just the top designers or engineers,
either. In an interview with Datamation, Schutz says he saw his
job as getting every single employee excited about what they needed to do
at Porsche.
And it worked. Schutz says when he left the company, Porsche had no debt
and was earning about $150 million a year after taxes. Schutz also says
the same rules apply whether you’re managing an entire international
company or if you’re leading an IT department.
Here Schutz, who just authored The Driving Force: Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People, talks about how the people make a successful business, how to
make workers passionate about their jobs, and the mistakes that managers
tend to make.
Q: In your book, you say it’s the people and not the business. What
exactly do you mean?
Yogi Berra, who is my favorite philosopher, says baseball is about 50
percent about fielding and pitching, and 90 percent about people. It’s
the same with business. It’s the people in the business. And even more
importantly, it’s the customers. They’re our only source of revenue.
Q: Do you find that most business or IT managers understand this
point?
I always hope so, but I don’t think so. I’ve spent my time for the last
10 years trying to communicate that message to managers. I hope that some
of them are getting it, but it’s tough. If you’re running a business
that’s owned by people who have no interest except what they can walk
away with, then it’s difficult to get through to them. If the customers
are not doing business with you, then you really aren’t going to be
successful.
Q: What about the employees?
Without the employees the technology will not get implemented in a useful
way. If your employees are not buying into the technology and the whole
marketing concept, then it’s difficult to make the business profitable.
And it’s not all about the super stars. They cannot perform if they don’t
have a supporting cast of ordinary people who do extraordinary things.
The whole thing to making a business succeed is making ordinary people so
enthused and have so much passion about what you’re trying to do that
they will end up yielding extraordinary results… I was watching a game
last night… It’s a bunch of ordinary people committed and playing with
more passion than the other team can match.
Q: How do you make employees passionate about their jobs?
There was a construction site with three men doing the same thing. A
passerby stopped and asked the first man, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I
am busting rocks.’ he answered. The passerby asks the second one, ‘What
are you doing here?’ And remember that he’s doing the same thing. But
this time the answer is, ‘I’m earning my living.’ If people believe they
are busting rocks to earn a living and they put their heads together to
figure out how to make this a better job, chances are they’ll cook up a
plan to bust fewer rocks to make more money. In business school, they
teach you to get them to bust more rocks for less money. This all doesn’t
make sense. The passerby asks the third man, ‘What are you doing here?’
He answers, ‘I am helping my colleagues build a temple.’
People working together toward a shared objective will outperform people
who are busting rocks every time. For whom are we going to build a
temple? For our customers. Not for the managers. Not for the owners or
shareholders, but for the customers. If you get an organization of people
doing that, then I have found you have a huge success. You will have a
bunch of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Q: So what did you do when you got to Porsche?
In 1981, I suggested we go and win the big 24-hour race in Le Mans,
France. That united the whole company. When Porsche hired me, the problem
was we had people who knew how to design cars, people who knew how to
build cars and people who knew how to sell cars. They didn’t work
together. They were all fighting. I needed to get all these people on the
same page. Getting them on the same page turned out to be getting them to
win that 24-hour race. Almost overnight people were working together to
build the temple. They suddenly had the same objective. We won that race
big time and we never looked back. They got the idea that once we work
together we could do anything we wanted to do. Suddenly everything was
possible.
A similar thing happened to our country when Jack Kennedy said, ‘Let’s go
to the moon.’ Suddenly, the whole country had an objective. Our best and
brightest youngsters decided to study engineering because they wanted to
be part of it. In a negative sense, that’s what happened when the
Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. It united people.
Q: What are the mistakes that managers tend to make?
One huge mistake is to focus on making money instead of trying to build a
temple for the customer. Many people work on the cost side of the
business instead of the benefit side. If your biggest objective is to
reduce your costs, it’s unlikely you’ll get an organization of people
inspired and excited about that. Instead, if you say we’re going to find
a cure for cancer, then people will be excited.
Q: But if a company is making widgets or software, there’s no big auto
race or fight against cancer. How do you get IT workers excited then?
Watch Steve Jobs and what happened with Macintosh and now it’s the iPod.
The people who work on projects like that develop a passion and you can
see the results.
