Tag Archives: strategic inflection point

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The Uplifting Wisdom of Fred Smith

I recently enjoyed the privilege of participating in a small group online discussion with Frederick W, Smith, the founder and longtime CEO of Federal Express. Imagine being at the helm of a global disruptor like FedEx for an uncanny five decades. Think someone like that might have a few things to say about the life and times of business, society, and learning? You might be as surprised as I was about the big ideas he would most want us to embrace.

Legend has it that the initial business plan for FedEx emerged from an economics paper Smith wrote as an undergraduate at Yale University, describing the need for a reliable overnight delivery service. He best remembers receiving a grade of C on that composition. That idea grew out of his experiences as a young pilot, occasionally offering to deliver important packages for New England technology companies that he would carry in his personal travels.

Equally important in the formation of his character was a four-year stint in the U.S. Marine Corps commencing in 1966 where he received officer training and served in Vietnam. “Yale taught me to think, and the Marines taught me to do,” notes Smith in shaping his vision and leadership of FedEx, which he founded in 1971. The company began regular operations in 1973 and just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Smith has transitioned to executive chairman but is every bit as engaged in the company’s direction as he was at the outset.

Early market studies confirmed Smith’s thesis that there was an enormous opportunity for an integrated global delivery network that would be realized by harnessing the power of transportation machinery and sophisticated data systems. He took on the daunting task of merging the capabilities of technology with the mapping of logistics, bringing together physical assets and mathematical calculations on a vast scale. He knew that building this kind of network was a frontloaded bet, but that once established, the barriers to entry of challenging that network would create both a competitive advantage and a trusted brand among customers.

Today that network generates $90 billion in annual revenue, employs 550,000 people plus another 150,000 contractors, moves 16 million shipments each day, operates in 5000 locations in 220 countries, manages 650 planes, and coordinates 210,000 vehicles. FedEx accomplishes this through endless innovation, precision execution, and constant reinvention.

What can we learn from an incomparable entrepreneur, celebrated business leader, and caring philanthropist that might be even more exemplary than an indefatigable work ethic? My key takeaway from listening to his carefully chosen words is that humility is a choice, and Smith embraces humility not just as a core personal value, but as a motivating force that drives him to an always improving game. “The world does not begin with your birth,” he reminds us. “There is much to learn in studying the thinkers who came before you.”

Given the ceaseless advances in information technology, Smith believes it is the CEO’s job to stay immersed in the evolution of change management. In addition to the legally required standing committees of a public company’s board, he has found it essential to maintain a carefully identified technology advisory committee well versed in applied science beyond his company’s core competencies at any time to make sure those technical abilities become core competencies.

He also makes it a point to stay close to senior military leaders both formally and informally for their deep understanding of complex systems and human motivation in urgent circumstances. He has reciprocated over the years serving on key government panels and presidential commissions to help bridge the gap between private business and government, share emerging ideas, and offer his hard-won knowledge as a quiet contribution to public service.

Smith is now keenly focused on embracing the fast climb of artificial intelligence, yet another strategic inflection point both in the growth of his company and the world at large. The threat of cybersecurity has always loomed large on Smith’s short list of key concerns around systems risk, where he sees generative A.I. both exacerbating the problem and potentially forging a path to workable responses. “It will help remove the friction of international customs,” he suggests. He is also passionate about carbon capture, driving FedEx to a carbon-neutral future not just because it is the right thing to do for the environment, but because the companies that get there first will enjoy ongoing business advantages in proving models with measurable returns on investment.

The culture of FedEx remains focused on innovative practices as a competitive platform that is rooted in the company’s founding and ingrained in the necessity of proactive thought leadership. Not surprisingly, he is obsessed with teamwork and team accomplishment over individual ego and achievement. “You’re not the smartest person in the world, be humble,” he reminds us. His observations of multidisciplinary success in business, military, and government enterprises reinforce his championing of building and sustaining team dynamics.

Smith is concerned that people are now spending so much time behind video screens that their sense of reality is being distorted by inadequate forms of communication. “Thinking behind screens” does not bridge viewpoints or bring people together. He observes in social media that it creates “a place where outrage has found a business model.”

Now, about that lasting wisdom: Here’s where Smith brings down the house with his clarity of life’s lessons and unassuming purpose. Staying on the edge of technology and reinvention no matter one’s current success is more tactic than strategy for this highly accomplished individual. What is core to Smith is his embrace of mortality as a further reflection of humility. “Life is short and it ends, the clock is ticking,” he advises. “Don’t get all wrapped up in your personal self, that’s a very unhealthy thing to do.”

What is key to reminding us of our humanity in his worldview? “Maintain a sense of humor, because life in many ways is absurd, and you need to be able to laugh at yourself.” Smith clearly understands irony, has seen his share of farce, and with sporadic investments in the arts, knows a funny story when he hears one.

There you have it from one of the most successful innovators of our time: be humble, remember your mortality, and don’t lose your sense of humor. I would never have guessed that’s what I would take away from this conversation, but how delighted I am to have experienced such a treasure of actionable advice. Fred Smith understands leadership by example. Humility is evident in his journey, mortality is certainly at hand given these reflections, and if you listen at length he might just make you laugh.

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Photos: Pexels and FedEx.com

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The Many Lessons of Andy Grove

Time 1997We lost a great business leader earlier this year. His name was Andrew S. Grove, known to many as Andy Grove.

He survived Nazi-occupied Hungary as a child, then Soviet-controlled Hungary, immigrating to the United States at the age of 20 in 1956.

He received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from U.C. Berkeley and became a star engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor.

He left the stability of Fairchild Semiconductor with Silicon Valley legends Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore when they co-founded Intel. Together they later entirely reinvented Intel from a manufacturer of memory chips to the dominant producer of microprocessors.

He was Intel’s CEO from 1987 to 1998, the famous “Intel Inside” years when personal computing exploded from the hobby to the consumer market.

He wrote the legendary book Only the Paranoid Survive, published in 1996 and still a must-read for anyone who wants to understand innovation and the power of creative destruction.

For many years he co-taught a course in strategy with my dear friend Robert Burgelman at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

If you think everyday people always had the internet, email, streaming video, and smart phones, you have a loose grasp on current events, let alone history. Andy’s leadership at Intel took us from the 8086 to the Pentium chip, from monochrome to color displays, from floppy to CD disks, from no hard drive to software that could be installed.  If you didn’t live through the transformation of the universe from analog to digital, from buying hardware and software at Computerland and Electronics Boutique to Best Buy and Costco, it’s hard to explain the magnitude of this growth cycle. Andy is one of those guys who really changed the world.

Okay, you get the point, about 0.001% of mortal beings have a resume close to his. You can read his full bio on Wikipedia. I want to share something more personal about him, the key takeaways from the few times I met him in person during roadmap briefings at Intel in the 1990s. Among the many lessons I learned from Andy Grove, here are five that continue to guide me daily:

  1. Creative Destruction Is Real – Whatever product you ship today is already obsolete, no matter how well it is selling. If you are not working on the replacement for it, someone else is. That is why you have to be paranoid. You will always be correct if you presume you are about to be outperformed in the marketplace of goods and service. Never get comfortable, never rest on your laurels, or you will be gone in a heartbeat, wiped off the map while you are collecting your awards for last year’s success. I learned from Andy that almost every startup that presumes it is built to last is almost certainly on a crash course with obsolescence, that the vast majority of even robust corporations today last about half as long as a human life. Companies don’t reinvent themselves, they are reinvented by courageous, visionary people.
  2. Beware the Strategic Inflection Point – By the time a market has fully morphed at scale, it’s way too late to react. You can’t see a strategic inflection point coming, you can only acknowledge it in hindsight while confessing your memoirs. Sorry, Monsieur Business Plan, the landscape changes in real time! Because you have learned to be paranoid, you are going to figure out one dreary morning that something you are doing in your company is hugely wrong. Some product you are readying for release is going to tank no matter how much you spend on marketing. Remember when Bill Gates discovered the internet? Remember when Mark Zuckerberg discovered mobile? Those were Intel-inspired moments. They turned their companies on a dime the same way Andy helped turn Intel on a dime when they realized the market for memory chips had commoditized and microprocessors were the way forward. I learned from Andy to always remain nimble, that sunk cost is always sunk cost, eat it and move on. Achieving competitive advantage before others see it coming is where your investments must be all the time.
  3. Science Is Inescapable – No matter what your market cap might be, you can’t fake math. Pithy slogans don’t make better computers, engineers do. For Moore’s Law to work (roughly twice the computing power will be available every 12 to 24 months for the same cost) staggering volumes of calculations have to take place on a tiny silicon chip without the transistors melting down. If you want to win at the engineering game, it takes the boldest and brightest team of advanced engineers you can assemble. They need the time to do the math, which is why Intel was already designing the 486 chip while shipping the 286. You can’t predict when the equations will be solved, you can only form a thesis and test your working models until they clear quality assurance. I learned from Andy that there are no sustainable shortcuts in quantifiable outcomes, the minimum viable product be damned! If you try to cheap your way through a poorly constructed algorithm, science will have its way with you and the result won’t be a proud moment.
  4. Constructive Confrontation Works – A lot of people who didn’t grow up in the Intel culture found it an impossible place to survive. Intel was a place where undisciplined, random conversation was never the norm. Almost anything anyone said could be challenged directly and aggressively by anyone in the hierarchy. Even when you were visiting Intel as a channel partner, anything you said could get shoved down your throat as instantly as you said it. Was this nice? It wasn’t meant to be nice. It was meant to improve products, driving ceaselessly toward unattainable perfection. That was how Intel maintained design and manufacturing leadership for a generation, by always challenging assumptions, never accepting compromise or forging an unholy consensus simply to move on. It isn’t the right culture for everyone, but at Intel, you bought into it or got your walking papers. I learned from Andy that in constructive confrontation, it’s always the idea that gets attacked and never the person. You might feel that you are being attacked, but you aren’t. Your ideas are being made better or mercifully eviscerated.
  5. Resilience Is a Mandate – Imagine a guy who made it from the Holocaust to the highest level of American thought leadership—all the obstacles, all the challenges, all the knock-downs, all the reinvention. To embrace the example of Andy Grove is to embrace the notion of resilience as the single greatest motivator available to anyone at any stage of emergence. You don’t give up, you don’t give in, you don’t quit. You always expect more from yourself. You learn from your mistakes, you study your failures, you learn from your adversaries. Want to survive? Want to triumph? Want to leave a legacy? There is no other way. I learned from Andy that you stay in the game, you look forward at opportunity, and you try again—only harder. Resilience isn’t a nice-to-have. Resilience is fuel for the soul.

Andy was a living example of realizing possibility through discipline. It is extremely rare to find an innovator with startup DNA who can personally evolve into the CEO of a multinational corporation. It is equally rare to find a top-notch engineer who embraces consumer marketing as a key strategic initiative. Andy championed the “Intel Inside” campaign as a branding mechanism that made an otherwise invisible component a necessity for personal computer manufactures to tout. When the consumer press seized upon an obscure failing in a sample of Intel microprocessors, Andy accepted the criticism as a byproduct of his brand promise. He insisted his team correct the deficiency with renewed quality assurance rather than defend the company’s position with arguments the consumer would never understand. He was book smart, business smart, and street smart all at the same time. He gave back way more than he ever took off the table in every way imaginable.

If you ever worked on one of my teams, I probably bought you a copy of Only the Paranoid Survive and quizzed you on it a week later. Andy’s words, thoughts, and ideas remain that important to me. He was an industry icon and a human being impossible for me to forget. I hope none of us ever forgets Andy. He remains a truly one-of-a-kind inspiration.

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This article originally appeared on The Good Men Project.

Photo: Time Inc.

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Don’t Fear the Fad

As an investor, can you ever know for certain if that newfangled gizmo come to market is the real deal or a fad?

Let’s try it a different way—perhaps everything is a fad, until it’s proven otherwise.

Bread, most likely not a fad. But organic fair-market nine-grain soft crust, probably a fad.

Cars, probably not a fad. But eight-cylinder 130 mph muscle mobiles with no back seats could be a fad.

AM radio, possibly a fad, but one that has enjoyed a long shelf life—and now with news and sports retransmitted over the internet to mobile devices, probably a decent bit of runway left in the broadcast machine.

Farmville, Mafia Wars, and their brethren? You tell me.

Our attention spans are surely fickle, but just because something is a fad does not necessarily make it a bad investment. I am not certain internet keyword search will last forever, but the last decade and a half have proven pretty rewarding, at least for one company that currently commands better than 70% market share. Games? That’s where they come and go in a coughing breath—if you are going to bet at that crap table, come with a lot of chips and a jug of Pepto-Bismol.

The question of whether it makes sense to bet on a fad in a commercial, accelerated, low-loyalty, short-attention-span, vastly diverse, market-driven global economy seems moot. People have bet against railroads, phones, airlines, television, personal computers, and even guitar bands as fads—and that was before they had customers! Even after these “fads” had momentum, there were endless naysayers who said they were on their way out as fast as they’d found their way in. With that kind of outlook, eventually you have to be right, but you may be staring up at daisy roots when you finally win your bet.

There is tremendous Monday morning quarterbacking now about the dive in Web 2.0 companies, from Facebook to Zynga to Groupon to Pandora. Maybe they are all fads, but let’s separate the fad of stock market performance from the fad of consumer adoption as two separate issues. The shine may be off the stock, or the shine may be off the company’s products, but those are very different things. High-growth speculative stocks like these are most often valued on future earnings potential, not current performance, so if the stock is out of favor, that does not de facto mean the product or service has gone out of favor. Plenty of people are enjoying these consumables at the moment, though it is safe to say that they won’t all be in vogue for eternity. Styles change, tastes change, brand loyalties change. We know that to be Creative Destruction, an ever-present cycle, so when we criticize either an equity or a product as being a fad, let’s be careful to make the distinction, and even more careful not to level broad sweeping judgment that could lead to missed opportunity.

Can a company make money riding the wave of a fad? Seems to me that is more norm than anomaly. Can an investor make money owning the stock of a company that rides the wave of a fad without volatile exposure to market timing? Again this seems perfectly reasonable, depending on the window. Think Intel with micro-processing chips during the PC revolution, Electronic Arts with the rise of sports-based video games led by Madden NFL, and today’s True King of All Media, Apple. Equity markets in the long run reward smart risk and punish reckless risk, just as commercial markets reward desirable consumer offerings and reject cynical ones. There has to be risk for there to be reward or no one would invest, so the question is not whether something is a fad, but whether that fad represents some potential form of continuity recognized by visionary management as one in a string of ventures that together comprise opportunity.

Intel’s legendary former CEO Andy Grove clearly taught us, “Only the Paranoid Survive.” He knew at any strategic inflection point the difference between a fad and a trend was largely the expanse of the product life cycle. More importantly, he worried about management culture as the path to product culture, where innovation means never-ending creativity, not tossing the dice and getting lucky on a good roll. I don’t worry whether a company is profiting from a fad, I expect companies to be opportunistic. I worry whether the company is a one-trick pony, whether it has created a learning culture where success and failure are both studied. A company that has learned to learn, that can read data and understand how fads are perpetuated as trends that constitute periodically sustained disruptions—that is a company that can extract true shareholder value from a fad, foremost by surprising and delighting customers repeatedly with that which they never expected was possible.

I have a lot of criticism about this year’s poor performing new entries in the NASDAQ, but that criticism has nothing to do with whether those companies were beneficiaries of identified fads now assessed by pundits to be in decline. My own career has been the beneficiary of any number of fads that came and went—computer games that sold millions and now barely qualify as second round questions on Jeopardy, once immensely cool websites that scored millions of visits that no longer can be found, virtual communities that ranked with the best in loyalty and now would be lucky to make the card draw on Trivial Pursuit. Does that mean they weren’t good businesses that added significant value to their owners? To the contrary, in their useful lives they added exceptional shareholder value in earnings and lifetime contribution. We worked the brand promises as long as we could, but when their time was done, we moved on.

That’s why a sweeping statement like “don’t invest in fads” makes little sense, because if virtually everything is a fad with varying sustainability, there is no choice but to invest in fads. What I worry about is management vision, how the brand stewards of a company are migrating from one fad to the next, how maneuvering through Creative Destruction is an art and science unto itself. Edison did it over a very long period of time. So did Steve Jobs. The folks who run television networks have to do it, because no show lasts forever and formats are cyclical; yesterday’s Variety Shows are today’s Reality Shows, half-hour comedy goes in and out of style, so does one-hour drama. Walt Disney famously bet the ranch on 2D feature animation, clearly a fad, although one he created and that lasted more than 50 years—but that wasn’t the only trick he had in the magic shop, not even close. To invest wisely in the likelihood that originators can capitalize on a string of fads through creativity and experimentation is very different from investing in one hot rocket that goes straight up with full knowledge that gravity will send it back down with equal and opposite thrust.

As the contemplative George Harrison reminds us, All Things Must Pass. That doesn’t mean windows of opportunity aren’t always in abundance. Watch the fad-makers, not the fads themselves, and the game changes significantly. While even the best fad-makers can’t call winners forever, those longer windows leave plenty of room for upside, especially when you bet the full spectrum of an index rather than trying to call the hits in isolation. If you bet on a one-trick pony and lose your bait, that was most likely your mistake, not that you bet on a fad.

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Eyes on HP

Hewlett-Packard is not just any company. It is iconic. Like Disney, Ford, General Electric, Apple, Microsoft, and a few others, it is not only part of business history, it is deeply wound into the fabric of American history. Modern Silicon Valley pretty much begins with Hewlett-Packard—the foundations of information technology as a new sector of productivity, the power of innovation, the hardware/software product life-cycle, the beginnings of west coast venture capital, and the splitting atom of employees spinning off from the mothership to become founders themselves. The Hewlett-Packard story until recently is a magnificent tale.

HP WayBill Hewlett and Dave Packard really did start in a garage. One of the very first products they sold was a precision audio oscillator, to of all people, Walt Disney. They captured their thoughts in a book, The HP Way, reinforcing the need for a company to have a mission and a vision. When we talk about a job being more than a paycheck, a lot of that comes from the work ethic and values of Hewlett and Packard. They set the stage for a generation of entrepreneurs. They made it okay to fail, as long as that failure contained learning that was honestly disseminated. HP on an engineer’s resume was gold. The sales and marketing team was second to none.

It is almost impossible to understand the impact of a global company with over $125B in annual revenue and 325,000 employees changing CEOs four times in six years, not including the interim CEOs between hires. Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, and Leo Apotheker each left the company for different reasons, and while the HP board is now taking a lot of heat for perhaps not scrutinizing their decisions around these leaders carefully enough, that is unfortunately water under the bridge. The company is now under the direction of former eBay CEO and recent California Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who will need to move quickly and definitively to steady the ship.

HP has seen numerous mergers, divestitures, and acquisitions throughout this period of seismic change, and each time one strategy replaces a previous version, the impact is costly. Whitman has said she believes the strategy in place at HP now is largely correct, so if the issues she is facing are managerial, perhaps we will see a positive impact sooner rather than later. My guess is she will dig into strategy a bit more in the coming months, and then move aggressively to make her mark. The sooner she can restore confidence with customers, employees, and shareholders, the better it will be for all those who do care deeply about the company’s future.

Why is HP so important in the scope of business enterprise? When you dig into exceptional business books like Built to Last and Good to Great, both by Jim Collins, you realize just how hard it is for even the strongest corporations to go the distance in an environment of creative destruction. As Collins points out so often in the data he cites, only 62 of the original Fortune 500 companies named on the original list in 1955 remain there in 2011.

The great former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, talks at length about the “strategic inflection points” facing companies at every stage of their evolution—particularly technology companies—in his critical study Only the Paranoid Survive. Grove makes it all too clear how easy it is for a well established organization with vast resources and expansive markets to miss a fundamental change in the continuum of progress, only to catch its error to late to be fixed, having been lapped by any number of competitors.

Where Collins approaches the challenge largely from the aspect of defining and reinforcing a brand, Grove looks at it from the point of view of ceaseless innovation and refusal to accept the status quo as satisfying. Both approaches are vital, but neither has a chance in the face of organizational chaos. Products, features, and benefits must remain in constant flux, but ideals and values are their balancing counterparts. Remove the rudder from a very fast ship and it really doesn’t much matter what is powering the engine room.

It takes both leadership and strategy to steer one of these mammoth ships through the rough seas of business change, and simply taking those notions for granted is the easiest way for a company to fall from grace. Robert Burgelman, a colleague of Andy Grove who teaches strategy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (and is also a former board member of mine), tells us that strategy becomes real when we apply resources to concepts. We see that very much in action now at HP, but we see those resource decisions changing too frequently in real-time. The leadership of the CEO drives that strategy from concept to action, from white board idea to investment cost center, and if strategic shifts are reversed before cost centers become profit centers, value can be destroyed at an astonishing pace.

No CEO or strategy is meant to last forever, but change them too often, and costs pile up without reward. The toll on staff morale is immeasurable, and the lost jobs from reversing decisions may never be recovered. Employees feel the impact in loss of income, shareholders get pummeled. Customers just move on.

It’s time now for HP to turn the corner. As I said, HP is iconic, it is Silicon Valley. We need it as an example in the tech sector of a company that is Built to Last and can continue to grow from Good to Great. HP dates to 1939. It is the standard-bearer for all the great companies that followed its mantra, were born in garages, and now have office space in the adjacent neighborhoods. If we want to believe companies like AOL and Yahoo can find new creative life through reinvention, we have to have models for long-term success. We need succession plans that show great companies can transcend their founders and achieve new levels of success by ensuring that values are more than words in the employee handbook, and that they are liberating, not confining, as long as the leaders who embrace them help guide their teams through increased commitment to innovation with coherent planning and rigorous evaluation. No shooting from the hip, but no fear of change.

On a pragmatic level, we also need the jobs, particularly in HP’s home state of California. Surely the majority of new jobs in our nation will come from small business and startups, but we can’t afford to lose the ones we have in the enterprise, not for the families who depend on them, not for the state budget that needs the payroll tax. Because of its deep history in the community and legend, HP leads the ethos in Silicon Valley in so many ways, its stability is a reflection of hope, its instability a drag on the headlines when we need a shot of optimism.

This is a once in a lifetime career and company defining opportunity for the new CEO at HP. It’s like getting the chance to manage the NY Yankees after three bad seasons no one saw coming. They might be on a losing streak, they might have made a bunch of bad trades, but they’re still the Yankees. Everyone knows they can win, that they have the resources to win and a history of winning. Meg Whitman just needs to ask herself, what kind of game does she want her team playing, who does she want in the line-up, and where does she need to better read the competitive landscape. A little consistency in management will go a long way.

Let’s hope Hewlett-Packard has it right this time. There is already new criticism of HP’s board that they acted too quickly in hiring Meg Whitman, that she should have first been named interim CEO, or that her background is not right for the job. Their decision has been made, so I am rooting for the new CEO. This isn’t politics, this is P&L. It is critical that Meg gets this right and succeeds. A win for her in this role is a win for all of us.