Explotando Fortalezas

Transforming Commitments, continued

MANAGEMENT TOOLS

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BY THEODORE KINNI

rest of the organization. Having a clear anchor can help you decide which challenges to tackle first. At IBM, revamping the sales force, which was organized by geography and lacked expertise in specific industries, became a high priority given Gerstner’s new strategy of providing integrated solutions. Although thediscussion here has focused on CEOs’ actions, if you’re the head of a business unit or division, you’re also in a position to make and implement transforming commitments. To succeed, you have to have sufficient autonomy (either geographical distance from headquarters or distance from the core business). Your commitment must be consistent with the broader corporate direction, and you need to be ableto stay long enough to fulfill it. It also helps if you can fund the commitment without help from corporate. As Sull describes in his book, George Mosonyi and Istvan Kapitany, the local managers of Royal Dutch/Shell’s business in Hungary, achieved dramatic success when they committed to “increasing nonfuel revenues from the Shell Select gas stations with convenience stores” by turning the gasstation managers into mini-CEOs with the power “to decide for themselves what to sell and what prices to charge.” In 1991, Mosonyi and Kapitany’s efforts increased nonfuel retail sales by 60%. ❖
Loren Gary can be reached at lgary@hbsp.harvard.edu

Exploit What You Do Best
How companies are getting bottom-line results by leveraging what they already do well
n the late 1990s, Waterbury, Vt.–basedGreen Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) was expanding into a major enterprise—tripling its sales force and doubling its plant size. It was an exciting time of growth for the now $100 million specialty coffee company that CEO Bob Stiller founded as a coffee shop in 1981. By 2000, however, GMCR realized it needed to capture the economies of its new scale. If it could not do so, the company might finditself sinking under its own significantly increased weight.

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tivity. They worked through a “4D”AI process to:
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Discover the “best of what is”— they identified where the company’s processes worked perfectly. Dream “what might be”—envisioned processes that would work perfectly all the time. Design “what should be”—defined and prioritized the elements of perfect processes. Create a Destinybased on “what will be”—participated in the creation of the design.

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That’s when Stiller decided to employ appreciative inquiry (AI)—a positive approach to change that focuses on probing a firm’s best attributes and practices—to help achieve the company’s “25¢ Challenge,” which was

AI taps into “the collective wisdom, knowledge, strategies, attitudes, skills, and capabilities ofthe organization at its best.”
ultimately successful in reducing operating costs by 25 cents per pound of coffee, roughly a 7% reduction in gross costs. AI is typically thought of as a “soft” strategy used in creating organizational visions, aligning groups, and building cultures. But as GMCR’s experience shows, AI can contribute directly to measurable results. GMCR organized formal AI summits onthe company’s major business processes—procure-topay, order-to-cash, plan-to-produce, and market-to-sell—during which more than 200 employees, over half the work force, focused on raising produc-

GMCR’s success with AI supports one of the approach’s guiding principles: A positive focus tends to deliver a positive effect. The notion of accentuating the positive flies in the face of conventionalbusiness wisdom, which says the best way to overcome a major challenge is to focus on what you’re doing poorly and determine how to improve. But Stiller is one executive who believes there’s too much emphasis on the negative in business. “You have 99% customer satisfaction and the first thing everybody says is let’s look at that 1%” and determine what the company is doing wrong, he says. Among the...