Twelve o'clock high

April 7, 2009

Three or four times in my life I’ve been given divisions or companies to run that have not been performing. Although it seems like an opportunity like that would be a poisoned chalice, it was actually a no-lose situation. If things went badly then I was drafted in too late. If things went well then I would be credited with the improvement. When expectations are so low it is not that hard to exceed them. Which is not at all the same thing as saying that improvement or success are easy.

When overnight I found myself as CEO of Compass Design Automation, one of my staff gave me the movie Twelve o’clock high in which Gregory Peck takes over a bomber squadron during the second world war and turns it around. The previous commander had become too close to his men to be effective as a commander. It won some Oscars and still worth watching today.

It is a lot easier to make the changes to an organization as a newly-drafted boss than it is to makes those changes if you were the person responsible for the early decisions. Everyone is human and we don’t like admitting that we made a mistake. We get emotionally attached to our decisions, especially to parts of the business that we rose up through or created. Nobody wants to kill their own baby. If you’ve ever fired someone that you hired or promoted, you probably discovered everyone around you thought, “what took you so long?” Reversing decisions that you made yourself tends to be like that.

As a newly drafted boss, morale will usually improve automatically just as a result of the change. Everyone knows lots of things that need to be changed and that were unlikely to be changed under the previous regime. It is a bit like the old joke about a consultant telling a manager something he already knows so that he can go ahead and do it. Just making some of those obvious changes fast creates a “things are going to be different” mentality.

The best example I know of the difficulty of reversing deeply ingrained decisions (without changing the leader) is in Andy Grove’s book Only the paranoid survive. If you are less than a certain age you probably are unaware that Intel was a memory company, initially very successfully and then struggling against Japanese competition. Intel meant memories then in the same way as it means microprocessors today. Here’s the scene. Andy Grove and Gordon Moore are in his office in 1985 discussing an upcoming board meeting. The business is going very badly:

I turned to Gordon and asked, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” I stared at him numb then said “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?”

It was an extraordinarily brave decision, and laid the ground for what Intel has become today. Usually that type of wrenching change does require a new CEO who has no emotional attachment to the earlier decisions.

At the end of Twelve o’clock high the Gregory Peck character is removed from command. He identifies too closely with his men to be effective as a commander. Time for a new commander.

Posted by Paul McLellan on April 7, 2009 | Comments (3)

April 9, 2009

In response to: Twelve o'clock high
richfield commented:

And now for something completely different, Gregory Peck''s plane in Twelve O''clock High was the Piccadilly Lily which was named after the plane that was shot down over Bremen, Germany October 8, 1943. Although not the story of the Piccadilly Lily''s last flight, it was named in memory of The last mission of Crew 22 100th Bombardment Group. I know because my cousin Charles Sarabun who survived was the navigator on this mission. He recently passed away at age 92.

April 7, 2009

In response to: Twelve o'clock high
Meredith Poor commented:

If one does a spreadsheet showing 3% per year productivity growth, starting at the year one is born, one notices that productivity doubles in 24 years, and quadruples in 48. An electronics company in 1947 (the year the transistor was invented) wouldn't have to deal with the competitive threat until 1953, almost six years later. By 1971, a business might have 3 years to respond to a new development, and by 1997, maybe a year and a half. In short, over time, the time required to design competitive products with emerging technologies is compacted. This requires the people planning the course of a company sit higher on the mountain and contemplate a greater collection of factors in their future direction. The number of people that can do that declines by orders of magnitude as the leverage of existing tools increases exponentially. At some point executives have to create a 'science fiction world' and imagine something that simply does not exist, and create a collection of enabling technologies that consumers might find unimaginable, but 'very cool'. That this is unbelievably risky more or less goes without saying. People willing to take unusual risks are likely to be the winners, or at least the survivors.

April 7, 2009

In response to: Twelve o'clock high
SteveM commented:

Hi Paul: Good post and a great movie and it rings true even today. Perhaps you could do some analysis of EDA's top 4 companies and the changes everyone knows they need to make. In many situations it will not get better immediately and you will likely be unpopular for making changes, bringing in new team members and challenging the status-quo. It will often take time for your changes to result in changes to be visible in market performance and frequently there will need to be short term impacts to yield long term gains. In my last role I led a change to the product line and initially suffered nearly 30% attrition at the start of the initiative. It took several years to demonstrate results with the new product and ultimately emerged as the market leader. Recent example of a change leader could be Mark Hurd, CEO of HP. BTW I'm so thankful and respectful of military leaders and I would find it impossible to put my troops in the path of harm for success of the greater mission. Check out the NPR interview of Donovan Campbell 'Joker One': A Marine's Memoir Of The War In Iraq.

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