CEO Xerox “Lessons Learned on the Firing Line”
I had the great privilege yesterday of meeting the Chief Executive Officer of Xerox, Anne Mulcahy. Speaking to a packed auditorium at the London Business School, Anne talked about how Xerox has been transformed from a company with serious debt and health issues, into a streamlined, debt free, profitable company, with exciting long term prospects.
Obviously Xerox is not a small business, with a revenues of around $19bn in the last reporting period it is far from that in fact. But, some of the lessons Anne has learned could easily be applied to any business, large or small. So with that in mind, I want to summarise some of the key points Ann highlighted as being vital to Xerox’s success:
1) It is important for leaders to listen to advice and to understand the issues facing the business
Get to know your business, your market, micro and macro factors and more. You can get to grips with all of this with a good marketing audit, including SWOT, PEST and a host of other analytical excurses.
2) Leaders need leadership intuition, experience and accountability.
To get the most from your business and team, develop your leadership skills through a mixture of training and experience. The chances are if you’re already running a successful small business you will have some inherent intuition to use anyway.
3) Develop a clear vision and direction for employees, a story.
Anne’s team at Xerox wrote a dummy Wall Street Journal article about the company in four years time. This was distributed throughout the company to give everyone an idea of what they wanted to achieve. There’s no reason why you can’t develop a story like this for your business, no matter how large or small you are.
4) Invest in your business, even in the tough times.
Often when times are hard, companies cut back on some of the activities that are essential for long term success. This was a mistake Xerox wanted to avoid and whilst they did cut back on advertising, they continued to invest over $1 billion in research and development. When it comes to marketing Anne’s opinion is that “building the brand and investing in marketing excellence is very important”.
5) Work on communications.
This is both internal and external communications. Conduct a stakeholder analysis first to identify who you need to talk to and set about doing so in a planned and measured way. Anne considers face to face communications to be essential, especially with key customers.
6) Surround yourself with truthful critics.
Constructive criticism is a good thing, the last thing you want is to be surrounded by a bunch of yes men. Try to ensure the criticism you receive is complemented with advice for how to resolve any problems i.e. that it is actually helpful.
7) Ensure you have good calibre of people in your business.
This is a no brainer, although an enormous challenge especially for small business who often do not have the pulling power of larger enterprises. You can work around this by ensuring you have a programme for investing in and developing all of your staff, from the bottom up.
I like David Ogilvy’s thoughts here also as he only ever hired people smarter than he. That takes a great leader.
8 ) Success is based on the value you bring to customers - “they have to be the centre of your universe”.
This seems a fairly obvious point, but I can tell you from experience it’s very easy to lose sight of your customers wants and needs when you are hell bent on getting new business, or making the VAT return, or paying your staff. You need to keep in mind that satisfying the customer is the only way you will ultimately get paid.
I was extremely impressed by Anne’s presentation. A great business woman (and interestingly also voted the 5th most powerful woman in the world) and an inspiration. Thanks Anne, I’ll be trying to take some of this on board.
Tag:Advertising Customer service General
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Great article, very helpfull for those who are leading with this kind of challenge
Fantastic Article, although i don know if you write this by yourself but i would really appreciate for sharing your article here
Fantastic article …!