When Anne Mulcahy took the helm in 2001, Xerox was teetering on the verge of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company had over $17 billion in debt and had recorded losses in each of the preceding six years. A recent reorganization in the company had not gone according to plan. Customers were unhappy and the economy had started to falter. Facing the overwhelming task of turning this once great company around, Mulcahy decided the best course of action would be… to ask for help.
How did that plan work out for her? She was able to return Xerox to the Fortune 500 with billions of dollars in profits and was named one of the top 10 most powerful women in the world.
There were four critical things she did to accomplish this amazing achievement.
- She built a huge network of people that were interested in and invested in her success. Although there were a number of people that would have loved to see her fail, there was also a vast number of people that wanted her and Xerox to be massively successful, so she got these people on her team.
- She then went to all of these people, inside and outside of her company, and asked them for their honest feedback and best advice for what she should do. She became a world-class collaborator, working with people across multiple stakeholder groups in an effort to learn as much as she could about what it would take to overcome the incredibly difficult position she found herself in as the CEO of a major company on the verge of bankruptcy.
“You’re not supposed to have all the answers, so find the brightest and most talented people you can and ask them for help.”
- She took it upon herself to become a student of the business and her business arena. She dedicated herself to lifelong learning and continuous improvement in order to make sure that she always was on the cutting edge of her industry and absorbing as much information, input and ideas as she possibly could.
- She then took everything she learned and focused it on the two groups of people that she served, her employees and her customers, in that order. She understood deeply that without a highly engaged, satisfied and loyal employee base it would be impossible to deliver truly great products and services to their customers. So she started on a quest for internal excellence which she knew would lead to external success.
“The customer’s experience will never exceed the employee’s experience”
So here’s a quick summary to help guide your success:
- Become a world-class collaborator
- Ask for help
- Strive for constant and never-ending improvement
- Focus on serving your employees so that they can better serve your members
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Spence is recognized as one of the Top 100 Business Thought Leaders in America, one of the Top 100 Small Business Influencers in America, and one of the Top 500 Leadership Development Experts in the World. John is also one of the American Management Association’s Leaders to Watch along with Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos. He is an international keynote speaker and management consultant who has written five books on business and life success and has made a career out of “Making the Very Complex… Awesomely Simple”.
Thanks to a generous sponsorship from PSCU you can see John on the main stage at the 2016 NACUSO Network Conference in Vegas.
