Both the time and place of 2013’s CEO Leadership Summit could not have been more fitting. In December, in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy and with the fiscal cliff still looming ahead, more than 100 business leaders from across the country gathered at the NYSE Euronext—an icon of free enterprise that later turned out to have been in the midst of a merger—to share ideas on navigating the challenges of the stormy global economy.
The ensuing discussions encompassed a wide range of topics, from dire conjecture around the nation’s debt load and the likelihood of tax hikes, to more positive predictions regarding immigration reform and opportunities in emerging overseas markets. The pages to follow capture some of the concerns, insights and lessons shared during the presentations and discussion.
Winning in a Global World: Douglas Oberhleman
The New Calculus of Value Creation: Doug Conant, Kurt Schneider, Murray Martin
Performing while Transforming: Abhi Talwalkar, Bill Nuti, Mark Dorman
How U.S. Companies Can Lead in the New Global Economy: David Novak, Nick Akins, Chris Kearney
Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation
What’s Next for Governance?
Winning in a Global World: Douglas Oberhelman, CEO, Caterpillar
Since becoming chairman and CEO of Caterpillar in 2010, Doug Oberhelman has delivered record profits and pushed Caterpillar’s footprint in emerging markets to the point where 70 percent of the company’s top line revenue comes from outside the U.S. However, delivering strong performance amid economic uncertainty evidently hasn’t lulled the 59-year-old into complacency—quite the opposite, in fact. Oberhelman has lowered Cat’s outlook for 2015 twice—citing the likelihood of “anemic and modest” growth—and become an active participant in the “Campaign to Fix the Debt,” a group of industry leaders devoted to lobbying Washington to address the country’s $16 trillion debt load. Leading a company considered to be something of a bellwether for the national economy, Oberhelman—who endorsed Mitt Romney in the presidential election—came to the Leadership Summit fresh from meeting with President Obama, where he reported having an open and honest dialogue with “a different President,” one more “sincere about reaching out to business” in his second term. Excerpts from Oberhelman’s comments on the economic outlook follow.
“The long-term problem in this country is: what happens to the debt growth that we’ve seen? It’s unprecedented. And if this continues, when interest rates go up, we will be chewing up a tremendous amount of our GDP in debt service, so it’s time to act on that.
“Underneath that mess, the U.S. is a steady economy, and our machine sales in the dirt are doing okay. Deliveries of tractors and loaders across North America have been stable—at a low level—but not declining. Housing has come back; everybody’s feeling it. And China is turning. Their leadership transition is over, as is ours. A month ago, that was a big uncertainty in this country. That’s now gone. [The] same in China. The stories there are positive.
“Latin America is pretty strong; the Middle East is strong. Africa is, for Africa, flat-out booming, and that is really refreshing. It’s a continent that’s overdue for development, for progress and for democracy—and that’s happening.
“So overall, not a bad story, not a good story. Not too hot, not too cold. We will see some growth in 2013, although I don’t know how much.”
“Our port situation in this country is absolutely backwards and pathetic. The brand-new Panama Canal about to open will take the biggest ships in the world, but they can’t dock in the U.S. until we do some things to fix our ports.
“I was encouraged yesterday when President Obama told us that, as part of the Jobs Council that [General Electric’s] Jeff Immelt led, they are working on shortening the permitting time for a port in Jacksonville, Florida, from seven years to one year. That’s the kind of thing we need—to clean out the regulations and let us compete.
“Our airports—welcome to JFK—are embarrassing. It’s the same with our roads. When I talk about that, everybody says, ‘Caterpillar has a vested interest in infrastructure.’ Yes, we do. But I also look at competitiveness for our country, and everywhere I go, in China, Brazil and, to some degree, even in France and the Middle East, everybody’s building out very modern infrastructure. They want our jobs; they want our export markets. We had better be careful.
“When I joined Cat in 1975, the world population was maybe 3.5 billion people. Maybe a billion people were open for business. China was closed, Russia was closed, Vietnam was closed, Southeast Asia was bankrupt [and] Latin America was bankrupt. The Middle East was just starting to enjoy some wealth with higher oil prices. It was just North America, Europe and Japan—and Japan was fairly backwards.
“Now, we’re up to 7 billion people open for business today. Ninety-five percent of our potential customers are outside the U.S. Let’s go get them! To me, that’s the next wave that, somehow, all of us in this room have to take advantage of, whether we’re international or a domestic-only company that supplies an international company. We’ll return to growth in this country; there’s no question about it. But it’s a mature economy, so it will be 2 percent to 4 percent growth [with] some spurts and drops in between. The big opportunity is outside. We have to be there. Americans have to be there.”
Winning in a Global World: Douglas Oberhleman
The New Calculus of Value Creation: Doug Conant, Kurt Schneider, Murray Martin
Performing while Transforming: Abhi Talwalkar, Bill Nuti, Mark Dorman
How U.S. Companies Can Lead in the New Global Economy: David Novak, Nick Akins, Chris Kearney
Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation
What’s Next for Governance?
The New Calculus of Value Creation: Three veterans of business transformations offer insights on leading employees through disruptive change.
“Having people wildly engaged in culturally relevant ways—in the U.S., in Europe, in Asia—is the key. To get them wildly engaged, you’ve got to deliver on four levels: they must be able to make a living; they must feel loved; they must be learning; and they must feel that they’re leaving a legacy of contribution. We held our leaders accountable for creating an environment that was hitting on all four of those cylinders. I found that I then needed to survey employees once a year about how their leaders were creating that environment for them. You need a lot of discipline to make it happen, so that it’s not just the program of the month.”
Known for: Conant brought a 132-year-old company that had lost half its market value back to life.
“Make sure there are no silos. We’re a small company and that’s a lot easier to do with fewer employees. We took the position that any person can have an idea that’s going to affect everything in the company. To drive that home, I brought my management team to an offsite [location] and told them, ‘We’re going to play Welsh rugby.’ In rugby, you have the pack and the backs. The packs usually feel they’re doing all the tough work, while the backs feel they’ve got the tough job of running and scoring. In Welsh rugby, the guys in the pack play the back position, and the guys in the back play the pack position, so you get a perspective of what the other side is like.
“With my team, the CFO had to be the marketing guy, the marketing guy had to be the sales guy, the sales guy had to be the ops guy, and so on. We looked at the same issues we had before, but they had to present their case as that different person. It created really good perspective, and it also created respect—the two things you need.”
Known for: Since taking the Harlem Globetrotters’ helm in 2007, Schneider has reinvented and modernized this 87-year-old brand, making it relevant to younger generations.
“In an older company, it’s hard to create the impetus for change. That has to start at the top and go down layer by layer. We did it by leveraging an external opportunity to mobilize everyone around the need for change. Mail volume has been declining at around 2 percent [per year] for the last 20 years, but when 2007-2008 hit, we saw a drop of between 13 percent and 18 percent—which was significant enough to wake up the people who thought we could just ride this train at 2 percent forever. Everybody understood the need for change. They didn’t necessarily like the change, but they understood the need for it and went with it. It takes leadership that recognizes it, takes action, mobilizes the next layer and then drives [change] through the organization.”
Known for: Martin steered Pitney Bowes through its transformation from a national provider of mail services into an international physical and digital communication firm.
Winning in a Global World: Douglas Oberhleman
The New Calculus of Value Creation: Doug Conant, Kurt Schneider, Murray Martin
Performing while Transforming: Abhi Talwalkar, Bill Nuti, Mark Dorman
How U.S. Companies Can Lead in the New Global Economy: David Novak, Nick Akins, Chris Kearney
Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation
What’s Next for Governance?
Performing while Transforming: Three CEOs offer simple strategies for growing your business in an interconnected world.
“First, you need a strategic blueprint, a three- to five-year blueprint that both you and your board have the conviction to stick to, come rain or shine or snow. Second, you need alignment at the top and to keep the top incredibly small. You can never get to zero with inside politics—even a family of four has politics—but you can get closer with a small team. When our market cap dropped $1.5 billion a quarter after we did a $4 billion merger, investors were ready to kill me. The board was asking me why we had done it and employees were saying, ‘Sheesh, we were doing really well before you bought that other company.’ But the management team allowed me to stick with that conviction, and we stuck through it. Third, you need organizational transparency and engagement.”
Abhi Talwalkar, President & CEO, LSI
“One of the greatest misconceptions about bigger company CEOs is that we’re more command-and-control-oriented people. I think the best are good listeners who go out and seek out learnings, not just from their own people but from their networks. I have what I call a kitchen cabinet—people outside who I go to regularly for opinions, but I also ask my people. [With] engagement comes genuine inclusion. Pride of authorship factors into engagement. When people feel like they’ve authored the plan with you, the execution level will go up incredibly. The social contract is also important, not just compensation but things like training, development, benefits and the office environment.”
Bill Nuti, Chairman, President and CEO, NCR
“To create the right culture, particularly as you’re transforming, you need transparency, which means all of your leaders should be comfortable with you speaking to everyone in the organization. I hold fireside chats, which are skip-level meetings. They’re about understanding in the business [of] what’s going well and what’s not, so you can work on that stuff. Not only should your leaders be comfortable with it, they should actually encourage it. They should want people to speak to the CEO. They should want them to bring things up to show the success and share some of the challenges, so that it’s out in the open and we can solve it together.”
Mark Dorman, CEO, Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, North America
Winning in a Global World: Douglas Oberhleman
The New Calculus of Value Creation: Doug Conant, Kurt Schneider, Murray Martin
Performing while Transforming: Abhi Talwalkar, Bill Nuti, Mark Dorman
How U.S. Companies Can Lead in the New Global Economy: David Novak, Nick Akins, Chris Kearney
Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation
What’s Next for Governance?
How U.S. Companies Can Lead in the New Global Economy
“In international [dealings], the one thing I’ve learned is that if you don’t have local knowledge, you won’t have a very good business. The most important thing you can do in China is to get a Chinese leader you believe in and build a Chinese team around you. We’ve had very little success anywhere in the world wherever we had an expat there for very long. When we started in France, we didn’t have anybody [who] had any idea of what was going on there, and we wasted a ton of money until we got a team that was local. We believe in a de-centralized model, building local capability and then having the local leaders figure out how to localize what you offer and make it as relevant as possible. As long as you start with your people capability, you’ll figure out how to satisfy your customers, and then you’ll make some money.”
David Novak, Chairman and CEO, Yum! Brands
“In many companies like ours, with diversified business platforms and a diverse geographic profile, there is a natural tendency to rely on the financial reporting segments that you’re in. That [approach] inhibits exchanges of ideas across the company. We’re doing a couple of things to change that, particularly on the innovation front. We created an innovation council, pulling the best and brightest and most talented people from all segments of the company to participate. And they weren’t necessarily all engineers. They were salespeople, lawyers, HR people—everybody who had a great idea of where the company was, where we were taking it and what we wanted it to look like. Then we started breaking down those barriers and getting people—who had previously only known the people in their respective silos—to know one another.”
Chris Kearney, Chairman, President and CEO, SPX
“We see it every day. Our average age is almost 50—and you see these positions and the structure of our business changing, so we’re looking for a different skillset. Today, we also have an entire floor of our corporate headquarters devoted to cyber security. That’s a new talent requirement that we have to try to maintain and which the banks are pulling away. So, it’s not only the legacy skills that we continue to require because of people retiring but also those new skills that we have to be concerned about.
“I talk to university presidents, and I also talk to governors and others about craft positions, as well boilermakers, pot fitters, welders—that type of work. We partner with technical colleges, supply instructors and develop curricula for these jobs. We need to encourage that as much as we do the college education.
“There’s another facet that needs a lot of work. And that is what do we do about the inner-city schools? There are a lot of urban settings where corporations need to step up and ensure that those younger students are mentored and developed in a way that they can make decisions about what they do in the future.”
Nick Akins, CEO, American Electric Power (AEP)
Winning in a Global World: Douglas Oberhleman
The New Calculus of Value Creation: Doug Conant, Kurt Schneider, Murray Martin
Performing while Transforming: Abhi Talwalkar, Bill Nuti, Mark Dorman
How U.S. Companies Can Lead in the New Global Economy: David Novak, Nick Akins, Chris Kearney
Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation
What’s Next for Governance?
Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation
Innovation—it’s often heralded as something of a corporate Holy Grail, alluring and elusive. Ironically, even companies founded on an innovative breakthrough—think Xerox or Kodak—often fall prey to a dearth of innovation down the line. Typically, the trouble stems from an inability to foster inventiveness, rather than failing to recognize the importance of innovation, agreed CEOs participating in a CEO Summit roundtable discussion sponsored by FedEx, who identified the following four ways to build an organizational capability for breakthrough innovation.
“Like every other company, we struggle with the fact that if you’re doing your normal job, you have very little time for innovation,” asserted Andrew Gadomski, CEO of Aspen Advisors. “So we created an innovation department whose focus was to find ways to tap the whole organization and our customers to come up with ideas, which then go through a vetting process.”
Makovsky, an independent communications consultancy, takes a similar approach, with an innovation committee that meets monthly. The all-volunteer committee idea came about after the company held a crowdsourcing exercise to canvas employees for ideas, explained CEO Kenneth Makovsky. “The entire company participated, presenting ideas they thought our strategic planning committee should consider. It was very successful—three ideas came out of it that we decided to implement.”
Ideally, ideas should percolate from every level and every area of a company, noted Doug Evans, CEO of Organic Avenue, who says a lack of cross-fertilization inhibits innovation. “Companies are still too siloed,” he said. “They’re not bringing people from different areas of the organization to work together to solve problems.”
Often, the potential of younger workers to fuel the innovation engine also goes unrealized. “People take for granted that today’s [Fortune 500] companies exist, but a lot of them started from nothing or—like FedEx—from an idea that wasn’t thought possible,” said Evans. “Someone once asked Steve Jobs what he would have done differently launching Apple after what he’s learned. He said, ‘I wouldn’t have started the company. It wasn’t possible.’ That’s why young people are critical, because they don’t understand that it can’t be done. It’s important to tap that energy.”
Harnessing the potential of next-generation employees often demands reaching deeply within the organization, said Topaz Lighting CEO Tim Gomes, who sees efforts like the aforementioned crowdsourcing strategy session as ways of achieving that end. “I’ve found open source a powerful form of engagement,” he noted. “Enabling that avenue—whether it’s internal or includes your client base—gives people the ability to engage, to transverse departments. That’s very empowering, and it’s something younger workers really like.”
Is the customer really always right? Not necessarily. After all, back in the 1980s consumers roundly panned the concept of computers for home use. Tales of focus group findings that backfired abound. Witness P&G’s foray into laundry detergent pouches. Spurred by positive consumer polls, the concept failed spectacularly.
Instead, the trick is to focus on identifying problems and developing solutions for those problems. That’s the strategy FedEx employs when introducing new technology or services, reported Cary Pappas, who is leading the $40 billion giant’s move into computer repair as CEO of FedEx TechConnect. “It fits nicely into what our company is all about, which is creating time for our customers,” he said. “We’re leveraging the transportation networks we have in place and our sorting facilities to help customers who don’t want to wait a week or two weeks to get their PC back—who would rather have that [process] turned around in 24-to-48 hours.”
In the race for the Next Big Thing, equally critical enhancements can be sidelined. That’s a big mistake, says David Goldring, CEO of Overseas Military Sales. “Everybody is always talking about the next killer category, and that’s great if you have the ability to throw out your current business and start anew. But if you have a successful business, innovation can be more incremental—finding new markets within the same core, enhancing the core. Your expectations about innovation are as important as innovation itself.”
At Organic Avenue, Evans seeks to embrace a broad spectrum of inventive ideas by categorizing innovation into three areas. “We have tactical innovations, something someone does to make a customer happy that we want to repeat; operational innovation, things that improve the way we do business and strategic innovation, game-changing technology,” he explained. “Most people think innovation in the software business is all about products and features, but process is actually as or more important to us.”
Ultimately, one size doesn’t fit all,” summed up Pappas. “There are a number of different ways to innovate, and you have to figure out what’s the best model for your company, for your culture and for your organization. However, at the end of the day, you have to innovate constantly. That means finding the model that works for you and going after it.
Joe Burgess, CEO, Aegion • Christopher Connor, Deputy CEO, Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics • Doug Evans, CEO, Organic Avenue • Briggs Forelli, CEO, Precision Gear • Andrew Gadomski, CEO, Aspen Advisors • David Goldring, CEO, Overseas Military Sales • Tim Gomes, CEO, Topaz Lighting • Tee Green, CEO, Greenway Medical • Bill Hewitt, CEO, Kalido • Dawne Hickton, CEO, RTI International Metals • Christopher Kearney, CEO, SPX • Jack Liles, Director of Business Development and Reliability Consulting Group, Life Cycle Engineering • Kenneth Makovsky, CEO, Makovsky Integrated Communications • Bill Nuti, CEO, NCR • Larry Nusbaum, CEO, Ronco • Brian Olesen, CEO, Centro • Cary Pappas, CEO, FedEx TechConnect • Anshu Prunet-Sharma, Director of Innovation and Strategy, WDHB Strategic Learning • Todd Roberti, CEO, PHX • Larry Senn, Chairman, Senn Delaney • Sandy Postell Stojkovski, President, Scenaria • Rajiv Tandon, CEO, Technosoft • Mike Wicks, CEO, i3 • Richard Wise, CEO, Lippincott
Winning in a Global World: Douglas Oberhleman
The New Calculus of Value Creation: Doug Conant, Kurt Schneider, Murray Martin
Performing while Transforming: Abhi Talwalkar, Bill Nuti, Mark Dorman
How U.S. Companies Can Lead in the New Global Economy: David Novak, Nick Akins, Chris Kearney
Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation
What’s Next for Governance?
What’s Next for Governance?
If there is one reliable constant in the field of board governance, it may well be that nothing ever stays as is. The moment CEOs and chairmen arrive at a set of criteria for excellence, the governance game changes once again and the players are left to figure out a new plan forward. Whether the debate is about board size and composition, the CEO-chairman split, outside vs. inside directors or a host of other issues that have arisen over the past decade, tensions have steadily increased between CEOs and their directors, as record numbers of CEO exits in 2011 and 2012 illustrate.
Inherently, the relationship between CEO and board is one of the most challenging to manage in a healthy way. “Board members’ first job is strategy and guidance, but they also have the responsibility of executive compensation and executive development when levels mismatch. So, how, as a CEO, do you manage all those tensions, yet at the same time have enough dialogue with the board that they don’t someday get the question, ‘Where was the board?’” asked Peter Bible, partner with advisory and CPA accounting firm EisnerAmper, which cosponsored a CEO Summit roundtable on the topic.
CEO participants agreed there are no easy answers. But getting the balance right starts with an understanding of the roles of those on both sides of the boardroom table. What are the limits of board responsibility? How involved should directors be in development of the strategic plan? Or in managing plan execution? “For board members, there’s a real friction between keeping your finger out of the business, but having your nose in it enough to really understand what the business should look like and what it should be doing going forward,” noted Joe Slaughter, president of Herff Jones.
When they understand the business, board directors have the potential to be invaluable resources for senior management. Hasnain Merchant, CEO of Kuss Filtration, noted that although the majority of the time he executes strategic initiatives with his management team, on occasion he asks board members to help out. “We can talk about them keeping their fingers out, but there are times where you absolutely want help that you couldn’t have gotten with the [inside] resources and the structure you have.”
One of the biggest complaints around the room, however, was that too many outside directors still don’t really get what their companies do or what they are supposed to be achieving. “On the most global level we have issues where sometimes the board just doesn’t understand the business,” said Sandy Climan, president of Entertainment Media Ventures. “I’m CEO of a company that has a Japanese board. They have no idea what we do in motion pictures. They don’t understand; they don’t want to understand. It’s a very challenging environment.”
The corporate scandals of the early 2000s, which appeared to happen under the noses of board members asleep at the table, ushered in a new era of outside directors. Those with no ties to the company, it was thought, were best positioned to monitor. But that independence is fraught with its own challenges. Doron Grosman, partner with private equity firm Court Square Capital Partners, called the current system of board member selection and composition “arcane.” “Most of the members of public boards, in my humble judgment, have no right to be there,” he said. “They should get thrown out and we should replace them with people whose interests are aligned with their company: employees, many of your customers, many of your suppliers. Who knows the business better than customers and suppliers?”
Abhi Talwalkar, CEO of LSI, suggested that even the most diligent outside board directors cannot retain information about the company in the same way as those inside the company can. “As board members, we forget. We’re not living in the business every day. So, as the CEO, you have to bring that board back into the context every quarter with consistency—consistent charts, data—to get them to snap back in.”
Once there is a healthy understanding of the business and where it’s going, successful boards need to fashion the right culture, which is easier said than done, participants agreed. “How do you create a climate of trust and candor?” asked Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at Yale. “Are you giving people information in a timely way? Is there a culture of open dissent? Are you allowed to ask tough questions without looking like you’re a bad team player on the board? Do you take turns asking tough questions? Is there individual accountability?”
To get to that right culture, boards need experienced directors, suggested Jim DeCosmo, CEO of Forestar Group. “Our board is very mature and experienced and they know how to strike the right balance of involvement with the business vs. getting in your business vs. providing guidance. They’ve got teeth and they’ve shown us they can use them.”
Having consistent, transparent metrics for measurement can help both sides stay focused and keep either side from being surprised, noted David Deutsch of David N. Deutsch & Company. “There has to be a relatively simple set of metrics agreed upon by the board by which the CEO manages and by which the board monitors.”
That said, Tahlwalkar pointed out that there’s a lot more to board service than simply monitoring management’s potential missteps. Directors can fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities and, at the same time, be partners to management rather than an adversaries. “You fail to deliver on fiduciary responsibility if you don’t partner and all you do is audit. It’s all about solving problems with management, whether they’re compensation problems, strategic problems, whatever they are.” That communication and partnership is even more important during a turnaround, added Tahlwalkar, whose company has been in turnaround mode for the past five years.
Private company CEOs acknowledged that it was easier for them to manage out of the limelight, particularly in a turnaround. It also allows them to have advisory board members on hand without ceding fiduciary responsibility, noted Jim Rickard of Community Bank Shares of Indiana, whose advisory board consists of three shareholders and four outside members. “It’s not perfect, but it’s very healthy compared to what many of you are faced with because it’s truly advisory. And the shareholders are at the point where they realize the limitations in terms of the growth of the organization.”
All CEOs’ managing boards have to find a way to manage up and create a boardroom culture conducive to honesty and active participation. “People who sit on boards, in many cases, it’s an ego thing. Everyone wants to be on the board, but then in the meeting, they just ask a bunch of tactical questions,” said Tim Lewko of Thinking Dimensions Global. “The CEOs have to be aware that need to really shape those ground rules.”
Daryl Adams, CEO, Midway Products Group • Susan Battley, CEO, Battley Performance Consulting • Peter Bible, Partner, EisnerAmper • Sandy Climan, President, Entertainment Media Ventures • Marshall Cooper, CEO, Chief Executive Group • Wayne Cooper, Executive Chairman, Chief Executive Group • Guillermo De la Viña, CEO, Sigues • James DeCosmo, CEO, Forestar Group • David Deutsch, President, David N. Deutsch & Company • Mike Felmlee, CEO, The Prouty Project • Doron Grosman, Partner, Court Square Capital Partners • William Holekamp, President, Holekamp Capital • Tim Lewko, Managing Partner, Thinking Dimensions Global • James McIntyre, CEO, The Greenheck Group • Hasnain Merchant, CEO, Kuss Filtration • James Post, John F. Smith, Jr. Professor in Management, Boston University School of Management • James Rickard, CEO, Community Bank Shares of Indiana • Kurt Schneider, CEO, Harlem Globetrotters • Ralph Scozzafava, CEO, Furniture Brands • Joe Slaughter, CEO, Herff Jones • Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, President, Chief Executive Leadership Institute, Yale • Abhi Talwalkar, CEO, LSI • Christine Wicks, CEO, Keller Williams • Michael Wolff, Principal, EisnerAmper • Richard Zuschlag, CEO, Acadian Ambulance Service
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