I just finished reading the phenomenal book Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. It’s a great book and a story everyone who wants to succeed in business should know at least the bones of it. At its core, this is a story about leadership that creates and implements plans that may or may not actually be in the best interest of anyone but themselves and/or stockholders.
One of the elements of the book that gets a bit of a bad rap (perhaps undeservedly) is the culture of change. The same leaders that are making financial moves with the company believe that change is necessary to keep a company moving forward – sometimes even change purely for the sake of change. Push out new tech, reorg management, move the headquarters, change tactics, spin-off businesses. Change.
Change is one of those things in life that people don’t like so when they see it as a precursor to something bad, it can be easy to attach blame to it. Reorganized a year before missing earnings? That must be the reason, not the trajectory that was set two years prior. Often, we are just playing out trends that were established years in advance. Several of my projects this year were only successful because of work from three years ago.
Case studies are a great way to learn but most people read case studies wrong. The case study is only a collection of historical facts. A good case study doesn’t assign good or bad qualities to those facts. Sometimes things worked when they shouldn’t have. Sometimes things failed when they didn’t need to. Sometimes a case study is purely an intellectual exercise and other times it can have practical use. Be careful though, sometimes the conclusions they lead you to are the wrong ones.
Awesome review!