Product Description The first book to explore the unique leadership style of Boeings acclaimed CEO
Jim McNerney was one of Jack Welchs top protégés at General Electric and a finalist to replace the retiring Welch as CEO. McNerney lost that competition in 2001, but since then he has emerged as one of the most effective leaders of his generation.
You Cant Order Change tells the amazing story of McNerneys turnaround at the worlds leading aircraft manufacturer, which had faced a series of tough problems. Boeing is extremely hard to run, with more than $66 billion in annual revenue and 161,000 employees. A new product like the 787 Dreamliner costs billions to develop over many years, with global production hurdles and little margin for error.
Peter Cohan interviewed people who worked with McNerney throughout his career to explain why his consensus-driven style sets him apart. The title comes from a McNerney quote about the importance of winning hearts and minds with a clear vision of future success.
McNerney combines Midwestern integrity and humility with the brilliance and drive of a Harvard Business School and McKinsey alum. This book reveals his approach to accountability, growth, cost cutting, leadership development, customer focus, and other universal challenges.
How Jim McNerney leads BoeingMarch 15, 2010 Craig Matteson(Ann Arbor, MI) 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Jim McNerney is Boeing's current Chairman, CEO, and President. While he had a brief stint at 3M, McNerny's best known work before Boeing was his time at GE and when he was on the short list for replacing Jack Welch. Before GE, he had worked at Proctor & Gamble and McKinsey & Company.
This book is not by McNerny, but is written by Peter Cohan using the lessons from McNerney's career and approach to leadership. McNerney demonstrates the importance of being highly involved in selecting and developing your management team, creating strategies that create growth organically, tightening operations to make it easier to be profitable, and emphasize harmonious relationships within the company and with its stakeholders. You can't just send a memo ordering people to change and accomplish these goals, you have to be hands on and show the way by your own work and example.
Cohan provides 11 chapters on these topics.
The first three chapters deal with leadership development by helping you people improve their performance by 15%, to help disparate teams hash out their differences to mutually find a new area of performance that suits than both better than where they are now, and linking pay to profit and process rather than stock price.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 deal with organic growth by listening to your customers, invest in building your strengths rather than over focusing on your weaknesses, and grow by building your people and developing your existing team rather than trying to grow by merging with other companies. Some acquisitions will make sense, but for reasons other than mere growth.
Getting operations under tighter control is covered in chapters 7, 8, and 9. Too many big companies let their challenges linger because their bureaucracies make solving them so difficult. McNerny says you have to identify the problem, create a business plan that gets rid of the problem, and then pull everyone together to put the new plan in place rather than trying to get everyone together in solving issues piecemeal. Process improvement will help you raise quality while also lowering costs. You should also consider using a global supply base so you lower the risk of interruptions due to local disasters or economic unrest. You also enlist more stakeholders by giving them a reason to support your company.
The last two chapters deal with turning ethical compliance into a competitive advantage and being concerned with improving your company's environmental footprint. Really, this issue is about being politically sensitive and savvy about how to enlist political support.
Cohan writes well, and incorporates many interesting stories from McNervy's career. While I don't think this book is going to be one of the eternal business classics, I do think it is worth a read. McNerny is a talented business leader and knowing more about him and how he leads Boeing might help you in your work.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
great book for managers/leaders - from aspiring to establishedApril 26, 2009 J. M. Guerra 2 out of 3 found this review helpful
In "You Can't Order Change", Peter S. Cohan methodically dissects the leadership style and practices of Jim McNerney, the talented CEO of Boeing Corporation. McNerney is one of Jack Welch's disciples from General Electric. Armed with a Welch-like "results" approach, McNerney also cares about how those results are achieved. In essence, he views an organization's people as it's "critical assets" and Cohan shows us just how McNerney goes about enabling his people to achieve superior results. In a field filled with egos, we see a CEO that knows he cannot do it all himself - "there's only one of him".
The book's greatest strength is that it not only identifies the leadership style that McNerney employs to gain results at Boeing, but also describes the specific management tactics he uses as a CEO to overcome "leadership challenges". We see this through the lens of what Cohan calls "The McNerney Way" where the author has chosen four broad categories to convey "management imperatives" - leadership, strategy, operations, and communities. This is not a conceptual or high-level review, but rather a "nuts and bolts" view into a leader and his mission to change the fortunes of Boeing. Cohan has done his research and relies on a number of familiar sources while presenting his findings in a clear and straight-forward way. You will not find business school jargon or theoretical models in this book, but rather a real-world and no-nonsense look into the tactics a CEO uses to produce what matters in a corporation - things like revenue growth, operating profit, cash flow, and operating efficiency.
I would recommend this book to both aspiring and established leaders and managers as it gives the reader an insightful glimpse into how to be an effective leader in today's ever-changing and challenging globalized business world. It will give you insight into how to be a leader who motivates and has the respect of his people, but more importantly, gets results.
Walking in McNerney's FootstepsApril 14, 2009 Charles Roush 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Peter Cohan has written a very interesting and insightful story about a CEO and how he worked to change a major corporation. Changing any company is a very difficult task, but it is especially hard in a huge, premier company, such as Boeing. In addition to giving us a noteworthy book about leadership, Peter provides in a clear, almost textbook, style many useful check lists about how to carry out a change program. Walk in the steps of Jim McNerney and learn what he did and how he did it to change Boeing. You will not be disappointed.
LeadershipApril 16, 2009 L. Hansen(new york) 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is an exposition in a defined leadership style promoting personal excellence at all levels of the organization, as opposed to a 'follow my orders' style of leadership. The details of the applicability of this style are well thought out. I would recommend this book to anyone needing a refresher course in what it means to be a 'leader' as opposed to being a 'dictator'.
Portrait of a results-driven CEO with impeccable integrityApril 27, 2009 Robert Morris(Dallas, Texas) 1 out of 3 found this review helpful
In his previously published book, Value Leadership, Peter Cohan identifies five qualitative factors and six quantitative factors of "Value Leaders" and examines several companies that exemplify the concept and principles. They include Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, J.M. Smucker, MBNA, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Synopsys, and Wal-Mart. Agreeing that "what you cannot measure, you cannot manage," Cohan offers a way to quantify and manage "the amorphous topic of values": what he calls the Value Quotient (VQ) "which is predicated on a set of four or five activities that companies can perform within each of the seven Value Leadership principles." I mention this book and provide this brief excerpt from it to suggest that, as in You Can't Order Change, Cohan is not prescribing specific methodologies, strategies, and tactics for his reader to adopt; rather, he provides information, insights, and suggests that he asks his reader to consider. Then, when applying any material that is directly relevant to the reader's own organization, Cohan assumes that necessary modifications will first be made.
Jim McNerney and his leadership style and practices offer an excellent case in point, first at GE as group president and CEO and later as chairman and CEO at 3M and then Boeing. Throughout his narrative, Cohan identifies more than a hundred "leadership" lessons to be learned from McNerney's distinguished career thus far. However, it should be noted that how McNerney would apply them to challenges at GE would almost certainly differ from how he would apply them at 3M or Boeing. In fact, how he would apply them at GE in 2009 (if he were still there) would differ from how he would have applied them at GE 10-15 years ago.
According to Cohan, "McNerney's a smart leader: He's very smart about motivating people; crafting business strategies that spark profitable growth; making operations more efficient and effective; and creating harmony within communities." The focus in this book in on McNerney's leadership of Boeing but the aforementioned "leadership lessons" accurately indicate McNerney's style and practices at GE and 3M. Cohan organizes his material in terms of eleven leadership challenges and devotes a separate chapter to each. All of these challenges are familiar to C-level executives (including but not limited to CEOs) in almost all organizations, whatever their nature and extent may be. Here they are, expressed as questions but they could also be expressed as imperatives:
1. How to increase individual performance?
2. How to increase the performance of a team?
3. How can executive compensation be tied to increasing long-term value?
4. How can technologies help meet customers' specific needs?
5. How to use strategies that achieve decisive competitive advantage?
6. Which acquisitions (if any) will help to achieve organizational objectives?
7. How can new leaders "hit the ground running" and produce results quickly?
8. Which management methodologies (e.g. Lean) will increase productivity?
9. How to manage global product development?
10. How to create a culture of ethics, candor, transparency, and compliance?
11. How can an organization have positive and significant environmental impact?
As Cohan explains, McNerney is convinced that responsibility for responding effectively to each of these challenges must be shared by (a) the organization and its CEO, (b) the supervisor if other than the CEO, and (c) the individual executive. Chapters 1-3 explain how McNerney develops leaders (e.g. linking compensation to profit and process, not stock price); Chapters 4-6 explain how he develops organic growth strategies (e.g. investing in an organization's strengths, especially in its people); Chapters 7-9 explain his approach to productivity improvement (e.g. partner with global suppliers to reduce risk and accelerate time to market); and Chapters 10 and 11 explain how McNerney's approach to "harmonizing" Boeing's relationships with its community. To repeat, all of the material in these chapters offers real-world examples of McNerney's leadership and suggests what lessons can be learned from it. However, had Jack Welch, Jeff Immelt, or Robert Nardelli been hired to become chairman and CEO of Boeing rather than McNerney, they would have no doubt demonstrated a different style, and perhaps taken a different approach when seeking to achieve the same objectives.
Of special interest to me is the material provided in Chapter 5, "Invest in Your Strengths," in which Cohan explains how McNerney has demonstrated (at GE, 3M, and Boeing) the ability to create and execute strategies to satisfy customer requirements better than competitor', to attract and retain the best managers and other employees, and to create a more compelling work environment than competitors' by focusing on big, growing markets; by investing in existing strengths while eliminating weaknesses; and by analyzing and then exploiting competitor weaknesses. Under his leadership, Boeing completed extensive research on its customers' needs before making a $10-billion initial investment in the 787; he also made certain that the design and production of the 787 would have maximum systems integration to ensure "seamless" engineering throughout the entire process; and McNerney took full advantage of every opportunity for Boeing to exploit Airbus' corporate mission and ownership structure. "With his pure business knowledge, McNerney helped push Boeing's board to unlock the capital needed to go after a large, growing market in which it had competitive advantage over Airbus." And in so doing, his leadership reveals four lessons that Cohan lists on Page 95.
With regard to various ethical problems at Boeing that occurred two years prior to McNerney's election to serve as CEO, they are discussed in Chapter 10. Cohan suggests that these problems "helped propel" him into that job. He then settled a series of lawsuits against Boeing (for a total cost of $615-million), decided not to take a tax deduction (of $200-million) for the settlement payment, and while testifying to members of the U.S. Congress in 2006, he said that "I hope to discuss why, going forward, the Congress and the taxpayers of this country can place their trust in Boeing. Companies doing business with the U.S. government are expected to adhere to the highest legal and ethical standards. I acknowledged that Boeing did not live up to those expectations." The six specific steps taken, all guided and informed by McNerney's "moral compass," are listed on Pages 171-172. The "ethical lowlights" themselves are listed on Pages173-174. How McNerney guided Boeing through the transformation process, re-establishing ethics and compliance as a clear competitive advantage, reveals four leadership lessons that are listed on Page 180. McNerney's five behaviors are listed and briefly discussed on Pages 185-186.
Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out Cohan's previously mentioned Value Leadership, as well as David Magee's Jeff Immelt and the New GE Way: Innovation, Transformation and Winning in the 21st Century and William Rothschild's The Secret to GE's Success: A Former insider Reveals the Leadership Lessons of the World's Most Competitive Company.
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