by Cyndee Miller
Leadership, innovation, organizational culture. They’re all fine and noble topics. But people usually talk about them in the kind of lofty language that makes me want to punch them.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good corporate comeback tale—as long as there’s a good dollop of real talk.
Sometimes, it can be all unicorns and kittens. I want the dirt.
Drawing on his experience holding down C-suite slots at Boeing, 3M and GE, Jim McNerney got the mix right during the opening keynote at the 2016 PMO Symposium®—providing a solid gut-check on how even the heavy hitters lose their way.
“It’s the paradox of innovation. The most difficult projects are often the ones most worth doing,” he said.
Look no further than Boeing’s Dreamliner 787.
The Dreamliner was supposed to be just that—an airliner delivering on every aviation dream: It was going to be more fuel efficient, require less maintenance, create more space for customers, produce less humidity—maybe even cure world hunger.
Airlines lined up to put down deposits.
In reality, it was much more a dream deferred. Customers waited. And waited. And waited as the company blew past deadline after deadline.
Boeing simply flew too close to the sun.
“There were too many firsts at once,” said Mr. McNerney. “There was some degree of hubris. We made the cardinal mistake of promising a product before we had a handle on the schedule.”
But while the push for innovation might have been excessive, Boeing was able to right the ship—err, plane.
The first step back from the brink: Think beyond process and focus on molding the right culture—one that values innovation as a team sport, he said.
That kind of transformation is not going to just magically happen “by edict, email or issuing orders,” Mr. McNerney said. “You do it one conference room at a time.”
In the case of the Dreamliner, leadership recognized its mistakes and took corrective actions to get back on track. That included being brutally honest with customers about exactly what was wrong. Boeing also realized it overvalued heroic circumventing and undervalued process, so it put the focus on gated processes and risk management.
Mr. McNerney’s prior company, 3M, was no slouch on the innovation front, but it, too, had some issues. Early in his tenure, the company was creating some 3,000 new products a year, pushing quantity over quality. And business outcomes suffered.
Mr. McNerney set out to redefine what success meant: Would the proposed new product create growth for 3M? Only those projects that got affirmative answers warranted a green light. But he also emphasized that “no” wasn’t negative. It was about valuing 3M’s strategic alignment above all else.
That, dear readers, is called leadership. And for that, Mr. McNerney relied on some advice from his father: You have to decide early on whether you want to lead or to follow.
So, what do you want to do?
