Stepping back and looking over my many years at Procter & Gamble (P&G), then Microsoft, and then being a member of numerous corporate boards of directors, there is clearly one business tool that I was exposed to that has been the most valuable business approach I picked up.    As background, P&G is legendary for requiring that brief, thorough, persuasive documents be written in proposing change.  Literally every key decision P&G makes has one individual who is the advocate charged with pulling together a concise document with supporting data.  It is develope ..read more

Peter Drucker, the famous management/leadership guru, has made some very famous statements relating to the importance of focus.  Here is one of the most instructive:  “If there is one secret of effectiveness, it is focus and concentration.  Effective leaders do first things first and they do one thing at a time.” Check out these two companies, and how one continually ignores Drucker’s advice and the other uses it to drive to incredible heights in the microprocessor business. Campbell Soups – This company has been floundering for many years.  After posting yet another bad ..read more

Recently the President of the US issued an executive order/goal calling on electric, fuel-cell, and hybrid vehicles to account for 50% of car and truck sales by 2030.  That is only 8.5 years away! While such a statement coming out of Washington DC has no binding authority, it puts auto companies in a real box.  What are the forces that they face as they consider how to react to such a statement?  Here are the major ones: 1.) The Media – Given that the media needs to create as much sensationalism about such a directive as possible, in order to drive viewership and thus profits ..read more

WeWork was started in 2012 and leases office space and then subleases it to organizations as “shared office space.” It was co-founded by Adam Neumann.  SoftBank is a venture capital company that invests primarily in start-up technology companies and was founded and is led by Masayoshi Son (called Masa).  He runs the Vision Fund, which collected $100M from investors for Masa to invest in promising tech-focused startups and other ventures.  It has $4 billion invested in WeWork.   Masa is 20 years older than Adam and given his vast experience as a venture capitalist and his bi ..read more

Prior to 2018, Dow and Dupont were both mired in the complexity of a mishmash of many product offerings In several different industries and as a result, were turning in mediocre business results.  Specifically, each company, in varying degrees, had a variety of products in the areas of broad-use chemicals and materials, specialty chemicals and materials, and agricultural chemicals.  Net, they were both in too many different businesses causing the managements to be struggling to do good things in any one of their businesses.   The broad-use chemicals and materials area inclu ..read more

Exxon had a very rough year in 2020.  Revenues sank by some $83 billion versus a year ago and the energy titan tumbled from No. 3 on the Fortune 500 list to No. 10.  After two decades without even a negative quarter, it lost $22.4 billion in 2020. Exxon was removed from the 30 company Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) after 92 consecutive years as a member, replaced by software giant Salesforce.  Even more frustrating, Chevron, its longtime rival, kept it place on the DJIA.  Over the past 5 years, Exxon’s stock price has fallen -32% while Chevron’s rose +6% and the S& ..read more

Very few Fortune-500 CEO’s have been as successful in growing a company as John Legere.  He became CEO of T-Mobile in September of 2012, and the overhaul has been massive, and the results have been spectacular.  When he took the job, the stock price was in the $19/share range.  Today, it sits at $145.  The company was a distant #4 in the wireless carrier industry, and now it is #2, and in hot pursuit of the leader Verizon.  Legere retired in April 2020, and was replaced by the existing Chief Operating Officer, who is riding the thrust of what Legere put in place.  ..read more

Regularly posting these blogs on the Gutsy Leadership website (www.bobherbold.com) was started years ago to help launch the 3rd book I did entitled “What’s Holding You Back: Ten Bold Steps that Define Gutsy Leaders.” The book focuses on a roadmap of ten steps a leader can follow in generating big impact, and the blogs focus on examples of companies/leaders who have succeeded or failed in their pursuit of such impact and highlight the resulting leadership lessons.   Stepping back and considering past blogs, there are three negative behaviors that I think are quite subtle and very hard for ..read more

About five years ago, McKinsey, the once admired consulting giant, undertook a rapid expansion.  It sought out new ways to grow, and with a decentralized management structure, there were few protections in place to prevent ambitious partners from taking on lucrative but potentially problematic clients.  McKinsey’s partners have historically enjoyed wide latitude over their work and clients. This big push for increases in revenue and profit, coupled with the independent partners doing whatever they want to achieve the growth goals, yielded some major problems for the Company: Purdue ..read more

Back in 2012, Best Buy was on the ropes.  The stock price was in the neighborhood of $1.00/share. Its competitors Circuit City, CompUSA, and Radio Shack were even in worse shape: all three went bankrupt within a year or so. The fast-emerging online service and low prices of Amazon were killing the tech retail trade.  The CEO of Best Buy had recently been fired for his involvement in a scandal and the popular press was full on articles predicting that the company would die, like all the rest of the tech retailers, unable to cope with the low-cost online competition.   In Fall of ..read more