The Turnaround Playbook Nobody Wants to Admit Applies to Them
In an HBR interview, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman describes a company that spent five years quietly losing market share because its culture was too comfortable to admit it. His fix started with telling employees the truth.
Prompted by “The HBR Interview with Verizon CEO Dan Schulman”, HBR (Adi Ignatius).
Dan Schulman came out of retirement to run Verizon and found a company that had been “gently ceding” market share for five years. The cause wasn't bad technology. It was a culture too comfortable to admit it was losing. His fix started with one blunt move: telling employees the truth, with no slides and no spin.
One line from the interview stands out: “When the pace of change external to a company is faster than the change of pace internally, you're falling behind.” Verizon is a household name with a massive balance sheet, and comfort still won for five straight years.
What does that mean for a privately held company?
You have even less forcing you to admit decline early. A public company eventually hears from the market that it's losing. A private company can run for years on momentum and habit, with nobody but you positioned to notice the slide, or to say it out loud.
Test it out: pick one number in your business you haven't looked at hard in the last quarter. Customer churn, repeat business, employee turnover, whatever you'd rather not check. Pull it this week, and if it has moved the wrong way, say so to your team before you have a plan. Schulman's point is that the admission comes before the fix, not after.
Looking squarely at a slide before it becomes a crisis is the kind of thing we work on in Strategic Advisory.
Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗