The art of listening
Mulcahy explained that the Xerox turnaround provided her with
an abundance of leadership lessons, and at the top of the list
was that of listening. “Good leaders listen,” she
said.
And the new perspectives she gained by actively listening to customers,
shareholders, and employees at all levels of the company allowed
her to pinpoint specific hidden weaknesses in the organization.
“So rather than wasting a lot of time putting out fires,” she said, “we
were actually focused on the source of the fuel leak, which really
became critically important to fixing the real problems.”
Instincts
Mulcahy spoke of the importance of good management instincts.
When organizations focus too intently on data and process, she
explained, it can sometimes be a barrier to timely decision making.
In the 1990s, she said, Xerox had become a highly matrixed
company, organized by product, geography, and segments. It all
looked good on paper, but in reality, Mulcahy said, “it was a nightmare.
You couldn’t find anybody who had clear responsibility
for anything.”
“Peeling it all back and creating clear accountability ... was a big
part of cleaning the place up and putting some really well aligned goals back
into the system,” she said.
Vision
“Even while Rome was burning,” Mulcahy said, “people
wanted to know what the city of the future would look like.”
This, she explained, was also true of the Xerox organization.
When the end seemed to be approaching, the question employees
and investors wanted her to answer most was “what will
Xerox look like after it comes through this period of survival
and turnaround.”
So in 2001, in order to help them focus on a new shared vision
of the future, she said her team wrote a fictional Wall Street
Journal article, dated 2005, that detailed exactly what
the company would look like.
Research and development
Part of sticking to the company’s new vision, explained
Mulcahy, was a refusal to cut any funding of research and development.
“I knew that there was victory that would be shallow if
we solved a bankruptcy issue and wound up facing a technology
drought down the road.”
Now, she said, two thirds of Xerox revenue comes from products
and services introduced within the last two years.
Customer focus
Another key leadership lesson for Mulcahy was to keep the company
focused on the customer.
“When you are in deep trouble,” she explained, “it
is not always intuitive that you should be spending the vast
majority of your time talking to your customers.”
But, she continued, that is exactly what needs to be done. She
explained that every executive at Xerox is now tied to specific
key accounts they are responsible for and this builds a culture
of customer connectedness.
Communication
“When people ask me how this company made so much progress
so quickly I think they want to hear that there was something particularly
brilliant about the strategy or the planning,” Mulcahy said. “And
the reality is that it was the alignment of the people around
a common set of goals.”
Communication, she explained, is at the heart of
everything. “If you are a big company, the only way to deliver
progress quickly is to get people aligned around a common set of
objectives,” she said. “Otherwise,
it looks good but it doesn’t stick.”
