EHS CEO Report
Unlocking Opportunity:Senior leaders discuss strategies to improve performance.
EHS CEO Report |
What are the crucial obstacles to performance improvement that your company faces?Unlocking Opportunity: Senior leaders discuss strategies to improve performance. To obtain your copy of the latest report from EHS, click here. To gain insights on how leading companies are driving performance improvement, we invited a select number of CEOs, and other senior executives, to participate in a wide-ranging discussion on how they are identifying the best ideas for performance improvement and implementing them to achieve significant, sustainable new earnings. Whether you are actively involved in a large-scale change initiative, or just considering one, we are sure that you will find the insights of these senior executives helpful. The following executives participated in the interviews: |
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Mike Van Handel — CFO, Manpower“Certainly, one of our challenges as a large, global organization that’s fairly decentralized is how do we get the energy of the entire company focused on the initiative? How do we get everyone to buy in and move forward? And then how do we execute the changes on a timely and sustainable basis. I think it’s not only a matter of having a large number of initiatives but also ensuring that each initiative gets the attention it needs.” |
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Tony Earley — CEO, DTE Energy“In order to be successful, you need to enter into a self-discovery process in which the company pulls together teams of employees at various levels to do the initial brainstorming. Establishing high aspirations makes people think in ways that they don’t think about when they just have a 10 or 15% improvement target.” |
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Bill Johnson — CEO, H. J. Heinz Inc.“Our biggest obstacle was getting our people to think more aggressively about improvement opportunities. We needed to get our geographically dispersed organization aligned and truly motivated and bought into what we were doing and what was possible.” |
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Jim Rohr — CEO, PNC Financial“The first challenge was developing agreement among the management team that there was in fact a need for change. Following closely on the heels of that I would say that the second was to develop ways that we could motivate the top three or four levels of the organization to generate a high volume of ideas and to evaluate those ideas swiftly. Naturally this needed to be accomplished with transparency and accountability.” |
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James Calver — CEO, Hooper Holmes“If we had been sitting on the Titanic, everybody would’ve been happily listening to the band play while the ship went down. Number one was there was no sense of urgency. Two, the company hadn’t undertaken any formal performance improvement initiatives. So, although there was obviously very good knowledge in the management team of the day-to-day running of the business, they didn’t really have any ongoing productivity tools.” |
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Jack Moore — Former CEO of Regions Financial and Union Planters“Like most banks that are still around today, we have been serial acquirers in a consolidating industry. So, as a result, you have a bunch of different cultures, a bunch of different systems, a bunch of different products. We needed an initiative to get through all barriers, to shoot all sacred cows, to pull together as a team and as an organization. We all knew we had a great opportunity, but we needed to have an organized process and initiative to realize on it.” |
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In this series of candid interviews, these senior leaders shared their perspective on:
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