Taking People With You by David Novak

Author:David Novak [Novak, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-03T02:00:00+00:00

If It’s Not Simple, Start Over

Simple doesn’t mean your vision isn’t powerful or even ­far-­reaching. It means that it’s easy to understand and easy to communicate to others. If it sounds as though a consultant wrote it, redo it.

As Tom Ryan, the recently retired chairman and CEO of CVS/ Caremark, once explained to me, “To get a message out, it needs to be simple and it needs to be straightforward … I think one of the jobs of a leader is to simplify the complex. And I don’t mean simple from a concept standpoint. I mean simple from the standpoint of ‘I can remember it.’”

Not long ago, Ryan’s company came up with a new mission, which was “to find easy and effective solutions for our customers,” because the health care business tends to be complicated, and people’s lives are already complicated enough. But with 220,000 people in his organization, 45 percent of whom are ­part ­time, and a lot of movement in and out, he worried whether his message was getting through. Did people get it?

Then one day he walked into the cafeteria and saw a group of employees sitting at a table just outside the door. He had noticed that this same group of people sat at this same table every single day to have lunch. So he walked over to them and asked them why they always chose to eat in the same spot. Without missing a beat, one of them replied with a smile, “Because it’s easy and effective, Tom. It’s easy and effective.” Ryan was thrilled. “I said to myself, ‘It’s working! People are getting it.’”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.