What is the purpose behind Blair LaCorte's leadership?
Not just take it away, but I'm going to move a stool over to a different place and give you some experience because my job is to make the athletes better. One of the reasons we don't do that is because we feel risk. If someone's a high performer and we screw around with them, are we actually injecting risk? The other is it takes effort, and the effort isn't immediate payback.
The effort is the trust that you get from someone, the learning that you get from someone, and the strength that you build in someone usually comes over time, and we're so busy. If we believe our job is just making decisions, we won't move the stool, right? If we believe our job is coaching, and making people stronger so that they can make decisions will move the stool.
And, you know, so I think it's a mindset. I'm also, look, remember, I'm a change manager. So there are opportunities where you don't have to do that. We did a study when I was at Texas Pacific Group and, you know, we had bought a lot of companies over the years, right? You know, at the time I was there, we had bought 93, but we, you know, everything from Neiman Marcus, we bought IBM, right?
We merged it to create Lenovo. We bought Burger King. We bought Grohe. We bought a lot of companies. Every quarter, we were one of the few firms that would actually do an HR analysis of how we thought the team was doing. performing, all of the executive team. Now, you can argue it's biased, you have a certain mentality, but it's indicative over time. Who's an A?
Those are the type of people you thought were A's, they'd stay A's. These are the B's, these are the C's. What we found is that in steady state industries that were growing, if we could pick A players, which we considered A because they had the experience, they would perform like A players. But if the industry changed, the A's went immediately to C's.
If we picked what we would have called B players, which had malleability, they had done different things and they had seen ups and downs. If the industry changed, they would move to A's. So, again, as we start to think about what kind of people we want to hire, it depends on the context.
If I'm just trying to get this company to grow 5% a year because we have market leadership, it may be okay to pick someone and not push them and not try to make them better. If I think that there's an opportunity that the industry will change or I need to grow faster than that, then I need to put time into my management because they have to grow before the company can grow. It sounds very obvious.
But they have to grow before the company can grow. And most people who grow companies, it's a process, not an end, right? So you can't just say, oh, they're going to do the exact same thing again because it's never the exact same thing. So I see this as a mistake. A lot of people think, oh, my God, we need to grow. I need to get a salesperson who's done it before.
It's not just that they've done it before. Can they do it again? You have to ask what was the process and who are they and why did they enjoy that? Because it may have been that they just worked really hard, but they don't have that in them again. It may be that they got lucky. It may be in that particular industry or that particular product that they just got it.
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