40 BUSINESS DAY C002D5556 Monday <strong>26</strong> <strong>Mar</strong>ch <strong>2018</strong> MondayMorning In association with Harvard Business Review What breaking the 4-minute mile taught us BILL TAYLOR The sad news of the passing of Roger Bannister, the first human to run a four-minute mile, got me thinking about his legacy, not just as one of the great athletes of the past century, but as an innovator, a change agent and an icon of success. Most people know the basic story of Bannister, who, on May 6, 1954, busted through the four-minute barrier with a time of 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. But it was not until I decided to write about him, and read a remarkable account of his exploits by the British journalist and runner John Bryant, that I understood the story behind the story. Bryant reminds us that runners had been chasing the goal seriously since at least 1886, and that the challenge involved the most brilliant coaches and gifted athletes in North America, Europe and Australia. “It had become as much a psychological barrier as a physical one,” he notes. “And like an unconquerable mountain, the closer it was approached, the more daunting it seemed.” So the four-minute barrier stood for decades, and when it fell, the circumstances defied the confident predictions of the best minds in the sport. The experts believed they knew the precise conditions under which the mark would fall. But Bannister did it on a cold day, on a wet track, at a small meet in Oxford, England, before a crowd of just a few thousand people. Just 46 days after Bannister’s feat, John Landy, an Australian runner, broke the barrier again, with a time of 3 minutes 58 seconds. Then, just a year later, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race. Over the last half-century, more than a thousand runners have conquered a barrier that had once been considered hopelessly out of reach. Well, what goes for runners goes for leaders running organizations. In business, progress does not move in straight lines. Whether it’s an executive, an entrepreneur or a technologist, some innovator changes the game, and that which was thought to be unreachable becomes a benchmark. That’s Bannister’s true legacy and a lesson for all of us who see the role of leadership as doing things that haven’t been done before. In other words, great leaders don’t just outperform their rivals. They transform the sense of what’s possible in their fields. (Bill Taylor is the co-founder of Fast Company.) How volvo reinvented itself through hiring RAM CHARAN, DOMINIC BARTON AND DENNIS For years, Volvo was a brand stuck between a rock and a hard place. Its cars didn’t match up well with those of top luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi, yet the company lacked the capacity to compete with massmarket leaders like Toyota and General Motors. Under new ownership, the Swedish automaker decided to transform its product line by becoming a premium player. CEO Stefan Jacoby and Björn Sällström, the company’s chief human resources officer, rigorously examined Volvo’s existing workforce. The result was clear: Volvo needed new people with different skills. Volvo took three criti- cal steps to ensure that its outside-in transformation would work. The first was to put Sällström at the heart of the initiative. The CHRO needs to be at the center of any acquisition of talent from the outside. While Volvo didn’t acquire companies as it went looking for outside talent, Jacoby, and his successor Håkan Samuelsson, counted on Sällström to figure out what the company needed in places it had never explored before. That brings us to the second step: expanding the company’s peripheral vision. To get the skills and change agents it needed, Volvo looked outside the automotive industry. Between 2011 and 2015, the company added 3,000 new people in engineering and development. Third, the company developed a strong system for integrating that new talent. Communication was vital: Jacoby first described the strategy shift to Volvo’s key 300 employees, while Samuelsson, following his predecessor’s lead, holds regular sonal coach. It’s too early to say whether Volvo has definitely turned itself around. Says Sällström: “Even with all this outside DNA, it’s a long journey to change the mindset of an organization. It’s still a work in progress.” Financial signs are live chats with employees. Training was also essential: Jacoby and Sällström implemented a range of initiatives designed to shift Volvo’s staff into a more entrepreneurial mindset, and each of the 300 key leaders was given a percertainly pointing in the right direction. Net revenue hit an all-time high in 2017, and profits rose for the third consecutive year. The company sold 571,000 cars last year, up from 373,000 in 2010. Reaching outside to transform your company is sometimes necessary, but it’s always complicated. Volvo offers a road map for how to pull it off. (Ram Charan has been an adviser to the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest corporations and their boards. Dominic Barton is the global managing partner of McKinsey & Co. Dennis Carey is the vice chairman of Korn Ferry.) (C) (2017) Harvard Business Review. Distributed by New York Times Syndicate
Monday <strong>26</strong> <strong>Mar</strong>ch <strong>2018</strong> BUSINESS DAY 41