McKinsey Q, June 2010
Kevin Johnson left a much bigger position, as president of Microsoft’s platform and services division, where he had been responsible for more than $20 billion in revenue, for one of CEO at Juniper Networks, in September 2008. The sales at Juniper, a provider of IT networking infrastructure, were $3.3 billion during Johnson’s first full year as CEO.
Johnson tried to follow a set of transition principles that he described recently in an interview with McKinsey’s Endre Holen and Allen Webb.
He sought advice from many CEO’s on how to take over from the previous CEO, Scott Kriens.
One of the CEOs he talked with told him the importance of assessing the talent quickly and being clear with them instead of leaving them in doubt, whether they’d be retained or not.
He was also advised to take help from the former CEO but unobtrusively to avoid conflict in mind of employees. He realized he had to make the best use of the previous CEO’s expertise, knowledge, and talent, but also how you can get enough room to establish your own leadership agenda and connection with the team.
Since he was hired to scale up the company and didn’t have a lot of time , one CEO’s advice was that if you haven’t made enough of the changes you need to make in the first 12 to 18 months, it’s going to be too late.
Before even starting on the job, he put together a plan of what he wanted to accomplish in the first 100 days: how he would invest his time and the key people he needed to connect with—the leadership team, employees, key customers, investors, partners, and the board. Even though Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the global economy changed dramatically he continued to work on the 100-day plan, but in parallel he was trying to digest everything that was happening in the economy. That was probably a very unusual transition, but I’d expect all of them to have some serious issue—internal or external—that wasn’t anticipated.
The first few months he used to to connect with the organization, listen and learn, start testing some ideas, and begin to shape the strategic agenda.
Over the next three months, after one on one sessions with the top 100 or so people in the company and two-hour business reviews with every business group, he wrote a memo. It didn’t state specific solutions or actions but instead focused on his early observations about the company’s business, strategy, people, culture, and competition and shared the memo with the top 100 people in the company.
Four months after he started at Juniper, he had each of his direct reports conduct a people review with him on their organizations, their talent, and an assessment of their direct reports. This review was the basis for a board meeting where he took their directors through an all-up assessment of Juniper’s talent. Three months later, he took the leadership team through a strategy review process in a very structured way, and that fed the next board meeting. These management exercises allowed him to take the organization and the board along on a quest for the right answers—our long-term goals and the strategy that would help them achieve them.
The economic crisis helped in shaping the culture by bringing the team together and helping them to bond.
His new role at Juniper also expanded the scope of his responsibilities to new areas, including investor relations, managing a board, and allocating resources across a company. Strategically, they decided on continuing to fund R&D and customer satisfaction and at a time when many others were laying off huge numbers of workers, they increased investment in R&D and customer satisfaction. They did, however , operational expenditures in every other part of the business.
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