ReLaunch

How to Stage an Organizational Comeback

Mark Rutland

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780781409599
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A church in deep debt with attendance down by the thousands. A college that had lapsed into a coma, its buildings in shambles, its faculty demoralized, its enrollment at rock bottom. A university facing lawsuits, scandal, and near-bankruptcy. Each situation involved different financial needs, different lost dreams, different personal wounds. But they each had one thing in common: each needed a leader who could restore hope, vision, and viability.   Dr. Mark Rutland has led three institutional turnarounds over the past twenty-five years. He has seen organizations that were dying come to new life. And he knows the steps you need to take right now. How do you know what to do to help your church or organization make it, even when circumstances and personnel challenges seem too much to handle? Here are the answers. As Dr. Rutland writes in this New York Times bestseller, the true leader can say, “This book is for the rugged visionaries who see in the wreckage a hope for the future and are willing to pay the price for a relaunch.”

Part I

LEARNING THE ART OF LEADERSHIP

Chapter One

MY MOTHER’S FLOWER BEDS

There is a memory that has come back to me time and again in my life, a memory that has informed much of what I believe about shaping organizations. On the surface this memory may not be very impressive, but over time it has inspired a great deal of what I now know about turnaround leadership.

In my early years, my father’s work meant that our family moved often. Every time we pulled up stakes, we spoke little of what we were leaving behind. The party line was, “Excitement ahead! No grieving!” Not surprisingly, this made for an unsettled childhood. We were constantly on the move. I attended multiple schools each year until I went to college. I was always the new kid, and I always felt a little out of place. No matter how hard things were wherever we lived, I consoled myself that we would probably be gone by Christmas anyway. I tended to put out vines rather than put down roots wherever I lived.

Despite these upheavals, I couldn’t help but admire my mother’s resilience. She endured the many moves with a calm that mystified me. I’m sure the challenge of a new town, a new house, and new arrangements for her children stressed her—but I never saw it. What I did see was that after we were settled in each new house, a day would come when Mother would eventually go out into the yard, kneel down, and start remaking the flower beds. Now, this didn’t make much sense to me. The beds were a mess, and we would be leaving before long anyway. What was the point of improving anything? The question didn’t seem to trouble her. Diligently, she worked in the dirt—pulling weeds, planting seeds, placing bright mums, training vines, bringing order out of chaos and care out of neglect. Every time we moved into a new rental house, out she went and got to work. And when it was time to leave, she willingly offered up the work she had done in those newly beautiful beds for the joy of the next tenant.

Her flower beds were my first exposure to the hard, rewarding work of a turnaround.

“Mom,” I asked her once, “don’t you get tired of moving from one rental house to another?”

Her answer has never left me. She said, “I never worry about how long we stay in one place as long as when I leave, the flower beds are in better shape than when I got there.” That’s turnaround leadership in a nutshell. You are not thinking primarily of your own experience. You are not letting your past keep you from your task. You simply make things better for those who come next. Your goal is to leave the flower beds in better shape than you found them.

Over the last nearly quarter of a century, I have had the privilege of leading the news-making turnarounds of three large organizations on the edge of collapse—a megachurch and two universities. Turnaround has become a specialty for me. I have studied it in history, practiced it in the three major phases of my career, and distilled its processes into the principles you are about to read. After all these years, I’ve come to this conclusion: what I call turnaround leadership is not something mystical, murky, or mysterious that only the especially gifted can do. I believe turnaround leadership is a skill—or, rather, a set of skills—that can be developed. It is a matter of vision—of seeing opportunity where everyone else sees an unmanageable mess, of tirelessly communicating a defining vision, and of making that vision a reality on the ground. It’s complicated and difficult and usually exhausting, but it doesn’t have to be out of reach for most of us.

I have seen masterful relaunches staged by hundreds of great leaders I have studied. Lee Iacocca, CEO of Chrysler in the 1980s, comes to mind. He knew how to inspire and how to command, how to repair the inner machinery of his company with boldness and skill. He also knew how to embody the culture of his corporation before the watching world. By the time he started appearing as Chrysler’s spokesman on those famous television commercials, he had already completed one of the great corporate turnarounds in history. I also think of Steve Jobs. He was an unusual man, but there is little in the annals of leadership like his triumphant return to Apple, the company that he founded and that later fired him. As we all now know, he went on to create the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, and in doing so he turned Apple around—transforming a generation in the process. Now that is turnaround leadership!

There are also a lot of bad examples on the pages of leadership history. In the 1980s and ’90s, “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap was the CEO of companies like Scott Paper and Sunbeam. Believing that business turnarounds were measured only in profits for shareholders, Dunlap routinely closed factories, squeezed operations, and turned the painful, humiliating mass layoff into a dreaded art form. He refashioned companies through a ruthless scorched-earth policy that left thousands of people unemployed and made turnaround a dirty word nationwide. He apparently thought he was a success because he emerged from all of this with a hundred-million-dollar golden parachute for himself. Dunlap didn’t seem to care about the devastation he left behind until an SEC investigation revealed that his remarkable achievements were due more to accounting fraud than to astute management. The trials that ensued dragged on for years. Meanwhile, entire companies were driven into bankruptcy by his mythical brand of turnaround. His legacy? Several major business periodicals have included Dunlap on their list of the worst CEOs of all time. That is not servant leadership, and it is no way to make a turnaround.

Yet greatness is possible, and it has come to be nearly synonymous with a successful turnaround. Think of it: most of the people we call “great” in history were people who effected a strategic turn at a strategic time toward a strategic goal—Alfred the Great, Simon Bolivar, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion. Each of these had to summon a vision, summon a people to that vision, and summon wisdom to lead a nation up from disaster or decline.

In fact, this is one of the reasons I’m glad I first honed the craft of the turnaround in religious institutions. Frankly, there tends to be more wrongheadedness, more magical thinking, in faith-based institutions than in any other. Faith is good, of course. I’m a man of faith. But faith is no substitute for wise action. Often I had to overcome bad theology and wispy concepts of leadership to turn the ship. This allowed me to get a firm grasp on what works and to learn how to articulate what works in clear language. Each success I made thrilled me at the possibilities of turnaround leadership for our lives, our nation, and our world. I believe in it so completely that I’ve decided to devote the rest of my life to helping people master the power of strategic turnarounds.

There could not be a better time for it. We are living in a day in which nearly every human institution needs to be reimagined, reinvented, and relaunched—in short, turned around. We all know that our various levels of government are in desperate need of a return to first principles. We long for leaders who understand how to turn the ship of state toward her finest hour. Our industries need men and women who understand it is a new era, demanding a new kind of leadership skilled at creating new and creative corporate cultures. This means turnaround. Churches, schools, nonprofits, and businesses need turnarounds. In fact, if our nation responds to its present crises with the best it has to throw into the fight, I believe history may yet call us “the Turnaround Generation.”

There is more, though, and to understand it you must recognize a maxim most people never apply. It is this: if a principle of leadership is true, it is true for every kind of leadership. Now, I’m not talking about the technical side of leadership—how to run an airport or direct a roomful of accountants. I’m talking about how to inspire, position, coach, and empower people to do what they are made to do as part of a larger team. Whatever is true of Sony in this regard is true of your softball team. Whatever is true of General Electric when it comes to turning organizations—which just means large bodies of people—is in many ways true of any relationship. In fact, I’m certain that many turnaround truths work in marriage, work in friendship, and even work in the way we direct ourselves from within—the way we orchestrate our lives according to certain values and goals.

I’ve been fortunate; I’ve had great turnaround success. In fact, more than one business writer has referred to me as a “worker of miracles.” I can assure you, though, I am no miracle worker. The success I’ve had has come from being bold in the pursuit of a vision, implementing a plan, learning from my mistakes, and understanding what it takes to summon the best in people—not from just sitting around and hoping for a miracle.

You can do it too. Whatever your arena, whatever your gift, turnaround truths can help you reinvigorate and realign. It is an art we desperately need in these times, an art that is not the possession of geniuses alone, and an art we can master and transfer to the next generation.

Chapter Two

DREAM DAY AND MRS. BURKETT

Before I tell you a bit of my turnaround history and before we consider even one detail of the turnaround art, I want to plant a seed in your mind. It may be the most important thing I do for you in this book.

Here is that seed: leadership, and particularly turnaround leadership, is about defining a dream and tethering all aspects of the organization to it. Some dream well. Some define well. Others may tether well or excel at organizing. The art, though—the great craft of leading others—is the connection between the dream, its proclamation, and making the dream the driving force of everything that is done.

I wish this could be taught. I wish that we could acquire it through statistics and research, seminars and training. All of these help, of course, but learning how to define a dream—the vision for a person or an organization—is one of those skills that combine a dozen gifts and fields all infused by intuition and even spiritual insight. It can be learned, but it cannot come from a book or a college course alone. It can be mastered, but usually only after experience, failure, mentoring, and repeated unsatisfying attempts.

This is why I’m taking the risk here of telling you a bit of my story. I have something of a reputation as an expert in turnaround leadership. Yet it would not serve you well if I simply began to tell you the processes of a turnaround without describing the experiences that allowed me to hone the craft, to move from textbook principle to practiced art.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Burkett. My family was living in a mean little town somewhere in Florida. The school held kindergarten through twelfth grade in one shabby building. There were fights every day. It was a pretty scary place for an eleven-year-old new kid to try to fit in.

The saving grace was Mrs. Burkett. She was a short, rotund little woman, and she wasn’t particularly well educated. In fact, she taught me a mispronunciation of Mesopotamia that came back to haunt me decades later when I was giving a talk at the University of Maryland. That’s for another book. Whatever Mrs. Burkett’s shortcomings, she more than made up for them on the first Monday of every month.

On those Mondays at the unwelcoming little school, she would rub her chubby hands together and glance around the room with twinkling eyes. “Class,” she’d say, “it’s Dream Day!” Knowing what was coming, the students would quickly circle up their chairs and wait expectantly. And one by one, for as long as it took, we would go around the room and tell our dreams for the future. There were two rules for Dream Day: first, everybody had to share a dream. That dream could change from month to month (and they usually did), but no one was allowed to take a pass. And second, nobody was allowed to laugh at a classmate’s dream, no matter how unlikely it sounded. Anybody who laughed, giggled, or so much as raised an eyebrow would have to stand out in the hall during the next month’s Dream Day. Believe me, no one wanted to miss Dream Day.

I’ll never forget Danny Raffield’s dream. He was a lumbering, dangerous hulk, and not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The way I remember him, he was about thirty-seven the year we were both in fifth grade.

“So, Danny,” Mrs. Burkett asked, “tell us about your dream.”

“I want to be an astronaut,” Danny said. He pronounced it “aster-nawt.”

I didn’t laugh (I had been warned!), but I did think, Yeah, that’s gonna happen. If Danny Raffield goes into space, it will be with the chimpanzees.

Mrs. Burkett acted as if Danny’s dream made perfect sense. She clasped her hands together and got this dreamy look as though she was looking into stars. She gushed, “Won’t it be exciting for me when I’m sitting on my couch, watching television, and the news announcer says, ‘There’s Colonel Danny Raffield of NASA and the United States Air Force climbing into his space capsule … Wait, he’s lifting the visor on his space helmet. It looks like he wants to make some kind of announcement.’

“And then imagine my surprise,” Mrs. Burkett went on, “when you announce, ‘I’d like to dedicate this flight to Mrs. Burkett and all the students of 5A.’”

Everybody in 5A erupted in cheers. “Hurray for Danny! Hurray for astronauts!” And I thought, This imbecile is actually going to do it! Danny Raffield is going to fly to the moon.

Maisey Blanchard was a pale, skinny little girl with crooked teeth and dishwater blonde hair that hung limp on either side of a sad face. She came from a poor family; she wore the same print dress to school every day, and her shoes were castoffs from her older brothers. Her dream, she said, was to be a movie star.

“Won’t that be exciting?” Mrs. Burkett gasped. “I’ll be settling into my seat at the movie theater with my Coke and my popcorn, and the lion will roar, and the screen will say, ‘Starring Maisey Blanchard!’ And I’ll turn around and announce to everybody else in the theater, ‘You might not realize this, but I taught Maisey Blanchard in the fifth grade.’”

Against all the evidence, I thought, This girl is going to be rich and famous someday. I’d better be nice to her.

“How about you, Mark?” Mrs. Burkett asked me. “What is your dream?” As far as I know, no adult had ever asked me that. I had never thought to ask myself. So I was as surprised as anybody when I announced that I wanted to write books when I grew up. Mrs. Burkett thought that was a brilliant idea.

I don’t know if Danny ever signed on with NASA or if Maisey made it to Hollywood. But this is my fourteenth book, and I’m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I: LEARNING THE ART OF LEADERSHIP
• Part II: THE SEVEN STEPS OF THE TURNAROUND
• Part III: BUILDING THE TURNAROUND TEAM
• Extras