This is one of the greatest comebacks the business world has ever seen. In 2019, Briton James Daunt took over as CEO of Barnes & Noble. The famous American chain of bookstores, centuries old, is in agony, competed by online sales sites and lost strategically (nearly half of its shelves are filled with board games, calendars, chocolates and other gadgets ). To try to turn this disastrous page, the fifty-year-old, already at the origin of the rescue of the Waterstones brand ten years earlier, applies the same recipe: refocusing on books and rediscovering the soul of the neighborhood bookstores which adapt to local specificities and sellers who find a voice in the way they do their job. In other words, just because you run a world-famous chain doesn’t mean you have to manage it like H&M or Starbucks. And the James Daunt magic works once again. Barnes & Noble is returning to growth, even having the luxury of having opened more bookstores in 2023 than in the entire last decade. James Daunt, a genius in business and… management. Which rests on two legs: confidence and performance. “Identify people who have ambition, talent and a willingness to work hard, and let them open any door they want to choose. I just don’t stand in the way,” the businessman preaches invited last December from podcast “This is working”. And in case of failure? “You have to be very tolerant. I don’t want people to wake up at three in the morning. I want them to sleep the sleep of the righteous and wake up refreshed and ready to go the next day.” James Daunt finally insists on the need to “put in place a career plan” at the company level in order to have the capacity to promote the most deserving, “to tell them that they will be paid more and that they will have a position that reflects the respect their employer has for them.”
Motivate teams? Patty McCord knows how to do it. Talent director at Netflix for 14 years, she is at the origin of the “culture deck”, a sort of HR bible based on “freedom” and “responsibility” and described as “the most important document of the Silicon Valley” by former Facebook number 2 Sheryl Sandberg. Its engine? “Radical honesty”. “There is nothing cruel about telling people the truth with respect and honesty […]. At Netflix, whether it’s a subordinate, a colleague, or management, people talk openly about issues with each other. “Honesty flows from top to bottom throughout the company” (“Powerful”, Missionday, February 2018). A system which has the advantage of “dissipating tensions and discouraging betrayal; this strengthens understanding and respect”. This also applies to strategy: “Hiding the truth, or telling only half-truths will only breed contempt. Trust is based on honest communication, employees become cynical when they hear half-truths”, analyzes the one that shames excess procedures and copping: “companies put so many processes and layers to keep employees in their place that it ends up infantilizing them […]. The only indicators that matter are knowing that they did a great job and that the customers are happy, not monitoring whether they arrived on time for work, whether they followed the rules or requested the permission”.
The most important in management according to Sam Altman
Demanding of human resources managers – “they must behave like business people who understand how the company works” – Patty McCord believes that they must be creative and proactive in terms of recruitment “. Principle that Tracey Franklin, HR Director of Moderna, applies. “At our company, everyone must think as if they owned the brand and understand the overall strategy of the company, including me,” confides -she in theThe “Boss Class” podcast produced by The Economist. The American biotech propelled to the forefront during Covid went from 800 employees to 3,000 in a few months. To recruit the best profiles on the market, Tracey Franklin has only one compass: hire people whose personal values resonate with those of the company. At Moderna, a candidate has to go through a lot of interviews before eventually being hired: “We want to make sure we communicate who we are and get to know the person.” “During the pandemic, the company’s CEO, president and I took to pen and paper to define what constitutes Moderna’s mindset and what we value. We have established twelve points on which we now base ourselves to evaluate candidates and explain to them what is expected of our employees in general. Way to avoid any misunderstanding.
To compensate for your weaknesses, “recruit people who are complementary rather than candidates who are good in the same areas as you,” advises Sam Altman. In a post written in 2019, the iconic co-founder and boss of OpenAI, a pioneer of AI, invites leaders to “learn to assess in which areas people excel, and to position them there”. “It’s the most important thing I learned about management,” confides the prophet of artificial intelligence, much appreciated by his teams – nearly 700 of OpenAI’s 770 employees had threatened last November to resign if Sam Altman, then pushed towards the exit, did not return to the helm. Other advice from the father of ChatGPT? “Push people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard that they burn out.”
To protect her agents from professional burnout, Kristalina Georgieva, boss of the IMF, has implemented a policy focused on three points. Everyone must concentrate on the truly essential tasks. Allow yourself more or less long breaks to recharge the batteries. Finally, look carefully at where in the company burnouts are most common: “in a large organization, you always have 20% of people who do three times more than their share of work. We must protect them.” This exhaustion, reunionitis is not unrelated. According to a study carried out among 10,000 employees around the world by the Slack platform and published last December, 20% of executives say they work overtime at home due to too many meetings during the day (2023 study carried out by the Slack platform). So how can we limit the damage and get back on the path to well-being and productivity? Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz, co-founders of the media outlet Axios, argue for microdots. “Fifteen minutes is fine, but sometimes you only need ten or even five minutes to get in sync with a colleague. There’s no rule that says you can’t schedule a meeting that short […] Many of us schedule 30-minute check-ins simply because our Outlook calendars do so by default. This is a good, easy-to-keep resolution for 2024.
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