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DAN COUGHLIN (Fenton, MO) is a management consultant and keynote speaker, whose
clients include Toyota, McDonald’s, Abbott, Marriott, Coca-Cola, YPO, Boeing, the St.
Louis Cardinals, and more than 150 other organizations.
| Foreword | p. vii |
| Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| Introduction | p. xi |
| Prepare with Precision | p. 3 |
| Qualify for the Pole Position | p. 35 |
| Start Your Engine | p. 47 |
| Lead the Way | p. 63 |
| Deliver Problem-Solving-in-Motion | p. 85 |
| Use Pit Stops Wisely | p. 107 |
| Create Crew Excellence | p. 123 |
| Design Your Strategy to Win | p. 143 |
| Speed Up Brand Equity | p. 163 |
| Innovate to Accelerate | p. 189 |
| Progress Through Turns in the Track | p. 209 |
| Finish with Focus | p. 221 |
| Notes | p. 231 |
| Index | p. 235 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
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INTRODUCTION
The Management 500 is the business manager’s ultimate challenge.
The Management 500 is the real-world race for people who run a
business or manage a profit center to generate significant and sustainable
profitable growth for three consecutive years. It’s fairly easy for a
manager to achieve profitable growth for one year. The far greater
challenge is to generate significant profitable growth year after year
after year for three consecutive years.
The history of professional auto racing is filled with intriguing
events, people, and lessons for the modern business manager to learn
from. In a Formula 1 Grand Prix, NASCAR Sprint Cup Series,1 or
IndyCar Series race anywhere from twenty to forty-three of the
world’s fastest drivers in the world’s fastest cars compete for approximately
three hours with the expectation of going as fast and as smart
as possible. The driver and his or her team are responsible for continually
finding ways to make their car move with greater speed and accuracy
and to sustain that performance over an extended period of time.
I’ve always admired the power and speed of professional auto racing,
but I didn’t understand the nuances, strategies, and required commitments
until I began my research for this book. The farther I threw
myself into studying individuals, cars, and organizations that make up
the world of professional auto racing, the more clearly the management
insights came to me.
From Enzo Ferrari to Jimmie Johnson, from McLaren Formula 1
Racing Team to Toyota Racing Development, from the Indianapolis
500 to the Daytona 500, and from BMW to Chevrolet, I’ve stepped
into this vast and fast universe to see what ideas the modern business
manager can extract from professional auto racing and use in his or
her day job. The answer, it turns out, is a lot.
In addition to all the books on car racing that I’ve listed in the
notes at the end of this book, I taped the Formula 1 French Grand
Prix, Formula 1 German Grand Prix, and the Indianapolis 500, where
I was able to see over and over again how the drivers went into the
turns and passed one another. However, a few pieces of research stand
out as real highlights.
First, I found a rare original edition copy of Enzo Ferrari’s autobiography.
This book was extremely motivating and insightful. Written
in 1963, it helped to explain the reasons for the amazing long-term
success of the Ferrari brand.
Second, I had the opportunity to interview Lee White, the president
of Toyota Racing Development, USA. Lee’s passion and sense of
purpose was so remarkable that it reminded me of what I learned from
Enzo Ferrari. I then spoke with Ed Laukes, the executive who oversees
all of Toyota Motorsports in the United States, and he gave me some
very helpful insights into how NASCAR strengthens the brands of car
manufacturers, and, more importantly, he shared his thoughts on how
any business in any industry can strengthen its brand.
Third, I interviewed Geoff Smith, the president of Roush Fenway
Racing, which in recent years has become one of the top racing organizations
in NASCAR. He shared with me powerful insights on how
to compete successfully and strengthen not only your organization’s
brand but also the brands of your sponsors.
However, the most interesting day of my research was attending
the 2008 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series LifeLock.com 400 at the Chicagoland
Speedway. The race began at 7pm, and I drove into the parking
lot at 11 am, eight hours before the action started. Or so I thought. It
turns out that I was attending my first NASCAR race as a fan on the
exact fiftieth anniversary of Richard Petty’s first NASCAR race as a
driver, which was on July 12, 1958.
A NASCAR race is so much more than just a car race. It’s a Super
Bowl event. There were 75,000 people there, and I estimate there
were at least 20,000 people tailgating at 11 am. I repeat this was eight
hours before the race started. It’s a giant carnival, with actual oldfashioned
barkers yelling out that they had free offers inside their
tents. It’s a giant concert with singers and entertainers on stage all
day. It’s a massive outdoor mall with over 100 booths selling caps,
shirts, buttons, miniature cars, giant corn dogs—and even some lemonade
stands.
A NASCAR event attracts every conceivable brand name product.
I walked through the largest Abraham Lincoln museum I’d ever been
in outside ofWashington, D.C., and Springfield, Illinois, and it was on
wheels. I saw a display of dozens of the largest and most magnificent
televisions I had ever seen. However, the strongest brands there were
the racecar drivers themselves. People of all ages wore shirts with the
faces and numbers of their favorite drivers.
There are forty-three drivers who compete at each NASCAR
Sprint Cup Series race and there are thirty-six such races each year.
This is a traveling circus that is bigger than any circus I had ever
witnessed. And then there’s the race itself. You haven’t heard
LOOOUUUDDDDuntil you’ve heard a NASCAR race. If you haven’t
been to a race, then watching it on television doesn’t explain the speed
well either. These cars were within a few inches of each other going at
160 mph and jumping from high to low on the turns in the track.
The whole day pulsated with lessons both inside and outside the
track on branding, innovation, teamwork, strategy, execution, planning,
problem solving, winning, dealing with change, and preparation.
It was an amazing experience.
Details win races. They also lose them. It comes down to selection
and execution.
In car racing a driver has to decide when to push forward and
when to take a pit stop. He or she has to make a constant series of
instantaneous decisions to not only stay in the race but to stay in one
piece. The weeks and months leading up to a major race consist of
detailed preparations from team owners, car designers, team managers,
crew chiefs, crew members, and the drivers themselves. Projects
include establishing a strategy for the race, building effective teamwork
between the driver and the pit crew, and designing and building
and fine-tuning the car itself. Every detail is important.
The modern business manager has to do exactly the same thing.
How does a business manager accelerate profitable growth in a sustainable
way for three straight years? Whether a manager runs a
multibillion-dollar corporation or a hundred-thousand-dollar profit
center, that’s the challenge he or she faces. The manager and his or
her team have to achieve desired results quickly and improve performance
month after month. This book provides insights from the world
of professional auto racing that can be applied to win that business
race.
Unlike a professional car race that lasts for three hours give or
take a little, the Management 500 lasts for three years. You have the
next three years, assuming the wheels don’t fall off the car, to steadily
generate greater levels of profit for your organization and to do it in a
way that is sustainable for the long term.
You’re not competing with other businesses or to be the best in
your industry or to generate the most revenues or to have the most
employees. You’re racing against the clock. You have to produce
profitable growth this year, next year, and the year after that. That’s
the event you’re competing in. At the end of three years, you can
prepare for the next three-year race.
You may very well have to redefine the performance business
you’re in, and you may find that smaller is better, and more profitable.
Or you may have to increase your investments, add more employees,
and increase your marketing.
The Management 500 is not the rat race so many of us heard
about growing up. Instead it’s an exciting and challenging race that
will cause you to grow personally and professionally. It will cause you
to look inward and understand yourself better, and look outward to
better understand your boss, peers, employees, suppliers, and, most
important, customers. There will always be a sense of urgency,
whether the short-term results are good or poor. And that sense of
urgency will bring out the best in you. It will be a better best than you
ever thought possible.
Managers today not only need to be better prepared than ever
before, but they also have to deal with an unprecedented rate of
change in digital technology, consumer trends, globalization, communication,
and transportation. Team members who once sat in the same
conference room are now spread across continents and communicate
via webcasts, podcasts, instant messaging, and e-mail. Outsourcing has
become so prevalent that 30 percent or more of an organization may
be there only on a temporary basis.
As a manager you need to develop your skills and insights to generate
sustainable, profitable growth, but if you’re like most managers
you only have a few minutes a day to invest in your own development.
Many times it may feel as though you are buzzing around a track with
competitors zooming all around you. Even if you want to work all day
every day, you will find out very quickly that burnout is a real issue.
Pit stops are necessities to rejuvenate your mind and your energy in
order to drive results to a higher and more sustainable level.
This book is designed for the busy manager who wants to compete
and win in the highly competitive and fast-paced business world in
which we live. It was created to provide you with practical insights you
can read in a few minutes and then reflect on to find ways to accelerate
the achievement of your most important desired business outcomes.
Over the past eleven years, I’ve worked with large and mid-size
companies to improve their business momentum. One of my main
activities has been to work closely with the executives and managers
who ran the business or managed the profit center. I’ve served as a
management consultant for more than 130 executives and managers
in more than thirty industries. Some of these individuals worked in
huge corporations like Toyota, McDonald’s, Marriott, and Coca-
Cola. Many others worked in mid-size organizations, including CEOs
and business owners.
I’ve invested more than 3,000 hours on site at these companies
observing the managers in the flow of their normal work-day activities.
I sat in large, small, and private meetings with these individuals. I
observed them as they dealt with issues related to strategy, planning,
execution, talent management, personal effectiveness, priority management,
leadership, teamwork, innovation, and branding. At the end
of each visit we discussed my observations.
My goal with these managers was to co-create simple, practical
processes that they could take with them into their work situations to
try to improve their performance. A manager would try a process out,
and then we would discuss how it worked in the reality of a business
situation. Then we worked to refine the process to make it more useful
in a practical way.
This book provides a few dozen of these proven practical processes
from real-world business situations that you can use to improve
the sustainable achievement of your most important desired business
outcomes. As you go through the various processes, I have two
thoughts of encouragement for you: embrace simplicity and avoid
process creep.
It’s been my experience that really smart, really hardworking, and
really dedicated managers subconsciously want things to be really
complicated because if a process is really complex then it feels more
like work. Many times I’ve seen managers take a simple process that
is working well and producing very good results and make it much
more complicated in the hopes of achieving amazing results. It doesn’t
usually work out that way. The complicated process tends to bog people
down and waste time. This is what I call process creep.
I encourage you to avoid process creep like the plague and to see
that a simple process is much more powerful than a complicated process
because you can implement a simple process faster, teach it to
others faster, and customize it to your situation faster. The practical
processes in this book are two to seven steps long. They are clear and
simple. Don’t be fooled by their simplicity.
If you want to win the race for sustainable, profitable growth, the
key is to move quickly in ways that generate sustainable improvement
in key results. Embracing simplicity will increase the speed with which
you achieve better results.
Remember also to take regular breaks. If you’re looking for me
to say you have to work 24/7/365 in order to accelerate sustainable,
profitable growth, you’ve come to the wrong person. I want you to
focus your efforts and the efforts of your organization within reasonable
time boundaries each week and to do so over the next three years.
I also very much want you to have a life outside of work. Actually, I
believe your non-work life will help the quality of your work a great
deal.
The purpose of this book is to be a resource you can turn to during
the calm stretches and the turbulent times in the race ahead. Turn to
it often, not for inspiration, but for practical ideas you can use right
away to accelerate to victory.
Michael Schumacher is arguably the greatest race car driver in
Formula 1 Grand Prix history. He won seven Formula 1 Grand Prix
World Championships, which is two more than the next closest competitor,
and he won five of them in succession from 2000–2004. However,
in his very first Grand Prix race, he went way too fast at the start
of the race, his car broke down, and he was done after a few seconds.
According to Christopher Hilton, author of Michael Schumacher:
The Whole Story, Schumacher had to learn a very important skill: to
drive fast slowly.2 He needed to slow down his thoughts so he could
drive at nearly 200 mph while passing other drivers, increasing his
lead, and thinking through his upcoming decisions. At his peak, Schumacher
calmly held conversations with his crew chief while maneuvering
at breakneck speeds. He always looked refreshed at the end of his
races rather than exhausted.
As you go through the ideas in this book, I encourage you to drive
fast slowly. Slow your life as a manager down a bit and think through
your answers to the questions I pose. The questions take just a few
minutes to answer, but they do require you to slow down and answer
them thoughtfully in order to go faster toward the achievement of
sustainable, profitable growth.
You’ll quickly notice the book is laid out in the form of a race
around the business track. If you’re a fan of auto racing, you’ll also
quickly notice that the book is not laid out in the exact same fashion
as an actual race. I begin with thoughts on preparing yourself for longterm
success as a manager and later talk about assembling a team and
developing a strategy. In an actual auto race you would first assemble
a team and later on would prepare for a given race. Such slight differences
aside, I believe you will find the history of professional auto
racing to be an intriguing place to find powerful management insights.
Dan Coughlin
Fenton, MO
March 2009
Excerpted from THE MANAGEMENT 500: A HIGHT-OCTANE FORMULA FOR BUSINESS
SUCCESSby Dan Coughlin. Copyright © 2009 Dan Coughlin. Published by AMACOM
Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.
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