CUSTOMISED LEARNING SOLUTIONS The Guru of Fast-Growth Companies Verne Harnish (Owner, Gazelles, Inc., and Professional Training & Coaching Consultant) reveals how to achieve sustained levels of high performance, with HR providing the foundation for ongoing learning and education |
 Verne Harnish started out young by helping his father in their appliance repair business at the age of 15. He completed his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, while working for a USD 12 million HVAC supplier, spending about seven to eight years there. He launched his consulting firm in 1982, co-founded ACE (Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs) in 1983, and YEO (Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization) in 1987. In 1991, Verne Harnish launched an executive programme at MIT, which he ran for 15 years. In 1997, he launched Gazelles, Inc., because he thought “there was a need to educate the rest of the executive team, not just the CEO.” He wanted to offer an outsourced solution, providing a sort of corporate university for companies who could not afford to have customised programmes. Today, the company provides monthly high-level education programmes to members of executive teams and management in growth companies, and in this exclusive interview with The Human Factor, the creator of Rockefeller Habits Checklist reveals why small companies must invest in training. Q. How was the MIT experience for you personally? A. Pat McGovern was the first celebrity CEO I hosted at MIT’s ‘Birthing of Giants’ programme. He said that he had only three criteria for judging a business: it has to grow at twice the rate of the market; it has to net ten per cent of the bottom line; and it has to spend three per cent of the payroll on training and education of its people. I agree – we need more higher-waged, smarter people. When Jack Welch took over GE, he let go of many people, but in the same year, he made a massive investment in education via GE’s Crotonville education centre. Q. But how can small companies be convinced about training? A. There is a lot of bad training out there. Putting people in a workshop for a day is of no use if there are no practical tools that can help you improve at your work. We took the lead from John Cone who ran Dell Learning. He said that the industry was completely messing up adult education, because most people did not understand the concept. John followed up with some workshops and found that nothing had stuck with the employees when measured a month later. So he redesigned and delivered the right education to the right people, without wasting time and money. He taught us at Gazelles how we needed to design the structure of adult education. Our philosophy also comes from the great inventor Buckminster Fuller, who said that you cannot change the way people think, but you can give them tools, the use of which will change their thinking. This is why the heart of our methodology lies in practical one-page tools. Forms with fill-in-the-blanks have always been a tool for us and they help because they force people to think and apply their knowledge to fill the blanks up. Our last philosophy comes from the belief that no one can achieve peak performance without a coach. Tiger Woods’s first coach was his dad, and the second was Butch Harmon. He fired Butch saying he did not need a coach, and the result was that he went 19 months without winning a title. He then hired Hank Haney, while Phil Mickelson hired Butch Harmon. The two CEOs I admire the most in the US are Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, and both of them have a coach in Bill Campbell. Quite some time ago, Eric was asked by his VCs to go see Bill, but he said he already had so much success. He did it anyway and now he himself says that the most important thing in business is to have a coach. |
 Q. What should HR’s agenda for the future be in this regard?A. What HR has to do now is to first provide the foundation for ongoing learning and education through tools that will help people do their jobs better, and second is in coaching for supporting the execution of ideas. Companies call it HR when they should be calling it the People Division. I strongly suggest that the head of HR share an office with the head of internal IT. They have almost the same job, as we all need our employees to make good decisions everyday. How do we make them make good decisions? We make sure that we hire the right person and that is HR’s job. We support Topgrading which enables a 90 per cent successful hiring rate. Topgrading is used by companies like GE and Google, and we aim to teach it to small companies. So HR first hires, and then makes sure that people have the knowledge necessary to make the right decisions. Then, IT provides the right information to help employees make the right decisions. At Gazelles, we provide a lot of knowledge and education through the Internet. We are beaming right into India and conducting workshops for executives. I see the role of HR as that of a shock absorber between the entrepreneur and the rest of the organisation. In the US, the most common informal HR manager was the CEO’s assistant, as his/her job was to keep employee problems away! Q. Please share some of your coaching experiences with us. A. An important lesson I learnt from Gary Hirshberg, who built the Stonyfield Farm company that took on the USD two billion French company Danone, was to take one employee for lunch every week. Apart from casual questions, he asked the following three questions: what should we start doing, what should we stop doing, and what should we keep doing. When my family and I went to Elephanta Island last year, our guide talked about Shiva’s three faces of creation, destruction, and preservation, and we realised that they aligned exactly with these three organisational questions! |
