Chapter 1: Promote Yourself

Overview

After eight years in marketing at a Texas-based consumer electronics company, Julia Gould was promoted to her first project leader position. Up to that point, her track record had been stellar . Her intelligence, focus, and determination had won her recognition and early promotion to increasingly senior positions . The company had designated her a high-potential leader and had positioned her on the fast track to more senior leadership.

Julia was assigned to be the launch manager for one of the company s hottest new products. It was her responsibility to coordinate the work of a cross-functional team drawn from marketing, sales, R&D, and manufacturing. The goal: to seamlessly move the product from R&D to production, oversee a rapid ramp-up , and streamline the market introduction.

Julia ran into trouble early on. Her success in marketing was due to her extraordinary attention to detail. Accustomed to managing with authority and making the calls, she had a high need for control and a tendency to micromanage. When she tried to continue making the calls, members of the team initially said nothing. But soon two key members challenged her knowledge and authority. Stung, she focused more on the area she knew best: the marketing aspects of the launch. Her efforts to micromanage the marketing members of the team alienated them. Within a month and a half, Julia was back in marketing and someone else was leading the team.

Julia Gould failed because she was unable to make the leap from being a strong functional performer to taking on a crossfunctional, project management role. She failed to grasp that the strengths that had made her successful in marketing could be liabilities in a role that required her to lead without direct authority or superior expertise. She kept doing what she knew how to do, which made her feel confident and in control. The result, of course, was the opposite . By not letting go of the past and fully embracing her new role, she squandered a big opportunity to rise in the organization.

What might Julia Gould have done differently? She should have focused on mentally promoting herself into the new position, a fundamental challenge for new leaders . Promoting yourself does not mean self-serving grandstanding or hiring a PR firm. It means preparing yourself mentally to move into your new role by letting go of the past and embracing the imperatives of the new situation to give yourself a running start. This can be hard work, but it is essential that you do it. All too often, promising managers get promoted but fail to promote themselves by undertaking the necessary change in perspective.

A related mistake is to believe that you will be successful in your new job by continuing to do what you did in your previous job, only more so. They put me in the job because of my skills and accomplishments, the reasoning goes. So that must be what they expect me to do here. This thinking is destructive because doing what you know how to do and avoiding what you don t can appear to work, at least for a while. You can exist in a state of denial, believing that because you are being productive and efficient, you are being effective. You may keep on believing this until the moment the walls come crashing down around you.

No one is immune to this trap, not even accomplished senior executives. Consider the experience of Douglas Ivester at Coca-Cola. Ivester was promoted to CEO in 1997 after the sudden death of his predecessor, the highly praised Roberto Goizueta, who had led Coke since 1981. ^[1] In 1999, after a string of missteps that had eroded the confidence of Coke s board of directors, Ivester resigned.

To outside observers, Ivester had appeared to be the perfect candidate for the job. The real challenge [for Coca-Cola], wrote one PaineWebber analyst, is not becoming a casualty of their own success. And I think with the current lineup at Coke, starting with Doug Ivester, they re not too likely to become complacent. ^[2] Fortune dubbed him the prototype boss for the 21st century. ^[3]

An accountant by training, Ivester had spent nearly twenty years rising through the ranks to become Coke s COO and Goizueta s right-hand man. Named Coke s CFO in 1985, at age thirty-seven , he quickly made his mark by orchestrating the successful 1986 spin-off of the company s bottling operations, Coca-Cola Enterprises. He also succeeded as president of European operations, his first operating role, and oversaw the company s expansion into Eastern Europe in 1989. Ivester was named president of Coke USA one year later and became president and COO of the company in 1994.

But Ivester was unable to make the leap from COO to CEO. He refused to name a new COO, even when strongly pressed to do so by Coke s board of directors. Instead, he continued to act as a super-COO and maintained daily contact with the sixteen people who reported to him. His extraordinary attention to detail, which had been such a virtue in finance and operations, proved to be a hindrance in this new position. Ivester could not free himself from day-to-day operations enough to take on the strategic, visionary , and statesmanlike roles of an effective CEO.

The result was a series of missteps, none fatal on its own, that cumulatively sapped Ivester s credibility. His ham-handed treatment of European regulators contributed to Coke s failure to acquire Orangina in France and drastically reduced the value of its acquisition of Cadbury Schweppes s brands. He was also widely seen as having mishandled a crisis in 1999 involving contamination of Coke bottled in Belgium by not visibly taking charge. He alienated other potential allies by failing to respond effectively to a festering racial discrimination suit in Coke s Atlanta headquarters, and by applying too much pressure to Coke s already stretched bottlers regarding concentrate pricing and inventories. By the end, Ivester had few friends .

Suggesting that Ivester s failure was the result of a fatal character flaw, the Wall Street Journal mused, The job of running a giant company like Coca-Cola Co. is akin to conducting an orchestra, but M. Douglas Ivester, it seems, had a tin ear. . . . [He] knew the math, but not the music required to run the world s leading marketing organization. ^[4]

The root causes of Ivester s failure, however, lay less in what he could not do (or learn to do) than in what he could not let go of. An impressive career came to a deeply disappointing, even tragic, conclusion because he persisted in concentrating on what he felt most competent doing. Was his failure inevitable? Probably not. Was it likely given his approach to the transition from COO to CEO? Absolutely.

^[1] Ivester s story is chronicled in M. Watkins, C. Knoop, and C. Reavis, The Coca-Cola Co. (A): The Rise and Fall of M. Douglas Ivester, Case 9-800-355 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2000).

^[2] C. Mitchell, Challenges Await Coca-Cola s New Leader, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 27 October 1997.

^[3] P. Sellars, Where Coke Goes from Here, Fortune, 13 October 1997.

^[4] Clumsy Handling of Many Problems Cost Ivester Coca-Cola Board s Favor, Wall Street Journal, 17 December 1999.