Turning round a hairy mammoth

What an extraordinary thing is the turnaround in performance of the British terrestrial channel ITV.

By all the laws of nature, ITV should be the last of an endangered species, a hairy mammoth, surrounded by exciting new competitors using new technology and new routes to market, reflecting rapid changes in consumer attitudes and behaviour.

And yet. And yet.

The current top management duo, CEO Adam Crozier and chairman Archie Norman, have brought about something of a miracle, turning a loss bequeathed to them by the outgoing chairman Lord Grade of £2.7bn in 2008 into a profit of £464m in 2012, an increase of 17% on 2011.

How did they do it? Well, there were lots of cost savings on the way, of course. But on their own these would only have slowed down the progress towards a painful end.

It seems to me that the main strategy has been to invest continuously in new programmes that people in large numbers want to watch (Champions League football and most recently Mr Selfridge), and in keeping fresh the major properties that already exist, some of them decades old (Coronation Street, X Factor, I’m a Celebrity… etc).

That’s what advertisers, the lifeblood of ITV, still look for. And that’s what they have been getting. 

Will they be able to maintain their momentum? Only if they continue to invest in creative product and creative people – and make some good strategic investments along the way.

Of course Archie Norman (together with Allan Leighton) wrought a similar miracle with a previous dinosaur – the ASDA supermarket chain.  

Trawling for ideas

Credit to Britain’s Chancellor (Finance Minister), George Osborne, for this initiative:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11255037

Archie Norman and Allan Leighton pioneered this highly people-centred search for good new ideas very successfully - the “Tell Archie” programme - at ASDA.

Hope Osborne gets similar results (and credit).

So many organisations could up their game (and motivate their people) by transforming their tired “staff suggestions” schemes.

Huddles R Us

Whenever I run an innovation masterclass with a group of managers, I always kick off by asking them what are the things that really work well in their organisations and what problems they are encountering around innovation.

A constant refrain is that their company’s “culture” is not supportive of creativity, innovation and risk-taking, whatever the corporate mission statement (or the CEO) says.

This was a massive problem confronting Archie Norman and Allan Leighton when they took over the running of the major British supermarket chain, Asda. From the beginning they ran creative sessions with their leadership team aimed at finding ways to transform the culture. And among the ideas that they decided to implement was “team huddles”. Everyone. Every day.

These were (and are) opportunities to come together in functional teams for a few minutes at the start of the working day, to discuss what’s working and what’s not, to get fired up for the coming day, to connect personally with colleagues, to be briefed on anything new. Usually these are stand up, not sit down, occasions.

Of course, like so many innovations of this kind, the practice evolved in the USA, initially in sports teams, then in many American businesses. It’s also used a great deal in Japan. But it was (and is) quite unusual in major European organisations.

In the UK, huddles are fairly common nowadays in newer, smaller firms, in hi-tech and communications, but the idea that it should be applied in a vast business like Asda, with its 170,000 employees, was totally radical.

Together with a handful of other important organisational and cultural changes, Allan and Archie turned around a vast and previously sinking ship, so that it became (and remains) one of the great success stories of British business, and was voted “Best Employer” in the annual Sunday Times survey.

Do you have huddles? What’s your experience of them?