Robert H. Bloom and Dave Conti’s book The Inside Advantage: The Strategy at Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business, and Rick Kash and David Calhoun’s book How Companies Win: Profiting From Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You’re In.

However, they’ve [GE] been replaced by Danaher, one of the best “unknown” Fortune 500 firms. Leaders in implementing Topgrading and Lean practices, combined into what is branded Danaher Business Systems (DBS), read the 2020 HBR article titled Unexpected Companies Produce Some of the Best CEOs.

Blake’s experience running and turning around Promus Hotels and insurance giant USF&G, both multibillion-dollar corporations, gave him the edge over five other finalists. His mandate was to shepherd the USOC through a restructuring approved by the organization's 113 member board of directors. Blake’s reputation as a hard-driving, up-front turnaround expert was considered exactly what was needed to institute in the USOC many of the management disciplines common to efficiently managed corporations. The rationale behind Blake’s selection is not atypical - bringing in a change agent to lead a cultural transformation.

But they were wrong. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Pruitt-Igoe project was demolished, and the people who transformed the business world were not the men who employed armies of re-engineering consultants. The people who did transform the business world were those, like Google’s Sergey Brin and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who adopted a more oblique approach to business transformation. They invented new businesses rather than re-engineer old ones, they adapted and improvised endlessly, and they carried employees and customers along with them on a waver of enthusiasm.

If one has not internalized the concept of quality matching and the problems of change in chain-link systems, then Marco’s explanation of his actions may seem banal—he identified the three problems and worked on them in turn. But if one has these concepts, then Marco’s statement is dense with meaning.

The first logical problem in chain-link situations is to identify the bottlenecks, and Marco did that—quality, sales’ technical competence, and cost. The second, and greatest, problem is that incremental change may not pay off and may even make things worse. That is why systems get stuck. Marco’s solution to this problem was to take personal responsibility for the final result and direct others’ attention to the three bottlenecks, one after another…

… Marco avoided this problem by shutting down the normal system of local measurement and reward, refocusing on change itself as the objective…

Instead, Marco described a turnaround in which he provided the overall definition of what had to be done and in which he anticipated and absorbed the costs of change. In any organization there is always a managed tension between the need for decentralized autonomous action and the need for centralized direction and coordination. To produce a turnaround of a chain-link system, Marco Tinelli tipped the balance, at least for a while, strongly toward central direction and coordination.