At Gillette, I felt comfortable only about a year after I walked in that we knew exactly what we would need to do over the next five years.

“A leader must take action immediately to fix obvious problems. But developing an insightful strategic plan will take three to five months. There is too much information and too steep a learning curve to try to implement solid strategy in the first thirty to sixty days.” - Jim Kilts.

For example, Patrick Doyle, then a board director who went on to become chairman, suggested in a board meeting that Joly should, officially and publicly, declare the turnaround was over and announce the new growth phase. In March 2017, in the middle of his fifth year, Joly did just that. He announced the completion of the Renew Blue turnaround and introduced the Building the New Blue strategy. “I believe that you cannot have a strategy if it doesn’t have a name,” he shared, emphasizing that announcing the new strategy helped the company “more clearly close the door on Renew Blue and start the new phase.

Another factor at work here, though, is the status quo bias, a powerful and widespread psychological force in business. The concept was introduced by researchers William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, who showed in studies with many kinds of decision-makers, including managers, that “when making an important choice, people are more likely to pick the option that maintains things as they are currently.” When you’re enjoying success, your status quo bias is reinforced, which might be just fine. But given that after five, six, or seven years, market conditions will surely have evolved, it usually won't be fine to stick with the status quo later. When responding to those changes would involve making a substantial alteration to or even reversal of a winning strategy or to operational engineering you have orchestrated, the status quo bias makes recognizing the need for change and making the case for it to your team and board a good deal more challenging.

Consider Dave Cote’s fifteen-year run. It wasn’t until his tenth year that he finally gained widespread recognition for Honeywell’s remarkable turnaround. He knew from the start that the transformation of Honeywell he envisioned would take ten to fifteen years, and he committed himself to staying for the required duration— assuming, of course, that the board didn’t ask him to go. He had not underestimated the task before him.

The first stage, Proof of Performance, can range from less than a year in duration to an upper range of two years, depending on the results being achieved. Although the Launch stage for public company CEOs is intense, private equity partners, CEOs of PE portfolio companies who have also been public company CEOs, and directors who’ve worked with both the public and PE models unanimously agreed that the expectation for fast results was even greater for the PE CEO. Instead of being afforded a honeymoon or the exploratory period of a listening tour, a PE CEO is expected to immediately begin implementing the elements of the detailed investment thesis.