I found myself saying, ‘Here we go again’. This triggered some reflection over the next few months about what I really wanted to do next.
I did not do any active looking, but I had a number of concurrent offers. One was a lucrative role working with a competitor and being based fully in the US. I went through the process, was offered a role and then realised I really didn’t want to be domiciled outside Australia. We might have done it some years earlier, but there were too many things now back in Melbourne that were important to us.
Paul Rizzo and Ian Harper at MBS had contacted me about returning to the school as Associate Dean and leading what is now called the Senior Executive MBA. I would be able to devote a day or more a week to consulting and applied research and, thus, rebuild those local connections that I had not spent much time on. I accepted this role.
I gave Gartner about four months’ notice, so that my successor could be revealed at the same time as the public announcement of my departure, and returned to MBS to lead both the academic and marketing roles of the Senior Executive MBA.
Working with mature executives in an intense program meant that you were often explaining how things needed to work to people who were used to being in charge of their organisation or line of business.
Quite a few found it difficult to return to this type of study—in four residential four-week blocks—over a period of about sixteen months. No matter how we explained to them that they would need to hand over the reins of their business role to someone else while doing a four-week module, some did not believe it till part-way through.
Meanwhile, I was proud that the team that I had grown and developed at Gartner continued to be regarded as high performers and remained largely intact for quite a few years.
4
Grasp big change management opportunities
Inflection number five: Co-leading a major business turnaround
About ten months into my time at MBS I had a number of interesting phone calls with Gartner.
The previous CEO had left about midyear and the incoming CEO had spent some time investigating why a big chunk of the business was stagnating (which was also contributing to a low and sluggish share price).
Clearly a turnaround was required. Feelers had been put out to a small number of people and I was one of them.
I had maintained quite close links with Gartner while at MBS. Gartner is an iconic company and, like MBS, an organisation that once you have worked there, you will always have continuing ties.
During my last six months at MBS, the book I had co-authored at Gartner, The New CIO Leader, was on its way to the printer, and due to be launched at the next three major Gartner Symposia in Orlando, Cannes and Sydney.
I was invited to meet with the newish Gartner CEO, Gene Hall, at the Cannes symposium. His first words were that he wanted me back in the company. I replied that that might be possible, provided I could continue living in Melbourne.
This time the challenge was of a different type. The business that I had been part of previously represented about one fifth of Gartner’s total revenue, while the stagnating Research part of the business represented more than three quarters of total revenue.
My friend and former boss Robin Kranich had been asked to lead the business turnaround of the Research business, and my new role was to lead new product development as part of that turnaround. We all knew that most of the new Research business products that had been launched in the previous four or five years had faltered, and that the product portfolio needed an overhaul.
That challenge and opportunity was too good to refuse, though it again came with quite a few trade-offs.
Taking risks leads to learnings
If you have the chance to work on a major turnaround, start a new business, or lead a risky project, take it! These opportunities don’t come up very often. No matter how it turns out, you will learn a huge amount along the way.
I had made it clear at the outset that if I did return to Gartner I would stay until we did the turnaround, which would probably be about three or four years at most.
I sort of squared things away with my husband Robert when I returned to Australia from Cannes. He had come to enjoy seeing more of me than he had for some years, but he also knew this was a great opportunity and that it was the sort of role I would probably relish.
Now I just had to explain to the new MBS Dean, who had started in November, that I would be leaving. He was gracious and agreed that I could leave in the new year after we put a few other developments in place—inducting a new group of students in October and planning for the revised international module, which included time in China.
My advice to him, though, was that the workload really needed additional staffing. I knew that none of the current academic staff would take on both the academic and marketing leadership as I had done, and that turned out to be the case.
Additional staffing was put in place for the next program leaders and my role became two roles after my departure.
A different kind of return
The return to Gartner as Senior Vice President for New Product Development was both gratifying and a bit scary.
A group of the often-tetchy senior analysts told me the fact that I had seen fit to return meant that I must have thought we could turn the business around. That in turn, had a considerable, if concerning, impact on me. If they thought we could do this, then I really did have to believe we could, and that we would. It was a kind of positive re-enforcement and challenge rolled into one.
I did have to rethink how I did things quite early on. I was much more accustomed to working with a group who would think conceptually through a problem and work through to a solution. I quickly learned in this new role, that I always had to start with the numbers that could possibly be achieved through a particular course of action, no matter how fuzzy those numbers might be.
It was a crash course in remembering to shape and present the case in the style of the recipients—not the way that seemed most logical and obvious to me. This was something that I did know, but had to remember to do all the time. And, after one not-so-good 5am conference call, I learned to make sure the rhythm of the work meant that I was in Gartner’s US Headquarters for all the critical meetings.
After about eighteen months, we started to see a real turnaround in our numbers and I knew it was probably time to think about the next chapter in my career. Other people had ‘got it’ and were now running with the new products and services. I was under pressure to move to the US, but did not want to. And I missed spending a lot of time with clients, which is where and how I gain a lot of energy.
Sometime prior, I had been approached by, but declined joining, executive search firms. Their business models meant that, as a partner, you were effectively in competition with your colleagues. For better or worse, I have the collaborative ‘gene’, which better suited academia and Gartner-type roles.
Through this time period, I kept in touch with Mark Lelliott, Managing Partner at a leading search firm and then through his leadership of other businesses. We worked together on a major global Gartner report on what makes executives successful: he led from the executive search firm, and a colleague and I co-led this for Gartner. After that, I provided some feedback about capability and assessment tools he and his colleagues had developed.
When
