If a fighter pilot showed up in my squadron, I knew they’d been trained the way I was trained and I knew they had a core set of standards. Moreover, I knew this pilot had the discipline to carry out the process, to prosecute the standards, to fall back on good training. Why? We’d all been through this process ourselves, and we knew that he or she didn’t make it to fighters by adhering to anything less. Our core standards were so well understood throughout our entire force of thousands of pilots that even in times of the unusual, unanticipated, one-in-a-million unscripted moment when we came face to face with a life-or-death situation for which we had no training or no scripted response, we could fall back on our standards. We could trust people we didn’t train, we could trust people who had worked with us before; we could trust them to function because we all knew the standards.
Let me give you an example. One of my partners and one of our key main speakers is both an executive at Afterburner and an F-16 fighter pilot. On September 10, 2001, he was finishing a seminar in upstate New York. As it happened, the nearest airport was actually in Vermont. His seminar ended the afternoon of the 10th. He had another seminar on the 12th, so he spent the night in Vermont, planning to fly from Burlington to Houston, Texas, the next morning, the 11th.
The night passed uneventfully and he made his flight with time to spare. He boarded and sat on the airplane finishing up his paperwork. A little before nine, his plane started to taxi out to the runway at Burlington International when, several hundred miles away, on a morning few of us will ever forget, terrorists crashed a jetliner directly into the World Trade Center. Air traffic control shut everything down; everybody—all the traffic across the nation—was put on ground hold.
Well, my partner had no idea why he was sitting in this airplane in Burlington, Vermont, not moving, when around him there was no traffic. I mean, it’s just cornfields and mountains up there. So he called me because he was afraid he was going to be late for the seminar. He said: “Hey, Murph, I just want to let you know our plane’s running a little bit late, and you might want to call the client.”
At first I didn’t get it. I thought he was kidding. Didn’t he know what had happened?
“Do you know why your airplane’s late?” I asked. And then, while I was sitting there on the phone with him, the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Not believing my own eyes, I lowered my voice and told him what was happening.
Needless to say, he was instantly alert. He got out of his seat, walked up to the cockpit, showed his airline ID, and said, “Hey, Captain. Do you know why we’re on the ground hold?”
The captain said, “No. We just got stuff on the ACARS (our internal communication system from the home office to the flight deck), saying there’s some kind of national emergency going on.”
My partner told the captain what had happened and the captain thanked him and asked him to keep him updated. They sat there for another hour and a half, in the airplane, locked on ground hold. Finally, they taxied back to the gate, and the passengers were let out.
Bolting off the plane, my partner immediately called his National Guard unit in Fresno and said, “Hey, California Guard. This is Major Bourke. What’s going on?”
His commander said: “Get your tail here right now! We’re manning twenty-four-hour combat air patrols over San Francisco and Los Angeles, and you’ve got to get here.”
“Well, sir,” he said, “I’m in Vermont. There’s no way I can get there.”
The commander didn’t miss a beat: “Well, the whole air traffic control system’s shut down. Go to the Vermont Air National Guard. They may need your help. You’re activated.”
My partner said just two words: “Yes, sir.”
So, here he was in his Afterburner shirt and his khaki dress pants and his nice shoes, and he had just been told he’d been activated. He rolled his bag over to a taxi and took a ride across the airfield, where the Vermont Air National Guard has its headquarters.
Dressed like an average Joe off the street, my partner walked up to the security guard at the gate and introduced himself. The guard, who by now had a slung M-16 and was at the ready, eyed him warily but he called the commanding officer, who is a general, and the general met him, right off the bat, right at the gate, and said, “Son, are you the Afterburner seminar guy that’s stuck here?”
“Yes, sir, that’s me, sir.”
The general leaned closer. “You F-16 qualified?”
“Yes, sir,” said my partner.
“Block Fifty?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What size boots do you wear? I am short one pilot,” said the general. “We need twelve pilots to man twenty-four-hour combat air patrols and I’m short by one; you’re in a flight in two hours.”
That was it. My partner walked right into a briefing room, stowed his wheelie, sat down, and introduced himself to everybody. The flight leader looked pretty grim and just said: “Sit down. The briefing’s going to start.” So he sat there, going through an hour and a half briefing, then suited up—and this California pilot launched in these Vermont F-16s with guys he’d never met before and flew for the next seven days, doing twenty-four-hour caps over New York City—one of the first jets on the scene.
How was that possible? Standards. Air Force standards are so thorough, the training so strong, that even though he’d never met these guys before, he got tasked right into the mission, basically had no questions, and went out and executed.
That’s the level you need to have for those vitally important executional standards. Across your entire company, standards have to be set out so firmly, so clearly—and the employees disciplined so thoroughly to adhere to them—that even when you’re not looking, the newest, greenest, youngest employee is at least executing his or her mission.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that getting there is anything but easy, but I also say that the rewards are incredible. One day I was in John Schnatter’s office. If you don’t know John, you should. John is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Papa John’s International, Inc., the fastest-growing pizza company in the nation. He started Papa John’s when he was a dishwasher in the back of his dad’s lounge, Mickey’s. When somebody didn’t eat something, he was the guy who saw it because he washed and scraped the leftover food off their plates. It was as good as any research laboratory in the nation, when you think about it. He would see at all the food that people would return. So, after a while, he started figuring out what people liked and what they didn’t like. Every now and then he would go to his dad and say: “Dad, people don’t like the extra-spicy chicken wings. They eat the first couple, but they always come back loaded with the rest.” One day he came to a realization that would change his life. “Dad,” he said. “People never return the pizza. The pizza’s always gone. I also noticed that people are particular about the crust. They don’t touch it if it’s soggy or too thick, but the pizza’s always eaten.”
All this gives him an idea. His Future Picture began to form. First, nobody ever returned pizza, so that’s the right food to sell. Second, it had to be a thin, warm crust. Add that to a few other observations and you have a pizza business. He literally knocked out the wall in the back of the broom closet in his dad’s tavern and started making pizza. That was the first Papa John’s. He was in business. He was making and selling pizza, but more than that, because of his observations about what people liked and didn’t like, he was actually making an excellent pizza, a remarkably good pizza—and his business thrived.
All these years later, Papa John’s is now a system of more than 2,700 pizza stores. Better execution was on John’s mind, which was why I was in Louisville, Kentucky, Papa John’s corporate headquarters. As this was our first meeting, I asked John the question I ask of all our clients: “Where’s your pain?”
John’s answer stunned me. “My pain is that about 15 percent of our franchisees are underperforming. They thought they could buy a franchise and just sit back, and money would come in. They don’t adhere to our
standards. They want to sell chicken wings. They want to discount pizza. They want thicker-crust pizza. But we’ve told them this is how to make a perfect pizza. That’s our business. This is how many tomatoes, these are the exact ingredients, and this is exactly what you sell it for. If you do that, you’ll be successful. We know what works. But they don’t follow the standards.”
I was impressed. I’d never seen anybody as intense as this CEO. In fact, he wasn’t finished answering my question. He was actually getting worked up. “It’s a simple business, Murph. We make pizza. We’re not flying F-15s with a Mig on our tails in weather upside down. We make pizza. And if you make it the way we tell you to make it, you’ll have a healthy franchise. We rate our pizzas on a simple ten-point scale. We have statistical data that shows that if you’re making a six-and-a-half pizza or above, you are going to have a profitable franchise. If you’re making below a six-and-a-half pizza, you’re losing money. It’s standards, attention to detail. That’s where we’re dropping the ball. We’ve got the right system. We’ve got the right plan. We’ve got the pictures on how to make pizza. We’ve got Pizza University. We’ve put millions of dollars into perfect training. We’ve got great uniforms. We’ve got great stores. We’ve given our people every asset that they need, but our people don’t get it. Just make perfect pizza. If you’re making below a six-and-a-half product, I’m going to show you a franchisee that’s underperforming and not hitting their numbers. If I show you a seven-and-a-half or above pizza, that’s a franchise that’s hitting their numbers. Our only mission in life, Murph, our only mission—forget about the training, everything else—our only mission is to make the perfect pizza. If we make the perfect pizza, we’ll win this game. We’ll win the war.”
“John,” I said. “What do you want to be remembered for? I mean, you’ve got the greatest team. You’ve got this beautiful building, up on the hill. You’ve accomplished everything you could ever want to accomplish at your age. What is it that you want to do?”
He thinks a second and says: “I want to be known for doing something better than anybody else in the world.” He pauses. “And I think that is making pizza.”
Let me tell you, he was shaking, he was so intense. I looked to his people and asked, “Have you ever heard that before?”
They said, “No.”
Well, this is a man who goes to bed every night thinking about making the perfect pizza. He absolutely loses sleep when somebody down in Louisiana is making a six-point pizza. It took him years to figure this out. “We thought it was training for a while,” he said to me as we left. “We hired the best training people in the world, and we put in training and software packages and pictures, but then we did this. Let me show you some pictures. That’s a two and a half. That’s a four and a half. That’s a six and a half. That’s an eight and a half. And that’s a ten. Can you see a difference, Murph?”
I’ve never before in my life given the slightest thought to pizza, but I started looking at these pictures, and I could see his point. There’s a big difference between a two and a half, with four pepperoni slices on this side and two on that side, and a “ten pizza,” which was perfectly configured and had the right ingredients on it.
“If I put this pizza on your table and that pizza on your table, and there were ten people in the room, which pizza would go first?
I point to the eight and a half.
“Well, we’ve done focus groups, and that’s exactly what happens.”
Those are standards. If Papa John’s can maintain a system-wide rating of six and a half or higher on their scale, they win the war. And it doesn’t matter how smart someone is or what city they operate in or if the corporate office pays a lot of attention to the store owner personally; if you’re a high-number operator, the people at Papa John’s don’t have to worry about you, don’t have to mother you. They have standards. However many years it took to fine tune it, they did. They found the absolute minimum standard that, when all else is considered, points the way to be successful in the pizza business. Achieve that standard and you achieve your Future Picture—your Future Picture as a franchise that wants to make a buck, and Papa John’s Future Picture to be the one pizza company that makes the perfect pizza.
We have several layers of standards at Afterburner, Inc. We have fifty-one different fighter pilot facilitators doing seminars all over the world, at all different times. Often, we’ll have three seminars going on in three different cities on the very same day. But, despite the fact that all our team members are highly individualistic, extremely confident, well-respected fighter pilots accustomed to authority and command, when you see an IBM Afterburner seminar in Boston, and then another for Courtyard by Marriott in Florida, you’ll see the same energy, the same high fives, the same plan-brief-execute-debrief-win message. We worked really hard to make sure that the environment is the same and the visuals and audio are jolting and high impact because we know how to deliver our message and we know what it takes to change people’s lives. Our standards cut across every discipline. We want to ensure that everyone in the company is walking, talking, and chewing the Afterburner standards.
Just like Papa John’s, we have a standards guide. In the same way that Papa John’s pictorially shows a franchise what a perfect pepperoni pizza should look like, we spell out every thing we do and our standards for it. I remember our annual internal conference five years ago in Atlanta when we introduced it. “Guys, this is the standard. This is how you book your airfare. This is how you dress when you get on the airplane and when you show up. This is how you wear your flight suit, where your patches go, what color T-shirt you wear, where your name tag is. This is exactly how you hold your radios and what channel you’ll be on. This is how you stand on stage. This is how you give a high five when a main speaker comes up on stage and takes your position. This is how you stand on stage when you’re watching a videotape, looking at the screen, not at the floor, not at your notes, not getting some water, not walking around on stage, but at parade rest, military-precise.”
When we hand that book to a new hire, they know what it means. This is the stuff that’s going to save their tails in combat. In the fighter pilot community, if you know the standards, you pretty much can execute the mission without little idiosyncrasies tripping you up. Same with Papa John’s. If you’re not sure how many pieces of pepperoni to put on a twelve-inch pizza, just look at that photo on the wall. “Never give a business card unless asking for one in return—ever. Always read the client’s website and learn their language. Always show up prepared, line-up card in hand and ready to go.”
But, just like at Papa John’s, getting people to follow the standards is a hard thing to do. We’re human. We all want to do things our way; conversely, some people just won’t go along. Maybe they’re lazy, maybe they’re uneducated, maybe they’re just dreamers, but they don’t, and soon enough those people have to go. But there’s still that vast expanse of good people that mean to follow the standards but haven’t yet fully disciplined themselves to do so. Those are the ones we work on and you work on. They have the potential; they simply need leadership. At first, I didn’t do it all the time. Then I had to say, “If this is going to be our standard, then I’ve got to live the standard. I’ve got to set the example, have the discipline to adhere to it, and then hold our other main speakers to that standard.” In our standards guide, it says, “As the main speakers, you’re the on-site commanders. You are Afterburner. You are the standard.” Now, I live and breathe what I expect everybody else to do—and rare is the day that anyone deviates.
As I said earlier, our standards cut across every phase of our operations. Every Monday, our operations team briefs and debriefs. We brief the week’s mission. We debrief the previous week’s mission.
Every Tuesday, our hunter team—our sales and marketing team—briefs and debriefs. If they’re traveling, we have a one-hour phone bridge. Couldn’t be simpler. Tuesday morning, no matter where you are, you’re on the phone bridge—and
no one misses it.
And then at the seminar, we have a briefing, too. For the larger ones, that can be an involved, detailed briefing. Anytime we have over 120 attendees, we have four or five facilitators. Our experience has taught us that when we have four or more facilitators, we need to designate a person as the “CINC SETUP.” CINC SETUP is the on-site commander in chief who makes sure the room is set up properly. They make sure that the radios are all set to the right frequency so our people can move these large groups to and from the main session and the break rooms quickly and smoothly. They test the building for interference and work out a back-up plan to the primary radios. They check the large screen, the audiovisual system, and the sound. They communicate with the client to make sure that they have a breakout list and a roster of all the attendees. They make sure that the hotel concierge put up the pipe and drape in the right places. They make sure there’s a cherry picker onsite so that when the seminar’s over, we can pull our parachutes off the ceiling, pack up, and get to the airport.
Finally, that person is responsible for the mission brief. “We’re going to start at eight o’clock. Here’s the timeline. This is the order we will line up on stage in. Here’s what’s going to happen if, for some reason, Murph, the main speaker, talks five minutes over. We’re going to slip the timeline here, and cut the break to ten minutes versus fifteen. This is what the primary radio frequency is. Here’s what the backup is.” Just like the mission briefs when I flew the F-15.
To give you an example of how useful this is in business, we can have an entirely new, inexperienced CINC SETUP do a briefing and never miss what needs to be covered because the entire briefing guide follows our standards.
Next, we always do a debriefing after the seminar, but we go another step with this: We post the lessons learned on our intranet. Our idea here is to transfer the lessons learned from every experience to all fifty-one members of our team, wherever they are in the world. To make that work, another standard states that everyone reads those lessons learned, weekly, as if they were actually at that week’s seminar. This accelerates our learning experiences, as by now you know. Even if you’re not doing a seminar that month, you can maintain your proficiency because you’re reading the lessons learned of all the other seminars. Never personally been to a health-care seminar as a facilitator in our company? Just read the seminar debriefs under the keyword “health care” and all the lessons learned from the last three years of health-care-related seminars comes up on your screen. Read them and you are well ahead of the game before you show up and get briefed on the actual seminar that day. And if the lesson learned is powerful or important enough, we may change the standards guide to reflect this new best practice.
Flawless Execution Page 15
