PCMA EDUCATION CONFERENCE PREVIEW F
or Jason Jennings, author of The Reinven- tors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change, reinvention
began 13 years ago, with a mid-life crisis. A former radio and television broadcaster, Jen- nings had founded and was running a successful chain of radio stations and a media consulting company when one day, he recalled, the lyrics of a Peggy Lee song came to mind. “I was sitting in my family room and I thought, ‘Is that all there is?’” Jennings told Convene. “Money was not an issue, but I suddenly realized my soul was not being fed.” Jennings first thought that he might become
a theologian, and began studying at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. But after a few months, the president suggested to Jennings that he might not be cut out for the life of an ordained minister. For one thing, he told Jennings, “Sometimes you’ve got a mouth like a drunken blank-blank sailor.”
And the president had noticed something else,
Jennings said. “He told me: ‘You love business done well. You love leadership done well. You’ve got no time for leadership done poorly and busi- ness done poorly. I think your calling in life is to identify the greatest companies and the greatest leaders, doing the greatest things. And that’s the gospel that you need to write and talk about.’” Since then, Jennings has written five best- selling business books, including It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small — It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow and Think Big, Act Small. USA Today has called him one of the most in-demand business speakers on the planet — each year he delivers approxi- mately 80 keynote speeches to audiences around the globe. This June, he adds PCMA to the list as a featured speaker at the 2013 PCMA Education Conference in Denver. For his latest book, The Reinventors, Jennings
and a team of researchers screened 22,000 inter- national companies to find those that had been the most successful at reinventing themselves. Jen- nings distilled from those examples a set of quali- ties and actions that the companies had in common and that set them apart. Recently we talked to him about that process and what he learned.
In writing The Reinventors, you reinvented your own research methods. What did you gain as a result? For almost all my books, I had hired a research team and we would work together and go in
82 PCMA CONVENE APRIL 2013
pursuit of these incredible companies, gain access to them, get inside — I really loved that model. But I was sitting in New York with my publisher. Normally when he and I are talking about a book, it takes us weeks or months to figure out the direc- tion to go, a title, a subject matter — I mean, it’s a laborious, painful process. But I had written three paragraphs about The Reinventors on a single sheet of paper, and I walked in and gave it to him. He looked at it and said, “Let’s do it. Here’s the money. I will have the contract on Monday.” It was just as fast as I’ve ever seen him work.
‘The biggest surprise is how extraordinarily simple it is to start and build an incredible enterprise. What gets in the way 90 percent of the time is our own sense of self- importance.’
But he said, “One thing: You have got to get the book to me quicker. If you’re writing a book about reinvention, there are things that you’re going to have to reinvent, too.” So I sat down and I thought, just because my model has always been to have three or four young second-career MBAs working for me for 12 to 18 months while I’m doing a book — let’s figure out something else. And I hired one researcher here in America. I hired a company in China, and I hired a company in India. And I would tell you that, one, it was faster; two, I think it was more rigorous and complete; and the third thing is, it gave us, I think, a completely different perspective through differ- ent sets of eyes.
Was there anything that came as a surprise to you as you researched these companies? Well, one, everything does surprise me. I think, secondly, the biggest surprise is how extraordi- narily simple it is to start and build an incredible enterprise. And what gets in the way 90 percent of the time is our own sense of self-importance. I’ll give you a good example. I’m not going
to mention the company, but I’m doing a major speech for several thousand people in Las Vegas in about 10 days. This is a large retail organization that I’m a customer of, that I thought would be interesting. Now, this retail organization has had some trouble recovering from the Great Reces- sion; some competitors have been a little bit ahead of them and came out of it quicker than they did. And I put a lot of research into working with the company to build this speech. They not only bought the speech, but they bought a day for me to come and spend on their campus and get to know their executives. And I bet in the last two days, my assistant Caryn and I have had 30 messages from 30 different people all urgently requesting a five-minute or 10-minute or 15-minute telephone call for, quite frankly, sh-t that has been done for
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