Athletic CEOs

Stanislav Shekshnia, Alexey Ulanovsky, Veronika Zagieva

Description

An unorthodox model of effective business leadership in turbulent environments

Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times is a book about high-performing transformational leaders operating in turbulent environments. These CEOs do not lead by the book: they may not praise their subordinates, provide positive feedback or regularly celebrate small wins. Yet they have created formidable enterprises that deliver sustainable growth, have elevated their companies’ employees to new levels, have set new standards for their industries and have advanced their regions. Most remarkably, in spite of their prominence, these leaders continue to reinvent themselves.

Having studied them for a decade, Stanislav Shekshnia, Veronika Zagieva and Alexey Ulanovsky developed a model of athletic leadership which describes the leadership agendas, practices, outcomes and outputs of these leaders as well as unique attributes that make them effective.

List of Illustrations; Introduction; 1 Athletic Leadership Explained; 2 The Agenda and Practices of Athletic Leaders; 3 Effectiveness of Athletic Leadership: Outputs and Outcomes; 4 Vitaly Saveliev: Passion and Innovation at the Old Airline; 5 Eugene Kaspersky: Saving the World; 6 Alexander Dyukov: Quiet Transformation of Gazprom Neft; 7 Herman Gref at Sberbank: Entrepreneurship in the Least Likely Place; 8 Athletic Leadership in Other Regions: Roger Agnelli, Dong Mingzhu and Jeff Bezos; 9 Athletic Leadership for Non- Athletes; Appendix: Research Methodology; Index.

Sujets

• Organizational studies
• Management

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 26 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783087624
• Langue: English

Extrait

Athletic CEO s
Athletic CEO s
Leadership in Turbulent Times
STANISLAV SHEKSHNIA, VERONIKA ZAGIEVA AND ALEXEY ULANOVSKY
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Stanislav Shekshnia, Veronika Zagieva and Alexey Ulanovsky 2018

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-759-4 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-759-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
Contents
List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 Athletic Leadership Explained

2 The Agenda and Practices of Athletic Leaders

3 Effectiveness of Athletic Leadership: Outputs and Outcomes

4 Vitaly Saveliev: Passion and Innovation at the Old Airline

5 Eugene Kaspersky: Saving the World

6 Alexander Dyukov: Quiet Transformation of Gazprom Neft

7 Herman Gref at Sberbank: Entrepreneurship in the Least Likely Place

8 Athletic Leadership in Other Regions: Roger Agnelli, Dong Mingzhu and Jeff Bezos

9 Athletic Leadership for Non-Athletes

Appendix: Research Methodology
Index
Illustrations
Figures
1.1 Model of Top Performance in Sports
1.2 Athletic Leadership Model
1.3 Russia’s Year-to-Year GDP Dynamics (2004–16)
1.4 Bank of Russia Key Rate (2003–17)
Tables
1.1 Reflection: How Tough Is Your Mind?
1.2 How Adaptable Is Your Mind?
2.1 Sample Athletic Leader’s Agenda for 2017 and Beyond
2.2 Leadership Agenda: Self-Assessment
4.1 Aeroflot Performance (2009–16)
6.1 Gazprom Neft Performance (2006–16)
7.1 Sberbank Performance (2007–16)
Introduction
Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times is a book about high-performing transformational leaders operating in turbulent environments. These CEOs do not lead by the book: they may not praise their subordinates, provide positive feedback or regularly celebrate small wins. Yet they have created formidable enterprises that deliver sustainable growth, have elevated their companies’ employees to new levels, have set new standards for their industries and have advanced their regions. Most remarkably, in spite of their prominence, these leaders continue to reinvent themselves. The focus of this book is not on what effective leadership should look like but on how it looks like in a specific context. It follows an approach advocated by Jeffrey Pfeffer in his recent book Leadership BS : ‘If we want to change the world of work and leadership conduct in many workplaces, we need to act on what we know rather than what we wish and hope for.’ 1
In 2007, when Herman Gref, ex-minister of economic development and trade of the Russian Federation, became CEO of Sberbank, the largest and arguably the most inefficient bank in the country, no one believed that the former bureaucrat, who had never worked in business, could transform this cumbersome organization that had become a byword for poor customer service and inefficiency. Almost ten years later, even outright sceptics admit that Sberbank has risen from the half-dead. Client managers have begun to smile, queues have disappeared and 30 per cent of customers access all the bank’s services via their smartphones or computers without ever setting foot in a branch. Financial results have followed the clients: during Gref’s tenure, Sberbank’s assets have increased more than fivefold, and operating income has grown by over 20 per cent a year. In the year 2016/17 alone, Sberbank’s capitalization grew from US$30 billion to US$62 billion dollars.
The scale of the 300,000-strong organization’s transformation is breathtaking. Gref and his team have created a world-class IT platform, launched shared-service centres and built Sberbank Corporate University to educate employees about cutting-edge management practices. Sberbank has become the trendsetter for the whole country’s banking industry: it was the first in Russia to implement a lean production approach, to introduce agile innovation methods and to address the blockchain revolution. All of this was achieved against the backdrop of a global financial crisis and two local recessions.
If Sberbank is the “circulatory system” (according to its annual report) of the Russian economy, then Aeroflot is its wings. Like Sberbank, Aeroflot, one of the oldest carriers in the world, was famous for its poor service and consequent customer drain. When new CEO Vitaly Saveliev joined the company in April 2009, Aeroflot had only just enough money to continue operating for two more weeks. Experts advised him to change the brand, which was indelibly associated with communism, and to solve the problems of constant delays and bad flight experiences.
Seven years later, Aeroflot was ranked the world’s most powerful airline brand. The company was consistently winning international awards for its service quality and positive international press reviews. Of all European airlines, it had the highest customer loyalty index (with a ‘Net Promoter Score’ of 72 per cent). Passenger turnover had risen from 11 million a year to 43 million, while revenues had grown from US$3.3 billion to US$7.4 billion. With an average age of 4.2 years, Aeroflot also had one of the youngest fleets in the world.
Success allowed Aeroflot to be more active in lobbying for initiatives affecting the whole aviation industry, such as permission for Russian airlines to hire foreign pilots, stricter penalties for in-flight brawls and ratification of non-refundable tariffs. In exchange, Aeroflot had to carry out social obligations, such as launching ‘flat tariffs’ aimed at improving accessibility to the strategically important regions of Russia, even if they were not profitable for the company.
When in 1989 Eugene Kaspersky detected one of the first computer viruses (Cascade) on his desktop computer and subsequently cured it, he did not realize that this would be the first step in generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for his future company and an important milestone in the history of the emergent cybersecurity industry. Today, the name ‘Kaspersky’ is known to every computer user as one of the leading endpoint security vendors, protecting more than 400 million users and 270,000 corporate clients in 200 countries.
Established in 1997, Kaspersky Lab targeted the global market from day one, building a partnership network all over the world. The quality of its products and the speed of its updates became the main selling points and enabled the company to position itself as a provider of premium products. Kaspersky Lab has never lost its technological superiority. In 2015, Kaspersky Lab products participated in 94 independent tests and reviews and were awarded 60 first places and 77 top-three rankings. Kaspersky Lab employs a Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT), an elite group of leading security experts who operate all over the world and provide top-notch anti-threat intelligence and research. In recent years, this team has discovered and disarmed many of the world’s most sophisticated cyberespionage and cybersabotage threats, such as Flame, Gauss and Red October, preventing potential losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. It assists national governments and international security bodies in cyberthreat investigations, holds regular training courses for Interpol and Europol officers and the police forces of many countries and hosts the Kaspersky Lab Security Analyst Summit for the best IT security experts from all over the world.
In his ten years as the CEO of the Russian oil major Gazprom Neft, Alexander Dyukov transformed the company from an industry underdog to the most dynamic oil company in the country. Its reserves grew from 720 million tons to 1.5 billion tons, annual hydrocarbons production rose from 46 to almost 86 million tons in oil equivalent and refining increased from 24 to 42 million tons. Gazprom Neft’s revenue grew from US$20 billion (548 billion roubles) to more than US$23 billion (1,545 billion roubles) during Dyukov’s reign – all in spite of a significant fall in the price of oil.
Under Dyukov’s leadership Gazprom Neft reversed the trend of declining production by broadening its portfolio of greenfield projects and increasing the efficiency of its brownfield assets – and became the industry leader in extracting difficult-to-access oil, drilling horizontally and developing innovative digital or smart fields. The company also worked intensively on its image for end consumers. It developed a network of gas stations, conducted rebranding and introduced loyalty programmes which resulted in a doubling of its average daily sales volumes per station, becoming one of the market leaders in Russia. In a market dominated by sluggish state-owned oil companies, Gazprom Neft stands apart thanks to its proactive approach. In 2013 Gazprom Neft became the first company to produce oil from the Russian Arctic shelf, requiring the construction of an innovative offshore, ice-resistant stationary platform. The company has also been very ac