Ep. 108: Gary Piscatelli - Business Transformation for Today's Business Leaders

Contact Gary Piscatelli:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-piscatelli-5a64766/


Hunter Douglas: https://www.hunterdouglas.com/


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Adam
Larson, and this is episode 108 of our series. Today’s
conversation features Gary Piscatelli, Senior Vice President and
CFO of Hunter Douglas North America. Hunter Douglas is the
worldwide leader in custom window treatments as well as a major
manufacturer of architectural products. Gary joins us to talk
about business transformation and what kind of leadership is
necessary to successfully complete a business transformation. Now
let's jump into the conversation.

Mitch: (00:44)
What does business transformation really mean for today's
business leaders?

Gary: (00:49)
You know, it's an interesting one. You probably ask, you know, 10
people, you get 10 different answers, but for me, it's pretty
simple. It's getting better at delivering on your strategic
objectives, you know, or whatever they may be. You know, in some
companies they're, you know, financially focused, it could be
sales, it could be profit, it could be market share. It could be
market position. It could be long term  stability, customer
acquisition, quality, product innovation, et cetera. Whatever
those goals are, it's finding ways to accelerate, achieving those
goals. It's as simple as that.

Mitch: (01:28)
That's a very clean cut definition and something much simpler
than I've heard in the past, but definitely makes sense, and
definitely the goal of a whole business transformation is
improvement and acceleration. So, you know, when business leaders
look to make these improvements and they hope to improve the
organization, is there a  type of culture that is really
needed for a successful business transformation, and in that
culture, in implementing this, are there certain challenges that
a business leader needs to be aware of as they're going through
the process?

Gary: (01:58)
Yeah. I mean, certainly some cultures are, you know, more
conducive to accepting change than others, but you can't control
the culture.. Certainly, you know, when you're starting to make a
change and culture change takes a long, long time. So you have to
really work within that culture, but there, there is something
even more important than culture when it comes to change and
that's leadership, and you know, without, you know, buy-in from
leadership, even if it's just a CEO, but you need someone with
decision-making authority, but then it, you know, has the ability
to control that change to buy in, and if you don't have that, it
doesn't really matter what culture you have. And, you know, I
find leadership to be 100% accountable for results, including
change. And it doesn't really matter what that culture is. You
know, and there's some common things, to driving change,
regardless of the culture. And the first thing is, Hey, no one
wants to be changed. You know, if I asked you, you know, Hey
Mitch, do you want me to change you? You know, you would say no,
and you know, I would answer it the same way. So you have to go
into it knowing that no one wants to be changed. Everyone thinks
everyone else needs to change typically as well. So what you have
to do is you have to find a way to talk to people at a level that
they want to be talked to, and everyone would like their problem
solved. Everyone wants their life to get better, right? So the
first thing you have to identify is what are the things that are
really wrong in an organization that you can get some alignment
around.  The people would generally agree that yeah, you
know what, that's a problem. We need to make that better. You
don't even have to have, have a solution. You just have to
identify a problem, right, and try and get alignment that people
would say, yeah, I want that to be changed at that point in time,
everyone's probably pointing the finger at everyone else. I think
it's someone else's fault. It doesn't matter. That's okay. Even
first step is get recognition of a problem. The second thing is
to try and get people to fundamentally it without pointing
fingers too much as to what do we think the root cause of that
problem is? Right? So we can actually start to develop solutions
around, change around how we fix it. And the third piece is, you
know, even if you get people to say, Hey, we have a problem and
we have a problem. You know, we definitely want to get better at
X, Y, and Z, and we even know how to do that. You know what I've
found? And I was kinda shocked. you know, I think it was probably
that my third big change, I had a room of people, all finance
leaders, and I spent 20 minutes talking about what needed to be
different. Everyone in the room nodded their head, complete
alignment. So then I said, who's with me and no one was with me
and I just didn't get it. I'm like, why, why won't these guys?
Why don't these guys have just told me, they'll have a problem.
They're all senior leaders in a company. You know, they they're
responsible as far as I'm concerned for driving improvement, but
they're not interested. And that's when I figured, well, gee,
I've got to have in advance figured out what's in it for them.
Right, So I've also had to figure out how can I talk to them so
they're going to get on board. Right. And, you know, everyone is
motivated by different things, right? Some people are motivated
by money. You know, some people are motivated by job security.
Some people are motivated, motivated by, you know, career
progression. Right, so, and you can't just come up with one
solution, right, because everyone's got different factors,
they're going to drive their ability to get on board because
change comes with risks and they're in risk and work. Right. You
know, it's not easy to change, right. So people are like, why
should I, you know, spend a lot of time working on this when I'm,
I'm happy, you know, doing my job as it is today and getting paid
as I am today and what's in it for me? So you really have to
think through those things, at least with, you know, a handful of
leaders so they understand, you know, why it's going to be good
for them. At the same time, what you can do is, you know, outside
of that change, you can start to change your incentive program
because you know, pay does motivate people. So, you know, even
ahead of that change, you may want to restructure whether it's
short-term incentives, long-term incentives, even your annual
review process. So that, to the extent people get on board,
they're going to get rewarded and that's something I've, I've
done in the last two places I've worked, you know, ahead of the
change was to change the incentive program. So at least the
compensation elements somewhat addressed, you know, getting on
board and compensating people for delivering. And that's why I go
back to transformation is about accelerating achievement of
business results, right? So you should be doing it because it's
going to make the company better. From there, there's more, you
know, the other mistake people make is, you know, especially a
lot of, a lot of financially driven changes there's associated
cost reduction and people make too big a deal out of cost
reduction, especially around people. And if you try and sell a
change that says, Hey, it's going to result in 25 or 30% of the
people losing their jobs, and you then want people to work really
hard to make changes so that they won't have a job that's hard to
do. So, you know, as I've kind of moved through changes in my
career, especially the last one that I worked on at the company,
right now, we didn't even address that beca...