Zero-Up (Phase 3) How do you ensure success during the zero-up phase?

To make sure you're successful in the zero-up phase is the same thing you need to do in every room. You need to be engaged. As a leader, you need to make sure you understand what's going on. Now, there's a difference between understanding what's going on and actually doing it. You do not want to be the person in there making those decisions. And there's a couple reasons why. First of all, you're typically not close enough to it. Second of all, if you're doing it, it means the team's not. That means they're not owning it. They're the one that's got to go manage this process in order to do it, believe it, and truly get it through thick and thin. There'll be times it works and times it— It has to be their idea. They have to see it and believe in it. As the leader, you have to keep the big picture, which says, does this work? Do I believe it? Does the math work after that? Is there enough headcount coming out? Does it give me the goal? Remember, as a CEO, my number one job is to set that goal. I have to do the counting, if you will, myself and my CFO, to say, does this get us there? Because there's no need of putting a plan in that ultimately does not deliver the results that we want. You must have a shot at getting there. It's key as the leader, you understand that. If you don't understand it, what happens is it gets away from you. I'll give you an example, right? So we had a business, we were looking at it, and the person who was leading was a terrific person, everything, but they weren't sure about what they were doing. And after a while, I think they just decided to mail it in. They said, well, I need to get so much cost out, which we're all very clear about what we need to get to and how we're going to get there. And they made decisions, I think, without really putting the energy and effort in. I couldn't see it, right? I was not close enough to it, and we were just simply doing our meetings. I look back on that often and ask myself, what could I have done differently? And I think it comes down to just really 3 very simple things was I needed to ask better questions. The second one is I needed to get past that individual and go out and talk to the people who were doing the work. And the third one is I need to understand what the customers needed and where they were coming in. I didn't do that. I really just relied on the meeting itself. Ultimately, we had a bad outcome, right? We recognized our bad outcome really quickly because typically what you'll see when you do this is in the short run, profitability goes up. Sales will probably stay stable. They might go down a little bit. They might go up, but they generally don't change very much. Our profitability and our sales went down. That is a huge red flag. That's something's going wrong because we do this not really to save money. That's not the goal. The goal is to take better care of our customer. And their actions tell us if they're happy or not. So if your sales start going down, your profitability goes down, it tells you the customer isn't happy. Ultimately, as a leader, that's when you need to jump in, start asking the questions. Sometimes it was just an unintended consequence. Other times it was we just didn't do the work right. One of our key pieces around the Four Commandments is be data-driven. If you follow the data and you're looking at what's happening, you should see a result. If that result doesn't show up, Let's take action really quickly to get things back in line. You don't have to go back where you were because for some reason you made that change, but you should take where you were, what you did, and then make the next logical step. Trying to put the genie back in the bottle almost is impossible to do.