The voice of wisdom

As the worldwide Chairman for Saatchi & Saatchi and the man responsible for rescuing it and several US firms from collapse, Bob Seelert's corporate credentials are exemplary. Now he has decided to share his management and trouble-shooting secrets with aspiring business leaders in a new book. Diana Milne meets him to find out his pearls of wisdom.

“It's terribly important to know who you are, what you stand for and then to carry that through your career”
-Bob Seelert

Having built a reputation as an ace trouble-shooter with numerous high profile company turnarounds under his belt, the indomitable Bob Seelert is not a man who accepts failure - in any area of his life. Describing the standards he expects from his employees, he recounts the instructions he gave to his PA on her appointment: "The standard of performance for your job is what I call flawless execution. What I mean by that is you will ensure I am always in the right place at the right time, fully prepared with everything I need in order to perform and that will happen 100 percent of the time. It will happen flawlessly, I'll never be late and I'll never be in the wrong place." Even his leisure activities are pursued in the ruthless spirit of uncompromising perfection. Seelert is a keen golf player, but admits even out on the green, his competitive streak won't rest: "I try to perform at a high level on the golf course. I don't go out there for a social or relaxation type of thing. I go out there to try to post a good score."

While one can't help sympathising with Seelert's PA, it's this uncompromising approach to life that has driven Seelert's phenomenally successfully career. After graduating from Harvard College in 1960 he embarked on a 23-year career with General Foods Corporation which ended with him becoming Worldwide CEO of Coffee and International Foods and overseeing one of the biggest mega mergers in US corporate history, the acquisition of General Foods by Philip Morris in 1985.  This ability to hold the reins of a company steady in times of turbulence provided the impetus for Seelert's future career as a corporate turnaround king. To day he has executed turnarounds at the likes of Kayser Roth, a leading leg-wear manufacturer and Topco, a US grocery co-operative. His biggest coup however was the transformation of Saatchi & Saatchi in 1995. At the time when he took over, the Saatchi brothers who founded the agency had been ousted following a rebellion by the company's board members and went on to form the rival agency M&C Saatchi. Senior figures from the new agency soon defected to the new rival and the company lost around £40 million worth of revenue in the space of weeks. As the company teetered on the brink of collapse, Seelert was appointed as CEO of Cordiant, the UK holding company that was formed following the shareholder revenue. In 1997 he moved the company's headquarters to New York and was made Chairman of the company. He masterminded the merger in 2000 of Saatchi & Saatchi with France's Publicis Group at a share price 450 percent higher than the starting level. Ever since the company has improved its financial performance yearly. 

Getting results

For Seelert taking on Saatchi & Saatchi was the biggest challenge of his career.
"The thing I'm most proud of is when I came into Saatchi & Saatchi in 1995," says Seelert. "When the Saatchi brothers were ousted by their board six percent of the revenue had walked out of the door. They'd gone across town to start up a new and supposedly rival agency. The company was losing money, it was literally burning cash. It had too much debt at too high an interest rate. Soon everybody in the company and all the clients were asking 'should I stay or leave'. That was a really difficult situation. A friend of mine called me at the time and said 'congratulations but you'd better enjoy it fast because it won't be there in three months'." Seelert believes a large part of his success in transforming the country's fortunes was due to his strategy of being a very physical presence in the company's offices. "One of the things that I did was to get a very significant personal presence with as many offices as possible as quickly as possible. I didn't isolate myself in an office and just send out bulletins. I think I immediately gave some sense of inspiration and leadership that things were going to work out ok. I got around to offices that accounted for 65 percent of our worldwide revenue within the first six months that I was there. I got around to meet with the top 20 clients of the networks  and the group and with the ten leading shareholders who owned more than 60 percent of the shares. So I was in 24/7 kind of mode and I was an in your face personal presence trying to inspire people and give them confidence that we were going to survive and prosper."

It's this inspiring leadership that Seelert now hopes to impart to the rest of the world's
aspiring or current business leaders in his novel Start With The Answer. The book contains a series of business lessons based on his own experiences, including leadership case studies, personal conduct and turnaround practices. In the guide, Seelert, claims to offer "timeless wisdom for aspiring leaders." He says he believe that although the leaders of today face very different challenges from when he started out in his management career, the basic principals remain the same: "The whole challenge of leadersiup and how to be a great leader is the same today as it was back when I got started. Leaders fundamentally have to do three things. They have to set direction for the enterprise, establish standards or expectations for how the enterprise is going to perform and they have to unleash the energy of the organisation."

Making dreams come true

One surefire way to unleash this energy, claims Seelert, is to set in stone the company's "inspirational dream" - a message that should be conveyed, preferably in just 20 words. "Martin Luther King didn't get up at the Lincoln Memorial and say 'I have a vision', he said 'I have a dream'". Because dreams are a very powerful thing. We created Saatchi & Saatchi's inspirational dream in 2007 and it is 'To be revered as the hothouse for world changing ideas that create sustainable growth for our clients.' That's 17 words. You should do this in 20 words or less which is very hard to do. But it's because you want everybody to be able to, in theory, tape that strategy to their forehead. It should be short and memorable so every single person in the company should know what it is."

Also key to inspiring employees is to set high standards for the company's performance, from the start, says Seelert: "One of my core values is a belief in the long term, in growth, continuous improvement and out competing all of the companies in our peer group. Maybe some people don't set expectations high enough and don't encourage people to come forward and perform at a level that they are really capable of. The coach of an American football team had a great motto: 'ask a lot of your people, expect a lot of your people. They will usually meet it'."

But does this sort if idealistic leadership sit well with employees at a time of economic turmoil when companies face the daily threat of revenue loss and job cuts? Seelert admits the CEO's of today face very different pressures from those he encountered in his early leadership career, but says he believes an "inspirational dream" and leadership can carry a company through any crisis and enable its core values to remain intact: "Of course, we've been caught up in the difficulties of the 2009 economic environment. But we haven't changed a word of our inspirational dream. When you can write it and sustain it in good times and bad it's a really powerful statement that can go on forever. Are there more pressures for leaders today? Yes. Is there a faster pace and more wide ranging considerations including political, social and global considerations? Yes. But is the fundamental role of the leader any different today? No. He still has to do the same basic things."

Indeed Seelert has had plenty of experience of leading a company through times of crisis, having specialised in company takeovers and turnarounds. He describes the experience of running the Maxwell House coffee division when severe weather conditions destroyed a crop of coffee trees: "One of the most demanding operating environments that I was ever in was when I was at Maxwell House and was going through the consequences of what was called the "black frost" in Brazil. The frost actually killed off all the coffee tress and dramatically changed the price of the raw material for us by billions of dollars in a very short period of time. Figuring out how to survive and prosper in the coffee industry through that period was an extremely challenging operating event. Initially the cost of raw material increased by 700 percent and the crisis played out over five years."

A sign of the times

Although he sticks to his belief that economic circumstances have not created a new leadership template, Seelert acknowledges the dramatic ways in which companies' relationships with their customers have been affected by technology such as social media. The advertising industry has been on the front line of these changes and having been hit hard by the economic downturn, with a ten percent worldwide plunge in media spending in the past 12 months, it must adapt to survive. Seelert describes the way the advertising industry has transformed following the advent of digital media: "The internet allows instant access and instant gratification on any issue or any communication. This is having a tremendous impact on our business. When I first started in business, I could have a print and television campaign to launch a product in the United States, which would reach 90 percent of American consumers four of five times within a four week period of time. Now that's completely impossible because media is so fragmented. We used to intrude into people's homes. Now we need to get invited in by them. We don't want to bludgeon people over the head with messages now, we want to make connections with them. We live in a world of incredible social interconnectedness now." He goes on to say however, that he believes there is still a place in the global business market for traditional media: "The digitally driven world is having a tremendous impact on a lot of mediums, but I don't think they are going to go away. Some mediums, last year were down by as much as 30 percent while the digital world was up by 12 percent. But I don't think any of these things are going out of business. They are just going to have to find their new place in the sun."

Although he believes the worst of the economic decline is over in the US, he no longer views it as Saatchi & Saatchi's priority market, predicting that it will be taken over by China - the next stop on his tour of the company's global offices. "My own view is that we have entered into what I would call The Asian Century and more specifically The Chinese Century. I'm very big on China. It is an incredibly dynamic, growing market, which has fantastic prospects. So if you asked me where I thought the growth was going to be I would say it would be there." Going on to describe other emerging markets with high potential, he says: "Some of the African countries are growing rapidly in our business as are the Latin American countries. But the Western World is in a different mode right now. It is struggling to recover and media spend in the US for instance, will be down in 2010 for the third consecutive year."

For Seelert, entering the more creative world of advertised represented a major departure from the more pragmatic manufacturing industries he had been accustomed to working in. Summing up the differences between the two worlds, he says: "Our business is all about people and ideas. We don't have any factories or formulas, products or manufacturing capabilities. Our only assets go up and down in the lift every day. These are  very intangible, soft kind of assets as opposed to factories and production lines" He says too that "Here at Saatchi & Saatchi we have a lot of right brained people who are creative and see the world through a different pair of glasses than a left brained person would. Manufacturing companies have more left brained kinds of people which is why we always hired advertising agencies to get access to the right brained people who could generate insights and ideas to help build our buisness." When asked, however whether these right brained creatives make great leaders, he says: "When you're leading a public company that all comes together in a profit and loss kind of statement, you have to have a certain quantitative appreciation and understanding of how revenue comes in at the top and turns into something called profit at the bottom." It's quite clear then which category Seelert falls into. Having masterminded numerous company turnarounds in industries as diverse as creative advertising, fashion and coffee production his ability to generate profit and performance perfection in good times and bad is one any aspiring business leader should learn from.