1. Ram Charan´s biography
Ram Charan was born in a small Indian town, where he raised working in its family shoe shop. Later, he earned an engineering degree. Afterwards, he earned MBA and doctorate degrees from Harvard Business School, where he served after receiving his doctorate degree. His way of teaching did not go unnoticed and was appointed as the best teacher at Northwestern.
Over the past decade, he has written very successful books such as “Execution”, “What the CEO Wants You to Know”, “Boards at Work”…, and numerous articles published in different medias.
Nowdays, Dr Charan is one of the most important business advisors and a famous speaker among senior executives due to his ability to solve different business problems and, as a result of this, he has been working for thirty-five years at some of the world's most prestigious companies such as GE, Verizon, DuPont, KLM, Bank of America…
Dr. Charan has served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance and was elected an important fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources.
2. Summary
Ram Charan reflects trough the excerpt of his book “Leadership in the era of economic uncertainty” how the company DuPont saved his economic situation thanks to the immediate crisis measures that they implemented and through workers cooperation.
The author signalized that the economic crisis showed his first effects to Holliday, CEO of DuPont, in Japan during a travel. Afterwards, when he came back to USA, he met the six top leaders in his company and informed them the seriousness of the situation, which was spreading throughout much of the world. At the same time, it was affecting DuPont’s performance: a decline in production and in the reserves volume was taking place.
Therefore, Holliday decided to gather 17 standing teams which always assemble when a crisis was declared. Later, they decided to explain employees all the aspects about the situation, in order to let them know how to cope with the crisis by acting quickly. Nevertheless, Holliday became conscious that the activity pace was not as immediate as he would like. Nevertheless, DuPont was taking measures such as cutting back as much as possible on the over 20,000 outside contractor the company had hired to reduce costs.
Finally, Holliday ended up explaining that the inflationary trends would come back in the future and that they should be prepared so as to face it.
Mark = 5