Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The Authors

Ray Davis―Ernst & Young’s 2004 Regional Retail Entrepreneur of the Year―is a pioneer of change in the banking industry, revolutionizing how banks look, feel, sound, and operate. He is the president and CEO of Umpqua Holding Corporation and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fast Company, BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, Newsweek, and CNBC. Umpqua was named to Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list in 2007. Ray lives with his wife, Bobbi, in Portland, Oregon.

Alan Shrader is managing editor of Leader to Leader and an experienced writer and editor of business books.

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When Ray Davis took over the regional South Umpqua Bank (and its five branches) in 1994, many poked fun at his insistence that employees answer the phone with a cheery “World’s Greatest Bank.” Eleven years, $7 billion in assets, and more than 120 bank stores later, many now accept that statement without question. Other banks scoffed when Davis sent his tellers to the Ritz-Carlton to learn customer service. But with two top design awards, a name change, and a completely new definition of the banking business, Umpqua has become a growth powerhouse, increasing 30 times in size.

Leading for Growth tells how any business can use the same leadership discipline and creative thinking that made Umpqua Bank get bigger, better, more agile, and more customer focused, and turned it into a relentless competitor. This important book shows how to truly lead―as opposed to manage, plan, or strategize―through extreme growth. Ray Davis’s insights will help you

• Discover what business you are really in and create your competitive advantage
• Build an organization with committed employees
• Connect marketing strategy and execution on the ground
• Create learning opportunities for all managers and staff
• Fight the syndrome that often pulls people back into old routines
• Rise above the day-to-day conflicts to achieve a strategic perspective on your company and where it is going
• Manage mergers and acquisitions in ways that support rather than dilute your culture

Leading for Growth is written for any leader who wants to create a competitive atmosphere for exceptional growth.

Aus dem Klappentext

When Ray Davis took over the regional South Umpqua Bank (and its five branches) in 1994, many poked fun at his insistence that employees answer the phone with a cheery "World's Greatest Bank." Eleven years, $7 billion in assets, and more than 120 bank stores later, many now accept that statement without question. Other banks scoffed when Davis sent his tellers to the Ritz-Carlton to learn customer service. But with two top design awards, a name change, and a completely new definition of the banking business, Umpqua has become a growth powerhouse, increasing 30 times in size.

Leading for Growth tells how any business can use the same leadership discipline and creative thinking that made Umpqua Bank get bigger, better, more agile, and more customer focused, and turned it into a relentless competitor. This important book shows how to truly lead--as opposed to manage, plan, or strategize--through extreme growth. Ray Davis's insights will help you

• Discover what business you are really in and create your competitive advantage
• Build an organization with committed employees
• Connect marketing strategy and execution on the ground
• Create learning opportunities for all managers and staff
• Fight the syndrome that often pulls people back into old routines
• Rise above the day-to-day conflicts to achieve a strategic perspective on your company and where it is going
• Manage mergers and acquisitions in ways that support rather than dilute your culture

Leading for Growth is written for any leader who wants to create a competitive atmosphere for exceptional growth.

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Leading for Growth

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Industry publications write about Umpqua a lot. And they usually say nice things, remarking on our strong growth, our return to shareholders, our reputation for being cool and quirky, and our unique organizational culture. But these articles almost always insert a comment that irks me. No matter how positive the article is, it almost always says something like, "Umpqua Bank calls its branches 'stores,'" as if the word store is a gimmick. They humor us by putting store in quotation marks, as if real grown-up bankers wouldn't be so silly as to call their branches that. But it's not a gimmick. It's part of who we are and how we see our business. They don't understand that it's a huge, even dinosaur-sized, part of the reason they are writing about us in the first place! It's part of our unique culture that they extol.

Why do we call our facilities stores rather than branches? Because we understand what business we are really in. We're in the retail service business, which to us means we sell banking products and services to the public in our stores. In this chapter, I explain exactly what I mean by that and why it is so important for you to understand what business you are really in.

Business Not as Usual

It is too easy to look at your company and say, "we're in the banking business." (Or in the tire business or the computer business.) You will never break free of the hold of conventional wisdom with that kind of thinking. And if you can't break free of conventional wisdom, you'll never break out of the pack-you'll never create a competitive edge that separates you from your competitors.

To illustrate how a lack of understanding of what business you are really in can do to you, just consider Steve Jobs and Apple Computer.

Back in the early 1980s Jobs thought that his company was in the computer business, specifically the computer hardware business, and that it could prosper by selling better computers than its competitors. And for a while, that worked. Then IBM entered the picture, along with its then-partner Microsoft. In 1984, Apple tried to jump ahead by introducing the first point-and-click operating system with its revolutionary new line of Macintosh computers-a great leap forward that was much easier to use than Microsoft's cumbersome DOS system. But unfortunately, Jobs never realized that the business was changing and that he was now competing in the software business. He and his successor John Sculley kept the Mac operating system proprietary and used it only as a way to sell Apple's hardware.

Apple thought it was competing against IBM, Compaq, and the other PC clones when it was really competing against Microsoft. When Microsoft copied the look and feel of the Macintosh system with Windows-and sold it to every comer-Apple's goose was cooked. Of course, Apple faced many hurdles-who knows what might have happened if Jobs hadn't been forced from the company? But it's my firm opinion that if Jobs had understood early on that he was really in the software business, we probably wouldn't know Bill Gates as the world's richest man.

So understanding what business you are really in is absolutely critical to success.

"Okay," you might say, "that's an extreme example from the early days of a revolutionary new industry that was growing exponentially and whose landscape was changing daily. I'm in a mature industry that's growing slowly, even in good years. How does that apply to me?"

Well, it applies to you in spades! And Umpqua is living proof. After all, banking is a mature business if there ever was one-banks have been around for hundreds of years! Walk around any city, any small town, and you'll see a dozen banks in a few blocks. And don't talk to me about growth! When we started to reinvent Umpqua Bank in 1994, our market was in the midst of profound economic slump. The economy in our region was rooted in the timber industry-and just happened to be the home of the Spotted Owl and a strong environmental movement. Talk about total lack of synergy. The economy was at a standstill, our market wasn't growing, and yet we found a way to make Umpqua grow, moving from third in market share to first in just three years in our home market. How did we do it? For starters, we had to kill conventional wisdom in the company. We had to stop our people from thinking like bankers and get them to think like people in the business we were really in: retail service.

Most businesses are run on conventional wisdom, and they struggle to get by. Every quarter it's the same story. Are we meeting our numbers? Are sales up? You cannot grow your business by feeding it conventional wisdom. And you cannot grow your business if all you are doing is worrying about your numbers-because then you are not honing a strategy to seize the future. As the new leader at Umpqua, my first job priority in reinventing the company was to kill the conventional wisdom that had guided the company for forty years. The bank's board had hired me to take this small company and make it grow. Together we decided to seize the future.

But let me go back to the beginning.

Seizing the Future

When I was contacted about running Umpqua in 1994, it was a small community bank in rural Oregon with $140 million in assets and six small branches. It was called South Umpqua State Bank, even though there wasn't a North Umpqua State Bank. The previous CEO had retired, and the board was looking for a change. The bank was at a crossroads. It was a solid bank and well respected in the small communities it served. But it wasn't really going anywhere, and by continuing to practice the purest definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results) the company was doomed to go nowhere and in fact its future would have been doubtful. The big banks smelled blood and were sniffing around, looking for prey-in our world, acquisitions.

When the board interviewed me for the CEO position, I told them that if they wanted things to stay the same, I wasn't their man. But if they wanted to employ a strategy that might have a good chance of creating shareholder value, then I might be a candidate. Fortunately for me the board realized that if they were serious about creating value for the shareholders and improving the overall intrinsic value of the company, they would have to support dramatic changes in how it operated, marketed, hired people, and the like. In fact we had to reinvent the entire institution, and build it around the principles and practices of the business we were really in. The board bit the bullet and took a chance with me-an unproven character from Atlanta, Georgia.

Before coming to Umpqua I had run a bank management consulting firm and dealt with CEOs from all sizes of banks across the United States. I learned a lot in dealing with all these different bankers. In fact, it was like attending graduate school. I learned what not to do, from helping people fix some of the stupidest mistakes they could have made. I also picked up some pretty good ideas. But overall, I was amazed by the lack of creativity at the top levels and felt that I could take my ten years of consulting experience and put it to work in a small...