Mitt Romney signs a deal with Domino's Pizza in 1998. Photo credit: AP
Boston’s WBUR recently posted a compelling article about Mitt Romney’s work at Bain which included comments from some of his colleagues that worked with Mitt and saw what he did as a “turnaround” expert. The comments speak volumes to the leadership capacity, expertise, work ethic, data-driven drive, and can-and-must-do attitude that is so sorely needed in our nation’s highest office right now. Let’s hear from them in the following excerpts (emphasis is mine):
BOSTON — Too much debt. Too much money being spent paying interest on that debt. Unsustainable.
It may sound like the national budget today, but the crisis was Bain & Company in the early 1990s. The Boston consulting firm was in deep trouble. Workers and clients were starting to jump ship. Mitt Romney was called in to save the day.
“There’s nobody that I can conceive of who could have come into that fractious situation, and pull that together,” said Clay Christensen, a former Romney colleague who’s now a professor at Harvard Business School.
As interim CEO of Bain & Company, Romney negotiated with banks to buy time. He convinced employees and clients to stay on. And most spectacularly, he won $130 million in concessions from the founding partners, including Bill Bain, the very man who brought in Romney to fix the mess. Christensen says it was Romney’s crowning business achievement.
“I know Nancy Pelosi very well and I know a number of the Republican leaders,” Christensen said. “Pulling those guys together is a lot easier than pulling Bain together.”
America is desperate for competent leadership in Washington D.C. right now. The country is fractured along a seemingly impassable divide between politicians on both sides of the aisle that are unwilling to negotiate their ideals, and Americans are long tired of the broken government. Meanwhile debt is spiraling out of control and the economy remains in shambles. Here, above, we have a Harvard Professor and former colleague of Romney’s giving us a picture of what Mitt Romney brings to the table; namely: leadership.
We need someone who can lead America to a better future. Gov. Romney has shown time and time again that he can and will walk into a bleak situation, bring people together, and turn things around. And if Professor Christensen is correct in that pulling the guys at Bain together was much tougher than it would be to pull the politicians in Washington together, then we know Gov. Romney can get the job done and we know who our vote should go towards. Continuing:
It was a remarkable political feat, considering that Romney built his career not on bringing people together, but rather on bringing companies in line. In 1984, Romney was chosen to run a spinoff venture of Bain’s consulting business — not because he was a consensus builder, but because he was a tireless pragmatic.
“Mitt’s a guy who goes and goes and goes all day long,” said Geoffrey Rehnert, who worked with Romney from the very start at Bain Capital, Bain & Company’s then-new private equity firm.
“I’ve never worked harder in my life,” Rehnert remembered. “I think the first four years at Bain Capital, I took one week of vacation. Not one week per year, one week in a four-year period.”
On the surface, Romney’s team did what other management consultants did. They’d look at a company, go through its books, find out everything they could about it and its industry. They’d even count cars in the parking lot of competitors to figure out how many people worked there. Rehnert says Romney was ruthlessly data-driven.
“Dive into the detail,” Rehnert remembered of Romney’s capability, “to the point of building models, reading legal documents, drawing slides, taking notes, and then he could zoom right back up to 50,000 feet and look down and see the big picture.”
And then decide what to do. What made Romney a millionaire hundreds of times over was the fact that Bain Capital owned these companies. The venture wasn’t simply a consulting firm that wrote a report with a list of recommendations, hoping the client company would follow through. It made the company follow through.
“He’s a very self-confident problem-solver and deal-maker, too,” said Walter Kiechel, who wrote a book on management consulting, “The Lords of Strategy.”…
And there we have additional qualities of leadership that America needs. Given that congress decided to head home for Thanksgiving without a resolution to the super-committee’s debacle and the President was absent during that process in Hawaii with the first lady, Gov. Romney’s work ethic would be a refreshing change for Americans. One would justifiably predict that Gov. Romney would bring a new tone, work ethic, data-driven style, and pragmatism to Washington that we haven’t seen for all too long. The article concludes by hearing straight from Mitt Romney, so let’s hear it:
“In business, you have no choice,” Romney said at a recent stop in Exeter, N.H. “You must be fiscally responsible. If you don’t balance your budget, you go bankrupt.”
It doesn’t take much to hear the corporation turnaround specialist.
“There are some who say, ‘When you talk about cutting a program, you’re showing that you’re heartless,’ ” Romney told the audience. “I think we have to say no, no, you have to understand: we have a moral responsibility not to spend more than we take in. We have a moral responsibility to keep America the strongest nation on Earth.”
Romney’s critics say politics is different from private equity. They say running a country is not like running a company. But Romney thinks it shouldn’t be so different — that that nation’s problems can be solved pragmatically, by starting with the data.
To him, the U.S. government is not unlike a company that has lost its focus, a company that has lost track of where its money is going.
Mitt Romney would like the chance to turn it around.
Indeed. Businesses have no choice but to balance their budget and turn things around. In 2012, America will be given the choice to do so or not. The government has lost focus and lost track where its money is going. America needs a turnaround. Let’s give this proven turnaround specialist the chance to do it.
Michigan for Mitt Romney 