标题: Honeywell's David Cote [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 11-9-2013 11:54 标题: Honeywell's David Cote (1) Adam Bryant, Decisiveness Is a Double-Edd Sword. New York Times, Nov 3, 2013 (in the column Corner Office) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/0 ... -2-edged-sword.html
(interview with David Cote, chairman and chief executive of Honeywell)
Excerpt in the window of print: "Your job as a leader is to be right at the end of the meeting, not at the beginnging."
Note:
(a) David M Cote (1952- ; a 1976 graduate of the University of New Hampshire, where he earned a bachelor's degree in business administration; joined GE in 1979, where he served twenty years; CEO and chairman of Honeywell 2002- )
Wikipedia
(b) The French surname Côte referred to "someone who lived on a slope or riverbank, less often on the coast, from Old French coste (Latin costa ‘rib’, ‘side’, ‘flank’)."
(c) The surname of the cofounder René Lacoste of
Lacoste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacoste
(formed in 1933)
has the same etymology bu different pronunciation ("la" is a definitive article).作者: choi 时间: 11-9-2013 11:55
(2) Shawn Tully, How Dave Cote Got Honeywell's Groove Back; The GE veteran and one-time cod fisherman has led a remarkable turnaround at the industrial giant. Fortune, May 21, 2012 http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/14/500-honeywell-cote/
Quote:
"Cote (pronounced CO-tee)
"Today Honeywell ranks as a top performer among the diversified industrials, starting with how it has rewarded shareholders. Since the start of 2003, Honeywell's stock has surged from $24 to $60. Investors have reaped a total return, including dividends, of 215%. That puts Honeywell in second place among industrial conglomerates -- just behind Danaher, which returned 229%, and ahead of United Technologies, which has returned 210%. Honeywell's returns wax those of Emerson Electric (158%), 3M (80%), and Cote's alma mater, GE (9.4%). In the same period the S&P returned 88%.
"Honeywell was a stalwart of American manufacturing, named for turn-of-the-century plumbing entrepreneur Mark Honeywell and famous for its iconic round thermostat. AlliedSignal was a scrappy, acquisitive conglomerate run with ruthless efficiency by the legendary Larry Bossidy, the former vice chairman of GE.
"Cote's early life is an unlikely prologue for commanding an enterprise of 132,000 employees. He grew up in a New Hampshire mill town named Suncook. His father had an eighth-grade education and ran a garage. * * * e later took a break from school [Univ of New Hampshire] that wasn't exactly a junior year abroad: Cote and a friend bought a 33-foot lobster boat and spent a year running trawls for cod in Maine. 'It taught me that you can work very hard and get absolutely nowhere,' he says. Around this time Cote got married and his wife became pregnant. So he sold the lobster boat, and in 1976 he finally graduated from UNH. (Cote is twice divorced
Specifically, Honeywell is headquartered in Morristown, the county seat of Morris County.
(b) Honeywell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell
(section 1 History)
"The current 'Honeywell International Inc' is the product of a merger in which Honeywell Inc was acquired by the much larger AlliedSignal in 1999. The company headquarters were consolidated to AlliedSignal's headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey [Honeywell's headquarters had been in Minneapolis]; however the combined company chose the name 'Honeywell' because of its superior brand recognition.
(c) "Out of desperation the board [of Honeywell inn 2000] accepted a takeover offer from GE's Jack Welch. * * * But the biggest acquisition in GE history, and what Welch viewed as his crowning achievement, wasn't to be. In June of 2001, Mario Monti, the European Commission's competition chief and now Italy's Prime Minister, effectively killed the merger."
Jack Welch's book, Straight From the Gut. time Warner, 2001 talked about it in a chapter: European Commission blocked the merger for antitrust reason.
(d) "Cote's friends today swear he's the same gregarious, up-for-anything kid from New Hampshire outside the office. The CEO tools around the New Jersey suburbs on weekends on a Harley-Davidson."
(i) For "up-for-anything," see
up for: "(informal) keen or willing to try < she's up for anything>" http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/up-for
(ii) tool (vi, vt): "to drive or ride in a vehicle" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tool
(e) "It was a chance encounter with chairman Jack Welch in 1985 that propelled Cote's career. Welch heard that the company was dispatching exhaustive questionnaires about GE's business metrics to obscure corners of the world like Mauritania. Regarding this as a colossal waste of time, a furious Welch started calling everyone from the CFO on down, getting madder and madder when he found the brass were absent, until he finally reached the wonk who was handling the project -- Cote. Cote kept his cool, explaining he was doing his best at a job he'd been assigned, then called his wife and said, 'I think I'm going to get fired.'"
brass (n):
"4 singular or plural in construction a : high-ranking members of the military b: persons in high positions (as in a business or the government)http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brass
(f) "Though Welch prized Cote, it was clear by 1999 that Cote didn't have a shot to be Welch's successor. "Dave wasn't really in contention; he was a ways back,' says Welch."
(g)
(i) "Honeywell was capitalizing the cash spent on providing free brakes, wheels, and other parts to airlines to win orders. It was also capitalizing much of its outlays on aerospace R&D. 'The system encouraged executives to give away a lot of equipment and do research for its own sake, because those costs looked "free,"' says Tim Mahoney, chief of the aerospace business. Cote adopted conservative bookkeeping by expensing both types of spending in the current quarter, even though the practice pounded short-term earnings."
capitalize (vt):
"to treat as an amortizable investment in long-term capital assets rather than as an ordinary operating expense to be charged against revenue for the period in which it is incurred <capitalize development costs>" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capitalize
(ii) "a situation he couldn't abide"