Solving RFID's image problems
Published: 02 Jun 2005 19:45 BST
After taking the helm at Symbol Technologies, what magic did you weave to turn the company around?
I didn't weave any magic. I had a good management team, and they've done a great job with our product line. We focused on five things. The first was company culture. The second was operational processes. The third was vision, followed by strategy. Once we understood that, we developed our organisational structure to deliver on that.
The output was a good financial performance. We worked 24-7 for a few years on rebuilding our product line, our go-to-market strategy, services, capabilities and marketing strategy.
Did your experience at Cisco help in any way?
Absolutely. At Cisco, I had a reputation for being "Mr Fix It". I was shipped around the world to either build or restructure parts of the company. For many years, I had been doing fairly large-scale restructuring at Cisco. This certainly helps you, skills-wise.
But nothing really prepares you for a turnaround of this magnitude. This was — no hyperbole intended — maybe one of the largest or more significant turnarounds in corporate history in the last decade.
According to media reports, you engineered a plan to sweep out the "toxic culture" at Symbol. What was toxic before you came onboard?
There was a toxic subculture in the company that was largely due to unethical management, but it involved very few people. The other aspect of the culture that we needed to deal with was how we essentially had "muscle memory" on how not to make money.
We did not make any profits from 1998 to 2002. Those were some of the biggest boom years in information technology history to not make money during that time frame. It was surprising, to say the least.
For six years, people were doing things and thought what they were doing was translating into profitable growth. It was only when we restated the financials that people found out. What [the previous management] did was leading to a non-profitable company.
We had major behavioural and habitual changes that needed to take place inside the company [in order] to build "muscle memory" on how to grow profit from the bottom up. That required a substantial change in management effort. We restructured every business and function of the company. Out of 5,600 people in the company, we brought in 3,600 new people in two-and-a-half years.
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