A drop of water

So Pace was undergoing transformation. Previously, the company had become very internalized. We make very complex technology products where the systems and processes all were becoming more and more about ourselves and our own inefficiencies and inadequacies. And this had to be changed.

We needed to become a customer-centric organization. A lot of companies pay lip service to that, and they feel they should say those things. But we did it in a very dramatic way.

I stood up in front of the whole company and on the back of the screen behind me I had a simple picture of a drop of water falling into still water and concentric rings all coming out from it.

Now bear in mind that the audience I'm talking to is a bunch of cynical, hard engineers who live in their designs and what they do, and the last thing they think about is the customer. I needed them to understand how important that is. So this picture signified the customer was the drop of water. And the concentric rings would be: from then onward, all the systems and processes — the very structure and culture of the company — was going to change to put the customer at the heart of our business.

Because I know if you launch a phrase like that, everybody gives a big yawn and says they've heard it all before. But we need the company to understand that we were embarking on a radical change in how we operate from then onward. And so to meet the customers' requirements, we were going to join people much closer to the market and the customer, so they could hear what the customer was saying. So we created small, nimble, agile teams with everything they needed to serve the customer.

And that produced, then, a direct connection to the market. That engaged those engineers and those commercial people directly in what was going on in the market, to produce the types of products our customers would need.

That eliminated a lot of bureaucracy in decision making that just got in the way and, for real, put the customer at the heart of the business.

And as the ripples went out, that fed through from the design of the product to how we bought components, where we manufactured, and how we manufactured. This produced a dramatic increase: just within three years, the company went from a market capitalization of $100 million to $1.1 billion.

By engaging your employees with customers, your organization can better serve their needs.