When Bradley L. Mallory took over as president and CEO, Michael Baker Corp. was a two-headed business.
There was the engineering business and there was the energy business — completely different in nearly every regard.
“The two were not a good fit for one another,” Mallory says. “We were constantly being torn in one direction or another. At the end of the day, quite often, we didn’t end up focusing on either, because we were so torn between the two.”
Mallory and his team decided transforming Baker (Amex: BKR) into a purely engineering business was in the company’s long-term interest, so in October 2009, Baker Energy was sold to John Wood Group PLC.
The question that remained was, what did the future hold for Baker’s nearly 3,000 employees, the company investors and customers? Mallory and his management team set out to define Baker as an engineering company by creating a new statement of strategic intent.
“What you should do is convene the top management team of the organization and walk them through a structured process,” Mallory says. “It doesn’t make much difference how you do it, as long as you have a process that really provides people some opportunity to participate and get their feelings and thoughts on the table, and then, in some way, process them. Then create — five years is about the right window — an aspirational goal. It ought to be a bit of a stretch goal. It ought to be expressed in very concrete terms. You ought to be able to write [it in] a paragraph.”
