Put out feelers
Knowing your direction starts with knowing what the road around you looks like.
“It’s so easy to get trapped in the daily [or] quarterly grind,” McCluney says. “You need to take time to get out and really understand what’s going on in the world.”
At Emulex, different employees have different lenses to look through, whether that’s international markets, technology trends and advances, partners’ investments, and so on.
Customers are the best source of that information. McCluney and his executive team visit big customers — both original equipment manufacturers and end users — at least twice a year.
When you touch base with customers, you’re looking for insight into how they use your company — but you’re also digging deeper than that.
“I’m always asking how they’re doing and what their views of Emulex are. I think it’s very important to hear firsthand and that can be everything from operational things to the quality of the products as well as the quality and interaction of our people,” McCluney says. “And we’ll talk about markets and market trends and technology. I like to hear from them what their challenges are and what they’re trying to achieve.”
When you ask those kinds of questions, customers will expect the same kinds of answers from you. So McCluney goes in prepared to share Emulex’s goals, investments and road maps as well as trends he’s seeing in the marketplace.
That will help facilitate information and ideas from them — sometimes, making it pretty easy to determine your direction.
“Sometimes customers come to us with problems and say, ‘Hey look, if you could solve this, I’d be really interested,’” McCluney says. “That’s why I think it’s so important to stay close to your customer base; you learn things and occasionally we get some real breakthrough ideas.
“For instance, over the last several years, a big theme with our very large customers like IBM and Hewlett Packard and Dell has been globalization and getting into new and emerging marketplaces. The advice they’ve given me is, ‘Jim, you better be there with us because that’s where we see a lot of future growth for our business.’”
With that direct line of input, it was a fairly easy decision to take Emulex global by building strategic partnerships and even a physical presence in global markets where customers needed them.
But it’s not always that easy.
