David Hankin: The Alfred Mann Foundation is very different. We’re a 501(c)(3) and we’re called a foundation, but essentially, we are an operating medical device company. We have about 105 employees. Of those 105, 80 percent are scientific, so they’re engineers, physicians, clinicians and so on. We’ve created cochlear implants, insulin pumps and other sorts of things. What we’re working on right now is a micro stimulator. It holds the promise of reanimating paralyzed limbs. There is hope on the way.
The question that’s been put before us is an interesting one about challenges. I don’t really consider the last few years all that challenging. I consider the last few years ripe with opportunity. We have opportunity in just a plethora and overabundance of projects that are unbelievable that we can get involved with. Our business is about people and finding very talented people. We look for top decile people. Those people have been available a lot more in the past few years than they have in prior years. That’s helped us out tremendously. So we’ve been able to augment our management team and our technical talent, and that’s helped us not only internally develop better products, but it’s also helped us reach out externally in a more meaningful way.
We have also looked at the last few years as an opportunity to change our culture a little bit. Much of our culture was developed in a relatively cash-rich environment where we had done very well with selling some of the intellectual property that we had developed. The last few years have given us an opportunity to build more process into our organization, to develop and tighten down the allocation of resources and so on.
When you’re trying to change, how do you get buy-in?
Kupietzky: I definitely don’t look at the change we’ve done as something that we do top-down. I heard this great analogy from Tony Hsieh of Zappos — if you come up with 10 good ideas, I can implement all 10 of them because I’m the CEO, but if my employees — and I have 170 employees — each comes up with one idea and I can work with them to implement 20 percent of them, think of how many better ideas we have.
We were trying to define what kind of culture we wanted, and there were a lot of changes around which people wanted to stick around and which people wanted to engage in that. I tried to make that as inclusive as possible and say, ‘OK, instead of me telling you what I’d like to see, because I have a strong opinion, how about you tell me what you’d like to see.’ Having them get engaged in that process and make the motivation much more intrinsic than extrinsic has been a great partnership. They’ve been able to come up with a lot more buy-in to whatever the change is that we’re going to collectively do so that when it comes out and we say, ‘Here’s the direction we’re going,’ more of that came because the employees felt they were part of that process as opposed to just being told, ‘OK this is the direction we’re going to go.’ Approaching it much more as if we’re collaborating together as opposed to me coming in with an idea has been real successful for us.
What is important is that you do know the time for debate and that everyone does have a chance to actually weigh in on that and that you’re as clear and crisp and communicative as you can be in setting that context. That’s where my team has done a really good job is recognizing that there’s going to be a time for that debate, and there’s a time to fall in line. What I like is that when we do have that debate, people recognize that even if their opinion wasn’t the one that we listened to, they had the chance to air it, and we recognize the items that they pointed out as things that we have to work toward even if we didn’t go down with that. Then we make a decision and everybody wants to get on board with that because that’s the direction we want to go.
Hankin: My predecessor ran our business for 23 years. When I was handed the keys, to say that there was skepticism was probably a gross understatement. My predecessor was the smartest man in the room. He felt no reservation whatsoever about micromanaging anything in our business. He engaged in what I used to call drive-by management, where he would walk by somebody’s office and tell them how to do that a little bit differently. So that engineer would do something differently, and nobody else but that engineer knew that we were shifting course, and that created some problems. One of the things I learned very quickly when I was handed the keys was that I’m not the smartest man in the room. I’m not even close.
