Alain Couder has no interest
in taking responsibility for all the innovation that comes
out of Bookham Inc.
Couder, president and CEO of
the developer, manufacturer and
provider of optical solutions,
constantly makes it a point to
tell his people that they’re in
charge of innovation. And that
communication with his 2,200
employees is a priority. In fact,
Couder says that it’s those
communications that drive the
company.
By consistently building messages focused on where the
$235.5 million company stands
and on the need for accountability and innovation instead of
standard office politics, people
begin to understand the call for
action.
“Communication is extremely
important, and I do know that
some people will follow right
away, some will resist, but the
majority of people are just waiting to know whether we are
serious about moving ahead,”
he says.
Smart Business spoke with
Couder about how to engage
communications about breakthrough products and why it’s
important to shut people down
when they start talking office
politics.
Engage midlevel employees for
fresh ideas. All the best ideas
exist in the company, and top
management doesn’t need to
have many of those. When you
do a turnaround, the first phase
the executive team is smart
enough to understand what to
do, and then, in the next phase,
the executive team is not smart
enough to find the idea.
So middle management plays
a very important role in that —
and innovation is the same
thing. The individual engineer
has to come up with some new
idea, and as the leader, you listen and you can grab those.
This is not the kind of idea
you will get through a business
review; this is where you will
get the idea through a midlevel
meeting. Meet with a team at
the next level below or two
levels below you or work with
the higher-potential lower
management and technical
people. But it cannot be the
job of the CEO alone; it has to
be the job of every executive.
The best business advice I’ve
received was from one of the
HP executives when I was at
Hewlett-Packard, and it was
about imagining the user’s
needs. All business books tell
you about listening to the customer. … The problem is, no
great product has ever been
invented by listening to the customer because they don’t know
about breakthrough technology.
Your engineers have to imagine
how things could be done differently, or you don’t create breakthrough products — like the
iPod. No customer survey would
have told you to invent that.
So when I joined Bookham, I
would visit R&D and say,
‘Where is your skunkworks?’
And they’d say, ‘We don’t have
a budget for that.’ And I said,
‘You will never have the budget if you don’t (start it up)
because I’m worried about
your ability to innovate.’
So that’s the kind of comment that makes people think
it’s OK to come up with or
share new ideas, even if it’s
not part of the budgeted plan.
Create communication around
accountability. You have to drive
accountability in the organization by having good financial
metrics for every job, but you
also have to make it visible.
For instance, we created bubble charts. The graphs show
the profitability of the various
product lines and the growth
of the product lines, and people don’t like when their bubble is in the wrong part of the
graph and they try to move it.
We reorganized the divisions so everyone gets a look at
their share of overhead so they
know how much they contribute to the profit of the
company, so that’s the basics
of accountability.
With the road map for new
products, initially we are very
good at having a road map and
it’s always up to date because
it’s revised every month. But it
was never looking at the original road map compared with
the current one, so you just
put up the initial road map
with the current road map.
Just by showing things to people, things happen magically;
people don’t like to have those
red dots on their targets.
