Mohan Maheswaran admits that he wasn’t natural management material.
The Sri Lanka native is an engineer by trade, and he preferred tinkering with technology.
But during a decade-long stint with Texas Instruments, a mentor showed him tinkering could come from the executive suite.
“One of the things that he said to me was any good business must drive its own energy,” Maheswaran says. “In other words, it has to drive the energy to move itself, and it took me a while to figure out what that meant. Well, he showed me how it works in practice, and it’s really a wonderful thing when you see it working. Essentially, what you do is you put in place the systems, the processes and the people and, as the leader, you facilitate the business. But by virtue of the systems, strategy and the execution model you put in place, the business should have the energy to drive itself. So I’ve always taken that philosophy and applied it to everything that I’ve done in business. I say, ‘Hey, I can’t spend all of my day, seven days a week, focusing on the business.’ I have to be able to see it growing and scaling, even if I wasn’t there.”
So while Maheswaran became management material along the way, taking the post of president and CEO at Semtech Corp. in April 2006, he realized that not everyone shared his vision of a high-energy culture that could carry the day. In fact, the culture at Semtech was in direct opposition to this. The supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products was still performing — it posted $252.5 million in fiscal 2007 net sales — but that number was its second straight year below its record sales in fiscal 2005, and it was rife with signs of a struggling, fear-based culture.
“A lot of employees were somewhat afraid to take risks, unwilling to make decisions, and for me, a no-decision-making culture is doomed to failure in this competitive environment,” Maheswaran says. “You have to make fast decisions. You have to make well-balanced decisions, but you have to make them quickly, and that doesn’t come from a fear-based culture.”
So Maheswaran changed that culture by putting top-flight managers on the job and instilling systems that let people build their own expectations to fit his vision.
