Act Globally But Respect Local Markets
Andrew G. Ray
President & CEO, Getinge USA, Inc.
When we joined the organization in ‘09, one of the compelling, overriding issues was how do we take a look at being a global organization but also respect the unique needs of the local marketplace?
What we found when we dug deeper into the problem was that we essentially had multiple P&L centers. We had facilities in Europe that were created and designed to build products for Europe. The market requirements were met, the customer satisfaction metrics were met, but unfortunately, if we went to Asia or if we went to North America, the requirements of the customer base were different. While the application of the technology could be similar, the actual drive value from that technology was somewhat different.
What we had to do was get a group of people together and have a heart-to-heart discussion on whether we were truly going to be a global company. The direction in the global company, obviously, is one-size-fits-all; that’s the most operationally efficient method. The reality is, success comes from your ability to be operationally efficient but to provide a product that appears and meets the local requirements of the marketplace. After a lot of soul-searching and discussion, we came to the conclusion that if we are to grow, and our mandate is to grow, we have to respect those differences.
So the team came together, we broke down the walls in the P&Ls; we understood that we might lose money in one area of the businesses as we adapted the technology; we became comfortable that in certain markets we were going to have different profitability, we were going to have different growth rates; but as a total leadership team, we clearly understood that in the aggregate, we were going to be better served in going that way.
One of the most important things that we came away with, and a lesson learned if you will, is that it is often very hard for a culture to think outside of its own culture. One of the things I found during the meetings is that people tried to put their own cultural mirror on a marketplace. Success came when people just forgot about that and accepted the marketplace for what it was—not as they wished it were, as they thought it should be—and then acted accordingly. Once we got over that barrier and people just said, “OK, that’s a fact-based, focused-group market requirement, let’s go after it,” we were very successful. Until that time it was very difficult.