Manufacturing
Mikel Williams
President and CEO, DDI Corp.
By Patrick Mayock
Smart Business Orange County | January 2008
"One of the benefits of a flat and transparent organization is you eliminate unnecessary fear and anxiety." - Mikel Williams, CEO, DDI
He may have avoided rush-hour traffic, but Mikel Williams still had one hell of a commute. For his first six months as president
and CEO of DDi Corp., the reluctant jet-setter made the round-trip flight from Washington, D.C., to Orange County every week
so his children could finish the remainder of the school year back east. The arrangement was admittedly hard on his family, but
it proved beneficial to DDi, the once-struggling circuit board manufacturer. Isolated in an unfamiliar locale, Williams completely
immersed himself in the business, uniting 1,300 employees spread across six locations and ushering in a successful corporate
turnaround capped by 2006 revenue of $198 million.
Smart Business spoke with Williams about communication, the definition
of insanity and how to dig up buried resisters.
Create a flat communication structure. Everybody should be open and communicative and transparent.
We have everybody across the plants
engaged in a constructive manner with
one another.
For example, on Wednesdays at 1
o’clock, all the factory GMs get together
for that hour call. Another time, once a
week, it’s all the engineering managers
across the company. Another time, once
a week, it’s the HR people.
We need to be working together and
talking and sharing best practices. If
(employees) have a good experience on
the manufacturing floor with a new
process, they’re expected to share it
with their fellow plant managers so the
other guy doesn’t reinvent the wheel.
Information should flow freely. There’s a
lot of people who believe in the mushroom
theory, where you keep (employees) in the
dark and the strong survive.
I think just the opposite. If employees are
left in the dark and not communicated to
regularly, and they don’t feel like they
know what’s going on with their company,
then they fear the worst.
That’s particularly true if you’re in a business that’s underperforming. People fear
that what they don’t know is bad news.
One of the benefits of a flat and transparent
organization is you eliminate unnecessary
fear and anxiety, and that allows (employees) to focus on the things they should be
thinking about and worrying about
Challenge conventional thinking. The definition
of insanity is to do the same thing over and
over again and expecting a different result.
I encourage these guys to get out of their
shell and do something, think of something
new and different that’s going to enable us
to take our business to the next level.
We filed for two patents this year. One
patent came from our R&D group. ... The
other patent came from a guy in our factory who was struggling with a problem,
challenged conventional thinking and has
come up with something that we believe
may be fairly revolutionary in our industry.
He’s encouraged and actually responsible
for thinking of these kinds of things. In the
past, he was never encouraged to do that
but rather just told to do the same thing
over and over again.
It’s great to see something pop out of the
woodwork like that from somebody who I
didn’t expect it. Stuff like that starts to happen when you empower the employees.
Get them understanding what you’re trying
to do at a higher level and then give them
authority for the decisions they can make.
Dig up the buried resisters. The first thing you
have to do is communicate what you are trying to get done so (employees) have an
understanding of what the expectations are.
The second thing is, you have to have
some performance metrics out there. We
have literally a page of metrics that we
review every week as a group with all of
our factories.
By looking at those metrics and breaking
it down, you go after the root causes of the
problems and fix it.
Through diligently pursuing that, you find if
it’s a process problem or a people problem. If
it’s a people problem, you’ve got to talk to
them about it. If you can’t get performance up
and you work like hell to coach them and to
help the people get better, at the end of the
day, you’ve got to ask them to move on. It’s
the only thing that’s healthy for the company
and healthy for the individual.
It’s my obligation to the rest of the
employees to find out what I call the
‘buried resisters,’ the guys who just sit
there and shake their head, ‘yes, yes, yes,’
and then don’t go and embrace the concepts that we’re talking about.
It tells everybody else that’s around there
that you’re serious and that you’re willing
to make the tough decisions to make the
changes necessary to achieve the results
that you’re trying to accomplish.
A lot of times people will say, ‘Ah, that’s just
a bunch of words.’ Fundamentally, they
won’t really move until they see that, ‘Hey,
the guy’s putting new people out there, and
either I need to get on board and participate,
or I’m at risk for being asked to move on.’
Mind the language barrier. In some factories,
we have a lot of employees where
English may not be their primary language. As we communicate, that always
makes it more difficult.
You need to talk deliberately and slowly
and simply in terms of the tactics, and not try
to overcommunicate or make it too complex.
There’s a lot of terminology that we routinely take for granted at the corporate
level that the factory guys wouldn’t have a
clue what we’re talking about. Make sure
that the terminology is consistent with
their understanding.
You always need to think of the basic rule
of communication: Think of what you’re
saying in the context of how it’s being
received by the audience.
Assume that they’ve almost never heard
it before. You don’t learn something necessarily because somebody told it to you
once. When you’re just out there talking
about esoteric things like strategy and
vision and where we’re taking the company and why we want to go into this vertical
market with greater measure than others,
you have to be repetitive.
You have to take every opportunity to just
kind of reinforce it because, otherwise, you
forget that these people don’t hear it that
often and, as a result, they go focus on
things they deal with every day.
HOW TO REACH: DDi Corp., (714) 688-7200 or www.ddiglobal.com
