Bruce McWilliams is thinking
about the future right now.
He’s not ignoring what’s on
his plate for today; it’s just that
McWilliams constantly remembers advice given to him by a
mentor.
“He would tell me a business
is either growing or dying;
there’s no such thing as steady
state,” he says. “You always
have to be thinking about growing your business, how it needs
to change over time.”
If those are the only two
options for a business, you can
guess which one McWilliams,
chairman and chief strategy officer of Tessera Technologies Inc.,
is striving for. So he is forever
challenging the 400 employees
of Tessera — which provides
manufacturers with transformational technologies for next-generation electronics, optics and
imaging solutions — to make a
bigger splash in the marketplace. In turn, they have helped
grow the company from 2003
revenue of $37.3 million to 2007
revenue of $195.7 million.
Smart Business spoke with
McWilliams about how you can
set growth goals for tomorrow
while working on today’s business and why a customer who
hates your new idea is a good
thing.
Create a team specifically for growth. Four years ago, we set up a
group that is focused on
nothing but how do we grow
into new businesses and
think far out in time. And
then, when we acquire those
things, how do we protect
them so they don’t get
squashed by the organization, even though they will
seem at the time to be in
their infant stage.
You start by saying you
have to grow at a certain rate,
and you have to find a certain
market to do that. I often had
ideas of where to go, but
when I would come to a particular executive in the organization, they would say to me,
‘Do you want me to work on
the current quarter or year, or
do you want me to go look at
this new thing?’ And I’d
always say, ‘Well, you’ve got
to focus on the current quarter; if we don’t make that,
we’ll get hammered.’
So how I overcame the
problem is I set up a separate
group that’s job is the vision,
and I hired a guy who was
very talented in marketing, I
put my chief technical officer
in there, an engineer who can
run the numbers and two
lawyers … and I told them,
‘By 2010, we need an additional $100 million in revenue, come back with ideas,’
and we set up a strategic
committee with the board.
You can’t just overnight
create a big business, so this
is a key strategic plan, and
we have to isolate this group.
And there are people working on nothing but this.
Explain your vision — for now and
later. A leader needs to have
a vision — both near-term
and long-term — of where
the organization is going and
the value it delivers to its
customers. So you need to
be able to explain that to
anybody almost in an elevator speech.
In terms of the near term,
have two or three, or four at
most, goals that you can say,
‘These are the things that we
need to accomplish,’ and it
needs to be at a level that
everybody down to the
receptionist can understand.
Have a compelling vision for
why your company is going to
grow and be an exciting contributor in the marketplace.
(For Tessera,) it might be why
people like pictures and video
and why we’re going to see
more and more of that, and
that will be something people
can understand.
