At first Damon Canfield viewed New Product Innovations Inc. as a family.
Sure, it’s something a lot of people say about their company, but when Canfield, who is NPI’s president and CEO, got the company off the ground as a GE Plastics and FITCH joint venture in 1992, the group was small and a good culture came organically.
As NPI grew — today it has 55 employees and offices in Columbus as well as China — the old culture got lost in the shuffle. As a new culture began to grow on its own, it didn’t stop the turnkey solutions provider for product design, development and manufacturing services, but suddenly it felt like the company was running with weights on its back.
“So we’ve spent a whole lot of time on the glue, the characteristics of what we want,” Canfield says. “We all had some varying degrees of where our culture was and we’ve made a push to fix that; it’s kind of the secret sauce to our success.”
Smart Business talked with Canfield about why not keeping an eye on culture can bring your company to a halt.
Keep an eye out for a culture that’s slowing you down. That comes through a series of revelations. We started to see some evidence on how things were starting to fray a little bit. For example, I spend a lot of time in Asia and could see some inconsistencies with the way things were being done. It’s kind of like we lost the formula, the outcome is not what you want. So I had to go back to what part of the formula got away from me and I had to go back to work on my team and see what we thought was missing. We went back to the blackboard, we got back to the cultural piece, and then we realized there were a few areas that were out of sync, and we were willing to sit down and look at what we do, and we had to stand up here and say, ‘Let’s go back to work.’
