Aerospace virtual roundtable

Industry veteran Tony Velocci, in collaboration with Dassault Systèmes, is conducting a series of interviews with captains of the aerospace and defense industry about leadership, the customer experience, and what it takes to successfully compete in today’s challenging business environment. Velocci begins his series with two experts: Bill Swanson, former chairman and CEO of Raytheon Co., and Bob Stevens, executive chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp.
 

Velocci: Everyone has at least one profound lesson in his career that helps guide him in making better decisions on the road to success. Is there one that stands out in your mind?
 

Stevens: I’ve had a handful. One foundational experience was enlisting in the Marine Corps at 18 years old. In the Marines, there is a culture of leadership based on values that becomes ingrained in your character, your thought process, your behavior, and what you expect from others.

I worked for some great role models. One of my early bosses, the president of Fairchild Republic, was very instrumental in shaping my early thoughts about executive behavior. Once, as a young manager, I got word that he wanted to see me about a report I had written for him. After waiting well into the evening for an appointment in his office, he asked me a series of questions to find out how much thought and care I had put into the report:

“Have you done a thorough and detailed analysis? Is this your assessment of good quality? Are you sure about your conclusions?” I told him that I was sure and confident, at which point he pointed to a single word that I had misspelled, and followed with this logic.

If I was sure and confident, and there was an error in the spelling of a word, something that’s easily checked, then why should he have confidence that the rest of the content was accurate and of good quality? He wasn’t angry. He was disappointed, which was worse. He told me to never submit work that was not of the highest quality that our customers would deserve and expect.

The idea that this person, running a large company, would stay late to give me a dressing down over a single misspelled word made a huge impression. The lesson wasn’t about spelling. It was about setting high standards, meeting expectations, and doing your very best at every task every day.
 

Swanson: I was Raytheon’s youngest plant manager, and from my office window I saw the lot where the plant’s 7,000 employees parked. I felt as much like a mayor of a small town as I did a plant manager. The sight made me realize that one of my responsibilities was to make sure all those people returned the next day, and I remember thinking how could I, as a manager and a leader, make sure that happened?

I learned that process discipline across an operation – whether it’s a plant or an entire business – was key to success. It is the most underappreciated part of doing business, and that applies to all industry sectors. Wherever I go, I ask questions of different companies about how they do business in terms of servicing their customers. Health care providers, energy firms, banks, you name it – it seems most do not have IT systems that interface, and they don’t utilize common processes. They simply are unaware of the rewards that come from process discipline.

Velocci: Aerospace customers have grown more demanding in recent years. How is your company trying to respond to these new expectations?
 

Stevens: The demands and expectations from our customers can and do change rapidly. Not long ago, our government customers wanted transformational technologies; technology that would skip a generation. To achieve that goal, our industry fundamentally retooled, allocating more resources to R&D, accelerating more bold concepts, taking on more risk, and pushing the culture to reach far. Now we have been asked to be much more conservative, to abandon leap-ahead exploration and focus on technology that’s good enough to reduce costs and focus on affordability.

For industry, this change is dramatic and requires substantial time and attention. It is much easier for the government to declare a change in policy than it is for companies to implement that change. I think Lockheed Martin has been the industry leader in driving ahead on this new course.
 

Swanson: All managers are being held to a higher standard – and I am holding myself to a higher standard as well. We make every effort to look at our execution on contracts from the perspective of our customers. I have a saying here: When it comes to product delivery, early is on time, because the other saying I have is: performance better exceed customer expectations.

Not every business leader looks at their organization from a customer perspective.

I had a memorable moment about 13 years ago that drove the point home for me. I was watching a news report on Operation Desert Storm. Two young soldiers struggled to operate a shoulder-mounted weapon that appeared to be malfunctioning. I still have the video. When I recognized the equipment was Raytheon’s my heart skipped a beat. I recall thinking, ‘What must be running through their minds?’ It turned out that neither soldier was injured.

Although the equipment performed as predicted, I sought answers. We discovered a potential gap in the training operators received in service. In the spirit of partnership, I immediately reached out to our government customers to offer support and ensure training consistency so that no soldier would ever again be caught in such a predicament.
 

Velocci: What does customer experience mean to you; what’s the optimum experience?
 

Stevens: When the customer is successful in their mission. It is very hard to have any one customer at any one time completely satisfied. However, we can give them the capabilities they need to accomplish their mission by listening to what their challenges are, and understanding how we can allocate resources and apply our experience and energy to contribute to their success. If our customers are successful, we are successful.
 

Swanson: It means never losing sleep about the product we are going to deliver to any of our customers. I would rather they have to worry about some other supplier. The first step in delivering a superior experience is listening to what your customers expect of you. We follow a pretty simple formula based on fundamentals: listen to what our customers say, act on what they tell us, confirm that we did what they wanted us to do, and find out we can optimize their experience with Raytheon.
 

Velocci: What is the essential quality or ingredient for success that underperforming companies seem to overlook?

Stevens: I don’t know if it’s a single ingredient or an array of ingredients. At Lockheed Martin, we have a lot of spirited discussions about the expectations of employees, shareholders and customers, and about how we should allocate capital. But when we have settled on an approach, everybody has a playbook and pursues it every day. We are relentless. That is where an enterprise gets its maximum operating leverage.

If you want to understand how to deliver a customer experience at the highest levels, you must have a feel for what that experience should be. You cannot understand your customers when sitting in your office because you’re too insulated.

You must go to where customers work, see the world through their eyes, listen more than you talk, and share what you’ve learned with people who are responsible for product design, development, production, and sustainment.

I got out as often as I could. I have been catapulted off the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman in an F/A-18, flown an AH-64 Apache helicopter at treetop level at night, ridden to the edge of space in a U-2, and visited our forward-deployed troops in Afghanistan. That is living a day in the lives of our customers, and you can’t come away from those experiences without great admiration for what they do and an abiding commitment to get our part right. In every market, customers have a set of needs and interests that define value in a specific way. It is incumbent upon the leadership of an enterprise to understand that value and how to enrich it.
 

Swanson: Oftentimes, it’s less about missing a single ingredient and more about a lack of focus by leaders and companies on the basics. There is a tendency to look for a silver bullet when it’s the fundamentals that are required and proven over time.

I enjoy mechanical things, like wristwatches. I’ve learned that if you return a fine timepiece to the factory for repair you better have a backup because it probably will be gone for three to six months. When I ask about the return cycle time, I’ve yet to find a maker who can give me a straight answer. This tells me they are not focused on matters important to their customers.

Dassault Systèmes
www.3ds.com

Additional insight from Dassault Systèmes’ “Conversations with Global Leaders Series” is available at 3ds.com/aero-leaders.