Requisite Organization Works Very Well Across Cultures

Speaker A Requisite organization for Novus, and we don't use that term very much. We talk about the Novus management system. For us, it was very important to personalize it, to make it seemed to be something that was special for Novus, that was integrated into what everyone has. And we have this now. As we've grown so much, training has become increasingly important training in terms of what Novus management system means. To me, one of the important learnings along the way was how well this goes across cultures. There was a question at the beginning of whether this was going to be too American or maybe too at least Western. And in reality, everyone likes to know where they fit in the picture, what they have authority to do, what they're going to be held accountable for. They need to know that their work is being valued. They need their manager to tell them their work is being valued. They need to know where their areas for improvement, and they need to know that they're going to be compensated fairly for what they're doing. So in this sense, at its fundamental, it's very compatible with every place we've been in the world. And even Sabrina could tell you how well the compensation system stands up across the world, and we've been able to use it very effectively in all parts of the world. So as we have grown, we have really seen this to be becoming more valuable, because, as I mentioned, when you're small, you can make most decisions just because you can get in touch with the person that you need to get in touch with, and you can move on. And you don't need to have quite a degree of clarity and delegation. Today, where we're 600 people and we're scattered across the world, it's very important to have clear delegation. There's another part that's also come, I think, that's very consistent with corporate governance demands these days. This has become much more important than it used to be for all companies, including for private companies, but private companies owned by Japanese public companies. Corporate governance and segregation of duties and all these issues, audit issues, have become very important. And this organizational structure works very well to establish clarity with regard to corporate governance concerns. So we will continue to use organization. Certainly at the time when Joe retired, and we were in a short period of some uncertainty as to how the organization would go forward. And at that point, actually, the owners had looked outside to bring in different presidents to the organization, there would have been a question mark about whether the system should continue, whether it was actually achieving its goals. And my belief at that time and has been, I think, proven since, is that, yes, it was very effective in helping us to first de while we went through a process of reengineering the company. First, we downsized before we upsized. And in going through that process of downsizing, the organization back in 2001, it was very important to know to make the selection of who would stay in the organization, what were going to be the most important roles, at what level they were going to be, and to make those judgments. It was very important to have already experience with the Ruckus organization to carry that forward. So it helps both sides, it helps when you're needing to downsize because of some financial constraints and challenges. It has helped a lot now in terms of growing the organization. And I think that's where it's really showing now its power, because it's really showing in terms of its head, in terms of cascading down the goals through the whole organization and making sure that people have very clear goal setting and very clear delegation of really empowerment through the organization. But that we can also have an audit trail that we need to have from the corporate governance side. So I think as Novus is moving forward, we will have again go through more training of people. We're looking now at trying to move the training into a different phase. One of the areas for us, I think that's going to be increasingly important is people moving into stratum four. It's a real challenging area for us to identify first where we have capability for. But really as more and more of our needs are going to be longer than this one year making the budget, because we work in a very competitive market, we need to know what's going to be happening in two years and five years. We need to be really looking out there in a longer time horizon and we need to really have solid people at that level who can do that. So identifying them and providing them with the training, because if you think in terms of back to my own experience, learning on the job is one way of getting it done. But hopefully we can do better than that. And hopefully we can do in a way that actually will give them more confidence as they're moving into these roles, that they're going to be successful and that we can work with them to make sure that when moving into those really important senior management positions in the company that they can be successful. Because if they're not, the company will not be successful and we will not be able to grow and achieve our goals.