Getting your team on the same side.

• Author: Hansen, Paul G.
• Position: Management Strategy

When a new company turns a profit for more than nine years running, you have to wonder what it's doing right. The answer is good old-fashioned teamwork (minus the hype) that keeps everyone's eye on the ball.

It's safe to say that no company's success can be attributed only to strategic financial moves, clever marketing and sales tactics, or outstanding engineering and manufacturing operations. Success requires all of these -- excellent engineering, finance, marketing, sales and operations -- plus managers who operate as a team. "Teamwork" is an overused and often insubstantial word these days. But at Adaptec, we still look at teamwork as interdisciplinary empathy, not just slogans and well-coordinated efforts. For example, a CFO can't afford to look at his company as a black box with dollars flowing in and out. He must understand enough about the company's marketing, sales and operations to match them to financial strategies. The same holds true for the heads of engineering, marketing and operations. Without an empathetic business organization, it's tough to build real consensus on important corporate decisions, and that gets in the way of your profits.

This is a lesson that we've tried to instill in our corporate culture during a period of rapid growth. As of the last fiscal quarter, Adaptec completed 38 profitable quarters in a row. During this time, the company went public and our sales more than doubled between 1992 and 1993, in the midst of a difficult time for the electronics industry. We attribute our success largely to our emphasis on interdisciplinary empathy, but it's not a concept limited to our company. Companies aren't "born" with business organization empathy. That's a quality that each company must develop and nurture.

One way to start is with interdepartmental brainstorming sessions. This lets you bounce marketing's great idea off finance and operations, which may change the idea to align more closely with financial and operational realities. The employees at our brainstorming sessions range from executive staff members to mid-level managers to individual employees. Many of these sessions are as spontaneous as a hallway conversation with no set agenda, session leader or call to action, while others are scheduled on a regular weekly basis.

For example, when coordinating major product introductions, members of the finance, engineering, manufacturing and marketing departments often meet bimonthly to brainstorm problems and solutions. Each participant assesses the situation and can express an opinion on how, for example, a certain product packaging design could affect manufacturing or engineering processes or how the budget allotted for the project can help define product design or advertising. At these scheduled sessions, one team member sets the agenda, leads the session and follows up with a memo to each session participant on the next step.

What emerges from these interdepartmental sessions is usually an idea or set of ideas that reflects the company's overall competencies better than ideas originating from any one department. This parallels today's concurrent engineering strategies, where design and manufacturing engineers, with the help of marketing, work together on new products from the outset.

I've gained invaluable insights from our brainstorming sessions. For example, at a session some time ago, a marketing manager told us that to effectively develop a product and bring it to market, you must realize that there's a time to make decisions, a time to allocate resources and a time to execute your plan. After that conversation, I realized that any major activity in the company could be broken down into those three stages. From then on, that became one of my basic business philosophies -- timely decisions, adequate planning and crisp execution.

We also engage in interdepartmental communications programs, so that each department is exposed to the...