Experience

Threading A Needle Through Coat Hangers

A business turnaround is akin to threading a needle through 1,000 tangled coat hangers – sometimes with little time, resource, or belief left on the clock. Iomega is one example.

In the early 1990s, Iomega had a dominant IBM PC removable disk drive business, but a failing Apple Mac business despite the company’s various attempts. Iomega’s disk drives were heavy and single sourced, while dozens of brands using a competitor’s drives were all compatible with each other. After two months of analysis upon joining, I decided to see Iomega’s stagnant business as a PR challenge instead of a product shortcoming, much to the executive team’s dismay and the sales team’s disappointment.

The PR campaign emphasized Iomega’s reliability and its competitors’ lack thereof. I also conceived the “Iomega Inside” advertising campaign and persuaded the company to launch the video at Comdex. The “Inside Iomega” animation would go on to win the NCGA award and was later rebranded by Intel as “Intel Inside.” Within a year, Iomega’s market share in the most critical and lucrative major accounts nearly tripled – as tracked by the publication MacWeek – and the PR campaign eventually became a key contributor to the collapse of its direct competitor, Syquest.

More recently, I joined Kilopass as the turnaround CEO. Kilopass was the technology leader in a niche memory business, but was losing to its competitor in products and customer engagement. With a dysfunctional organization, staggering negative cash-flow, and the world in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis, time was running out for Kilopass. Like Iomega, the Kilopass turnaround had to be threaded through a needle, this time technology licensing – a risky, time consuming, and uncharted path. Through three rounds of lay-offs and a complete management team change-over, Kilopass persevered and won Samsung as a technology licensee within one year from first meeting to cash in hand.

In these and other turnaround examples, the proverbial coat hangers will fall – often – and some business decisions will invariably be wrong. But seeing the shortest path to safety and having conviction and courage despite the noise of falling hangers ultimately results in rejuvenated businesses.

Experience