By making full use of internal and external feedback, Malkash not only achieved the stability of Xerox, but also enabled Xerox to gain new development.
Despite that mortal battle won her a lot of praise, and the signs of her body remained the same, Xerox CEO Malkaxi was calm. She still smiles from time to time, and she still takes off her "battle shirt" at 6 pm every day and hurries back to dinner with her family.
In her eyes, Xerox is not a small workshop after all, if as a CEO can not finish the work during work hours, it means that her working method may not be suitable.
At least for now, Malkash ’s approach to Xerox is still effective. In 2001, Xerox suffered a loss of 94 million U.S. dollars, and by 2006 it had achieved a profit of 1.2 billion U.S. dollars. Since Malkasi took office six years ago, Xerox's profit margin has more than tripled.
What can you get from your employees?
Explaining in Marcaxi's own words, her treatment for Xerox is uncommon-seizing the two key points of employees and customers. This is no different from many other companies. Whether it is struggling in a difficult situation, or an invincible company, almost all of them claim to value employees and customers. So, what's so special about Malkash?
In fact, Malkash's success coincides with the principles of cybernetics. Cybernetics believes that feedback plays a decisive role in the control and stability of the system. Whether in business, military or other fields, many failures can ultimately be attributed to the lack of feedback. During the American Revolution, the British colonists organized an important battle, the Battle of Saratoga, to suppress the American uprising. At that time, the British military commander attempted to send two troops from Canada and New York to encircle the American insurgents in Saratoga. However, when one British army arrived at the designated location, the other British army disappeared. As a result, the British army suffered a terrible defeat. Afterwards, it was ascertained that the British military commander's combat order was only issued to one of the units, and the other unit did not receive the order at all. If the commander receives timely feedback from the army, this situation is obviously avoidable.
But the survey shows that most people are not good at or willing to provide direct feedback, and so are companies. Before Malkash took office, the once glorious Xerox was close to death. An important reason for Xerox's decline is the lack of feedback from employees and customers, which makes it difficult for leaders to gain a deep understanding of the effect of command and control on the enterprise and the true situation of market development.
Malkash changed this situation. According to her, when she first took office in 2000, she almost lived on an airplane. She kept on visiting non-stop Xerox employees around the world, held employee meetings and interviewed employees. In short, whenever she has the opportunity, she will talk to the employees and listen to their opinions sincerely and openly. She is rarely in the headquarters, and sometimes she also walks into the employee's office, talks with them about business opportunities, talks about customers, and of course talks about their children, family, etc.
However, Malkash was not indecisive. After fully understanding the views of employees, customers, analysts, etc., she announced that she would lay off 30,000 people in 3 years and stop some businesses, including the department of inkjet printers where Malkash worked when she first entered Xerox. . In addition, Xerox sold its half stake in Fuji Xerox for $ 1.3 billion.
Whether it's layoffs or exiting a business, Malkash attaches great importance to employee feedback. She generally does not let her subordinates announce the bad news for her, but communicates with the employees personally to explain to them. She also talked to employees about how to solve the company's problems and portray Xerox's future for them. The purpose is to increase employees' confidence in the future and avoid employees only focusing on negative information.
Malkash believes that good leaders must admit that the ruler is short and willing to learn from others anytime and anywhere, and must empower others to make decisions. Whether the authorization can achieve the expected results depends largely on the feedback of the exercise of power, and the modest attitude of the leader helps to contain the feedback information and continuously improve the art of command and control based on the feedback.
Traditionally, Xerox used to be a "sales-driven, results-oriented" company with relatively centralized power. Later, the company gradually decentralized and the power at the manager level was greatly increased. Malkash pointed out that in such an organizational structure, simple command and control management has been unable to adapt, because this management method will lead to different directions within the enterprise, and it is difficult to gather forces. In this case, feedback is very important. To this end, Malkash encourages managers to constantly evaluate their own performance and listen to feedback from superiors and subordinates. Now, Xerox ’s managers are required to receive 360-degree comprehensive evaluations of their superiors four times a year. Malkash also holds a four-day chairman's forum twice a year. Those who participate in the forum are people with potential but Malkahi may not normally reach. Of course, this also allows her to get more feedback about her command and control.
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Customer-driven innovation
Malkash spent all his career at Xerox. Therefore, she still sees Xerox's success or failure quite clearly. For many years, Xerox has not only won the top spot in the field of copier technology, but also achieved fruitful research and development in some other fields. The graphical user interface and mouse we are accustomed to today are innovative masterpieces of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Unfortunately, all of this does not guarantee that Xerox will be protected from commercial waves.
Like many companies that have experienced twists and turns on the road to innovation, most of the previous Xerox only knew about R & D and almost never took the initiative to understand the feedback from the outside world-even if there were, it was also based on limited feedback after product sales. Make improvements. When in a market advantage or even a monopoly stage, companies may not fall into crisis; and once the market changes from scarcity to oversupply, R & D that does not pay attention to feedback will bring many problems. Xerox's misfortune lies here.
After taking office, Malkash did not cut R & D expenses due to financial difficulties. In 2006, Xerox's R & D expenses were US $ 922 million, which is approximately 5.8% of sales. However, she also understands that Xerox's previous roads are no longer viable and must be reformed. Now, a new innovative model has taken shape, and the results are beginning to show. The core of this innovation model is to continuously adjust based on customer feedback-Xerox calls it "customer-led innovation."
Xerox has set up the position of global manager of "customer-led innovation". Every year, the company invites about 1500-2000 customers to visit its four R & D institutions around the world, and encourages R & D personnel to have face-to-face communication with visiting customers. Some R & D personnel go to the customer to "work onsite" every one to two weeks, observe how the customer uses their products, and understand the customer's new ideas. Xerox also hired ethnographers, experts in anthropology and related disciplines to study customer behavior, and used "shared dreams with customers" as one of the indicators for each engineer's performance evaluation.
Many of Xerox's new products were developed based on customer feedback. Three years ago, a R & D team at Xerox envisioned the development of a commercial printer with dual engines. Prior to this, Xerox generally modeled and then obtained customer feedback, and further developed accordingly. This time, the R & D staff decided to break the routine and first listen to potential customers' views on this idea.
Xerox convened some customers to meet with them for comments. The customer's response greatly exceeded the expectations of Xerox R & D personnel. They originally thought that customers wanted to use the second engine to print special colors, but in fact, customers even wanted to use the second engine as a backup to avoid the printer being able to print when one of them failed. Based on this information, Xerox has developed a two-engine printer Nuvera 288 that can print 288 pages per minute. This printer, which costs up to $ 460,000, was launched in early April this year.
At every step of the Nuvera 288 development process, customers are involved. In early 2005, one of the company's customers, "Color Center", president of the company Lakensina saw the design sketch of Nuvera 288. More than two years later, at 9 a.m. every Tuesday, he still discussed with Xerox engineers the use of the trial machine provided by Xerox. It is understood that since the beginning of 2005, more than 1,000 customers have expressed interest in buying this printer, and most of the customers who have tried it have finally officially purchased it.
Customers who participated in the development of Xerox ’s $ 500,000 color iGen3 color digital printing press also participated. According to Malkash, when Xerox developed iGen3 in 2002, it chose the old customer "Royal Impression" as the test site. During the test, Xerox technicians moved to the headquarters of the "Imperial Impression" company, temporarily erecting a wall around iGen3 to facilitate confidentiality and control of the production environment. During the test phase, "Royal Impression" proposed to Xerox technicians, Xerox adjusted and improved accordingly. Later, "Royal Impression" purchased several iGen3s. During the development process, Xerox also set up a technical command center in Rochester, New York, where technicians remotely monitor the work of each iGen3. If there is any machine color deviation, the technician can adjust it on the command center user interface.
There are many similar examples. After visiting some customers, Xerox engineers found that a large number of printed products were eventually abandoned, causing a lot of waste. So they developed the idea of ​​developing reusable printing paper.
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Of course, this kind of feedback is also difficult. The first is how to ensure that researchers and clients can "pair". In order to solve this problem, Xerox designed a web tool that allows R & D personnel to enter the topics they want to discuss with customers, and then customer experts can find suitable customers for them accordingly. In addition, Xerox also uses blogs and WiKi to allow customers to post their feedback on Xerox.
The transformation of the innovation model has borne fruit. In 2006, Xerox received nearly 560 utility model patents in the United States, an increase of 24% over 2005. Currently 95% of its product line is newly developed in the past two years.
Xerox's future lies in service?
During Malkash ’s tenure, Xerox ’s business also changed significantly. The biggest change is that the company withdrew from the consumer business. At present, Xerox's business mainly includes three major parts: digital product printers, color printers and office multi-function machines, business consulting services. Malkasi is particularly optimistic about the service business.
According to Malkash's explanation, Xerox's service development business is actually based on customer feedback. She said that some big customers want Xerox to become a service-oriented company, because they need not only products, but also various services, such as how to reduce IT costs.
In 2002, Xerox established the Global Service Division. After several years of painstaking operation, the service business has played an important role in Xerox, and its growth rate is significantly faster than Xerox's core business. In 2006, services accounted for about 30% of Xerox's operating income. Malkash expects this percentage to rise to 50% in the next few years.
Xerox's service business focuses on the intelligent management of documents, which is significantly different from companies such as IBM and HP. It has many services that are based on Six Sigma evaluation services. With this service, it can track and manage the entire process of documents in the enterprise, thereby discovering the hidden costs. Xerox said that such services can reduce the costs associated with document management by 30%.
From customer feedback, Xerox realized that there seemed to be many major opportunities in this seemingly remote area. Once, a customer told Malkash that Xerox was like a combination of painkillers and steroids. After hearing this, Malkash felt the fog, because no one had ever described Xerox like this. So, she asked the client what happened. The client said: "Before working with Xerox, the document management was a headache for us. We didn't know where the money was spent; Xerox saved me money and increased productivity. This is a painkiller. Through document management, we Retaining customers more effectively and thereby developing our business is called steroids. "
This feedback from customers further strengthens Malkaxi's determination to develop the service business. Now, the customer base of its service business has expanded to include companies such as Honeywell and Microsoft. In 2006, the number of Xerox service business orders increased by more than 15% over the previous year.
Some of Xerox's new businesses are gradually developed based on customer feedback. In 2004, Dillard Retail Company told Xerox that the company consumes a lot of paper every day in more than 300 stores across the United States. Training materials, recruitment materials, and invoices are processed in different ways, which not only causes delays in time, but also costs Increased accordingly. Later, the company accepted Xerox's Global Services Business Unit's proposal and installed a multi-functional networked system. Through this system, managers can print documents in any format they need directly on the Internet at any time, and the accounting department is also a lot easier when processing various bills. Of course, the most important thing is that the cost has come down.
In order to further consolidate and develop its service business, in 2006, Xerox acquired Amici, an electronic search chain technology company, for US $ 175 million. The company's technical advantage lies in the identification, filtering, production and storage of various paper and electronic document data. Xerox estimates that the annual compound growth rate of services provided by electronic search chain technology will reach nearly 40%. By 2009, the US market alone is expected to reach US $ 2.5 billion. On June 29, 2007, Xerox announced the acquisition of Blackstone Valley Office System Company, the purpose of which is to expand the scope of Xerox office technology.
Nonetheless, it is still unknown whether the service business can be the pillar to support the future of Xerox Building. One thing is certain-services like this are like redistribution of benefits. For Xerox customers, only when the cost of receiving the service is lower than the cost they can reduce, they will accept the service of Xerox, and the service cost of the customer is what Xerox has to consider when providing services.
Obviously, in today's business environment, it is difficult for companies with one-way information flow to adapt. Xerox realized that it was not too late.
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