After taking over the helm as CEO, what magic did you weave to turn the company around?
I didn't weave any magic. I had a good management team, and they've done a great job with our product line. We focused on five things. The first was company culture. The second was operational processes. The third was vision, followed by strategy. Once we understood that, we developed our organizational structure to deliver on that.
The output was a good financial performance. We worked 24-7 for a few years on rebuilding our product line, our go-to-market strategy, services, capabilities and marketing strategy.
Did your experience at Cisco help in any way?
Absolutely. At Cisco, I had a reputation of being "Mr Fix It". I was shipped around the world to either build or restructure parts of the company. For many years, I had been doing fairly large-scale restructuring at Cisco. This certainly helps you, skills-wise.
But nothing really prepares you for a turnaround of this magnitude. This was--no hyperbole intended--maybe one of the largest or more significant turnarounds in corporate history in the last decade.
According to media reports, you engineered a plan to sweep out the "toxic culture" at Symbol. What was toxic before you came onboard?
There was a toxic subculture in the company that was largely due to unethical management, but it involved very few people. The other aspect of the culture that we needed to deal with was how we essentially had 'muscle memory' on how not to make money.
We did not make any profits from 1998 to 2002. Those were some of the biggest boom years in information technology history to not make money during that time frame. It was surprising, to say the least.
For six years, people were doing things and thought what they were doing was translating into profitable growth. It was only when we restated the financials that people found out. What they (the previous management) did was leading to a non-profitable company.
We had major behavioral and habitual changes that needed to take place inside the company [so as] to build 'muscle memory' on how to grow profit from the bottom up. That required a substantial change in management effort. We restructured every business and function of the company. Out of 5,600 people in the company, we brought in 3,600 new people in two-and-a-half years.
We built our business systems up from a company that managed itself on Microsoft Excel to one that is connected globally with a set of applications that's used consistently on a global basis. And we spent a lot of money and time on leadership and people development to attack this notion of muscle memory.
Lastly, we set in place a very aggressive communications plan. We were very mind-numbing when it comes to the ensuring consistency of our messaging internally in the company and externally, so people would understand where we were going and how we were going to get there.
In terms of new product introductions, what were some of your big bets in recent years?
We completely refreshed our entire product line. Two years ago, there were really only three businesses in the company--advanced data capture, mobile computing and wireless LAN.
We made two very large bets. The first was the acquisition of Matrics, which allowed us to move into the RFID space. The second was opening the mobility software division, which is focused on end-to-end value added solutions for the enterprise mobility architecture of capture, move and manage. Essentially at its core, it's a mobile and wireless LAN deployment and management system that would enable our customers to drive down total cost of ownership, as well as gain control of the mobile edge.
You were once touted as the heir apparent to Cisco boss John Chambers before you took over Symbol. What were your opportunity costs back then?
I was very flattered to be considered as a possible successor to John. But by the same token, I think it's always difficult to follow a John Chambers. I wasn't interested in taking a US$24 billion company to what was next.
I wanted to set out on my own and take a smaller company to the size of Cisco and challenge myself along those lines to achieve greatness on my own.
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