One of the themes of my career has been to seek out jobs that nobody else wanted. Or jobs that had no apparent route to success. My theory was that if you go to a place where everyone assumes you will fail, it will be easy to succeed. It has worked so far.
The APO group at Landmark had been under-performing the rest of Landmark for several years. The Company had replaced their long term VP (who coincidentally started the same day at Landmark that I did) with a fellow who was running a competitor's field offices in Asia. He hired many of his old friends, and worked diligently to try and change the Landmark culture into his previous company's culture. It did not work. There was an employee revolt, and he was let go.
I came to Asia where employee discontent was rampant. My first job was to reassure the people working there that their concerns were going to be taken seriously. I had several people ask me if my first action would be to fire them. (These conversations took place in the middle of the night for me, as I was still in Caracas). I let everyone know that I would make my personnel decisions based on performance, not on rumors.
Then I had to visit all the clients and let them know that the Company would continue to honor our commitments to them, and to make sure that they would be able to get their jobs done with our software. We made many more technical people available to help the clients, and we saw an increase in sales as a result. We increased sales 75% in a year, and profitability 105% in the same period.
The Company was also in the process of changing our business model to concentrate more on services, and less on product sales. We also reduced the responsibility of the regional VPs by moving marketing, pre-sales, and software support out of the regions in to global organizations. Some of the VPs were less than enthusiastic for these changes.
The Company did see an increase in sales during this period, though one would be hard pressed to say that there was an corresponding increase in profits.
But it did have the effect of making the Company more attractive as an acquisition target.
As I recall there were three companies that were interesting in purchasing Landmark. The end result was that Halliburton under Dick Cheney (yes, I met him) purchased the company.
I decided that HAL would not be the best thing for me, so I decided to leave the company.
So now it was time to move back to the US, and find something else interesting to pursue.
