Name: Avnet CEO Tells What It Took To Reinvent 100 Year Old Tech Company
Uploaded: 2018-08-27
Duration: 3 min 37 s
Description: Bill Amelio says trust, vision, inspiration and removing obstacles are key to success.

[ MUSIC ] Bill when you became CEO of ABnet two years ago. You decided to take the company in a completely new direction. From a leadership point of view what was the key thing you had to do To reinvent a 100 year old company. I think the top thing leaders need to do is to gain the trust and confidence of all the people. Then you have to think about instilling the vision that people can follow, and then you gotta think about how to take the obstacles out of the way that are stopping people from getting things done and change. And finally you gotta do it in an inspiring way. What was the hardest part of that whole process? There is un invisible resistant in any organization that stops you from doing things. I like to call it corporate antibody. So when you wanna change something all of a sudden they are there trying to stop you from changing. And what you need to do is have a compelling. Reason for change. And if you can get that across to the leadership and all the rank and file, then all of the sudden you can make great changes. I mean all of the changes that you did make; whether it was acquisitions or getting out of businesses or management changes, were pretty disruptive. So what did you have to do to get people to stick with you- Change with you and execute this vision that you describe. Over communicate. Lots and lots of communication. I travel a lot, so when I visit any particular site I do a town hall, I do an operations review and I do a town review. All that matters because the contact people have with you, all of a sudden they say Okay, this is not going away. This change needs to happen, and the leadership is right here trying to make it occur. And then what did you do with that feedback to get to the next level in getting their support? I spent a lot of time listening to people, too, to gain their feedback and make adjustments to the strategy to make sure that we can demonstrate that we're listening. But yea we still got an agenda that we're gonna pull off. But that doesn't mean we can't make adjustments along the way that fits a little bit better in the current culture that we already have. I was really interested to see that you created a new position at Abnet called Chief Transformatoin Officer. What was your thinking on that? And how is it- helping you to do all these things you want to do. Well we realize to transform a company the size of [ UNKNOWN ], 15, 000 + employees, $ 18 billion in revenue, there had to be really an impetus to change and one spot you could go to that would contain all the projects that we're managing. So we developed 10 different work streams, over 400 projects and all managed in the Chief Transformation Officers with a [ UNKNOWN ] that occur every week to make sure that there's progress being made on each and every one of those particular projects. Given that you're making some big bets on Avnet's future, what's your approach to get everyone in the company To try new things, to do things differently, take more risks. Get the top team together, and we ensure that no one can leave the room until everybody's hands' on the table and say they're in. Nobody can put their hand under the table and do the old cross your fingers and say I agree with you now, but when I leave I'm gonna agree with something else. The key is, we all agree And when you lead, we expect you to execute. And so, what about people who do try something new and it doesn't work out, what's your reaction to that? It's great to fail, I think we all learn from failure. I was a wrestler, I don't remember many of the [ INAUDIBLE ] Wins I had. But I can remember every loss. Because I learned something from the losses. So if you take a look at some of the best companies today. They're filling fast. I mean the Amazon models won where they throw everything against the wall and not everything sticks. And I think thats an important message that we tell all of our people that The most successful companies are taking experiments and taking calculated risks each and every day. If they don't do that they're not going to innovate and evolve. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Avnet CEO Tells What It Took To Reinvent 100 Year Old Tech Company

Leadership

Bill Amelio says trust, vision, inspiration and removing obstacles are key to success.