Ellen Kullman, President and CEO, Carbon
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE

MPW Summit 2020: Taking Leadership Know-How to Silicon Valley

Uncategorized

The long-time CEO discusses her bold move to running the 3D printing startup in Silicon Valley, the future of manufacturing, and what she has learned about crisis management.

Hi everybody, we're back. Um I wanna move right along to our next conversation. Ellen Coleman led Dupont through some very tough times the 2000 and eight financial downturn and a battle with activist investors. Now, she's taken on a new challenge running a three D printing startup in Silicon Valley. Allen joins us now to talk about what she has learned about leading through crisis, the value of innovation and the ability to piven plus the future of 3D printing. Ellen, welcome, thank you for joining us. It's great to be here. Great. Um okay, so I'm gonna kind of boil it down. I'd like to talk to you about really three things your career pivot, um leading through crisis, which again, you know, a thing or two about in the future of manufacturing. But I think just for starters, it would be great to hear from you, for those who don't know what is carbon and and give us a quick summary of what the company does. No acronyms allowed. Okay, so carbon is involved in additive manufacturing of polymers. So we three D print polymers at a scale and a rate that that enables manufacturing as opposed to just prototyping or low volumes. Okay. Right. Um I think that gives us the right amount of context there. Um, let's talk a bit about your career pivot, not only moving to Silicon Valley, but obviously um taking over a company that is very different in nature from um in size and scale, I should say. Uh and an age what you were doing before you went from learning a company that Was started in 1802 joining a company that was founded in 2013. So tell us about the decision to make that career move. At this point. You know, I've worked in manufacturing all my life and the digitization of business has impacted every aspect of business except manufacturing. And when I went out and looked at the technology, I was asked to buy a board member of the company, I fell in love. I really had tremendous regard for the team, the founder joe de Simone and really felt like this technology could make a real difference in taking manufacturing into digital into the cloud and really enabling a very different future. And what has the experience been like? I mean, it sounds like a, it would be quite a culture shock. Um, but but maybe not, I mean it's also a really place to your, to your roots and your strength here in terms of what the company does. So talk about that, you know, it's interesting when you lead up, you know, a very large multinational, there's a lot of filters, a lot of layers, a lot of people and you go into a Silicon Valley environment and it's the pace, it's the lack of filters, it's the transparency. Um, you really know what's going on. You're working with teens, um, making decisions moving forward. It's fun actually, especially they're not being public part, But um, you know, it's a great team and a great board directors and I just really enjoyed myself. It's a very different environment than, you know, my 27 years. It depends. And so I'm still learning and growing and having a great time all the while and covid aside because we'll get to the implications there. But do you feel that the experience of joining carbon as the ceo taking on this role has changed you as a leader? What have you learned in the past? You know, since he took on the role hasn't been that long? No, no, you know, many of the aspects of it are the same. I mean you need to be genuine and authentic. Um you need to really listen very hard and get to know Um you know, I think they were in the beginning were very worried that I would bring big company bureaucracy to their 400 person company. And you know, what they found was that now I'm a learner, I'm a listener and um and you know, we're going to create a future for that company based on the realities of the market, the competition and our technology and what we can do to win. So it's, it's really been just tremendous for me and the team. Um, let's move on to to leading through crisis. Um you uh you took, you took on the Ceo role at Dupont and In 2008 I think. Uh, so you were immediately thrown into a crisis there and you've got this great quote, I heard you a while back. I just, I just got my dream job at the worst possible moment. Um can you talk a little bit about what principles you learned in leading through previous crises and how that applies today? You know, I mean it was interesting because everybody was scared, nobody knew what was going to happen or when the recovery would start or you know how it would impact different industries. And so you know, the first thing that I've learned in the number of recessions and different areas of crises that I've dealt with is that you need to focus on what you can control. There's a lot of time wasted worrying and discussing things that you cannot impact. And so it's really important to get the team to focus on, okay, what can we do, what lovers do we have, what's important for us to accomplish can get aligned around that and keep driving. I think the second thing is is that people just wanted to return to normal and it's not going to the normal is going to be different. So you create your own trajectory. You have to really understand the impact of the crisis on the company, on the environment, on your marketplace and what plans have to change. What do you have to do differently to be successful coming out of it? The authorities communicate, communicate, communicate because people are scared. People don't know what the future is going to bring and it's reassuring to them to see what our plan is. To understand the actions that we're taking and the last one is about the values of the company and how to hold them close during this time. I mean that gives people a sense of confidence, that that is not going to change, that. We're still going to be, you know, hold our core values, you know, treat our people with respect, you know, whatever your core values are you going to hold them dear and constant during the period And if those four things that I've learned over the years that you know, that really served me well during the global financial crisis and are serving me well today, and why is it important to practice these principles before a crisis actually hits well? Because you don't know how people are going to react? You don't, they many times felt like it was a surprise, it comes out of left field, why do I have to do this? And I think when you talk about it, especially when you're seeing your team and they get comfortable with it, then it becomes sort of just a very natural thing to move into it and to say, you know, what are we going to do differently? We just moved into daily stand ups, although we're all sitting on zoom calls, but it was called it a daily stand up with the staff and just let's spend, we, you know, scheduled a half an hour, maybe we only needed 10 minutes, but what's going on, what people do we need to check in with? What are we learning from the marketplace and keeping everybody together? I think it's really important and then having a little, you know, or warning of it just enables it to go much more smoothly. Do you feel that you had enough time on the job before the pandemic hit in order to release solidify these principles and you're, you're, you're sort of your leadership style at carbon in order to make this an effective transition now. Yeah, no, I um, you know, you would have loved another, you know, three months. I was only really on site for three months before Covid hit. And so that meant that I had to do some things differently than maybe I would have otherwise, because I didn't have strong relationships across the board with the team. I had some people you deal with every day, like you CFO and your head of people, you know, were natural, but I had to take the time to spend with others that were, you know, not only maybe a direct report, but an important person in the organization and, you know, have periodic checks every month, you know, and my support team Carbon is tremendous at that, doing that, but it just took time, took effort and focus. Um, but I'm really glad I invest at that time because it's paying dividends now. We have women in the, in the community who have taken on new jobs, made treated career pivot during the pandemic. I'm actually surprised by how many career moves I've been hearing about lately. Especially do you have any advice for executives in that position where they didn't even have those three months of uh, you know, a little bit of a head start being in person and getting to know their team. Yeah, I think it is a lot of one on one time investing in maybe even doing it informally, maybe over a cup of coffee and not necessarily upset agenda. A glass of wine in the evening and just talk about not business things, get to know them as a person, understand their family situation, what's important to them, kind of what they love to do and, you know, try to create that relationship. It's it's never easy on zoom, but it's better than a phone call and so, but take the time to get to know the person and the people and that will pay dividends when you start working together as a team. Great, great advice. Um I wanna pivot a little bit to the manufacturing. Um you mentioned, I think earlier that manufacturing has been very slow. Two digit digitize. That is always a hard word to say, no matter how many times I've had to say, occurring technology. Um but I want to hear from you, you know, I realized that manufacturing and supply chain are not um very prone to taking risks and to exacting quickly to new technologies. But are we in a point now, especially during the pandemic and post pandemic where that shift is being forced upon them and what's at stake. You know, I think there's a lot of discussion about it and there's a lot of reflection about it, you know, this wasn't a crisis of demands where in a normal recession where demand would fall, this was a crisis of supply and the supply, the supply lines were interrupted were frozen and we couldn't even get masks or face shields or nasal flaring geos fobs right into the United States. So the key medical um equipment that we need it, we're just missing. And so as we have come out of this, and I mean we show the industry the added industry showed the power of distributed local for local manufacturing um in in during this crisis, you know, my own company and with our network of customers produced hundreds of thousands of face shields to distribute, produced over a million nasal Fanjul swabs um and their stories like that all over the additive industry. So what's happening now? Dental labs instead of making swabs or face shields have gone back because dental was really impacted. And now they're coming back to 75% of where they were before. But I see more and more, oh I am having really serious discussions about how do they think about he's totally optimized global supply lines versus something more flexible, more resilient, giving you the ability to pivot. So I don't think that it's um necessarily want to change overnight. But certainly we see absolutely intent to understand how they can distribute their manufacturing reduce their risk much more so than it was pre covid. It's really interesting. You pointed out that this was a crisis in supply, not a crisis in demand as we've seen in previous crises at least the last few. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the role that carbon and three D printing in general plays there, um, in speeding up and in making manufacturing more flexible and agile. Um, what do you see as the future role? I know it's relatively still early days, um, for for, you know, things beyond prototyping, but can you talk a little bit about that? I think that as designs become digitized are, you know, they're designed digitally and into the cloud that gives you flexibility on where you produce some on how you produce. And I think we've seen that through this crisis, additive manufacturing as local. For local, we can take the same design, we can put it on the cloud, downloaded anywhere in the world and produce the same part. And so that has a capability and the resilience to it, that didn't happen before. And in the last couple of years active is at a cost per part That is more relevant today than it's ever been to produce. In our case, millions of mid soles for Adidas, our contract manufacturers are, or liners for football helmet or um, industrial parts. And so it's that change is coming and it's coming because it's not as much of an economic barrier to the adoption of the technology. Um, but it is a difference in terms of how people design, how they manage, um, those designs and how they distribute them globally. So I think it's coming. I think this pandemic has shown the value of it and I think there's a lot of work we need to do, but I think there's a lot of excitement ahead of us, um, for, for those of us who survived last night's presidential debate. Um, you may remember that manufacturing came up a few times and there were a lot of numbers being thrown out along with all sorts of other jabs being thrown out an interruption. But I want to ask you not gonna ask you to comment on some of that and probably her side of the debate, but but really um just the state of manufacturing and we saw manufacturing jobs go up and then we saw them go down and what's going on now and without getting too in the weeds just give us kind of like the state of the, from your vantage point, you know, it's there are a lot of numbers being thrown around and um and it is true that manufactured in the United States, there's been an exodus over decades um into Asia and other areas of the world and it was all on cost. It was on optimized global supply chains and costs. And I think this disruption is having people look in different avenues in terms of even both candidates looking in different avenues in terms of how can we stimulate more manufacturing? Good middle class jobs in the United States? An additive is one technology that can help that because it is getting to a point of costs that it is um It's relevant in today's world and so it is technology that I think can help from the standpoint of making the U. S. A relevant manufacturing entity in many more industries than um than it is today. Um I see a lot of interest in that in many of the O. E. M. S. Who are looking to have that distributed nature and a little more resilience in their supply chains. And so it's just not a wish for manufacturing to come back. There has to be the technology and the demand for it. And I think with the advances that we've seen in the last few years, I think those changes are coming and I think it's a positive for not only the United States, but many countries who want to reignite a manufacturing base in your economy. Um, I think we've got some questions coming in from the audience, jen over you. Thanks, Michael. Hi Ellen. We have an interesting question from Lynn old ham, who says, how long did it take you to gain the hearts and minds of the people who thought you were going to bring bureaucracy to carbon? What did you do specifically to get them to trust you? If, you know, it's interesting because in the beginning, you know, we'd be talking about an issue and, you know, I'd I'd be silent in the meeting. And so finally, one of, one of the staff looked at me and said, well, what should we do? And I said, well, I don't think you want to do what I did it upon, because first of all, I don't think we can afford it. And second of all, I don't think we need it. Um so let's talk about what's relevant for us, 400 people with our thing. And they just kind of lit up and started talking and and having ideas and and, you know, I think that creates that banter and that dialogue really creates, you know, okay, maybe this isn't what we think, and you just have to continue to reinforce that all along the way and just pull the ideas out of them and ask questions instead of making statements about, you know, what would work for much what doesn't work kind of thing, Because I think if you can all align on the assumption that you're using and, and um, and therefore what the action steps to be that you're gonna get there much more quickly than if it, I think you should do this plant. I think we've got one more quick question. Yes. Um, Ellen, knowing what you do about running a large traditional manufacturer. What advice would you give to leaders coming up in that environment who are trying to make the leap to additive and other newer technologies to transform the company's quickly. I think you have to pick your place of where you're going to start because any large company that's looking at a new technology um, when they have an existing technology that serves their needs, you know, how they have to, you have to prove it to them. And so pick your spot. Where is an area It's either knew or maybe critical that you have more resilience in, um that you can really show the proof that it works or doesn't work or what it's going to add to the equation. And I think that there is when you have those proof points, you know, it's like the early work we did with Adidas, I'm making a mid sole out of three D. Printed lattice. Um, you know, when you have that proof point, then all of a sudden the excitement, you know, and build people start to believe and more and more comes that way. But it's really creating a speech heads or those proof points that that then show what the future could be. Okay, Well, we do need to wrap up. Ellen, thank you so much as always for joining us and sharing some of your experience and we hope to have you back when we're all in person someday soon. Thank you. Great