16. Why Alignment Enables Rapid Growth with Girish Rishi

In 2016, JDA Software, today known as Blue Yonder, was valued at $2.8 billion. In April 2021, Panasonic announced it will acquire Blue Yonder at an $8.5 billion valuation. When Blue Yonder CEO Girish Rishi was hired as an outsider to lead the company, he knew he had an uphill battle to establish trust within the organization. In this episode, Girish shares the keys to leading a company on a transformation journey, which can be applied to any organization big or small. The number one strategy: alignment. This episode goes beyond the theory of alignment and dives deep into practical steps leaders can take early on across direct reports and stakeholders to get on the same page.

Transcript

David Morris  00:09

Welcome to season two of the HiPER Leadership Podcast. I am your host, David Morris, CEO and founder of HiPER Solutions. At HiPER Solutions, our mission is to bring positive change to the world. Leaders today are faced with unprecedented change, and yet even the best leaders have had to toss out their standard playbook and think outside the box. Our intent with the HiPER Leadership podcast is to share best practices so that you, our listeners, can gain some actionable approaches to your next big endeavor. Today, my guest is Girish Rishi, CEO of Blue Yonder. As a leading supply chain management company, Blue Yonder helps to provide revolutionary planning for the manufacturing, retail, and operations of businesses, giving them the ability to predict, assess, and meet their customer demands. Girish and I were recently introduced through a mutual connection, because, as they described it, Girish is a true game changer. Hi Girish.

Girish Rishi  01:12

Hello, David and glad to be on your podcast.

David Morris  01:15

Girish, tell me what it was like. What was that tap on the shoulder? What did it feel like when you got that call to join the predecessor name of Blue Yonder?

Girish Rishi  01:26

David, I received the call on October of 2016. And I remember it like yesterday: while I'm speaking with Egon Zehnder, who approached me, I knew of JDA, and something instinctively told me this is for me, that I'm interested and I want to pursue it. The opportunity to come to a marquee company, close to a billion dollars in revenues, and transform it and lead it was an opportunity of a career, as I envisioned it then.

David Morris  01:53 

And there was a lot, I’ve come to discover with you, you know, training that went into this making this a really great fit. Now, it's so intriguing to me, as I've seen so many companies try to transform from legacy software into SAS, they want to achieve the recurring revenue, they want to become more customer centric, but few pull it off. Microsoft and Adobe have been real benchmarks for you have really now established yet another benchmark. What's the challenge? Why do so many companies fail in this?

Girish Rishi  02:25

I'll tell you why we succeeded. And maybe that is, in a way, answering your question why others fail. And it has to do with the customer and the culture we prioritize. Day one: the first town hall. The second week I had, we prioritized looking deeply into our values, what makes us tick. 4,000 Associates then across the world, across 41 different locations, what drives us, what binds us together, and then customer experience: SAS too often becomes about hitting a certain metric or hitting a certain valuation. For us, it was always about achieving a high level of customer experience where the customer benefits from our supply chain solutions. Early on, David, a core management team and I myself, we visited with to the CEO of Adobe up in the Bay Area. And that's one of the mantras he and his management team shared with us. So, we prioritized customer experience immensely from day one, four years ago, and our own culture internally. How do we disagree? How do we debate? How do we align around common goals and then go, you know, climb big mountains and drive towards achievements?

David Morris  03:37

On this journey from a two and a half billion-dollar company to an eight and a half billion-dollar company and approximately four years, what really was the biggest challenge in that first year?

Girish Rishi  03:48

Yeah, when you're mentioning two and a half billion’s the valuation, two and a half billion 4 years ago. Now the valuation’s eight and a half billion and the most significant challenge when we started this path four years ago when I joined the company, is within the first week, I met with about 70 to 80 Associates, team members, very loyal employees, supply chain experts, software experts, but there was lack of clarity on company strategy, there was lack of clarity on what our product roadmap is, and how we will rally behind it. And gaining credibility on that, within the employee customer base, with the board of directors, investors, but especially with customers was a big initiative at the outset.

David Morris  04:32

How do you do it? I mean, we talk about shared compelling vision and North Star a lot with game-changing CEOs, but for anybody sort of going new in seat into a role now, it can be tricky. You can talk to a lot of people, but how much ultimately is the synthesis in your own mind versus facilitating with others? I mean, you make it sound really straightforward. But as you sort of go back, and you got all those inputs, how do you bring it all together?

Girish Rishi  04:59

You gotta have a vision. Vision is not a community development area, a true north has to come from an individual. And given I was coming in from the outside, I had a true north definition that supply chain happens at the edge in the retail shelf and the warehouse floor and the truck and fleet and the factory floor. And as an enterprise software company, we need to lean into the point of impact, onto the edge. And that's the kind of software company we will build. Laying that vision out rallies team members, having a management team that is collegial in nature, we have a vast majority of the management team today. And very soon, within a year when I came on, we had to deploy a new management team, a new senior leadership team on my staff, some from within, some from outside. So out of 12 management team members today, 10 are new, who were not in their roles four years ago, because ultimately, you need a debating, argumentative, but aligning management team, highly transparent, highly trust-oriented management team that can take on the challenge that we faced at the start of 2017. I'm immensely proud of what we have achieved on that front.

David Morris  06:13

And what did the sequencing look like? You know, in those first, say, six months between solidifying that vision, and also, of course correcting the leadership team, how did it all play out?

Girish Rishi  06:24

You know, authenticity was number one, JDA, then what we were called, the team did not know me. So, when you are not known, there is a lack of trust. And listening and being authentic is a daily job initially for the team to start trusting, even if they disagree with what you’ve said. For me job one, job two, job three was establishing a management team and a behavior from a culture standpoint that would exude and last through the stamina of the years ahead. And getting the management team wrong or marginally right was not an option. That was job one in the first six months, and we hit a home run on that front.

David Morris  07:07

Was it a cascading effect? I mean, was it getting one or two people that you were really targeting and then they brought people along? Again, you have an ability to really make it sound so simple. Yet there were so many moving pieces to this. What was the key? I mean, were you using the same search folks? I mean, how did you do this?

Girish Rishi  07:28

That's a great question, David. It started with the head of go to market. On my first day on the job. It was a global sales kickoff. We were in Vegas. And I went for a walk outside with the head of North America. And that afternoon itself on my first day, I said, I'm going to contemplate if this gentleman should be the head of global go to market. He had been in the company 22 years; he's still leads the company in that role. Bringing on a provocative product leader, a search we started literally a couple of weeks into the job was a big priority. We recruited a leader who's in that job, [he] came in within the first six months. He's the product leader today. I want to share two more examples. David, the weekend before I started, I spoke to the chief marketing officer. And in the first two minutes, he said, “Girish, you're the wrong guy for the role. I believe the board made a mistake. I'm not sure if your background is relevant to us.” And guess who the chief marketing officer is today. It is that gentlemen, because my message to myself was I applaud this gentleman who is so candid with me. If he is as good as I think he is, he is going to be my partner. And here, four and a half years from now, he and I are simpatico, the general counsel who's now the chief administrative officer used to report to the CFO. And we had an instantaneous personal connect when we met. And he's taken on much since then. And as a trusted partner, I can go on and on; I'm immensely proud of my leadership team, but really the expanded management team across the world, but the ethos of a company, the power of a management team, and what you deliver is determined based on what we just talked about.

David Morris  09:05

And so, the concept of having that new team solidify the vision and the plans and all of that versus you having to have enough of an instinct to be able to actually promote these individuals, you know, using that as sort of a benchmark, again, the ordering of it: what did that look like?

Girish Rishi  09:24

The ordering was gain credibility with three stakeholders. First of all, if your employees don't believe in you, everything else is moot. And the generous associates of Blue Yonder gave us time that allowed us to craft a strategy. We made commitments instantaneously to customers that we lived through. I was involved with our team to take customers live, to solve problems. And based on that gaining credibility of the board of directors and investors, who are skeptical initially, ‘can this management team can the CEO do it?’ That was, at the outset, pivotal for us. And then there was the seminal meeting up in Sonoma, I took 30 leaders to Sonoma, into wine country. And we spent Monday through Friday there, we worked 12 hours. And then we went to a winery here or there every evening. And we approached big rocks, as the meeting ended, I put up on a whiteboard, I said, “if we'd go execute all of this, we may be four and a half to $5 billion in valuation.” And today, those management team members have called me and said, Girish, we never believed that then, we thought it was a stretch that was not possible to bridge. It's those aspects that stuck out in my mind today, as I speak to you.

David Morris  10:40

It sounds like alignment, alignment, alignment.

Girish Rishi  10:42

Correct.

David Morris  10:44

How many months in was that trip up to Sonoma?

Girish Rishi  10:47

It was right after the twelfth month. So, the first six months, establish a management team a strategy, cohesive strategy; the second half of the year, in the first year, gain board buy in, and immediately after that we headed in the spring to Sonoma.

David Morris  11:01

And again, the key goal of Sonoma was...

Girish Rishi  11:04

Alignment. You said it and I was going to use that word. What I believe CEOs and management teams need to attain and achieve is pristine, absolute alignment between the front lines all the way back to the board. Through small and large companies that I have worked, where companies have tripped, is there is a different view of the true north of what needs to be achieved all the way through different nodes from the front line onto the board. So, communication, laying out a vision, a manifesto on a regular basis, literally writing a two-page manifesto out of what the future looks like, and getting your stakeholders to buy into it, including your customers, one needs to have immense stamina to do that, that is a marathon. And we, I, myself with the management team, we spent a lot of time and we continue to do that today by the way.

David Morris  11:54

What percentage of the way there in terms of the game plan to get to the big milestone of the acquisition from Panasonic recently, what percentage of that game plan did you land by the end of the Sonoma trip?

Girish Rishi  12:09

I will go back, if you read the press release [from] the day I came on, and if you read my quotation, which is only thing I wrote myself, it calls out where we are heading. And it was all about the edge about the point of impact, literally the word edge. And edge analytics is laid out in my quotation, and the manifestation of that true north. The detail on that strategy in Sonoma led to this provocative acquisition by a discerning Japanese brand, Panasonic, that's been around for 100 years, that was announced less than a month ago.

David Morris  12:44

So, when you were on the flight home from Sonoma, with a game plan, with an aligned team, how close did you feel you were to what you needed to pull off the goal at hand?

Girish Rishi  12:57

I'm a paranoid person by nature. So, there was no swagger, no immense confidence that we can pull this off. I had big questions ahead of me. I was 12 months in, [asking] ‘Can we deliver our first product SAS product on time? Will customers buy it? How will the experience be? Will the go to market team worldwide and partners have an uptake on that? Will we be able to deliver a better proposition than our customers?’ I was immensely paranoid, I was deriving my strength from the growing momentum within our employee or associate base, where they were vocalizing their belief in the in the long-term strategy. And as we were meeting with our customer advisory board, they were encouraging us and they were telling us, we're on the right direction, while they were critiquing us on different fronts. So that was the source of my confidence that we may be onto something.

David Morris  13:52

The Customer Advisory Council, how much did you evolve that when you joined, and what's the biggest lesson learned from that experience?

Girish Rishi  14:00

The biggest lesson learned is iteration. Companies, they have a governance forum where they formally meet with the customer advisory board once or twice a year, it's a two-day meeting, they have social hour, they go away. For us, it's become an intimate relationship. It's about 30 companies, there are C-level folks on it. And we use them for navigation purposes. We bring opportunities, problems, and supply chain around the world solutions for it and we ideate with them, we fully, transparently share with them our roadmap, we fully, transparently share our cultural attributes, and we learn from them how to continue building a company so we have, we have iteration with them. Tomorrow morning, the second time in a month, we'll be speaking with the customer advisory board again, sharing with them the Panasonic-Blue Yonder thesis. So, I would say iteration is the name of the game to leverage that capability.

David Morris  14:58

You know, as I just think about this alignment: everything in terms of you aligning with the culture and understanding of the organization, understanding that team, evolving the team concurrent with being in sync with the customers, and yet alignment with the board. What I'd like to transition to is, again, you make this look so easy, you really do. And I'm just trying to understand what it is about your background, and maybe a couple of mentors or your upbringing that allowed you to just be able to get yourself in the shoes of other people, really understand what's on their mind. How did you learn this?

Girish Rishi  15:38

There's a couple facets, one professional, one personal that I would like to share with you. The most defining professional experience for me was when I was at Symbol Technologies, an innovative technology company out of Long Island that I joined when it was 100 million dollars in revenues, we were about a billion. And in the year 2000, the CEO asked me to move to Europe to run EMEA. David, I was 31 years old then and indigenously, not European. And I took on a company, a division or a part of the company that was 30% of the company. So, to arrive in Europe, people learning how to pronounce my name, and establishing trust across the various offices with customers, and building a growth strategy and putting that into work tested me to the extreme, and I learned a lot. So that's a professional experience. A personal experience here, David, is I grew up in a rural mountain town in northern India, South of the Nepal border. My father, who was an LSU graduate, chemical engineer from LSU, was a management team member in this aluminum company. And he had 20,000 workers, employees on his team. And I grew up used to my father being gone in the evenings, gone on Sundays, because he was in the hospital with an employee who had an accident on the production floor, or showing compassion to another employee’s family member who was in a difficult situation. So, for me leadership training was watching my father immensely supported by my mother. And that shaped in some ways, I believe, my own leadership skills ahead, being authentic, genuinely empathizing and engaging, while being demanding to drive towards business results.

David Morris  17:29

And now bringing that back now to the last six months before the company was acquired. Did you feel that the alignment across all stakeholders was at its best? I mean, did you ever feel a finish line? Or does that paranoia prevent that?

Girish Rishi  17:49

There's no finish line, we are calling the Panasonic acquisition of Blue Yonder a pitstop and we have a provocative vision ahead of what we want to keep building. Just a month before the pandemic started, we change the name of the company from JDA software to Blue Yonder. And then the pandemic comes on. And I woke up every day from March through May, saying, we cannot lose the company on my watch. And how do we save the company? How do we save our customers? Because we do supply chain?

David Morris  18:20

Was it really at risk, in your mind?

Girish Rishi  18:20

No, but the fog was so dense. I mean, our balance sheet was immensely strong. We had not taken any new debt in four years; we had a great recurring revenue stream. But you go back in March, when the world was shutting down, the fog was so dense, we had no idea what we would see tomorrow when we woke up. So, what are all those measures we can take on a defensive mechanism, but as well as on an offensive mechanism for the company to prevail? And that was about 14 months before we announced the Panasonic acquisition of Blue Yonder. And since May, we went on the offensive. We finish the year with more employees than we started. We added more to research and development, we made an acquisition of an e-commerce company.

David Morris  19:04

That's really remarkable. And just thinking about this hire, putting ourselves in the shoes of the board, and what kind of CEO to bring in. What would you do next time around? Let's say you are on the board of a company and you are looking to bring in a CEO that just had this ability to swiftly realign completely realign, be able to rethink the strategy with the team, evolve the team, customer alignment, etc. Talk to me a little bit about how you would evaluate that candidate if you were hiring that CEO.

Girish Rishi  19:37

David, that's a great question. And I draw learnings from my own experiences. Picking me as the head of EMEA 20 years ago, the example I shared with you, I was not the obvious candidate. What management teams and boards tend to do at times is select somebody within the standard deviation. The standard deviation four and a half years ago for the board would have been go to one of the big ERP companies or go to Microsoft and recruit somebody. I was outside of the standard deviation. But I give credit to the search committee, to the board, to look at a basket of candidates and make a bet on me. And I'll have asked our board members, “Why me?” at that time, after a few years after I was selected, as trust developed, and I have gotten different answers. One was I was the most well prepared, I had a 16-page document written on JDA for my own purposes. When I'm on a public board, and I have been on boards for the last decade, I look for authenticity, we do not hire any prima donnas. Is the leader transparent? Is the leader, he or she have the ability to admit mistakes? What is the recruiting and motivation strategy that the leader deploys? Can the candidate debate on a topic around ideas? And those are things I look for and perhaps that's what the search committee and the Board of Directors of JDA tested me on.

David Morris  21:03

And how about this whole empathy and alignment piece? If you don't already know the person, and you're the board member trying to assess the CEO, what would be some practical approaches that you would use?

Girish Rishi  21:15

You can tell about a person [in] the first five minutes you meet, if the person is authentic. Right? Is the candidate able to share their contemplations, their areas that they have doubts on, their vulnerabilities, balanced with their conviction on their experience, their strategic wherewithal, their ability to build teams. So, authenticity leads into compassion, empathy, that results in getting a buy in from the broader community out there, be it your associate employee base, or the customer base. That's a pivotal ingredient to test candidates on and that's what I practice when I interview people. 

David Morris  21:57

Beyond your intuition as you're observing those aspects, is there anything else you leverage, or particular inputs from others?

Girish Rishi  22:05

Definitely, you know, I tend to anchor in a candidate, we just hired a phenomenal leader from Workday: he had been there for 13 years. He joined the founders 13 years ago when the company was less than 10 million. And he left just two months ago, when Workday’s four and a half billion. And in the first 40 minutes, I knew Derek Butts was my guy, I wanted to recruit him as the most recent hire in the management team. But then from there on, I have a slew of interviewing forum, at least six to eight people who interview the candidate. I have board members who interview and I do references myself. There is a methodology that ghSMART uses where you chronologically go through a person's life to understand that person better. So, it starts heavily on the right-brain side of instinct and feeling good about it. And then it continues to slide to the left-brain, the analytical, the factual, the evidential side, to feel good. And David, recruiting is still an art. All of us get it wrong at times.

David Morris  23:10

Well, what an awesome story: authenticity, trust alignment, and a playbook that you've clearly developed applicable to so many industries. Thank you, Girish.

Girish Rishi  23:21

David, thank you for the very compelling and provocative questions.

David Morris  23:27

To our HiPER Leadership listeners, thank you for your continued support and feedback. Stay tuned this season for many more HiPER Leadership achievements. If you haven't done so already, please subscribe to the HiPER Leadership podcast on Apple podcasts. And if you have a big digital transformation you're leading, visit our website to learn more about how we help align teams and stakeholders for excellence at hipersolutions.com