RESULTS -- what you can expect from us

Recently, a former president of Nabisco called Delphi one of the best search firms in America. High praise from someone who had survived the "barbarians at the gate." At the same time, the chairman of a very large energy corporation volunteered that Delphi had introduced the only fundamental innovations in executive search since the profession was founded. Perhaps he's right. If so, these innovations were inspired through work with both very large (PepsiCo) and very small (you wouldn't have heard of it) companies. Below we describe these two very different assignments to illustrate the powers of our model, processes and software tools in the search for knowledge worker leaders.

"Pepsi-pretty"

PepsiCo had a serious problem. The backbone of each of their companies was an executive they designated as a Level 14. They had 500 and needed 750 in two years if their strategic plan was to be realized. For the most part, these best and brightest had been avidly culled from numerous other companies by marauding bands of headhunters like us. While the work these folks did provided them extraordinary development experiences, all were subject to "The Silver Bullet Theory." This held that at the moment an executive was hired by PepsiCo, a gun was fired. From its' barrel emerged a silver bullet that took about five years to catch up to him/her. Thus the fate of L-14's at PepsiCo was predetermined. They were highly paid, worked into the ground, and then lost at their peak.

At this time, Pepsi's executive development plan was a joke. Three realities accounted for this: L-14's had no time to participate in it in a meaningful way, what existed was largely a tissue of Harvard Business School theoretical musings, and no one had bothered to discover what it took to be an L-14. This was the business problem.

So we did!

We used WingSpread to sequence and map the skills of incumbent L-14's from each business function. Along with expected concentrations in finance, leadership, and management, and the technical skills appropriate to their function, to our great surprise, each L-14 had extraordinary research and development skills (graph on right). Shown this, human resource folk felt that this skill cluster had unconsciously conditioned recruitment and promotion decisions in the company for years. It was an important part of being "Pepsi-pretty."

This new understanding of L-14 skills provided a profile and process for identifying hitherto hidden internal candidates, and greatly enlarged and focused our external sourcing. If you know what you are looking for, you know where to look for them.

The delights of swedging machines

The country's leading manufacturer of high quality KD furniture (called "knock down" furniture because it requires modest assembly by the consumer) needed a new vice president of manufacturing. His product quality was suffering. The competitive advantage of KD furniture resides in the ability to offer very high quality furniture at competitive prices because of greatly reduced shipping costs. Shipping a few cubic feet is understandably much cheaper than shipping a few cubic yards.

Since their manufacturing was already more sophisticated than traditional furniture makers, they demanded someone from outside their industry.

Their manufacturing was dependent upon two primary processes, tubular stock swedging and electrolytic metal deposition. Using WingSpread, we constructed a profile of the skills required by these processes. We then contacted the major manufacturers of each system and discovered the industries that used their products. A plot of these two curves showed intersections at three points: casket, automobile seat and bicycle manufacturers (graphic at right). We discovered the companies that populated each of these industries and identified the manufacturing executives in each.

Simultaneously, we launched an automated search of the publications and net chat groups associated with each industry. This harvested the names of authors or cited experts on quality and manufacturing innovations. Three names kept recurring. The successful candidate, who scored the highest on the WingSpread profile, came from a major bicycle manufacturer. If you are lucky you have one of his tables in your office.