Bracken Darrell
Johnny Spragg:
Welcome, Daryll. Thank you very much for joining us on
Bracken Darrell:
Thank you
Johnny Spragg:
Why do you think it’s so important for institutions, sorry, industry and government institutions to sort of collaborate to really drive a more meaningful energy conservation?
Bracken Darrell:
Well, you know, truth is it would be very difficult to pull this off without governments, large companies like ours, our whole industry, everybody’s going to have to engage to pull this off, because the smart grid is not really one big grid that runs around and it’s all connected. It’s actually a whole collection of different connection points, suppliers, producers, users, consumers. So, there’s a lot of complexity in this whole space.
Johnny Spragg:
Whirlpool is all about innovation. I mean how is Whirlpool’s innovation gonna help the future of energy efficiency do you think?
Bracken Darrell:
You’re going to have to shut me off on this, but you know the – you know we’ve reduced – I’ll probably get the numbers wrong, so anybody out there, I apologize if I don’t have them exactly right, but we’ve reduced about 35, 40 percent of the energy consumption by appliance just in the last eight to ten years in the industry in western Europe. You know that’s amazing.
And we haven’t done it just because we’re nice guys or nice girls in this industry. It’s because it’s fundamental to the business model. We are more profitable, more value creating, a better place to work, more engaging place to work, and more likable for the consumers we sell to by doing that.
So, it’s a nice situation for everybody who works in this industry that doing right is also doing good for business. Not everybody can say that, and it’s becoming more and more, true all the time.
Johnny Spragg:
What are your personal strengths in this area?
Bracken Darrell:
In the area of innovation?
Johnny Spragg:
Yeah.
Bracken Darrell:
I think one of the things that all of us at this, at – who are shepherding or overseeing businesses that are very innovation driven, you have to love change, because it’s inherent in the innovation process that you’re going to drive a lot of change. I think I’m very flexible, very fast, and I like change. I am very collaborative.
And you know the other thing I’d say is innovation is a contact sport. It’s all about people, and people management and getting involved and rolling your sleeves up. And I love every element of this innovation workshop that we all live in and the debate that goes with it, and the arguments, and the ultimate outcomes. So, I’d say I’m extremely engaged. I’m very people-oriented. I love change. Those are some of the key things that I bring to the party here.
You know, it’s – one of the values of Whirlpool, you know if we described our values I’d give you a list. It’d be integrity, diversity – one of the, and I think in some ways the most telling one is “winning spirit.” What winning spirit means is that – it means a lot of things, but the short end I’ll use in this case, is it’s about that competitive drive to win.
Now, if you grew up playing sports, you know the real competitors, the real, the people who have the biggest drive to win respect their competition. We respect our competitors. When they come out with something that’s terrific, we break it down. We tear it apart. We weigh the parts. We look at every innovation. We look at every feature. We try to figure how the world did they get to market with that before we did, and how can we do better?
So, I would say you know we love it when somebody comes out with somebody better, after we beat them to market with the next innovation on it. We hate that, when they come out --
Johnny Spragg:
Before Whirlpool, you were labeled President at Braun. You were recognized, I’m going to do a few quotes here, I think you were recognized as the man that was going to make Braun the new Apple. A guy called Kevin Roberts, from KR Connect, credited you for giving Braun their mojo back. I mean how do you take compliments like that?
Bracken Darrell:
Well, first of all, Kevin Roberts is a wonderful guy. Even more wonderful since he said that --
Most comments that are positive, I really focus on the negative, I think like a lot of us. I’m always looking for the constructive feedback
Johnny Spragg:
I guess, a more serious question is, what are the business challenges of breathing new life or having that challenge of breathing new life into, not necessarily an old retired company, but maybe a company that just needs different perspective on it?
Bracken Darrell:
You know, I feel lucky because I didn’t – I don’t think Whirlpool has that problem at all. But, I’ve decided after, you know at this point in my career and it took me a while to get here – well, let me go back. In my first job I had – one of my first jobs, I had a turn around I was working on a product with a very old brand, very old brand, Old Spice.
And it was very successful, and I still look back on that with fond memories. It wasn’t me. It was a huge team of people that did it. I kind of decided after – at this point in my career, I’ve never worked anything that wasn’t a turn around. You just have to figure out where you’re going.
So, I think having that, as Jim Kiltz, one of my former bosses, used to say, “Having that turn around mentality all the time, is the key.” And having turn around mentality is a vision for where you want to go, and then making those few priority calls that you’re going to invest in. You’re going to drive, as would say, “Have a management process that is truly excellent to gt there.”
So, I think all of us in leadership positions have the wherewithal, if we have the wherewithal, we have to throw ourselves into everything we do as it if was a big turn around, because, as I said in the beginning, change management is what we do. I always tell the people who work directly for me, you have three jobs to do. The first one is, you’ve got to deliver your commitments, because life is all about making promises and keeping them.
The second one, and maybe the most important one is, while you’re delivering your commitments, you’ve got to figure how to transform wherever you are into a completely better place. So, that when you leave it one day, it’s a much better place. So, if you’re running a business like mine, you know my boss expects me to leave this some day, a much bigger, much more profitable, much more engaged, business. And that’s exactly where I think I am.
Then the third rule is to, you know attract and build the best people in the world. It’s pretty tough to do the first two without the last one.
Johnny Spragg:
You mentioned your first job was with Old Spice
could you go back to the just come out of college, what advice would you give to that man, that boy, that young man?
Bracken Darrell:
That’s a good question. I guess, I’d say be a little less patient. Make the tough calls a little faster. You won’t regret it. I think when I look back on the mistakes I’ve made through the years, and unfortunately, by the time you’re my age, you’ve made enough mistakes that you’ve learned from most of them. So, you’re through a big chunk of mistakes.
I think where I made mistakes was where I just waited too long, because I believed somebody could change on something they couldn’t. Or that you know somebody would come through in the end and do something they didn’t. I think sometimes, you just have to call it quickly.
Johnny Spragg:
I wanted to talk, obviously, about innovation a little bit more, and I know you mentioned earlier, it’s all about this sort of turning around, being able to turn around and start again or go in a different direction. Do you think culture in a company needs to change to really bring innovation out?
Bracken Darrell:
I do think there are certain aspects of a culture that are required to be innovative. If you’re – if the culture you work in is one where people are scared to death to make a mistake, it makes innovation tougher to draw out.
The second thing is, I think if you don’t have a system where you manage risk well, even if you are in a culture where people are willing to take risks and it’s okay to take risk, you’re probably not going to do very well, because if you don’t risk well, then you go out and you’re just making an inordinate number of mistakes per attempt. So, it’s striking that happy middle ground. I think having good risk management which is about great management process, great tollgate processes for this execution of innovation. You know I think those are the key.
Johnny Spragg:
So, what advice would you give to someone that perhaps is leading a rigid organization that perhaps is looking to go in a different direction to not necessarily, become bigger risk takers, but you know just change the culture. Is there a starting point?
Bracken Darrell:
Well, at the risk of sounding really boring, I think what most people want to hear is you know go put bean bags on the floor. Bring a pool table into the lobby. You know have a – everybody wear flip-flops to work, and you’re going to get more innovation.
Johnny Spragg:
Sounds like Facebook.
Bracken Darrell:
Well, you might. I mean, they definitely, they’re a pretty good story. You might, by the way. But I guarantee you, the companies that do that, don’t only do that. They have processes that drive, that attract and drive innovation.
You know they have metrics that make sure that they’re actually, that they’re delivering high levels of innovation. You know they know that they’re delivering 25 to 30 percent of their new products ever year, innovative. They have a definition for, what is innovation? You know they know what that means.
So, I think all those things, it really is about management excellence, high expectations, management excellence, and then managing risks. I think with those three things you really can, any company anywhere can deliver innovation. Innovation is about making things better, solving problems.
So, you’ve go to be able to identify the problems or the opportunities you want to solve. Then the innovation comes pretty easily, once you have a process to draw that out.
Johnny Spragg:
And just, how do you define innovative success
Bracken Darrell:
We’re growing market share or improving our overall value creation, as a business. We’re doing those two things for the shareholders. We’re doing those two things. I can also tell you, we’re probably creating higher engagement for employees. So, when you put those three together, I would say that’s the best definition of “are we winning in the innovation race?”
Johnny Spragg:
So, what are your core values at Whirlpool Europe?
Bracken Darrell:
I mentioned one of them, the one I personally think is the most distinctive here. If you ask what’s a really distinctive core value? It’s winning spirit. You can tell I love that one. And I think most of us who – it’s a, really a defining value for us. You know people who have it do well. People who don’t have it, sometimes you know plateau.
So, this desire to win and to compete and loving that, and being, debating and critical of ourselves, because we can do better than that, that’s all wrapped up in winning spirit. I’ll give you an example. When I first came to this company, I had the benefit of sitting on another region’s monthly or this case it was the end of the year, so it was the annual review of the business. But we do it every month with our CEO.
And this region had the best region ever – I mean, best year ever, best quarter ever, best month ever, so, finished an amazing month, an absolute you know, wow. Pat me on the back. I really did well. They went through the business review with the CEO and it was a great review, wonderful. At the end of the review, they added an extra page. The page was, here’s all the things we screwed up and here’s how much it cost us. That’s winning spirit. So, that’s a pretty important value.
Johnny Spragg:
Do you ever go to bed thinking that was a crap day?
Bracken Darrell:
Oh, of course, yeah, absolutely. No. The other thing I started doing a few years ago, was I could create in my – you know I’d have a frustrating day or a frustrating – I finally decided, you know what. We at least have to know where we’re going. So, let’s start with where we’re going. So, you know even if, it’s some numbers or a picture or, I always encourage people to do this, you know create the picture for where you’re going.
Because when you have that picture, first of all it’s more real, and it may be a word picture, a numerical picture, but it may literally be a picture. But create the picture of where you’re going, because when you’ve got that, you can take all the bad days and the rough nights, and the 2009s.
Johnny Spragg:
And I think we all make mistakes, we all do. I think every successful company’s based on mistakes, and learning from them. How do you know when you’re right? Sometimes it’s easy to know when you’re wrong. In your heart of hearts, when you work out over everything, yeah, I may have been wrong on that. But how do you know when you’re actually right, when everyone else around you is telling you you’re wrong?
Bracken Darrell:
You’re wrong. You know it’s really interesting. In your career, and this is what I meant. You asked me what would I, give advice to myself when I first started, and I said I’d be a little less patient. I think you accumulate wisdom and intuition as you go through. You can’t exactly define what that is. I’m a very data driven person, so I highly rely on data. But, for all the really tough decisions, the data goes both ways. So, you end up having to rely to some extent on your intuition.
I think the longer you work the more confident you get. You face more and more tough situations. You had to make a call. Sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes you’re right. If you’re fortunate, you’re right more than you’re wrong. If you’re really, fortunate, a lot more than you’re wrong. It builds a certain level of confidence in your intuition.
You know, I guess one of them is that it’s all about people. You know it took me a little while to learn that, because when you’re young you think, at least I thought, you know you can do anything if you work hard enough. So, I outworked everybody else. I worked longer. I worked harder. I’m not sure I always worked better, but I worked a lot.
It took me a while to realize, hold it. There’s another way – have great people. Then as I progressed through my career I’ve had – and it’s a lot of my mentors and coaches, people who worked for me, as well as people who I worked for, who helped me understand it really is about having great people. You want to be surrounded by people who are better than you.
When you pull that off, it’s amazing. It’s amazing what a difference it makes. So, I guess that’s the most important piece of advice I’ve ever gotten, was you know, don’t over rely on a process. Don’t over rely on yourself. Don’t over rely on great thinking. You know, over rely on great people, and if you don’t have great people, build them or find them.