On the road to glory it is rare that the ride is without a few bumps! The following is a description of one of our most challenging moments as a young company:
Our major"Butt-Pucker Moment" at Data Domain we effectionatly called the smoking backplane. (Brief description of the problem --we discovered a had an electronic fault in some of our backplanes that started to “smoke” –needless to say smoke in a data center is not a good thing). Electronic faults on motherboards have happened to many of the worlds top technology companies. The responses of many companies varies from do nothing, tech notice (client requested swap), and the extreme of active inform and replacement/repair on 100% of systems.
What would you do? Do you ignore the issue because it is not yet a reasonable percentage of clients impacted? Or do you do more?
For our team the only answer was to act in the best interest of our clients, their satisfaction, and safety and actively repair/replace 100% of systems. We stayed true to our cultural values at a time when we could have been tempted to ignore the issues (we had just filed our IPO).
- We contacted our 3rd party providers and they informed us that no one else had this issue... (we later found out they were not 100% truthful).
- We hired a failure analysis team to help us understand the potential extent of the issue
- We stopped shipping product until we had more information
- We were willing to incur millions of cost (financial reserve) to solve a problem
In reality, we had a very small number out of the many thousand of systems sold that showed this issue.
An example of failure defining culture:
Our third incidence of this occurrence occurred at a large Japanese client. Within 5 hours of the issue being reported myself and David Sangster our VP of Operations got on a plane to Japan to meet with the client directly.
The client while concerned - was appreciative of our rapid response...while the customer wanted to know root-cause we "saved-face" and the reputations of our young company and our local sales team via our actions of showing up and discussing our plan of discovering cause and remediation. These actions enabled us to take a very tense situation into another multi-million dollar order from this client in a short amount of time.
In the end "the smokers" were a test situation...an event that proved our culture and our commitment to clients and employee's. Our culture enabled us to make a decision quickly - there was no other choice for us.
About 3 years later the story of Toyota's Prius accelerator issues made a lot of news. Accelerating into parked cars is a serious problem -- but the way Toyota handled the issue caused them the most pain. They denied the problem...oops.
On the road to a Billion in revenue you will be tested -- remember who you are, and what you, and the company stand for...don't sacrifice your company for a short term money based decision - or everything that you do from there will be different.
Good luck!
