Implementing change means there is no time to rest for Logica chief
March 23, 2009
What happens when you put someone who doesn't really need the job in charge of a corporate basket case? The answer, in the case of Andy Green and Logica, is quite a promising turnaround situation.
It is just over a year since Mr Green was parachuted into Britain's biggest software and IT services company, after 22 years at BT, with an agenda for change. One of his first challenges was to shake up the culture at Logica.
“The first issue was that it wasn't a company, it was a series of businesses that came together to fight for their turf in a centre called Stephenson House. The building itself had real personality, but it was an awful one — the lifts didn't work, the toilets got blocked. People used to refer to ‘what Stephenson House says' and I said: ‘Hang on, buildings don't talk.' There were people who had been beaten down by it.”
From having more than 700 staff in the old headquarters, Logica now has a small office in Kings Place, the swanky new block near King's Cross station in London. Other staff are in Reading.
“The second thing was that I knew Logica didn't sell well, it wasn't a sales-driven organisation. It spent 40 per cent less on sales and marketing than the sector average. When I spoke about the need to keep overheads down, I was shocked when some people interpreted that as cutting the sales force.
“I'd never heard the sales force being referred to as an overhead before, as a necessary evil, rather than being at the heart of a thriving company.
“That was when I came up with the idea that we needed to change the culture. I started on January 5 last year and, by April 24, we came out with our strategic review. We had a pretty simple plan: we would integrate the company, cut overheads, grow our offshoring operations and have a ‘one Logica' policy.
“I know every CEO has a ‘one something' strategy, but that was ours. The City thought it was OK when we presented it to them and then the next day I got our top 200 managers in. We presented the story to them in six frames and spent all our time trying to energise them.
“Then I spent the next few weeks on the road talking to the staff. I spoke to around one third of our 40,000 people in total. I didn't want what we were doing to be blocked by anyone on the ground.” He added: “The other key way we signalled that things were changing was when I started a blog — which people were just amazed by. I insisted also on going out with our salespeople — I have seen a customer a day since starting in this job. We also did lots of video messaging and I have also done webchats with the staff.
“Closing Stephenson House was the other key thing we did. The way people saw things were changing, the signals on how the organisation was changing, to let them know what was different, was to talk to them all the time about customers. A lot of my time is about driving cultural change.
“We did have to make some reductions in the headcount, but the point is, if you do it in a framework, people understand and even find it energising.”
Although Logica is the biggest of its kind in the UK, Mr Green is keenly aware that it is much smaller than its competitors in the United States, and some in India. He said: “There are three ways you can compete — on cost, on product difference or on customer focus. The Indians compete on cost. With the Americans, it is on the products.
“Where we are different is our customer intimacy. We are so European, we don't believe in Europe, if you understand that. What I mean is that, unlike the Americans, we don't regard Europe as a whole. We love the diversity of Europe. If you are in Finland, you need a good Finnish team. You can't give them what you give your French customers. We don't just say this — we constantly stick to it. And people appreciate our ability to listen and to be local. For example, we were bidding to run a call centre for some customers in Norway. To save costs, they wanted people being called to answer in English rather than Norwegian. We gave them options — they didn't want India, so we gave them Wales. The standard response would just have been to give them something in India, but they didn't want that. They are paying more by being in Bridgend, rather than India, but what got us that job was being flexible.
“The other people we were competing against for that work just had a standard way of doing it. It is a question of being bright enough to listen — and you don't always get that with American companies.”
Mr Green knew about business from an early age. Born in Solihull and educated at King Edward's School in Edgbaston, Birmingham — when it was a state school, he noted — his father was a director of a company that made scaffolding. He said: “My Dad was a proper metal-basher. They made things, as you should in the Midlands. It is one disappointment to me that I've never made things.
“Dad had a very strong sense of values and was a very good salesperson and very good with people. My mother was a real business wife. She spent a lot of time away, travelling around with him, as well as entertaining at home. There were four of us and we always had to be on our best behaviour.
“At school, I was always into maths and science and I chose Leeds University because its chemical engineering course was a year shorter and I was keen to get into business. I was very keen to get working. Unfortunately, I chose chemical engineering, rather than electrical engineering, which would have been the smarter move, but chemical engineering was more interesting. There was a physical product at the end of it.”
Mr Green started his career as a graduate trainee with Shell, where he rapidly learnt the importance of client relationships. He said: “I went straight into industrial sales and marketing and had responsibility for a plant in Wilton, on Teesside, which went straight into an ICI factory so there was always a similar set of questions at the end of every month — how much are we going to supply you and at what price?
“I enjoyed Shell very much, but the problem I had with them was that they tried to tell you from an early age what your career was going to be — and I did not like that very much.”
He left to become a management consultant for Deloitte Haskins & Sells, where his first assignment was with BT. He said: “I was there as a consultant but got a bit fed up about the fact that when I would do work, the world would change and consequently the work would change, and I got very fed up with not seeing things get done. I like to see results. So it was time to go. I was about to do so when I was invited to go and fix payphones for BT.
“It was one of their markets where they had big problems. Payphones were a symbol of everything that was horrible about the company — around a quarter of them were broken at any one time and someone in the Government had been asking questions about it. Somebody at BT, in response to this, had stood up and said: ‘It will all be fixed by March.' So we had no time at all.
“I then had the brainwave of sending people out to check the boxes a few times a day — previously, it had been assumed that the public would just get in touch if they weren't working, which, of course, they didn't.”
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