Why do you need a Passport?

 For reasons that escape me now, I found myself in Waltham, Massachusetts one day, speaking to an assembled crowd of designers and product marketing managers.   It might have been due to a scheduled Logic Analyzer talk, or it might have been a Corporate Engineering visit.   The former would have been circa 1978, the latter about 1982 or 1983.  I imagine that it was the latter.

Whatever the gist of it, I was 'on-stage' in front of 200+ folk, who had just learned that their division was being carved up, that Boeblingen would be allowed to enter the ICU monitoring business, since they had essentially defaulted on serving the European medical market. 

Mad as hornets, they saw me as a 'corporate puke' at the moment, and I must have been part of the game to strand them!   Well, I knew nothing about this, but there I was, more or less unarmed and defenseless.  My first feeble attempt was to say that they, this very division, had taken my graphics program away from me in Colorado Springs because Dave Packard thought that they could sell displays far faster than we could.  He probably was right about that--in 1970, hardly anyone but the U of Utah and Alvy Ray Smith's NYIT thought displays for computers was a good idea.   

That didn't cut any ice with them, so I tried another tack.  I said, "what are your sales in the US, and what are they in Europe?"   The answer was that basically no one in the room seemed to know.  Later, I checked, and the sobering truth was that four years earlier, Waltham and Andover orders were $104M in the US, and $36.7M in Europe.  Now, four years later after lots of 'push' from Corporate to "do more" in Europe, the numbers were $183M to $49.8M.  Sales in the US had grown 76%, vs. 36% in Europe.

But I didn't know that at the time.  I had a simple question:  "How many of you have been to Europe this year?"  No hands.   "How many last year?"   No hands.   

"How many of you have a valid US Passport?"  Four hands.  Probing, I found that wo of them were only for vacations in the Caribbean; the other two were for international travel, but neither had done so fo more than three years.

I heard myself practically screaming, "I'm glad they took your charter and sent it to someone else.  You're not running your business as a worldwide business in any way."

It did not endear me to the crowd, needless to say.  But I did keep track, and in 1982, four years later (which is way too quick for a new division to gear up, and especially to invent something for the 'local market), the overall numbers were $308M to $74M.   The US sales up another 68%, Europe up 49%.  Getting slightly better.  Four years more, and the results were $421M to $152M -- now we're seeing 37% growth in the USA, and 105% in Europe.   

Vindication?  Yes, but it took almost a decade.  These kinds of business strategic decisions don't change things 'overnight' and my guess is that few, if anyone, in the room that day ever calculated the numbers a decade later, to say "Hummn, guess they had a point there."

But, for me, the question was: "How did I come up with that question about passports?  And was that the key to the puzzle?"