Hello, my name is Rajeev Suri. I'm the CEO of Inmarsat,
a global satellite communications company. These are my biggest lessons.
And these are my biggest lessons.
My first lesson is to ask a lot of questions.
I like to ask a lot of searching questions so that you can get to
the bottom of the answer and sort of conceptualize the idea.
I'll give you an example. When I started my current company about a year ago,
the first thing I did was to meet with all 140 senior leaders in a one-to-one setting,
so I can ask questions about the culture, about the technology about where we're going,
about what they think we should change.
I also did a survey of three very simple questions with all employees.
I asked them: What do you want me to absolutely retain? What do you want me to change?
And what do you think is working well at the company?
And then I'm recalling my time, when I was a first time CEO back in 2009,
I was CEO of Nokia Siemens Networks.
And it was very clear that I wanted to be a customer centric company.
So, the first thing I did was to go out and meet
100 customers in 100 days face to face so I could ask them what is working and what we must change.
Stay humble and grounded. Humility is a personal trait. I like to be down to earth.
It's just the way I am, but I also think it's great if
that can translate into your company values in some way, shape or form.
So, for me in my previous company, we had that illustrated through respect and openness.
The thing is when the leadership team is grounded, is down to earth and displays humility.
It says to people that we have an open door.
You know, we are willing to listen and learn from employees, from the best ideas in the company.
It says that bad news can travel faster than good news,
and you're okay with that. It says that you accept criticism.
And so, I love the idea of companies being humbled.
And when bad news travels faster than good news, it does mean that you rarely are blindsided,
and you have no risk of company arrogance.
I recall when I became CEO of Nokia in 2014, the first thing we got to work with the top 45 people
was our values, because I think values are timeless.
They last forever, culture can change with your business context, but values are timeless.
And so, we got to work on the values. And after we worked with our top 45 people, we did
a culture jam for two days to get all 100,000 people enlisted in co-creating the values and
it was a super energetic process, but it also set us up for a period of major change.
My third lesson is to build a star team, not a team of stars, and ensure that that team is better
than you in every respect in every field because that's how you create greatness in a company.
Back when we were trying to revive Nokia, through the revival of Nokia’s infrastructure business,
our profit was zero, our revenues were declining 21%, but we had a team
that was brought together and really live that shared goal
of success to revive the company and to bring it back to its days of glory.
And we took that annual profit that we had a time of zero in 2009
to, well, more than 2 billion some years later.
And during that special phase of 2010 to 2012,
that team was just driven by that one shared goal, and we created that star team.
And here, when I've joined my current role about a year ago,
I brought in about a third of the team from outside.
The rest of the team had a lot of deep space sector knowledge.
And we've retained that part of the team,
but we brought in people from the outside where we needed the greatest change.
So, marrying the outside perspectives with that deep space sector knowledge is now
allowing us to create that dream team.
And the task here at this company is not a turnaround or revival,
but it is about doing great new things.
And so, in just eight months, we've been able to announce that we are combining with
a fast-growing company so that we can create a number one industry leader,
and it’s also allowed us to launch a few things right at the outset in just
under six months because we were able to gel well as a team.
My fourth lesson is to choose speed over perfection. You rarely go wrong with speed.
Companies have a lot of institutional knowledge, and there's a lot of deep instinct there.
Leaders rarely tap into that gut instinct. But you marry that analysis with gut instinct,
and you get to the right, speedy decision making.
So, for me, speed is a real virtue that's underestimated in companies.
And so, when I became CEO here a year ago,
the first thing we got to work on was a future back strategy.
So, we looked at, okay, what kind of technologies do we need 10 years from now?
And what kind of company do we want to be 10 years from now?
And so, play back from that point and say, what are the things that we need to do now
to enable that future? And so, we launched ORCHESTRA.
ORCHESTRA is the first of its kind global mobility communications network, which combines
low Earth orbit solutions, with high Earth orbit solutions,
as well as 5G from the terrestrial side, and our geostationary orbit satellites.
This has not been imagined before in the industry. So, we did that fairly quickly.
We combined that with some analysis and some deep gut feel,
and we surprised all our competitors and we delighted most of our customers.
On the other side, there was another decision, which was waiting to happen for a long time.
It's called ELERA, and ELERA is an IoT pivot, an industrial Internet of Things pivot that we
chose to drive by way of new technology, and this was a decision waiting to happen for a
number of years at the company because people were looking for the perfect business case.
And like I said, you won't find a perfect business case sometimes,
and endless debate has to stop. And so, we made a decision.
We moved forward, and already some months later, we’re enjoying the fruits of both these decisions.
My final lesson is to experiment and fail fast. That says to your people that you're
willing to take risks, you're willing to incubate new businesses, you're willing to
make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, but also says that you're willing to learn.
Because companies don't often institutionalize failures and learn from those things.
So, you want to experiment, you want to create experimentation culture,
but also as individuals, you want to learn, learn and learn.
You want to learn beyond your job, and I've always chosen all of my roles based on learning first
and other things came later because learning is what drives me to put in my best.
And so, I was 25 years at Nokia. I changed some 10 jobs.
I've done strategy jobs, I've done technology, leadership roles, I've done product management,
I've done account management, I've led a large region,
culminated in me leading the largest business unit in which I had no background,
services business unit, and we created that to become the fastest business unit in the company.
And then I became the CEO of the company later, as well. And so not only that,
I also moved a number of locations, I think I live in some eight countries during that time.
So, moving locations, changing bosses, and changing roles just becomes very exciting.
So, my philosophy has always been if you stop learning,
you're in a comfort zone, time to do something different.
And I brought that here as well to my current company,
and we're trying to take more risk, and we're trying to create experimentation.
And so why did I choose my current company?
Because it does something completely different from the company I came from.