For the manager here came his second lesson in professional life. In a corporate environment, the best way to grow is by making others grow and not relegating them.
Until 2000, 70% of GE’s income came from the United States and 30% from the rest of the world. A decade later the equation was reversed. Martín worked as account director for the north of Latin America, and attended the CFE in Mexico and the CFNL in Costa Rica.
Later he was appointed Director of Sales and Operations for the north of Latin America to serve the public transmission networks of the public and private sector. They did the design, engineering and construction of electrical substations. The manager reports that over four years they had double-digit growth. “A business that for GE Mexico was barely 20 or 30 million dollars a year, we converted it to 105 million dollars a year.”
In Martin’s opinion, the company began to make unfortunate decisions. The most notorious was the purchase of the French competitor Alstom because it represented a clash of cultures within the organization. Another, that the gas-based electricity generation market had been declining and had an excess of installed capacity. “That’s where his downfall began.”
The challenge of making ‘smart’ light bulbs with scarce chips
The quest for reinvention was what captivated Pedro Martín at Signify. His arrival at the company was marked by the challenge of entering the world of smart lighting and then experienced the disruption in supply chains due to the pandemic.
For the first time, the Dutch company was competing with companies like Tesla and Samsung for the purchase of chips. “It was really hard because Signify went from being a lighting company to a technology company. Today lighting is a secondary effect of technology. We had to look for new suppliers”, she reveals.
Added to this was the challenge of redesigning the product in a very short time to use the chips they obtained and launch the smart bulb on the market. The company’s chips sources are China, Korea and Japan, while its main factories are in China, the United States and Mexico.
“But even if you have the best product in the world, it is useless if people are not well,” he says. During the pandemic, Tal Ben Shahar and Martin Seligman, specialists in positive psychology, dedicated themselves to studying the Science of Happiness. They preferred to give seminars on wellbeing and no training on sales techniques. This allowed them to delve into happiness as an organizational philosophy.
Today, Martín is convinced that professional success does not come to be happy. “Once you are happy, you will be able to be successful, and before putting pressure on commercial teams to go out and sell, it is better to talk to them to find out how they feel. If you make people feel good, the other automatically follows because happy people are willing to give the extra when necessary, ”he says.
In 2020, the company grew 9% when the economy decreased 8%, and the construction sector, which is one of the most important for Signify, fell 30%. This did not diminish the ability of the company’s talent to find new opportunities, as its e-commerce platform grew 20%.
As a purpose, each year 25% of the products in the portfolio are new and currently, Signify Mexico serves the final consumer by offering traditional and intelligent lighting at home, street lighting, construction through distributors of electrical equipment for corporations, projects such as the lighting of the Azteca Stadium and the BBVA tower in Reforma and Luminarios, to whom they sell Philips components.
In 2021, the company grew 8% year-on-year and the expectation for 2022 is to reach a similar percentage, considering that consumption in Mexico is depressed by inflation above 8%. “That could impact the results, but they are economic cycles in all sectors. The important thing is to have an open mind to see business opportunities”.
For the manager, the challenge for 2023 will continue to be caring for and developing people’s resilience. Their concerns and environments can favor or reduce their performance and desire to be in a company.