Scoring for the Customer

The Esprit team has planned and produced the Siemens Building Technologies Annual Management Meeting (AMM) for the past 20 years. The first 10 years were for companies such as MCC Powers,  Landis & Staefa and Landis & Gyr. Then, 12 years ago Siemens bought Landis & Gyr. Initially, it was a tough transition and much of their senior management experienced turnover. Then during the past 5 years the Building Technologies Division of Siemens North America has had outstanding results with excellent sales and profit growth, along with the rollout of many innovative products and services.

During that time, many European executives have been brought over to help manage this division. In most cases they did well, but their personality did not always gel with the American way of doing business and the personalities of some of the US based managers. A few months ago a new president was brought over from Europe. While he did conduct an initial road trip to many of their branches across North America, the AMM was really his first chance to meet and be with all of his managers. He was made aware of the major staging and production for the general sessions and the raw excitement of the awards ceremony. Our communications client was unsure how he would do with our way of doing meetings and to say the least, he rose to the occasion.

He embraced his role as host of the event, always had a big smile on his face and was always the first one to jump up and high five the award winners. I believe he was blown away when he saw how the power of face-to-face communication created a bond with him and his managers like no other form of communication can.

The meeting had a baseball theme of “Hitting a Home Run for the Customer”.

We had our welcome reception at Fenway Park and many of the workshops had baseball analogies to make their training come alive. Also, the awards ceremony had a wonderful take off of the Field of Dreams called Dreams of the Field and drew comparisons from baseball and laughter from the audience.

To demonstrate their customer commitment and warm welcome at the end of the conference, the field managers came to the stage and gave the new president a baseball signed by his direct reports as their commitment to 2013’s goals and objectives.