“We were going 90 miles per hour on an icy road, headed toward a cliff.”
This is how president Jay Graf described the feeling at Cardiac Pacemakers (CPI), developer of cardiovascular technology, following its acquisition by one of the foremost global pharmaceutical companies. Performance was sky-rocketing. Sales growth, too. But Graf saw innovation at other companies surpassing CPI — and CPI had no product in development to overtake the competition.
Graf knew that CPI needed to build a product development process in order to avoid the rapidly approaching cliff.
Solution
Graf and his team knew they had an issue with internalized belief and lack of confidence after the first series of receptive listening conversations among the organization. Graf and his leadership team laid out results that brought internalized skepticism into the air. Open dialogue where beliefs and negative experiences arise can be difficult and feel chaotic in the moment. But by listening, Graf and the leadership at CPI were then able to articulate what needed to change in the organizational culture, in the form of results:
We’re missing the market.We lead the market.We have very few new products.We have many new products.We rely on acquired tech. We rely on our product development.We miss deadlines.We hit deadlines.We have a 4-year development cycle. We have an 18-month development cycle.
Results
14 new products in 14 months.
Annual sales: doubled.
9x increase in stock price.
