“Logitech is a human company.” For the final luncheon of the year, the AIC welcomed Bracken Darrell, the CEO of Logitech, to address a group of over 50 people at the Hotel Métropole in Geneva on December 7. Based in Lausanne, Logitech is a Swiss provider of personal computer (PC) and mobile peripherals.
Mr. Darrell took us through the last six years of Logitech, since he joined in 2012. “I made everything worse”, he said with a wry smile. In fact, the PC market was suffering great losses at the time, and Logitech was tributary to the general market trends. Mr. Darrell has since been on a quest to “rediscover who we are” and has brought the company back into healthy black figures, primarily through leveraging the value of design and exploring cloud-based products and services. Having learned the importance of design during his time at Braun, Mr. Darrell hired a former head designer from Nokia and currently has 150 designers at Logitech around the world.
Logitech is now exploring peripherals around cloud-based services. These include PC gaming, music and video-conferencing. He explained to the audience how they go about innovating and growing these products through a system he called “Trees – Plants – Seeds”. The trees are the cash cows that are growing but at a slow rate, such as their PC peripherals. The plants are the newer products that are growing fast, such as the peripherals around gaming. And the seeds are the small-scale teams working confidentially on innovating new products, many of which don’t make the assembly line.
Discussion around the “seeds” led Mr. Darrell to talk about a subject he claims to be fascinated about: leadership and teams. He believes that small teams are the most productive. In fact, he argues that the best teams are pairs, since there is only one relationship to manage. This seems to be the basis of his vision of the structure of Logitech, which he says is “superflat”. Indeed, he has 25 direct reports in the company and meets with each of the “seed” teams himself every two weeks.
He’s recently presented to his board the idea of “Scaling Small”. Mr. Darrell loves small companies, stating that things are changing too fast for a big company model to work anymore. The Scaling Small model puts small seed-like innovation units at the center of the organization, with procurement, distribution and supports teams surrounding these cells on the periphery. This allows for a relatively large company to still feel small, and put
Mr. Darrell’s presentation was informal and entertaining yet very informative. Eschewing any PowerPoint presentation, the CEO of Logitech took to pen and paper on three flip charts to draw for us his ideas. Many of the questions from the audience were focused on his Scaling Small idea. Rounding out the event, Ron Banks awarded Mr. Darrell with the customary Caran d’Ache pen and honorary membership, and said his farewells and thank yous for the last time as the AIC President.