HSI Sensing has long been an engineering company.  Our founder, my grandfather, was an engineer.  His son in law Bud was the next president, also an engineer.  Bud was followed by my uncle Tom, then my father David, both engineers.  Now I am leading the company and big surprise, am an engineer.  This culture puts us in a great position because we understand the value of a great design and a great product.

However, 47 years of engineering culture has some trade-offs.  Engineers are really good at making things complicated.  They are also really good at telling you why something won’t work.  As an engineer I have had to learn to balance the value of product with the value of relationships.  The same goes for the balance between logic and emotion.  This thinking has permeated our company culture.  It shows itself in how we design new products.  It shows up in how we approach new opportunities and new orders.   It shows up in our quality system.  It even shows up in how we set up and administer benefits.   The engineering culture is pretty ingrained.

{Let me interrupt this blog post to say that this is not all bad.  Nor does it mean that we exhibit all of the worst engineering stereotypes that you can imagine.  Now back to the post}

So now as we embark on our 48th year, the challenge is to balance our strong engineering culture with more sales culture.  It will require us to de-emphasize some of the Engineering personality and play up a more Sales friendly personality.  The Engineering culture which wants to rely solely on logic, quantitative justification and product innovation to grow versus the Sales culture wants to respond to customer emotions in order to make them happy and put relationships first.

For years these cultures have been viewed as opposing forces.  Almost like the light and dark sides of the Force.  One inherently good and the other only leading to bad outcomes.  As a company led by engineers you can guess which was which.

I do not believe this to be true.  I believe we can restore balance to the Force.  Those forces of sales and engineering need not be mutually exclusive.  A result that ultimately optimizes the customer experience.  The goal is to develop great products AND great relationships.

My next posts will address specifically my goals in achieving balance and the plan of attack.  It’s easy to lament cultural problems, but it’s another thing entirely to try and change the cultural norms.  Yet, this is precisely what I intend to do for the benefit of all involved, especially our customers.