As we approached the second sunrise of the flight to Singapore I closed my laptop lid. I’d worked eighteen straight hours and built a demo-able mock system that seemingly would show a supply chain alive, with data and visualizations that told compelling stories.
I’d made up on the fly, pardon the pun, a strategy, system, and a story. With Excel spreadsheets embedded into a PowerPoint file with maps, charts and clickable links and buttons, saved as an HTML file and opened in a web browser I could mimic a vision for Dyson.
Upon arrival I met John, the Senior Vice President of Strategy for my company in the hotel lobby bar. John was solid-built and slick and a fellow countryman. He was a powerful person in the company then and aggressive and harassing. Much like his former colleague who was known as an ass and is now sitting in Florida on death row for killing his ex-wife and her lover.
John once ran a label company and was the brainchild behind the "Intel Inside" sticker on computers. He wanted to turn a room in the Singapore factory into a makeshift command center because this is what Blackberry had. The Chief Operating Officer of Dyson had come from Blackberry and established that setup – I saw it with my own eyes in a pirated video on John’s laptop, of which I was sworn to secrecy.
We took a taxi to the factory where John staked claim to a rectangular conference room and demanded all overhead projectors in the building be dismounted and laid in a line on the conference table.
While painters brushed the walls with fresh white odorless paint in front of us, John briefed us and then we performed dry run after dry run of what we were going to show Dyson. My reporting Vice President, Fred, was shamed in front of us all for his answers to John’s questions and a local employee was sent home to bed to 'get rid of his cold before the meeting'.
On Saturday in the famous Raffles Hotel, we and our competitor were grilled separately by two panel interviews on our business practices. A slip up and John would flip.
After a few hours, Jean, a stylish Frenchman who was leading the pack stood up and demanded we now take them to our command center. They were blown away. Fred did a good job of teeing things up for my demonstration and gave me an encouraging “Don’t fuck this up” whisper before handing me the floor. But things went well. In fact, things couldn’t have gone better.
We didn’t win the business. Our pricing was too high. But Dyson saw what they needed to see. A condition of our competitor winning was to catch up by the five years that we were 'ahead of them'. A few months later, they incubated a Santa Clara software startup called Elementum with SIXTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS and put one of their VPs as CEO.
My CEO funded me a million dollars. The race of technology supply chain software had begun and so too did the next chapter of my career.