Frequently Asked Questions About the New Management Structure at Aurora WDCWritten by Arik Johnson on Wed, 03/03/2010 - 4:00pm.
On Monday, March 1st, 2010 we welcomed the dawn of a new era at Aurora WDC. Derek Johnson, Aurora's Chief Operating Officer and Director of Research for the past seven years, was promoted to Chief Executive Officer while I stepped into the new role of Chairman, after having served as CEO myself since founding the company in our hometown of Chetek, Wisconsin in 1995.
Derek and I began planning for him to take the management reins of the company in the latter half of 2009 and timed the official hand off to coincide with Derek's seventh anniversary at the firm. Derek joined Aurora on March 1st, 2003 after beginning his career in the investment management business, where he earned both an executive MBA and the Chartered Financial Analyst designation among his other credentials. In fact, I had been actively recruiting Derek for several years before he finally agreed to come to Aurora. Derek's strengths in business and as a manager were so complimentary to my own it furnished us the opportunity to grow the company in new ways that I could never have managed alone.
As some of you may know, Derek and I are brothers and, right behind his eminent professional qualifications in my calculus of recruiting him, our relationship of deep mutual trust and admiration which began in childhood meant we might be able to accomplish things others could only dream of. Growing up as tight-knit brothers in a rural Midwestern community, Derek and I came to rely on one another's advice and friendship long before we ever took an interest in one another's career. We helped each other through our parents' passing and our closest friends became one another's over the years.
What this all meant for me was, there was nobody else in the world as qualified for the job as Derek was when we discussed his coming aboard in 2003 to take over my original role of running the research business of the company as I turned my attention toward expanding into new lines of business. Around the same time, my wife Tina and I started having children and Derek was once again called upon to step to the plate and take over day-to-day management, not only of research, but of company operations as a whole in my absence. This was the start of another critical transition for Aurora as the crucible of running all of the internal operations for the company (which, by then, had grown substantially from its one-man origins) became only the latest challenge Derek tackled.
Today, Derek's ready to lead Aurora into its next 15 years and we believe the benefits to the company, its people, business partners and, most importantly, to Aurora's clients, will bring a new level of passion, intellectual engagement and creativity to Aurora's offerings. Another happy, if ironic, side-effect is that Derek and I will also have the chance to work more closely together, which has been another goal of ours for a while now.
In response to some of the more frequently asked questions we've been hearing over the past few weeks in notifying and seeking advice from Aurora's “extended family” about the change, we thought it would be helpful to write a short FAQ to guide you as well. It's also been helpful for us to define the benefits for Aurora's team, for our many valued clients and friends and for one another more explicitly; but if you have additional questions that you don't see on our list, please reach out anytime to Derek or me and we'll be happy to answer them for you.
On behalf of everyone at Aurora WDC, we thank you once again for your trust and confidence these past 15 years and we look forward to celebrating with you in person at the SCIP 2010 conference next week in Washington DC or whenever we're able to see each other again in person.
Best wishes,
Arik Johnson
Founder & Chairman
What are the benefits of this change to Aurora's clients?
Most important to everyone at Aurora is how this change will affect our clients and their expectations of Aurora's ability to help satisfy their intelligence needs. Indeed, as the pace of change accelerates in every industry, the uncertainties that accompany strategy, operations, market and product decision-making also increase.
It's never really been a matter of having the right tools to anticipate disruptions to your company's status quo - we actually have that figured out pretty well - it's more a matter of leadership to confront the hard realities of the marketplace while engaging the workforce in making the tough decisions that determine the fate of organizational sustainability.
Aurora WDC will be better able to assist with client needs in our chosen service categories – or recommend referrals to similarly vetted partners when there are better options available – as a result of the managerial structure we've now put in place. But we will also be able to improve our service offering internationally in a more disciplined and organized fashion now that distinctions between Aurora's core research business and other lines of business are less of a factor at the management level.
How will Derek's role change?
While Derek will continue to oversee the operations of the core research business, reseach has become a more integral part of Aurora's complimentary lines of business so that program development can be pursued on a more integrated basis to meet more of our clients' needs. The role of COO has also been eliminated and all line of business managers will now report directly to Derek including the continuation of Aurora's various research vice presidents. This will enable Derek to look holistically at the complete enterprise for opportunities to add value to customer relationships and eliminate duplication redundancies in Aurora's various lines of business operations.
As regards developing new capabilities, Derek can also listen more directly to current clients who might have needs beyond Aurora's core research business alone and could involve intelligence needs in other areas, such as monitoring, systems consulting, program development, or training. Derek will also have more intimate relationships with Aurora's complimentary service partners around the world beyond industry, subject-matter and regional experts in the research business alone.
Derek will also be able to offer innovative program management techniques - such as Portfolio - which he has been developing while running the research business to assist client intelligence managers in finding the "efficient frontier" where ROI of their collective activities is greatest for their unique characteristics and enterprise. Portfolio as an intelligence asset management system means that those intelligence deliverables or "assets" which may once have been considered necessary but over time may have failed to prove an ROI can be reduced or eliminated while other methods which are producing a greater return on investment can be build up or increased. If you'd like to learn more about Portfolio or any of Aurora's integrated capabilities, please contact Derek directly to discuss how Aurora can help your enterprise reduce risk and exploit every opportunity to grow.
How will Arik's role change?
While Arik will remain available to work directly with Aurora's clients as requested, his focus will shift more toward topics of long-range planning, corporate identity, competency acquisition, partner relationships and the launch of Aurora's new R&D lab based in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Arik will also be engaged in developing new channels for thought leadership and intelligence community development within and beyond Aurora's current client base.
Aurora has always been disciplined in never letting our reach exceed our grasp by offering clients only those services which could be considered the very best available anywhere in the world. For all other client needs, we are diligent in screening partner firms to complement Aurora's own services or for Aurora to refer such work requests with confidence that similar high standards of client satisfaction will be met. This discipline of organizational design has become even more important as Aurora deliberately constrains its scope of services to core areas of value while stepping up recruitment of more global partners of all kinds that clients can turn to for help and which compliment our in-house capabilities.
However, there continues to be a seemingly infinite array of intelligence problems our clients face for which we have no current solution nor can we offer confident suggestions where they can turn for help. In recognition that many of these problems will require both expertise in existing methods (so as not to "reinvent the wheel") as well as creativity in the design of new solutions, Aurora has opened a new R&D lab to work directly with clients to pursue solutions together for eventual release through other organizations who might benefit from them. Though not strictly philanthropic in philosophy, the new focus on driving fresh ideas and breakthrough innovations in intelligence methodology, doctrine and theory will require new models for open collaboration among partners in the intelligence field. Without such a collaborative approach, the kinds of problems we expect to confront might never find a single sponsor to fund their resolution. And while Aurora and its clients and partners will work together toward solutions, we fully expect the side-effects of these endeavors to offer insights for Aurora's other lines of business as well as lessons for the field at large.
To support the firm's launch of this new R&D initiative, Aurora recently opened new offices near its headquarters in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin at 770 Technology Way – appropriately, perhaps, in the same building to serve as the original corporate headquarters of Cray Research, Inc., the world's first high-performance supercomputing company. Aurora's expansion in Chippewa Falls began when the company moved its headquarters to the city in 2002. So, if and when your organization is facing seemingly insoluble intelligence problems, please contact Arik directly to discuss potential research approaches.
And, finally, what are the benefits to Aurora WDC?
In a word: ambidexterity.
History has shown how difficult – even impossible – it can be for a single manager to think simultaneously about maximizing operational performance, customer satisfaction and financial results, while also looking several years down the road at where customer needs, technology and business methods are headed. And, even when s/he does, success all too often breeds complacency.
“It is a classic conundrum for business titans: How much money and attention should be focused on a new, but growing, operation that is far less profitable than the core business?”
~ Prof. Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma
Aurora is not immune to this paradox and we believe that in order to separate near-term objectives of continuous improvement in current operations, services and capabilities while also planning long-range to be where our customers' (and non-customers') needs will be in years to come, Aurora must also to separate these two perspectives into the offices of CEO and Chairman. Aside from the tenets of good governance dictating a separation of management interests from those representing shareholders among the board, we look forward to a more collectively ambidextrous point of view in every decision Aurora makes and everything Aurora does, for our clients as well as the company we love.
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