Konecranes’ Executive Vice President of Technologies, Claes Erixon, visited Gofore’s Intelligent Industry 25 event to talk about leadership in today’s rapidly changing global business environment. Erixon argues that traditional long-ranging detailed planning is becoming less relevant, and calls for more empowerment and autonomy for managers, to follow set strategies and direction.
Claes Erixon has a long career in the automotive industry, mainly with Scania, and has now been with Konecranes for some 1.5 years. As a strong believer in empowering leadership, he is now acting to strengthen that even more within Konecranes.
– It takes courage to move away from the overly detailed planning that many organizations rely on. When all the targets are not met – and usually they are not, you get caught in the trap of “excuse management”, meaning trying to explain why the targets, set when we knew the least, were not met. Then we probably do a “lessons learned” exercise to try to improve the target setting for next time. When the surrounding world and business environment are taking surprising turns, the traditional way of long-term detailed planning no longer serves us, he says.
Gently nudging the change forward
How to change the “This is how we’ve always done it” mindset is the million-dollar question.
– The shift towards that leadership style is not done overnight but it’s doable. You can’t force something like this in. Introducing it is like nudging; we need to take our time to talk about this and allow people to digest it, Erixon describes.
While he is still relatively new to Konecranes, Erixon’s ambition is to help drive an even stronger empowering leadership style at the company. Like Scania, Konecranes is also a fully global company, which means that cultural differences require extra challenge when implementing changes into the entire organization.
– I think the overall fascination of making plans is really hard to abandon. Transitioning from top-down to bottom-up leadership takes time. We need to find ways to get employees to feel involved and supported by the management, Erixon says.
So how should the transformation be done? Erixon emphasizes the need to have clearly communicated strategy and direction. Be distinct about identifying adequate customer pull and define the capacity you allocate. Include the customer early in the execution, and be explicit when delegating and setting clear guardrails.
– However, in uncertainty, your greatest certainty is the collective power of your people, Erixon reminds.
Similar transformation in automotive and material handling
When leadership is agile and empowering, a company may be quicker than its competitors to adapt to fast changes. Erixon spent 30 years with Scania, where the change pace has been almost as high as in the passenger car business of late. Electrification, automation, servitisation and connectivity happen to be the main technological developments in both automotive and material handling.
– We are definitely on the right path in terms of technological advancements. The customer offering is almost completely electrified, and we are well positioned. AI presents substantial opportunities; not just for productivity enhancement but also in directed AI expert systems that can assist service technicians with comprehensive knowledge, Erixon says.
Konecranes is exploring AI within its products to enhance operational safety and integrating into smart factory systems with other equipment in the customers’ workshops.
– I am sure that we will see even more applications for AI. One example is predictive maintenance. It will enable us to be more efficient in how we optimize the time of our technicians. We want to automate as much as possible and add value to the customers but always include the human in the equation, Claes Erixon ends.
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