Richard Millman comes to Houston with a little over a year under his belt as president and CEO of Bell Helicopter and fresh from trips to India and Asia. He sat down with Rotor & Wing to discuss the company, its challenges, and its plans.
Last year, at your first Heli-Expo as the head of Bell, you said the company had “islands of excellence” that you wanted to meld into a continent of excellence. What progress have you made on that?
We’ve made a huge amount of progress. That’s due in large part to the team at Bell, which is as strong a leadership team as I’ve ever worked with. The team has been strongly aligned on what we need to do. There are no “yes men” in this place. We’ve got lots of opinions. But everyone agrees that we’re on the right path.
The impression in the market was that Textron brought you in last year to straighten out the problems at its Bell subsidiary. Are you a troubleshooter for Textron?
I wouldn’t describe myself that way. The corporation trusts me to go into an operation, have a look, and make the right decisions about where that operation needs to go. And most of the time I do okay. Bell has outstanding growth opportunities, and we’re going to punch up the returns.
What did you determine to be your priorities as you settled in at Bell?
Companies are successful when they are what I would call learning organizations. You want to make sure that the experiences you have are embedded in the processes that you use, so that everyone has the ability to learn from those experiences. If you finish a project and write a lessons-learned book, nobody ever reads it, and if they do, they don’t read it in context and the lessons just don’t get passed along.
Textron started as a corporation in 2001 to transform itself and its units into a learning organization. We started using the same product-development process at all businesses. The questions you ask at each phase of development are essentially the same, whether you’re building a business jet at Cessna, a golf cart at E-Z-GO, or a helicopter at Bell.
Bell was not as deeply engaged in that learning process as Bell could have been, in my opinion. We are now. So my expectation is we will do better. These things don’t happen over night. We’re not going to get the kind of profit margin at Bell that we get at Cessna or Textron Systems [which Millman formerly led] overnight. But the arrow is pointing in that direction.
Where does Bell see the market right now?
Demand is very strong. Part of our business goes with oil prices—higher prices means more exploration, and the oil companies need more birds. Emergency medical services is growing rapidly. Law enforcement and homeland security is growing rapidly. Part of that is the global war on terror, part of that is law enforcement in general.
The issue is having the capacity to meet the demand. So we’re building capacity like crazy.
What are your expectations for Heli-Expo this year?
This year’s HAI is going to be a very interesting one. Last year, I was showered with gifts. ["When customers tell you how you can do things better, it’s a gift," he told R&W last year at Heli-Expo. "They’ve given me a lot of gifts."] This year I expect to receive additional gifts. But I expect also to see some customers who are better satisfied than they were before.
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