Pour ceux que ça intéresse y a une interview intéressante de Henry Juszkiewicz (une des deux qui ont repris gibson en 1986) ici, c'est assez sympa.
Citation:
Q: What was sick about it?
A: It had been for sale for two years. When you do that, your better employees get a little nervous. Most of the good employees had left. There was one guy in the entire company who actually knew anything about guitars. Product quality was terrible. Morale was really bad.
Q: How did you even start?
A: You have to do homework. I spent seven months sitting in that company. I pored over the books. I interviewed every employee. I interviewed dealers. I interviewed customers. I came up with a comprehensive plan. I was kind of known as the Harvard geek because I would sit in this little office in front of a computer most of the time. We made money the very first month. And we have not stopped growing since 1986.
Q: Were there key decisions that really made things jump?
A: I fired all of management. That made things jump! But they were so bad, I didn't want them near the place. What happens is it has nothing to do with the people involved. It has to do with a sick culture. Once a sick culture takes place — a certain belief system — it's virtually impossible to fix.
Q: Did you do anything in particular with the products themselves?
A: Our employees wouldn't buy our products. They thought they were bad. One practice common in all companies was that if a product didn't make a certain quality level, you would sell it as a second. The problem was that dealers were not necessarily telling their consumers that seconds were seconds. So I got into the factory and I picked up a guitar. Got the employees around. "See this guitar," I said. "This guitar says Gibson on it, and it's not Gibson quality. So, here's what we do." I took the guitar, and I smashed it on the factory floor. I said any guitar that doesn't make the grade is going to be put in a pile, and we are going to take a chain saw to it every week. We are doing that to this day. We have Japanese dealers who just cry when they see the pile. It's a very small pile, though, now.
Q:What else did you do?
A: I said we are going to increase prices. Prices were ridiculously low. And people said, the price has been decreasing 20% a year, how can you reverse that? I said I'm just going to double the prices on a lot of models. I actually tested it and got an inverse price curve. Basically it showed that every time I raised prices a certain amount, volume would go up.
