EXECUTIVE WATCH Larry Alexandre
President, United Rotorcraft By Rick Weatherford
The first impression is that Larry Alexandre seems not properly placed to lead United Rotorcraft, a well-known maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) leader that specializes in customizing helicopter medevac interiors one aircraft at a time. Alexandre is passionate about Lean, the practice of creating a more effective business by eliminating wasteful practices and focusing on value creation for customers. “Very few MROs in our industry believe that Lean principles apply in our world, often because they believe it is only for high-volume manufacturing. I’m a big believer in and practitioner of Lean principles to rally an entire team around making your business better (through efficiency) and creating value for your customers.” Earlier in his career when he worked in Operations at Turbomeca, Alexandre says, “I enjoyed taking inefficient practices, often rampant
in fragmented
industries like the helicopter industry, and making them more efficient and process oriented. I started each day with the belief that anyone in the team, with the right focus, could find waste in their processes, eliminate it, and improve efficiency.”
With quotes like that, one could envision Alexandre swinging a meat cleaver to cut off fat with little concern for employees and craftsmanship. Isn’t United Rotorcraft known for lovingly customizing one helicopter at a time? How can we let Henry Ford come in and replace custom craftsmanship with industrial assembly lines?
Before we send Cousin Eddie out next Christmas Vacation to kidnap Alexandre, tie him in a big red bow, and make him see how his cost- cutting, jelly-of-the-month-club ideas hurt little people, let’s remember one bottom-line fact: real business executives are more human — and humane — than fictional businessman tropes. First impressions can be dead wrong. We never saw Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko from Wall Street reading Think Like a Monk, but Alexandre is currently consuming that self-help book about leading a balanced life. (His wife, Prab, is a life coach.) “In my 30s, it was work, work, work all the time, climbing the ladder and trying to prove myself. Maybe I’m just aging, but I make it clear to my team throughout the year that I’m not impressed with someone working 60 or 70 hours a week,” Alexandre says. “I’m impressed by those who get their job done in 40 hours and have a life away from work. I have the responsibility as the leader of a business, as do the leaders around me, to make sure that we give our employees that ability to have balance. It’s so important because eventually burnout happens, people disengage or eventually walk away in a market where it’s difficult to find talent. Our objective as leaders should be to help our teammates work smarter, not ask them to work harder to compensate for inefficient processes. That is the essence of Lean.”
So much for first impressions. Put that in your smipe and poke it, Gordon Gecko! That’s how real business leaders talk.
14 Jan/Feb 2022
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