Tula International | Executive Search for Renewable Energy and Emerging Technologies

Tula International Spotlight on Executive Search in Wind Energy

ATLANTA 5-7-2012: Tula International succeeded in finding a superb General Manager for a company in the wind turbine engineering industry in Arkansas. Bernard Vanderlande, managing director of Tula International, knows the emerging wind energy market and explains: “The wind industry’s success depends on finding great people who really know the business, who understand and can sell the wind industry. Companies are looking for people with expertise in the industry, and that is our strength.”

The search was focused on identifying a candidate already prepared with a portfolio of global contacts and ready to perform from day one. “Tula International was able to find us an excellent candidate for the General Manager position. We were pleased with their disciplined approach. They know the industry, work hard and deliver,” explains Thomas Grigoleit, Executive Vice President of Beckmann Volmer GmbH & Co.

Filed Under: Wind

Do You Really Need an Executive Search Firm?

Interesting article by Warren Carter about Selecting a Retained Search Firm

Do You Really Need an Executive Search Firm?

Executive search firms exist for a very specific purpose within the broad range of service providers in the talent acquisition market. This paper provides some insight into the dynamics of using a search firm, the distinction between large and smaller firms, and the advantages of each.

Why Should You Use an Executive Search Firm?

An organization’s culture, effectiveness and success are almost entirely dependent upon its people. Having high quality competent leadership is essential to drive a business to successfully read more by downloading full article about Selecting a Retained Search Firm here.

Filed Under: Executive Placement

Football or Basketball?

Sometimes baskets are easy. A series of three photos in 2003, by Nadalcuba, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

We recently heard of an executive placement that fizzled. After a promising start, the candidate was let go after a short time. What went wrong?

This executive was extremely talented, with a superb background in the renewable energy disciplines the company needed. He had technical skills in abundance and a proven record. He had managed large, complicated projects successfully in the past, and had demonstrated an ability to overcome challenges with aplomb. He had a winning personality, too.

Digging a little deeper, though, we realized that the problem was cultural. The candidate had worked for the renewable energy division of a large firm, where even new business ventures had a strong support network. An IT department dealt with their computing needs, a team of accountants watched their financial and tax issues, and human resources professionals handled employees. In this setting, executives could focus on implementing strategy.

The hiring company was a start up, with almost no division of labor. Executives had to be able to hop from one issue to the next, solving a technical hiccup while fielding calls from the contractor building their work space, or writing a sales brochure while negotiating with a supplier about a batch of substandard parts. The company needed someone who could swiftly decide which of the day’s emergencies mattered the most.

The candidate assumed that someone would take care of the extraneous issues while he focused on his job, not realizing that at a start up, everything is your job. He soon became overwhelmed and could not think strategically while dealing with the myriad snarls that bedevil every new venture. The company thought that his list of talents included the flexibility that start-ups require, but they were mistaken.

This situation resembles an athlete choosing between football and basketball.

On a football team, there’s a clear division of labor. You won’t find a tackle kicking a fieldgoal, or a quarterback blocking linesmen. Everyone has a specific set of duties, much like employees in a large company.

Basketball is different. The sequence of events is fluid and seamless, and each player can be called on to shoot, take the ball down court, defend, or make foul shots. Any player can take on any role, at least for a short time. In other words, it’s just like a start-up or any entrepreneurial situation.

So the question everyone needs to ask is, are we playing football or basketball? It’s a rare athlete who can excel at both, and few leaders do equally well with structure and with chaos. It’s better to find out in advance who you are, before the whistle blows.

Filed Under: Executive Placement Tagged With: executive search

The Long Haul and the Short Run

Attacks against climate science and global warming countermeasures seem to have sidetracked renewable energy and even cleantech. Public sector funding for solar energy has been almost criminalized in the current Congress. Here at Tula, friends and acquaintances sometimes urge us to find a less beleaguered field.

And yet we are buoyant, even optimistic. We see a large difference between noise and turmoil in the short run compared with impressive potential in the longer term. Nor are we alone in these hopes, since serious investment is flowing into very long-term cleantech possibilities.

Pension funds and asset managers are committed to cleantech, but the long-term view can best be seen in venture capital and private equity firms. These patient investors know that picking winners eludes even the savviest. Thus venture capital firms may back dozens of companies representing a broad variety of technologies. They know that few of them will result in an explosive initial public offering. To justify risking their capital, they just need one to succeed.

Consider one well-known venture capital firm, Technology Partners. Their portfolio includes both cleantech and life science companies. Under the cleantech umbrella, they have undertaken more than a dozen investments in energy technology, water technology and advanced materials.

The deeper you delve into their cleantech portfolio, the more varied it appears. Technology Partners has put capital into alternative energies from coal, into exchanges for energy and environmental capital markets, into thin-film solar, into metering and smart grid applications, not to mention energy storage, a new wind turbine design, biodiesel, a methanol innovation with telecommunications uses, advanced batteries, nanomaterials, water sensors, and electric cars.

Several factors unify this diverse list. One is that they fit Technology Partners’ criteria, offering large market opportunities and a unique and defensible technology. Another similarity is no less important. These companies and others like them all need excellent, dynamic managers, as well as leaders who can overcome the harrowing chasm that stretches between start up and IPO.

Maybe it’s our bias as an executive search firm, but we believe that leadership ability is a necessary condition for everything else. Leaders are the ones who can persist effectively in the face of short-term hardship, and keep aiming at the long-term rewards.

Filed Under: Clean Tech, Venture Funding Tagged With: clean tech, experienced leadership, investment

Overview of the Past and Future of Wind and Solar Projects

Renewable Energy Project Finance in the U.S.: An Overview and Midterm Outlook
Copyright © 2011 Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.

Interesting report on renewable energy projects by Mintz Levin law firm. Report covers excellent overview of past and future of projects for wind and solar.

Law firm is well known for deep understanding of the renewable energy in North America.

Filed Under: Renewable Energy, Solar, Wind Tagged With: Renewable Energy, Renewable Energy Project Finance in the U.S.: An Overview and Midterm Outlook, Solar, Wind

Time for the Pros?

Beginnings are wonderful, sometimes even exhilarating. In the beginning, a promising idea and enthusiasm can take a company a considerable distance, garnering exciting publicity and generating solid revenues. The business press abounds with tales of visionary companies succeeding on sheer willpower. Circumstances appear more tolerant of mistakes and wrong turns. Managements can experiment and take more risks.

In the current environment for renewable energy and cleantech, this sounds like a long time ago. We are well into the middle phase. Euphoria is long gone. Companies have a slog ahead of them, often through dangerous terrain that will quickly punish heedless risk-taking. Sometimes it will even punish careful risk-taking.

Companies are struggling to devise the right goals and to assemble the talent to implement them. Renewable energy now requires sharp business methods and experienced managers. This kind of management experience was welcome even during the euphoric stages, but now it’s a necessity.

Take the case of First Solar, the largest US solar company. Its shares have been volatile, hurt by competition from Chinese solar energy companies, but then recovering. The company recently cut both earnings and revenue estimates and announced about 100 lay offs. Some securities analysts cut their estimates. The company has shifted toward providing solar systems for utilities and away from markets supported by government subsidies. Management says its goal is to get “substantially all” of its new revenue from those markets within three years.

A transition like that doesn’t happen easily, even for experienced leaders. Under the circumstances, you want managers who have successfully navigated a tense realignment before, who know the pitfalls firsthand.

One intangible that comes from this kind of experience is a combination of courage and wisdom. Courage is necessary if a company is to endure rough circumstances without getting rattled or flinching at the wrong moment. Wisdom counts, too, because managements need to quickly tell the difference between a difficult patch and an urgent signal to change strategic direction.

It’s a long way from euphoria, but it’s a realm where professionals shine.

A 1941 photo by Irving Rusinow of the US Department of Agriculture of child carrying water in Taos, New Mexico

Filed Under: Clean Tech, Leadership, Renewable Energy Tagged With: change, First Solar, leadership, tough times, transition

A Modest Realism about One’s Gifts and Plans

From the University of Buffalo NewsCenter comes a story about humility in leadership. According to a recent study by Bradley Owens of the University of Buffalo School of Management, “humble leaders are more effective and better liked.”

“Leaders of all ranks view admitting mistakes, spotlighting follower strengths and modeling teachability as being at the core of humble leadership,” says Owens, adding that “these three behaviors as being powerful predictors of their own as well as the organization’s growth.” It’s a theme that is probably particularly true of renewable energy and cleantech, where the exact path forward isn’t obvious.

The study sounds straightforward: “Owens and co-author David Hekman, assistant professor of management at the Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, asked 16 CEOs, 20 mid-level leaders and 19 front-line leaders to describe in detail how humble leaders operate in the workplace and how a humble leader behaves differently than a non-humble leader.”

The leaders were from various sectors, including manufacturing, health care, financial services, retailing and religious, and yet they had a common ground: “[T]hey all agreed that the essence of leader humility involves modeling to followers how to grow.”

“Growing and learning often involves failure and can be embarrassing,” says Owens. “But leaders who can overcome their fears and broadcast their feelings as they work through the messy internal growth process will be viewed more favorably by their followers. They also will legitimize their followers’ own growth journeys and will have higher-performing organizations.”

The researchers found that such leaders model how to be effectively human rather than superhuman and legitimize “becoming” rather than “pretending.”

…Owens and Hekman offer straightforward advice to leaders. You can’t fake humility. You either genuinely want to grow and develop, or you don’t, and followers pick up on this. Leaders who want to grow signal to followers that learning, growth, mistakes, uncertainty and false starts are normal and expected in the workplace, and this produces followers and entire organizations that constantly keep growing and improving…

These findings may seem counterintuitive, if you believe in the heroic, larger-than-life view of leaders. But in cleantech as in other industries, leaders are humans, too.

A 2002 photo of a woman rapelling down the side of a bridge in Veracruz, Mexico, shot by Gengiskanhg, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Filed Under: Candidate Advice, Clean Tech, Renewable Energy Tagged With: leadership, leadership skills

Transformative technologies

A recent talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was aimed at students, but it contained encouraging ideas for executives in renewable energy and clean tech businesses. The message was optimistic: Aided by astute policies, the nation’s clean tech companies are fully capable of expanding our energy supply, reducing the carbon emissions that disrupt the climate, and reviving US manufacturing as a source of jobs.

Addressing MIT’s Energy Club, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu described “transformative technologies” from the past: Artificial fertilizer and the “Green Revolution,” which enabled the world to feed a much larger population; the automotive assembly line, which dramatically enlarged the market for cars; the transistor and integrated circuits, which resulted in digital everything.

As befits a secretary of energy, Chu called on the nation’s engineers and scientists for new transformative technologies in renewable, carbon-free energy. One lesson from his talk was that predicting winners is hard, but worth the effort because the rewards can be very large indeed.

He cited a telling historical example of the difficulty, according to David Chandler’s informative account of the talk on MIT’s website. The government provided grants to Samuel Langley to build the first heavier-than-air flying machine to carry humans. After two failures, Langley abandoned the project — “and nine days later, the Wright brothers succeeded in making their first flight, without any government support. ‘Congress was outraged,’ Chu said, charging that the government shouldn’t have been “picking winners” with federal funds. ‘Some things never change,’ he added.”

Chu reminded his student audience that after the Wright Brothers’ success, government funding supported aeronautical technology until the United States had an overwhelming commercial edge. Europe topped airplane production in the early 20th century, but investments from the U.S. military and the Post Office made commercial aviation viable in the US before anywhere else.

The same thing can happen again today, Chu said. Innovations in a variety of fields have the potential to resuscitate American manufacturing. Some of his possibilities:

Solar technology is changing so rapidly that opportunities abound to regain the lead from China.
Improved steel alloys and composite materials could make car bodies, engines and drive trains a third lighter (or more), with no trade-off in size or performance.
Buildings can become far more energy efficient. He cited a new Obama administration initiative to cut energy use by commercial and academic buildings by 20 percent. “Most of the technology to improve the efficiency of buildings doesn’t cost any more,” Chu said, and savings on energy expenses can recover the costs in less than 10 years.
Improvements in power-conversion technology could result in electrical transmission lines using higher frequencies than today’s 60 hertz, resulting in smaller, less expensive utility infrastructure.

According to Chu, successfully creating “a few new materials or systems” could enable us to master our energy challenges. America could surge ahead of the rest of the world in clean energy, according to Chu. But invented in America “…should be made in America. This will be the seeds of our future prosperity.”

It’s an inspiring and familiar theme for the leaders of renewable and clean tech companies. Identifying the right technology path is just as nerve-wracking for businesses as it is for governments, but that hardly means that we should abandon the effort. The strongest executives will use whatever means are available to win big in technology, whether it’s wisdom, or courage, or luck. Plenty of patience also helps.

Filed Under: Clean Tech, General, Renewable Energy Tagged With: carbon-free energy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, renewable engery, transformative technologies

The Culture Factor

On February 22, 2004, Personnelman 1st Class Larry Davis, of Rockhill, S.C., admires a painting in the museum aboard USS George Washington (CVN 73) during a celebration of President Washington’s 272nd birthday.

An organization’s culture is a fluid blend of every employee’s history and values. The founder, leading executives, and other managers are vigorous cultural influences, not least because they make decisions and choose strategies. What is actually rewarded and how the rewards are given further shape a company’s culture.

In an executive search, a recruiter can often find two or three candidates with the required skills for the position. Cultural fit is absolutely crucial in this situation. Will the candidate be comfortable in a small, highly entrepreneurial start-up? Or will they thrive only in a large, structured organization with clearly defined hierarchy? We have seen candidates hired in the US to work for a northern European country who could not get used to the blunt style that was the norm at the parent company. In a similar way, we have seen, for example, companies from China with great products, but with no idea of what it would take to sell them in North America.

Though culture pervades an entire company, it’s often hard to state clearly. If every employee shares a commitment to renewable energy, studies the physics of solar energy with pleasure, and works best on a team, these traits may not seem unusual. People on the inside just regard them as the ways things are done.

Such a lack of awareness about a company’s culture can be costly when choosing employees. It’s entirely possible to select highly qualified candidates who are great people in their own right, but they don’t fit the culture: They may be a lone wolf rather than a team player, or more academic rather than caring passionately about sales, or a vegan rather than a carnivore.

When interviewing executives personally like a candidate, they may just assume that the cultural fit is solid. Executives may notice the discordant traits too late, after a new hire has started working. Backing out of an ill-judged hire and finding someone new is time-consuming and expensive.

Skillful and attentive interviewing is one of the most effective ways to assess a cultural match. This is where recruiters can be invaluable. An outsider can often view a company’s culture more objectively than those inside. They may be able to see fixed features of your culture that might be more significant than you realize.

Paying attention to culture can do more than just weed out mismatches. An astute recruiter can help a company find candidates who are not only a good fit, but who can contribute to the culture and make it more adaptive and resilient. In hiring, you need someone who can view your culture from the inside and outside.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: culture, fit, interview, match, pitfalls

Seeking the growth

Executives who are thinking strategically will seek industries where growth is strong. They want significant positions in businesses that boast charts like the one below. The leaders of solar companies (and other renewable sectors) will welcome them.

Average Annual Growth Rates of Renewable Energy Capacity, end-2004 to 2009

Chart: REN21 Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, www.ren21.net (November 2010)

This sounds straightforward, but, as Joseph Romm at Climate Progress points out, the New York Times can miss the obvious, especialy where renewable energy is involved. Romm cites two stories in the “Energy” section of the “paper of record” in which the writers do their utmost to minimize the rapid growth in solar. Romm summarizes the Times’s stance:

“…energy demand is growing, that renewables’ share of the market will grow — and thus its absolute growth rate will be very fast — but that U.S. solar jobs will come at the expense of U.S. jobs elsewhere, even though the paper says it’s an export industry.”

The other story newspaper also forgets the terrible cost in climate change impacts brought on by fossil fuels, as if that were an unrelated topic.

Romm is right, and the executives seeking solar are right, too.

Filed Under: Renewable Energy