TTM CEO Tom Edman on the Process of Strategy

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

For this issue on strategy development, we sought input from Tom Edman, CEO of TTM Technologies. He’s been at the helm for almost 10 years and has overseen quite a few major changes in that time. 

In this interview, we asked Tom to discuss what goes into planning a successful strategy, how to narrow down the perfect strategy for your company, and why the boss shouldn’t bear the entire responsibility for this strategy. It needs to be a team effort.

Barry Matties: Let’s start with how you define strategy. What does that mean to you?

Strategy is about charting the corporation's direction for the long term. When I’m planning a strategy, I'm really outlining the critical components that will drive the company forward. For me, that's what you're looking at with a corporate strategy.

Matties: What are some of the key considerations that go into developing a strategy?

This is very timely, because we just started our process in July. First, we define the major trends that we're seeing globally that would have an impact on the company. Those trends can be anything, such as macroeconomic, climate, geopolitics, personnel challenges, and technology trends. So, we always start there, and I think that provides the right background. 

One of the board members I worked with in the past always said that when you’re developing a strategy you should start with no more than three major trends that impact the company. We try to do the same because it helps one to really crystallize the major impacts that you have to look at as a company vs. getting caught up in some of the less critical areas. We always try to define three impacts, but sometimes we end up with four. At least that's where we start.

How do we address the major trends in our rolling three-year strategic plan? Every year, we come back to ground zero, take a fresh look at trends, and plan three major strategies that we will focus on in the three-year period. We define the tactics and we get a little bit looser there. We try to keep it to three, but we generally end up with five or six tactics, tying directly to the strategies.

To read this entire conversation, which appears in the August 2023 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.