Deere & Company: Software Vertical Integration

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Clearly, there are new technologies available now that didn't exist 20 years ago, such as See & Spray and autonomous solutions. These technologies are not fully developed, and adoption has been low. Do you think the company is on the right track by pushing these technologies out responsibly, or is it perhaps pushing them out too quickly to increase revenue, especially software-related revenue?

The problem was, from 2000 to 2010, the company treated software like hardware and insisted it had to be fully developed before going to market. The rest of the industry didn't act that way because it was software. If it broke, you could fix it within an hour. It's not the same as hardware.

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Clearly, there are new technologies available now that didn't exist 20 years ago, such as See & Spray and autonomous solutions. These technologies are not fully developed, and adoption has been low. Do you think the company is on the right track by pushing these technologies out responsibly, or is it perhaps pushing them out too quickly to increase revenue, especially software-related revenue?

Deere learned a hard lesson during that decade. It was intense. People didn't want to join the organization because it was a career risk. Nothing had been materially innovated as first to market. Customer problems took a long time to solve, and there were many of them. When I joined the organization, my call to action was to fix all that. The intersection of when agile methodology became mainstream and popular was when I joined the organization. I converted it to a 100% agile methodology in September 2010.

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Jahmy did explain all of that, which I found interesting and helpful. The approach of always seeking new technologies is crucial. The fear is that without proactive exploration, you fall behind and end up overpaying for acquisitions. Seeding innovation within the organization makes a lot of sense to me.

Deere made a significant decision in 1997 to purchase and integrate GPS into the company. I can't emphasize enough how critical that decision was and how the board of directors decided back then to make GPS a core competency of the firm.

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