History of The Collaborative Way®

The Collaborative Way® was developed at Rodel, which was the dominant company in the market of providing consumables to polish silicon wafers; in fact, almost every computer chip in the world was touched by at least one of their products. However, the owners, Bill and Don Budinger, had the foresight to recognize that with the growth rate and strategic nature of their market, they would soon face bigger competitors with more money and resources. These visionary leaders saw they needed a new way of working together that would give them the edge to compete head-on with these tougher competitors in order to continue to be the leader in their market.

Lloyd Fickett & Associates, Inc. began work with Rodel in 1989 and developed what we now call The Collaborative Way® to help meet their challenge. This way of working provided the edge the company needed when they took on both the larger competitors that came into their market and the challenges of rapid growth. 

In 1994 we were approached about bringing this way of working to other companies. Implementing The Collaborative Way® into organizations from a broad range of markets and businesses has been our primary work ever since.

“Rodel was like a lot of companies that earned great success, but found customer satisfaction with our performance less than our market share would have suggested was the case. Although we had climbed from garage shop start up to best in class, multi-hundred million dollar, #1 market share holder in 15 years in a key component of semiconductor processing, we knew we had to get better. Lloyd Fickett led a transformation of our management effort that included every employee in the company. As a result, we transformed ourselves from best in class from an internal perspective to best in class from the point of view of the market place we served. Truly remarkable.”

– Don Budinger