To which I probably smiled and nodded. But inside, I was shouting, "Wow!"

He wasn't done. "Think about it," he said. "Our employees get defensive in front of our customers if they can't responsively get access to the information they need to properly serve them. If that happens, our customers start to roll their eyes. That's the exact opposite of the situation we need to establish with our distributed systems function."

Then he hooked me. He said, "Distributed systems are a critical link in allowing our employees to respond quickly and creatively to our client needs. Why? Simply because an effective distributed systems environment integrates local data with a pull-down of centralized information from many sources. If we want to move fast as a business, we must allow as many decisions as possible to be made at the edge of the enterprise. "Empowerment" is an overused word these days, but the last thing we need is to have every decision go up to some central point and back down just so everyone's backside is covered. That's bureaucratic and glacially slow. Our folks can only be creative and responsive if they have an environment that allows them to be, and our customers will sense this and our business will grow."

I was hooked because he used the word "creative" to describe what he wanted employees at the edge of the business do. I already knew that this is one of the most powerful energy releasers there is.

I was on board within 60 days. Over several years, I was able to assist the chairman and his general management team achieve the decentralized decision-making environment they had jointly committed to. While it took some time and their continued support, their goal was eventually realized for each business in the enterprise.