In the final year of IHS, I was asked to "resue" the business unit by accelerating earnings through a different channel. So far, we had focused on the "builder channel", selling into masterplanned communities like Playa Vista. Good money, but also slow. I was asked to get an appropriate product portfolio into retail.

After the "dismanteling" of the European Business Case, I was offered multiple positions within the company, all outside of IHS. Since this business was to a large part my baby, I could not leave it in good conscience. So Mike Kauffman, the GM, offered me a position of intriquing potential: the creation of a new business model for the retail channels in the USA, Italy, and the UK.

With the help of one lone (but immensely powerful) product developer, Balaji Swaminathan, I put together a matrix team. Together, we developed the target customer profile, the matching product portfolio out of the IHS portfolio, added some new requirements (like language, which was not part of the USA-centric IHS products so far), and developed the business case. Here is a list of the products in that portfolio:

• The HomeCEO web tablet, a touchpad driven keyboard-less laptop, side-by-side refrigerator for storage/charging optional
• Installation services for broadband and WiFi (this was 2001, mind you!)
• Web Applications for cooking and laundry (core consumer needs)
• Web Applications for email, calendaring, and to-do (adjacent consumer needs)

Below you find the brochure:

We passed the first tollgate and could proceed towards the market-readiness assessment. There we got a provisional green light. However, the retail business was a volume business, and we had to purchase the web tablets with a rather long lead time in the beginning. That to my mind was the deathstroke. We would have caused a considerable lift in the Working Capital of Whirlpool. End of story: Restructuring of the whole department.