Chapter 6. The Beaten Path and The Road Less Traveled: Established and Emerging Countries

A single millimeter.

That’s all it took to sink the Whirlpool Corporation’s dream of developing a washing machine that would serve the needs of customers from Mumbai to Mexico City.

The time was 1990, when going “global” held the promise of hundreds of millions of new customers for executives of Western companies from developed lands. The lure of the emerging world and all its upside was irresistible for many, including then Whirlpool CEO David Whitwam. “Being an international company—selling globally, having global brands or operations in different countries—isn’t enough,” he told the Harvard Business Review in 1994, “Everybody is going global but hardly anyone understands what it means.”¹

To Whirlpool, it meant the “World Washer”—a slimmed down, simplified washing machine that could be sold globally with minimal localization.² The device reflected the company’s strategy of using a common product design all over the world, in order to create never-before-realized economies of scale. Whitwam believed that this could help save the Benton Harbor, Michigan, company $200 million annually within a few short years.³

Despite all its efforts to perfect this relatively simple design, Whirlpool missed the mark by less than the width of a paper clip. But it may as well have been 5,000 kilometers.

A single millimeter gap between the agitator and the drum of the machine was the culprit. This gap was perfectly fine in the United States, where people laundered durable clothing like jeans and t-shirts, but it was ill-suited for India, where the machines had to accommodate saris. The long, thin fabric would get stuck in the one-millimeter gap, destroying the delicate garments.

The setback cost Whirlpool not only goodwill in the Indian market, but lost opportunities as well. Buffeted by complaints by numerous consumers, the company had to rethink its product strategy and then pay a Korean company for its designs for a replacement product launch.⁴

To this very day, the World Washer is held up as one of many examples of failed attempts by Western companies to transport products and strategies crafted in established markets to emerging markets. In the case of the World Washer, it turned out to be too expensive for India, and at least as far as saris were concerned, too aggressive.

What does the story of Whirlpool tell us?

That strategies and products developed for the United States and Western Europe don’t always work in places such as India, where needs, expectations, and means are very different. That goes for China, Africa, and Latin America as well.

The inverse is also true.

Phone giant Nokia is excelling in the emerging markets, thanks to its pioneering endeavors. By lining up key distribution agreements and introducing innovative solutions, such as cell phones with integrated radios and flashlights, the company has addressed the needs of local customers in India.⁵ As a result, it has established a commanding 55 percent share of the market,⁶ which boasts more than 525 million mobile subscribers.⁷ And to better understand the needs of its customers in emerging countries, Nokia operates “Open Studios” in places such as Brazil, Ghana, and India, where it invites local developers to share their ideas for new designs and features. In April 2008, BusinessWeek magazine showcased some designs, which included solar charging cells and ozone monitors for measuring pollution in crowded urban areas.⁸

While Nokia was focused on emerging markets, it took its eye off the ball in the established world, where a smartphone revolution was underway. In addition to basic phone features, customers there also wanted applications, web browsing, and global positioning systems available on devices like Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry. Nokia’s inability to meet customer needs in both established and emerging countries resulted in a significant drop in its smartphone market share, from almost 51 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to less than 41 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.⁹

Where Whirlpool succeeded in established countries, and Nokia succeeded in emerging markets, some companies are learning to do both.

Take General Electric, for example. It was challenged when it first tried to sell sophisticated medical equipment in China in the late 1990s. Rather than give up on the market, however, GE decided to make an even bigger commitment to China with new technologies designed specifically for that market. One piece of diagnostic scanning equipment that GE designed for the Chinese market, for example, costs one-third of what its original counterpart costs in the United States and Europe. When it achieved the leading market share in China, GE introduced the product in more established countries and marketed it to thousands of health care facilities that could not afford its original, core offering. By serving the Chinese market with a customized product and applying what it learned in the United States, GE did both—established countries and emerging countries.¹⁰

The crux of GE’s success is that its strategy and business model for the emerging countries were distinct from, yet complementary to, its strategy and business model in the established world. Better yet, the two leveraged one another to produce new gains.

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt described his company’s approach in an October 2009 article for the Harvard Business Review. “The reality is, developing countries aren’t following the same path and could actually jump ahead of developed countries because of their greater willingness to adopt breakthrough innovations. With far smaller per capita incomes, developing countries are more than happy with high-tech solutions that deliver decent performance at an ultralow cost—a 50 percent solution at a 15 percent price. And they lack many of the legacy infrastructures of the developed world, which were built when conditions were very different. They need communications, energy, and transportation products that address today’s challenges and opportunities, such as unpredictable oil prices and ubiquitous wireless technologies.”¹¹

Like GE, Cisco did business in emerging countries for years—and did fairly well there. But it didn’t see a significant increase in influence or relevancy until the company’s leaders stepped back and examined the real opportunity in the emerging world. Cisco was forced to examine everything from product offerings to pricing models to go-to-market strategies to hiring policies and more. What the company concluded was that emerging countries moved with different rhythms and often with different objectives than their counterparts in more established countries. Unless Cisco made a commitment to understand these conditions, its leaders conceded, it would never fully maximize its opportunities there.

Cisco already had sales offices, manufacturing facilities, and distribution hubs in many emerging countries. These gave the company presence, but CEO John Chambers wanted greater relevance with national, business, and academic leaders. Instead of settling for a role as an IT supplier to emerging countries, he believed that Cisco could become a key, trusted advisor.

So the company began formulating an approach to emerging countries that was unlike anything it had done before. Considering the changes underway in the world’s economy, the timing couldn’t have been better.

Boldly Going Where Few Had Succeeded Before

At the dawn of the new millennium, it became clear that the combined economic output of the world’s emerging economies would soon surpass that of the world’s established nations. Experts now predict this will occur in the next few years.¹² Cisco recognized this global economic shift would mean several things. For starters, there would be hundreds of billions of dollars up for grabs.¹³ Some of that would come from investments that individual nations were planning to make on infrastructure upgrades that they believed could help their economies catch up to, if not leapfrog, those of the West. Some would come from the development funds that institutions such as the European Union (EU), World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were making available to emerging economies. And finally, even more would come from the billion new consumers expected to enter the market for the first time.

A Goldman Sachs study calculates that the global middle class—which it defines as people with annual incomes ranging from $6,000–$30,000—is growing by 70 million people a year.¹⁴ These consumers need everything from communications to transportation to housing to take their place in the world economy.

To prepare for this, Cisco needed to rethink its approach to emerging countries. That meant devising entirely new strategies for the nations that boast more than 85 percent of the world’s oil reserves,¹⁵,¹⁶ more than 85 percent of its natural gas,¹⁷ and more than 75 percent of its copper,¹⁸ along with a growing number of world-class business and educational institutions. If Cisco were to distinguish itself from the many others who noticed the upsurge in economic activity in these nations—including an estimated $21.7 trillion in infrastructure spending by 2018—it would have to demonstrate a relevance that matched its interest.¹⁹

Cisco understood that emerging countries—from behemoths like China and India, to smaller markets such as Poland, Argentina, and Egypt—have different needs than mature markets. But catering to those was difficult for Cisco, given its organizational structure at the time. For example, the territory manager responsible for sales in Italy was also responsible for sales in neighboring Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. As you can imagine, the manager devoted more of his time to the world’s tenth largest economy than he did to the world’s 68th and 97th largest economies.

The first step in overcoming this natural tendency? Separate emerging countries from traditional sales territories and elevate their priority inside the company.

In August 2005, Executive Vice President Rick Justice established a new region for the emerging markets. With this, Cisco sent a signal to the outside world that it was serious about emerging countries and told employees that they could no longer fall on old familiar ways of doing business. The new geography was composed of countries culled from Latin America, Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe.

To minimize disruption in Asia, Cisco maintained the composition of its Asia Pacific region, which included India, China, and several other emerging and developed countries. To lead its charge into these countries, Senior Vice President Owen Chan continued to lead the Asia Pacific region, and Senior Vice President Paul Mountford was appointed to lead the emerging markets region.

The product of a hardscrabble, factory town in England, Mountford seemed like an ideal choice to lead Cisco into places where it had never gone before. Gregarious and competitive, he made a decision as a young man not to tether his future to his town’s 200-year-old ironworks and steel factory. Instead, he joined the computer revolution.

Upon taking over as head of Cisco’s newly christened emerging markets region, Mountford started to devise a unique strategy.

He understood that Cisco needed a balance of insiders and external partners to adequately cover the region. So he began hiring country managers who were, for the most part, natives of the countries they served. His team also began recruiting new partners and solidifying relationships with existing ones. Mountford began amassing reams of economic, political, and social data on more than 130 countries. This helped his team shape its coverage model plans and draft their go-to-market strategies.

The emerging markets team started to build locally relevant solutions tailored specifically for customers in emerging markets. That included special offerings tailor-made to help municipalities create “Digital Cities” and connect health care providers, among other things. Given the construction booms underway in the Middle East, Africa, and Russia, Mountford’s team also began compiling solutions for specific vertical markets, with a particular focus on tourism, real estate, construction, and transportation industries. Some ideas came from customers themselves. Could Cisco replicate the airport solution that it devised for the city of Toronto to help the city of Dubai? That’s what the former CIO from Toronto wanted to know when he called Cisco after accepting the same job in the United Arab Emirates.

Cisco could achieve a sizeable return by establishing a presence in the emerging market countries, and the company could boost this return with locally relevant solutions. But Mountford knew that the lynchpin for Cisco’s success would be whether or not the company could participate in the broad country transformations underway in many emerging nations. He recognized that unless Cisco played a significant role in the ongoing infrastructure, financial and social transformations in the emerging countries, the company would be seen as just another Western company looking to make a quick buck in a new land. So he began calling on heads of state, along with ministers of communication, transportation, healthcare, and education. He huddled with business leaders, academics, and other influential figures to learn about their challenges and goals. His message: Technology investments lead to productivity gains, which translates into economic growth and therefore in a rise in living standards.

“Selling products was obviously very important to Cisco,” says Mountford. “But we recognized early on that we had a unique opportunity to participate in country transformation at a very high level. That meant helping emerging countries develop blueprints for increasing social and digital inclusion, and tackling some of the bigger issues before them.”

Hitting Bumps in the Increasingly Flat, Digital World

With its three-pronged plan—presence, relevance, and country transformation—in place, Cisco expected to build momentum rapidly in places such as Romania, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates, but it quickly encountered roadblocks, both externally and internally.

The sheer challenges associated with setting up a local infrastructure proved more difficult than originally anticipated. Some of that was due to the difficulties in dealing with government regulators or local business officials. But much of it had to deal with Cisco itself. Just to establish a new office in an emerging country required the coordination of 22 separate business functions inside Cisco. There were legal issues to solve, offices to rent, staffing challenges to address, IT systems to install, and licenses to obtain, among other things. For a newcomer to Cisco (and most county managers were newcomers since Cisco was expanding), the burden was almost overwhelming. Mountford soon discovered that his new country managers were spending 80 percent of their time setting up local infrastructure and just 20 percent with customers.

Meanwhile, Chan faced similar challenges with the emerging economies in the Asia-Pacific region: Opening offices in Western China, localizing products for emerging countries, and recruiting the best talent all proved to be obstacles that he had to overcome.

Mountford and Chan, along with Senior Vice President (and author) Inder Sidhu, believed that Cisco could overcome its challenges with the emerging markets if the country managers in far-flung locales had better support from and access to corporate resources.

The three executives recognized Cisco’s processes were geared for the company’s biggest opportunities and most mature operations. But the ability to work on relatively small issues in far-off lands? This was a challenge. And the further out in emerging countries that Cisco reached, the more issues there seemed to be. What is the best way to serve customers who speak Pashto, trade in Afghanis, and have technology needs in Afghanistan, where you need clearance from the U.S. Department of Defense just to make contact? That’s a real issue Cisco faced. And it was just one of dozens like that.

To address these issues, the Emerging Countries Council (ECC) was born in early 2006, with Sidhu, Mountford, and Chan as co-leaders.

The ECC—one of nine cross-functional leadership teams formed around Cisco’s $10 billion market opportunities—quickly set the audacious goal of tripling the business in just five years, or reaching a run rate of $10 billion in annual revenue in a matter of a few short years. But first, the ECC had to help emerging countries scale operations and install the support mechanisms required to do business around the world.

Sidhu, Mountford, and Chan drafted some of the company’s top executives from operations and finance, government relations, corporate philanthropy, and acquisitions to serve on the new council. The ECC leaders recruited three of Cisco’s six executive vice presidents and some of its most influential leaders from the worlds of sales, services, operations, planning, manufacturing, human resources, and marketing. This included Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs Tae Yoo, Senior Vice President of Manufacturing Angel Mendez, and Chief Financial Officer Frank Calderoni.

Membership and vision established, the council got down to business. Council members began to spend significant time in places like India, Russia, China, and the Middle East. They removed obstacles, garnered funding and resources, and helped establish infrastructure. Most importantly, the ECC educated leaders within the company as to the real opportunity in the emerging countries and the actions required to capture it.

Progress was swift. In its first full year, the emerging countries business grew by more than 30 percent. Almost as soon as Cisco could install salespeople into a new region and equip them, bookings followed. The number of sales offices grew as well, from 45 countries in 2005 to 59 by 2006.

By the time the ECC moved into its second year of operations, it began shifting from reactive to proactive initiatives. Supply lines were established, accountability was institutionalized, and functions were aligned. But the company still needed answers for dealing with the spiraling need for corporate resources, including services, IT, human resources, and legal.

The ECC jumped in to help. Instead of simply requesting more budget or headcount, the council actually identified the investments required to grow revenue by a designated amount. This approach got results: In a year of tight budgets, the council secured an additional $58 million for the emerging countries in 2007. The ECC then applied these funds to fortifying the central functions, in support of the field. This represented the first end-to-end value chain for the emerging countries, which soon added another 17 nations to its portfolio.

Moving into its next phase, the ECC decided to rally the company around its efforts in specific countries, starting with Mexico.

The council decided to address a longstanding shortcoming in Cisco strategy in Mexico—the company was only doing business with a few of the 18 families who, along with the government, influence 65 percent of the country’s GDP. The council began a concerted effort to forge relationships with these families, including a trip to Mexico in 2008. One of the people the council met with during this visit was Alejandro Burillo Azcárraga, chairman of Grupo Pegaso. He was so enamored by the description of Cisco TelePresence technology that he asked for systems at his home in Vail, Colorado, his office in Mexico City, and even on his yacht. (No word yet when the marine-ready version of Cisco TelePresence will be available, but a consumer version was announced in January 2010.)

After creating ties to key influencers in Mexico, Cisco then focused its energies on developing strategies to help the country address some of its most pressing challenges in the areas of health and safety, education, and citizen inclusion. These efforts culminated in the signing of Memoranda of Understanding with three state ministries in April 2009. The signing of the accord took place at an event attended by Mexico President Felipe Calderon and Cisco CEO John Chambers. There, Chambers unveiled Cisco’s largest commitment to the nation to date: a plan to invest as much as $5 billion in technology, training, and infrastructure. Additionally, Calderon and Chambers committed to making the Mexican government the most connected in the world by 2010. They are already on their way to making that commitment a reality: Cisco has already deployed more than 30 TelePresence rooms across 2 dozen different ministries and agencies in the Mexican government.

In addition to the investments Cisco is making in Mexico, the ECC is pursuing a similar model in China, including a $16 billion investment, and is expanding the idea to India, Russia, Brazil, and beyond.

As Cisco grows its business in these emerging countries, it also endeavors to transfer knowledge from the emerging world back to the established. Here’s how.

Leveraging the Best the World Has to Offer

Two weeks before the motion picture Slumdog Millionaire stunned the world by winning the Oscar for Best Picture, a new initiative was launched in India to address some of the challenges that result from rapid urbanization, as seen in the film. That effort is Cisco Smart Connected Communities.

Working with partners around the globe, Cisco is developing technologies that will help municipal leaders to better manage their communities. How? By connecting citizens, resources, and institutions in urban settings, which are literally teeming with people. Take Mumbai, for example, the setting of the award-winning film.

The population of Mumbai has grown seven-fold since 1950. And its growth continues unabated. By 2015, the city is expected to add another two million residents.²⁰ That’s like adding another city the size of Las Vegas or Vancouver.²¹ But the growth doesn’t end with India. Thirty of the world’s fastest growing cities are located in emerging countries, in places such as Rwanda, Mexico, Venezuela, Niger, and the Congo.²² United Nations estimates suggest that 500 million people will become urbanized within the next five years.

All this growth is adding up to a lot of challenges for community and world leaders, who are well-aware that the current infrastructure in these cities is woefully unprepared to handle such a surge. “More than ever before, cities are home to humanity’s great expectations,” said a United Nations Habitat Report in 2008. “They are also home to increasing social disparities, poverty, pollution, waste and environmental problems.”²³

To combat these challenges, leaders are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure—everything from roads to sewers to airports and more. In addition to all the brick and mortar they are buying, they are dramatically stepping up their investments in information and communications technologies.

That’s why Cisco created Smart Connected Communities, an integrated set of network-based solutions that improve economic development, city management, and quality of life for citizens around the world. “Smart Connected Communities puts the network at the center of city planning and management,” says Executive Vice President Wim Elfrink. “By running a city on networked information, leaders and citizens alike can connect and share information in real time.”

By embedding networking technology in buildings, public safety systems, transportation systems, and a myriad other things, Cisco can help community leaders offer remote healthcare services, increasing the availability of preventative care. They can automate and remotely monitor building security, thus improving safety and lowering costs. They can provide real-time traffic information and therefore reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But that’s not all. Smart Connected Communities is also making a difference in rural settings in underdeveloped areas, providing villagers and nomadic people with technology such as the mobile Internet. With these solutions, services like personal finance, healthcare, education, and more will be available to people in some of the furthest reaches in the world.

Among the notable things about the Smart Connected Communities solution is where it is developed. Instead of San Jose, Raleigh, London, or some other engineering lab in the developed world, it is being developed where it is needed most—in the heart of the emerging world, where it is most relevant today.

The level of innovation emanating from the emerging countries convinced Cisco to invest more there, not just to sell gear, but to capture ideas created there and turn them into solutions—like Smart Connected Communities—that would be relevant all over the world.

To make the most of this opportunity, Cisco built a second world headquarters in Bangalore, India in 2007. The man who oversees this effort at Cisco is Elfrink. A native Dutchman, Elfrink speaks eight different languages and has lived most of his adult life in places other than the Netherlands. And as the head of Cisco’s $8 billion services business, he has experience running large, complex operations and dealing with the media to boot. To underscore the importance of his new assignment, Cisco named Elfrink Chief Globalization Officer before sending him to the subcontinent.

At the time, Cisco was not aware of any other company that had such a position. But Chambers thought the title would underscore just how serious Cisco was about developing global capabilities. From the onset, he tasked Elfrink with building Cisco’s operations in Bangalore as a center of excellence that could launch customer solutions development and services delivery for the emerging world and beyond.

“We want to build the company for speed, scale, flexibility and replicability,” says Elfrink. “This is what globalization provides to the company.”

Elfrink believes that at least 20 percent of Cisco’s leadership talent will be based outside of the United States, Europe, and other established economies. He says it is incumbent for forward-thinking companies to look to places such as India for growth, innovation, and talent.

Inaugurated in November 2007, the Cisco Globalization Center is today an epicenter of solutions development, product development and localization, and technical support, as well as a growing destination center for leading entrepreneurs, consultants, and networking engineers. More than just another office, it is a second company headquarters that plays a critical role in the company’s transformation from a multinational corporation to a global innovator. The home of key business functions inside the company, the Globalization Center has 5,000 workers and expects that number to double over the next several years.

Close geographically and culturally to many of the emerging countries, India has become a key hub of solutions development for—and engagement with—many of these countries. This is providing Cisco a level of relevance that the company has never before enjoyed in many parts of the world.

“Don’t sell what you have,” says Elfrink of his philosophy for customizing solutions for customers in the emerging countries. “Create what they need.”

That’s a big change for Cisco’s salespeople, who credit the Globalization Center for helping them win back business once lost to the rivals who demonstrated greater local industry know-how than Cisco.

“Before the Globalization Center, we were limited in terms of what we could provide to customers,” says Ferry Chung, director of business development for Cisco’s Asia Pacific region. “But when the Globalization Center opened and we saw the programming and integration work they could do, we formed an Internet Solutions Group here in Asia to leverage work done in India. We now have the support we need to provide real solutions to customers in fields such as real estate, healthcare and manufacturing.”

The result? More functionality for customers and more business for Cisco. Take SingHealth, the largest healthcare group in Singapore, for example. Cisco created a Connected Healthcare solution that dramatically increased the number of patients that the healthcare provider could reach remotely using Internet technology. SingHealth rewarded Cisco for the effort by increasing its spending on Cisco products and services by a factor of five.

This kind of success has inspired Cisco to make other bets in emerging countries that wouldn’t be possible without Elfrink’s team. Take the Connected Real Estate solution, for example. It is helping building owners better manage their facilities by linking disparate power, lighting, plumbing, heating, and cooling systems over a single network. The core solution was developed in the Globalization Center and then shared with Cisco teams in Asia and the Middle East, where a great deal of the world’s new construction is ongoing.

Keen customer interest in Connected Real Estate inspired Cisco to make an even larger commitment to this market in January 2009, when it acquired Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence. In past years, Cisco would never have dreamt of pursuing a company that developed such specific industry solutions. But now that it has the Globalization Center, it can. Today, important business units at Cisco are taking shape in India. For example, the Converged Building Systems Business Unit, of which Richards-Zeta is now part, is based in Bangalore—a business unit based in an emerging country with the specific charter of building products for the rest of the world.

This kind of effort is helping to make Cisco an influential player in industries where the company was traditionally an afterthought. None of this would be possible without Cisco’s devotion to making the most of opportunities in emerging countries.

“It’s fair to say that no one has gone to the extent that Cisco has to develop transformative industry solutions in the emerging world with an eye to migrate them back to the established world,” says Savi Baveja, a consultant with Bain & Company.

Baveja has studied the globalization efforts of companies like IBM, Motorola, and Nokia. Several have progressed well beyond basic labor arbitrage and market expansion and are now considered innovators in their fields. While many companies pursue productivity, scale, market opportunities, business model innovation, skills development, and/or risk management in emerging countries, very few progress beyond a basic level in any one of these areas. Even world-class leaders who have been at it for more than a decade—Accenture, for example—have developed advanced capabilities in only a few of these areas. But Cisco, in a relatively short time, has made remarkable progress, Baveja believes.

Because it didn’t form its globalization strategy until the middle of this decade, Cisco is doing what many organizations and institutions in emerging countries are themselves attempting, that is, a leapfrog jump over those with a more established presence in emerging countries. To do that, Cisco recognizes that it will need to do something that sets it apart from its predecessors, many of whom stopped investing in emerging countries once they established sales offices or offshore labor centers. Cisco believes continued investment with an eye on cross-leveraging efforts between emerging and established countries will provide it the edge that it seeks.

“Whether it is Dubai, Shanghai, or Mumbai, Cisco is more relevant in the emerging world thanks to the Globalization Center,” says Elfrink. “Every day, that relevance spreads back to the established world and beyond. For instance, our Smart Connected Communities solution is now being adopted in San Francisco and Toronto.”

While Cisco’s efforts may not be worthy of something akin to an Oscar just yet, the company is pleased that it has proven to customers and thought leaders all over the world that it is something altogether different than a mere market contestant hoping to be the next “millionaire.”

Ideas Without Borders

A cheap labor pool. A place to peddle inexpensive merchandise.

That’s the way a lot of companies see the emerging world. But Cisco and GE have seen more. And since its debacle with the World Washer, so has Whirlpool.

After its initial setbacks in India, Whirlpool recommitted to the marketplace. In 1996, it bought a 436,000 square foot plant and made an $80 million investment in the facility, which produces refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, and microwave ovens. By 2002, Whirlpool had become the top-selling refrigerator and washing machine brand in the country.

But it’s not just a capital investment. Whirlpool is learning to do both—emerging and established countries. It set up a design center in the Indian state of Maharashtra, which provides services to counterparts in Brazil, Italy, and the United States.

“India is an important market, and by gaining leadership in this market we are today in a position to transfer our learnings to other parts of the world,” says Raj Jain, Whirlpool’s managing director in India. “As Asian competitors become more visible in other parts of the world, we can understand them and be better prepared for them.”²⁴

By establishing presence, driving relevance, and striving for country transformation, Cisco expects to do no less.

It isn’t abandoning the beaten path, but it also hopes to take the road less traveled.