How Judy Marks leads Otis Worldwide Corporation through uncertainty and technological evolution

Judy Marks is one of a few dozen women leading a Fortune 500 company. Otis Worldwide Corporation has been making elevators for more than 170 years, so it has seen its share of change over the decades. So has Judy. Not long after joining Otis as president in 2017, she quickly became CEO and led the company through a spin-off from its former parent to become its own, independently traded company. She later was named chair as well. Additionally, she serves on the board of Caterpillar. In this episode of Inside the Strategy Room podcast, McKinsey Senior Partner and North America Chair Eric Kutcher talks with Judy about geopolitical shifts, technological change, and how she leads 72,000 employees in 200+ countries and territories around the globe. This is an edited and abbreviated transcript of their conversation. For more discussions on the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.

Eric Kutcher: One of the things I’ve always admired about Otis is how global it is. I imagine you probably have a view unlike that of many others of what’s going on around the world, particularly about some of the macro trends in geopolitical shifts you’re seeing. What are those, and what’s the impact on Otis and how you think about strategy?

Judy Marks: Our macro trends probably don’t align with the ones in the media today. Everyone’s talking about electrification and gen AI, for example, and all of those are important to Otis, but the macro trends we focus on are at a higher level. It’s about continuing urbanization in the world. It’s about aging populations and how they deal with mobility. It’s about digitalization across the enterprise, across our products, across everything we do, and what our customers are demanding.

We are trying to look above and beyond to see how these trends translate into service offerings and commitment to our mission across the globe. When we think about geopolitics, we’re one of the ultimate local companies: 2.3 billion people a day touch our product, and we go to market in over 200 countries and territories. We do it locally because we’re primarily a service company.

We’ve lived through just about every regime, every leadership change there is. And what I tell the team is, “Stay calm. Stay committed to our customers. Make sure we execute our strategy. But don’t overreact. Let’s understand where the macro trends are going. Let’s align that with geopolitics. But let’s make sure that no matter what we do, we continue to move the world.”

Eric Kutcher: Realizing you are a very local institution in a very global world, what are some things impacting your decision-making?

Judy Marks: When you’re this distributed, you have to empower people to make decisions locally. You have to give that authority, the tools, the processes, and the full support so our teams can serve their customers every day.

On any given day, we’re doing 200,000 service calls and installing or modernizing over 10,000 elevators and escalators across the world. That scale requires leadership at all levels. You can lead from the top, which we do. We are committed to our strategy, implementing it, and what we call our absolutes, which are safety, ethics, and quality.

But you’ve also got to lead from the middle and from the edge. A key journey we’ve been on is how to empower those leadership behaviors across the globe. Think about it: We have 1,400 branch offices we call “operating territories” and many P&Ls [profit and loss], and all must be able to service customers, make decisions, resource things, and impact our colleagues’ lives and their communities.

Eric Kutcher: How are you seeing sustainability as an obligation we have as citizens of the world and as leaders to think about the next generation? How does that influence Otis’s business and where you take the business from here?

Judy Marks: I think sustainability has an impact on everything we do. When people talk about purpose, to me, it’s all about the legacy and leaving the business in a better place than when you found it—impacting communities where you can, while you’re in a leadership role, so they’re in a better place than when you started.

It talks to our product and service offerings. We live—back to these macro trends—in an as-built world. There is a physical world here, and as an industrial company, we’re dealing in the physical. Digital ability is critically important, and there’s probably no better zealot than me disrupting us—inside the organization, as well as in our industry. But living in an as-built world means we don’t have the opportunity to have a clean sheet for sustainability.

So we do it through modernization of the as-built world and renewal and refurbishment. We can implement and introduce more energy-efficient products. We can drive technologies to eliminate hydraulic elevators and replace them with more modern traction elevators that don’t use oil and lubricants, so there’s no environmental impact.

But then we look in our enterprise: 71,000 colleagues across 1,400 locations, plus warehouses and depots. We’ve got a fleet of 22,000 vehicles that, every day, if we can optimize the routes and use less carbon, we should. We’ve got 17 factories that are all focused on greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve tuned the factories—whether it’s waste, using solar power, we’ve done it.

Eric Kutcher: Moving to what it’s like to be a CEO and what your responsibilities are on a day-to-day basis, what do you think the role of the CEO is?

Judy Marks: I think the CEO has myriad roles. The challenge is trying to continue to learn to be your best at all the roles and understanding, situationally, when to use them. When are you the inspirational person who’s got the vision, as well as sometimes the corporate cheerleader, to motivate, mobilize, and catalyze the organization?

When are you the zealot who says, “The customer comes first. We have no business without the customer, without customer centricity—and remember how many hundreds of thousands of customers we have every day?” We’re a B2B business, but we touch so much of the world.

We don’t have a relationship with our passengers, but with 2.3 billion people a day touching our product, how do you catalyze the organization to be more responsive, more customer-centric?

In years past, we would focus on business customers. Today complaints don’t come in from them. They come in from condominium owners. They come in from all over the globe and through every channel. Those people have a right to get proper service, even though we have no contractual relationship with them. They have every right to expect excellence, and every potential to impact your brand and your reputation.

So you try to provide clarity and focus. There’s so much noise out there, whether it’s external factors, internal factors, talent, any one of those. As a CEO today, you try to provide clarity as to what’s important and not just generate initiatives but say, “This is what we need to focus on. This will have the most impact on our full range of stakeholders.”

I think of my role in two categories—strategy and stakeholders—and every day gets balanced between them. Stakeholders, on a given day, or the same day, can be the board, a customer. They could be government involvements where you’re trying to drive policy, in our case, regulation and the life safety business. They could be your colleagues, your communities.

Then you surround yourself with a team that operationally executes.

Eric Kutcher: So I’m hearing you say, set the strategy and direction for the organization, build alignment around it, and that alignment goes both up and down, if you will. You’ve got to get the board aligned to it, you’ve got to get your team broadly defined. You listen to the customers. You absorb their messaging and you make sure you are reacting to them and the rest of the stakeholders and, in doing so, give people purpose for why they’re showing up for work every day—is that right?

Judy Marks: Exactly. And that purpose is what drives our colleagues, no matter what generation you’re part of.

Eric Kutcher: What does your day look like?

Judy Marks: Every day starts early and ends late. If there are other CEOs who have mastered a 40-hour work week, I am not one of them. When you lead a global multinational, it means things are happening across the world. You need clarity in terms of what needs to be in front of you, when. Some of that is intuition. Some is metrics. Some is allocating authority.

I wake up about 5:00 a.m. My agreement with the folks in China and Asia‒Pacific is I am reachable from that point on. They send me things overnight, but if they really need to talk to me, that’s when they can text or call. I spend the first hour fusing information from multiple sources—economic, industry-specific, competitors—because one of the tenets of my being a CEO is continuous learning. We’re in such a fast-changing world that you have to watch and be on top of everything that might impact you.

After that, every day is different, and most days are on the road. I think you have to be out there with your stakeholders. Any chance I can be with my mechanics, with my colleagues, is valuable, no matter what country I’m in. Any chance I can get real-time customer feedback so that we can extend relationships is worth doing. You’re always on call. I read my own email; no one filters my inbox. I read my own LinkedIn. And I take complaints. My mobile number is on my business card or on my QR code. And I get called. Sometimes customers aren’t happy. Sometimes colleagues aren’t happy. But it will get resolved or at least addressed.

Eric Kutcher: Being both CEO and executive chair of the board, how do you get the most out of your board, or what have you seen to be most effective, since you’ve also sat on other boards?

Judy Marks: We had a unique opportunity as a spin company. We got to form the board. My executive chair (at the time) and I got to sit down and ask ourselves, “What skills and attributes do we want? What disciplines do we want? How do we create something that supports Otis, while supporting governance, while making sure that our company remains on track, focuses on capital allocation, focuses on strategy, enterprise risk, all of that, in a very dynamic time?”

We brought a board on that was thirsting for education and knowledge about our business, about our industry. We have some pretty efficient board meetings because we send data to our board every day. They see the same digital information clippings on Otis and our industry peers that we do. We share it all, transparently.

We have a typical committee structure, three committees. But because everybody wanted to learn, we time our committee meetings so every board member attends every committee. I know that’s rare; not everybody typically raises their hand to sit through audit meetings. But it’s helpful because everybody hears the same information simultaneously.

And while not every board member can vote in the committee meetings, they all have access and can ask questions. And they get exposed to management. The downside of a SpinCo board is everyone has the same tenure. So we’ve been in board replenishment mode, even though we’re young—171 years old, but going on five years as a new independent public company.

It’s been great to watch. It’s chemistry, it’s knowledge, but also figuring out where the gaps are, where you need additional domain expertise, experience, active leaders. We’ve been able to pull something together without drama or ego, and adding tremendous value. And it shows in our performance.

Eric Kutcher: For those aspiring to be a CEO one day, what do you wish you had known before you became CEO that would have made you more effective?

Judy Marks: I think you never know everything until you’re in the chair. But there’s preparation, good coaching, and good succession planning that can and should happen. From the day I took over this role, we’ve been talking about succession planning because I think that’s my responsibility as CEO, and I think it’s the board’s responsibility. And they take it very seriously.

But what I think people don’t know about are the real-time challenges. The pace of change is so exponentially faster than anything I’ve experienced in my career: when you think about a strategy, how many years you want that; an operating plan, how many years you want that; even a long-term incentive, three years out. How do you do that in a world where you can’t predict what’s going to happen a month out in certain markets?

Some way to incorporate more strategic thinking for executives before becoming a CEO would be good. Most people, whether they were a CFO, a COO, run a business unit, no matter where they come from, tend to be more operationally and tactically aligned, and a bit more short-term, for all the right reasons, because that’s the role.

They need some time, whether you block it on your calendar or you sit with your CEO and say, “Let’s talk strategically: three moves ahead on the chess board. What makes sense?” Because that’s probably the one area you all of a sudden have new stakeholders.

You have a board you work for, instead of one person. You have everyone who wants your time, which takes good time management. But more important, how do you think strategically? Because if the CEO is not doing that, the company will not succeed and grow.

Eric Kutcher: Any other advice for aspiring leaders?

Judy Marks: Get comfortable with change. Change is around you every day—you have to get comfortable that you won’t be able to understand every last fact to drive a decision. You have to get comfortable that, if you’re a consensus-driven leader, every now and then, after you’ve taken all that in, you still have to make the decision. The decision is in that seat and that chair. Then, if you made the wrong one, you need to admit it.

Eric Kutcher: How would you describe your own leadership evolution? How have you changed as a leader since you spun a public company?

Judy Marks: When you’re in a role like this, the impact and influence you can have on people and society is tremendous. With that comes the responsibility. You don’t know how long you’re going to be doing this; that’s up to your board. You see lots of CEOs changing out, you watch how quick and fragile it is.

What I’ve seen is this push to keep driving daily impact. And that is probably different. If you learn to embrace change and build that resiliency muscle, you’re a calmer leader. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be demanding or see impact in every day. That’s the balance as a CEO: driving the team to achieve results, and not necessarily just incremental results, while also making sure they understand the vision, the mission, the strategy, and what it looks like.

You need to inspire, but in the early days, it was hard to say, “Here’s what it looks like five years or ten years from now.” I feel much more comfortable now not just saying, “Here’s our vision,” but, “Here’s how we’re going to get there. And here’s what we’re going to do, right now, to make an impact.”

Eric Kutcher: I think most CEOs, as they get through the first handful of years, get more comfortable in their own skin. They become much better CEOs as they get more comfortable in the role.

Judy Marks: Experience is worth everything. And continuous learning is the basis of that. The challenge is not becoming so comfortable that you’re not still the disruptor and the change agent. I’m the first non-Otis person to lead this company in its history. It’s now been over seven years at different levels—pre-spin, then as CEO, and now as CEO and chair. But I will never give up disrupting because you can’t lose that. You can’t stop questioning. Soon it’ll be five years and I’ve started thinking about looking back. It’s interesting to put a fact list together of what we’ve done in five years. But it doesn’t matter. What about the next five years? What are we going to do today? What are we going to do tomorrow? How do we get to the next five years? How do we get beyond? Because in a long-cycle business like this, the strategy we set today goes for many years.

Eric Kutcher: What would you like your legacy to be at Otis?

Judy Marks: This is an iconic brand that I’d like to restore to an iconic company. To me, they’re two different things because when we can get to excellence in performance for every customer, when we are the leader in the industry, I’m so proud of that. But we can’t rest. How do you drive to being this iconic company, where the rest of the world looks at you and says, “That’s the best service company in the world,” not “the best elevator service company.” I want to help us on that journey. To me, that will have left an impact. We’ve had growth, so we’re impacting far more people, every day, both in terms of their livelihoods and in terms of the people who use our equipment. I couldn’t be prouder to return us to growth because growth is just so critical.