Starting With People - Garrick Villaume - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode # 42

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be. Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy. Welcome. Today's guest got his start in particle physics and now coaches businesses. He has a focus on helping businesses deliver cleaner products and greener services. He helps organizations start, grow, strengthen business operations, sustain techno— technological innovation, and maximize product margins with an efficient operating process. Oh, that's a mouthful. He is owner and principal at Physical Systems Inc. Welcome, Dr. Garrick William.

Hi, Joe.

How are you?

Doing great. Thanks. Glad to be here with you.

Yeah, I'm glad to have you. There's a lot of, a lot of big words in that intro. I, I'm intrigued for our upcoming conversation because I also have a degree in chemical engineering. So although I understand the sciences, physics was always my hardest subject in engineering. So I don't quite understand how you physics think, but it's quite abstract and interesting. So I'm excited to get into our conversation today.

Well, let me make a point there. First of all, I did work with the chemical engineering department in my last year as an undergrad. I had a great experience working in, in a lab that they, they managed. So that was a lot of fun, and there was some, some work that I did that was pretty close to, to work that I've done in physics, and back then it was, it was quite close. Also, with regard to physics, just, I think people get anxious about it, but the simplest way to think about it in my view is we're just people that are trying to model all the different things that we see. All right, how does it work? I mean, I went into physics because I wanted to know why to a lot of things. That's really a philosophical question ultimately, and while physics doesn't help you really answer why ultimately. And maybe we can talk more about that later because it's a big point of discussion right now in, in, in the community. It sure does teach you a whole lot about how, right? How things work and what can work and what cannot work and what makes sense and what doesn't make sense with regard to the world around us, right? And, and how we shape and move and manipulate things. And that's really relevant to then, you know, what we do to make more of our resources and drive business. Yeah.

I think that training sets you up well to have a conversation with any executive because we're always working on the whys and hows in our business and our roles and, and our people.

So, with that in mind, I think that's a, that's a more, an increasingly important area of focus for leadership these days. I think it's fair to say it was not sufficiently tended. Right, during the heyday of industrial growth, right, in the latter half of the 20th century, and here as we've steamed into the 21st century. But it's— we're at a point now where it's really hard to get away from it, right, because of the attitudes and ideals, right, and thoughts of the coming generations, but also as people of our generation reflect a little bit more deeply about, you know, what does it all mean and where have they been? Yeah.

Well, that brings me to my first question then. What, what is something, what is an opportunity that you see in the C-suite today that you think other leaders should know about?

Well, that relates to, to, you know, what we call tech. I mean, there's, there's many different things. But I wanna, I wanna emphasize my view that It's all about people, right? All of our organizations, all of our business, all of our technology, all of our processes are— begin and end with people, right? It's about working with ourselves, working between ourselves to make more of our resources to create value and to do that in a way that balances and ideally harmonizes all the different views and beliefs and perspectives, right? Every person and, you know, sort of common group of people bring, right, to social and political interaction and the business world. So people need to be central and business and many executives have said that, right? There's a whole library full of management guru practice books, right, to talk about all that, but saying it and doing it like every other activity in business, whether it's managing difficult yield, right? Or working complex financial programs and deals. It's easier said than done, right? So we need to put a lot more effort behind the words, right? Of people are the core, people are the greatest asset. It's all about people. And tech is both the great opportunity and unfortunately these days a great risk. To that, right? We've really only scratched the surface of what is generally called tech can do for us. And my view is that we're quite adolescent, right, in our approach to it, in our application of it. I'm not a fan, right, of surveillance-based management, for example. In fact, I vehemently oppose it. I don't like the idea, nor do I ever accept that it's innovative to put statistical process control on the motions and actions of people loading trucks or working in warehouses. That's a certain kind of innovation perhaps, right? By a strict definition, but not one that I think is good for people ultimately, which is what business is about. And we've lost that, we lost that a long time ago and we need to restore it and tech can help us do that.

Yeah. Do you think we lost that even before tech when, we started looking at numbers and metrics and giving a lot more weight to analysis and percentages than we did people's unique abilities. That happened way before tech.

Sure. Yeah. No. So I'm well-versed in sort of the history of quality management, right? Total quality systems and performance control processes. In fact, I used to do a lot of that professionally. Those methods, right? Those tools were generally applied with the best of intents, right? To get more out of our processes and resources. And they did that, right? And again, I had a lot of success with that, but there's a boundary, right? Of application to that, that makes sense from a benefit point of view. And when you start to cross that boundary is when you're taking people and turning them into assets as opposed to the focus, right, of, of our efforts, right? And so this idea that people are assets, that we can talk about markets and not really think about, um, the underlying persons, right, within that comprise those. We smear all of that stuff together. We really, we really, um, lose sight of that. So I don't, I don't think it really has anything to do with the rise of better, more strict fidelity, right, to process adherence and things like manufacturing, fabrication, execution of, uh, transactional, uh, programs and things like that. It's rooted much deeper, much deeper in our view that Business is about getting ahead of other people, right? Or making advantage from others' disadvantage, right? The whole rainmaker thing and, you know, I win, you lose mentality. That's the problem. And we've turned, in the way I think of time, right? In our evolution society, we've turned our early use of technology, like we have, many others sort of against ourselves, right? We, we use it to chop each other up and reduce each other to bits, right? So that we could package each other up as a marketing, you know, element to, or, or sales target, right? A little mini market within a major market and all this stuff. And I think that's just trivial, right? And, and we could be doing so much more to make more of what we have for more people if we change our mindset.

Are there any examples of that changed mindset at the top that you are seeing out there?

Yeah, there are actually. As I've been looking around more proactively to find collaborators and people with whom I can test some of the ideas I'm working on, right? And I want to be challenged, right, on some of the concepts I'm proposing, and I want to temper them through debate. You know, I kind of— I started out in a scholarly domain and have missed it, right, from time to time. And the wordiness, right, of my, of my mission statement and all that is more of a reflection that, you know, you can't, you can't take the scholar, right, out of the individual, even if you take the individual out of the academic environment in some ways. So, you know, there's I'll just leave it at that. Yeah.

So what would be some examples of some, you know, tech that's being used the right way or for good or organizations that are searching for that type, those types of answers in their tech?

Let me, let me talk about a couple of different things. And specifically then, because because this, you know, this tech, which is this computational analytical data, turns into some sort of information set which then drives some sort of decision process, right, that leads to, that leads to value, right? Whether it's an efficient process, whether it's, you know, virtually expanding the access, right, bandwidth, if you will, of people being able to process something in a given amount of time. All that stuff, that's all good, right? And so take healthcare, right, for example. Being able to get online care, get online support, make appointments online, check your records online, right? All of that stuff electronically, that's all generally very beneficial. But there's a dark side to that, and then it's, and it's the other side of the very same coin, and that is that information has been rightfully recognized for its value. But wrongfully viewed as this asset for others to exploit, right? And so even if you're an anonymous statistic within some sample set, you have been reduced to that representation, right, of you that singular reputation of representation of you in that case for somebody's use, right, that you may or may not, right, agree with. And in many of these cases, right, we, we don't agree with them. All right, another example is, is look at Amazon. Okay, so there's, there's a number of benefits, right, to what Amazon has done in terms of being able to, to provide access to goods and services that others might not have had., right? In, in some, in some sector, right? Some product arena. But it's come at the expense of absolutely reducing people to automata, right? In certain senses. You know, the whole, the whole issue with the trucking, right? And, and the delivery vans and the conditions that they have to put up with, right? From dealing with their, you know, biological needs, both intake and output, right? And, and, you know, the issues with the environmental stress, right? And all of those things, not to mention, not to mention the extreme control loops put on their actual physical movements and performance. And then that's all in a context of a world now that is watching every single move they make everywhere they go, right? So it's kind of a nightmare scenario of worker life, right? In this brave new world, right? Where, where everything about us is being digitized and turned into some sort of, some sort of trading item, right? For all this.

Well, I'm curious if you're more, and maybe it's not, maybe it's not a more or less, but there's a difference in my mind between dehumanizing and depersonalizing. And, and you, I kind of hear a little bit of both in your, your samples is, Is that the tech challenge that, that's really in your head or that we're dehumanizing the person and turning 'em into a stat? Are we depersonalizing the individuals from one another? Or is it both?

It's both. It's both. I mean, look, look at, look at Meta. What does Meta want? Right? Meta, Meta wants a world where people live their lives virtually. All right, I'll just, I'll put it out there. I mean, I've been saying this for years. In fact, I first said this in 2005 when I was with a large magnetic data storage company at a research, what do you call it, meeting, right? The periodic research convention that we had. And I was listening to a talk about smart data., right? And being able to embed contextual information, right, in sort of dynamic knowledge along with some dataset. So somebody put the example of you could have surveillance video of a 7-Eleven going, and if you had a detection system that saw the cashier put their hands up like this, then you, you know, you'd call the cops. And at that time, you know, the movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger that's an unfaithful representation of The Running Man was out, right? And that whole movie is predicated on warping videos like that to falsely accuse somebody, right, of a crime. And I'm like, I can't believe you people aren't even considering this, right? So the words that I told them was beware the unreal world. It is of little value ultimately. You can't eat in it, you cannot actually drink in it. Why anybody would buy electronic water makes no sense. And it's only there to put you in a pen to be digitized and exploited, right? From that view. Now, on the other hand, being able to dramatically reduce worldwide airplane travel by having virtual meetings and virtual conferences experiences that were close to being there has a lot of attractive potential to it. So how do we achieve that vision without having the unreal world, scary, you can be accused of having done something you weren't even involved in, right? Or whatever, right? Or whatever other nightmare scenario you can figure. Or even, or even just more practically, right, being boxed and categorized based on some feature that you don't control, be it your religion, your belief, right? Or your ethnicity, right? Or where you were born, right? Or what school you went to. There's no, there's no limit to how those boundaries can be applied with sufficient power and malintent. Yeah.

I know some people that really enjoy being boxed in and understood from an advertising standpoint. They'd love it when the exact thing they were thinking about or interested in shows up on their screen and they can buy it on sale. But that's, you know, in other people's minds, that's a, that's a terrible thing. That's horrible that, that people know so much about us, that computers know so much about us that they can predict what we're gonna buy next or where we're gonna go next. It really is a conundrum, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I, I tell you, I'm gonna, this might offend some of your listeners, but for those that really get a thrill, right? When some analytic puts the ad of just what they were thinking about, that just tells me you've been conditioned to be a consumer., right? And you're, you're at the extreme end of that, right? And so, and so to be thrilled that you can go buy something, right, is itself kind of questionable.

So it, it could be, I mean, if there's, there's a lot of judgment in that, right? Maybe someone wants to be a consumer, enjoys consuming, and, and that's necessarily, you know, not necessarily a bad thing.

But I can see how— Isn't it? Isn't it? I mean, if you look at the data, consumption is what's driving the problems that we have, right? At least from the point of view of the very wealthy portions of the world, right? I mean, look at the split on where carbon load, right, originates. It's not even close, right? It's not even close, right? So the mass consumption the business based on gobble everything. I call it the more beans model, right? If you remember the old Monty Python skit, it's like, yeah, yeah, more beans. Good. Yeah. So you can tell I got— I've got a bit of a, of an attitude about some of the things that we have going on in the world. And I'm disappointed, right, in my fellow technologists for, for applying a lot of this stuff this way.

Hasn't consumerism been a driver of a lot of innovation though over the centuries of mankind? How so? People want more, so they innovate to get more.

Is it consumerism to say I want to be clothed? Is it consumerism to say I want to have enough food to feed my family?

Is that consumerism? I don't know. Could be I want warmer clothes, could be consumerism at some root level. I just wonder if, you know, there's some good in the consumerism just as much as there's some bad in it, in which is similar to many of the examples you gave. There's a little good and a little bad in just about everything, right?

Well, I'll be really careful and make a clear distinction here. Right, because to me, to me, the word consumerism connotes a behavioral aspect. My, my view, Joe, and, and the model, right, which may or may not be a theory of innovation in technology, starts with the fact that our collective needs for energy food, water, the shelter, right, that protects us from the environment, the heating and cooling that keeps us equalized from a temperature perspective against the extreme conditions of the planet, right, in various places and so on. Those needs plus our desires, right, the things that we aspire to, the things that bring us delight, right, that make us really happy, that we really want to strive for, for ourselves and for our progeny, for our friends and neighbors and family. Those are the origin of commerce. That is the nature of business. Innovation in my definition, and I've looked this up and done some research on this academically, and it's hard to really get a clear definition of it. So I've taken a stab at putting on my own and I have a pretty simple one. And innovation is essentially a conceptual process that can be realized that reconfigures energy and matter of the world, of the resources around us to meet some purpose. So we can irrigate or we can create this thing called a wheel to roll stuff down a road that we want. All of these innovations in terms of reconfiguring the flow of energy, the organization of materials in time and space, The tools and the instruments for doing that are technologies. The ideas, right? The realization that there's a new way of doing it, that's the innovation, right? And so it goes from a state, complex, mixed up, dynamic state, right? That has some collective set of capabilities or potentials in it to a new state under the innovation that has some new capabilities, right? And then there's maybe new technology or maybe it reutilizes old technology in a new way or something like that. All of that was how we created prosperity, which means a nice satisfying amount of our needs being met, a sufficient number of our needs being met, and a sufficient number of our desires at least being kept alive. So if we have those minimal things, innovation has done all of that over all these centuries. And We have produced more for more or less, right? Overall, in other words, in terms of being able to transform the resources as they were given into the things that people need to live, right? And want to be happy and fulfilled. So that's all great. That's the origin of commerce. Somewhere along the line, a viewpoint took hold, and I think this is very, very old that I've been looking back at, at some some work, right, that goes back into how people started, you know, trading, right? And exchanging goods and services. Somewhere along the line we went from, hey, let's get together and see how we can, you know, make more out of this material, right? Be it a grass, right, that might grow. And so we get to cultivation, right? Or pooling up water so that we could make a well or digging a hole to make a well, right? Whatever it is. And my belief ultimately is that predominantly people did that for the betterment of everybody, right? In the group, in the village, in the tribe, in the social structure, right? Both localized and near neighbor-wise at a minimum. Somehow a different attitude came in, a different idea came in, and I believe this had to have happened after there were more than enough resources so that people had time on their hands to do this, right? And weren't preoccupied with the former. And they started to think, well, I'm gonna get it from the other people. I'm gonna extract, appropriate, bamboozle, right? All these things that said, well, business is about me getting more from you than you got from me. I have to win this deal, right? So that's the the, what do you call it? Zero-sum mentality, right? That has dominated our view of business and economics. I have to get ahead, therefore you must fall behind. It's, I think that's, that's somehow we lost our way very early and that's become our guiding light and it's the wrong light. And we need to get back to the point where, hey, we're all about making it better for those to come.. And if that's our purpose, we'll be better too. And more of us will enjoy that, right? So that's kind of where I'm at with that thing. So when I think consumerism, I think, I think the food industry making something like, su— sugar corn pops and a cereal called Super Sugar Crisp. And talking to an executive that I was familiar with not long ago, who came from that industry, who sat in and almost, almost with glee talked about the research studies of rats, right? Shunning everything else in favor of sugar. And I thought I was like listening to a tobacco exec, right? Like it was a flashback to a tobacco exec. And this guy's basically saying, oh, it's sugar that sold. So that's what we sold it.

Yeah.

And, and by the way, that came through the experience of, working on the nutrient value proposition of these materials that are left over from certain processing and saying, why do we throw these away and let 'em become greenhouse grasses while it has all this remnant value, right? That's actually more nutritious than what the default is.

So what are you working on to make a difference?

A couple of different things, and I'm not sure where the results are going to end up. So first of all, Physical Systems as a consultancy has a conventional advisory component to it that's all about business process excellence, right? Operation excellence and so on. And I have myself a tremendous repertoire of of performance management, both in an organizational sense, but also in a high technology sense, right? Optimizing processes, you know, tuning designs, driving a continuous cycle of capability and performance improvement, and then mapping that into the operations to be efficient and so on. And a lot of that comes from empowering people, right? The actual best results come from when you can use technology to make the shortest paths in decision-making, problem resolution, right? And that you can propagate information completely accurately, fast, right? Widely to all of the stakeholders, right, in the given situation. So I can, I can help with that. And I'm, I'm targeting businesses that know they need to get to sustainable right, capability, right, because of certification, because regulatory stuff and so on. And like, like in other arenas, quality systems, certain other, certain other IT applications and so on, you just can't buy it off the shelf, right, and start plugging in metrics and saying, oh great, my dashboard is going to suddenly go from red to green, right, because I, because I tracked all this information. You have to go put the process work into it. You have to transform the processes. And oh, by the way, you have to have continuity plans because you can't just say, oh, I'm going to switch this massive supply chain, right, to this, you know, lower impact alternative without having some assurance, right, that that supply chain is going to stand up right through the whole time that you need it. Right. And so there's risk involved in these things. And so I help people work that much like you would imagine doing quality systems work. So you can think of it as sort of sustainable systems integration in terms of core business processes, including the operational technical processes specifically, but also decision processes around them. So that's kind of the business shingle. Along with that, I'm developing this framework, this model, this philosophy informed by my experiences, but also heavily heavily augmented by work that I alluded to earlier around technology and innovation. Resources include Santa Fe Institute in particular, and the whole complexity science, ranging from work that they're doing in, in sort of rethinking economics in particular, to kind of the, the phenomenon of a phenomenology of scale, right, and how big things can be in natural lifetimes, and then extrapolating those beyond just our biological world to say, do they apply, right, to human constructs and so on. And I, I believe they do. Right. And so with these kinds of, of, more technical components, I then also have been complimenting a pretty, with that, with a fairly, fairly healthy dose of sort of organizational management behaviors. I mean, I took a lot of, and then I was afforded great management training, right, coming up in, in a Fortune 500 company. I've been through, you know, many of the sort of characterization programs that people have, and I've been through a number of development processes and I'm a big fan of those. And then all the guru books like Leadership or, you know, Learning Organizations and Five Dysfunctions and these things, all of which have some value, but they're bounded, none of which are panaceas, right? And so I like to offer a service that, that is predicated on you want to pick the tools and integrate the best practices that work for your organization, right, that fit your business, your product, your technology, whatever that may be, and your, your people, right, in the profile of that. And so I don't come in with a preset, oh, you want this tool and you got to follow that method and so on. And I'm Six Sigma, train, right, to the yin-yang, all this stuff. I, I say, hey, these are tools that you can use, but let's start with your people, right? And who's all involved. Let's figure out what processes you need, and then let's talk about the tools that you're going to use to do innovation. The, the framework around change is, is inevitable. Innovation is our way to managing change. Innovation is the origin of, of or is the fountain of prosperity because it's what allows us, right, to continue to produce more out of the finite set of resources we have and so on. Those are more, I hate to use this term, thought content, thought leadership stuff that I'm looking at trying to get out through publication, starting a blog. I've got much unpublished stuff and I'm thinking of putting it out there about that. And then trying to say, size up whether or not I have enough to it to form some sort of program that could be part of some other training institute, right? Be it an accelerator of some sort, right? Or some sort of management program in a learning institution and then add it as a complement and grow it from there. Right? So I'm stirring that down and trying to feel my way through it. And to be quite honest, to your question about what do I want out of this podcast, I'll just jump to that and say exposure to the ideas for people and then the opportunity for them to come back and throw tomatoes or roses around however they feel.

Right? So, yep. You've been working around this thought leadership framework of yours. You're putting some pieces together and I imagine there's some things emerging that at a high level that are insightful or ahas that you could share now without digging super deep into the actual work.

Yeah. So if I go back to what I was saying earlier about somehow the origin of commerce of making more for the group, right out of the resources by changing the world around us became get more from the world by figuring out how to take it. And if we have to, if we can create value by somehow extracting from other people's needs, then so be it. That's what we'll do., right? So those two differences, right? I, what I like to say is that, is that our value, the value of our values, right? Or how we value our human values is miscalibrated, right? And I'm gonna, I'm gonna give this example. If, if you, like many, many Americans do, watch any one of the national evening news programs, right, with all the legendary anchors, right, that have sat in all those chairs, and we know who the cast is now— and I'm not necessarily talking about cable, but you can include in this if you want— you will know that the last 8 minutes or so is about 90 seconds, right, to maybe 120 seconds of actual news content. And the rest of it is dominated by largely pharmacy commercials. And those pharmacy commercials, by the way, if you listen to them carefully, have these frightening disclaimers on them about all the horrible things that might happen to you if you take this medicine. All right. And, and any one of those medicines is really probably targeted to, it's a large population. Absolutely. And I don't mean to diminish their need, people's needs for these things, not in any way, but it's a relatively small fraction of the audience, right? That's watching the show right now. And you are dragged through these series of vignettes about all these people whose lives are improved and so on by this wonder drug., right, that's sold by some big pharmaceutical company. And I think about the whole cost of that sector of producing those commercials, cameramen, scriptwriters, marketing people, actors, all of this stuff. And I'm pretty certain that almost everybody in that ecosystem is better paid than an elementary school teacher on average in the country. The value of our values is misaligned, and it's misaligned because we have a view that we make money off of other people's needs. And while fundamentally It's our needs and desires that are the creation of value. There's no other beings around here, right, that are moving stuff around and exchanging goods and services, right? It's people. And as far as we know, we're the only ones that do this, right? In our experience, we've decided that we're gonna be a predating society and that predating on the other's needs is how we're going to better ourselves. And because we do that, we then end up with these wild disparities and disconnects in what we claim we value and what we actually put value into. So that's, that's one aspect of that. And I really would like to see us redirect, recalibrate. And I think there's a lot of momentum in that direction right now. But as I think is evident to anybody, the oppositional forces are steeling themselves and making it harder today. How much of your view is based on the US culture and economy versus worldwide? I'm born and raised as an American, educated as an American, employed as an American, but I spent a considerable amount of time working overseas, right? A big part of my job in that Fortune 500 company that I started coming out of, I was still in grad school. All right. So just a real quick aside, I was working on a, on a PhD. I had passed candidacy. I was finishing up my analytical work and beginning to write my thesis and raising a family of 4. Right, on a graduate student stipend. And value of our values— no healthcare, right, for extended family members, right, in that context, right? And there's a whole story to be told about grad compensation and grad exploitation. And I don't feel exploited, but that was the reality. So I had an opportunity to go to work in industry. It so happened that the particle physics, um, employment scene was nuclearized, was, was bombed when the Superconducting Super Collider, right, was shut down, right, right as I was looking at graduation, right, about 94, I'll say. So I went to work in industry and was writing my thesis at night while I was doing test code and process improvement stuff, right? In the daytime.

So I lost the thread.

Well, I was asking about the worldview versus the US view when it came to some of your conclusions. So, so at that point, that put me into this, this global company arena where I had to begin working with people. Of course, there were grad students from other, other countries. Right. And when you're in an experiment like in high-energy physics and there's a fairly large number of people, you come across a lot of cultures. But it isn't something that, that has a huge influence, right, in how you think about work in the world around you and so on. But when you get into a company where you're routinely engaging with other cultures, and you're in, you're in a, a mode where you have to have phone calls at, you know, tail end hours, right? Early morning or late in the evening because you're communicating to people in, you know, around the world, right? In 12-hour away time zones. Then you start to get a sense of that, right? And then you start to, to realize that your view of the world is certainly not the only view, right? Your priorities and goals certainly aren't the only priorities and goals, even if you're working on the same business, right? On the same product, in the same program. Them, right? There's other contextual stuff. So that, that kind of led me into this view that says, oh, it's a bigger world around there. Well, in time I spent time as an expatriate in Northern Ireland, right? Which is a really great culture. I would've liked to have actually been there a little longer and I spent 3 to 4 man years net in Asia, largely Malaysia, Thailand, China, Singapore, Those are, those are the places that the companies I worked happened to do business, right? I didn't get to India. And my time in China was, was not as extensive as others have been. Those engagements, friends that I have to this day, right? Who worked in those companies, who were part of the, of the network, right? Of the production supply chains and so on, right? That I was involved with. Those friends of mine influenced the way I think. The way I had to transfer, right? I was, I was heavily involved in process transfer, um, both from US to Europe, right? UK, right? To in, in Ireland, right? In one subspace. And US to Far East, right? Asia-Pac, right? In another, uh, area. And you cannot do that successfully without taking on an understanding, right, of of their perspective, their views. And I will tell you that those experiences, maybe coming to a more immediate expression in answer to your point, I very much believe that knowledge transfer to those different from us is essential to sustaining prosperity and propagating, right, these new capabilities that innovation provides for us, right? So when we innovate, yeah, we can, we can put that under wraps and hoard that and be the masters of that and, and find ways to entice people to say, oh, they want a piece of that and they'll pay what they can get for that. And, and that's kind of how we do business. There's a different way of doing it, right? And that's, that's sharing it with others or maybe a royalty-based model, maybe as opposed to a colonial ownership mastery model that would invite people into it. And you have to, if you want people to get involved, if you want people to make a device that you designed, invented, and fabricated in spot A, and you want them to do that in spot B, and spot B is markedly different than spot A from the people, the culture, and so on, you have to transfer that information, that know-how, in a way that can be received, right, or will be received this way. So I call it impedance matching, right, in communication. A more sophisticated physical model might be how waves propagate and reflectance and transmittance and so on. And just as I use a lot of physical metaphors in my, in my business conversation, if I'm propagating a signal down a channel and there's a junction like that different organization over there, there's going to be a transmission component and there's going to be a reflected component, right? Always will be, right? My goal is not to reduce the reflected component to zero. My goal is to understand the reflected component and say, is it telling me something about the message I'm transmitting that I should change, right? And so my transmission is more effective. And that may be a little bit, a little bit, um, abstract for people, right? But, uh, um, just, just think about it as impedance, right? You want, you want a nice transfer, right, across junctions. And I'm a big believer in doing that. And so cultural differences and how different parts of the world and people from different parts of the world look at the same problem very much influences my thinking. And let me, let me end with this because this one might be good, right, in, in your editing. My first director job was going from— I, I had been the manager of a test system that I had been chosen to drive this test process in that was basically a complete disruption, right, to the status quo to take down cost and so on. And it involved hundreds of testers, right, moving things upstream, all of that stuff, very complex, thousands of parts. An hour kind of processing throughput rates and all these things, sophisticated magnetic testing, blah, blah, blah. So I had been doing that job, and as a— because of that, I was doing a lot of analysis work around what the test was telling us. There was an analysis group whose job was to figure out, you know, what's working and what's not working in various products and the product— try to diagnose processes. And then our friends across the sea in the Far East factories were doing a similar thing. Things had, had gotten out of hand such that the two different groups, largely— well, two different U.S. groups, component people and system people, and then the Far East group, which were the component builders, all looked at the same data and all came up with different conclusions about what was going wrong and what to do about it. So my mandate when I was made director, right, of this analysis group, right at the beginning of 2000, January 2000, my Y2K passes, I take this job. And my job was, Derek, can you get these 3 different groups that are looking at these data to come to one answer, right, on the same data? And I started that as a technical problem. And there were aspects to the solution that were technical in nature, but it wasn't a technical problem at its root. It was a cultural problem that had elements of the different peoples and their backgrounds and makeups and so on, belief systems, right? How they thought, you know, life should be, the world should be. But it was also a business cultural problem that coupled right to that, to that personal right or national problem, because people weren't lined up to the same overriding goal. They were being driven to competing goals that were localized to their operation that were in contention and inhibiting us, impeding us from solving the larger optimization problem. And again, that was cultural. So long-winded answer, sorry, with maybe a lot more anecdotal material to go with it. But my thinking has to be by definition, I can't claim anything ultimately biased, right, by my upbringing and my cultural beginning, but I work actively and have had enormous experiences to complement that, right?

And offset, right, my own intrinsic tendencies to want to view it from my lens. In that example with the 3 different analyses of the same data, was there a right answer or a wrong answer? Were there just need to get 3 consensuses to down to one path?

The, the, the, the, so there was no one question, right? It was, there was always a multitude of questions about why is this failing and what's wrong with that? Why was he allowed to hear on that, you know, thing? And, and gee, that works, maybe we should do more of that. Um, and the, the The answer is there was rarely any one right answer. This was such a complicated system that with everything so interdependent, right, from the physical fabrication to the assembly and integration, right, of the components, right, into the superset object and how all that worked, to just the nature of the way it worked— I'm talking about a magnetic recording a hard drive in this case, um, that there were lots of different solution spaces that were okay, but there were a few, and occasionally one but multidimensional space, that was best. And what kept people from reaching consensus on what's good enough close enough to best that accounts for all these different variations that could happen was this fracturing in what the real goal was, right? Because in this case, this was a business where it had worked in a mode where each successive stage, right, of the process treated the upstream stage as a as a supplier and wanted the supplier to treat the next stage as a customer. Right. Even down to, even out of the finances. Right. Even though it was one big product going out the door at the end. Right. That used all of these parts. And so by turning a, a natural partnership relationship into a customer-supplier relationship brought some benefits in terms of you know, demanding requirements, right, and fidelity to the need and so on. But those were ultimately washed away, right, by parochial interests, right, that over time distorted the whole set of requirements for a given operation and made it paramount, right, to be that. So most solutions had to end up being constructed as compromises because they were trade-offs, right? And this was a situation where, you know, in a technology where the trade-offs ruled., right? But if you got the trade-offs balanced, right? That's a pretty good performance and you could get some great stuff out of the operation and the process and the, and the product. And so I, I moved from being a test guy to an analytical guy to a, a program guy to then being kind of a, a coach, right? A therapist, if you will. Where I was kind of a neutral party, right, from a, from a role point of view, my goal was just to make sure that we were getting the most out of our stuff, right? And, and that, you know, we were getting the profit that we wanted out of the end product and not having our real, our real customers, right, like Dell and EMC and all these people, right, cranking on us. I ended up putting a lot of procedural structure in place in terms of, you know, management, communication and protocol and knitted that all together with better systems integration tech to reach those compromises more effectively. And back then, right, it was time to market and time to volume and time to yield and time to reliability, right? Because that business had a life cycle of 12 to 18 months, new product, right? A CAGR of 40% plus give or take, right? And it was go, go, go, go, just like chip world, right? Even maybe more so. So we had to be fast in reconciling and discriminating best from better, knowing when not to let best hold better hostage, right? And to coach and train people to realize that if they give up something that may be you know, deemed as a shortcoming on their part, it's acknowledged and recognized that it was to better the overall result for the company. And, you know, there wouldn't be any negative consequences for that because those were other practices, right, that had come into play that people were getting, you know, negatively impugned for things that, you know, for falling short on things, even though it was done in the interest of helping the other operation, right? Cover some sort of other mess. Right? So all that stuff. Right? So I think, I think that's stuff that's probably familiar to a lot of people who have worked in those kinds of complex environments. I'm not sure how that, how that might sound to a healthcare executive, right?

Or insurance agent. There's certainly some aspects I think most of us can pull from. In a way, you kind of want to dehumanize the people component to try to get more harmony in the solution. It sounds like back to our initial conversation around, you know, some of the values of tech is sometimes taking that inner—

I wouldn't say dehumanize. I would push back on that quite hard.

I would say it's de-egoize.

Right. Which is the human characteristic, right? It's a conditioned thing we have right now. We have been conditioned for decades to believe that our personal glory is the path to prosperity for others.

It's not working and, and it's the wrong philosophy. I would agree the ego can create a lot of problems.

Is it conditioned or is it innate? There's a potential for it within us, but we know plenty of examples where the complementary potential to be integrative, right? Non-ego egocentric. And by that, I don't mean, you know, hey, I'm an autonomous agent, right, that is interested in satisfying my needs and meeting some number of desires, right, that makes sense. And there's a limit, right, to what I'll do, right, for the latter, right? And there's a limit even to what I'll do for the former, right, from a moral ethical point of view, right? We won't do anything, will we, to avoid from starving or dying of thirst? Well, that's a test hopefully people don't have to face, right? We shouldn't ever consider we would do anything, right, to satisfy some desire that isn't really necessary, right, to our own, to our, well, I used to like the Star Trek, the episode of the companion, we shall be, you know, continuing, right? Our continuing, right? What I want to see is the continuing of the species every bit as much as a certain talkative, tweetative technology executive, right, that's well known out there. I have a wildly different view about how we sustain humanity and how long it's going to take than that individual. So, and if I fact, I think that way is the path to destruction.

So that's interesting. Very thoughtful discussion, which is refreshing in these times where most people jump to conclusions and don't want to talk and don't want to think and just want to do and react. I feel the, the world is changing from lots of perspectives, but from a leadership perspective, there's a much different worldview these days where we, technology has created more connectivity than ever, which means we're now faced with more variables than ever before and more of the potential cultural clashes and, and personality differences and, and those things we talked about, which, you know, at some scale, if you can desensitize some of those differences a bit, also with technology, that might not be a bad thing, but too much can be a really harmful thing as you, as you alluded with at the beginning of the show. And I think there are conversations that aren't happening about how much is too much. And what's the right use of technology and, and what's the not the right? And, and how do we, how do we determine right from wrong?

You know, who's, who is it to say that you and I can, can make those determinations ourselves if that's even, you know, the right thing to do? Well, I'll tell you, I think, I think, you know, you, you may remember from a few years ago, everybody talked about join the conversation, right? So the conversation, right? Whatever politics at that time, right? Social rights, social justice, whatever. I think there is a growing conversation about what's it all for? Why are we working like this? Right? You know, people talk about the millennial phenomenon and what they think and what they don't and what they'll do and what they won't and Gen Z and all this stuff. Right? And there, there's real, there's real meat, right? And, and real content and, and, and what I wanna say, force, force right behind all of that. But I don't want to sell short the fact that people in my age bracket are also in large quantities reflecting back on what happiness did they really get out of all this striving and pursuing and so on. And, you know, that 401(k) is maybe, you know, not too bad. It looks pretty good. But is that really, was that really worth all these things, right? And all this time and missing all these kids' events or whatever, right? May have happened in all these lives. And so there is a lot of, I think, reflection on that. And again, one barometer of that is the rise of coaches that you can see clearly on LinkedIn addressing those very things, contentment, happiness, reward, satisfaction, all that stuff. It's a booming industry right now. Which if you, if you take it at face value, says there's a lot of demand, which must mean people have a lot of thoughts that, that maybe that wasn't what they really had, had intended. Right? So I think there's a lot to that right now. The, the challenge is that, is that we have a lot of conversations that are quite seminal going on and, and a couple of them are existential. And so they dominate things and these other thoughts get pushed down again and will only come back if we break through some of these other barriers.

Well, it's been a very interesting conversation, Gary. I really appreciate your time. And I think that for our listeners that have been inspired or provoked or eager to jump in and join the conversation. As you said, you would be very open to that. And we'll have your contact information in the show notes. And I think you, you've been a great guest and I'm sure there'll be plenty more to talk about.

So thank you very much. Thank you, Joe. I really appreciate the opportunity to share some of my views. And I welcome anybody to send an email, pro or con, right?

That's what the dialogue, right, is for. Yeah. And thank you to our listeners. It's great having you on again this week, and we look forward to talking to you more next week. This has been the most philosophical discussion I've had on the 40+ episodes, and it's been really fun.

I hope you enjoyed it.

We'll see you next week for for more. And that's a wrap. There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuitretreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at yourcmo.com, yourcmo.com, spelled wrong on purpose.