What Counts?

My grandson, my son-in-law and I were discussing the meaning of life. My grandson was telling us about someone  in his high school class who got perfect scores on the SAT. (At this point in his life my grandson had been given a scholarship and stipend of 50% of his tuition plus room and board from a University of his choice. . Before his first semester was over he was working in the Dean's office.)

I suggested getting a perfect score on the SATs was not his thing. His thing is to be the most integrated person I have ever known.

I was discussing him with his sixth grade teacher. She had written a remarkable reference for him. She said  that " you can't determine what he has by testing."

Today in the new York times there was an article on baseball announcers using the new statistics in their game descriptions. Mr. Vinnie B gave us a quotation that beautifully summarized what I have thought, albeit less eloquently:

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted"

P.S. Although the sentence is often credited to Einstein there are a number of more likely candidates

Negotiating with Myself

Yesterday I got an email from a critical supplier who told me that they could not ship the product.  The reason given made no sense (to me) and I could not understand the reasoning.   Furthermore the implication seemed to be (to me) that they could never ship to me again.

Since this was critical to a business I was beside myself. I began to make up reasons for the non-shipments.  They didn't like me anymore, there was government interference, and we were too small for them and several things about money.

Now I had to decide how to appease them.  What should my first offer be? What could I do that would change their minds?  If I threatened to send Vinnie would that help.

Suddenly I realized that I didn't know very much about what was going on and in making up these scenarios I was in effect negotiating with myself.

This is not the first time I have done this and probably will not be the last.  Like most of us I had seen groups spend hours on this kind of negotiations.

Several had been in response to a simple phone message, which merely said, "please call me back".

It didn't take much for the group to get into why would he call now?  From that, it went to a long discussion of how we would deal with the problem.  No one really knew what the problem(s), if any, were.  In the absence of any evidence at all they would make up disaster scenarios and an anguish of what kinds of things could be done. 

People who were sure that the message leaver hated them offered to quit on the spot if that would solve the problem.

In my recent case the supplier wanted an answer to a simple question.

(c) 2013 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

Useful Distinctions

The closer two words, pictures or actions are the more useful it is to understand their differences and similarities. I am going to talking about two sets of them because in each case I have been repremanded and even in trouble for confusing them.  They are not burnt into my flesh but occupy a very special compartment in my mind.

The first set is the two words accuracy and precision. In common use these words seem to be used interchangeably which reflects neither accuracy nor precision.

Lets take the case of a guided missile, which certainly needs accuracy, and some level of precision.  Accuracy describes how close to the intended target you came to. So if you intended, for example to hit Sudam Hussein and instead got the Egyptian pyramids your accuracy is fairly poor and certainly not up to the task at hand.  People often refer to actions that range from the above to getting a pitch called the slider in the strike zone as accuracy and they are correct. But this is in no way precision.

Precision refers to the degree to which you can both adjust and repeat a given action. An easy example is a machinist who uses a dial on their milling machine to ensure that two metal parts are exactly alike.  In this case, like in all questions of precision, there is a certain tolerance involved. That is the parts need to be measured as the same within a certain range of measurements. This is called tolerance and varies with the practical usage of the item.

Eli Whitney, who is supposed to have invented the Cotton Jin, discovered that if he could make parts precisely the same within certain tolerances that parts were interchangeable. Since he used this on the manufacture of rifles this sharply reduced the amount of handwork required in creating a rifle and thus substantially reduced the cost of manufacture.

This concept is the basis of all large-scale manufacture through the world.

The second set of words that are confused and misused are responsibility and accountability. In the world of crime, for example responsibility refers to the fact that you are nominally in charge of the jewelry store heist. You are the overall boss and may have subordinates who you make responsible for subordinate areas such as obtaining the guns and masks fencing the jewels stolen and so on.

Now what happens when the police catch you as they sometimes do? Then society holds you accountable for the crime and your accountability may appear as a ten-year jail sentence or something similar. Even if you plead innocence on the grounds of insanity and are place in a mental institution that is the result of being held accountable.

One often reads in the paper of a politician who says that it they were responsible, that it occurred on their watch or in their territory. They strut around acting as if they had done something noble by accepting responsibility.  What the rest of us really want is for them to  be held accountable by the next level up or higher.

This can get a little hazy. For example the president of the United States is in charge of the entire country. To what extent is he or she responsible for everything that goes on, including my daughters' moving back into the house?  In this case I may or may not be responsible but I am surely accountable.

I invite comments on these ideas, as long the word “idiot” is not included in your comment.

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

Alignment

Planning is not a result or a destination, but rather a process. A process by which you prepare for an uncertain future.

So the purpose of a planning exercise is not to produce a document which is often never looked at again, except perhaps for getting the format right for the next time around.

What you are looking for in the process is alignment.  Alignment within yourself and/or alignment of the team that is doing the planning.

At this point we need to differentiate between two processes that the team might use. The first is consensus. In consensus you are creating a direction which is in a sense the lowest common denominator. The set of things that everyone signs up for knowing that they are really not getting all that they want, but hell doesn’t the group come first.

The second, and I believe more productive process, is called alignment. In alignment each person’s vision is part of the whole.  This is achieved through creativity.

It can be more work to achieve alignment than consensus but the results in productivity are worth it.

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

Commitment

I have spent a lot of time in my career as a business man and consultant thinking about whether I was really committed to a project, whether the others were and how could I tell anyway.

My thinking and viewpoint have evolved over a period of years and I will describe that evolution.

When I started out I thought that commitment was identical with hard work and hours spent and how much I was willing to sacrifice to get the job done.  Then I worked at a company that loved to give the employees personality/character tests. When I got my test back it said that I was more committed to my own personal growth then the teams objectives.

This really puzzled me because I had gotten a lot of feedback about what a great team player I was.  And there were many times when I was selected to represent the team even when there were much more senior, experienced people on the team.

What I realized was that when we got into trouble I tended to reflect on how I related to the trouble while other team mates focused on worker longer hours to the point of exhaustion. Despite this I was often acknowledged as having a clearer picture of reality than any of the others.  It certainly was not true that I was calmer or more organized than the others in the face of difficulty. In fact I may have acted as the craziest person in the group. What was true was that at the end of my process I almost always knew what was standing in the way and what was needed to move forwarded.

So how did I get there.  All my life I have tended to care more about my internal process rather than the details of what was going on.  I had become successful doing this but never understood what I was doing or how I worked. 

Then I started to notice that once I was clear about what was happening inside me I was much more capable of dealing with what was outside me.  This clarity came at a high price in energy. It was almost like I was becoming the problem and asking myself why I was doing this. The most difficult part was in owning up to things inside me that I didn't want to; self doubt, confusion laziness, competiveness, greed, anger, in essence the seven deadly sins. Once I was willing to acknowledge these I became much freer to deal with the job at hand.

Then I realized that the test results were more of a comment on my process than my goals.

So what is commitment? I have concluded that it is the willingness to confront the crap inside me to get the job done.  The process of confrontation was much harder than the problem at hand but at the end it made work much easier.

Over my 30 years as a business and management consultant I have taught this concept both formally and by example, particularly when I was carrying out interim management.

Many of my "students" have responded to this and found it very helpful in their careers as well as in their lives in general.  And, more than 35 people who have worked for me have gone on to become Presidents and Vice presidents of companies, many of their own.

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

Ideas on Using the Question Tool

1. Use the questions in the order presented. They are carefully crafted to work in that way.
2. Use "What isn't working?" to pinpoint problems.
   
3. Use "What's missing?" to find solutions to those problems. These are distinct functions.
4. Use a large pad or blackboard to keep lists of answers visible to all participants. That will generate momentum.
5. As much as possible put the answers in concrete terms: e.g. Our failure rate is down to .4%
6. For soft areas: "We are 3 days behind in order entry" vs. "We just can't seem to keep up with the work." This is not intended to ignore all of the sometimes painful soft issues that come up. You are looking for ways to handle them concretely.
7. Don't add extra questions. We've tried that. It just doesn't work very well.

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

Tools for Discovering Concrete Reality

Most of the time we need to know exactly what is going on.  I usually rely on the following three questions in order to get me to where I want to go:

1. What's working?
2. What's not working?
3. What's missing?

I have used these questions in such a wide range of situations that I have come to believe that they are universally helpful. I have used them with start ups, fortune 100 companies, emerging companies, nonprofit organizations, religious organization, government  and more.

It is wise to remember that we are not trying to discover ultimate reality. We want know what is going on accurately and clearly.

Using the tool  It is not unusual for team members to disagree on what is true right now.  That needs to be settled on the ground not in people's heads. 

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

The Foundation of Planning

Planning begins with reaching agreement on the present concrete reality.   I am not referring to  a philosophical concept such as  Plato and The Cave. What you need to reach is agreement about where things stand. All paths must have a starting point, a direction and a destination. If the starting point is a 100 miles north of where you think it is your chances of getting where you want to go are at least greatly diminished and may be zero.

Concrete reality describes how things really are. Someone may tell you that they think that there are 100 shippable units in inventory and you can decide to believe them. Until you go to the stockroom and count them several times you really don't know how many shippable units are there.

To get to concrete reality you have to set aside your limited beliefs, desires , guesses and assumptions to determining what is really measurable and true.

Let me contrast two statements:

   1. Sam told me that there were 120 units in inventory.

   2. I counted them myself and there were 120 units in inventory but 2 appeared   to be damaged and need to be tested before they can be shipped.

If we are to believe that Sam's count (1.) is correct we have to rely on a number of assumptions created by and residing within our belief system. In the first case we must  believe that Sam can count correctly and that he did count the inventory, and finally that he was able to communicate the count correctly. For example did he count working units, cosmetically ok units or .....

This does not mean that you have to count them yourself. If that was the case why have a team.  What it does mean is that Sam's instructions about what he has to count and what represents shippable inventory needs to be clear.

It is not unusual for team members to disagree on what is true right now.  That needs to be settled on the ground not in people's heads.

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

John Kennedy and our National Commitment to Walk on the Moon

On May 25th, 1961 John Kennedy said,  "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

There is an apocryphal story that after his speech the metals guy came up and said we don’t have the metals. Then the fuel guy came up and said we don’t have the right fuel and we don’t know how to produce it. The electronics guy came to him and said we are decades away from having accurate enough navigation tools.

"Good now we know what to work on," Kennedy said.

When someone makes the kind of commitment that Kennedy did, the office of “it can’t be done” opens immediately. If you are committed this does not stop you, it shows you the way.

I have a college professor friend who designed some chips for Apollo 11.. He told me that you could ask anyone at NASA; janitors, astronauts and administrators what their mission was. The answer would always be the same; 'we are going to put someone on the moon and bring them back safely.'

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

Two Kinds of Planning

Consideration – the act of considering; careful thought; meditation; deliberation: I will give your project full consideration. Commitment - the act of binding yourself, intellectually and emotionally to a course of action: Your commitment is really needed. 

In consideration based planning you deliberate; you gather all the facts; you assume that with enough facts (considerations) you can make the best decisions about a course of action. You assume that if you have enough facts you can predict the future. You assume a mechanical view of reality. In commitment based planning you go for it. You assume an ever changing and uncertain reality; that you will have to adapt to changes all the time. It is your commitment that moves you along. There are a number of flaws in decision based planning. The most important assumption is that reality unfolds in predictable ways. The problem is that it doesn’t Consideration based planning is useful in covering your behind. It gives you a lot of data to confuse your superiors. Many companies seem to use consideration based planning. In commitment based planning you do not ignore the considerations. They become what you have to work on. When you commit to something it carries with it an acknowledgment that nothing is certain. Be willing to be uncomfortable and anxious with your direction.You will be forced to grow in order to accomplish what you want to do. You will not be the same person when you reach the goals. Let me give you an example: We used to give workshops to change the culture in companies. They were a sort of basic training. They lasted two days with follow-up. At the end of the first day we asked people to commit to a task to be completed overnight. The task needed to be seemingly impossible. People didn’t believe that they could reach their target. Inevitably they would not only reach the target, they would substantially exceed it. The management group at a publishing company committed to raising $38,000 over night to improve their bottom line. There were strict rules. If you got an order there had to be documentation with a signed purchase order. 6% of the sale would be credited to the bottom line. If you sold a piece of equipment, you had to have a signed agreement. If you dropped an expense, it had to be documented with invoices and checks. The next morning they had added $138,000 to the bottom line. At that point they were no longer the same company or people. What had seemed impossible the day before now became something that they knew how to do. They completed the year with all shortfalls made up. Beyond that they were now able to carry out their business at a whole different level, in a whole different way. They had come to the conclusion that what they considered impossible had a very large component of fear in it. They could press though the fear and reach new heights. As you might imagine I am a big fan of commitment based planning.

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

Thomas Jefferson - Strategic Marketer

This is a portion of the instructions to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by President Thomas Jefferson describing what they were to accomplish on their journey. Jefferson understood the economic potential of what would be discovered on the journey and was positioning the United States to take advantage of that potential.

"The commerce which may be carried on with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue, renders a knowledge of those people important. You will therefore endeavor to make yourself acquainted, as far as a diligent pursuit of your journey shall admit, with the names of the nations & their numbers; the extent & limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes of nations; their language, traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, arts, & the implements for these; their food, clothing, & domestic accommodations; the diseases prevalent among them, & the remedies they use; moral & physical circumstances which distinguish them from the tribes we know; peculiarities in their laws, customs & dispositions; and articles of commerce they may need or furnish, & to what extent. And, considering the interest which every nation has in extending & strengthening the authority of reason & justice among the people around them, it will be useful to acquire what knowledge you can of the state of morality, religion, & information among them; as it may better enable those who endeavor to civilize & instruct them, to adapt their measure to the existing notions & practices of those on whom they are to operate.

"Other objects worthy of notice will be the soil & face of the country, it's growth & vegetable productions, especially those not of the U.S. the animals of the country generally, & especially those not known in the U.S. the remains or accounts of any which may be deemed rare or extinct; the mineral productions of every kind; but more particularly metals, limestone, pit coal, & saltpeter; salines & mineral waters, noting the temperature of the last, & such circumstances as may indicate their character; volcanic appearances; climate, as characterized by the thermometer, by the proportion of rainy, cloudy, & clear days, by lightening, hail, snow, ice, by the access & recess of frost, by the winds prevailing at different seasons, the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flower, or leaf, times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles or insects."

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

A Lesson Relearned

A few weekends ago my wife and I took our twelve -year-old granddaughter to Sequoia National Park. It was a short trip so we needed to focus. We settled on two destinations inside the park; the largest tree in the world (the General Sherman) and visiting the Crystal Caves.

The hike to the General Sherman is a quarter mile downhill. It is also a quarter mile uphill. I was stopping frequently on the hike back. Then an idea from my trail running days came back to me. The idea is to walk (or run) at a pace at which I didn’t have to stop. That worked very well. The trail to the caves was a half mile down a much steeper hill. Coming back I used the same technique and walked all the way without stopping. My wife did as well even though she had foot surgery about a month ago and is still healing. Our granddaughter had no such limits and walked and ran up and down the hill as she wished. She was very attentive to her grandmother and kept checking in with her. So why am I showing you this part of the family album? On the hikes I relearned a lesson from a while ago. Work has it’s ups and downs. Keep moving even if it means slowing down. It’s the way the tortoise beat the hare.

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

Why Plan?

We are unable to predict the future.  The uncertainty and anxiety that we experience is just what  generates the  need for planning.  However the most useful  output of planning is not a document.

I was discussing  their planning process at a  large defense contractor . I bet an  executive that he never looked at the plan after it was finished.  I lost the bet.  He told me that they take the old plan off the shelf every year to make sure that they get the format right for the new one..

The really useful  output of planning is an team or organization that is prepared to deal with the uncertainties of the  future.

Planning at its most useful  is the preparation for an uncertain future. The process of group preparation requires commitment and teamwork, the same qualities that must be present during the work itself.  .

A team that has gone through a successful planning process is one in which the vision or mission becomes clear to all involved.  Every team member knows what their role is and how it relates to the whole.

Often the process of planning goes something like this. One person create an outline (or uses last years) She then parcels  out portions of the outline to others. The results are then melded into a single document by the person who created the writing assignments.

 This will not produce a future ready team.

My partner and I were asked to attend and then comment on a management team's planning session.   When they finished they asked us what we thought.  What we told them that if they wanted the company to be a tea party then the meeting worked.  If they wanted a powerful company it didn't

They began to tell us that we didn't know what we were talking about.  We explained that we were on their side and that we could only tell them what we saw.

Gradually the discussion among the team members heated up and real disagreements were put on the table and dealt with.  It was universally agreed that it was the best planning session they have ever had.

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

No One This Side of Heaven Can Predict the Future

Planning: A scheme, program, or method worked out beforehand for the accomplishment of an objective: a plan of attack. 

No one this side of heaven can predict the future.

Where we run into a problem is with something called asynchronous reinforcement. We get it right infrequently, but often enough to convince us that we can predict the future. Where is the evidence that we can’t predict the future? It is in newspapers, television, radio and the internet and most importantly our own lives. Like most people almost all of the best things I have in life seemingly came out of nowhere. Unfortunately some of the worse things did also.

As human beings we know what we know and we know what we don’t know. By definition we have no clue about what we don’t know, we don’t know. It is this last area that drives our inability to predict the future. We have no way of even being aware of what most of the factors influencing the future are. Furthermore not knowing what we don’t know is always the largest portion of our reality.

You may or may not be positioned to handle what comes out of the first two (1. what you know and 2. what you don’t know) but what reality delivers out of the third area “what we don’t know, what we don’t know”, is where the problems arise. As they say in our military “no battle plan survives the first encounter with the enemy“.

My Uncle Al used to say “people plan and God laughs”. So why plan?

Oh, That's the Problem

We were working a company up in China.

 There were some consistent systems in place and many that needed to be added. This was not a raw start up, however. They had been selling in China and Japan for some time and were profitable. What they had not done was to sell in the west. We agreed to get them going.

Despite the fact that they were not a start up they had made recognizable and common mistakes. I will discuss one and how we dealt with it. Their products were numbered sequentially independent of type. So that snt-52 might bare little resemblance to snt-65. Their are several problem with this sort of numbering system. The most important is that in order to be productive in the company you had to have memorized all of the part numbers. That took a while for new employees.

A second related problem is that the parts numbers told you nothing about the part. With hundreds of different parts sold you often had to look up the corresponding description or the number if you have a description. Along came ust.

We decided to put in a semiconductor product style of numbering system. What this means is that the devices are organized by similar types and the part number tells you something about the instrument. It would not be perfect but it would eliminate most of the problems. It worked like this.

Say you had an instrument as shown in this post. The decoding of the part number would be as follows: S – Company 07 – Type of Instrument, in this case forceps T – Material, in this case titanium 0958- Instrument style, in this case tying with a perforated handle M- Instrument length, in this case 85cm M This has worked pretty well.

The only drawback was that since there were many hundreds of instruments in the catalog it took about three weeks to get the initial numbering sorted out.

As a side note, the actual coding of the instruments was carried out by a female owner of the company and my wife/ partner who had spent most of her career in banking, rising to Senior Vice President. Because they didn’t speak a common language they hired a Chinese neurologist who was bi-lingual to support them. He made the mistake of treating these two very strong women with a lot of arrogance. They fired him after the first day.

After that, for three weeks, the women worked together coding the instruments. Even without a common language they worked smoothly and quickly and seemed to pull out of the air what was needed in a particular situation. The company adopted the numbering system to use with all its’ customers.

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

A Brief Diary of My Trips to China

About ten years ago my wife, and then business partner, took a vacation trip to China. What we found was substantially different from what we expected; everyone was not wearing Mao jackets.

We encountered only two instances of the Chinese Government on that trip. Our guide told us to be careful about what we said in Tienanmen Square because there might be agents around. On a bus trip, when it was convenient to reroute, we couldn’t do so until the local government approved.

My next trip to China was a trade mission with 24 Chinese Americans . On the trip we met with government officials (local regional and national), high tech businesses, venture capitalists and the Beijing Olympic Technical Committee. At the latter I had an opportunity to give a talk on planning and conduct a review of their early plans.

At one point in the trip I met with the CEO of an incubator in Suzhou, near Shanghai. The incubator is more like a real estate agent leasing spaces to new and emerging companies.

After an additional trip or two we were presented with the opportunity to choose between two product lines to bring to the west; fiber optic connectors and hand held surgical instruments . The market for the fiber optic connectors was not in very good shape. A distributor in the us offered to sell us his inventory at below his cost.

We showed the surgical instruments to our ophthalmologist who told us that they were good instruments.

We went to a major conference and exhibition in Philadelphia to do due diligence. After a day we made a deal with an exhibitor to use part of their booth. We were in the instrument business.

Our ophthalmologist comments turned out to be correct. The instruments were soon soon accepted in the US. They are now used at the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University Hospital, The VA, many universities and by leading surgeons.

I then went on to have a total of 7 additional trips to china making it 9 in all.

On September 18th I went to China for the 9th time. The purpose of the visit was to visit the new factory, see what new product areas they are working on and settle some business issues.

I spent part of a day  at the World EXPO in Shanghai. Shanghais is about two hours by bus or car from Suzhou where the factory is.

There was so much to see that I only scratched the surface, but the surface was very interesting since most of the world was there. .

(c) 2012 Bert Berson, Berson & Associates  All Rights Reserved

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