Adversity

There are very few among us who get to go through their professional careers without having to deal with some sort of adversity. I think this is pretty much a given. To be trite to the point that it almost pains me to type it, it is how we deal with this adversity that separates the truly top end from the rest of us. Sometimes dealing with this adversity has the added benefit of providing us with something called perspective.

This one is already becoming difficult for me. I think you will understand when I get into why in a little while.

When we think of adversity we normally can think about things such as difficult market conditions. Especially if you are associated with any sort of equipment or infrastructure sales in today’s capital constricted markets. Adversity can take the form of a difficult boss. I like to think about the pointy-haired fellow in the Dilbert comics by Scott Adams. Adversity can take the form of a difficult assignment, or the requirement to find your next assignment or even the next job. Obviously, adversity comes in many forms.

To one extent or another I think we have all been there. All of these examples (and many others) constitute difficult environments and situations to either find yourself in, or experience. They require a certain amount of fortitude and focus to get through. But that is just the point. They are situations to get through. With work, focus, effort and the proper attitude they can be traversed.

I think that deep down we all understand that, even when we find ourselves in those uncomfortable places. We should focus on the resolution, and finding our way to it. It is only when we take our eyes, and minds off of this goal that we run the risk of a longer-term failure as opposed to a shorter-term set-back. Still, I think we have all seen it happen.

I might get into mind-sets and methods of dealing with this type of adversity at another time as well.

I’m going to talk about a different type of adversity.

One year ago, today, my eighteen year old son was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes.

Now we are talking adversity.

Admittedly it is not as much as many face and endure, but it also has added a great deal of perspective for me when it comes to talking about and dealing with things in the professional world.

Most of the time I talk about issues, topics and observations in the first person, and what I have done, either correctly or incorrectly in dealing with them. However, this is one where I can’t. It didn’t happen to me. It happened to him. For whatever reason, his pancreas stopped creating insulin. Mine still does. His doesn’t.

I like to think of myself as a leader. Someone who solves problems. But this was one issue that I couldn’t find a resolution for.

“Type 1 diabetes, once known as juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes, is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin. Insulin is a hormone needed to allow sugar (glucose) to enter cells to produce energy. The exact cause of type 1 diabetes is unknown. Usually, the body’s own immune system — which normally fights harmful bacteria and viruses — mistakenly destroys the insulin-producing (islet, or islets of Langerhans) cells in the pancreas.” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/type-1-diabetes/symptoms-causes/syc-20353011

Every time we eat our bodies break down the consumed food into components that are used to sustain our bodies. One of the key ones, as noted above, is sugar to produce energy. Diabetes inhibits this process.

A little more than a year ago, we noticed that our son was losing weight, was getting lethargic and was drinking a ton of water. I credit my wife with spotting the symptoms first. At this point he was almost six feet tall, and weighed close to one hundred and twenty-five pounds. We got him into the doctor, and then we got the diagnosis.

After two nights in the emergency room on an insulin drip to get his blood-sugar down to an acceptable number, he was discharged and set out to deal with the adversity of being a diabetic – for the rest of his life.

This was not a temporary set-back. This is forever, for him. I had broken bones, dealt with various sicknesses, had bad bosses, and looked for new jobs, and all other sorts of set-backs. I think as I said, deep down I knew these adversities would pass.

He was dealing with his first real adversity, and it wasn’t going to pass.

As a parent, and the nominal leader in our house (Make no mistakes here. I like to think of myself as the leader, someone who solves issues, however my wife is the “boss”. I refer to her as “The most powerful woman in the universe”. At least in my universe.) this was something that I could not fix or resolve. I had to recalibrate how I dealt with this since it was by no means going to be temporary.

But I am a reasonably experienced individual. I’ve been around. I’ve gone through a lot.

My son was just eighteen. He was finishing his senior year of high school. He was already accepted into a good university. This was supposed to be a great time in someone’s life. The rites of passage. The beginning of the transition to adulthood. The last of the truly carefree times in life.

I don’t quite know what he thought, but I thought it was unfair.

I watched for any telltale signs on how he was taking this. He had gone from being able to eat, drink and do anything, like any other teenager, to having to be totally aware of what he was eating, drinking and doing, in order to maintain a healthy blood-sugar level.

What I watched as time passed, both astounded me, and made me proud.

It astounded me in that I didn’t see any changes in my kid. I was angry at the randomness and injustice of this, but he wasn’t. He was the same laid-back and happy guy that I have always known. He was facing adversity and not letting it change who he was, and is.

I was proud in that when I asked him about it, he was philosophical about it, and it seemed to be way beyond his years to me. He said he decided he wasn’t going to change because he now had diabetes. He would still eat, drink and do what he wanted, but he would now just add monitoring his blood sugar to the process.

I was proud of him in the way he was dealing with it. He said that at first, he was angry, but then he realized that being angry wasn’t going to change his situation. It was something that happened. He realized he couldn’t change it. So, he had quickly come to terms with it. And besides, he really wasn’t the angry type.

I was still angry. I probably still am, to some extent, even a year later.

Here was an eighteen year old who had never faced any adversity to speak of, let alone adversity of this type, basically schooling me on how to handle it. Here I was, someone who had gone through the highs and lows of business, the lay-offs and the promotions, pretty much all of it, and I was learning from him a perspective that in retrospect I probably should have had, to one level or another from the beginning.

He is now nineteen years old, and has finished his first year of college. He is still a diabetic, but he has put the weight back on and is now a healthy, but slender six feet tall and one hundred and sixty pounds. It is still an adversity that he has to face that will never go away, unless a cure is one day found.

We have tried to automate and simplify his regimens with the addition of Constant Glucose Monitors (CGM) and Insulin Pumps that are attached to him so that he no longer has to prick his finger to test his blood, nor use a syringe to inject the required doses of insulin.

Adversity comes in many forms. I don’t want to try and equate the adversity that occurs in business with real adversity. I learned this through watching someone I really cared for come to grips with and deal with the adversity that he faced. I also saw that although I thought what he faced was great, there were those that faced even greater adversities, many of which might not be able to be dealt with, and in many instances despite all efforts might have to be accepted on an even more painful level.

I was going to end this with some nice quote about adversity. None of them felt right, when looking at the adversity that is faced in business when compared to my son. I think this has to do with my perspective that has been gained relative to adversity. I’ll go in a little bit different, but not entirely unrelated direction here. Charles Swindoll said:

“Life is 10% what happens, and 90% how you react to it.”

If that’s the case I think my son is going to do pretty well in business, as well as in life. And I think I have learned a lot about how to deal with adversity from him.

When Metrics Fail

It has long been known in business that you should “Inspect what you expect”. This basically means that if you want to achieve a certain goal, or engender a specific behavior, you need to establish metrics associated with that objective. Then you need to monitor and measure the progress toward that objective.

After all, it has also been known in business that “Data is your friend”. The idea of gathering unbiased information regarding the progress toward the business goals and objectives has also been acknowledged as a path to success.

So, if you have the metrics, and you have the data, everything should be great, right?

Not so fast.

In these days of quantifiable objectives and unbiased measurements, with customer service taking an ever-higher pedestal in the pantheon of business goals, why is it that service satisfaction seems to be taking a nose dive instead of soaring to new heights?

I think the answer is simple, and it directly relates to the first item above: Inspect what you expect. Unless businesses are very careful when they set their goals and objectives, they will incite an employee behavior to manage to the metrics, instead of the business objectives. To illustrate this behavior and resulting customer satisfaction failure, I will regale you with my own personal travails though the metrics mess.

Since the advent of mobile phones, I think it is safe to say that just about every business person has had a business mobile phone. Across this mobile communications time-scape I have had the bad fortune to break exactly one of my business phones, to the point of requiring a replacement phone.

Personally, I think this is a pretty good record. I know of several of my colleagues across this period that are well into double digits on the number of phones they have broken and replaced.

In any event once broken, I then started the process of trying to get a replacement phone.

As with most organizations, there was a corporate “Help” line available to call should there be a connectivity issue. I called it. They answered right away. I asked my questions regarding where to go to start the replacement phone process. They directed me to the appropriate organizational web site.

Up to this point, this has been a really good service experience.

Time passed and I then accessed the replacement program and filled out the then required information and submitted it. I got an error message. It didn’t tell me what was wrong with my phone replacement application, only that it was wrong. I searched the rest of the page and found a help number (different from the first help number) and called.

They took my information and opened a trouble ticket, and told me they would get back to me.

Fifteen minutes later I received an email providing another URL directing me to another tool for phone replacements, and that since they could not do anything else, they had closed my trouble ticket.

Time passed and I then went to the new location, filled out another form and requested a replacement phone. Now I received a different error message, but again, no information on how to resolve the error. I again searched the rest of the page and found a help number (different from the first help number, and the second help number) and called.

They too took my information and opened a trouble ticket, and told me they would get back to me.

Another short time later I received another email providing the URL of the original Help line directing me to talk with them since they were actually in mid-conversion of the on-line business phone procurement tool and that since they could not do anything else, they had closed my trouble ticket.

As you might guess, my opinion of the quality of the service experience was eroding quickly.

Time continued to pass and I then re-called the original Help number and informed them of the circular cycle I had just been through, and again asked for their help. They said that they would look into it and then opened yet another trouble ticket.

Again as you might guess, I soon received another email confirming that there was indeed a conversion going on within the systems and that I would have to wait until it was over to order a replacement telephone, and that since they could not do anything else, they had closed my trouble ticket.

Now, I will get to the resolution of this phone replacement story in a little bit, but I am using it here to illustrate the issue that metrics can create. It was quite obvious that the metric that mattered most to the “Help” entities was how quickly they closed the trouble ticket once it was opened.

This metric mattered so much in their requirement set that it was all they focused on. I had opened multiple trouble tickets for the exact same issue, with multiple entities, some of them multiple times. They had closed every one of the tickets that I had opened quickly and efficiently.

And after all that time and effort, I still didn’t have a replacement phone. They had not solved my problem. Their metrics probably looked great. Their customer satisfaction, at least in my particular instance was close to non-existent.

Someone had obviously associated rapid closure of trouble tickets with increased customer satisfaction. In light of this correlation, they created a set of objectives and accompanying metrics around this topic. Goals were set. And associated behaviors were adjusted to this new arrangement. The tickets were indeed closed quickly.

And it was obvious that they learned that “usually” closing a trouble ticket quickly resulted in increased customer satisfaction. Closing multiple trouble tickets for the same issue quickly, but not solving the underlying issue resulted in the exact opposite. I was not anywhere close to satisfied.

By the way, I could not make this story up. This actually did happen to me some time back. It is kind of humorous in retrospect, however at the time I was not especially amused.

Getting back the resolution about how I eventually got a replacement phone, when everyone thought that they had done their job, yet there was no method for me to get a phone.

Most companies when they think they have done a good job like to issue customer surveys, just to make sure that they have done a good job. This sort of customer feedback looks good when it comes time to report on the group’s performance at the end of the year.

They sent me a customer satisfaction survey.

They asked that since all my tickets were closed so quickly if I was nearly as delighted as they thought I should be.

I told them “no”, and graded them “Zero” out of five on every metric, and submitted it. I in effect told them they stunk.

I like to think that once my survey hit their inbox with such low scores, that something akin to the “red button” was hit (along the lines of the one in the movie “Ghostbusters” – the first one, not the sequel) where the alarm rings and everyone comes running.

Within a couple of hours of sending it in, I received a call from the help group manager. He asked if he could set up a call to understand what my issues were. I agreed, but only if he brought in the other two help groups I had unsuccessfully interfaced with as well. He said he would.

Believe it or not, weeks had passed since I started the process of trying to replace my phone. What should have been a relatively simple exercise had now stretched out to the point where I was have a conference call with more than a dozen people who were trying to understand how I could be so wrong about the quality of their support services.

During the call I did agree with all of them that they had indeed closed all the trouble tickets I had opened quite promptly. I commended them for this obviously herculean effort.

I then informed them that the objective here was for me to get a new mobile phone, not to get my trouble tickets closed so quickly. I wouldn’t have minded that they were closed so quickly, if I had in fact achieved my objective, which was to get a new phone. And at this point, as of this conference call, I still didn’t have one.

There was what I could only have described as stunned silence on the call.

The actual final solution to the issue was to have the director responsible for the company phone services, who was on the call trying to understand what went wrong with the process, to personally order a phone for me. He did, and I received it two days later.

I think I should have called him directly in the first place.

Aligning goals and the accompanying metrics can be a tricky business. Leaders need to understand that just because all of the so-called metrics have been met, doesn’t necessarily mean that all is well in the business. Metrics tend to replace the actual business goals and objectives, since it is the metrics that people usually get measured against.

Understanding the metric alignment with the organizational objectives will be crucial in avoiding those instances where the metrics indicate one thing, while reality demonstrates something entirely different. It is always good to remember that having data is good, but that metrics, if not properly understood, can fail.

Globalization and Regionalization

I have had the opportunity to work for several different organizations in both global roles and regional roles. They are as diverse in their approaches to business as they are different in their drivers. As Captain Obvious might say “Well, duh”. However, I thought I might spend a little time looking at why they are so different. What factors contribute to what appears to be an ongoing, never ending conflict of business imperatives between the global business and the regional business unit.

Global businesses are driven to try and do everything only once. That means they try to create single products that can be sold and implemented in multiple regions. The same would also be true of their services. Global businesses try to create single business processes and business structures. They then try to make the regional business units fit this ideal as closely as possible.

This is all based on the global business’ desire to minimize costs and associated overheads.

If you can do things only once, you don’t have to put multiple products, or redundant business support infrastructures in place. This keeps your costs down.

It is also a very internally focused approach to doing business. As we have all seen, when your internal drivers outpace your customer focus, you are probably in for some difficult times in the very near future as your competition outplays you in the customer environment.

Regional business units are usually put in place to deal with a specific (regional) customer set. This can usually be due to language, regulatory, cultural, or any number of other factors associated with and specific to that region. By their very nature, and the limited customer set that the regional organization focuses on, they are primarily externally focused. They want products and services that have been specifically modified and adapted to their specific customers’ desires.

As we have all seen, when your customer focus overwhelms your internal cost concerns you are also probably in for some difficult times as your costs and support issues drive your profitability down.

I think herein lies the root of the “push-me, pull-you” issue between global and regional organizations. Global organizations want minimal diversification of their products, services and processes in order to keep the associated costs at a minimum, while regional organizations want multiple, specific customer and cultural variations that directly relate to their specific customers.

So, what can be done?

Sometimes one of the regions emerges as the “lead” region for the organization. Again, usually, but not always the lead region is the region where the global organization is located. This is the region where the provided product or service gets the most traction, or generates the most revenue. This “lead region” has a tendency to create a resonant “do loop”.

The lead region provides its input to the global organization as to the customer specific variations that they need or want, and the global organization responds to them first since they are generating the most return for the organization’s investment expense. Since the global organization wants to minimize the total number of variations that they must support, the other regions are usually left to try and adapt to the lead region requirements.

Customers within in the dominant region get their requests responded to first and hence maintain their lead position by then making the purchase decision, where the other regions’ and their customer specific requests are forced to wait, if they receive their requests at all. Since there is always competition in every region, those customers within the secondary regions tend to remain smaller since their product and service requests are not met as well or as quickly as those of customers in the dominant region. The secondary region customers have a tendency to utilize other suppliers if they wish to have their needs met on a level that more closely meets their needs.

This phenomenon is equally applicable to both the customer product (external and customer requirements) and business process (internal and cost directives) associated with both the regional and global organizations.

While Darwin was a champion of the survival of the fittest, that is little consolation to the secondary region within a global organization, when it is simultaneously told to grow, but cannot get the regional specific needs of their customers, or business processes quickly or adequately addressed.

As an example, there are few things more ubiquitous in the business world today than the laptop or personal computer. Everybody has one. And size matters. But not how you might at first suspect. In the business world, the smaller the laptop computer an executive has, the more important they are. The really important people do not carry a laptop at all. They have someone who carries it for them.

But I digress….

Instead of making country specific laptops and computers, vendors make a generic computer with country specific plugs and charger cords, since very few countries enjoy using the same wall outlets or power structures. They have a global product with specific regional, or country adapters. It works great.

Unless you take your laptop to another country. Then you need another adapter.

What I’m getting at here is that even something as ubiquitous as the laptop needs to be adapted to almost every region and country. And when a laptop that was designed for one region is taken into a different region, it needs another adapter.

I think that sort of implies that almost every other product, service or process will probably need the same type of adaptation treatment for each of its targeted regions.

On the other side of this argument, it can be said that not every country has a market opportunity sufficient to support its own specific product or process set. It is in these types of instances that again as Captain Obvious would again say “well, duh”. Hence, relatively similar countries get grouped into regions where similar market characteristics can be addressed.

This doesn’t mean that they are all the same. Just similar. We all know the basic beak-downs, North America, Latin / South America, Europe, etc. Within these regions we might see some further specification such as Caribbean or Southern Cone in the Latin American region, or Benelux and Scandinavia in Europe.

So why all this grouping and sub-grouping of regions and their respective organizations? Partly to reduce redundancy and overlap of cost structures, but also to more clearly enable what should be that bastion of business, the business case.

By accreting organizations upwards, (hopefully) business cases can be made for the appropriate level of diversification / specification of the products, services and processes to specifically service that region. Or at least one would hope that this is the case.

Again, the problem here will be that the business cases of the lead region / country will almost always be stronger than even those of the secondary regions. So, what can be done?

The solution will lie with the business focus.

If the business focus is on cost containment, increased profitability and process unification, the needs and desires of the regions will be deprioritized in favor of global approaches and processes in the name of cost containment and simplification. This will normally be the case with both “cash cow” and lower margin businesses. Businesses associated with older technology products as well as businesses associated with services will usually try to drive to this one size / one process fits all reduced investment and increased earnings optimal state.

In this case, the desires and needs of the lead region will probably drive the directions and processes of the entire global business.

If the business focus is on revenue growth, that means specific customer requests and requirements must be responded to in order to obtain the desired customer commitments. This means the specific needs of each region will need to be addressed within the global organization plan. Prioritizations regarding which customer demands are responded to first will still be made, but there will be an extensive set of delivery plans to make sure as many specific regional requests as possible are met within the desired time frames.

The net result of globalization versus regionalization is that neither organization will ever be entirely happy. Regional business units will never get all that they want in the way of customized products, services and processes that are adapted to their specific needs. Global businesses will never be able to get their one size fits all cost utopia. There will always be a spectrum along which these items will lie.

The more internal the focus of the topic or the business, the more globalized the approach. This seems to particularly be the direction for anything associated with internal organizational systems and processes.

Businesses associated with older technology will probably also find themselves with less R&D funding available for region specific developments, as that funding will probably be utilized on newer products.

Services businesses, which normally also operate on a lower margin business case will also probably find themselves trying to regionally find a way to adapt as closely the one size fits all approach of the global structure as possible.

It will probably be only those high growth or high margin businesses that will enjoy the opportunity to access full customer responsive regionalization. This will normally be because they are the only types of products (and services) that can afford the investments that regionalization requires.

This further supports the golden rule of business: Those regions that deliver the gold, get to make the global rules.