Reflect, Appreciate and Breathe

 

 

 

Over the past weeks, I have taken a few moments and thought about this past year (thinking back to March of 2020 when Covid really took hold here in the U.S.) and it’s hard to try to sum it up.  It has been challenging, heartbreaking, tiring and bewildering just to try a few adjectives; and while the challenges certainly continue and the virus is still present in our communities, we have taken a new and tentative step forward.   It is in this context that I want to suggest that it's a good time to reflect on all that we (and you) have been through, appreciate all that we’ve (you’ve) endured and accomplished, and take some time to literally take a deep breath (or maybe two or three!)

 

As I think back over the year, I reflect back to where were as a society last summer.  The virus was raging, the vaccines were not clearly in sight, and it wasn't at all clear how we were going to make it through what was being forecasted as a dangerous fall and winter of 2020.  In our business, while revenue was strengthening, we were pretty consumed by thinking about ways to keep our employees healthy and safe, and like many organizations had a huge spike of positive cases after the July 4^th holiday last summer.  It was a time of crisis management, and high levels of anxiety and uncertainty.

 

Here we are today, July of 2021 and we are in a different spot.  Society is still challenged by the Covid virus, now with a new variant spreading quickly among unvaccinated individuals.  Vaccinations aren’t just available, 66% of eligible adults have had at least one shot, and while we may not make the president’s 70% goal by July 4^th, we will hit that level before the end of July.  In our business, over 70% of employees have had at least one vaccination shot, the business is strong and we have started taking steps to reopen the offices.  I am so appreciative of the actions, hard work, and sacrifices of so many over the past year and am deeply appreciative for the health, stability and support of my immediate family. 

 

In the context of reflection and appreciation, we need to acknowledge just what an incredibly difficult time this past year has been for so many including ourselves… I don't know about you but I have NEVER been through anything like this!  We need to give ourselves the room, the time and the grace to take a few extra breaths, and realize it will take some time to recover from all of this…  and that process may take a while and that's not just ok….. its required as a process of healing!

 

I will close this essay with a quote from a note I recently received from my dear son Bryson as he reflected on the past year…

 

“I think the present question is how do we process that past period, how can we incorporate the lessons and survival instincts of such a tumultuous moment into the calm of a new normal?  Do we perpetually recall memories, emotions, lowlights from the period, bringing an infusion of gratitude to the present?  Or do we push the harshness away, enjoy the freedom of our earned safety and trust that the implicit takeaways are baked into our conscious and unconscious selves?”

 

 

I will let you ponder these poignant and very “on-point” comments, and as you do, please join me and take a few moments to reflect, appreciate and breathe as we all find our way forward from this past year and chart new paths and directions for all of our futures!

 

 

D=>K=>I=>A/A/A…. A foundational “formula” for success!

 

 

As a guy that does gravitate to formulas, processes and repeatable management disciplines, this essay has been brewing for a while.  A few weeks ago, I had a great conversation with a young friend Meg, who was interviewing for a number of very different roles.  In that conversation, we focused in on the fact that while the roles were very different (one in a small non-profit, one in a large ad agency), the actual “foundational work” of the roles had some clear similarities and those common ideas triggered this essay.  Regardless of your role, or nature of the organization where you work, these simple ideas or process steps are incredibly common and deeply important in order to drive successful sustainable results.

 

The foundational formula/process/discipline is made up of a set of actions that are done in sequence, and follow the path of: 

 

Data->Knowledge->Insights-> Action/Assess/Apply

 

D: Data

 

Noun: facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis:

 

The first step is always to dig into the data…. and never get tired or bored, it always worth it!  I for example pull together a weekly performance dashboard for my leadership team, and rather than have someone in IT or finance pull it for me, I take an hour every Monday digging into last weeks results and building the dashboard myself.  I find that weekly process so helpful and EVERY WEEK I find little nuggets of trends, aberrations and surprises that allow me to understand where we are as a business and what actions we need to take going forward.  This first step, all about the data, is a step EVERYONE should do!  Don't let a fear of Math, or a lack of formal “data analytics training” stop you from diving in…. a vital and REQUIRED first step in this “foundational formula!”

 

K: Knowledge

 

Noun: facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject

 

By taking the step above and consistently digging into the data, we can gain knowledge and a deeper “understanding of a subject.”  Data on its’ own is relatively inert.  The purpose of the data dig “experience” is to gain understanding and build knowledge over time so you “convert” the data into actionable insights.

 

I: Insights

 

Noun: a deep understanding of a person or thing

 

Having a “deep understanding” of the work at hand is the big part of finding success.  While this evolves over time, the process steps reviewed above allow you to always be updating YOUR “deep understanding” of the business and will push you to take those thoughts/ideas and translate them into action!

 

 

A/A/A: 

 

A: Action

 

Noun: the fact or process of doing something, typically to achieve an aim

 

Take action, its time to have an impact!  Don't let the D->K->I phase lull you into passivity or inactivity.  This whole “foundational formula/process” is about taking thoughtful action in the marketplace and the “first A” is vital.  This step takes insights (mentioned above) AND COURAGE.  Step out there, make your recommendation be heard and drive to action!

 

A: Assess

 

Noun: evaluate or estimate the nature, ability, or quality of

 

With the “Action” step fully in-place, lets make sure we are ready to “evaluate” and learn from the “Action” deployed.  We can never learn enough, but too many skip this step entirely.  The amount of work to get the “Action” deployed is often so significant, many “run out of gas” at this step and lose energy to “evaluate” the impact/costs/ROI/etc. of the “Action” and fail to glean very available and much needed additional “Data” to help this process strengthen over time.  Many of you have read my essay on the “Curbside Debrief” https://fylegacy.blogspot.com/2014/02/selling-curbside-debrief.html

This tool is a handy way to ALWAYS take a step to “Assess” or learn after every significant “Action.”

A: Apply

 

Noun: give one's full attention to a task; work hard, administer

 

This final step as another call to turn learnings into “Action.”  If you have “Assessed” the impact of “Action,” once again don't get passive!  Turn those ideas or approaches into immediate improvement plans and deploy…. No need to wait and start the process again, dive in and “Apply” those learnings and drive success!

 

 

Well there you go, the simple ( and vital) D->K->I->A/A/A model.  I hope you can use it in your work, whatever the organization / industry and let it have a positive impact of the challenges of the moment, and help you be more successful with your challenges/opportunities over time!

A “Virtuous Cycle” in the Pivot to Growth

 

 

Like so many companies and organizations, this past year has been incredibly challenging. Leading a company through the reality of Covid has been so intense and difficult, certainly the most difficult challenge of my 35 year career!  Here we are as we enter May, we are finishing up our on-site vaccination clinics over the next few weeks, finishing up our return-to-work planning and prep activities and starting to look at easing some of our Covid policies (e.g. outdoor mask policy, etc.).  Along with these policy/readiness adjustments, we are dealing with the difficult (and wonderful in many ways) challenge of a booming business, growing very quickly, that is pushing our capabilities and capacities across our system.  We are clearly in a big “Pivot to Growth” moment and I have refreshed myself on some lessons that will help us and may help you as well.

 

Virtuous Cycle

 

I want to emphasize the first word here, “Virtuous!”  When businesses are dramatically beating budget and forecast, and outstripping existing capabilities/capacities, it is very easy to devolve into a “Destructive Cycle” of anger/blame/finger-pointing/etc.  Do your best as a leader to stay calm, remind everyone that we are in this together, and that in so many ways we are lucky to have the problems of a high growth business.  Remind yourself that “anger/blame & finger pointing” are rarely highlighted and key leadership tools for progressive/successful leaders in good times or bad.  Stay calm, keep your cool, keep your team together and work the problem at hand!

 

Work the Problem

 

At least for our company in this Pivot to Growth, there are multiple problems all occurring at once.  That dynamic is actually not surprising and should not be allowed to cause confusion.  Look at the landscape, idea the problems and help the team to break them down into bite-sized chunks.  Remember “Aunt Lorraine’s Law”????  “Take small bites and chew thoroughly”!  

That lesson is so true now… help your team on this and get everyone focused on THE problem at hand and have other teams working on ANOTHER problem at hand but be careful to have one group working on many problems at once….. usually a situation that causes confusion and limited progress!

 

Search for Root Causes

 

As teams get into problem solving, we can find ourselves actually fixing a problem at hand and being tempted to quickly move on to the next issue at hand.  As a leader help your team to slow down enough to try to identify the “root causes” to the problem so we might possible not just fix the problem at hand but identify and solve the deeper “root causes” of the problem to we don't face this challenge again.  A technique that I learned many years ago is the “ask “why” five times” rule.  Once a problem/issue is clearly identified, force yourself and your team to go five layers deep…. Ask, “Why did this issue occur”??? then when that answer is clarified, ask “why” did that occur??? and keep that routine going for five layers of asking “whys?”

 

Deploy solutions and measure success

 

The best part of problem solving is actually fixing the problems/challenges at hand…. duh!  No brilliant insight there but again we are so often tempted to fix it and move on; not good enough!  Use the measurement tools at hand or build the measurement tools to assess just how much or how well we have actually fixed the problem and improved performance.  We only really learn true performance improvement through measuring our success and continuously improving on that improved performance.

 

Work the problem

 

Repeat the “Virtuous Cycle!”

 

 

I hope that this simple “cycle” can be helpful as you and your organization begin your pivot to growth post Covid!  There will be challenges ahead (there always are) but none so daunting as the challenges we all faced this past year.  We can work our way through the challenges of growth by keeping our cool, reminding the team that we are all in this together and working the “Virtuous Cycle” above….. those will be key ingredients for solving the growth problems that lie ahead!

It's been too long old friend !

 

We have all shared quite a year, so much loss and so many sacrifices.  It will probably take years for us to really understand the impact of the pandemic on our families, our society and our future.  Now that vaccination trends are accelerating (I am one shot in, my second scheduled for 3/31!!), we are starting to turn the corner to think about "life after Covid."  One step I have taken in the past month was to start traveling again to get back to the plant in Bakersfield; it has been incredible to be back in Kern County and back with the inspiring Bolthouse Farms family!

On a recent flight back to LAX, I got through security early at ATL and walked out to Concourse E to see Dr. King's Nobel Peace Prize medal.  As many of you know, I have always been very inspired by Dr. King's speech from that event in 1963, and have shred with with teams and have commented about it on this blog over the past 10+ years. (see more at https://fylegacy.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-work-of-hope.html)

There are so many emotional moments these days, but I found myself standing in front of the display at the airport, tears in my eyes, just so happy to "be back" visiting my old friend.  This moment triggered me to reflect on all the things/places/people/restaurants I wanted to see and experience again once vaccinations are broadly deployed and we can say we are officially "post-covid."  

I dont know if you have done this, but I actually took a few minutes on the flight and started a "notes" page on my phone that I titled "Post-Covid."  It was stream of consciousness at first, a jumble of ideas ( with quite a number of restaurants in Atlanta and Bakersfield dominating the list) but after a few lines I settled into all the people /places I wanted to visit again and it was interesting what topped the list.

My Aunt Lorraine lives in an assisted living facility in N.J. and has survived the pandemic.  With her advancing memory loss, the phone calls have grown more interspersed and less connected over the past year.  No-one in the family has seen our Aunt over the past year and that needs to be my first stop post Covid.  My other "first stops" that topped my list are visiting my mom and sister's grave in my hometown of Murrysville Pa., and visiting my old boss Bruce's grave in Appleton Wi.  

I hope that as we get close to this "post Covid" reality, we all stay as safe as possible and that we work hard to get our vaccines as soon as we are eligible!  This "light at the end of the tunnel" is not far away and I am already thinking about my visits ( maybe mid summer??) to see Aunt Lorraine and the gravesites of important people from my life!  I hope you build your list, and think about your summer "trips"to reconnect to all the "old friends" that you have missed this year!

Work the process & work ON the process!

 

It’s been a wild ride over these past 20 months since we bought Bolthouse Farms back from Campbell’s.  The challenges of turning around a business in steep decline, executing a “carve-out” of a business that had been integrated into a bigger entity, rebuilding a team across all functions/levels … and then Covid hit! In the midst of these significant challenges, the business is growing, the team stronger than ever, and we have learned so much and become stronger through facing and overcoming challenges in our way.  A great lesson was shared last week in a “zoom call,” that I want to pass along today.

 

Late last week, we had our weekly S&OP (sales & operations planning) call and one of our excellent, long-term Bolthouse veterans John (no last names on the blog!) was on the call early when I signed in.  He and I had a couple of minutes to catch up and were talking about our fast growing beverage business and how hard it was to get the right flavors, in the right size, in the right level of inventory, to the right customer …etc!  We were talking about how hard it was to run a tight S&OP process in a high growth business and John shared a powerful insight….” You know Bill, we have to work the process and work ON the process at the same time!”

 

That simple phrase really hit home in this moment/situation, but is so true broadly.  Too often we don't even do the first part very well; we often don't even have a consistent business process and if we do have one we don't execute it in a consistent, disciplined fashion.  Knowing this, the idea that we have to always “work ON the process,” identifying ways to improve WHAT we do and HOW we do it was the deep insight of John’s comment.  

 

Even though our business is booming, and so many good things are happening, we need to push ourselves to improve our processes broadly.  To often companies wait for things to go bad to start thinking about changes, the trick is to dive into this work when things are going well… that's the perfect time to work and work ON your processes!

 

A few helpful tips:

 

Ø  Think about your business/enterprise/organization and identify the key operational processes that are required to get the work done, and insure you have a structured, disciplined process in place.

Ø  Once those core processes are set, don't get bored with them!  Execute and lead those processes with intensity and efficiency and insure the broader organization knows that those process steps are key to the organization’s success.

Ø  Look for the processes and that need improvement and work ON those processes very publicly.  Identify and implement improvement steps and you will insure that your processes will continue to improve over time!

 

A fresh start for spring… Again!

 

As many of you know, I have grown up in a family of keen gardeners.  My grandmother (Mama) raised a garden her entire life, and one of her biggest gardens was when she was over 90 years old!  My brother is a master gardener (and quite a “canner”) and my sister is often working in her garden on Bainbridge Island.  Part of this family tradition has included the passing down of tomato seeds across generations, and specifically passing along seeds from a tomato that Mama grew for decades in her garden in West Virginia.

Every year I take the seeds form a healthy tomato and let them dry in a dark/dry pace over the fall and early winter.  In January I typically start those seeds inside and after a week or so the first seedlings start to appear… well those seedlings pictured above are Mama’s tomato seedlings that sprouted this past weekend.

 

It's an amazing piece of family history to think that Mama was raising these same tomatoes, keeping the seeds and starting them anew each spring decades and decades ago.  While the story of this tomato’s origin is filled with family lore (and certainly embellishment), there is no doubt that my grandmother was raising these same tomatoes more than 50 years ago!

 

While I have kept this tradition alive personally for over 20 years, this January it all felt a bit different.   We have been in “covid mode” since mid March of last year.  So many things have been pushed off to another time, another year…. so much of life has been put on hold.  With the millions of positive cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths tied to Covid here in our country, I am actually VERY grateful to have a life where we can put things on hold for a bit.  Yet this year as I pulled out the seeds from last summer and started preparing the seed trays, I became excited about the fact that I was TAKING ACTION on something for the future.  The garden was not going to be on hold…. Mama’s tomatoes are not going to be on hold…. summer will come and we will enjoy delicious fresh vegetables from the garden AND save some of those seeds for the future.   The cycle of seasons will hold and winter will go into spring and into the summer.  Never has that felt more vital and important!

 

In this dark and cold winter, faced by so many challenges, I hope that you can find something, maybe as small as a tomato seed, to take action on that will allow you to focus on and have an impact on for the future.  Yes there are dangerous days ahead and our need to continue to practice our covid safety protocols (mask wearing/social distancing/hand washing/etc.) has never been more important.  Its in that context that I share this story; the positive energy and the small “light” of hope that those seedlings are bringing to me this year are helping me see a brighter summer for all of us.

In honor and memory of Dr. King…. His “challenge” for our future!

 

 

 Since my earliest postings on this blog in 2009, now 200+ essays ago, I have shared a deep inspiration (in good times and bad) that is rooted in the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that Dr. King gave in Stockholm in 1963.  While Dr. King’s writings and speeches are broadly inspiring, I continue to find myself coming back to this same document, almost as old as I am, and I continue to find fresh encouragement and inspiration that is very timely and relevant to the challenges we are facing today.

 

For those of you who have not read his entire speech, click this link (www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-nobel.html)

and take a few minutes to savor the entire document.   

 

Today I want to focus on a specific paragraph of the speech and reflect on what it says to us today, a few days before the inauguration of President Biden, and Vice President Harris. 

 

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

 

Over the past few weeks and months, certainly culminating on the attack at the Capitol on January 6^th, I have been discouraged by the  ““isness” of man’s present nature” that Dr. King refers to in his speech.  Are we incapable as a country and a society to reach to “the eternal “oughtness”,” thus being doomed to a “starlight midnight of racism”?  These questions and doubts have been persistent for me, and maybe some of you as well.  As I write this essay, in the dark quiet of the national holiday honoring Dr. King, I re-read this passage and I am actually energized by another sentence….. “I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events.”  While these words were written almost 60 years ago, they are “on point” for all of us today/this week as we end one chapter of our American story and begin another!

 

Dr. King’s challenge for us is that we aren’t victims of history, we aren’t “mere flotsam and jetsom in the river of life” …we are actually active parts of CREATING the future for all humanity! Our actions matter and if we choose to act in paths that will create a more just, a more truthful, and a more peaceful society then our world will have a more hopeful future!  The eternal “oughtness” that he refers to is his challenge for us and our actions to CREATE a better tomorrow for all!

I wish off of you a peaceful and hopeful week as we move into a new chapter for our country, and I for one am working to be hopeful about the path ahead.  Take a few minutes this week to read (or re-read) some of Dr. King’s works and find fresh inspiration and challenge for OUR work ahead!