Amidst the accelerating and intensifying maelstrom of complexity facing organizations in every sector, leaders frequently face “Brody Moments:” an unambiguous realization that current-course-and-speed will lead to failure and is no longer a viable option. It’s an allusion to Martin Brody, Chief of Police in Jaws who, upon getting his first up-close look at the shark that he’s hunting, slowly backs into the cabin, saying “you’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Jon Lindekugel
Donna Williams
As an organizational leader, you’ve probably experienced a few Brody Moments over the course of your career, and you’ve probably got a few more coming. In a series of interviews, we will talk to experts from a variety of fields to hear about how they are confronting these moments. In Part 3, we explore Brody Moments in Manufacturing and Supply Chain (M&SC) with Jon Lindekugel. During his 31 years at 3M Company, Lindekugel worked in eight different functions and 14 different businesses, earned his Six Sigma Master Black Belt, and played several senior leadership roles including SVP of Operations and SVP of Strategy, Business Development and Marketing-Sales. As SVP of Operations, he led 3M’s manufacturing and supply chain organization and its 50,000 employees. He retired last year to become General Operating Partner/CEO in Residence at Francisco Partners Consulting, where he applies his wealth of experience in finance, sales, marketing, and manufacturing, in everything from industrial, consumer and health care businesses to investment portfolio opportunities and consulting.
David and David: What is a Brody Moment you’d be willing to share from your past?
Jon: I was a newly-minted vice president leading a healthcare IT business and our market was changing very quickly. Electronic health records (EHR) were new, machine learning and artificial intelligence were new, and ‘big IT’ was just entering our market with IBM, Microsoft and Google on their way into our space. Our product line was aging and did not integrate well with our customer workflows at the time. Our market was transforming rapidly and our business was at risk.
I’ll never forget the Brody Moment: I received a call from an executive at our largest business partner, who had just decided to go with a competitor – and had notified their customers that they could no longer use our solutions. This represented 40% of our customer-base. More than half of our business was suddenly at immediate risk. We realized we had to do something fast, so we pivoted, and announced we’d develop the first web-based, artificial intelligence-driven application in our market. In the end, we lost no business, and two years later had more than $100 million in growth driven by the new application.
What’s funny is that this triggered another Brody Moment. This much growth outstripped our deployment capacity – we had roughly five times more new deployments than we were staffed to deliver. Once again we needed to regroup. We hired 250 people in three months and worked with our clients to readjust the deployment plan.
In both cases, unforeseen outside factors disrupted our business and created the Brody Moment; I suspect that’s what’s usually the source of Brody Moments. In one case it was technology, competitive, and regulatory changes that we didn’t anticipate. In the other case, our own use of technology and new competitive positioning led to unforeseen growth that out-stripped our ability to deliver for our customers.
David and David: What are the Brody Moments that other leaders in Manufacturing & Supply Chain are experiencing today? What are the factors that are producing those Brody Moments?
Jon: Unforeseen external disruption is a major issue in every industry. I believe it is more extreme in the manufacturing sector, and especially so today. The world is more dynamic than ever before. Change is accelerating. We’re experiencing the steady march of digital technology. Customer expectations for service and the expectations we place on ourselves and our partners continue to be influenced by the Alibaba (or Amazon) effect. Supply chain structures are confoundingly dependent on ecosystems that are intertwined geographically and with customers. In general, everything is more interconnected, more linked physically and digitally than ever before.
As a direct result of all that connectedness, Brody Moments are now global in scope and scale. A natural disaster in one part of the world cascades and affects things globally. A pandemic, a strike at a key shipping port, tighter pollution controls in China, geopolitical events like a trade war – any one of those will wreak havoc with supply chains. It used to be far more localized, and now it just cascades across the board.
David and David: What do you see ahead? What should leaders be looking out for?
All these factors put a massive premium on seeing around the next corner and acting on what you see in real-time, not six months later. Six months is going to be too late in any business, but especially in the industrial manufacturing and supply chain world.
And too late means you’re going to lose business and competitors are going to grab your market share. If you’re not ready to deal with tariffs as an importer or manufacturer, for example, and you don’t adjust prices and renegotiate contracts fast enough, you’re in trouble. If you don’t have the ability to radically increase your supply when you need to, then you’re going to have competitors pop up that will take share quickly. It’s a race won by the team with the best line of sight.
David and David: What characterizes the new trajectory leaders in Manufacturing & Supply Chain need to move their organizations to? The “bigger boat” so to speak?
Jon: The external forces aren’t new, but the pace and impact of them is what’s new. Leaders must put processes in place to make sure the organization is looking around the next corner, doing scenario planning and being ready with likely solutions in advance.
It’s tempting to sit back and say “I can’t predict what a politician is going to tweet next or what trade issues are going to come up.” Instead, you need a team scouting for likely future scenarios. The team needs to be working with relevant thought leaders and paying attention to what the geopolitical or market-focused firms are predicting. They need to select three to five significant external events that may arise over the next year that will have a significant impact on your business. Then you can lay out pragmatic solutions that position you to react quickly. While the future will seldom play out exactly as predicted, you will find that you got some things right, some things wrong, and that many situations will arise that are directly analogous to your scenarios. Your solution set and scenario planning will turn out to be very useful.
Effective scenario planning requires digital transformation. For example, through machine learning and artificial intelligence, you can closely track real-time commodity prices in certain markets to get a very early warning of economic change or supply-line problems on the other side of the world that will affect you. You need to have transformed digitally to see these things happen. You need a real-time digital view of your supply chain from suppliers, through your own operations, to channel partners, and to your end use customers.
David and David: What will get in the way of leaders driving these changes?
Jon: For non digital natives, like most companies in the manufacturing and supply chain world, digital transformation is difficult. Those who have tried to go after it in a piecemeal fashion have realized, usually after several years and millions of dollars invested, that they’re not making enough progress. You must transform your talent pool and culture by reskilling the team you have with more digital and analytic capabilities, and bring in people from the outside as well. This has been a challenge for manufacturing and supply chain companies because they can’t easily offer compensation that is competitive with Google, for example. That’s a barrier that needs to be overcome.
Beyond talent, you need to do four things. You need to develop a good understanding of new digital technologies, incorporate these technologies into your business processes, develop a digital view of your ecosystem, and get very good at basic change management. All of that requires strong and visionary leadership and a different mindset. It also requires that we ask completely different questions and optimize around very different outcomes than in the past.
David and David: Do you have any other advice you can offer? Parting words?
Jon: Brody Moments are going to happen, and you have to put processes in place to look around the next corner, and the corner after that, and embrace digital transformation to improve your vision of what the future will bring. That’s a tall order, but in my experience, existing Manufacturing and Supply Chain teams have more domain knowledge than anyone gives them credit for. All the digital science in the world is just math if you don’t have the domain expertise to give the math context and meaning. The key is to effectively blend new digital analytic skills with functional domain and process expertise to deliver real value.
