Speaker 1: 0:23

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by all those Mopros out there. I am your host, michael Hartman, once again flying solo, looking forward to getting Mike and Naomi here. We are just now. I think we're within two weeks of Mopsapalooza 2024 as we're recording this, so you can imagine why everyone is busy. So if you're not already registered for that and hopefully this gets out, I can't remember if this will be out before that happens or not, but if it gets out before, go out there and get out to Mopspalooza. But joining me again second time, I think is today is Tony Ferreira. Tony has nearly two decades of experience in data, marketing technology and operations. He specializes in leveraging digital strategy, analytics and technology to drive business growth and enhance customer experiences. He is currently director of marketing technology at Wrench Group. Prior to Wrench Group, tony held several leadership roles in marketing operations, marketing technology, as well as digital slash e-commerce. Tony, welcome back and thanks for joining us.

Speaker 2: 1:26

Thank you very much. Nice to be back, Tony. Welcome back and thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1: 1:28

Thank you very much. Nice to be back. So I know we want to get into something that actually is kind of near and dear to my heart, as I've been doing some transformational project work with clients in terms of organizational readiness that I probably talked about on here before. But, as I mentioned, you've been on with us before, so it's good to have you back. What's been going on in your world since the last time you were with us on the podcast?

Speaker 2: 1:55

Yeah, big changes. So last time we talked I was in the agency world and now I am not. As of five weeks ago, I switched jobs where I am taking over the marketing technology for a large company about $2 billion, investing in enterprise-type tools, trying to figure all that out, really having some challenges with this topic specifically, which is kind of perfect timing this topic specifically, which is kind of perfect timing.

Speaker 1: 2:36

Yeah, that's, I've. I've been in, I've been in like that size enterprise type companies before myself and I I find readiness the biggest example I've had is I think every place I've ever been has someone has come to me and say we need to, we need to quote do IBM right and then end quote they really meant is go buy some technology and try to do something. And so, for better or worse, I've always pushed back that, like technology is not really the problem here, like that we can solve that. But are we ready to actually go through the process of identifying the target accounts and making the plans for the strategy for how we're going to go after those? And invariably that's where the problem is right the organization wasn't ready.

Speaker 1: 3:21

So I feel your pain. I know what you're talking about. Well, congratulations on the new role, thank you. I know what you're talking about. Well, congratulations on the new role, thank you. So we're going to like we talked about. We're going to talk about organization readiness and how it can impact the effectiveness of marketing and marketing operations. So just curious and I know you've joined a new organization and that may have been part of this, but I think when we first talked, you had not switched. You were still at your previous organization. What was the trigger for even thinking about this topic and wanting to talk about it with our audience?

Speaker 2: 3:56

Yeah, it was something that kind of came up in every conversation I was having with potential clients and it was an interesting pattern that started to show up where it was. Hey, we have these tools that are very expensive and people are like, oh, they should probably just do some magic and there should be no issues when you invest in them. But every single person I was talking to, regardless of the company size or what, was saying we're not getting value from our tools. So I started to dig a little bit deeper there and I was like what, what is it Right? So I started to dig a little bit deeper there and I was like what, what is it Right? And what I started to learn was that, you know, everybody was treating it as a technology project and that was the only way they were thinking. They weren't figuring out all the underlying issues that come with that.

Speaker 2: 4:41

Yeah, that makes technology work Right. And it's actually kind of funny. Before I got hired at my new job, a agency reached out to me who was working with them, asking me they've got these roles, they're not working, they're not helping their technology. Should it be one role? Should it be two? How should they structure their org to get better use out of this? And I gave them my recommendation, which ultimately got me hired, which was kind of nice.

Speaker 2: 5:08

But it was just an interesting thing that, like this is happening, Everybody's dealing with it. Nobody kind of wants to talk about it because the easiest thing to do is say just go buy another tool and it'll solve it.

Speaker 1: 5:23

Yeah, so it's interesting this to me, this first thing I'm going to say you used the word invest in this technology, and I think that's actually one of the mistakes we make is that we think of this like an investment. To me, it's just dollars out the door. Right, you're paying for technology and I guess you want to get a return from it, but at the end of the day, like, I think trying to quantify that benefit in real, hard numbers is difficult, and I think you should think about this Like I, I'm the kind of person that I agonize over whether or not I spend an extra 30 or 50 bucks on a hotel like, or a air, an airfare, when I'm traveling for a business. Right, so for me, I don't know, maybe it just comes naturally that I, like, I think about this stuff as if it's my own money and I think too often, right, it is this sort of particularly large organizations, maybe it's everywhere, but there's this sort of normalcy that's associated with we're just going to write big checks. You know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 6:28

Definitely. Well, I mean, think about it. Right, You've got a $10 billion company. What's a few million dollars on technology, right? Like whether it works or not, rip it in, rip it out, rip and replace all this kind of things. It's a very easy solve because you can say oh, it was the tool, Buy a new tool, you reimplement it, Everything works. Say, oh, it was the tool, Buy a new tool, you reimplement it, everything works for a while. But then it always falls back to the same root causes and then eventually everything starts to slow down and become a problem again.

Speaker 1: 6:55

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it sounds like it's like a rounding error for those organizations, right, when it's $50,000, it's just a.

Speaker 1: 7:04

It's not even material to their financial performance, right, yeah, so I think there's, there's that is is part of it.

Speaker 1: 7:12

But so that makes sense that you, you know you were thinking about seeing that a lot of your clients I've seen it pretty much everywhere where I've come in and seen either been asked to build something that was somewhat in flight or to walk into a place and go like it's things are broken, we don't know exactly what it is like, how do you fix it. And I'm always like part of the problem is, like, structurally, from an organization, from the way we you know some of the things we do, from a process standpoint, across teams, like they all affect this stuff. So but let's, before we get too far in this, it might make sense to do a little bit of a, you know, step back. So when we're talking about organizational readiness, you're referring to how some of those things I just talked about can affect the organization's ability to maximize. Let's's keep it to the tech stack, right, how do you think about that when you think about maximizing your tech stack and organizational readiness. What are the parameters that you use to sort of think about that?

Speaker 2: 8:20

Yeah, you know it's funny, Years ago, a long time ago. There's something that has always stuck with me that is still applicable today and you've heard it probably mentioned in multiple different ways. I've heard it with the three P's right, people, process, platforms, and it's always that triangle and you can put data in the middle or whatever you want, but like yeah, I've seen some variations in it, like levers or all that kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, yeah, those are the three consistent ones.

Speaker 2: 8:53

Yeah, and if you pull on any one of them, right, like you invest a new platform, your people need to be able to use that platform because, the end of the day, what is technology right? It's an enabler to do something like if I just buy technology, it doesn't solve a problem. It's when I use it to do something that it starts to show its value. So if the people aren't using it or the processes are bad underneath it, then the tech gets all the bad press right. Everybody's like oh, it's the tech, it's that investment. It's like well, what about all these people we invested in? What about the processes they're using? And I've seen it where people will go out and buy these large enterprise platforms for millions of dollars but they'll use old processes from before they had it, where they're doing manual things with a tool that automates everything and they're wondering why it's taking forever to get stuff done.

Speaker 1: 9:41

It's interesting because I was literally just yesterday talking to a founder of a startup and and I was sharing a story of I was in another community that joined during the COVID era and in different one than marketingopscom. It's a big one out there. If I said it, people would recognize it, so I don't want to. But there the short version is there's a Slack group. There was a discussion about if you're a start, if you're a team of one leading marketing at an early stage company and you had budget to either buy technology or hire another person, which would you do Without hesitation. I was like go hire another person, because I think you get way more leverage from that than you do from just a piece of technology.

Speaker 2: 10:31

So yeah, I mean it's well. There's a lot of questions around that.

Speaker 2: 10:34

Right, that goes through my mind, right, because it's like sometimes tools can solve what people can't, but at the end of the day, the technology has to be used by somebody we're not at a point yet where, like, we have ai leveraging the tools we invested in to do what people are doing and then sending it out and doing all the processes that a human would do.

Speaker 2: 10:59

Like we're not at that point yet, right, so there still needs to be interaction by somebody and if that person isn't doing the right thing, like there was a conversation I had with a client before I left my old company where I was saying they were very angry, saying oh, everybody's saying the technology is broken, it's the technology's fault, blah, blah, blah. And that's all they looked at. They were like it's the tech. We got to fix the tech. So I started digging in and I looked at it and the people they were passing the technology to downstream we and the people they were passing the technology to downstream weren't using the tool the way it's supposed to be used. So they're trying to use it for something it's not and saying it won't work.

Speaker 1: 11:34

Right.

Speaker 2: 11:34

And the other people are saying well, we implemented it the right way. And it was just like bashing of ideas and no one was really talking and I was like, wait a second, the problem is the two of you working together. And then I found out they never talked and I was like wait a second.

Speaker 1: 11:49

So what's happening?

Speaker 2: 11:49

And that's kind of like that's part of it, right Is it's this, like that's the whole? That's why I like to call it organizational readiness, rather than like department readiness because it's not a single entity, it's a whole function.

Speaker 1: 12:03

Yeah, just one small thing and then we can keep going. But I'll just back up. I'm going to sort of back out a little bit of what I said, because I do have examples where I was at a small company, a small team, and we had to have somebody monitoring the replies to our marketing emails because we had to be able to help people out manually as those came in, which it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're getting all these auto replies and you have to go to site scan through everything to see is there one that says this person is no longer there, or stop sending me stuff, or F you or all the crazy stuff you would see in those there was technology. I don't even think it's right. There's probably other versions of it. The one we had I know is no longer there because the founder just decided he couldn't find a buyer and he didn't want to do that anymore.

Speaker 1: 13:08

But it changed our lives because we put this tool in there. It monitored that inbox, it identified when people were and it did it pretty well identified when people were saying stop sending me stuff. It would go back in our marketing system, unsubscribe them, or if it said that they're no longer with the company. It would mark them as inactive or invalid, which saved a huge amount of time, and it also because I was always like we've got to be compliant with privacy laws and so there was also just like a stress level that went down from it. So I think there are times when technology can make a difference. So I don't want to say I don't want to be kind of see it that people is better than technology, but I agree with you right Organizational readiness across departments, across teams, is paramount to being successful with the implementation of technology.

Speaker 2: 14:01

For sure.

Speaker 1: 14:03

So all right, so I'll try to stay off my soap boxes this time. Um, so the other part of this, and I I think I'd be surprised if there's any listener out there in the marketing ops space, or even rev ops space, who has not heard in the last two or three years. You know something to the effect of we need to get the most from our tech, or you know, uh, are you well, I guess it sounds like were you hearing that a lot still in your consulting days? Are you still? Do you still hear about it where you are? What's the? What are you hearing? What do you like? How do you take? How do you think people? What do you think people mean by that?

Speaker 2: 14:51

Yeah, you know. So, really, where this all came about was I was at Adobe Summit last year, so for four straight days I was on the floor talking to people and the first thing they would come up and ask this question is about the company and blah, blah, blah. And the next thing you would get into is what's your big problem? Everybody was I have the technology, we invested in it. I'm not getting value. So then I would jump in and say why aren't you getting value? And it always came back of like there were all these like pointing the finger right, of like well, this is that, that and that. And I was like but what are you trying to do with it? Like like, have you taken a step back? And said we, we have this, we've invested in the right tools, but is our organization set up around that to enhance its capabilities, to get the value? To make sure our CEO and C-suite doesn't come to us every quarter and say where's the value in this? Why am I spending so much money on this?

Speaker 2: 15:43

And they had no answer and I still hear it. I see it on LinkedIn all the time. I still hear it. I see it on linkedin all the time. You hear it and other people like it's just the thing that everyone's going to, because people are still looking at, like I said, as just a technology project, right?

Speaker 2: 15:58

you hear that a lot. Where people are like it's they, they start blaming the tool about the problem because they can switch that out. But when it's a more organizational challenge, now it becomes a bigger issue and it becomes more of a change management issue.

Speaker 1: 16:16

Yes.

Speaker 2: 16:17

Than a technology issue. So not only was I hearing it and that sort of like brought this to head, but it has been a thing, because the other thing you're hearing is cost efficient. Like everybody's trying to cut costs, the first thing they look at is technology licensing.

Speaker 1: 16:31

Right. When you're out there pursuing the technology, it's an investment. When things get tough, it's a cost.

Speaker 2: 16:39

Exactly.

Speaker 1: 16:40

Right, so it's always a cost, by the way.

Speaker 2: 16:42

Yes, yeah, but it's just interesting that, like yeah, now, even now, I think it's still a conversation because technology is getting more expensive, right month end of the quarter conversation with executives around. Why are we spending so much? Should I get rid of this? Should I not Type of conversation?

Speaker 1: 17:13

Yeah, so we keep using this word. Do we get value from it? One of the things I'm curious in some of those conversations you had at Adobe Summit or other things, when people said that, did you ever ask the question? What did you expect would be the quote value in quote?

Speaker 2: 17:32

yes, with tools like that, the challenge is they get sell. They get sold like it's a unicorn right, like sure. Anything the person says they need, the tool will magically do right whether it's made for that or not.

Speaker 1: 17:48

I think you have to pay for the fairy dust separately though right.

Speaker 2: 17:51

but I think the challenge is when you ask people that they always think of value in terms of dollars, like, oh well, we use this and we got x amount of customers which is this and it's like that's, but that's more of like a downstream marketing thing. So I've had to kind of explain to them my thinking and I always think of it as tool adoption and tool utilization. If those are high and you have more people using them, more of your brands on them, whatever your organizational structure is like, but if it's being used more often, then the cost comes down.

Speaker 1: 18:30

Yeah, I think the way I would think of it is a little bit differently than that, and what I would think of is if we get this, because I think it needs to come back to a financial value ultimately, but the financial value doesn't have to be somehow like make 14 steps to go. This is affecting revenue, incremental revenue. I think that's a losing game, but it can get to. Uh, sometimes it's an efficiency thing. Right, we're going to be able to be more efficient. Therefore, we're not going to have to hire more people or the. The nature of what people are doing is going to be more strategic versus the, the, the things that now we have a tool that's going to enable our people to to do more.

Speaker 1: 19:16

I hate to say do more with less, but but do more like do more interesting stuff. We're going to now, instead of us spending 80 to 90 percent of our time just building emails and getting them out the door, we're going to be able to reduce that to 50% of their time, which gives them another 25% where they can actually do analysis that they weren't able to do because there just wasn't enough bandwidth. I think there's tangible financial ones where you're avoiding cost a little bit, right. So it's not cost cutting, but it's a cost avoidance. Right, you're avoiding incremental costs because you were to do what you're doing at the scale you're. Without that tool, you're gonna have to spend more on people, blah, blah, blah, right, uh, it's also a little bit anecdotal and I and I readily admit that that's a part of it right and just, yeah, the nature of people's job, hopefully that ties to satisfaction and they're more likely to stay. You know we retain that.

Speaker 2: 20:13

Well, it's also the conversation around like and this is, you know, maybe not all companies think this way, but I do. But it's like the opex versus capex thinking, yeah, absolutely when it comes into things right and it's like this is a run the business need, so that's always going to have some sort of like time reduction, productivity right, because otherwise why were you looking at that tool in the first place?

Speaker 1: 20:37

yeah, no, so this and this is why I don't want to belabor this, because we've I've talked about enough.

Speaker 1: 20:42

But this is like you just bring up capex versus opex, right, these are terms that are finance terms and this is why you just bring up CapEx versus OpEx, right, these are terms that are finance terms and this is why I am so adamant that people need to understand that right, because that's an important concept.

Speaker 1: 20:54

We're not going to go into it because we don't have time, but suffice to say this money on this technology and what the quote value is from it, then you're going to struggle to keep it, even if you inherently know it's the right thing. Okay. So one of the things that I sometimes see that negatively affects success of leveraging TechStack is you kind of hinted at this right is the way that teams are organized and how they work. You mentioned where you landed here, right, that part of what led you to this is that somebody approached you about how they should organize their team, like how you don't have to go into details there but like, how do you think about that? Like, how is organizational structure an impediment to being successful with the adoption of technology?

Speaker 2: 22:03

Yeah, you know, you see it all the time. Right, where, like, depending upon where all this fits to, which is the fun part? Right, like, is it under marketing, is it under IT, is it somewhere else? Right, but there's a collaboration that has to happen. So, from an org structure standpoint, there's got to be capabilities of enablement from the tech side and usage from the marketing side.

Speaker 2: 22:30

So I think, when it comes down to organizational structure, you have to think about who is implementing and managing the technology, who is supporting it, maybe from, like, a product ownership mindset, and then who owns it from the business side? Right, and a lot of times those things don't exist in these areas and I always try to bring those concepts in to say, if you're going to get the most out of the tools, the technology, if you're going to be really ready to invest well in technology, this is the way you need to think about it, because that's ultimately how you manage these, because they are products, so you have to manage them for long term, because that's the thing. If you manage it for three years, there's sunk costs to that later on, with all the work you've done, if you rip it out and put a new tool in, so the hope is a long-term relationship with your vendor.

Speaker 1: 23:33

That's scalable, but you have to be structured in a way that supports that long-term yeah, by the way, there's another financial term sunk cost. So you know, I think you used the term change management a little a few minutes ago and I think what you just described is the fundamentals. You want all the key stakeholders to be involved in a very clear way, especially if you're trying to adopt a new technology or do a significant change, and I don't see a lot of organizations that do this. Well, and, to be fair, people are doing this as if it's just on top of their day-to-day job. Right, and it's unfortunate, because to do this well and get the most out of it, my experience is you need to have a very thought, well thought out plan on a change management, and it's not just, and it doesn't. It starts well before you even probably select a tool. Right, it's like what do we need? What do we really need? How do we across these teams? How do we expect the benefits to be? So we can make smart decisions, ask good questions when vendors tell us bullshit stuff that doesn't matter to us, but it's a cool bell or whistle that it has and I'm not disparaging vendors right, they are doing what they should do.

Speaker 1: 24:50

I just learned a long time ago evaluating and implementing accounting systems, which sounds really mundane, but we always had to coach our clients. They're going to tell you about all these whiz-bang things that they can do, but we always had to do it like. You still need to be able to do AP, gl, ar all the time, and it needs to be right and you know, otherwise what comes out of it doesn't matter, um, but change. So when you say change management, like I, have an idea in my head of what that means. What does that mean to you?

Speaker 2: 25:23

yeah, I mean there's multiple, there's a lot of levels to change management, right, and there's like books written on it and all this stuff.

Speaker 2: 25:29

At the end of the day, in my mind, it's communication, right, and it's how do you communicate the changes? Like, how do you communicate what's going to happen, how do you communicate why it's going to happen and how do you communicate what it's going to do to impact those people? Because when you do large change management, regardless of the size of your business, everybody needs to be on board, because one person can derail a lot of that 100%, and if you're not communicating correctly or more frequently or in a way that makes sense to people. I've also seen it too, where, like, people get a little too tied down to like true change management, so the stuff they send through it just like washes over people and they're like this is too much. So, like a simplified way of communicating also helps people understand okay, this is what's coming, this is what I should expect is how it's going to impact me, I'm good, I'm ready, and then it's just about delivering. At that point.

Speaker 1: 26:27

Yeah, I mean I communicate. I think you hit on the key thing, which is communication, and to me you need communication for stakeholders at different levels of involvement. So typically you have a core team that engagement and communication is pretty real time, right or very frequent, and then you may have key stakeholders who are provided, or very frequent, and then you may have key stakeholders who are either going to be users ideally users of the platform or significantly affected by how it's implemented, et cetera, et cetera, and so you want their input as early as you can on how you want to configure the system or whatever, and you want them actively involved for a while, and then after that you're probably doing less communication, but you're like always validating things with them. And then I've always had like a steering executive, steering committee, and their role is just, they need to know that we're on track, we're not on track. Here's the issues we've got. Here's a here's a thing that we tried to get resolved across those other stakeholder groups. We couldn't. Here's our recommendation. Will you approve this Right?

Speaker 1: 27:32

So it's more about providing that ultimate decision maker on situations where we couldn't do it ourselves, and that has worked well for me in multiple places. But it's hard, it's effort and it's not just project management. You need a communication plan. You need people you know get agreement, particularly big organizations. You're asking people to allocate part of their time. That's not their core job, you know. So all those things are key to being successful. From my standpoint, I will say project management is one where I can. I've been a program manager, project manager, but I find myself being more effective if I can bring someone in to do that oh, definitely so we've had a number of project managers on, in fact, recently, uh, who are experts at that.

Speaker 1: 28:20

So if you're in that boat and you need some help, go back and listen to some of those previous episodes. Um, so the other thing, I thing I've been doing some consulting work with a large enterprise that's going through massive change stuff too, and I've been putting together some change management tools. This is part of why I was curious what you thought about it and in my research I came across like a Harvard Business Review article that had been. It was updated like 20 years ago, so it was written, you know, 30 or 40 years ago and I read through it Like it still applies today, like because it's all about that communication and alignment and getting people bought in, Because your that point, you your point about one person be able to derail this stuff is so true.

Speaker 2: 29:07

Yeah, I've lived it, I've seen it, you know like and you want to stay away from that like there's going to be people who don't want to do it right because they're just so comfortable with their everyday stuff, but like it's going to happen regardless. So getting them on board, getting them comfortable with it and spending a little bit more time with that person too, is critical, otherwise they're. If they don't do it and everyone needs to do it you're literally at, you know, a stalemate where it's like, okay, what's going to happen?

Speaker 1: 29:36

and now it's an executive decision and it's just that becomes too much at that point um, so in my it's like one of the examples of where I've seen kind of a symptom of maybe a lack of organizational readiness is after something is implemented, like there's just not adoption quickly, which, by the way, part of change management in my book should also be post-implementation. There needs to be a time of hyper, maybe even before you get to the late stages of an implementation or after. That are indicators that the organization really wasn't ready.

Speaker 2: 30:19

Yeah, I mean, the biggest ones are departments not talking to one another. That should be talking to one another. That is always the clear indicator for me that they are not ready for certain tools and processes, because they've been at the company for 20 years and never spoken to one another, but their teams are integrating all day long, every day, and no one's communicating and that's like a huge red flag immediately for me.

Speaker 1: 30:50

Yeah, sorry, I want to maybe go on that, so I can imagine some of our listeners are thinking well, like, getting those teams to talk is not my job, right? But so how would you respond to something like that?

Speaker 2: 31:06

Yeah, I love the comment of it's not my job is always an interesting one for me because everybody's job is to excel the business Right and help accelerate the business forward in some way, shape or form. So communication and partnership is literally everyone's job, like your description might be implement this, write this code, do this thing, but at the end of the day, in order to truly push things along, there has to be partnership, there has to be communication and collaboration. So if everyone said that no one would do it, right, because it's really not anyone's job at the end of the day.

Speaker 2: 31:47

Right, right Cause, really not anyone's job at the end of the day, like there's never a bullet point in a job description that says, like communicate and effectively make these two teams work together. Right, but it needs to be part of it, because without communication and collaboration, nothing will be successful. Right, because nothing gets implemented in a silo.

Speaker 1: 32:07

Yeah, yeah, it's funny that your point about that. Like I've I've said before that I think the worst thing about job descriptions is it tells people what they don't do. Um, there are probably other things I would add to that these days, but I know I've said that in the past. Um, anyway, again aside, um, so you've you've also hinted at another thing, which is uh, I think you even use the term like some organizations get tunnel vision on technology, or I think technology is technology, but are not, um thinking about the underlying other elements that affect it. Um, can you go like, maybe go a little deeper on what you mean by that?

Speaker 2: 32:53

Yeah, it goes back to thinking of it as only a technology project. They come in and they're like we're implementing this tool. The success or failure is the implementation of that tool. It's up and running by X date. You succeeded. The problem is nobody's using it now. It doesn't fit into the rest of your tech stack. People don't understand how to leverage it in their processes. Like it starts this whole cycle of chaos that they forget was there. So they kind of keep the blinders on all that and say like all I got to do is check the box to turn this tool on and I'm good to go. And then they sort of like push everything else downstream and then the tool is good and they're like great, check that box. But now everyone's like that's when the question of value usually comes in, like right we spent all the money.

Speaker 2: 33:46

It's now live. What are we doing with it? And it's like I don't know no one's using it. I don't know why, right, but they're still stuck in that tunnel vision of of the tool. What's funny, too, is when you get stuck in that view, then everyone else gets stuck in that view.

Speaker 2: 34:01

So, when it doesn't work, everybody's immediately staring at the technology rather than thinking about the intent, like that is something no one ever talks about. Is like this is this tool, but what is it built to do, right? What is its why? Exactly Because if you focus on the intent, talks about is like this is this tool, but what is it built to do, right? What is its why? Exactly Because if you focus on the intent, that actually solves a few problems with this whole organizational readiness thing. It solves the organizational structure to support it. Because if you're thinking intent, then you put roles in place to support that intent rather than just a developer for that tool.

Speaker 1: 34:36

Right.

Speaker 2: 34:37

You know. And then the same thing goes for when you're thinking about value. It's less about just what the tool is and becomes more about what it enables for the organization.

Speaker 1: 34:48

Yeah, it's interesting that you're making me think about. And in one of my career stops I came in as as a marketing automation platform was being implemented and near the end of a fiscal year, had been ongoing for a while and hadn't gotten across the finish line in terms of, like, flipping the switch, turning it on and connecting it to the website, etc. Etc. And I I, the cmo I said I can see that like we need to get, like we just need to sit, claim some sort of victory and have say we've turned it on by the end of the fiscal year. And we did.

Speaker 1: 35:25

But I think in the back of my mind I was like I know this is like based on what I had seen already, right, what had been done before is like this is not going to work long term. And I was already anticipating that we're going to go live, we'll talk about it. But immediately I was getting into the mode of, okay, we'll get a whole vendor and consultant who is implementing it accountable for the results that they had sold to everybody. And if not, we're going to. And so, yes, I did that too.

Speaker 1: 35:54

But I think, like in the back of my mind I was like the real benefit of this is going to be from the way it enables the organization to take steps that it wouldn't have been able to without the tools and so. But I could see that it was not going to do that the way it was because they weren't ready as an organization. The senior executive leaders had all nodded their head yes, let's go do this. But this was another piece like a lesson learned right. The what I would call the lieutenants within the organization were not really fully aware of it, nor were they really bought in, and then the whole effort spun for so long that I don't think they ever believed it would actually ever come to fruition.

Speaker 2: 36:38

Right. And then that spinning creates this idea in their head of like we just need to get it live because we're paying for it, Yep. And then they sort of lose focus on like what the whole point of it was and it becomes a whole different type of project at that point.

Speaker 1: 36:52

Yeah, but it was at a point where, like you talked about some costs, like I think there's a lot of organizations who kind of there's a sunk cost fallacy.

Speaker 1: 37:01

If you're not like we spent you know, uh, a hundred dollars, right, and it's still not working, we need to spend another hundred dollars because we've already spent the last hundred dollars. And I'm like that's not the way it's. Like if you make, make a decision, if you go like it's not working and, um, because you're not gonna get that hundred dollars back, yeah, generally speaking, right, I guess there are certain cases where you could go, you know, pursue some sort of, uh, legal remedy, remedy or something like that, but that's not really ideal. So I think that's another thing. Right, you need to be willing to say we have, we're actually whether it's because of organization readiness or whatever right, we're like we spent all this money we're actually not going to achieve, like we know that we almost are certainly not going to achieve what we hope to achieve. Assume you know what that is we need to cut color losses I literally just went through that.

Speaker 2: 37:57

Actually, yeah, there was a big project led by leadership that said we need to switch from one tool to another. They spent so much money in the process to do that and I basically said, hold on, why are we spending more money? Like well, we're already this far? And I said no, no, no, we're good, it's getting everything. Like we have what we need. That's just. We just threw that money away to learn that that's not the tool and this isn't needed now. Right, we'll recoup it over time, but like we need to end it now because we're just hemorrhaging money yeah, stop the bleeding exactly, and we just then we had to call it like people weren't happy, but it's.

Speaker 2: 38:35

Do you want to spend another X amount of money to get to a point further down the line where you really are stuck?

Speaker 1: 38:40

Yeah, I totally, and I think there's too many places that don't realize that they're making a decision based on, like past stuff that you can't change.

Speaker 2: 38:51

You know it's interesting. I don't know if anybody ever heard this, but like I just read a book about like Amazon and stuff and they have a term called successful failures.

Speaker 1: 39:00

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 39:00

We're like we failed, we invested, but we learned and we took those learnings into something that will be a success later. There are so many companies that need that and don't think that way. They just think like we lost all this money and we're done. It's like what did you? You got to think what you gain to at some point this money and we're done. It's like what did you? You got to think what you gained to at some point. Otherwise, yeah, you're just going to throw money and that's going to be your life.

Speaker 1: 39:19

Yeah, I mean, that's variations. I think I've heard versions of that that google uses in other places fail fast, whatever. I think the problem is people don't really know what that means. They're still afraid, like there's a cultural norm that doesn't allow you to say we did this, it didn't. Uh, they don't say it failed because they feel they have an ego tied into it. Um, and then it's like okay, well, what do I do next? And in some places, like I think it's a cultural thing that you've got to make it normal to like we tried something. It didn't work, we tried it, we did it really quickly. We know it didn't work, but we learned a lot from that. And now we know, like we can. You know, we either need to do that same thing with the same objective, but do it differently, or we need to go and tackle a different problem. Yeah, I'm all for that. Um, so okay.

Speaker 1: 40:09

So you and I have been talking. We both. You're at a relatively large organization. I've been mostly at large organizations. So people are like like, oh, I'm at this small startup or I'm at this mid-sized company. This kind of stuff is not going to happen for me, right? Maybe it's back when you talked to those people at Adobe Summit. But was there a commonality on company size or stage in that conversation or did you have a broad range?

Speaker 2: 40:36

Well, in those conversations you know it was Adobe, so it's people investing in Adobe, which you're sort of like medium-sized enterprises and up. But I will tell you, this happens everywhere. I worked for two startups. I worked in medium-sized companies. I worked for startups that turned into medium-sized companies. It is ever-present, right, and I think it's just because the speed at which you need to move.

Speaker 2: 40:58

Now the good thing is about startups and medium-sized companies. When you realize this, you can move pretty fast to remedy it. Versus at a large organization, it's like all this political red tape and all these teams and there's thousands of people that need to be involved, right, which is tricky. Versus at a smaller company, there's like 20, 30 people and you can kind of move quickly, but the big problem there is if one person at that point is the naysayer, it becomes an even bigger problem. So change management is a much bigger part of the smaller companies than even the larger ones, because if a CEO says we're doing this and one person's like man, I don't want to do it, and there's only 20 people doing it, there's a problem, right. Yeah, it is present literally everywhere and it's present for all technology.

Speaker 1: 41:45

I mean, I've seen this with free versions of tools before. Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that at a small company, where how would it impact a single individual that is outsized compared to a large organization, and I think you're right. Right, you need to spend more time on getting people on board with the change itself. Makes sense.

Speaker 2: 42:05

Yeah, and in a smaller company, right, like you know everybody. So there's a little bit more of a relationship, hopefully. So it should be a little bit easier to do that versus someone you haven't ever spoken to and who knows where in the globe and all these different differences and stuff like that, but they also have, you know, 10,000 other people telling them to do it, so they just do it right.

Speaker 1: 42:26

Um, okay, I think I've got one more sort of topic area and then we'll probably have to wrap up here. But one of the things I have seen as a challenge as part of why I talked about having sort of different tiers of circles, if you will, of stakeholders involved with a big project is that decision-making is, you know, a challenge, right, decision-making, approval is that it's a lack of clarity about who actually has approval rights. Uh, who has input versus in the. Typically, the big one is like too many people think they have veto power, which drives me bananas. Um, I just had to bite my tongue there. Just, uh, try to be family friendly here. Um, the yeah, but I mean, have you run into that too, where it was like knowing whose heads need to nod or who can undermine a decision after it's already been made? That kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 43:24

Everywhere. And the other thing I've run into that causes a problem with this is this single point of decision-making at the top destroys everything. And I'm seeing it a little bit at my current company and I'm trying to make some changes and this happens a lot of like well, all companies actually where there's a single point of decision making, so everyone knows that's the decision maker, so when decisions need to be made, they have to wait until that person's calendar clears up to make a decision, but at the same time, that is the same individual who's complaining that things aren't moving fast enough, right? So it's just like catch 22 of like you want all the power but you can't. You're also complaining because you have all the power, like and I called there's a thing it's like it's really heavy in the military, which I love, but but it's delegated decision making.

Speaker 1: 44:16

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 44:17

Right. So it's understanding who can make what decisions down the line to progress things fast enough, but don't allow them to rock the boat or put the business underwater. So there's an escalation curve, but it allows people to make decisions where they need to, because when you're talking about change management and organizational readiness, there are decisions that need to happen quickly yes, up and down the ladder, and if they can't be made, then you derail the whole process.

Speaker 1: 44:46

Yeah, you know, and to me, whenever I've seen this, it usually I think the underlying root cause to me usually comes down to something around trust. Right, we don't trust our teams to make the right decisions, and that could be because of a number of things like past performance, or it could be just this is too important. I don't want somebody more junior, like whatever it is, but my view on that is like you need to enable what you described right. My view on that is you need to enable what you described right Delegated decision-making and help people know what the parameters are for, how much they can do, and then, if they go beyond those or do something that ends up being the wrong direction or decision, you need to hold them accountable. Right, and they need to hold themselves accountable and learn from it, but you don't hold it over their heads.

Speaker 1: 45:37

I think to me, that's the way it should be.

Speaker 2: 45:39

And I'm like I'm notorious as a leader with my teams, where I put people on my team in like uncomfortable situations to make decisions. Yeah, but they've always surprised me. You know, like the junior resource, where I'm like, hey, run with it, you've got this, you make the decision, you own it. And they're like, excuse me, yeah, and I'm like you've got it, like I'm here to help you and support you and be a sounding board, but, like your project, at the end of the day, you've got this and the things that come out are vastly different than what I would have thought of, which is the whole point.

Speaker 1: 46:06

I have a story that I've told many people before, and if this person that worked for me a few years ago, we were going into a one-on-one and we were going to be talking specifically about some challenge or issue on a project and I came into that conversation with a sort of preconceived notion of what I thought the right solution was for that, and that's how we started the conversation. And this person pushed back and it had reasons why. Right, it wasn't just flippant, came up with like this is what I think we should do, and ultimately it convinced me that, yeah, that was the right thing to do. And my reaction to that was not like oh God, I'm so stupid. I went to my manager. I said this is a great day because this person just challenged me and actually made a better decision and I'm so excited about that, right, cause it's, it was the better one, and I was fricking awesome, like that's what I want, right, I want people to be like that, like I want them to feel like they can do those things to a point.

Speaker 1: 47:09

Right, you know you want them to. The risk there is you get people who are uncomfortable with making a decision. Some people just are uncomfortable with that and taking responsibility for it, and they'll hem and haw or they'll go through so much analysis that they never get to that decision point. So the coaching there is like sometimes you have to make decisions when you don't have complete information or all the information you want, and that's okay.

Speaker 2: 47:37

You will never or all the information you want, and that's OK you will never have all the information. I will tell you 100 percent. You will never have even 90 percent of the information you make. The decision is usually 60 to 70 percent and you just got to trust your gut.

Speaker 1: 47:48

Yeah, no, absolutely, and I know that, like you're going to, it's sometimes it's going to be the wrong direction, but that's why that, like you're going to, it's sometimes it's going to be the wrong direction, but that's why. That's why you need to like, but you'll never know unless you make the decision and you take a step forward and then and then you could learn and adjust from there.

Speaker 2: 48:05

And no decision is actually more damaging than making a bad decision. Oh my.

Speaker 1: 48:07

God, I, that's like I cannot believe, like there's. So how many times I've like surprised I still have hair left, but I've like just like beaten my head against the wall the best like why? Like, what one more piece of data or information do you think we need before you'll be make the decision? Um, it's funny because to me, this is when we, we become salesmen internally, which is a little bit of irony given, I think, how a lot of our listeners might perceive salespeople. But having been in sales, I know how hard it is and I'm like this is what they go through right Convincing people to make decisions when they probably know in their head that they're not providing everything complete assurance to somebody.

Speaker 1: 48:53

Anyway, it sounds like you and I could probably go on for a while on this you know, maybe we, maybe we can convince uh Rizzo to have us do a round table sometime about all this. Yeah, we can do that. Um, tony, been great. As always good to catch up. Uh, if folks want to kind of keep up with you or or uh, keep up with what you're talking about these days what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 2: 49:18

LinkedIn or our Slack channel? I'm on there, I'm active. You can reach out to me. I'm happy to chat.

Speaker 1: 49:23

Awesome, as always. Thanks to our listeners for getting to support us. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, reach out to Rizzo, naomi Liu or me and we will be glad to talk to you about what that might be and see if we can make it happen. Until next time, everybody, we'll talk to you later. Bye.