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002 - Catherine Cooper on Change Management, Internal Communications, and Defining Success
111 Plays6 years ago
PROFILES SUPPLY CHAIN CONVERSATIONS
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EPISODE 2 CATHERINE COOPER ON CHANGE MANAGEMENT, INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS, AND DEFINING SUCCESS
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Welcome to Episode 2 of Profiles, a podcast centered around supply chain conversations hosted by Brian Glick, founder and CEO of Chain.io.
Our guest this week is Catherine Cooper. Educated as an engineer, Catherine has dedicated her career to the logistics industry with the last 18 years in top leadership positions (CIO of a $1 Billion global logistics service provider and president of two successful consulting firms). She founded World Connections in 2006 where she works with senior executives from Fortune 500 companies, private equity firms, and global logistics service providers who partner with Catherine to develop innovative solutions at the intersection of technology and people. Recent clients include QVC, Coca-Cola Enterprises, and Gap Inc.
Catherine's articles on leadership, project management, technical trends, and change management are published in these industry journals: Inbound Logistics, Food Logistics, IIE Solutions, Operations and Fulfillment, and Distribution Management.
The real definition of success to the wife of the climber and the children of the dad who’s climbing is getting down the mountain and coming down alive…
Listen in as Brian and Catherine discuss:
- How Catherine got into the supply chain business and why she decided to stay
- The evolution of change management in regards to people vs. technology
- Tips for how to keep change management in scope
- Why Catherine founded her business, World Connections
- What Catherine wishes she had known at the beginning of her career that she’s learned since
- The challenges that folks who are new to the supply chain industry face today
- Best practice for handling employee mistakes, especially in light of how costly supply chain mistakes can be
- The balance between A.I. tech and human involvement in supply chain processes
- Upcoming challenges that logistics practitioners need to be aware of
- Whether best practices for brand messaging should also be applied to internal communications regarding change management and project implementation
- The importance of leaders to openly communicate risk so that it is shared by more than just the person in charge
You need to help your team understand the difference between no evidence of risk, and that that is not evidence of no risk. Try to explain to them that these are the things that are out there, do we all agree we’re going forward with this level of uncertainty? Do we all agree this is a risk? And I think getting people to share the risk with you will certainly help you in your career because it becomes a thing where you’re the leader of the discussion but not the sole owner of all the problems.
Links and resources mentioned in the show:
- World Connections
- “When the Chain Breaks”, an article from The Economist
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Transcript
Success Beyond the Peak: A Business Analogy
00:00:02
Speaker
But the real definition of success to the wife of the climber and the children of the dad who's climbing is getting down the mountain and coming down alive.
Introduction to ChainIO Podcast
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome to Profiles by ChainIO. I'm Brian Glick, ChainIO's founder and CEO. Over the coming weeks and years, we'll feature the partners and customers who make up the ChainIO network. We'll focus on learning about the individuals within these companies
00:00:31
Speaker
and how they've helped build the organizations that drive our network.
Logistics Industry Journeys
00:00:35
Speaker
Together, we'll learn what drew them to the industry, why they made it such a big part of their lives, and where they see us all going in the future.
Interview with Katherine Cooper
00:00:45
Speaker
On this episode, we'll be talking to Katherine Cooper, the president of World Connections. Katherine is one of the industry's true luminaries. In addition of being the former CIO of a billion dollar global logistics provider,
00:00:58
Speaker
Katherine is also the past president of the Warehousing Research Council, its national board of directors, and was a past instructor at Georgia Tech's Supply Chain and Logistics Institute. She's led supply chain and change management initiatives for enterprises like QVC, Coca-Cola, and Gap. And most importantly, she's my former boss and definitely the single biggest influence in my career.
00:01:20
Speaker
Catherine's been a great personal mentor and her unique ability to understand that even the most technical project is only successful if the people on the team are on board was a great example for me earlier in my
Katherine's Career Path in Supply Chain
00:01:33
Speaker
career. Today, Catherine, the World Connections team work with Chain.io customers whose project and change management needs go beyond systems and into large scale organizational and project management. So without further ado, here's the interview.
00:01:51
Speaker
Katherine, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Happy to be here. So we'd love to get started just if you could give us a little bit of a background on how you got into the supply chain industry and why you decided to stick around for your career.
Technology and User Integration
00:02:06
Speaker
So getting into it was just more of an accident, but certainly staying was very deliberate. My very first job out of college was doing training for a warehouse management system. So I was put in a warehouse to teach the warehouse operators how to use the system. And in that
00:02:29
Speaker
introduction, what I quickly learned and enjoyed was that how much power the operators actually have. If they don't understand something, they find workarounds, they create their own shortcuts, they will make the system work for them. And so all the design that was done could actually go out the window with clever operators. So I learned early on the value
00:02:56
Speaker
of making sure that the people and the users of whatever technology is coming in are brought on board at an early enough stage where it can be truly applicable to their job.
Logistics Evolution and Challenges
00:03:11
Speaker
And what made you stick around?
00:03:12
Speaker
Because the job never has gotten boring. So I've been in it for coming up on 28 years now. And not one year has been the same. Not even one month has been the same. So logistics is always evolving with new technology. But then you also have the supply chain that's become more expansive than it's reaching deeper down into the suppliers.
00:03:39
Speaker
or even the changes with the geopolitical climate, costing, so many things keep it to be an extremely dynamic industry. So it's not a place you can get bored, so I'm always learning and have had no reason to leave it.
00:03:58
Speaker
So one of the things that you mentioned there was about how much influence the operators had over kind of the first project you were on. Do you think that the role of change management has evolved since that project or how do you kind of see that that all comes together as far as the people part versus the technology part?
00:04:18
Speaker
I think that it's recognized as important. It shows up on all the strategic PowerPoint charts and project plans. I think actually executing it and fully taking action on it still
Budgeting for Change Management
00:04:33
Speaker
has a long way to go. Training is just a component of change management. Training is teaching you to do something new.
00:04:44
Speaker
and change management is teaching you a different way of doing things that you already do. So it's a much bigger effort. But I think that actually truly budgeting it, truly bringing along all the stakeholders at the front,
00:05:04
Speaker
is something that many of us fall short on when we're doing projects because you don't see immediate value, you just pay for it at the end. So it's still very much a once burned user community that takes that to heart.
Everest Metaphor: Post-Launch Importance
00:05:20
Speaker
So I know when I've worked on projects, there's always the things that get cut as the schedule gets off track or the budget gets off track and training might be high, but general change management is probably even higher on that list of things that get kind of sliced out or never even make it in the first place. Do you have any tips that you would pass along to people when they're talking to their bosses or to their CFO to try to keep that stuff in scope?
00:05:46
Speaker
Well, the first thing, the analogy I use to usually kind of help them understand it is the Everest has become a business metaphor. And a lot of MBA schools now sponsor the hiking trips on Everest. But the majority of the people, the highest percentage of deaths on the Everest climb is on the descent.
Founding World Connections
00:06:09
Speaker
And they're usually presented as a question. And they say near the top. But a lot of people don't guess it's on the way down.
00:06:16
Speaker
And definition of success for many of the Everest climbers is making it to the top, putting your flag up at the top. But the real definition of success to the wife of the climber and the children of the dad who's climbing is getting down the mountain and coming down alive. And so
00:06:38
Speaker
on a Go Live or an implementation of a big project, Go Live Day is putting your flag at the top of the mountain. But you still need the oxygen, the energy, the power to get down the mountain. And that is the implementation to actually start having people use it. So I try to teach them that Go Live is actually day zero. That's the beginning of the real project.
00:07:03
Speaker
Up until then, it all can be erased. It's all on paper. It all can be reprioritized. It can even be put on hold. It's such a different animal than go-live date. Once you flip the switch and everyone's actually using it in production, that's the first day of the project. And when you teach it to them that way, they'll tend to talk about a little bit more in the upfront stages.
00:07:31
Speaker
That's great advice. What caused you to found World Connections and to make a business out of this?
Communication in Supply Chain Projects
00:07:39
Speaker
So the one, job security. So there is never, in my experience so far, there's not a shortfall of projects that are challenged at the seams of supply chain or the seams of cross border and cross organizational boundaries. So the technology continues to evolve and it changes and there's consolidation in the market.
00:08:03
Speaker
3PLs are out, they had a big consolidation of providers. All that will kind of come and go and you can find yourself in or out of a job. But as far as making all the organizations work together, that seems to be a never-ending pool of opportunity.
00:08:26
Speaker
What World Connections does is we basically help clients achieve success of the project they already know they want to do or help them create their strategy, but we help them achieve their own success. And where we shore up their team is making sure they understand the challenges of the
00:08:48
Speaker
seems focusing on the communications of the project.
Learning from Mistakes in Supply Chain
00:08:53
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So what do you wish you knew at the beginning of your career that you've learned since?
00:08:57
Speaker
I wish I could go back and tell my very junior self to ask more questions and understand that it's not important to know everything and that actually people enjoy talking and they enjoy sharing their knowledge. Early in my career, I felt it very important to show I knew everything. So I would want to come in and make sure that I express that early in a conversation because I felt I needed to prove myself.
00:09:27
Speaker
And you know as you get more comfortable it's not that i'm any smarter it's just as i got more comfortable years ticked away i learned that you know if i come in and ask them how do you do it why do you do it that way why do you feel that's important what did you try before doing it this way that didn't work.
00:09:47
Speaker
they'll just talk forever and share it. But it actually allows me to be more efficient with our clients because going in with questionings rather than a prescribed methodology or toolset allows us to come to a solution together and it's much more, has a higher likelihood of being adopted by their company because it's developed in conjunction with them and with their culture.
00:10:13
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So I would tell that younger self, you know, relax a little bit, just go in and ask some questions and be a better listener.
New Professionals and Costly Errors
00:10:20
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And it actually makes your job easier. But it also makes you smarter in the long run in a short amount of time. So I probably wasted a few years trying to be too smart, too early. I think many of us in this industry can be accused of talking when we should listen.
00:10:38
Speaker
So I certainly can relate, and I think a few of my clients from my younger career would absolutely agree with that as well. And you and I worked together back then, so you could probably attest to that fact too. So what do you think for people starting today, what kind of challenges do you think they faced that maybe we didn't a while back when we both started?
Mistakes as Learning Opportunities
00:11:04
Speaker
I think that a supply chain, right, glitch or a mistake is very costly. So I think back in the day, you know, when we came along, you could fix some things pretty quickly, but I think now it moves at such a pace.
00:11:19
Speaker
And you can deal with such large amounts of either data or flat-out cargo that a mistake is very costly to an organization when there's a glitch in the supply chain. So I think that what they face is it's less of a safety net except what's provided by their company.
00:11:42
Speaker
and their impact of their work while rewarding can be a little bit riskier. So maybe it's harder for them to get up in the higher positions because of the exposure of what they can do wrong. So I know you helped me with this actually earlier in my career, but when they do make that mistake.
00:12:03
Speaker
What are kind of some of the ways that people should react? When you do screw it up, you book the freight to the wrong location or you copy the wrong column in the spreadsheet and it screws up the forecast.
00:12:15
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What's the way to kind of own and handle that?
Honest Mistakes vs. Risk Recognition
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah, so one, I would like to credit the former CEO of IBM because he had an employee. It's a story from his book, but talked about that the employee made, let's say, a $400,000 mistake.
00:12:35
Speaker
And they said, where are you going to fire the person? And his response was, no, I just spent $400,000 training them because they will not make that mistake again. And so I think of it a lot that way. When someone makes a mistake, um, it's, it's, you know, the mistake is already made. So if it's a lack of training or lack of knowledge or maybe too much on their plate,
00:13:01
Speaker
They're not going to make that mistake again, considering they're a good employee all the way around. You don't take those opportunities to weed them out. You take those opportunities to help share that knowledge and the lessons learned with a broader group, not to make them feel bad, but
00:13:19
Speaker
You know, they're already in fear of their jobs. So I think if you say we're going to showcase this because others can benefit, they tend to come along very, very quickly. But there's got to be a tolerance for mistakes if you're going to climb in your career. So I think the other thing is you've got to find a boss.
00:13:36
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or an organization that'll tolerate that. And if they don't tolerate any kind of errors, then you're not in a growth innovative environment.
Predictive Tools and Human Input
00:13:48
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And so I would question your long-term viability at that company if you want to grow. So there's going to be some. And you just got to take it when it happens, learn from it, and move on.
00:14:02
Speaker
I think there's a difference, though, if I can expand on this, between just flat out making a mistake and being blamed for not seeing something that happened. Because in hindsight, it's always very easy to see what we should have done differently. So I think that that's another thing that happens a lot in organizations, particularly in IT, where I've spent a lot of my time. As soon as a risk happens, then you're like, oh, you should have seen that coming.
00:14:32
Speaker
But, yeah, you can't predict everything. And it goes back to the guy who, you know, they say if there was a guy who on, you know, September 11, but on September 10 said we should barricade all the cockpit doors on all the planes because someone might break through the cockpit. Everyone would be, that's very expensive. We have to ground our planes. We have to
Adapting to Unpredictable Supply Chain Events
00:14:54
Speaker
do it. It's costing each of the airlines. They're going to raise prices. And they'd probably be tied up for years in debate and discussion.
00:15:01
Speaker
But on September 12th, boom, every cockpit is barricaded. So the hindsight problem is something that is always a challenge. And you have to be brave and strong enough to say, I can't see everything that's coming. And yes, it did happen. And I think that's where resilience comes in, because you can't resist against everything.
00:15:23
Speaker
So I go to a lot of conferences and we're talking about things like predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics where the computer is supposed to hypothetically see everything, right? And tell you what's going to happen next. And then all of these, these kinds of science fiction things. How much do you think this is still about people?
00:15:44
Speaker
in our business and how much should we be loading off to the tech and are we going in the right direction or are we setting ourselves up for a big mistake here?
00:15:54
Speaker
Well, so the machine learning and the prescriptive, I still think is, while it would make us faster, that just means your reactions have to be faster. Because it can make suggestions of what you should do, but it still only has the data of knowns that we're kind of already working with to model and predict forward. I'll use an example of, in 2015, we had the port slowdown on the West Coast of the United States.
00:16:19
Speaker
And there was an inventory and so everyone from that did a lot of where should we put our inventory how should we better plan for next time what if we now go to the east coast and divide our inventory across the ports and there is a great deal of work to respond to that make sure they're prepared for going forward.
00:16:39
Speaker
Just about as soon as there was an equilibrium in inventory and things got back to normal, about six months later, Hanjin went belly up. So, you know, number seven in the world shipper went into receivership. And, you know, stopping their credit line resulted, you know, in the inability to purchase fuel, which meant ports would not let them come in and they were stranded at sea because they were afraid they wouldn't get paid for unloading and loading their cargo.
00:17:07
Speaker
So while you had done and do the port closure, a lot of port diversity and expanding your risk that way, many were still shipping on a single carrier or single line or all their product for a particular line coming across for value savings and costs.
00:17:23
Speaker
And anyone who was on the Hanjin ships at the time had a huge problem because it happened right before the holidays. And the Wall Street Journal reported that about 14 billion worth of cargo were called up in transit during that time.
00:17:39
Speaker
So would the predictive analytics caught that prior to us not reporting about what if things just get stranded at sea? I don't know.
Overseeing Complex Supply Chains
00:17:48
Speaker
So I think it helps us be faster, but I still think you got to put the reaction to it and the brains to it as well.
00:17:57
Speaker
So what I'm hearing is that as organizations, we have to build ourselves in a way that we can react to those things and that we're not buried in that situation where we're not listening to the guy who says to put the barricades on the door and that we're able to listen and deal with these things as they're coming up. Is that a good summary?
00:18:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's like still use your speedometer for your car, still use all the gauges that are telling you everything. The Tesla, the self-driving car, I still look at the road. So I think you still need to keep your head up and not go blindly into reports and you run your operations off of reports.
00:18:37
Speaker
I think the team at Tesla would agree that you should still look at the road based on based on what I read in the newspapers. So I'm sure they appreciate the advice as well. There could be immediate land closure and only your eyes are going to tell you that. That's right. What do you think are some of the big challenges as a kind of group of supply chain practitioners that we all face coming up?
00:19:00
Speaker
You know, I think the thing that's coming more clear to me in working with my clients is how deep the supply chain is going, right? So you have to go all the way to your suppliers and be responsible for that as well. If you go back to, was it four years ago in Bangladesh, there was the big fire for Benetton at their factory. And the outrage and the protesting that went on in all the Benetton stores
00:19:27
Speaker
It wasn't that there was an accident, you know, I think people can tend to understand and work through that part of it.
Supply Chain and Brand Perception
00:19:34
Speaker
But it was that Benetton was very, very slow to come up and take responsibility for it. And so people were posting online actual fabrics, you know, burnt garments with the logo, you know, their tag in the garment.
00:19:49
Speaker
And when you talk to Benetton and when they were giving their explanation for it, they're like, well, we have, you know, 700, you know, a labyrinth of suppliers and manufacturers across 700 countries. And, you know, we, it took them a while to figure out, did they actually own and contract to those sewing machines in that plant in Bangladesh on the day of the fire?
00:20:14
Speaker
And so I think the challenge for us is you can no longer use physical distance as an explanation for not being responsible for your supply chain from complete sourcing all the way through. It's a much bigger animal than we kind of used to think of it as port to port and then cross country domestic. I know one of the pieces of advice that I've given our clients over the years has been that
00:20:43
Speaker
back way back when branding was a thing the marketing department owned. And now your supply chain is part of your brand. And that disruption, it doesn't matter whether you contracted the factory. It almost doesn't even matter if that was a counterfeit product in there that you had absolutely nothing to do about. You still have to
00:21:09
Speaker
be out there ahead of it, you know, which is which is very different than the way that a lot of us in the supply chain space think we're very process oriented, right? And that brands about emotion.
00:21:19
Speaker
Right. I mean, the economist came out with an article. It's called when the supply, when the chain breaks. But in that, after surveying like 100 companies and looking at their financial, their stock price, and it turned out that a supply chain glitch had more impact on a company's stock price three months prior, three months after than anything else than a plant closing announcement than an untoward financial event.
00:21:45
Speaker
It was a supply chain glitch because that's the whole product. So it is one where, whether it's all the way down to your provider, but you're only as strong as your weakest link and you're now responsible for every link. So kind of looping that back to the change management conversation, if brand is about emotion and messaging
Human and Technical Aspects of Projects
00:22:09
Speaker
around an incident is so important,
00:22:12
Speaker
Does the same apply when we're talking about change management and internal projects and getting system integrations done or starting up a new WMS? Are companies good enough at looking at the perception of these projects internally and what they mean and messaging them? Or is that something that we're all ignoring with our internal work?
00:22:32
Speaker
So I think there's a lot of room for improvement on that. And the cognitive intelligence is, you know, really an area where we can grow as far as you know, because people focus so much on where the dollars are spent and the dollars are typically spent on a technology piece.
00:22:51
Speaker
And it's not spent on the on the human side of it. But the you know, people decide, you know, the common expression is people decide if they'd like you way before they decide if they want to listen to you, and certainly way before they're going to follow you or do what you say. And so when you get someone who comes in and just starts talking immediately about the technology, which is the way we do our projects, the first time we hit kind of the community of our companies,
00:23:19
Speaker
is once we're ready to go forward with the technology, and they're even named technology projects, ERP, new WMS. They absorb the name of the technology, and it's like, wow, it's so much more than that. So I think we still have a long way to go on adapting the technology to the people and allowing them to make the most of it by adopting it quicker.
00:23:46
Speaker
if I could just share a piece of advice that you gave me kind of when it comes to those things. One of many over the years, when we started some projects and you would ask the question, when we get to the end and this thing has failed, what are we going to blame? What was the thing that was not successful as sort of an envisioning exercise at the beginning of the project? And it was very rare that we'd be in those meetings and someone would say,
00:24:14
Speaker
Well, the technology didn't work, right? That the the WMS was not able to process orders and issue pick tickets, right? It was we got off schedule or our meetings, we forgot to have our weekly meetings, or, you know, we didn't talk about all these other conditions in the project, or some other project became more important. And I think, you know, that's a big thing that a lot of us forget on the tech side of the business is that the computers are going to do what they're supposed to do, for the most part.
00:24:40
Speaker
But the rest of it, the soft things, are certainly a lot harder and definitely where I know many of your clients and coworkers have appreciated your contribution over the years. Well, that's, yeah. And knowing that logistics expertise, that's out there. And so you can find it. But as far as doing a successful project or a successful strategy, you need logistics expertise and human skills in equal measure.
00:25:08
Speaker
And that is, you know, not as
Leadership and Risk Communication
00:25:12
Speaker
prevalent. You have a lot of good techies, a lot of strong systems, and it's the magic of pulling them together and having those, you know, high value exchanges of the cross-functional leaders that make it successful in the end. And that's not something you do bits and bytes and coding on. Is there any other advice that you would give to someone who's kind of starting up in the business?
00:25:36
Speaker
You know, if we look at everything we've talked about, whether it's, you know, properly being resilient or, you know, doing change management on the human side, defining success, I think the whole thing for a leader to learn coming up in this is share the decision risk through your communication. It doesn't mean that
00:25:56
Speaker
you know, you have to own everything. It just means you need to help your team understand the difference between no evidence of risk and that that is not evidence of no risk. And so trying to explain to them that these are the things that are out there. Do we all agree we're going forward with this level of uncertainty? Do we all agree that this is a risk?
00:26:19
Speaker
Do we all understand this? And I think getting people to share the risk with you, um, will certainly help in your, in your career. Um, because the, it becomes, you're the leader of the discussion. It doesn't mean you own all the problems. So I would tell everyone to relax a little bit and share it. I think that's a wonderful piece of advice and probably a good
00:26:42
Speaker
Good note for us to wrap up on. So I really appreciate you joining us today. And you
Conclusion and Next Episode Teaser
00:26:48
Speaker
look forward to your continued contribution. Thank you so much, Brian. Have a great day.
00:26:57
Speaker
So that's a wrap for this episode. Thanks again to Catherine for taking the time out of her schedule to join us. And tune in next time when we'll talk to Brian Eigenberg about his company Freightsnap, their really cool dimensioning and augmented reality projects, and finding a fish on a loading dock in Memphis. Thanks so much for listening.