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Hey, what's up Toby?

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We've made it to number 21 of the Processed Debt Podcast.

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No one has asked us to stop yet that we know of.

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We've gotten no cease and desist.

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So that means we're not successful.

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Hey, special shout out to our listener and Boise.

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Oh, there's a couple.

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Yeah, a couple.

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I understand even somebody said, you're top of mind, buddy.

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I'd love to buy you lunch.

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I got lunch out of the podcast.

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So I am officially an influencer now, influencing ones of people.

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I love it.

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It was only a matter of time, my friend.

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Well done.

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All right, today's topic.

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Yes, today's topic, not specifically, but layoffs.

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Yeah.

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Or just changes in employment.

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Well, if you haven't been part of it recently,

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you're probably only one degree of separation

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from somebody whose job has been threatened as budget cuts come along

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or has been part of some of the governmental layoffs.

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But even in the public space, with all the uncertainty,

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people are tightening their belts.

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And so this topic of layoffs today, what's crossing my mind,

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and we were talking just a little bit before the show,

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was what happens when people that have really defined and held

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ownership over a process are removed from the equation?

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Yeah.

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These are the process owners.

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Maybe they're the conveners.

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Maybe they're the people that drive the chopping wood consistency

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that makes a good list happen.

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Chris, you and I both have laughed over the years about we've

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had more than one or two jobs a decade.

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Oh, gosh.

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And we've been part of leaving and part of being left.

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Yeah.

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What's your thought?

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I mean, you probably had a person or two leave and the process

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that they owned was left in the porch.

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Well, what's funny is my first job out of college,

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this was back in, I don't know, let's go 25 years ago, just for fun.

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Back in the old days.

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Back in the day.

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Most people won't remember this, but Microsoft

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didn't always have a ribbon.

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And that was a major shift.

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And back in the day, I was writing some code.

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And so actually, right out of school, I eliminated my job.

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And it must have been six months.

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I eliminated my job and half another person's job.

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And so this was my first layoff.

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You're the original Doge.

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I literally am doing nothing.

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Right?

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Then I get bored and I'm like, let's tie the production schedule

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to purchasing, because I was in the purchasing department.

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So I tie it and I'm just so bored.

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Because I literally am done with my week's worth of tasks

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by noon on Monday.

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I'm just faxing out.

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I literally, OK, this is how long ago it is.

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I basically run my report, which basically tells me all my open orders.

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My system tells me whether I need to expedite it or not.

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And I fax it.

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I literally fax a whole bunch of these things to people.

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And then they send it back and they say, we can't expedite it.

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So then this is how I got my first layoff.

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And I don't know why my boss let me go and do this,

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because it took a long time for me to figure this thing out.

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But he was just like, hey, the new kid seems to be a wizard at Excel.

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So I build this whole thing out.

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And then by the end, I think I went through two rounds of layoffs

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and I was part of the third.

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But by the time the third rolled around, I was answering phones

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at the front desk, because I literally hit.

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But who knows what happened with that thing after I left?

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So there's some zombie magic probably to this day.

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Oh, yeah.

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Still colliding production schedules and procurement activities.

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And it probably just treats it like a fragile artifact, right?

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Oh, yeah, because if it breaks, who are you going to call?

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Yeah.

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You apparently didn't leave a forwarding address,

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because it doesn't sound like they're tracking you down.

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I was young and stupid.

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And I password protected it.

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And then they found out about it.

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And I was like, oh, a gooser is about to stop.

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Make your deal on this password.

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I'll hook you up.

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No, but I think it's interesting, right?

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I think what I left, they probably used for quite a while.

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And then it just entropyed.

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And then they stopped using it at some point.

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Or maybe it's still being used.

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I don't know.

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But what's interesting is you've got the people that leave,

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and you've got wealth of knowledge that kind of leave

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and disappear.

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And the true loss, I think you can't account for it.

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There's no way to account for it.

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I think the accounting or the recognition,

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we talk a lot about is it discoverable?

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Is it visible?

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I love those themes that you bring up a lot.

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And I think about it so oftentimes,

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it's not discoverable because somebody is still refining it.

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Or maybe they don't have time to document it

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and start to mentor somebody.

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So it's only discoverable when they're in the room, right?

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And therefore not transferable.

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And so yeah, if they would have at least

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bought an annual license key, they

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could at least get an email from you

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about how to make that spreadsheet work.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, no, it's pretty crazy.

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And I think the same thing happens when people leave,

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and then also when people show up, right?

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Like I can't tell you how many times people are like, well,

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my last company.

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And what's interesting, I think oftentimes

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is like most companies don't have a strong process culture.

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And so when someone shows up and they say,

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hey, I'm going to be in my last company,

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there's not this like major like almost like coup against it

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where it's like we don't do stuff that way.

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Like we do, because most processes don't support people.

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Those processes are what we would call sad man work.

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Full of misery and extra innings and unpaid Saturdays.

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Let me go get my Crayola crayon and draw some things.

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Well, you know, you make a really interesting point

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because when we bring somebody on,

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even if internally we see ourselves as a process culture,

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I don't know that I've ever heard somebody define

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what that experience would look like.

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Yeah, yeah.

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You know, think about an organization

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that you've been involved with maybe recently,

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maybe further back in your past.

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But, you know, think of an organization maybe

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where you felt like there was a very clear process culture.

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And the answer could be, mm-hmm, still waiting.

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But I'm curious about how would you describe that culture

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without naming the innocent and the guilty parties alike?

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I would say that it just gets skipped.

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But if they do have a process culture in place,

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how might you explain what it means?

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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Like, I mean, if you had a process culture,

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it would be like, look, these are the tools.

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These are the reports, right?

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Like, I think what you would see is you would see,

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you would see almost like three,

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like you could go to three different teams

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and things would be done in the same way, right?

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And I think the challenge, I think where people fall down here

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is they don't have a standard.

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And so they either push, well,

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they either are too standardized or too loose.

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And so where they're like too standard

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and they don't create, there's no autonomy,

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then I think people just rebel.

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And they're saying, I'm gonna do it this way, right?

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And then the other thing is oftentimes you don't see

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a reporting structure that basically goes up a level

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and goes up a level and goes up a level, right?

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So like, I would say if it's done correctly

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is as you look at a report and you scale down a layer

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and then you go down another layer,

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you would actually see processes that support it.

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But my guess is most of the time you rip off those reports

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and what you find is like scaffolding and duct tape

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and it's just not put together.

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Right.

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And some of that I think is because oftentimes

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process is driven by reporting.

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It's not driven by the people doing the work.

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Yeah.

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And so you think about the people that come in,

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they're like, I wanna see this thing.

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Right.

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And so because of the thing that they wanna see,

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they drive process which may not actually even be accurate.

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Like the thing that we don't talk about with reporting

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is what's the precision on this thing?

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Let's not make anybody too nervous.

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Years ago when I was in telecom,

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I sat in the sales organization and I had to get fortune

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to work with a really exceptional process-minded manager.

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Yeah.

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He had already done a good job.

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Several of these guys had come over from MCI.

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Oh yeah, yeah.

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We're back before Sarbanes-Oxley

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and all the corporate malfeasance

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that pulled a bunch of people.

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For our young people, what was MCI?

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Yeah.

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Back in the day when the only phone in your house

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was stuck to the wall, MCI was that forced person

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that you could pay less money to talk to somebody

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more than five miles away.

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Got it.

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Okay. Right.

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That phone that was on the wall.

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Like the invention of the cell phone.

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This was-

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Brought to us, it brought to us the where are you at?

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Because you never had to ask that

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because you were always at home stuck to some line.

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It was always super easy.

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Are you in the living room or did you take the 40 feet

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of phone line into the bathroom or laundry room?

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The thing that was so beautiful was

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when I joined this organization,

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we had a measure of leadership alignment

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where RVPs had this high trust in our reporting

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and we rounded to the nearest thousand.

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Sweet. Right?

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Because we're talking about million, two million,

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five million dollar a month budgets

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that they're supposed to be hitting with their sales targets.

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We're not gonna miss by pennies.

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In materiality.

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Yeah.

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But a new senior executive, to your point about reporting,

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came in and what he discovered was

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my team and I are producing very insightful reports

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that precede anything that'll actually hit the books.

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We're looking out the sales funnel.

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We're doing all this management reporting

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but we're rounding to the nearest thousand.

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Yes.

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His finance organization was chasing their tail

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and trying to go out to 17 decimals, like most-

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Wanted to go.

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They can't reconcile the ninth decimal.

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No, that's unfair, but you know these guys.

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Yeah, yeah.

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And so his solution was take the cowboys

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and stick them in finance

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and then that'll make it all work better.

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And to a degree, we took across some of our secret sauce.

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Sure, sure.

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We were using Excel and Visual Basic

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to do very complex automations

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to produce an enormous volume of reporting

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because traditionally hours go into reporting

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and seconds go into the analysis.

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Oh, it's crazy.

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But here was a case where we took a strong process culture

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out of sales, stuffed it in finance,

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and then snuffed it to whatever extent

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it could be snuffed out.

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Yep.

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Right?

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It's such a bear.

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And that was probably one of those first moments

263
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where I went, hang on, good process doesn't always win.

264
00:11:35,680 --> 00:11:36,880
It should, but it doesn't.

265
00:11:36,880 --> 00:11:40,200
Totally, and that's the new guy coming in and saying,

266
00:11:40,200 --> 00:11:43,520
I found value over here in the corner.

267
00:11:44,680 --> 00:11:46,960
Let's move the value over here.

268
00:11:46,960 --> 00:11:51,960
And then some ways like bastardize it.

269
00:11:54,400 --> 00:11:55,240
Yep.

270
00:11:55,240 --> 00:11:56,800
If people don't understand it clearly

271
00:11:56,800 --> 00:11:58,920
and they can't articulate it, it doesn't exist.

272
00:11:58,920 --> 00:11:59,760
Yeah.

273
00:11:59,760 --> 00:12:01,680
I think that's the sad truth of it.

274
00:12:01,680 --> 00:12:02,520
For sure.

275
00:12:02,520 --> 00:12:04,720
Well, we're just a smidge over five.

276
00:12:04,720 --> 00:12:06,600
Oh, we did it again.

277
00:12:06,600 --> 00:12:08,800
As is often the case, I wanna give a shout out

278
00:12:08,800 --> 00:12:12,200
to our listeners or singular household.

279
00:12:12,200 --> 00:12:13,040
Perfect.

280
00:12:13,040 --> 00:12:16,640
And Edmond, not Montana, just a little north.

281
00:12:16,640 --> 00:12:17,640
Edmonton, yeah.

282
00:12:17,640 --> 00:12:18,960
Edmonton, Canada, yeah.

283
00:12:18,960 --> 00:12:20,280
There you go.

284
00:12:20,280 --> 00:12:24,160
Saskatchewan, I believe, I think, one of the provinces.

285
00:12:24,160 --> 00:12:26,560
I mean, I'm surprised that we have Canadians listening.

286
00:12:26,560 --> 00:12:27,400
I mean, we are the-

287
00:12:27,400 --> 00:12:29,120
It's makes their good judgment.

288
00:12:31,240 --> 00:12:32,080
All right, man.

289
00:12:32,080 --> 00:12:33,840
Or just their ten minutes speaker.

290
00:12:33,840 --> 00:12:34,920
We'll pick it up next week.

291
00:12:34,920 --> 00:12:35,760
Thanks, man.

292
00:12:35,760 --> 00:12:36,600
For real, have a good one.

293
00:12:36,600 --> 00:12:47,600
Bye.