JACK MIXNER STRATEGY

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When you're dealing with an unknown, potentially lethal biologic sample, the last thing you want to do with it is to open the sample container to take a whiff. In some cases, such activity is a death sentence. Unfortunately, that (Peters, 238) is exactly to one of C. J. Peters' team members did with a sample he suspected was Ebola, a very nasty virus, indeed. When the technician (actually a highly trained physician) finally realized his error and confessed, it was days later, after lots of people had been, potentially, exposed as well. Not a good start to a very tough story.

The Ebola sample came from a large monkey colony at a test facility in Reston, Virginia, just outside of Washington D. C. The colony, after much and diligent effort, was eradicated, along with the Ebola virus.

So, what is the strategic point of this discussion? The Army team in charge of cleaning up the monkey colony was long on education and experience. They knew what to do and how to do it. They were experienced. This wasn't a case of a strong leader out ahead of the pack telling everyone what to do. Each person on the team knew what to do and when to do it. If they hadn't done things correctly, lots of people could have gotten hurt.

The point, to return to the question, is that there are strategies that require highly trained and experienced personnel to effectively carry out. Some of those strategies require true "outside-the-box" thinking. Some of them require the opposite, let's call it "inside-the-box" training. Two different types of people are required. Moore's Chasm talks about crossing the chasm from early adopters to the main market. Lots of that is outside-the-box thinking. Bureaucratic thinking, maybe even mainstream thinking like getting things done right time after time, is inside-the-box thinking, more like the repetitive strategies (like quality upgrades and just-in-time processes) in Moore's Darwin. Next time you do your SWOT for a strategic analysis, you might want to consider the folks in the room and whether they are insiders or outsiders. Who get assigned what may be the difference between success and failure.

Reference

Mixner, Jack. Expertise - or Talent? http://mixnerstrategy.com/blog/2010/05/post_4.html 

Moore, Geoffrey A. Crossing the Chasm. Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. HarperBusiness 1991.  

Moore, Geoffrey. A. Dealing With Darwin. How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution. Portfolio. 2005. 

Peters, C. J., M. D. Virus Hunter. Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World. Anchor Books. 1997.

Posted by jackmixner at 04:58 PM | Permalink

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We all know about neurons in the brain. They are, supposedly, the place where thought takes place. Have more neurons, have more intelligence, or so the theory went. Until scientists looked at Einstein's brain. His brain looked just like yours and mine in terms of neurons. Where it differed was in the number of cells that were not neurons. In some areas of the brain, his "not neurons" were off the charts (Fields, 7). That led to a whole new exploration of the brain. They used microscopes, binary microscopes and electron microscopes. The problem with all those systems was that they worked on dead tissues. If you've ever run an electron microscope, you realize that the beam has to be focused on specially preserved, especially dead, tissue. So how do you look inside brain tissue - at the molecular level - to see just what is going on? Enter Atari and the generation of scientists the Atari-like imaging spawned.

First it was home computers with their readily accessible controllers and color graphics (Fields, 52). Attach a home computer to a microcope to a video camera and interesting things began to happen. Add a laser system and even more things showed up. You could see what was happening inside a live cell. So, what do you focus upon inside a living brain cell? Calcium transmits information from outside brain cells to the inside of brain cells. All this new technology allowed scientists to see calcium migrate - and when (Fields, 52). When scientists added fluorescing calcium-detecting dyes to brain cells, they could see which cells lit up and what kind of signal caused the flash.

This took new traits in your scientist (Fields, 54). In the past, the good scientists took their time. Preparing samples for an electron microscope that are worth anything takes time. Now, real time science required real time decision making. Your test brain cells only remained alive for so long. While they were alive you had to figure out what to do with them. When you was something on your computer/camera/laser imaging system, you had to figure out what it was - fast. Speed was a new trait. Fixing things on your equipment came in a close second.

Reference

Fields, R. Douglas. The Other Brain. From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries About the Brain Are Revolutionizin Medicine and Science. Simon & Schuster. 2009.

Posted by jackmixner at 03:13 PM | Permalink

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Novartis spent more than $100 million, maybe a lot more (Miller, 146), during the years between the mid-eighties and 2005 on xenotransplatation, "the use of live animal tissues and organs to heal sick people (Miller, x)." Ending in 2005, Novartis' investment over three years in the final xeno company they supported, Immerge BioTherapeutics, totalled $30 million. During the period, Novartis never saw a return on its investment.

With all the stimulus funding sloshing around our economy, billions of dollars seem more the norm, but Novartis' $100 million was a lot to them. For their money, they received significant results. Specially grown pigs with special genes were able to provide kidneys and hearts to baboons. The organs weren't immediately rejected. One kidney, in fact, lasted more than two months (Miller, 207).

Immerge and companies like it were established because there is a need for organs. Human donations aren't keeping up with demand. It seems there might be a calculation here to ascertain if federal spending on xeno projects makes sense. Totalling the lifetime of expenses for the normal kidney dialysis patient might give some indication whether additional NIH investments makes sense. We all know the answer. It all makes sense. The problem is "Where's the money to come from?" Not an easy question.

Reference

Miller, G. Wayne. The Xeno Chronicles. Two Years on the Frontie of Medicine Inside Harvard's Transplant Research Lab. PublicAffairs. 2005.

Posted by jackmixner at 02:28 PM | Permalink

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It may be that I am abnormal. I got all teary-eyed reading the introduction to Kennedy's autobiography, especially since we all know the outcome. A sad story in an inspiring family. Let's focus on the inspiration side.

Mid-way through the book (Kennedy, 230) we start to hear how it felt to be Bobby Kennedy, especially as a new Senator. He had a choice: he could do what all junior Senators did, namely, knuckle down, do his homework, and keep quiet, or he could act differently from the norm. He was the brother of a President. He'd already been Attorney General. How should he act as a freshman Senator?

"Bobby decided that he would take on issues that championed America's dispossessed, such as antipoverty bills and further civil rights reform. He searched out injustices and moral causes. His involvement in them lent them a sense of urgency they might not otherwise have inspired. As he grew and learned, he became more and more interested in people, as opposed to abstract issues (Kennedy, 230)."

Reference

Kennedy, Edward M. True Compass. A Memoir. Twelve. 2009.

Posted by jackmixner at 11:37 AM | Permalink

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Here's the story (Swan): hyper-active kid grows up, decides to become an adventurer and, because he read a lot of cool books as a kid about Artic exploring (and Antartic exploring, as well), decides he wants to retrace the steps of the original explorers in the Antartic. All good. We get that. All of us know enough about the topic to predict what happens next. Two things, actually. One, money is hard to raise for such an exploration. That's easy to figure out. Two, the explorers get in trouble. All this makes the story interesting. There's a twist in all this that makes it even better: the explorer becomes a green advocate and tries to change the world. Also predictable, if you think about it. I could stop now, but we need to consider the topic.

There are politics that make a solution for our green problems hard to solve. The science of our green problems is hard, as well. We don't know precisely what to do, especially when we balance the green problems with the capitalistic need for growth.

The federal government, in all sorts of ways, is trying to spur business to recognize the need for change, and more importantly, do something about it. In my speeches to entrepreneurs, I always try to make clear that there is no free money from the government. If you take a grant or a loan you're going to have to work to get it and then you'd better perform according to your business plan. Or you are in trouble.

So, we have to realize that the government is interested and that the government doesn't know what to do. We talked about capitalistic growth. Well, in less obvious terms, the government is pointing to an opportunity to fix things before it is too late. Take that government money or not, realize that the opportunity still exists for you and your company to do something. Think about it. What are you going to do? And how are you going to make it profitable?

Reference 

Swan, Robert and Gil Reavill. Antarctica 2041. My Quest to Save the Earth's Last Wilderness. Broadway Books. 2009.

Posted by jackmixner at 10:51 AM | Permalink

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Phase one of a formula for disaster (Lewis): Take a thousand home mortgages. Rank them according the odds that they will successfully be repaid (and, yes, a few other things, but let's just keep things simple). Stack them up with the best ones on top and the worst ones on the bottom. Divide them into sections - tranches, in finance-speak - and sell the best ones off at a high interest rate and sell the worst ones at a lower interest rate. That's normal stuff. Now it gets interesting.

Take a thousand of the worst mortgages and divide them up the same way, only, since they're all bad anyway, don't really spend too much time figuring out which ones are the bad loans and which ones are the good loans. Pile them up and sell them the same way you did the first batch of one thousand loans.

Do you notice something? I'm sure you do. Since the second pile was composed of all bad loans, it is almost guaranteed that some will go bad. That's, basically, a given.

Now the second phase of our formula for disaster: Assume that residential housing prices will continue to rise - forever. It seems logical enough. We've got lots of history that says housing prices rise over time. We all know what happened. There was a housing bubble. Houses stopped rising in value. In fact, they crashed.

When the finance guys ran the numbers on that second pile of loans we were talking about, they estimated that the whole pile would collapse when three percent of the loans failed. Whoops. We all know what happened. Somewhere around eight percent of the loans failed. The pile of bad loans really fell down. Whoops, again.

Now, in the past, we would have just felt bad for the bond-holders and moved on.

Phase three of a formula for disaster: things get worse. Some smart person realized they could make even more money on the bad loans by insuring their holders, essentially insuring that loans would never fail at more than the three percent rate, let alone the eight percent rate. Since they were so sure of their financial numbers, they did something really smart: they leveraged their bets, big time (or maybe more than that - thirty times or so, actually). Whoops, again.

Put all this in one pot and mix and you have what we got: an almost guaranteed formula for disaster. The best part? Someone - maybe ten someones, actually - predicted all this failure and shorted the market for insurance company stocks, and bad bonds. They made billions. We lost trillions.

Ah, capitalism. Pretty cool, until it's not.

Reference

Lewis, Michael. The Big Short. Inside the Doomsday Machine. W. W. Norton & Company. 2010

Posted by jackmixner at 10:30 AM | Permalink

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Sometimes experience matters. There was a patient. She "didn't feel too good (Gawande, 1)." The medical student assigned to her had done his best. The nurses were watching. All seemed well. The resident wasn't buying it. His experience told him that that patient warranted close following, more than the medical student was providing, so he took it upon himself to continue to follow up. This time, the patient was lucky. The resident found a problem on one of his frequent, unscheduled, visits and made sure things were put right. A good result for the patient. A good result for the medical student. A good result for the resident.

Even without the resident's close attention, basically, the patient got the best care in one of the best hospitals. However, without the resident's willingness to admit that he didn't feel good about what was going on, the patient would have probably had a wholly different outcome. His experience - call it gut reaction, if you will - made all the difference.

So, strategically, what's the difference? Lots. We might say, "Trust your instincts and act," and we'd be partly correct. There's more. Follow-up takes work. Showing up and asking questions repeatly is a part of success. Training the staff - the team - that doing things by book might not be enough seems obvious. Sparking their interest in following-up is part of your job. Not easy, I know. However, relying on "following the book" isn't enough. So, it takes two things to succeed, at least in this instance. Do things by the book, yes. But, at the same time, you've got to focus on the patient and the book. Keep looking when things don't feel right. Showing up isn't enough. Show up engaged works better. The trick here isn't easy, however. You've got to figure out how not only how to motivate yourself to show up engaged. You've got to do the same thing with your team.

References

Gawande, Atul. Better. A Surgeon's Notes on Performance. Picador. 2007.

Posted by jackmixner at 09:26 AM | Permalink

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The press has been full of comments about the fiftieth anniversary of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. I thought I'd pull the book from the library and give it a quick read over the Memorial Day weekend. Interestingly, my local library didn't have a copy. It did have, however, Johnson's "Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents" about the book. Since I have never had to write a report on Mockingbird I have never become informed by a more professional point-of-view and have missed some of the nuances in the book, clearly. That being said, I spent some time considering if there are strategic considerations to the book. Atticus Finch is the lawyer we have all come to know. He is heroic, at least he was, in terms of the times the book was written (the early sixties). But, times (may) have changed. Johnson presents Freedman's (Johnson, 189) point of view that Finch did what was expected of him and wasn't terribly heroic for what he did. He would have been more heroic if he had attacked the system independently of the trial and tried to limit inequalities in the community. She rebuts Freedman with Barge's obvious opinion (Johnson, 191) that times haven't really changed and that there are still opportunities for change to occur in how all sorts of people are treated in America, or around the world (not to mention Alabama).

Just for fun, I examined the Code of Ethics for a consulting organization in Orange County that I have been a member of on-and-off for twenty years. Its Code misses entirely the community nuances of Mockingbird, remaining focused on the professional expectations of consulting, probably correctly. However, and this is where things become strategic, I'll bet each of us, in our interactions with our peers and the community, have opportunities to re-examine what is right, and maybe make a few changes.  This is close to preaching, I'll admit, but like one of my friends likes to say, "Just sayin'...".

Another book I found for the long weekend, Kennedy's Compass, talks about responsibility in this simple sentence, "People responsive to the great human condition, and who've tried to alleviate its misery-these will be the ones who join Christ in Paradise (Kennedy, 29)." Responsiveness to customers is a business condition. Responsiveness to the community is one, as well.

Association for Professional Consultants. Code of Ethics. http://www.consultapc.org/files/codeofethics.doc

Johnson, Claudia Durst. Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird. Greenwood Press. 1994.

Kennedy, Edward M. True Compass. Twelve. 2009.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. HarperPerennial Modern Classics. 1960.

Posted by jackmixner at 02:24 PM | Permalink

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In a way, Buckingham faked me out (Mixner) in his book First, Break All the Rules. His premise - don't try to change people; work with what you've got - morphed into "Don't hire based on experience; hire on talent." I bought the idea and wrote it up. Well, it ends up that there is, like most things, another point of view on hiring and managing.

Gladwell and Goleman both refer to Hogan's work (Hogan) to argue the opposite point of view. In their mind, talented people with outside the box thinking only take you so far. Gladwell derides Michaels' book The War for Talent (Gladwell, Department, 28), saying that, basically, Enron, in accepting McKinsey's thesis that talent was better than experience, hired the best graduates of the best business schools year after year because they were the best at "outside-the box-thinking." By continually thinking outside the box, however, those same super-qualified employees made all the mistakes we all know about so infamously. "It never occured to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing (Gladwell, Department, 33)."

It is always fun to pick on the winners. Any time a business text labels a company best-in-class or some such title, folks start to look for weaknesses. No company, basically, stands the test of time. Those that survive (and since Enron famously did not) will go through cyclic periods of success. Failure, however, is just over the horizon. When the numbers are starting to click is the time to re-evaluate strategy.

References

Buckingham, Marcus and Curt Coffman. First, Break All the Rules. What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. Simon & Schuster. 1999.

Goleman, Daniel. Managing; The Dark Side of Charisma. New York Times. 1 April 1990. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/01/business/managing-the-dark-side-of-charisma.html

Gladwell, Malcolm. Department of Human Resources. The Talent Myth. Are smart people overrated? The New Yorker. 22 July 2002. 28.

Gladwell, Malcolm. What the Dog Saw and other adventures. Little, Brown and Company. 2009.

Hogan, Robert, Robert Raskin and Dan Fazzini. The Dark Side of Charisma. Audio. http://www.wsradio.com/wsradio-player.cfm/type/windows/show/The-Doug-Noll-Show/segment/21070

Michaels, Ed, Helen Handfield-Jones and Beth Axelrod. The War for Talent. Harvard Business School Press. 2001. 

Mixner, Jack. First Break All the Rules. Which Rules? http://mixnerstrategy.com/blog/2007/10/change_or_not_to_change.html

Posted by jackmixner at 11:12 AM | Permalink