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Strategic Leadership In The Age Of AI · Taking The Supply Chain Pulse

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hi everyone, and welcome to a special episode of Taking the Supply Chain Pulse.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're excited to connect again with Mark Mansummerin, the managing director of Logic Source and the author of two books.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: His latest titled A Return to Strategic Leadership: Judgment in the Age of AI.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Consider this an exclusive author interview you won't want to miss.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And now here's your host, Fred Kranz.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: I read this book.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I actually I bought four copies.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: I bought four copies for our senior leadership at St.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Ones because I thought it was something that they should read, because I think the challenges in this book are challenges that are facing every organization.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to have Mark in to uh talk about his book and uh give us some insights from the years that he's worked for some of the largest consulting firms in the country and what he's seen uh that are similar among all and across all industries.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Mark, welcome back.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: Fred, uh thank you.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: Appreciate you uh having me back, and I appreciate uh the plug for the book.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: Now, first of all, if this is my third return here, um I want to know how my priority points are racking up and and what uh level I've now earned.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: You get uh I'll tell you what, if you come in again, I'll give you a free open jacket.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: A free open jacket?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, with the uh with the claret jug on the uh on the logo on it.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, there you go.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of like the the one I'm wearing today.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, so appreciate the the thought on the book.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: That um I've really uh I really enjoyed writing this one.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: I thought uh it was timely given you know the topic with AI.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: I I thought 2025 um AI came to uh the forefront.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: It became real in many sense.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and um that's why that's what motivated me to write the book.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: I thought the time was right, and I thought there were some some messages that needed to uh be um expressed, and that's what I tried to accomplish.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's interesting.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: The the whole idea of a conversation like this is to tell people just enough to make them want to buy and read the book.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: There you go, thank you.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Not not to give the thing away.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, there are there are no uh you didn't get no royalties, no uh no consideration for uh that's okay.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: I I I think the book is worth buying.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the in the interesting thing that you talked about and that you pointed out one of the one of the premises behind things is no matter where we are, whether it's individuals or companies, people want a quick and simple solution to something.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the main focus of this book is that AI represented a challenge to a large and and well-known consulting firm uh from the standpoint that AI could produce output that was quicker, faster, and cheaper than the work of their high paid long-term consultants, and all of a sudden was a a solution to a problem.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I was talking with someone the other day and I said, you know, just because you can use a term successfully in a sentence does not mean that you know what the term is, what it does, how it works, and and what it means.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, AI is a tool in a toolkit, not a solution.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Could you talk about that?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I I think you've nailed it, Fred.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: And and part of uh it was really the underlying motivation for writing this, in that um AI has suddenly become the term de jour, um, not just healthcare, not just consulting, really cutting across all aspects of both business and life.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: And what I observed is a un an unconscious naivete about what it was, what it could do, and more importantly, the dangers of misuse.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: And what I see is that just because something um enables you to be quicker, faster, um, and and more eloquent in what you do doesn't mean that it's good.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in fact, um it places greater emphasis on some of the leadership um or human skills um uh that are required in order to be able to use the tool effectively.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: And lacking those, first of all, if we don't appreciate what those are and we lack those, a lot of harm could come from this, and that's what concerns me most.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um the tool can give you bad insight, bad direction, lead you on a bad path real fast if you're not thoughtful about what you do.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and just a little bit more about the idea of the the firm was challenged because its customers were saying, ah, we have AI.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: AI is going to be the solution to our problem, and that's what we're going to implement.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and um what I liked was you never explained one of the terms in the book, Erebus.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Erebus is the uh Greek uh god of uh the Greek god of the uh of terrible things.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if you knew that when you chose it or if it just happened that way, but uh but I thought that was uh an ironic thing that that's that's well there is a method to that.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um certainly I'm not gonna take full credit.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: I I received some help on that, but uh we'll leave it at that.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um but yeah, it it fit perfectly because Erebus, for the benefit of the listeners that haven't read the read the book yet, Erebus is the um uh the AI that was developed by an outside group really to undermine everything this consulting group was doing.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: It was simply um it was a complete substitution for uh uh professional advice designed to ask this question, and it it came back to you with a you know well well-articulated strategic plan or whatever the case may be, quickly and and impressively and full of detail and full of um you know uh sounding as if it knew exactly what it was doing.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: And if you accepted what Erebus told you uh without making sure you asked it the right question or considered the moral or professional implications of what the answer was, it could take you down a path that could be disastrous.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: And that's really part of the story of the book.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and there's a couple of pro parts of process in there too.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't even gotten into leadership yet, but there are a couple of parts of process in there.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Number one is I can't, especially capital equipment, when I was running supply chains, it seemed like we were always doing what I would call jeopardy purchasing because the uh the uh department director, the clinician, had come up with a role a model and name and item number that they wanted, and that's what you were gonna have to purchase instead of going through a value analysis requirements-based approach to figuring out A, what you wanted to accomplish, B what was needed to do it, and going through, you know, uh evaluation, sourcing, etc.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you did what I called jeopardy purchasing.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what uh that's what um these guys were doing to the uh to the large consulting firm is they came up with an answer and wanted to uh implement it, so why did they need, you know, not knowing that they don't know the key to that book to me was this the great organizations know enough to A get help get help and B get help from people who know how to lead them to asking the right questions.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is that fair?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: Ah you nailed it.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's asking the right questions.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and just as a minor tangent here, because people have heard a lot about uh the hallucinations that can be can come from AI.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a part of the issue.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's not all of it, but it it's appropriately getting attention in that um uh AI, uh, if you're not careful, can give you an answer that is totally off the mark.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: It will it literally will make up information that sounds rational, sounds in support of their answer.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: And and part of the solution, and not oversimplifying, but part of the solution is they'll say, ask the AI to do deep research on this question, as opposed to just say, give me an answer to this.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's part of it.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what the what I tried to get across in the book, and one of their there are four um um four dimensions, if you will, that I offered in the book about effective use of AI.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: And one of them was curated data.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: And this goes beyond simply the idea of avoiding hallucinations, and that is you know, you and I can ask AI, we can research the internet even without AI.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and if if we simply ask it to do research around whatever is available out there on the internet, we get a lot of garbage back.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we know that uh scraping information off the internet is going to pull a lot of a lot of data that is meaningless, misleading, or just out and out wrong.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: So I go beyond the idea of the issue of hallucinations and say, curate the data.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: Do your AI built on curated data, information that you or your team or your organization or some quality organization has done them enough uh curation to know that the data are valid, that it has the right elements, that it's fact-based, that it it all the right conditions, all the right parameters are defined in your underlying data.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: So before you even ask the first question, you're asking the question based on a data set that is meaningful, impactful, and and accurate.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: Curated data.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: So bringing in human expertise.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: And when you're curating that data, um most often, this is my opinion, correct me if I'm wrong, uh, a an individual organization will not have the expertise itself to actually do the curation, to have had the experience to know how to take the data and move toward.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: They can be involved in the curation, but they don't have the resources to do it themselves.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Is that fair?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh to a large degree.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I think part of it comes to uh building your data set.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: So what you're building the proverbial Erebus upon, um uh and and really what uh what this company did in the book was to um build it upon expertise and development, internal or external of the organization, but but that you had sufficient uh quality control over to understand that the the that the data were meaningful.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: Now that can come from professional organizations, can come from consulting firms, can come from government sources, whatever the case may be, probably in any of all of the above, but simply not scraped from the internet.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: It has to be a validated source that you know enough and there's been enough QC on to be of value.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: So since the book is a return to strategic leadership, why don't you do me a favor and define the difference between strategic leadership versus transactional management?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's a good question there, Fred.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: So let me uh give an off-the-cuff uh answer.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: Transactional management certainly is the th the things that are we're doing every day, and it's it's more likely than not to be based on um protocols, standard operating procedures, things that we're doing, and there's a pattern for doing strategic leadership needs to um employ a level of professional judgment that says here are here's the information that we had laid out in front of us.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: Now, based on the years of experience, the training, the development that we've had, our understanding of um cause and effect in what we've experienced before, now let's exercise some judgment and let's define a path forward that we know we don't have all of the answers, but we're making an informed determination based on what we've observed and based on our professional expertise and capability, our judgment.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: So to me, maybe what you're getting at is then when we're using the AI in this particular case, we've got the curated data, we've asked some probing questions, we get some input back.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Now, strategic leadership should come from taking stock of what it's saying, exercising professional judgment, um incorporating moral judgment, and then saying strategically, where are we going with this?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: What should we do about it?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: Not not being handicapped or not being um uh uh tied into or locked into what the AI told us the answer was, but rather that's just one more input.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: And now we're we're exercising strategic leadership to say, where do we go with this?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: What's the best course of action based on everything that we know and based on our experience?
• 13:33
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• 13:38
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• 13:48
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• 13:53
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• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and I would say from a healthcare perspective, because that's where I've you know, I've only I haven't had the wide business perspective that you've had, but in healthcare, I've always it's my opinion that there is far more transactional management approaches to problems, situational over the short term, than there is strategic leadership present in organizations.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh recently I was talking to your your colleague David Kirshner, and I made the um I made the remark that I believe there are four kinds of healthcare organizations, those that are failing, those that are struggling, those that are surviving at the moment, and those that are thriving.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the smallest list of those four categories is the ones that are thriving.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that, in my opinion, is because um from what I've seen over the years, healthcare organizations uh don't take strategic approaches to to doing their business.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is that fair?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think that's that's fair.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: I I think it's a it's a um it's a it's a an issue that uh has a lot of dimensions.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: It goes very, very deep.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh healthcare organizations are designed away, and and and we might want to make a distinction, and and at the risk of opening a Pandora's box here, we can make the distinction of nonprofits versus profit-oriented or uh organizations, and that could be inside of healthcare or outside.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: Nonprofit organizations um are designed very effectively to fulfill a mission.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: They're designed very poorly to operate in uncertain space and operate with any degree of pace.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I'm gonna I'm gonna offer a little teaser here.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: Book three is under development right now, um, targeting a summer release for this, and it's gonna address this issue very directly about the uh, you know, I'll now contrast it against um uh even um publicly trading companies live on a clock.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: They live on a quarterly clock because that's when they report earnings.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: Partnerships, um, and in the consulting firm that I was a part of, and you were a part of, um, operated on a calendar clock because that's when the partners took their draws.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: Private equity firms live on a almost a minute-by-minute clock.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: They fail fast.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: Healthcare organizations toss the batteries out.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: They don't even have a clock.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's not necessarily it shouldn't be interpreted as an indictment.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's a reflection of the systems that come up.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: Don't reward or punishment, punish leadership for timeliness.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: They they reward leadership on the basis of thoughtful, mission-oriented decisions.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: Do no harm.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's great until you're at a point of crisis and and don't have the infrastructure to be able to respond um quickly and at pace.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: And when I say infrastructure, I mean that's how we promote and reward, how we recognize, how we um incentivize, how we build our systems.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Our systems are built around leveraging committees to organize complex thought across multidisciplines and come up with a solution that best fits our fits our mission.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And those are by design methodical and slow.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: That is true.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: The uh the other thing that I that I'm as I'm listening, I'm I'm trying to remember.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um almost every consulting engagement I've ever worked on, whether it was with smaller or the very large consulting firms, we were brought in in my opinion, when they had realized a problem and we were brought in to fix something rather than to help plan for the future.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um what would you say the percentage of uh companies out there that have that broad strategic vision versus the help get me out of this problem now is?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's not a hundred percent, but it's it's dearing uh that if I'm following your question properly, is you know, we're brought in to to fix a problem that's on its surface seems like it's well defined, but it's probably missing the truth of what's the underlying it it's dealing s um um with the symptom rather than the the underlying cause.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and I think that's that's part of why so many organizations go off track so quickly, is because um we may have full understanding of what we're trying to solve, but we've misdefined it from the get-go.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: So let let's take that and I'm gonna call on your expertise now.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm young Fred Kranz, I'm 35 years old, coming into an organization, a healthcare organization.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: They've hired me to be the uh assistant vice president of supply chain.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: They have not given supply chain a formal uh vice president or senior level leadership position, and I see all kinds of things that need to be done, and I need to lead up to uh and educate senior leadership to be able to try to convince them to do some things.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: How do you lead up to people that are entrenched in their thinking?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh the the the short answer is that um you need to put the you need to define the problem on their terms.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the as you're leading up, they're not viewing the problem from the lens of a supply chain officer or a supply chain expert.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: They're they're evaluating, they're they're viewing the world from the lens of patient care, physician relations, um, clinical as uh aspects.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: So you need to be able to translate the problem, the issue, the opportunity, in the terms that make sense to the people that you're selling up to.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: And how it impacts the the lives that they're dealing with, the problem, the issues that they're facing on that particular day, that week, that month.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's a you've got to come out outside of where your comfort zone is, where your frame of reference is, and understand their frame of reference before you could have that communication, or else it gets nowhere.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, the other problem that I had when I was young Fred Kranz was I was young Fred Kranz.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: And and and by that I mean I had no cachet.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: I had no, I was I was the guy that was the director of materials management.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Supply chain didn't exist then.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was materials management, which means I handled stuff.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: I got it bought, I got it pushed through the place, and if I saw an opportunity or a need that was strategic, uh they were I wasn't uh referred to as a peer by the senior leadership team.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was just a support uh person.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that's still a that's still problematic for a lot of people.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: They they find out that they need that they need strategic leaders.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: But you get to the big organizations, and you know, I I will name some names of people, Steve Downey at Cleveland Clinic, at his cock.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: After time, the organization hires people that are at the same level as the senior leadership, and then that strategic stuff is possible, and those are the people that will invest resources to do things because it's the right thing to do, as opposed to uh save me, I'm about to go under type leadership.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is that fair?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: You named you named two outstanding leaders, by the way, um, who I think you and I share uh uh just an incredible amount of respect and admiration for those two leaders.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: What they have many commonalities, but one of the things relevant to this conversation right now is the two of them have a worldview that extends outside of supply chain.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of it is experienced, but as well is they are both exceedingly adept at understanding the perspective of the person that they're talking with.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: They've either walked in their shoes or they have enough um consideration for what they're dealing with that when they speak supply chain issues to uh the uh the VP of clinical care or the chief medical officer or whomever it might be, they're speaking in terms um and with a view that those people live in every day.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: They're comfortable getting outside, you know, Steve and Ed are getting are comfortable getting outside of supply chain and talking in terms of clinical care, in terms of um medical organization.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so when they bring up supply chain issues, they flow naturally and they they already have earned the respect and the and the seat at the table.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, over over time.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I know that uh what was interesting is when I came to work for the largest consultancy I ever uh worked with, and you know who that is, we had a um we had a large hospital system in the south that called us in to take 19 million dollars out of their operating budget and uh and and what we would call a non-salary expense reduction project.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: And as part of the uh as part of the process, I as a former supply chain leader, now an outside consultant with the big guys, was talking with the CFO and CEO.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: And um the CFO asked me, what do you think of our healthcare supply chain?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I said, Well, you don't have a healthcare supply chain.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: He said, What do you mean?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: I said, You have a university supply chain.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was an academic medical center.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: You need to get uh a um uh healthcare supply chain.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: And several years later, the person who got uh the opportunity to lead that organization is is now I'm not gonna name names, but one of the most highly respected supply chain leaders in the country said at a national meeting, I couldn't believe it, um said, I owe my I owe my position here to Fred Kranz because he told our leadership that we didn't have.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: But if I had been Fred Kranz in my organization at that time talking to my CEO, my CEO would have ignored me because I didn't have the cachet to uh to uh be to be uh considered uh viable when I made that statement.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a difficult thing.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, you there are a couple things there, Fred, that as you're telling the story um that that resonated.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: The first is what you were demonstrating with that is the ability to have a tough conversation.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: And this is the phrase that's coming up.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'm actually I uh literally just um uh was working on and on that phrase in this upcoming book is the the ability to have tough conversations, honest, candid, um mission or value-based conversation, getting at the truth as opposed to what the person wants to hear.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that is a leadership skill that we need in much greater numbers, especially with what healthcare is going through now.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: The ability to to tell the organization, to tell the leadership what they may not want to hear, but they need to.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: But to do it in a way that's constructive, that's not um, you know, you're not um uh uh picking out or you're you're you're not uh it's not personal attacks.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's honest, candid, value-based conversations that are consistent with what the mission is trying to organize.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now that's first.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: Now, the ability to have a tough conversation is lost on a lot of people.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's not it's not honed the way it can.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: You obviously had that.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: Here's the second part.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: The recipient has to be willing to hear those tough conversations.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: And unfortunately, what happens is people inside the organization don't have that cachet, particularly lower in the organization.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: They haven't earned that right yet.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: They haven't uh laid the foundation to be able to do it.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: And frankly, and it it's it's been a sad commentary I've observed through my career, um, is that an outsider can have that conversation more readily than an insider.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, is somebody expressed it to me once is that um, you know, uh the definition of an expert is somebody that lives more than 50 miles away.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: And and is be and part of it is, you know, and and I've used this kind of in my own personal approach, is that whatever in in any of my dealings with any organizations, is I'm very upfront with people and saying that, you know what, you or I could walk away from this at any point in time.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that I I I I I establish these relationships with that level of honesty is that you know, if we wake up one day and one of us just doesn't want this to carry on, we shouldn't be locked into any contract.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: That enables me to have conversations that I wouldn't otherwise be able to have with people.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: Listen, we can walk away tomorrow and we'll still be friends.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm gonna tell you honestly what I feel about this because I think you need to hear it.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um now that's pretty risky if you're you're Fred Kranz at 35 years old at it as an AVP, you know, who who you know needs to make sure that you could pay the rent or the new mortgage that you just took out.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: But when I was Fred Kranz.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: But when I was Fred Kranz at 50 something working for a large, a very large and prestigious consulting firm uh with an organization that had just paid three million dollars to us to help them save 19 million dollars, all of a sudden I was uh I was uh credible.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, but the other thing that is in your book, uh, one of the little points I think is excellent, is the person who the transformational leader in this in this book um created uh a uh culture of inclusion.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you you you just said something about many times the people at the lower level in the organizations don't have the credibility to get their points across.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would say that 80% of the recommendations that I made across or that we made across all of our engagements had already been recommended by the folks that work there.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and I would make sure, and I was very fortunate uh to it's just the way I am.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna take credit for something I didn't do.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna if if if uh you said something, I will say Mark Van Summerman told me this, okay?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um But I would tell tell people that you know your folks out in the in uh in the storeroom uh suggested this.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean they're the ones that they're the ones that uh that this idea came from, and so that they would start to get credibility themselves.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: So uh the leader had built a culture of inclusion in which the input from people at all levels was valued.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: Could you talk about that a little bit?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, uh 100%.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, in my view, in observing really, really good consultants, uh the majority of the recommendations that they delivered were not original or unique to what it wasn't solely based on them being smarter than anybody else.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: What they were particularly good at is listening and learning from people in the organization.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: I think the answers, for the most part, are there.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: They haven't been fully baked, they haven't been communicated, they haven't been put together in an integrated whole.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you're you're pulling bits and pieces from different organizations.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's that it's that the great consultant has the ability to listen, synthesize, and then deliver that recommendation in a way that's understood, acceptable, and acted upon.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: You notice I didn't say that they that they were smarter than anybody else.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: They were just they were they were just able to do those three things very effectively.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and the other thing that they have, and this is this is the um another conversation I had with a CEO one time that I worked with.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: He was uh he was saying something to me, and I said to him, I said, Do you do you uh notice that I never say I think when I'm talking about supply chain?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he says yes, and I said, You want to know why that is?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because I know.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: I said, How many places have you worked?
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he worked at one place.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Um you've only worked at one place, you can't have perspective, you've only got one data point.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and and the thing about the consultancies is you have seen so many different variations of the same theme that you're you have a wider perspective about what the possible solutions might be.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: And uh smart enough to be able to uh leverage those and and pull what works and what doesn't in other work condition conditions rather than simply saying it worked here, it must work there.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: So sort of pulling this together, um, if you were talking to that young Fred Crayons out there that had great ideas and was uh a junior level person, either a director or associate vice president or whatever, um, how would you tell me to to build my expertise to become a strategic leader?
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so first and foremost, listen to a lot of people, ask a lot of questions, go around and learn outside of supply chain.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, if if if something is occurring in an organization that when you have your supply chain or in that case your materials management hat on, you look at and say, this isn't right, it can be better.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Don't stop there.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: Ask people why it is the way it is, what has gotten it there?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: What stands in the way?
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: What am I missing?
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: Ask questions, learn, and then as opposed to uh just hypothesizing or uh uh being the prophet and saying, here's what you should do, I say, well, have we considered this?
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: What's wrong with this approach?
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, if you could do this, what would happen?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: It does a couple of things.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: One, it it builds the understanding and helps frame the solution, but it also makes the ownership of the idea more broadsped in the organization.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: When the when the idea is owned by others is when you're successful, not when you own the idea.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: That is absolutely true.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: And when it's owned by others, and you give others credit for it too.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think it just gets lost on leaders all the time.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I talk about the A Great Society where people will stand around telling me, Oh, well, uh, we've done I've done this, I've done no.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: You haven't done anything.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: We have done everything.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is done by we, not by I, not by me.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: And uh well stated.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: And making making those people feel that they're important, I think that's pointed out in this book, is one of the essential one of the essential pillars of uh of this company's successful turnaround was including the um the folks every day.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's it gets back to Steve Downey at the Cleveland Clinic.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: Every day at the Cleveland Clinic, they have 15-minute uh huddles at every single level of the organization, from the bottom to the top, so that everybody gets to know what's going on, uh asked to put their input in and are included in in the enterprise.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a big deal.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Fred, I don't know if you remember um you worked with us when we um used the uh uh the tools and the lessons from um Matt and Gail Taylor.
• 34:35
  unknown: Yeah.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: Were you you part of that?
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: So uh the nowhere store and and the accelerated solutions environments.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: Now, without going into a big dissertation on that, but one of the, you know, the Matt and Gail Taylor had a set of axioms that they that guided their scientific approach.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: And it was very rigorous, but very thoughtful.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: But one of them that stuck with me is, and I I'll get the axiom wrong, but the point was, and you were making it, is that if you take um your idea and add it to somebody else's idea, and then somebody else's idea, you might come up with something that's really effective.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: And that's really what they were getting at is that each of us sees a part of the elephant.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and and it's when we thoughtfully combine those different perspectives with that we start to get a vision and an image and impression of something that's truly meaningful and actionable.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that well said.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well said, Mark.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I just want to thank you for sharing your your thoughts on this because I think there are a lot of folks out there that are listening into this that either are leaders or are becoming leaders, and that could um that could benefit from the insights that uh you've shared with us today.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think everybody, uh no matter what industry they're in, uh should should read your book.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I uh I really uh I learned a lot from it.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's what I like is it's it's uh a short book.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: It gets it's you know it's didactic, it teaches you.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh uh and and it tells a story, it's didactic storytelling, which I like storytelling.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: People relate to people relate, uh they learn better when there's a story involved, basically, I think.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: And and thank you for for the the endorsement, uh, if you will, to use that word.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um it was written as a novel purposely, one because um speed was important in terms of getting this out, and and you know, I could have done a lot of research behind making it uh uh nonfiction, but uh but the timeliness um uh uh was important and therefore the novel form, but the storytelling.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the the nicest compliments that I received was from um Nancy Slifting.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: Nancy used to run um Henry Ford Health System and was one of my first supply chain clients back years and years ago.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: And we've maintained a closer relationship, great friendship.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I asked her if she would be kind enough to review the book while it was under development.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: And her response back after her initial reading was I never thought I would read a uh a business book that would be so entertaining.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was very it really was.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and that was uh there couldn't be any higher praise um to come from, especially who it came from, but also just the idea that a business book, something that got business principles off in an entertaining way, and just made it an enjoyable read, hopefully.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: So well, great.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, folks out there, the title of the book is A Return to Strategic Leadership, Judgment in the Age of AI, and you can find it at Amazon or wherever you buy books.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I think uh it won't take long to read it, and it was something I would carry around with me uh to use as a workbook wherever I go.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, Mark, thanks.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh let's tell me uh when you're ready with book number three, and we'll do this again.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh, thank you for that.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm I'm hard at work on it.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I've got now gotten the bug in my semi-retirement years, and this is this is my new passion.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I'm about two-thirds through the initial drafting.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'm targeting myself to to release it in time for your summer vacation reading.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_02: Let's just put it that way.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and it's gonna have a strong healthcare focus to it.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: So it should be this audience should find it of interest.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Very good, Mark.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks again for joining us today.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and uh I look forward to seeing your new book when it comes out.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: And thank you everybody for joining us for another episode of Taking the Supply Chain Pulse.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see you next time.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's all for today.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining us, and don't forget to hit that subscribe button and connect with us online so you'll never miss an episode and can catch up on all the ones you might have missed.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: Got a topic you're fired up about, or maybe you want to be a guest on the show?
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Fred would love to hear from you.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: Just reach out at F C R A N S at S T O N G E.com.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time.