So What? Business Process Re-engineering

Well, hello, hello everyone. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics at Insights Live Show. Happy Thursday. Happy last Thursday of January of 2022, which is crazy that we're already at the end of January. I started seeing end of month emails coming to my inbox.

And I was like, but isn't it just January 3rd? So I don't know. Maybe it's just me. I feel like I'm sort of stuck in this limbo matrix of time right now. Um, anywho, uh on today's episode, we are talking about business process reengineering.

What it is, uh, how to audit your processes regularly, processes, and how to get started with re-engineering those processes. Is it processes or processes? Processes. It's a good thing I'm not wearing a retainer processes. Anyway, so that's where my head's at.

Chris, do you want to kick us off? I had to deal with this a lot in graduate school. I went to Boston University, and one of the professors on staff uh was a guy by the name of Tom Davenport, uh, who is a huge consulting bigwig way back in the day in the 90s. And business process reengineering was his thing. That's so much to the point where like if I had to hear about you know the Xerox uh internal process reengineering, I was gonna shoot somebody by the time I I finish my master's degree.

But the good news is we got beaten into our heads what this thing is and why it matters. Fundamentally, there's two ways that you can change business, right? There's uh evolution, which is process improvement, you know, tuning, optimization, things like that. And then there's revolution, where you just take everything, fling it out the window, uh, and and build from the ground. It's sort of the whole burn it down and build from the ground up.

Business process reengineering is the latter. It's take everything, burn it down, and start over, as opposed to something like TQM, total quality management, which is evolutionary, which is saying let's take all the processes and tune them and adjust them over time, so you know, and and make them as good as they can be. And business process reengineering is what you do when there is I'm gonna again, this is another term that got beaten into our heads. When you have a paradigm shift in your industry, you engage in business process reengineering, which you know, to be fair, like the the uh invention of and the rollout of the smartphone was a legitimate paradigm shift to the point where now people fundamentally do business differently with these little mobile supercomputers that we all carry around in our pockets. Um, the internet itself, the the web, was a massive paradigm shift.

There are a lot of companies that love to say that their product or service is the next big thing, and it never is. Um, Facebook's going on about Meta and the virtual reality universe, which like, yeah, Second Life did that 20 years ago, guys. Get on get off your horse. Um, but that's what business process reengineering is is you take everything that you're doing right now, you basically fling it out the window because the environment that you're doing business in has changed so much that all of your existing processes are handicapped, right? They they're holding you back.

They're that's not the way business is done anymore. And so if you stick with what you know, the tried and true, you're gonna fall so fall behind so far so fast that you you will never keep up. Artificial intelligence, like commercial artificial intelligence is I think a legitimate early paradigm shift. It's still super early, but it is one of those things where if you're trying to compete against machines for tasks that machines are better at, you're gonna get your butt handed to you. So I have a couple of questions in terms of clarifying this.

And let me see if I can sort of phrase them correctly. So what you're what you're describing is essentially what people consider those like innovative or industry disruptors. And so it disrupts it to the point where everybody has to stop what they're doing and completely sort of pivot. However, you also said that AI, which is not a new concept, people are just it's still a buzz term. If you are following along with what AI is doing and you are evolving your business processes along the way, then do you have to completely re-engineer them, or can you just continue to evolve them?

I guess maybe it depends on where in that innovation adoption curve you fall. Exactly. And it depends on the your kind of business. So, like if you are a brick and mortar store, you're gonna probably approach AI evolutionarily, right? If you are a digital business, you're gonna approach it revolutionarily because everything you've been doing so far is just gonna get butt handed to it by a competitor that has the AI advantage, that has just a massive advantage of data.

Um, you know, we we actually are I I should have thought of this up front. Uh, we are actually currently in the middle of a massive paradigm shift. Um, and what we are currently in is called a global pandemic, right? It is fundamentally changed how we work, how we buy things, how we interact with others, and even after you know the the current situation tapers down, it the world still cannot go back. A lot of companies have said, hey, you know, this whole not paying for real estate thing actually really kind of works out well for us.

Let's you know, let's keep doing that. Where hey, letting employees work from home and you know, where they work best is actually seems like a sensible thing to do. And so that's that is a shift in in the fundamentals, and that's that's what sets it apart for evolution from evolution. AI is is not at the point yet where it's forcing massive large scale change, but we are getting close to that point. In some ways, it already has, like, like the news that you consume is largely driven by AI now, right?

What you see on social networks and on in search engines and things, the content you get is governed largely by AI. The things that you are told to buy by recommendation engines, told to watch by Netflix, told to listen to by Spotify is all driven by AI. You no longer have a choice, you can't go back. So those things have had a paradigm shift. And if you are a new entrant into those markets, and you also don't have good or as good or better AI, you're gonna get squashed.

So let's take it down to a more practical you know, application, something that a lot of marketers might be seeing in their own processes. And you know, you can help me understand if this is evolutionary or revolutionary. So you're talking about AI. So let's take you know, SEO, for example, and the way people, you know, search for things. So majority of people still open up a search engine and type in you know a couple of words, but there has been this shift of people who just yell at their you know smart home devices.

They just yell at their phone like, hey Google, tell me where the nearest coffee shop is that has non-dairy options. Like people don't search when they're typing that way, but when they're speaking, it's a different way. And so the way in which you're approaching your SEO, your keywords, the phrases, the content, answering the questions, that has had to evolve, but both are still relevant. So help me understand where that falls in this. You have you picked a great example because the front end of SEO, meaning the the what we as the humans do, that really has not changed.

That's an evolution, how we ask questions. The revolution is the language models on the back end and how Google looks Google in particular. I'm going to use Google as the headline example here. How Google processes that data. Now, when it takes you know, coffee shop near me that serves non-dairy, it's going to look across media types.

It's going to look at videos on YouTube and the contents of images, the contents of podcasts, and understand that and return back the things that it it thinks are best, regardless of media type. So from a marketer's perspective, we have to look at that and go, okay, so just tinkering with the H1 tag on our site will probably have little to no effect anymore. Um not that it really has had one for very long. Um if we are not publishing YouTube videos, if we are not publishing podcasts, if we are not putting out metadata, if we're not publishing images, if we are not um doing you know the the structured data on our websites, inside the unified model, Google will not favor us. And what's critically different is about the unified model, and this is the revolution part, is that today Google does crawl index rank three stages.

Crawl the web, pull in all the stuff, index it, try and figure out what things belong where, and then rank it. The unified model collapses crawl and index into one stage. So it's now so crawl and index happened at the same time, and it's it's AI enhanced. So Google has been doing this already in in some markets. There was a big piece about in Alita Solis' newsletter this weekend.

But Google's been starting to write rewrite people's content based on the intent of the searchers, changing headlines, changing page titles and things. So the unified model is gonna do much more of that. So from a marketer's perspective, we've got to expect that our content's gonna get rewritten. We've got to expect that we need to have multimedia and we need to have stuff that is relevant and fits what the customer is searching for. We almost have to get rid of the idea of keywords, right?

Uh, which is it is the revolution part. We've been talking about SEO keywords for 25 years. Um, we are now at a point where Google's saying throw out the keyword, it doesn't exist anymore. It's not gonna be a relevant way to for people to get information. You must now focus solely on the concept and your best understanding of the concept.

So let me pose this question to you and John. So you guys have you know, a really popular podcast, Marketing Over Coffee. And so m so again, sort of this is me just trying to wrap my head around it. A lot of people might go to marketing over coffee.com and then start to go through the different episodes. And so historically, you would have just had to make sure that the marketing over coffee website was optimized in a certain way with topics, but now people, someone me might go, Hey Google, play the latest episode of marketing over coffee.

Help me understand as a marketer how John, how you, how I would need to set myself up for success to make sure that if I open my smartphone and say, Hey, play the latest episode of Marketing Over Coffee, that that's the result that I get. Like, what does John have to do? What do you have to do? And then what do I as the user have to set up on my side? Sorry, John, were you gonna say something?

Uh I was just saying, you know, a lot of that for us is managed on the back end, you know, part of the Libsyn hosting that we use is they do take care of a ton of that. That's and that's the great part about working with a platform is that there's that one point where once they figure out how to correctly enter you into those other indexes, and there is there's a service for Amazon Music, there's one for Apple. In fact, I there's over 20 different formats now where when we post an episode, it actually updates 20 different services and tells them that, hey, there's you know a new podcast available that you can get over there. Um, but yeah, and then there's some overlap, just you know, the old SEO that you would do, you know, now you have to make sure you're in Bing so that you can get into some Google devices, and uh you know, there's um there's partnerships and platform agreements that go uh together behind the scenes to automatically move that content over. Um so that's more of an evolutionary thing, you know, in that like we don't have to worry about um an entirely new posting format.

We just tweak the existing model and it you know shows up in the new place. So then I, as the subs as the listener, do I have to be a subscriber of the podcast in order to say, so okay, Chris. You are hitting on exactly the thing. Remember these I do CDs, albums, and stuff, and how they used to be coherent works, and then streaming was a paradigm shift, it broke the model of the album. Now everything is playlists and individual songs, and you as an artist should judge on your merits for every single individual song and not the album as a whole, right?

That is that was a major paradigm shift that some artists really figured out and and have have succeeded wildly, other artists have not. From a marketing perspective, what you're talking about is the same shift. You are no longer judged on the album that is the web marketing over coffee website or the subscription. Now we are judged and we are found by every individual atomized piece of content. So, yeah, you're exactly right.

You don't have to be a subscriber to marketing over coffee. We are going to be found on an episode by episode level because somebody's gonna say, play me a podcast about SEO, right? And it'll pull multi- the multitask unified model, and even Google today's Google will pull up a basket of stuff. And we have to, as marketers, as content producers, we have to knock it out of the park with every single piece of content because it is our one and only at bat. Um the person will not go to the website and and check out everything else.

Um, they will they will judge us on that atomized piece of content alone. So our metadata's gotta be good, our branding's gotta be good. You know, we have we have you know, thankfully, we have you know really good audio branding. Like you know, you're listening to marketing over coffee in the first three seconds based on those the sort of introductory chime notes and stuff. But audio branding is a huge is a huge thing.

The same is true for everything. So people will not judge trust insights by the trust insights portfolio of our website, right? And optimizing pages, they will find a white paper we've written or a case study or a thing, and that will be the brand to them for that experience, and then they have to go and figure out see if they if they like that experience, they'll they'll go in and get more. And so it raises the bar for all of us as marketers to say every piece of content we have to put we publish has to knock it out of the park because there's no room for mediocre content. If Google services a piece of mediocre content, and that's the first and only chance we have with that audience member, they're gone, and we lose a chance, we lose a chance of getting them back until they you know find some next random query.

So that's the revolution part is that we've got to get away from this idea of content monoliths and accept that content is become like playlists and your individual pieces are gonna be pulled and and sampled. When we upload this episode to YouTube, one of the things that YouTube asks in the upload thing is it says, you know, will you allow sampling of your content? And you always check yes. Um and and YouTube that will then allow someone else to sample like 60 seconds of of our show for their own thing, right? And they don't have to ask any more permissions.

So it's not even that you know we as a uh as content producers have to think about you know this live stream episode. We have to almost think about are we saying something smart or dumb every single minute because that 60 seconds may find its way into another show uh as someone doing a roundup. So I guess the big paradigm shift there and and where you have to bus do a subserious business process reengineering on your content marketing is content has to be treated as atomic. Be as to you as you have to assume it's going to get broken up. You have to assume it's going to be seen out of context and you have to assume that the user is going to take just the pieces they need.

So can you produce content for SEO for content for social that meets those new criteria. And that may mean this is the reengineering part we have to throw away everything we think we know about creating content you know spend $10,000 and hire designers and do all this stuff and say no we gotta we have to change those processes. We can't evolve the existing processes they don't work anymore. So my head is now spinning I'm a little overwhelmed um you know I mean it makes sense I mean it's definitely evolving with the way that we as humans behave online because our, you know, our um, I can't even think of the word, our attention span is so short that these things, these you basically have to have like sound bites and things at all times for people to glom onto to even know who you are. So I guess the second question and the second bullet point that we wanted to go over in this episode is what processes should be audited regularly?

Now that's a broad question. So we can take it again, sort of back to this example of SEO and where AI is starting to evolve how SEO is done, or you know, revolutionize or a paradigm shift, or you know, whatever you want to call it. Basically, AI is changing how marketers have to think about SEO. So we know that there's standard processes, processes for keyword research. Let's just take that one for example.

Um, how would you go about auditing the process for how you're doing SEO keyword research and evolve it to change with how AI is impacting how people are finding things? I would start by learning how machines process language. Um specifically how we know Google uses the BERT model for its query parsing for understanding inquiry. So that would be my starting point is to say, okay, well, how does it work? How does it understand language?

You know, does it tokenize? Is it vectorized? What is the what are the underlying mathematical principles that make BERT work? And then from there say, well, what from that can I learn that will help guide me for the things I need to create? So like is is a keyword, you know, we've said this for we've been saying this for a while.

The keyword answer of semantics is kind of out the window, right? You know, the uh the the old joke, uh an SEO expert walks to a bar, pub, tavern, you know, those the those um semantically related terms, that's gone in a lot of ways. The way the BERT model works now is more at the at the sentence and and paragraph and topic level. So what we would have to do is start our planning with intent, right? So, what is the question that the person is asking?

What are the next three questions that person's going to ask? And that's going to require, instead of sitting there with your SEO tool of choice and just typing in keyword combinations, that's actually require you to talk to customers, right? Listen to customers, see how they behave, ask them questions, you know, focus. This is where stuff like you know, CX and DCX and you know, digital customer experience really matter because you've got to have that qualitative input from customers to say, when I'm looking for a management consulting firm that focuses on on change management, I'm I'm I'm theoretically looking for change management, but I'm really actually looking for how do I stop my boss from making dumb decisions, and that's you know, sort of an HR thing, or how do I hire people who aren't dummies? Uh, or how do I scale my business?

And so we have to anticipate what those next questions are, and then we build our content around that. In some ways, you don't actually need the keyword tool anymore, you now need a topic map, a landscape of here's how these different concepts all cluster together, and then we build that content from that. So, like, for example, the the topic of this week's show was business process reengineering, because in a keyword forecast, we picked that out because it is a it is gonna be a high volume term, it's gonna peak um uh in terms of search. But when we think about how we've approached the creation of this episode, we really focused on the implications. What are the next questions?

Like you do this really well, Katie, when you put together the so what episodes, the concept, what is it, why is it important, how does it work? So you're already anticipating the next three questions that when somebody types in that query, and that's how we need to change our thinking about SEO is not just you know what keyword comes next, it's what is the intent of the user and how do we fulfill it? And then you have to layer on Google's other stuff, like signals about expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. That gets layered on next. Yeah, definitely uh a little little bit ahead spinny.

You know, because it's interesting. I did not anticipate you saying that the place to start is to do research on the development of the Google algorithm itself. And so I guess John, you know, uh how like I have no words. Like, how are you feeling about this conversation? I'm I'm a little overwhelmed, I'll be honest.

Yeah, well, it's you know, if you're trying to redesign SEO as your approach, I mean, that's now left to the vendors, you know. I mean, really, that's not the kind of thing now where a frontline marketer is gonna be like, okay, let me see if I can outwit Google with my content here. Um, you know, it's really gone too far beyond that. Um I don't know, for most organizations that are playing an SEO game like that, uh switching over to the customer experience side is usually the place to go of like, okay, how can we get you know more in the funnel at the top, or how do we get them through the transaction faster, easier, uh, smoother? And I think, yeah, SEO, the SEO game is pretty much almost over unless you're a vendor, you know, like the the vendors are the only one that have the understanding and the ability to kind of do that for the frontline marketer, it's just make excellent content.

I mean, that's really all that they can do, and and and hope that that gets through. I think there is a lot of opportunity though for you know, any kind of web property to start looking at things like okay, do we look at other channels like you know, online payments like Venmo and things like um uh more text messaging as opposed to email? You know, do they redesign the customer experience around those sections? But yeah, I think the SEO door is pretty much slammed shut for uh for just what you were talking about. It's like, you know, no director of marketing is gonna take two weeks off to try and back solve um how Google cracks Ngrams, you know, it's just it's way too much to bite off.

And that's what makes a business process re-engineering. We've got to throw out everything that we've been doing on this because you can't evolve. It's like you know, go back to a century ago. How do you, you know, if you were a horse and buggy manufacturer, you're like, oh, how can I make my horses faster? You know, I can feed them, you know, better, better hey, and stuff.

Meanwhile, you've got an automobile. Like, okay, you have to throw out everything you've been doing because the world is no longer using horses, the world is now using cars. And if you've not adapted to that, you're you're going out of business. So let me ask you this question then. So, in that example of the horse and buggy versus the automobile, so yes, majority of people moved to an automobile away from the horse and buggy.

However, couldn't you argue that the horse and buggy market found new use cases for their current product? Oh, for sure. And and they still exist. They're just very, very tiny niche things now. Like you can still take a horse and buggy carriage ride around Boston, you know, pay 20 bucks for the tourist experience and stuff and have some guy yell at you about you know attractions that uh you could just look up on your phone.

Uh, but it's the sort of that experience. But the vast majority of people do not use horses and buggies. Um but no, but my point is so you're talking about it purely for the use case of transportation, but automobiles aren't necessarily the most efficient to pull things across farmland, for example, because it's gonna tear up the farmland. And so couldn't you then make the argument that a horse and buggy or a horse and cart is still a relevant thing, but the application of it has changed. You could, but traditionally what typically happens is those businesses just go out of business uh because they don't evolve and then somebody else buys the assets and figures out there's some other application that you can use them for.

But for the most part, the big names, some do evolve, but a lot just don't make it, you know. It's like uh ice carving companies. There still is there still are ice carving companies. Um there's like this whole cottage industry of artisanal carved ice, you know, people chipping away chipping away uh glacial ice and stuff like that, selling in like $12 ice cubes to bars. And you know, there still is a calling for that.

It's just not a very large calling, and you know, it's it it's very artisanal. Um but when you look at companies that successfully pivot, they successfully pivot because they just fling everything out the out the window and say, we're not doing it that way anymore. You know, uh one of my favorite companies, uh, Apple has managed to fling everything out the window several times, right? Um, they've they in the beginning was the personal computer, and then there was the graphical user interface like, no, we're not, we're just throwing away the old computers, we're not doing it that way anymore. And then came along the smartphone and the tablet and the smartwatch and things.

They were never first on any of those things, right? They were never first, but they were the best at it because they re-engineered their processes and said, We're just not doing it that way anymore. We're we've got a brand new way of doing it. Um, whereas you take a company that doesn't pivot as well, and apologies to them because I'm I'm one of the champions, but IBM has struggled for 30 years to pivot to new realities, and they've consistently been a little on the late side, and their offerings take a long time to get up to speed. And you know, IBM should have been up there with Google and Amazon, you know, in in being one of the dominant forces of the new economy, and they're not.

Yeah, well, that creates an interesting question too. And I'd be interested in what you guys have seen with that as far as reengineering, you know, not being able to be done by mainline mature businesses. I mean, a lot of times I see that it's somebody does a spin-off, you know, you either create another division and oftentimes you even put them in another building, different chain of command because it just can't be pulled off by the existing business. Like they're they're too caught in the weeds and invested in the current process to be able to burn it down and start from scratch. That's exactly what Apple did, right?

The Macintosh team was literally the pirate team. They had their own building, uh, their own culture and everything. But the the thing that makes that made that work, and the reason why Apple's kind of stagnated uh a lot in the last few years is because their leadership isn't the same, right? Tim Cook, as a CEO is in a exceptional operations person. He is the you know, business process evolution guy.

He will fine-tune a process and make it sing. He's not Steve Jobs, he's not F at all. Let's let's burn it all down and do something completely new. You know, um, that was you know, some of the brilliance behind uh the way Steve Jobs did does things, and you know, Katie, you should you can speak to this for sure, but leadership is is what drives that. No, it's true, and that's where we always come back to it's that change management process.

It's whether or not you can get people on board. And so we work with a few enter enterprise size uh organizations, and they're the ones that have the hardest time with this revolutionary change, let alone any sort of evolutionary change, because an evolutionary change means that there is a clear and existing process to start with, and a lot of times, like 10 times out of 10, that's not the case because everything is so siloed and nobody knows who owns what, so you can't even establish a process to start with, let alone evolve it. And then if you want to, you know, in the words of Chris, burn it down and start over. Well, that's a top-down initiative, that's not a bottom-up initiative. You probably have you know, a lot of team members who are totally on board, but unless the stakeholders and decision makers are also comfortable with that, it's not gonna happen.

We were talking about that in a smaller scale on the podcast this week about analytics amnesty, which is essentially, you know, that sort of same idea of like, okay, as of this day, you cut over, and everything that happened in the past doesn't matter. This is the new world order, and you're either on board or you're not. And the thing that prevents that from happening are the people. You can write all the process you want. You can have the latest and greatest cutting edge platforms.

But unless you get the people, uh unironically, it's my middle finger, unless you get the people on board, not only on board, but also the consistency of the buy-in, then it's never gonna happen. It doesn't matter. So, you know, Steve Jobs is an interesting yet unicorn example of someone who had the authority to say, all right, you over here, you just sort of like keep doing what you're doing. I'm just gonna spin up this whole other thing over here, and you two just like once I get this going, this is gonna stop over here. There's not a lot of companies that feel comfortable with that level of risk because there is a lot of risk involved because it's a big financial investment.

And if it doesn't work, then that's all sunk costs. Yep. And there's a lot, you know, if you do it, one of the reasons why consulting firms have a have something of a bad name is because if you do business process re-engineering, if you're really gonna do it, you're gonna end up giving a lot of people pink slips because they're not gonna want to adapt to the new reality. And you're like, no, this is what this is the direction we're going, and you don't fit in anymore. You you know, we don't need your skills anymore.

You know, you may be the best, you know, horse groomsman in the entire company, but we're not gonna have horses anymore. Well, and that's why, you know, one of the things I know you, Chris, talk about is always learning and growing and staying on top of what's next. And so, you know, let's say, you know, Chris, you came to me and said, Okay, Katie, you may be the best at grooming our horses, but we're not gonna have horses anymore. And that's my opportunity to say to you, that's okay. I just learned how to rebuild a car engine, so I'm still valuable.

So yeah, I can let go of the horse grooming because I've been staying on top of what's going on. So I can still work for you and the direction that you're moving in. And so just as much as it's on leadership to make those decisions of where the company's going, they need to share that vision and transparency with the with the c the rest of the company, the team, so that the employees are then responsible for professional development and making sure they're keeping up with the direction so that you know they have their jobs. And some of that is on the employees too. I mean, if I think back over my career, I started as an IT guy and I threw that out, right?

And I became uh, you know, uh sort of a uh analytics person, and I threw that out, became a marketing technology person, threw that out and became uh a data science person, right? And I don't know what I'm gonna end up throwing out next, but each time has been such a big pivot that it's no longer the same career, it's no longer the same titles, and it's just not been a smooth evolution. It's been a lot of throw it out and and do something different. Um, it is incumbent upon each of us individually to look at our career paths and say, is the world changing and are we changing with it? Right?

Like you see right now, artificial intelligence is a a big thing. It's impacting every aspect of marketing. If it is not in some way infused in the work you're doing, you've got a bullseye on your back, right? Uh we see content atomization and multimedia content creation is uh it's has obviously been the thing for 10 years now. Um, you know, anybody who's got some gray hair remembers when Netflix was a company that shipped you discs in the mail, right?

Um, and that has not done that in a really long time because they they totally pivoted into into streaming video and original content. If you are a marketer and you don't have the ability to create video or to create audio or do illustrations or something, you've got a bullseye on your back. Um, and and so as much as there is business process re-engineering for the organization, there really is career re-engineering for the individual, and not enough people are thinking about that. So that is essentially the point that I was making is that the responsibility is on leadership, but also on the employees to be the ones uh keeping up to date. Now, I can give you, you know, you guys work with me every day, and you know that I am not I'm technologically, you know, I have the right aptitude, but I don't use it all the time.

And so I understand it, I don't necessarily use it. So, like, you know, I was just sort of saying today, I signed on to Discord for the first time, and it's an overwhelming experience and it's gonna take a little while. Um, you know, I signed on for TikTok. It's an overwhelming experience, it's gonna take a little while, but this is my dog is yelling in the background, but this is me taking responsibility trying to keep up with these things because I know if I don't, I cannot effectively help lead the company in the right direction. And so that's me taking my personal responsibility.

I don't want to do it, but I know that it's necessary. Yeah, it is crazy too, because of the there's been so much churn in that you know, you'll have ten things come down the pipe and probably six of them you really don't need to worry about because they're gonna be dead, you know, in the before the next cycle is up. So it's yeah, it's kind of constantly a struggle to know what's gonna be you know the next Facebook and what's gonna be the next beanie babies. Come on, John, you don't you're not gonna roll on our Clubhouse channel? I've got Clubhouse, it's gonna be huge.

That I'll be promoting it on Plerk so you can follow up. I have a live journal now. We've got a lot of stuff going. It's gonna be huge. And so pick up our NFT coin for this session today.

Um it's gonna be huge. But I think you know I do a coin. That's sort of the thing though. So we're fortunate, Chris, that you are someone who is constantly curious about the next thing. And so I pay attention to the things that stay consistent that you consistently talk about, and that's where I know I need to start exploring what those things are.

And that's how I manage my expectations of how much technology I need to keep up with is you know, you're gonna try everything. You're gonna look at everything that's out there and try it at least once. But the things that stick around are the things that I will then start to pay attention to. And I think that's an important part of business process reengineering conceptually, both as you know, as a consulting firm and as an organization, is looking at people who and and the kind of the roles they fill. Are you know who are your early adopters, who are your later early adopters, who are your you know, middle and pack, who are your laggards and stuff like that.

And if you diagram out the sort of the org chart of your organization, putting people on that axis, and you find your organization leans very heavily towards laggard or late and late adopter, you know that you're gonna have a big, you know, uh change management problem because everybody's on the left-hand side of the bell curve. If you've got a good distribution, then you can say, okay, from a consulting perspective, you you'll be able to make change. It'll be tough, you'll be able to make change. If you have a lot of people who are leaning on the right hand side that are early adopter, you know, beta testers, stuff like that. It might be easier to get change to go through because you have more people who are more accepting of change because they're constantly dealing with it.

You know, they're the the beta testers like, oh yeah, the button was over there yesterday, now it's over here, and you know, and all you know, everything's been broken. They're they're like uh they're the folks who's instead of yelling who moved my cheese. They're like, you know, playing the game, where's my cheese today? Um if your organization is like that, you're gonna have an easier time with change management. So it's yeah, that concept of who is where in your your org chart on a bell curve would be a really useful exercise for companies to go through when they approach business process reengineering as you know, how where do you lean on the bell curve of comfort with change?

I disagree with that slightly because I feel like it's very one-dimensional. Uh so for example, if you look at the three of us, I would say, Chris, you're probably early adopter. John, I would probably put you squarely in the middle, leaning more towards the early adopter, whereas I'm definitely on the laggard side of the curve. However, I am open, and so that then you have to factor in uh the emotional intelligence. I'm open to change.

I just need a little bit more time to understand it and understand why. And so I'm not someone who's necessarily gonna dive in and start testing the new thing. I need to spend a little bit of time thinking about how would we use this? What is the application? Is there a so what here?

And so I think that yes, the adopt the adoption bell curve is important, but it's one-dimensional. So you need to factor in other pieces to that as well. Stay tuned for the Trust Insights adoption quiz on our website. All right, John, that's your to-do for this week. Yeah, right.

To run with the but how do you guys feel about that? Because that is another thing. I have seen it done different ways. You know, on one side, there's kind of the announcement that, yeah, we're gonna do re-engineering. And on the other, I've seen management take a team and say, okay, you guys go off and figure this out, but we're not even gonna tell the rest of the org that we're looking or doing this project until we know either like there's a there or uh, you know, we we don't want everybody to just get excited about losing their jobs when we don't even know if anything's gonna happen.

Is that um have you guys seen that play out and any tips on how to deal with that? You know, it both both approaches can work. It's just a matter of dealing with the consequences and the fallout. And so if you're on the in the first scenario where you're like, hey, we're gonna do this thing, then the consequences of that are you're gonna have some people who get on board and some people who either walk away or are asked to walk away. And so as long as you're okay with that, then that approach can absolutely work.

And that I've been at companies where that has been the approach, and it is very painful, but you're sort of in that mindset as the employee of like, okay, I can either get on board and do this and you know, go along for the ride, or I can just be like, this is not my jam. In the other scenario where you have, you know, like a tiger team of people who are trying to figure it out and then roll it out to the company, those tend to, I mean, both both sides of the equation are painful. It's just a matter of, you know, how much buy-in do you want to get from people? So when you have a smaller committee who then rolls it out, you tend to get a little bit more buy in because it's not so sudden, and it feels like more people can collaborate and get engaged versus just a top-down, this is what we're doing, get on board or walk. It depends on the external forcing function, too.

So back in in 2008, early 2009, I was working in financial services at a company that did federal student loans. And that year, um, Barack Obama was elected in uh to the presidency, and one of the things that was in his platform was bringing federal student loans back into the department of education. The company I worked for, 85% of its revenue came from reselling federal student loans. And so we basically had 65 days to cool up with a completely new business model or lose 85% of our revenue and just close the doors forever. And so we had to pivot really, really, really fast.

It was an all hands on deck, and we had no choice. We had zero vote in the matter. It was gonna happen. And we did. We successfully pivoted, we moved into a bunch of new product lines and things, and it was very, very painful.

I mean, it's basically, you know, every night was a late night for two and a half months, redoing all of our systems, redoing all of our websites, um, changing what we marketed and things. And we survived. Um, we were not nearly as profitable as as we had been. Uh, arguably, it was it was morally better because we were just, you know, we stopped selling nearly as many people into debt as we were used to. Um, but it was a wholesale, like you had no choice.

Everybody had to get on board because the business would be to disappear otherwise. So, as we're sort of we've been talking about this for almost 45 minutes, it sounds like there's a few takeaways. You know, one is you as an individual, one of your responsibilities is to within your industry stay try your best to stay up to date on the latest and greatest technologies, innovations, you know, processes in which other companies that are competitive to you are doing things and try to see how that will impact your daily life and are there things you can learn from that and start to apply to your company. What are some of the other key takeaways guys if you're talking about business process reengineering, you're talking about revolution. So it is not iterative.

It is not you know slow it slow and steady. It is you are breaking stuff and starting over. And so if you're if you're working with a you know any kind of consulting firm stuff and they're saying that they're they're doing business process reengineering and things are not getting thrown out the window wholesale, they're not doing business process reengineering. They're doing something else. So just know what it is that you've bought.

Um and I think Katie the biggest point though is is what you we're hinting at first which is know what's going on outside of your your the you know the your day to day know what the big changes are on the horizon and be ready to adapt to it because sometimes change happens really slow and sometimes change happens really really fast. And if you're not aware of what's happening and we see this all the time when we talk to people in who are in marketing like oh yeah you know I don't have time for professional development then you're toast because at some point, something's gonna come along. It's just gonna sink your ship. I would say to that, even have your processes documented at all so that you know what needs to change. John, what do you think?

Yeah, I think the the a big idea is understand that if you think there's opportunity out there that you want to go grab, then when you re-engineer, it has to be a separate team. And if it's something that the market is forcing upon you, then you can re-engineer within the existing org. And you really kind of have to obey those because it doesn't work the other way around. You know, if the market itself is taking a shift and you create an outside team to do it that has no experience, they're going to crash and burn. And if you're going after something new that's huge and high risk, the existing org is going to have no interest in, you know, leaving the current safe bureaucracy.

And so make sure you've got the right approach for how you put that to work, or otherwise you're going to come up short. Yep. I think that's a good place to stop it. So if you got questions and stuff, uh pop on it. We'll we'll share our links to our Slack group and stuff in just a minute.

But thanks for tuning in today, and we'll talk to you soon. Take care.