Strategies every CEO should embrace to maximize thought leadership ROI Today, we explore why investing…
Operational Thought Leadership | Ron Crabtree
Using thought leadership to fix operational gaps.
An interview with Ron Crabtree about finding knowledge gaps and best practices for filling them.
Today’s guest is Ron Crabtree, CEO of Meta Ops Inc | Meta Experts. Meta Experts is a global network of OpEx development experts ready to take on interim roles as advisors and executives to solve operational problems in fast-paced industries.
Ron shares how he got his start in thought leadership at Disney in the late 70s creating training materials for complex problems so they could be understood by everyone. Over his thirty plus year career, he has worked for automotive supply chains, implanted Lean Six, Sigma and continues to be a lifelong learner.
Meta Experts
As we continue down Ron’s career path, we learn about his company Meta Experts. Next, we learn what happens when an expertise gap occurs in a company. Then, we discuss why their network of experts might be the best route to fill that gap.
Ensuring any knowledge gaps you have are filled can be critical but how do you know when there is a gap that needs to be filled? What does that gap look like? Ron gives great examples for identifying the gaps and the process they use for vetting the talent you can hire to fill those gaps.
Three Key Takeaways:
- Thought leaders can find success with content that identifies a market that needs new solutions to ongoing problems.
- When time is money, your thought leadership needs to help clients avoid days of lost profit.
- People skills are almost as important as your knowledge. If you can’t get your thought leadership to connect with people, it will all be for naught.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!
Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. Today we’re looking at the concept of the role of the interim thought leader within an organization. What happens when an organization discovers a critical knowledge gap? This gap might suddenly become visible after making a big promise to a client or a critical individual with key knowledge may retire, go on, leave, or even take another job. My guest today is Ron Crabtree. He’s the CEO of Meta Ops. And we’ll be talking about the hidden thought leadership that’s often buried deep within the operations team. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Ron.
Ron Crabtree Thank you.
Bill Sherman So let’s get started. How did you get into the world of thought leadership? Because nobody sort of goes to school for it. What was your journey like?
Ron Crabtree Well, you know, I think back to my first really awakening that it was something I really wanted to do. Back in 1979, I was working for Disney’s manufacturing division and project and program management, and we were building short right equipment for the Epcot Tokyo Disneyland Project. And I was very fortunate hiring there at the right times or ramping all that up. And they sent us off to a bunch of training and bleeding edge project program management. And then we were using program evaluation review technique, computers on computers. Mind you, in 1979 alone, three critical paths, the whole nine yards or variable to do backward forward scheduling, capacity constrained planning for a three-year window. It was an amazing process and I was so good at it and said, Hey you, we need you to put together a bunch of training and teach all of our facility managers how this stuff works. You know what this really means, why it’s so important. So I was sitting around designing courseware at the tender age of 23, no college degree, and I’m teaching all these really fancy program managers and project managers are running these huge facilities for Disney in Tokyo and in Orlando what this stuff was all about. So I just learned that, hey, I’m really good at understanding complex things and then converting that into something that other people could understand pretty easily and helping them to effectively assimilate and do something what they learned well.
Bill Sherman And I think that leads to a good question. What is thought leadership for you? And I think you hinted on a little bit in your answer, but let’s call it out. What is thought leadership from your point of view?
Ron Crabtree Well, I think there’s a couple of aspects, right? There’s a personal aspect and there’s probably an organizational aspect. And for individuals, I think it’s kind of you’re a little bit born with, you know, this this inclination to be a thought leader. And I also think it’s something you can learn by applying yourself. And the other thing I think it’s really important to be a thought leaders. You’ve got to be a highly autodidact. And if you just heard that word said, you know what, I got to go Google and find out what that.
Bill Sherman Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kid’s a great word. You want to unpack it?
Ron Crabtree Yeah. So if you felt like I got to go find that out, you’re probably going to be a thought leader or could be a thought leader because you’re willing you have a passion for. Maybe you’re just like one and. All right. I want to understand how these things work and, you know, really be the master of an area of knowledge. With organizations, it’s a little more complicated, right? So every organization is involved with thought leadership, regardless of their size, their industry or whatever, But it could be very hidden or it could be very, very exposed. Or I might want to hide it so that our competitors won’t steal our ideas and run away with it. Or we might actually use it as a basis to compete. You know, I think about a quick story, if I may, if you would, please. Awesome. So I was working with a really great engineer, a guy, and he was working for this large automotive OEM. And Toyota was allowing the automotive suppliers and even some of the OEM people themselves, U.S. OEM guys go in and actually visit their plants to take a look at what they were doing with lean manufacturing Toyota production system. And he’s going through there and they’re answering the questions and they’re showing you all these cool things they’re doing. And he got to the end of it. Shorty pulled the tour guide and started. He said, Look, this is crazy. Why are you telling all this, where your competition guy says, look, he says, you guys can try to copy this. It’ll take you years to figure it out. Get it done. By then, we’ll be so far past you, it won’t even matter. Toyota is committed to thought leadership around always innovating, always going to the next level of being. Never being satisfied with good enough as part of their culture. And they parlayed that into a heck of a business model. If you think about taking so much of the automotive market based on quality, reliability, better gas mileage back in the 70s and 80s, that’s because they made it their business to be the thought leaders in that space.
Bill Sherman Well, and this leads to an interesting sort of separation between the concept of intellectual property, right? The secret sauce or the Coca-Cola recipe that’s kept in the safe or the Colonel Sanders recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Those things are considered secret. And they have value because they’re not known because they’re not taken out into the world. You experience them, but you don’t know how to make the magic happen. Whereas with the story that you’re telling here, for example, thought leadership really pulls the information and invites people to see what is going on and to share a vision of the future. Recognizing that if you’re here today, you’ll be there somewhere tomorrow, and you can be copied. But you’re still progressing.
Ron Crabtree Correct. So absolutely.
Bill Sherman Talk to me a little bit. You are now working on it in sort of that operational sort of thought. Leadership space and solving problems for deep expertise is needed in almost a critical place. Can you explain a little bit of what goes on there and how your journey has led? Because I think this is fascinating, right?
Ron Crabtree Well, it’s just a little bit of a history story. You know, I originally started my company in 19 years ago after a career mostly automotive supply chain, and then ventured into consulting and really got started with helping to implement Lean Six Sigma supply chain best practices and then got pulled into doing a lot of thought leadership development for various universities and institutions and building up this big, you know, group of folks I could pull in for projects. And then over time, it became apparent that the market needed a different solution. And we kind of created what we call a meta experts brand, where we characterize highly skilled people that bring that thought leadership into organizations to get stuff done very, very quickly, as if you will, arms and legs to buckle in and be part of it and help organizations get that jumpstart they actually need.
Bill Sherman And this is on the operational side or the product side, right?
Ron Crabtree A little of both. A little of both. Okay.
Bill Sherman Okay. So can you give me a, for example of the expertise and how were you filling it? When does this gap occur and how are you feeling it?
Ron Crabtree Well, there’s a lot of things that where the gap can occur. And, you know, for example, for organizations, we’re just like people. Organizations are nothing but big people, really. And one of the phenomena I keep running into is you get to do everything for the first time as an amateur. So, you know, for example, if you’ve grown your facilities and it’s time to, you know, rethink how we do business and stand up a new facility. When’s the last time you did that? And how much do you really know about that? That’s a good case for me. Maybe I don’t want to be autodidact. I can figure it all out by myself and get some help to do that. Another aspect is time is money. And what I mean by that is, you know, you identify something you need to do, but every day that it doesn’t happen is a lost day. For example, let’s say, you know, you came up with an idea or a program or whatever you need to do, and it’s worth $1 million a year of additional profits for your company. If you do the math, works out to about $4,000 a day profit. And every day you don’t do it. There’s a day that’s gone, right? That’s $4,000 you didn’t put in the bank. That’s never, ever going to come back to you. And I kind of call that that lost opportunity cost. So that’s an important realization that executives bump into. And then in other cases, you know, it’s like, okay, you know, I thought I had a team that could handle this, but clearly it isn’t getting done. Something’s sideways. You figure out, wait a minute, we thought we knew how to do it, but we’re really acting like amateurs, right? Or we’re trying to put too much on one person to make it happen. And for example, if you’re growing a rapidly growing business, maybe you’re producing product, personal protective equipment and you know, your site manager walks out on Thursday and forgot to tell you they’re recording orders you have to have out on Sunday. You know, that can be a problem. And then any real big shift in the competitive reality can trigger the need for a rapid introduction of new thinking and new approaches, new processes, technologies that the case may be, but you may not have that expertise in. For example, know. So you’re a medical distributor while you’re distributing medical devices and getting it deployed in the field and then suddenly, wait a minute, we have to start doing reverse logistics. We have to repair and reuse this equipment and put it back into the field. That’s an entirely different business. Handling all that physical infrastructure and all the technical aspects of rebuild, reuse all the cleaning, blah, blah, blah. If you have an experience, the FDA is pretty rigorous. Well, that’s a big one to chew on. Or maybe you’ve had a merger and acquisition activity going on. Maybe you acquired you know, you’re suddenly going to be in the paper recycling business. And we’ve got millions and millions of dollars we’re going to use to stand up more facilities, but only have 1 or 2 people that actually know anything about it. Those are the only ones that came over with the acquisition. So now what? Those would all be cases where, you know, this gap and the impact of that, you know, the lost opportunity costs, all the issues associated with, you know, doing it as an amateur can really bite.
Bill Sherman Well, and one of the things that I think from a strategic perspective that’s underappreciated is a lot of organizations, they may think about talent and knowledge, but they don’t think about it from the thought leadership perspective. Where do we have key knowledge and skills that if it walks out the door, either through retirement or something happens on the health side or they get a better offer from a competitor, how do you retain that thought leadership and continuity not only to deliver to existing customers and commitments that you’ve made, production timelines and project plans, but with that gap, like you said, each day, the opportunity is money that’s parked, right? Correct?
Ron Crabtree Absolutely.
Bill Sherman So can you give me an example or two of. Where that gap has arisen in an incredibly painful way, where it came as a surprise. What does this look like when that thought leadership sort of gap hits and strikes hard?
Ron Crabtree Yeah, there’s different scenarios where that can come into play. You know, I mentioned, you know, a really critical site manager that runs the facility. Evaporating out the door. You know, maybe, you know, your guess is really important. Tactical deployment underway. And suddenly you realize, wait a minute, this is going off the rails. We’re going to miss our customer due dates. We’re not going to be able to ramp up the hit the volumes our customers require. Obviously, we’re not going to sell that stuff. You know, that can be a real, real awakening of, wait a minute, you know, we have to pull out all the stops and make that happen quickly. You know, maybe it’s kind of like you’re the proverbial frog in that slowly warming bucket of water. Lots of stories around that. And then suddenly you’re like, wait a minute, I’m jumping out of that pan because I just realized that we’re going to be we’re going to be eaten alive or boiled to death if we don’t deal with this quickly and turn the corner on something before it becomes a real serious issue facing my company. So that can certainly come into play. You know, any merger and acquisition situation, there’s very little patience around realizing the monetary gains or the other performance boost that, you know, the investors are looking for in that business. So that puts a lot of pressure on, you know, the traditional cycle of, well, let’s hire somebody and develop them and eventually we’ll be able to execute. You just may not have that luxury in that situation. And frankly, any changing of the top of the guard, if you will, of leadership level, new owners, whatever it may be, you know, there’s going to be a very low level of patience around the way we’ve always done it. And they’re going to be looking for some degree of step level change or improvement that wouldn’t really be possible with what you have today. You know, the old Princetonian, you can’t get there with the thinking that gotten here. Right. Can’t solve the problems you created with yesterday’s thing.
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Bill Sherman So let’s build on that. So I’m a senior executive. I recognize that I’ve got the knowledge gap. What are my array of choices at this point and what works? What doesn’t? You know, how do I respond when I have that moment? I’m lying in bed at night and go, We’re in trouble, right? What do I do or What can I do?
Ron Crabtree Well, here’s some of the things that I see out there. And probably no surprise to anybody. But, you know, generally you’ve got a handful of really good people in your organization. I’ll call them the Five percenters, Right. These are the people that no matter what, you can count on me. You go grab one of them and say, hey, you know, get after this. Let’s make that happen. But there’s lots of problems with that, right? Maybe they are the amateur doing it for the first time, too, kind of rolling the dice that they’re going to get it there if they’re not going to fail. You know, you have that lost opportunity cost thing coming in to bear. And worst of all, you end up burning that person out. You lose them because that can be a real killer. You know, maybe you turn it over to reach our department. And now I hear this all the time. It’s, you know, the frustration of taking 3 to 6 months to actually get somebody found and get them started and start onboarding them. Which was a long ramp up time, not on the higher cycle, but also to get them on board. And can you spell loss opportunity cost? Right. Well, come right off the top. But what about unhappy customers, right? I mean, we’re not moving the needle on happy stockholders. You know, they have patience for that stuff. The other option would be, you know, high flying consulting firm. You know, we can bring in the consulting firm. You know, they bring some big bill rates, but they’re great at assessing what’s going on. They’re great at advisory, but they often can be horrible on the execution side of it because they’re not, you know, inside your companies making these things happen. And there can be a lot of an anticipated, you know, downfall of that, you know, a loss of momentum when I walk out the door, did they make sure it was sticky? So you had people that could sustain it, continue to improve it or can it go flat? And remember, you know, all consultants are there to sell. You’re more consulting. So you always have to watch out for that issue as well. And then you have, you know, another option. And that’s really taking a look at, you know, who can we pull in from? I’ll call it the knowledge thought leadership space. We call them better experts, you know, people that we put through a rather massive vetting process, earn the right for us to bring them forward to our customers. That could step into more of a learn not and not only learn by doing, but more of the gifted doing boots on the ground. Let’s make it happen right away. So that’s a process that we’ve been perfecting now for the last ten years. After coming up with a better expert’s brand and working with a number of organizations around the world to provide that kind of talent.
Bill Sherman Well, and what I would describe that you’re doing is just in time for leadership to fill critical gaps. Would you say that’s a fair summary?
Ron Crabtree That’s a perfect summary. You know, I wish I could have said it myself.
Bill Sherman Cool. So give me an example of what that just in time sort of expert thought leadership looks like in the moments maybe some of the times where you’ve worked with clients and you’ve helped them fill a gap.
Ron Crabtree Yeah, a couple of a couple of things come to mind. You know, I was working with, you know, a $500 million division of Flextronics and they had been acquired and they were on to this very, very steep growth curve. And in their industry, it’s very, very specialized products. And they had identified somebody they were going to hire that actually lived in Europe and were going to relocate them to the United States to run their procurement group because they identified one of the top three things they had to do is really get after their spend because they were contract manufacturing, almost everything. Well, it turned out that he ran into a immigration issue and suddenly he was going to take 6 to 9 months to get him on board. So they turned to me and said, Who Do you have a step in here? Just flat run this procurement function for us until we can get this guy hired and get him on board. So a week later, we had Rich on the ground and inside that seven month period, he booked, I think, $40 million of spend savings if they actually booked their financials for that following fiscal year of recurring savings. And at the end of seven months, they actually got the guy from Europe. So they waved thank you. And he was able to pick up the reins with that and continue running with it. I mentioned a little story about, you know, private equity and real situation. Get a call on a Friday afternoon. And it’s the president of one of the private equity companies owned companies we work with. He says, listen, I’ve got John on the phone. He’s up in San Francisco. He’s got a site down in L.A. The site manager just walked out the door. We’re making PPE for one of the big retail chains. Who do you have in Los Angeles that can help run that facility? That could be there tomorrow? By the way, this was Good Friday and I need somebody on Saturday morning on Easter weekend to help make sure we get these orders out the door. Well, because of our model, we had three people lined up for John to talk to on his drive from San Francisco to L.A. during Covid. And he was good to go on Saturday morning and Lexus did a great job for them. He ended up doing lots of stuff besides just making sure we got orders out the door. He helped them get a lot of other initiatives done that they had put on the back burner or they were waiting for a new site manager. So that worked out pretty well. You know, another example this is pretty common here is, you know, chief operating officer stepping in to run, you know, a new acquisition. They’re going to be growing rather quickly. He realizes, whoa, you know, I’ve got a big gap. I need somebody really help me use advanced project program management tools for manager of product lifecycle development. And by the way, we have management execution systems. You have it team. We don’t need a full time I.t. Guy. We don’t need a full time mers expert. You have somebody that can kind of step in on a part time fractional basis to be the CIO and help with those two things. And so Mike jumped in there to really get the program management things sorted out and Kendall jumped in to really take a hard look at mers and i.t. The first week they both produced what that c o needed for his quarterly business review. And he came out of that with flying colors because now he was able to go to the owners of his company and really articulate very professionally and completely their business case for some of the major changes he needed to do in this case. Both Mike and Kendall are sticking around to lend a hand now as they move into deployment, which is pretty cool.
Bill Sherman These are great stories. Yeah. I want to push on something. And this is something that I think for our listeners. We often talk about thought leadership from the external facing go to market. And often it’s the knowledge on where the market is going or what you’re doing. More of an insight. But here this is operational thought leadership and the examples that you gave are if we don’t have this knowledge, the plant doesn’t run and we disappoint customer.
Ron Crabtree Right? Correct. That’s a very.
Bill Sherman Deep in the infrastructure of the organization. But if you extract that knowledge, the company can’t do what it does.
Ron Crabtree Correct. Yep, that’s a that’s a very astute observation on your part. And absolutely when I talk about thought leadership, generally, it’s all around new product development, who we’re going to serve, what’s going to be different? ET cetera, etc., etc.. And that’s all true. And we do get involved with some of those things as well. From time to time when that really needs to happen. But the reality is thought leadership is everywhere in your business. You know, what is the basis for competition? What allows us to actually be different or better from our competitors? What’s our secret sauce? And it’s often very operational. In the case of Toyota, which I mentioned earlier, you know, they use that as a real weapon. But there’s countless examples of how that comes into play. I’ll share a couple of quick stories about how I can. For example, this is a great story. I heard a large telecom buy. They make and install telecommunications equipment all over, all over the place. Huge, multibillion dollar company. And one day they grab some of the guys out of continuous improvement, engineering, etc.. You know what? We want you guys to go off and do it all skunkworks things for us. We would like you to sit down and design a company that would put us out of business. We repeat that. Define a design, a company that would put us out of business. And they did that. They came back to the executives and they said, my God, my gosh, goodness. Right. And they actually said, okay, now we need you to go ahead and stand that up. So they actually use that as a form of what you’re describing, right? A skunkworks kind of an approach to what should we be doing to bring real value to the market that we’re not doing today? Or how can we innovate and stay ahead of the competition? And yet another example. You know, I’ve had the pleasure to get to know a really interesting gentleman who works for one of the largest medical devices companies in the world. And I’ve got to grab my notes here. Very specific role of strategy and project management of strategic scientific operations, corporate science and technology. And it’s his job to do nothing but collaborate with the leaders of all the key operational engineering and development. So he’s got the scientist R&D folks, operations folks, supply chain cutting across all of that. And it’s his job. Make sure all these guys interface and we’re comparing notes and really talking about what’s changing, what’s different, what’s coming. And he has direct responsibility, reach outside the company and figure out who to collaborate in non competing firms and actually with a couple competitors as well to compare notes around how they’re going to do that. And that is kind of the pinnacle of really putting a name to thought leadership and going beyond just that new product development, but also thinking about the end and execution of it’s great, I can come up with a new widget, but if I can’t fulfill it and deliver it perfectly, it’s worthless.
Bill Sherman And this leads to the question of where do new ideas come from within your organization to improve it? And that can come from any department, whether it’s corporate treasury, whether it’s in the plant, in the factory. But are you nurturing a mindset of thought leadership and encouraging those insights rather than saying, they weren’t invented from our product team, therefore they’re not thought leadership, Right. And that operational excellence requires its own thought leadership, for example.
Ron Crabtree Exactly. You’re spot on.
Bill Sherman So as we start to wrap up, Ron, I would welcome your advice. And you’ve been working with folks who have deep expertise for many, many years. Right. In operations and that thought leadership of operations. How do you spot those folks who have that little bit extra who are not just good at operations, but they’re the ones who can see around the corner? What do you look for? Can you give a tip or two?
Ron Crabtree Yeah, we have a rather a rather rigorous process. You know, of every hundred people we look at potentially to come through our vetting process to be in Sutter Firewall as a matter expert, maybe 5% actually get through that wicket. And you know, we tend not to gravitate toward consultant types because they would tend to be pretty narrow and generally around a very specific expertise like growth, for example, or innovating a new product. But we tend to be biased toward people that have the very strong operational background, very strong people skills. We’ve learned the hard way that, you know, you know, I have a little quiz electron people through when I’m interviewing them and we ask them to rate five different attributes associated with success and organizational transformation. And what I like to listen for is do they really understand that if you don’t get the people part right, the technology part will never get you there? Because at the end of the day, if you can’t successfully connect people and their ideas, their hearts, their minds and their souls with what it is you’re trying to accomplish, it’s probably a non flier. You know, I think way back to the Disney days and the thing that stuck with me and some other organizations sense, you know, the last we do it for three and a half days of orientation, when you get hired at Disney, this is back in the day, right, 1978, 79. And you go three and a half days orientation for you report to work. And the last stop is in Walt Disney’s personal office. And he plays a video about his vision for Epcot and what Disney not. And then the big thing that came out of that is he said, everything we do is an organization’s around two words. And just to. Good show. So when it comes to family entertainment, no matter how you come in contact with your organization, retail, theme parks, movies, whatever it may be, it’s going to be the best family entertainment activity or experience on the planet. There’s a lot to be said for, you know, people have the ability to think like that, right, To see that, yeah, I need to have all the technical skills. You don’t get to the party without them. But at the end of the day, if you’re not successful in connecting people hearts, minds, thoughts and being able to relate to them and bring them along, it’s pretty marginal. So we put a great emphasis on people skills, communication skills, their ability to just talk their way around, some difficult questions that we ask. And then we also have you know, we like to talk to people they’ve actually worked for. And we asked them some pretty tough questions that that are a little abnormal. But again, we’re trying to find out what makes that person tick, what makes them how do they operate in a in a with a lot of ambiguity around them? How well do they cope with that? And that’s a real key element to success that we look for.
Bill Sherman And I think that’s a great tip to close on. No good idea reaches scale. No activity gets done unless you’re able to draw others into it. And your ability to achieve scale relies on your ability to connect with others and get them to agree. Thank you, Ron, for joining us today.
Ron Crabtree Thank you.
Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.
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