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Solving Your DAM Problems: How Can You Predict Your Company's DAM Future?

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the January 2013 issue of The PCB Magazine.

Would you like to look into a crystal ball and know if you are headed in the right direction or the wrong direction with your company? Would you like to know if your company is going to prosper or plummet? Silly and rhetorical I know, but hear me out. You already possess this ability and likely don’t even know it. Permit me to be the first to encourage you to change your DAM thinking and use your sensory skills! Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink gets at this innate skill we all possess, so read this book if this article isn’t enough for you. Confused? Hang on and let me explain.

How do you feel when you enter the lobby of a supplier or a customer? Do you feel welcome or unwelcome? Does it appear as though they are making lots of money or struggling? Do you get the sense that they are running a tight ship and anticipating, or do you feel they are disorganized and probably just reacting to situations? Do you see any evidence that points to the accuracy of the best supplier award hanging on the wall, or the mission statement which states that people in this company are treated with respect?

How you feel in the lobby and how you are treated in the lobby during the first five minutes tells you a lot about the business you are visiting. But we are trained to take these intuitions and feelings and put them on the back burner with the dial in our brain set to ignore. Yet what you are sensing, right off the bat, and what you will likely continue to sense during your visit, is the culture of the business enterprise.

This is a skill not to be ignored and left to fallow, but to develop and use deliberately to make your company better. In fact, this isn’t a luxury; it is a necessity. According to Louis Gerstner, who turned IBM around from the brink of disaster, “If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you many not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.”  Why should you care? Because if you don’t do this, if you do not manage your company’s culture, you will have DAM problems by the bushel load.

Thinking DAMs, the true source of any DAM problem, are what I described in my first book, Change Your DAM Thinking. To illustrate, let me explain two thinking DAMs: The ego DAM and the learning DAM. If you have someone in your company who you would describe as a perfectionist jerk, who seems to feel that he or she can do no wrong, and treats others as inferior, then you know what I am talking about. The learning DAM described here is the know-it-all, and the ego dam is I am better than you. You can’t teach know-it-alls anything new, because they are perfect, so discovery is blocked. Furthermore, you can’t work with  superior beings, because they are  jerks, and productivity is blocked.

Let me give you an example about how debilitating perfectionist jerk behavior can be. Remember back in the 1980s and early 1990s, as layer counts were growing and cores were getting thinner? Well, registration scrap was growing and becoming an increasingly worrisome problem for the entire industry. Everyone believed strongly the problem was the fault of the laminate supplier who could not make a stable core material. During the 1990s, AlliedSignal’s Chandler, Arizona lamination plant (where I was based) would bake all of the core material in an attempt to stabilize it. And we would do a huge amount of destructive testing using ovens to simulate our customer’s multilayer lamination cycle. Then, we collected data to see if in fact the core was unstable. All of this extra work was really expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, all of this work made our customer relationship worse, not better, because our data used in our test showed the core was stable, but their data used in our core, in their process, showed the core was unstable. There was fear, mistrust, and crisis, especially when a major customer would jump ship in favor of our competitor, who promised a more stable core; of course, this proved not to be the case. We were at a loss as to what to do. It was like we were searching for the Holy Grail. This was a serious DAM problem!

When all of this work and switching lamination suppliers failed to solve the core material instability, which was the believed to be the source of registration scrap, the arguments from know-it-all experts became increasingly fantastical. It was the poor quality of American glass, and Japanese glass was the cure. It was the resin suppliers that the laminators used; they needed to be looking at the control charts of their suppliers’ reactors.

All of this fantastical, dogmatic thinking (yes, DAM thinking) got our entire industry further and further away from the real truth. If you challenged anyone who believed in this dogma you might as well prepare yourself for crucifixion. I was one of the few who didn’t believe, and I will never forget how my boss went on and on with his face turning all shades of red and the veins popping out of his head, telling me I was insane to pursue the effort: an effort to organize a team to once and for all understand why the core material moved so unpredictably in our customers’ processes.

By combining a good pair of ear plugs, an unyielding faith in the scientific method and collaboration with some outstanding people at Continental Circuits, we were able to find (using a Fein Focus machine and doing design of experiments) that it was the interaction of prepreg style (as well as resin content of the prepreg and not the core) in conjunction with the amount of copper left on the core material after etching that was driving the movement and not some sort of unpredictable instability in the core created by exotic issues pertaining to the glass and the resin. In truth, the movement of the core (without any extra baking) was remarkably consistent for a given multilayer construction. One of the ways this is handled today is by having neural net software train itself on movement data from a production population containing a variety of multilayer constructions to come up with reasonably accurate image compensation values.

This wasn’t a tough technical problem to understand and solve. What made this problem so impossibly slow to resolve was the perfectionist jerk behaviors of too many well-meaning people, who proved to be obstructing the truth. This happens way too much in our industry. This is why it is important not to ignore this behavior, but identify it and get it out of your company’s culture. You can call it “The No Asshole Rule” as Bob Sutton did in his book with the same title, or something more polite, but the question is, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to put up a sign that says “Perfectionist jerks need not apply and if you work for us already, don’t be surprised if you are fired?” Check out this YouTube video with Bob Sutton for more ideas about why your company culture is so important.

What do companies like Apple do? Steve Jobs said in an interview: “One of the keys to Apple is that Apple is an incredibly collaborative company… And there is a tremendous amount of teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. And teamwork is trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all of the time.”  Here is the two-minute interview excerpt with Steve Jobs.

When it became clear that the person in charge of iOS, Scott Forstall, whose team apparently wasn’t dealing with Siri issues effectively, and who wasn’t collaborating very well with his peers for some DAM reason, would not apologize for Apple Maps, he was fired. All of this had to do with his behavior going against the grain of maintaining Apple’s collaborative culture that at its heart was based on trust. Was this a good business decision to let Forstall go, thus preserving the collaborative company culture? Time will tell.

Where is your company culture? What does it portend for you? Where do you need to go? What is your compass and what is your map? To find out the answer to these questions, visit businessagilitysolutions.com and take the self-assessment test to help you understand your company’s culture.

Table 1: Portion of self-assessment test for determining your company culture.

Table 2: The four types of behaviors.Figure 1: The four culture categories that a company can experience.

Table 1 is a brief description of the type of behaviors you will see and things to watch out for in each of the quadrant categories. Figure 1 shows the four categories your company can experience: crisis, dysfunction, hyper-growth, or development.

In Figure 1, the X-axis score is determined by how much DAM thinking you have going on in your company (as seen by an increasingly negative score) or how much FLOW thinking (lack of DAM thinking) you have going on in your company (as seen by an increasingly positive score). The Y-axis measures your company focus, which can be reality based or fantasy based. For example, when you have DAM thinking going on, are you dealing with immediate reality or pretending problems don’t exist? If you are pretending problems don’t exist, then your company is in trouble.

For example, let’s say that you believe that you can get away with not knowing the organic levels and/or the age of your plating tank chemistries, and you are not going to get copper stringers. Or, you think you can get away with not having a service contract for your laser direct imaging machine, or not maintaining the accuracy of your laser drills by allowing the temperature and humidity of the room they are in to fluctuate wildly. I have seen all of these things happen in our industry and the resulting crisis scenarios. DAM thinking and pretending we can make shortcuts and get away with it puts us in the crisis quadrant.

When your company has a FLOW thinking culture, then we can have fantasies about how great we could be. For example, at some point William Morean, co-founder and chairman of Jabil Circuits, must have had a far-fetched fantasy about his company being one of the most significant contract manufacturers in the world. And today it is just that and Morean is one of the wealthiest people on the planet. This is a company I discussed in my November 2012 column, “Is Kaizen Required to Make Those DAM iPhones?” that does tens of thousands of Kaizens a year. This should tell you something about the importance of collaboration at Jabil.

Probably about as far-fetched as Morean was Earl Bakken, when he ran a ten-employee company called Medtronic and asked my grandfather, who at that time owned a venture capital company called Community Investment Enterprises (CIE) for some money to keep going. My grandfather told Earl he had to dream big, and Earl did dream big, and eventually Medtronic became the biggest medical device company in the world. The point here is that when you have the right culture in your company, dreams can manifest as reality. When you don’t have the right culture and dream big, you will accelerate your company’s demise. Behaviors lead results. Culture matters--a lot.

If you take the assessment test and find yourself in the dysfunction quadrant, do not despair. How many of us took a “How to Create a Great Company Culture Class,” in which we were told what to do? We all have been trained to compete against each other and to be wary and even not trust each other, and pretend that we know it all. It’s a hard habit to break.

When people read my first book, they told me, “The book caused me to think a great deal, but you didn’t tell me what I was supposed to do.” The first step to solving any problem is to be aware of it and observe it not only in others, but more importantly, within yourself. For example, when you see the ego DAM in yourself, understand that you have the power to change it. The next time you are confronted with a challenge, instead of showing everyone how you can do it all yourself, show your company how you can organize others and get them to do it themselves in their own way, where they get full credit. If you can do this seemingly simple thing, you are well on your way to making your company the next Apple, Jabil Circuits, or Medtronic. Your behavior at work, the spirit you think about and conduct your work, will predict your own success and your company’s success too. After all, there is only one way to solve your DAM problems and that is to change your DAM thinking.

Gray McQuarrie is president of Grayrock & Associates, a team of experts dedicated to building collaborative team environments that make companies maximally effective. Contact McQuarrie at gray@grayrock.net.