Lessons Learned the Hard Way

I’m sure many of the real people behind the colorful characters portrayed in this work will not appreciate me identifying them, and I intend to honor their wishes. With that being said, I have to give credit where credit is due: Ladies and gentlemen, you undoubtedly will be able to determine who you are. I offer each of you my thanks for the many Lessons you taught me, both positive and painful. My thanks go out in aggregate to the many interesting and entertaining people I’ve met during my career – particularly those who had to learn their own lessons the Hard Way. You’ve provided me inspiration to write all of this down so that others may learn from a few of our shared mistakes.

I want to thank my corporate friends, many of whom who have proven to me they care about more than just relationships of convenience. I’ve discovered that if you open yourself to others and accept the vulnerability such action entails, you can befriend many wonderful and caring people – even in the shark-infested waters of corporate America.

This book would resemble a collection of poorly integrated chapters if it wasn’t for the help of my proofreading friend. Joy – thank you for all your help and guidance on this project.

I owe a debt of gratitude to my family, who stood by my side lived through many of the sometimes unbearable corporate years chronicled here. Laura and kids, thank you for your tolerance and patience with all the missed events, long trips, and many hours spent away.

Forward

The story you are about to see is true. Only the names have been changed, to protect the innocent. – Dragnet, 1951-1959, 1967-1970.

Well, that’s not exactly the case here. Lessons Learned the Hard Way is about truth – one man’s truth. Mine. From 1977 until 2012 I was employed by a series of public corporations, and served as a division President, group President, or COO for the last three. The fictitious Opaque Manufacturing, Inc. is an amalgamation of my experiences in four different organizations, but I’ve written them as if they all came from just one firm.

Each tale is as true as memory could make it, with only the names, places, and products being changed to help disguise where each episode occurred. In some cases I had notes or supporting documents in my possession to clarify time periods, people involved, and specific actions. In others I was able to have peers review my version of events. A few of the tales relied solely on my own recollections. While I tried to stay as factual as was humanly possible, in one chapter I had to write the story from a perspective other than my own in order to make the tale fit into the fictitious Opaque.

Yes, all these things did happen. And I’m quite sure similar things happen in nearly every large corporation. Somewhere. Every single day. I hope that by relating the stories and my personal Lessons Learned, I can help budding managers and experienced professionals avoid gaining the same knowledge the Hard Way – the way I ended up learning it.

I’ve heavily disguised the details for obvious reasons. I wanted to avoid causing needless hurt or harm to the innocent, and some of the chapters describe things that might be considered confidential or embarrassing. While I’m less concerned about offending the guilty, I saw my choices coming down to: (1) disguise the specifics, (2) lie about what actually happened, or (3) accept that these lessons would never be shared. I found only the first one of these options to be tolerable.

I’ve also made a few simplifications to the stories to make them easier to read. For example, the original draft of Lessons included over one hundred and fifty named characters. I’ve managed to whittle that list down to a smaller, manageable total. This was mainly done by describing peripherally involved individuals by job title only. I also edited out a few minor players, and in a few rare instances, combined multiple holders of the same job into a single character.

Dialogue ranges anywhere from completely fabricated (to make the reading more interesting, or to illustrate a specific point), to absolutely exact verbatim discussion. I’ve tried to do only as much of the former as was necessary to keep the book from being bone dry, and as much of the latter as my memory allowed.

I recall one of my close confidants once describing a particularly annoying executive as …the hero of all his own stories. It’s a characteristic of human nature to see the world from our own perspective, and not much of a stretch to think all our actions and opinions are always fully justified.

After considerable reflection during this writing, I’ve realized I made quite a few mistakes in the things that I said, did, or didn’t do during my career.

In fact, some of my most important Lessons Learned occurred when I made a gaff, sometimes of epic proportion. In the spirit of objectivity, I’ve tried to be as quick to admit my own faults as I am to point out the shortcomings of others. Hopefully, the reader won’t find me falling into the trap of being the hero of every story told here.

During the review process, I’ve had several people ask me why I wrote this book. I must confess, in the beginning I did it simply because I had a great deal of repressed anger surrounding my last years in corporate life. Writing about those things provided a catharsis of sorts, allowing me to clear away the wreckage and move on to a new career. As the stories began to appear on paper, however, I realized there were valuable things I’d gleaned during the course of my career – the kinds of things never taught in an MBA course. I decided if just one or two of these lessons could help a young, rising manager avoid learning the same Lessons the way I had, then some small good would be achieved by telling the tales.

In this way, Lessons Learned the Hard Way was born.

John Samuels

September, 2012

Table of Contents

Forward

Chapter 1 – Great Expectations

Chapter 2 – That Damned Corporate Conference

Chapter 3 – Sometimes the Consultants are Idiots

Chapter 4 – Inventors Really can be Crackpots

Chapter 5 – Hey, that Wasn’t Funny!

Chapter 6 – Things Just Run Better When We’re Behind

Chapter 7 – With Partners Like These

Chapter 8 – The Brown Briefcase Brigade

Chapter 9 – Yes, They are Just Big Children

Chapter 10 – 26 Discs and a New Car

Chapter 11 – Learning to Love Ambiguity

Chapter 12 – Is there a Referee in the House?

Chapter 13 – Everyone in Management Knew

Chapter 14 – How Not to Buy a Company

Chapter 15 – Sometimes You’re Just Too Honest…

Chapter 16 – The Rotten Contract

Chapter 17 – We’ll Know ‘it’ When we See ‘it’…

Chapter 18 – This Can’t go on Forever

Chapter 19 – I Felt Like I didn’t Negotiate Well

Chapter 20 – A Fancy Office is Most Important

Chapter 21 – Never Trust your Best Friend

Chapter 22 – You’re Just the Wrong Guy

Chapter 23 – We’ve Never Done a Good Acquisition

Chapter 24 – Decisions, Decisions

Chapter 25 – It’s Tough to Fire an Owner

Chapter 26 – He Went on Vacation

Chapter 27 – Just Change the Assumptions

Chapter 28 – Unfired

Chapter 29 – The Silly Solar Support Stucture Scheme

Chapter 30 – …You Dive Down, I go Up

Chapter 31 – Putting Someone Behind the Eight-ball

Chapter 32 – The Power of a Vindictive State Attorney

Chapter 33 – Attack Dog

Chapter 34 – Is this the end?

Appendix – The Lessons, a Summary

Acknowledgements

About the Author

1 – Great Expectations

I arrive at Opaque Manufacturing looking for a kinder, gentler work environment.

Can a person be an effective and successful leader of a public corporation without being an asshole? That question was very much on my mind when I thought through the three job opportunities I had in front of me – four really, if I included the option of staying on as President of Falcon Instruments, a division of Dawsongen Industries based in Southern California.

But I wasn’t really considering staying, because Brian Boneface, the Chairman of the Dawsongen Board was an asshole, and his heir apparent Charles Cheesefinger, was an even bigger one. Cheesefinger was trying to out asshole Boneface, which would be quite a feat. He was such a huge jerk, that I couldn’t envision working for him. I was looking for an out – preferably one that would be close to the opposite of the ultra-aggressive style I had learned to hate at Dawsongen.

LESSON 01.1: When changing jobs, look beyond the absence of those characteristics you hated in your last position. Failure to do this will likely lead to a new, different, set of dislikes which will again leave you restless and ready to move on.

I thought back to my last strategy conference at the famous Dawsongen Conference Center – Boneface had come swooping in on his helicopter, one of the fleet of more than fifteen private aircraft available to the senior managers of the company, and had proceeded to verbally tear my new Vice President of Engineering limb from limb. The subject of the beating: Not increasing engineering spending is not the same as cutting it.

My nervous VP had inadvertently walked right into this buzz-saw by tossing out this casual statement at the beginning of his presentation: …we’ve cut back new product development programs…to the bone. The statement was not factually correct, but flaying him for more than twenty minutes in front of an audience of thirty managers was typical at Dawsongen. And it was beyond humiliating. On my way back to the airport, I rode with my Director of Human Resources, Dean Wolf, and we decided to let the new VP go. I considered it a mercy killing.

Since that event nearly a year earlier, I had grown to hate each trip back to corporate headquarters more and more. Once each quarter I was required to update the Dawsongen corporate staff on our progress at a budget review meeting. Over an hour-long presentation, I had the chance to identify every possible performance weakness, and describe our corrective actions – a process I came to think of as a quarterly gum scraping.

In principle this was a good exercise, and since Boneface rarely attended the meetings, they generally were less punitive. Sam Cranston, Dawsongen’s Co-Chairman, generally presided over the budget review, and while he could be tough, he often had an encouraging word or two for me – a rare bit of positive reinforcement in what was normally a very negative and hostile environment. Over the last few quarters, however, heir apparent Charles Cheesefinger had begun to attend the meetings, and his presence turned them from modestly terrifying to deeply hated.

In one of my last budget reviews, and the first where Cheesefinger attended, I presented a trend chart of customer orders. Cheesefinger immediately pounced on a small decline in order flow during the final couple of weeks. I explained that this was due to the holidays reducing the number of working days, but I didn’t have the data at my fingertips to prove it. As a result, I was sent back to to my divisional office on the far side of the country to get my facts straight, and ordered to return next week to present the same material again.

This entire episode was executed solely for intimidation purposes. Day by day order trends were an interesting, but not a particularly insightful measure of the performance of the business I was managing. What really mattered to Dawsongen were profits. Quarterly profits, in fact. My orders, which were insignificant to Dawsongen anyway, had already bounced back in the current quarter, and we were well ahead of plan on profitability.

I could have easily pulled together the data Cheesefinger demanded given thirty minutes alone, but the message was delivered so much more dramatically by forcing me to fly home and then waste another three days on the return trip.

Falcon Instruments division was a trivial part of Dawsongen Industries’s total empire. My division represented less than fifty million dollars in annual sales in a Corporation whose revenues were more than twelve billion dollars at the time – less than half of one percent of the total.

It was during this particular torture session that I decided I needed to get out. On my way back home, I started planning my departure.

I don’t mean to brag, but I was a pretty attractive asset at that point in my career. I had the right education: a BS in Engineering Science from Ohio State University, and an MBA from Kellog. I had good work experience in manufacturing companies: nearly ten years at a division of the Ford Motor Company, and my seven years at Dawsongen Industries. I was only thirty-six years old, but had already held a President’s title for three years. I was articulate, and cock-sure. I had all the answers. And I interviewed well, to boot.

I thought about my three new opportunities – staying at Dawsongen was definitely out. One of the three was definitely less attractive to me than the others.

The least attractive offer was to be President of an automotive division of the SPX Corporation. It meant moving to Minnesota, and it meant re-entering the automotive industry – neither of which was an enticing prospect. But most concerning was the corporate culture, which reminded me too much of Dawsongen. My final interview with SPX was at their corporate headquarters. There I met a CEO, who was dynamic and forceful, much as Boneface appeared to outsiders. I was told: Only a fool wouldn’t want to hitch his wagon to SPX. The arrogance alone was enough to make me think twice.

Well, maybe I was a fool, because SPX was out. The risk of jumping from Boneface to a virtual clone was unacceptably high. That left me with offers from Danaher Corporation and Opaque Manufacturing. Which one was I going to go with?

I was intrigued with Danaher. That interest started when I’d participated on a Dawsongen team working on the acquisition of Sucaf Associates a year earlier. My assignment had been to evaluate the synergies between Falcon Instruments and Bell Particle, a Sucaf division located in Washington. The Dawsongen team ultimately put up some pretty high valuation numbers including significant synergies, but we lost the bidding to Danaher.

How had they seen more value in the deal than we had?

Word was also starting to circulate concerning something called the Danaher Business System, a set of management tools used by the company to execute their strategy. Danaher’s strategy appeared to be remarkably similar to Dawsongen’s – growth through acquisition, and profits through subsequent cost reductions. Except Danaher seemed to be getting the job done more successfully. I had always been enthusiastic about learning new things, and this sounded like something worth learning.

The downside to the Danaher offer was its location – I would manage the Bell Particle business, and another division in the same segment Danaher already owned. One was located in rural Washington state, and the other was in a suburb of New York. Neither location was particularly appealing to Laura, my spouse.

Opaque Manufacturing was an entirely different kettle of fish. I had a friend there, Al Airknock, who I’d worked shoulder to shoulder with at Dawsongen when we were both assigned to their Kansas City corporate offices. Not only was Al a friend and a known quantity, he would be my boss at Opaque. And Opaque was located in Indianapolis, which was a plus for my wife. Her grandmother lived in Indianapolis, as well as an aunt and numerous cousins. We had never lived anyplace where there were extended family members.

I liked the job at Opaque as well. They were the world leader in a niche market for Permanently Affixed Chemical Spraying Systems or PACS. The machines were huge steel devices that were used in agricultural applications, and I would be responsible for the global business for the product. It was an invention that helped farmers by increasing crop yields, and thus the world’s supply of food. And it also used smaller amounts of fertilizer and other chemicals compared to the common practices in place, due to the higher frequency and smaller quantity of each application. It was a product I could be proud to be associated with.

The icing on the cake at Opaque had been my interview with Chairman and CEO, Walter Wimpball. Walt was a German, and came across as the antithesis of a Charles Cheesefinger or Brian Boneface. He was soft-spoken, calm, and intellectual. He seemed to be the servant leader type I’d recently been reading about in the Harvard Business Review, and had fantasized about working for some day. In addition, with Wimpball at fifty years old, I would be the ideal age to move into the CEO position when he eventually retired.

LESSON 01.2: Don’t rely on only your own observations of company strategy, culture, or the character of those above you in the chain of command. Seek out those who know, and ask them. A little time invested in this can save you from a costly mistake.

In reality, I knew the decision was already made. We were headed to Indianapolis and Opaque Manufacturing. I started my new job with great anticipation, and supreme confidence that I not only had what it took to succeed, but I had what it took to ultimately become the CEO of Opaque – the type of role I had been striving toward since I’d started my career.

Little did I know that my education as a senior manager was about to begin. Little did I know that I was about to face some of the most bizarre, and seemingly irrational situations I would ever see in my life. Little did I know that I was about to experience a career’s worth of Lessons Learned the Hard Way….

2 – That Damned Corporate Conference

My introduction to Opaque, and an intense schedule.

Have you started on your Corporate Conference Presentation yet? Al Airknock asked.

Corporate Conference? I asked, hoping he was talking about something totally unlike the conferences we used to have at Dawsongen Industries.

Airknock and I had spent a few years together at Dawsongen before he became my boss at Opaque, and we had both suffered through their Corporate Conference, a veritable gauntlet of pressure and aggression. When I left the company, it was one aspect of Dawsongen I certainly was glad to have behind me.

I’ve convinced Walt to hold a Corporate Conference this year. We’ll use it to roll all the division five year strategic plans into an overall Corporate Strategy. It’ll be like old times.

I loathed those old times, I muttered to myself.

This was sounding horrifyingly familiar, and was giving me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

When I’d been an analyst in the strategic planning department at Dawsongen, I’d worked six eighteen-hour days a week during the month leading up to, as Laura used to call it that damned Corporate Conference. Back then, I spent my time helping the CEO and various business unit leaders put together their presentations for a huge two-day production that included everyone who was anyone in Dawsongen management. I’d quickly grown to despise the assignment. Every nerve was on edge, and every trace of bad temper was amplified during the high pressure days leading up to the big show.

Are you serious? I asked.

Yep. It took me a while to talk him into it, but it’s a go. In about a month.

But Al, I hated the Corporate Conference at Dawsongen….

You’ll thank me later. Since you and I are the only ones here that know what it should look like, it’s your opportunity to really shine. You can show Walt why we hired a smart guy like you.

I shook my head, but responded in the affirmative. I didn’t want to go through this again – even if it was going to be a somewhat watered down version. But I could already tell there was no talking Airknock out of it.

LESSON 02.1: When your boss is enthusiastic about an idea, it’s exactly the wrong time to point out the potential problems with his position. Sometimes you have to let him learn his own Lessons the Hard Way.

Using pushpins, I posted the first draft of my presentation on the wall of my office. Probably I could have just edited it on the computer, but that wasn’t the way we did it at Dawsongen. Besides, posting it for all to see did pull me back to the material over and over again, allowing for plenty of fine-tuning. I found myself explaining the presentation over and over again to everyone who walked into my office which, while tedious, was good practice.

Opaque didn’t have a corporate planning department, any analysts, or anyone even remotely resembling the young MBAs that had done the bulk of the work for the Corporate Conference at Dawsongen. We used to refer to those guys as chart flippers a pejorative term that described the lowliest function fulfilled during the conference – changing overhead slides during an executive’s presentation.

But there were no chart flippers at Opaque. Instead, all I had to help me was my already overloaded staff.

I broke up the total presentation into pieces, and assigned them to various staff members. Since I pretty well knew what I was doing, I kept the lion’s share for myself. I was relying heavily on Rob Rochlitz, the VP of Marketing and Sales, however, to obtain all sorts of competitive data.

My presentation would be a brutally honest summary of our competitive position, and would provide several strategies for how to make us a more dominant leader in the PACS market. I knew exactly what Airknock was looking for, and spent hours and hours staring at the slides to get them as close to perfection as humanly possible.

Unfortunately, other senior executives didn’t take the assignment as seriously.

Three days before the Corporate Conference was to begin, I was already exhausted. Keeping up with what was going on in the PACS division, advising several other corporate staffers about their presentations, and putting the final touches on my own, had kept me at work late every night. The prior night, in fact, I hadn’t left the office until well after midnight.

The competitive data from Rochlitz proved to be extremely difficult to get. Most frustrating was the inability to get any hard data on our market share by state – something I judged would be nice to have, but not a disaster if omitted. Rochlitz was intent, however, on finishing the assignment even if it killed him – trying to construct the answer out of a mountain of data, and a long list of shaky assumptions. Eventually, we were all waiting on him to complete his analysis so we could wrap up our own material.

Make it up, I finally told him. Nobody is going to dispute the data. Or care, for that matter. There’s a time for truth, and a time for charts. Now is the time for charts.

But what if somebody wants to know where the data comes from?

They won’t. But just in case, we’ll tell them the truth – it’s your best estimate based on…whatever you end up using to come up with the numbers.

He nodded and returned to his office. In a short time he returned with the data we needed to fill out the last of our required charts for the presentation. I salved both of our consciences by putting a footnote at the bottom, noting the source was an internal estimate. Of course, the footnote was in eight point font, and no one in the audience would bother to read it.

LESSON 02.2: There will never be the perfect data you need to prove your strategies, plans, or assumptions are completely correct. Part of the art of management is learning when close enough is good enough.

Early the next morning, we had a dry run scheduled with Airknock.

I wasn’t sure what to expect.

At Dawsongen, a presentation dry run was typically much worse than the experience during the actual meeting itself. The dry run was when the most knowledgable senior executives tested and challenged the message you were delivering, and tried to guess every possible counter-argument Brian Boneface might launch at you. The dry run could be brutal, long, nitpicky, and would also focus on every stupid little formatting detail of the slides.

When I entered the room, an auditorium at the local art museum where the conference would be held in two days, there was already electricity in the air.

Do you always drive your car looking in the rear view mirror? Steve Skullwad, President of the Plating Division, shouted with a sneer.

Skullwad and Airknock were about thirty feet apart, staring each other down. Both men were red-faced, and the tension was thick enough to cut with a knife.

"I’m telling you that rate of growth is going to have zero credibility. It’s not supported by anything in the past, or anything you say in your presentation," Airknock said. He wasn’t shouting, but he was talking fast, and in a loud voice.

This is bullshit, Skullwad nearly screamed.

That’s not the point….

I don’t give a shit what the point is!

Airknock along with everyone else in the room just stared at Skullwad – in my experience, a subordinate didn’t scream at his boss often and survive.

This entire process sucks. I’ve already presented this fucking strategy, and everyone signed off on it, Skullwad continued, now in a full rant.

Stop it, Airknock said, quietly.

"You have no idea what will or won’t work in this business. I’ve been in it for ten years. Ten years! I’ll tell you what will and won’t work!"

Stop it, Airknock repeated, slightly louder.

I’m sick of all this second guessing, and I’m sick of this process, and most of all, I’m sick of YOU!

Stop it.

If you don’t like what I’ve got to say, then you get your fat ass up here and make the presentation!

Stop it, Airknock said, still calmly, but a bit louder again. You’re embarrassing me, and you’re embarrassing yourself.

At that moment, Skullwad seemed to remember where he was and suddenly sat down.

Let’s take a break, Airknock said to the room.

I gladly left, but noticed both Airknock and Skullwad stayed behind. Probably for a fight to the death, I decided.

Skullwad’s dry run was certainly a flashback to the Dawsongen process. Now I was even more nervous than I had been when I walked in the door.

Five minutes later, I saw Skullwad and Airknock walk back out into the lobby laughing and slapping each other on the back.

It was as if the blow-up had never happened.

Only Airknock never forgot it. Later he told me that some of Skullwad’s comments had stung so deeply that he just couldn’t see the man in the same light.

LESSON 02.3: You might be able to get away with an anger explosion in your job, but if you personalize your rant, forgiveness will be hard to come by.

I was up next, and was feeling the same sense of dread I’d experienced prior to a dry run at Dawsongen. But I wasn’t momentarily tempted to run in the opposite direction, screaming – I just wanted to get the damned gum-scraping over.

The earlier blow-up with Skullwad must have taken the fight out of Airknock – at least for the moment – because he was a pussycat when he initially began to review my material.

We did my run through with printed slides in frames, rather than using a computer. The presentation would be made using two screens, and the auditorium didn’t have a set-up to accommodate it. I was going to do my presentation old school.

Rob Rochlitz was flipping slides on one side of the dual screens, and Adam Surestorm, Rochlitz’s director of Product Management, was handling the other. I started my speech, which still wasn’t final at that point – we’d had so many last minute changes to the slides that half the points I originally wanted to make had been blown away. I was flying by the seat of my pants, knowing that one slip of the tongue might bring down the wrath of Airknock.

Stop! he said, when I was near the middle of the deck of overhead slides.

I froze. What the heck did he want?

Go back on the left…more…more…to that blue slide, he commanded.

Surestorm sifted through the pile of used slides, and flinched as he slid one onto the overhead projector.

Not that one! Airknock yelled. The pie chart.

He didn’t add, you moron! but the thought was hanging in the air.

Another slide went up, and Airknock studied it for a moment. It was a pie chart showing current and future acreage being managed by PACS, broken down by crop.

That’s wrong, he said.

I don’t think… I started to say. But Airknock ignored me.

In fact, it’s garbage! Throw that piece of shit chart on the floor.

Surestorm looked at me with a question in his eyes, and I nodded slightly.

The slide went on the floor.

I was surprised Airknock didn’t demand that he spit on it, too.

After that one incident, we went back to where I’d left off, and finished the dry run without further comment.

I’d managed to escape relatively unscathed.

~ ~ ~

The Corporate Conference was anticlimactic.

I managed to muddle through my presentation, and everyone told me it was good, although I have trouble recalling any specifics. With the build-up of exhaustion leading up to the event, it was a bit of a blur. I did note a couple of the presentations by other division presidents didn’t really hang together but maybe I was being overly critical. If I’d still been at Dawsongen, Boneface would have taken the earliest possible opportunity to rip those men new assholes. But Opaque wasn’t Dawsongen, and Wimpball was pretty much the antithesis of Brian Boneface.

That night, at a huge corporate dinner, the company invited a well known professional football coach in to give a speech. I was looking forward to hearing it, and expected inspirational words, and maybe an appeal for better teamwork. I could already tell that Opaque could definitely use better internal cooperation.

Instead, the coach decided it would be more fun to try out his amateur comedy routine. The jokes were mildly entertaining, but he crossed the line several times by insulting the company and Walter Wimpball, our CEO. Wimpball, to his credit, laughed along with the rest of us, and seemed to take it all in stride.

The Corporate Conference was never again repeated at Opaque, and I can’t help but thinking that speech was at least part of the reason for its demise.

It was an event I was certainly happy to see go the way of the dinosaur.

3 – Sometimes the Consultants are Idiots

The development of SCAS, and how it missed the market.

SCAS has been the cleanest, most problem free new product development we’ve ever done, said Rob Rochlitz, Vice President of Marketing and Sales.

Silently, I winced. Not because Rochitz was lying, or even embellishing – at least not as far as we knew at that point. Rather, I knew we were still a long way from introduction of the product, and statements in absolutes, like the one Rochlitz was making, often came back to haunt. Repeating the remark in front of CEO Walter Wimpball, and my boss, Group President Al Airknock, at our quarterly performance review, was a sure-fire way to eventually have it thrown back in our collective faces.

Unless we were able to exceed the original expectations for the project, that is. But then exceeding expectations, which were already set at a stratospherically-high level, rarely seemed to happen.

I certainly didn’t think it was likely with SCAS.

I‘d been at Opaque about a month when I first heard about the SCAS project. The concept was pretty simple – SCAS was intended to be a specialty sprayer of concentrated liquid farm chemicals that rode on the structure of one of our Permanently Affixed Chemical Spraying systems, or PACS as they were called.

Conceptual understanding was pretty easy to come by. Determining whether the project would be a success or failure was much more complicated.

LESSON 03.1: When still in progress, it is safer to express concerns about a project than brag about how well it is going. The time for bragging is after successful completion of the project, when the results can speak for themselves.

To understand SCAS, one first needs to understand the functioning of a PACS chemical sprayer. A PACS system is an overhead mechanical chemical application device used in large farm fields. It consists of a water pumping station that pushes a mixture of pressurized water and chemicals down a long steel pipeline. The pipeline is supported by a series of towers, with tires and electric motors to drive the towers around the field. Coming out of the pipe are a number of hoses that carry the mixture to individual spray heads. The system was designed for fertilizers and other diluted chemical applications.

The systems can be quite large. A typical PACS consists of a stationary central base and five to ten drive towers, whose length would be roughly a quarter mile. Some PACS reach a length of three quarters of a mile, with a few even longer still.

PACS were already used to apply many farm chemicals and fertilizers, but they were limited to materials that could be highly diluted. Any chemical that needed to be applied in a concentrated form needed to be put on with a ground rig or through aerial application (crop dusters). My wife, Laura, describes ground rigs as gigantic insects, especially when they are driving down rural roads. Ground rigs and aerial application methods are expensive, and weather and crop conditions can sometimes make their use impossible. To remove these limitations, the SCAS concept, a system hanging on the already present PACS structure, was born.

The original concept, as far as I was ever able to learn, was first described by Opaque’s already retired Chief Engineer. It was initially targeted at a particular crop and chemical application – the vegetative kill on potatoes – with recognition it should also be usable for other chemicals and crops, if it proved out there. The concept, just like the PACS, was pretty simple – a separate polymer tube suspended from the PACS pipeline, with its own set of spray heads.

While the engineers and marketers at Opaque knew quite a lot about PACSs and applying fertilizers to crops, they didn’t know much about chemical application – particularly the powerful concentrated types we were working with in SCAS. That was why Opaque hired Pyrofarm Consulting, a marketing firm from Kansas City, to review the project, and advise us on what performance characteristics were necessary to make the product a success.

A typical PACS of a quarter mile in length, at that time cost the company about twenty-five thousand dollars to produce, and was typically sold to the farmer for about forty thousand installed in his field. Pyrofarm’s study, which was delivered to Opaque senior management before I arrived at the company, confirmed an SCAS sales price of ten to twelve thousand would be workable for potatoes.

With the external validation from the Kansas City marketing experts, the company forged ahead with development of the product. Unfortunately, the expert consultants (and our own people) missed a few critical points that turned this example of new product development prowess into a disaster. And then, I fell for a recovery strategy that made the situation even worse!

LESSON 03.2: When becoming involved with an already active project, carefully review and challenge the underlying assumptions upon which it is justified. You get one shot at disclaiming responsibility for any gaffs, and that is at the start of your involvement. Any hedging later looks too much like whining to do any good.

~ ~ ~

It was two months after the fateful quarterly review when Rob Rochlitz, and his lead Product Manager, Adam Surestorm visited my office.

John, we have a problem with the SCAS system, Rochlitz led off the conversation.

I’d been worried about the project because company expectations were so high. Now, I felt my stomach twist in a knot. Outwardly I tried not to betray my concern.

What’s the problem?

Some of the initial batch of sprinklers are cracking when we run them on our bench test, said Surestorm, taking the lead in the conversation from Rochlitz.

Why would that be happening?

We’re not sure. Our initial guess is a chemical incompatibility between the herbicides and the spray system’s plastics.

In situations like this, I had a tendency to revert to being an engineer. I asked a number of questions about chemicals, materials of construction, mold parting lines, and pressures. In the end, I thought the problem might indeed be a chemical compatibility issue, and it was probably worsened by the design of the part and the molding tool.

While we’re looking at alternative materials, let’s check the costs to change the molds, too, I concluded.

Rochlitz and Surestorm exchanged a knowing glance, like they were children whom I had just discovered playing with matches.

What? I asked.

"Well, getting the tooling changed will be…difficult," Rochlitz replied.

"What do you mean by difficult?"

The tools are in China, and the supplier hasn’t been very responsive since he shipped the initial order of sprayers to us.

"Describe not very responsive," I said.

They were never very good about answering the phone. And as soon as we started to suggest an alternative material, they said it was impossible. Now they aren’t even replying to my emails.

This story wasn’t getting any better.

Who owns the tooling? I asked. Sometimes possession and ownership could become a little…confused when it came to molds, especially when they were located half way round the world.

We definitely own the tooling, Surestorm said, confidently. The molder acknowledges it.

Can we pull the tooling from the current supplier, and send it to somebody else who will make the parts?

We don’t know any other molders in China.

How about in the U.S.? I asked.

Yeah, there are some molders here that we currently work with.

We discussed the merits of moving the tooling to a more cooperative supplier, balancing that against the higher piece part costs, and the cost to ship the heavy steel molds.

All the while I was wondering: What in the hell are we doing placing the tooling for a new product in China? We’re steel fabricators, not plastics experts. New product, new process, new vendor, and China to boot? That’s a recipe for disaster.

LESSON 03.3: New product, new market, and a new supplier, is a prescription for failure. When working on a high risk project, try to keep the amount of new to a minimum – it will significantly increase the chances of success.

Then another thought crossed my mind.

When we bought the current inventory of parts, how many did we purchase? I asked.

I think the purchasing department bought an entire shipping container’s worth, Rochlitz responded, as if he and Surestorm had no part in the decision. Then he added: There’s probably half a million dollars of product sitting in building 118.

An entire shipping container’s worth of sprayers? That was roughly a lifetime’s supply. And now we find out the product is unusable! The future half-million dollar inventory write-off was going to attract a lot of attention. But it wasn’t something that had to be dealt with right now, so I filed that issue away for later consideration.

So if you guys are right, and the problem is material incompatibility, then that entire container load of product is scrap, right? I was trying to force them to come to grips with the magnitude of the mistake.

They both nodded, sheepishly.

The picture of what had happened was getting clearer. Probably the Chinese supplier had quoted the job too low, lost money on this first container’s worth, and now wasn’t interested in investing any more time in this lost cause. That was most likely the reason for the poor responsiveness.

Mr. China supplier definitely wasn’t going to help us figure this out. We decided to move the tooling to a U.S. molder, and I gritted my teeth, certain this wasn’t going to be the end of the story.

The best new product development project ever at Opaque PACS, had just received its first smudges of dirt. Unfortunately, there were a lot more to come.

~ ~ ~

Winter passed, and the molds were shipped to a company in Texas. During the cold months, our test systems sat in farmers’ fields, with unknown quantities of spray heads cracking in the cold. The molder in Texas considered our problem, and decided making the part in the proposed new material wouldn’t work with the Chinese tooling. It was never completely clear to me why, but I had the impression they thought the mold was of very poor quality, and didn’t want to stake their reputation on it – especially since the new material would be much more difficult to work with. The decision to scrap the old tools immediately cost us a hundred thousand dollars, and then we spent another quarter of a million to have new molds made.

The new material was an engineered plastic costing three times what we’d paid for the old stuff. I didn’t