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This PROACTIVE Problem Solving Newsletter and the book/training by the same name are my answer to the calls for help I’m hearing from team members, managers and leaders.
The stresses each group is feeling are different. What isn’t different is a universal sense that “the old way of working isn’t working anymore.”
Leadership tells me that everything they’ve learned in school and as they rose through the ranks doesn’t seem to work with today’s employees and hyper competitive marketplace.
Managers report that they are wasting 3.5 hours a day dealing with employee mistakes and broken work systems. Further, some 74% of managers say they don’t have the training and support they need to help their employees.
Team Members are so frustrated that only 32% feel actively engaged. The old way of working is not working any more.
“I read PROACTIVE Problem Solving in a single sitting. I couldn’t put it down. In my opinion, this is not only Doug’s best book yet but also one of the best business books I have read.
I appreciated how clear and down-to-earth the writing is. It doesn’t feel like a dry business book, it’s engaging and easy to apply whether you’re leading a team or just trying to improve how you work. There were quite a few “aha!” moments where I found myself highlighting sections to come back to later.”
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Read the first two pages of the Introduction below:
An Antidote To The Multitude of Problems You Face
We are living in a time of unprecedented change. The consequence is a never-ending stream of problems in our professional and personal lives. Concurrently companies are facing dramatic drops in organizational engagement. Eureka! Ranch research finds that 44% of managers feel employee engagement is worse since Covid.
The Eureka! Ranch study also found the average manager wastes 3.5 hours a day reacting to flawed company work systems and employee mistakes. Interestingly 78% of this waste is from flawed company work systems. These include poor work instructions, flawed digital systems, ineffective communications and needless bureaucracy. Only 22% of the wasted time is from employee mistakes. The only effective way I’ve found to address this epidemic of waste, is to engage the entire organization – employees, managers and leadership in proactively identifying and fixing the work system problems.
I learned this as the co-founder and CEO of the highly disruptive Brain Brew Bourbon Distillery. Despite the Covid pandemic, by applying the lessons in this book to engage employees, Brain Brew grew from shipping a few thousand to shipping over 100,000 cases a year.
Stated simply, the complexity of today’s world makes it nearly impossible for leaders to command and control their organizations. Rather, they need to engage and embrace the ideas, insights and thinking of all their team members.
On June 24, 1980, a documentary broadcast by NBC told the story of how Dr. W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician, helped change the Japanese economy after WWII from a focus on low cost to high quality and reliability. Host Lloyd Dobyns had this to say about the need for broad scale worker engagement:
“In almost all of the solutions to the problem of productivity, there is a common thread. Each of them includes, in some way, worker participation. Every expert to whom we talked with, agreed that no solution can succeed fully unless it includes the active participation of the people who actually do the work, union or nonunion. All humans think, and nowhere is it chiseled in stone, that those in management think best.”
NBC White Paper–“If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”
My previous books, most recently Driving Eureka!, teach how to create and execute ideas for growing sales and profits through disruptive strategies, offerings and business models.
This book is different. It’s about helping YOU and those around you, become PROACTIVE Problem Solvers. It’s about teaching you how to move your mindset from “reactive” to embracing a more optimistic and “proactive” way of life.
The need for this book became real to me over the past few years, as I experienced the thrills and challenges of leading what is arguably the world’s most disruptive Bourbon distillery.
Leading the Brain Brew Distillery has taught me that while disruptive ideas for innovative products, services and business models are critical, having a team of PROACTIVE problem solvers is just as important. If I were to break down the relative importance, I would estimate that when it comes to sustained success, 25% is due to having a disruptive product/service, 25% is a result of a disruptive business model and fully 50% is due to the never ending continuous improvements by employees.
At Brain Brew, innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day is not optional. It is the job of every team member. From operations, to finance, to procurement, to marketing and sales, the Brain Brew Crew is on a never-ending quest to find smarter ways of working.
The distillery has the quirky name “Brain Brew” to remind team members that our collective mission is to work smarter than our competitors. Or said in the irreverent language of the Brain Brew Crew, our focus is to STOP THE STUPID.
By “STUPID,” we mean the stupid processes, work systems and bureaucratic junk that develops within all organizations and industries. When Brain Brew was created, I had the preconception that we could create our production system once and be done with it. I was wrong. What I didn’t understand what the need was to reinvent our work systems as production grew from 600 to 10,000 to 24,000 to 48,000 to 70,000 to 100,000 cases. With each leap in production, work processes that had been SMART, suddenly became STUPID. Dramatic growth impacted everything, from raw material flow to work systems to production rhythm.
Cheers
Doug Hall
Founder – Eureka! Ranch
Co-Founder – Dexter Bourbon Company from the Brain Brew Distillery
Co-Founder – Eureka! Ranch Distilled Spirits Group
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