A "numbers guy" can have problems

I am a numbers guy.  I am an engineer.  The two are sort of synonymous.  Being a numbers guy can get you in trouble with guys or gals who are not numbers obsessed or oriented.

Tear down at the end of a trade show is always a bit hectic.  You are almost always in a hurry to get done and get away  ---  to get on the road, to catch a plane, or perhaps just to relax. Over the years I have "worked" maybe 300 - 400 trade shows and have helped set up and tear down way more than anyone should be forced to endure. (Here I am, headed off tomorrow to do another one, with solo set up and to help tear down. Ugh!)

I have digressed to set the stage for explaining why I was once accused, after the fact, of doing "time studies" on two of our staff members to be sure they were moving fast enough getting materials moved out to the truck during tear down after a trade show.    I confess, I was timing them, but only to judge how long it would take them to complete the tear down and move out if I did not stay to help.  I did not want to make the burden too great.  At least one of them will probably read this post and  may still question if my motive was pure.   

A numbers guy can have problems, or create them for himself.

Sales numbers, money numbers, time numbers, distance numbers, probability numbers; the opportunities for numbers people are endless.

Last fall, I did a series of calculations involving several factors and the rate of rise of the national debt for the last several presidents.  I was going to present it in my political blog (link top right), but it never made it to the "light of day."  Too many words were required to explain it all.  It probably would have caused me problems anyway.

I once asked my friend, Lawyer John,  what he thought the probabilties of winning a particular case were.  I was floored that he had not considered such a thing.  He is a really smart guy with a scientific mind and I was sure all really smart people with scientific minds would think in numbers.

When you start thinking in numbers about things that not everyone tries to quantify, especially if it appears that you are trying to judge them, you may have a problem.

Don't get me wrong though.  There are lots of things that cannot or should not be quantified!!!

Is it an obsession?  Or worse?  A narrow view of the world?  Or merely an attempt to bring some order to chaos?   What else is an engineer to believe?

If you are running a business, any business, you'd better be able to think in numbers, even if not all the time.  Otherwise, you'll probably lose your direction.

 
My friend Larry, a self confessed numbers guy, writes an interesting (to me anyway) blog about the Cocoa Beach real estate market. (See his Nov 28, 2012 post for his confession)
Check out his blog by clicking this.  
Then you can go to November 28 to read the confession.  


-30-

You've got to tell them to sell them

"Back in the day" as they say, Hamms beer was immensely popular.  In the 60's, as an engineering student at the University of Iowa, I did my share to help the cause, especially at Doc's Bar.

John Cimino, of Des Moines, owned Cimino Distributing Company, one of the top Hamms distributors in the nation.    In perhaps 1980, I read a story sbout John Cimino in the Des Moines Register.  My takeaway from the story was this quote:

You've got to tell them to sell them and if you don't tell them, you will never sell them.

That has been sort of  guiding principle ever since and reminds me that you can never stop selling.

The story went on to tell how John Cimino spent every Friday night going from bar to bar in his territory, telling people about Hamms beer.  Of course, he bought them samples to backup what he was telling them.

A few months ago, I was researching for this post and found that I had the quote wrong, though the sentiment was correct.  Never mind; the quote, as I remembered it, has been one of my mantras for over thirty years.  I stand by it!

The Captain Speaks

Just ten minutes ago I got off United flight 1629 from Las Vegas to Denver.  As an "in-flight announcer" the Captain may have been the best I have ever flown with.  He spoke loudly enough to hear and added just the right amount of humor.  He added a couple of times that we had an "excellent" and "fantastic" crew whom he knew was "taking good care of you."  Just little things like that make the flight better.  It all adds up.   (see diminutive additives post of January 25, 2013)

The Captain was standing up when I exited the plane. I said to him that he should be "the model of announcements from the cockpit for every pilot in the company."  He thanked me with a chuckle.

I have long said that you "have every right to complain" about bad service, but you also "have every obligation to compliment" good service.

A secret from a master salesman

Harlan was my mother's cousin and he was a master salesman!

As sort of a retirement activity, he became a salesman for the area Harvestore dealer.  Those with an agriculture background will know what a Harvestore silo is, for the rest suffice it to say that the presence of a Harvestore structure on your farm announced to the world that you were a success and could afford the best.


Harlan once told me the secret of his rise to be a top salesman in the whole company, not just the area dealership.

Harlan said he always wanted to get into the house for meetings and preferably to have both husband and wife present.  But his secret was to see if either or both husband and wife had any vanity items, such as a nice car, fancy truck, or especially, nice home furnishings and expensive jewelry.  The furniture, jewelry, and clothing were an instant indication that he could appeal to the wife to give approval and nudge the husband into making the purchase (investment).

As a corollary, I once read that a good salesperson will "flatter the prospect until you (the salesperson) are embarrassed, but not until he (the prospet) is embarrassed."

The Principle of Diminutive Additives

The Principle of Diminutive Additives^TM

The principle of diminutive additives is very simple:  Little things add up.  This principle, important in explaining all manner of things that happen in our lives was discovered, well really just named, by me (Rich Borglum) in about 1985.

5000 little drops of rain can make you very wet.  If you start out the day with a temperature of 65 degrees and 20 little degrees start running away one at a time, you will be cold at the end of day. 

If you eat just 100 extra calories every day, you will gain a lot of weight over a period of a few years.  If you save just a dollar a day, at 5 percent annual interest, at the end of 30 years you will have $24,967.

If you save just 20 seconds on a manufacturing operation, you will save 33 minutes while processing only 100 pieces.  That is 26.4 hours when doing only 4800 parts.  Do you still think little things don’t add up??

Or let’s go on our ten minute break, but add just a couple of minutes to each one.  If we have 30 people each working 250 days  --- that is 7500 total “people days.”  At four minutes a day for each “people day”, that is 30,000 minutes, which is 500 hours a year. 

When you go home tonight, if you have a traffic signal on your route, think about this.  If every driver shaves just a little bit off the light what will happen.  You start one or two seconds early on your green and that gal on your left stops just one or two seconds late on her red, where are you going to be?  T-Boned that’s where.  Little things add up.  (12 miles an hour equals 17.6 feet per second)

Look around you  --- at home, on the job, or the next time you are “out and about”.  What examples of diminutive additives can you see.

Simplification is the most complicated process(TM)

It is easy to design a product or a process that works, at least in relative terms.  The same goes for writing almost anything.

But the real trick is to make it simple and still have full functionality and effectiveness.  In short, simplification is the most complicated (part of the) process.

For some people it comes more easily than for others.  Training and experience usually improve a person's ability to make things simple.

Whether you are writing advertising copy or designing a new product, making it simple is important.  Rachel was VP (& Director of Sales & Marketing) at Richway for a number of years and would sometimes spend literally hours getting just the right words in the proper places for a media ad or a brochure.  (Other times things flowed pretty easily, but she always spent time over several days to perfect her "copy")   I often told people that they need to have the same level of concern whether they are writing advertising or a letter to a customer.  

The same thing applies to product design.  A number of times we designed a product and put it into production, only to decide later that we could make it more simple without compromising performance.  We are not alone.  I often see the same thing as new models of a product emerge.

Simplicity is elegant!!      Simplification is the most complicated process.

I wrote this piece pretty quickly.  It will probably have a few changes made after I hit  "publish".

changes ..2



BTW, I trademarked this phrase a number of years ago when I made a wall sign that said just that. In writing this post I "googled" the phrase and guess what----  Somebody named "San Pedro" decided to use it as his own in August of 2012.  click here to go to the website    See below.

global.zinio.com/sitemap/Men-magazines/Metro...2012/.../pg-147
“One of the things I've learned from my mentors is that simplification is the most complicated process,” says San Pedro. “You can make a piece so bongga, but ...


-30-

What They Don't See Counts

In the early 1980's, Mike Pint served as our service manager on a part time basis.  He was a full time firefighter in a nearby city, with a rotating shift.

Most of our products had a switchbox with a cover attached with four screws.  Every time Mike had a switchbox apart for service he would make sure the slots of the four screws were exactly aligned horizontally.  He would tell everyone nearby that "the customer may not see that the screws are lined up, but he will know it."  Mike would remind us that those little things tell a customer that he is getting a quality product and that we care about him.

I learned a lot from Mike and he helped shape our quality conscious culture.

Squarely aligning shipping labels and carefulness of sealing tape application can telegraph some notion of product quality even before the customer opens a box. Then the proper alingment of decals on the product itself sends another message.  The customer may not really "see" it, but "it counts."

The John Deere tractor manufacturing factory is only a few miles from us.  In the early 1980's I was told by a supplier to both Deere and some of the car manufacturers that Deere was more concerned about fit and finish than US car makers.  This became obvious in the reputation for quality (or non-quality) both had over the next twenty or more years, when "Detroit" began to catch up to their Japanese competitors (and Deere) in quality.


You can apply the concept of "what they don't see"  to anything.

My friend Paul is an executive chef and consultant in the restaurant industry in Florida.  He points out that the little things that you may not actively see in a restaurant can shape your opinion as much as the taste of the food itself.  Incidently he confirms that whatever you do see in the restroom is usually what you would see if you got to look in the kitchen. (If the restroom is dirty, Paul suggests that you may not want to eat in that restaurant.)