Long-form interview with Tom Marine, the masterclass innovation leader who implemented, in record time, a DAM-enabled workflow for a multichannel catalog marketing firm.

Professional Background

MM: We’re here with Tom Marine of Johnson Ventures. Would you quickly summarize your professional career?

TM: Sure. I’ve been in the publishing industry for more than 30 years. I started out in newspapers and quickly went into marketing. I’ve been focused on catalog publishing for the last 15-plus years. I have been in charge or have been involved in large- to medium-sized catalogs that have wide national distribution—everything from door-chimes to fake food, and restaurant equipment.

MM: Most recently you worked with a company called Central Restaurant. Could you describe a little bit about the company?

TM: Central Restaurant is a wholesale equipment supplier to the restaurant industry, and also to large institutions that offer food services, selling anything from small wares like tongs or flatware—up to walk-in coolers and freezers.

They do multichannel marketing, utilizing both a relatively large catalog of about 320 pages. We send it out six times a year to millions of customers and prospects throughout the United States.

Catalog Marketer

MM: The nature of that business is that it constantly is on-boarding a fairly significant number of new customers?

TM: Correct. Yes. Acquiring new customers is very important for us, because of the volatility of the market.

MM: Before we go on into the specifics of that, could you give us a little bit of background on your previous engagements—specifically at Hubert?

TM: Sure. At Hubert, I was in a similar role—only it was a larger catalog of about 1,000 pages. We also sent out monthly catalogs to do more prospecting as well as to drive business back into what we called “The Source Book”—both print and online versions.

At Central Restaurant, not only did I handle catalog production, but I’m also handled circulation, the list procurement. That’s where the differences lie between the two jobs.

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MM: I recall from our previous conversations that while at Hubert, you played an instrumental role in reworking their core catalog production processes, developing an integrated workflow for the print and online catalog. This entailed driving many internal changes around how to produce multichannel marketing communications and, specifically, big-book catalogs

TM: That’s correct. Something we did at Hubert—in 1998 and 1999—was to rework the flow of catalog production. That also then was in the early stages of getting the web online. So there were multiple reasons to do that.

Central went through a similar process. There were a few steps different, because it was 10 years later. But there are an awful lot of things that are very similar in how to approach this new, very integrated relational database situation.

I was basically the evangelist of the Hubert change, and I did that at Central. Along with that, I handled a lot of the database publishing duties for other K+K-America companies. Including C&H Distribution and Connie Safety, at the time. I was also highly involved in their integration into their publishing database, as well.

Change Process

MM: As we develop our master-class profile in this interview, detailing how to facilitate and drive these sorts of process transformations, perhaps we develop combined narrative from your experience with Central Restaurant and Hubert. So, let’s start with what typically kick-starts a change process: a catalytic event. What happened that required a change in workflows, either at Hubert or at Central Restaurant?

TM: ‘Require’ is a strong word. In both cases, the company saw itself as a business leader and having a best-in-class environment. While Hubert did not want to not have the best systems, Central was dead-set on having a best-in-class environment in all of their different technological pieces.

MM: Where did that notion arise in the organization?

TM: In 2006 by Johnson Ventures purchased Central.

As the owner, Rick Johnson just believes that having the best in class for anything—that’s where he wants to be. Now, the best in class doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be the best out there. It could mean it’s just the best for the environment for the company at its particular stage—and looking toward the future.

An example might be an Endeca solution, a guided navigation solution for a website that is best in class. But it’s best in class for the big boys, and maybe that’s not necessarily needed for a company of our size.

MM: So with the mindset of having the best-of-class system for your particular organization, what led to the need or idea of, “We’ve got to do something different?”

TM: Well, luckily, when I was hired at Hubert, actually in the interview process, I mentioned to them that I’d been looking at database publishing solutions for my previous job, which was with a centralized prepress group for newspaper circulars.

As it turned out, that company decided not to go down the road of database publishing. But I had already researched many solutions that would help production efficiencies.

During my job interview with Hubert I mentioned my research of database publishing systems. That intrigued them. I believe that my research became one of the key reasons they hired me. Consequently, a couple of years later, they gave me the freedom to continue that research. That involved going to events like Seybold and Print and ACCM—looking into the providers of these types of automated database publishing solutions or content management systems and digital asset management, and coming up with a solution that was right for Hubert at that time.

When I came on board at Central Restaurant, it was very easy for me to jump back into research mode and take a look at all of the pieces. All of the different vendors who had been out there—many of whom were the same. That was reassuring. But also to take a look at some of the newer vendors out there, and to make a determination of whether or not those solutions might be a better fit for us.

MM: So, looking back, the idea of ‘investing yourself personally in research,’ and developing mental maps as well as thick folders of research, you were also really investing yourself in understanding the next technology wave in this case, the next generation of database publishing.

So, not only did you find it gratifying, but it became a differentiator in the job market, making your more attractive as a potential employee.

TM: Yes. And it’s ongoing, of course. Not only did it help me get the job at Hubert, but also Hubert then allowed me to continue my research, and to become basically an expert in the field while at Hubert. That then allowed me to broaden my wings and move on after Hubert. Although I must say, Hubert was a great place to work.

Innovation Leader

MM: So, the mindset of having a best-of-class system must also entailed hiring the best individuals who understood what it means to be best of class, and who—in your case—are real innovation leaders. So Hubert, had already invested in the idea database publishing as the “next wave” of innovation and productivity—and hired your to execute that idea. What happens next?

TM: Well, I think the key is to develop a systematic way to gain buy-in, so that the company can move forward with an innovation.

At Hubert this started with writing a white paper that depicted what database publishing could do for Hubert. It was fairly in-depth on how it would affect the organization—and in some ways, the hierarchy of the organization.

It basically outlined, “Here are the steps that we have to do.” It’s not just implementation. Part of the success of database publishing involves bringing in the key vendors that are involved – to have them methodically work through a process with you, and to show the company that they understood what you were doing. That way, they could present to you, based on what you wanted out of the software.

Even before there were presentations being done there was a lot of dialogue outlining how those presentations should be done for Hubert.

MM: As you had developed the organizational strategy for how Hubert might benefit from database publishing, one of the major efforts that you undertook entailed developing an internal white paper. The preparation of the paper allowed you to put into cogent, logical order, an organizational change—an organizational transformation story.

As you began to circulate the white paper, it served as a persistent messaging object—a framework—for structuring and guiding internal conversations around how affected stakeholders could come up-to-speed with the new system.

TM: Absolutely.

MM: As I recall for our previous conversations, your process of bringing stakeholders up-to-speed revealed new adoption criteria and business requirements that subsequently you wove back into the next version of the white paper. So the white paper was a living document that continued not only the conversation, but also the coalescence of, “Yes. This makes sense for us a firm.”

With internal consensus, you built a nice platform by which to start engaging vendors in terms of what you need from them. I find absolutely fascinating. As I recall in ‘98 or ‘99—when all of this took place—your were in a lot conversations such as, “Maybe we ought to get a DAM.” But you came back with, “Let’s figure out exactly how we produce our big-book 900-page catalog, and understand if there are any other inefficiencies we should work out before we actually start looking at DAMs.” Would you take us through that process?

TM: Absolutely. That was the fun part, really.

What was intriguing was that it was apparent that all of the people involved in producing the catalog had probably never been in the same room at the same time, before. Therefore, there were lots of big revelations once we sat down together.

We got 15 stakeholders in a meeting—people from groups that touched the catalog to people who participated in the production of the catalog—everyone from merchandisers to graphic artists to IT people. Also, we had some fairly significant shareholders, like a VP of Marketing who was there for many of the meetings.

Basically we had 15 people that met twice a week for half a day over a 9-month period, Initially we defined the workflow that was currently in place. The direction of the meeting was very specific. We were not there to change anything at that point. We were only there to identify and to bring artifacts. To make sure that everyone understood exactly what was being done now. We met in what we called the ‘War Room.’ It was a fairly big conference room that had windows—over half of it that we actually covered up at one point, because we simply needed more room to put stuff on the walls.

Workflow Model in the War Room

MM: As I recall, you physically mocked up each step of the workflow associated with publishing a 1,000-page big-book catalog and a website. Is that right?

TM: Yes. Absolutely.

MM: If someone had the printouts from your mainframe—then you physically tacked a piece of green bar up on the wall which somebody then transcribed that into a spreadsheet.

TM: And if an artifact like that didn’t work well, then we took a picture of it. Remember when you were moving paper around, a lot of times it was, “Put something in a bin,” or, “Take it to this location.” If we felt it couldn’t be described very well, we’d take a picture of it and put the picture up on the wall, too.

MM: If “sneakerware” was involved, where someone had to physically move a file from one person to another, you had photographs of the individuals and a string connecting the two individuals?

TM: We had yarn. We had different types of colored tape that we would use. We had different colored starbursts that meant different things. We identified pain points, as well, during this process. And, a big red star meant, ‘Here’s an issue.’—a real Pain Point.

MM: How did you call out defects or mistakes?

TM: In much the same way: remember, we were not trying to solve any problems, yet. We were only identifying them.

MM: I can’t overstate the importance of what you just said. Many people make the mistake of going in to an organization with a change mindset: “Here’s how we’re going to change this. Here’s how we’re going to change that.” That naturally produces all kinds of pushback and resistance among stakeholders.

TM: And resentment.

MM: So you simply got everyone to acknowledge, “Here’s how we do our catalog.” With the idea of really coming to understand if not appreciate exactly the kind of frustration each stakeholder had experienced in this process.

TM: And you know, it’s funny you say that. Actually, at three points during the process, we had everyone come up to the board and sign it, that they agreed with everything that was up on the board.

The first time was after we defined the current process. Everybody agreed. Another time, when we defined an interim process that we felt we could implement without the software solution. So we saw some immediate benefits from defining the process. Then the third sign-off was when everybody agreed to the “new optimal process,” which would include the database publishing system.

MM: Fabulous. What you just described, Tom, is the workflow map in the War Room. It became a visual contract.

TM: Absolutely. Yes. That’s what it was.

MM: What made it easy to sign, is that the stakeholders participated wholly in defining the current state, as well as the interim state in terms of, “Here’s what we could do to make things better without having to automate anything.”

TM: Correct.

Who’s Responsible?

MM: As you begin to create this visual roadmap, people naturally begin to argue about who was responsible for what. Or how things got done. Can you take us through a couple of those scenarios, and how they resolved?

TM: Let me step back just briefly and talk about a little bit of the hierarchy we had at Hubert. I think that that had an effect on those types of situations.

At Hubert, we had a VP of Organizational Development. He was a person who reported to the president but did not have any structure under him. He was a change-management guru.

Because he reported only to the president and had basically no agenda, he could work across departments and not appear to be persuaded by one or the other.

Additionally, this man was trained to facilitate meetings. He was really good at what Peter Block would call the ‘what’ question. That is, “If you ask a ‘what’ question, you’re going to get a whole lot more different types of responses than when you ask a ‘why’ question.”

If you ask, ‘why’—you’re challenging somebody. However, if you’re asking ‘what’—you’re asking them to explain what it is that they need to tell you. That was something that he was a master at doing. He was able to allow people to speak freely, but also was able to get them focused on the right path—together—without creating a lot of disturbances.

That said, there are some people in every organization that are going to create disturbances. You have to address those—and sometimes, that means that there’s somebody that’s going to have to go. And at Hubert, there was. There was a person that had to go.

At Central, they were fortunate to not have it to that degree. But, there are always those that latch on to change and those that desperately try to avoid it.

Change Management Toolkit

MM: Could you take us through Hubert’s toolkit of change management? What does that mean?

TM: It is making sure that you do things right the first time, and therefore you don’t have to worry about it later. That lives in several different areas. It can live as a whole— meaning if we hadn’t done the research and the white paper and all that stuff upfront, would we’ve been as successful?

But you can take it down to the minutia, too. That is, Hubert identified during the current process that there was a maximum of 7 times where a price could be entered into the workflow. Now, that 7 times didn’t happen all the time— but it wasn’t unusual for a price to be entered at least 4 times into the system at some point.

MM: You had developed this already in the Hubert organization. Is that correct?

TM: It is. But this was by far the biggest change that they’d ever undertaken.

But our VP of Organizational Development also did some train-the-trainer type things.  It was the cultural paradigm. So, the idea was, that if everyone in the company had this skill-set, and then it would be a better place to work.

Let’s say there is a process that involved Sales and Marketing. Maybe a person in the Warehouse was trained to do it. Maybe the Warehouse person would facilitate that meeting, because he did not have an agenda between Sales and Marketing. But if it were a big process across multi-departments— which this one was— then he would be involved with something that big.

MM: Tom, I have found that very few companies have a structured, defined, and repeatable change-management process in place.

TM: I’ve never seen one other than Hubert.

MM: Exactly. And I say that the lack of such a process makes change wrenching, difficult, expensive, and problematic. Inevitably, change means that people have to get out of their comfort zone and get out of their daily routines and habits, and do what is new, uncomfortable, and probably prone to criticism.

TM: Yes.

MM: Your work validates one of the emerging principles of an innovation culture or an ingenuity culture: you must have in place a change-management process that you invoke whenever you need to accommodate an innovation.

TM: Yes. That would be an excellent model for any company.

MM: I believe that a lot of people consider innovation as a top-down thing. Yet, the real innovators with whom I have interviewed consider innovation as bottom-up activity, from the actual users – the stakeholders in the workflow. The reason? Because the actual users are the one’s closest to what actually has to get done, and, specifically, the nature and likely root causes of the pain.

TM: That’s absolutely true. However, upper management—even though it’s not their idea—must actively support an innovation or change for it to happen.

MM: However, most change processes run into trouble when it simply becomes a top-down mandate, as opposed to a bottom-up collaboration and discovery of, “What’s the best way of doing this one piece?” Effective change processes maintain the context of business priorities and individual needs.

TM: Absolutely.

Value Chain Analysis

MM: You also did something else at Hubert that I consider most extraordinary: you had developed this end-to-end visual depiction of the entire catalog development and publishing process—in part, what Michael Porter of Harvard Business School calls value chain analysis. In your telling me of this, you tied together several principles that others could apply in achieving similar results. Let’s start with, “Get it right upfront.”

TM: Yes. That was a theme that became our mantra.

It means making sure that you do things right the first time, and therefore you don’t have to worry about it later. That lives in several different areas. It can live as a whole—meaning if we hadn’t done the research and the white paper and all that stuff upfront, would we’ve been as successful.

But you can take it down to the minutia, too. That is, we identified during the current process that there was a maximum of 7 times where a price could be entered into the system. Now, that 7 times didn’t happen all the time—but it wasn’t unusual for a price to be entered at least 4 times into the system at some point.

MM: That means manual data entry of a pricing data 4 or 5 times against 50,000 SKUs?

TM: More than that. Yes.

So if you think about the opportunity for error there, and we’re talking about entering where it could be somebody writing it down on a sheet of paper. That’s “entry.” Right? Or putting it into a spreadsheet and not into a database. That’s entry. Putting it into one database and then another database. That’s two entries.

That’s what I’m talking about—how that is looked at. The idea was, “Let’s find the point where it should be entered—the right point—upfront. Let’s find out where it should be entered, who’s responsible for that entry, and—when you enter it—make sure you do it right.”

MM: Let me unpack it a little bit. First, you had this wonderful, messy, warts-and-all visual depiction of the entire end-to-end process—to which all the involved parties contributed. Then, you got everyone to physically signed off on the visual depiction. In effect, your got everyone to, “Yes. That’s my contract with reality.”

TM: Yes.

MM: Just in that process of getting them to put their signatures to the visual end-to-end process map, you dissolved all or most resistance to change.

TM: Right. When we came out of that, everybody in that room was eager for the next step. Not afraid.

MM: Having repeated the process elsewhere with my clients, I am sure that your Hubert colleagues were aghast about how the big mess on their hands. That was the first thing. Right?

TM: Yes. They couldn’t believe it.

MM: That then gave rise to a collective rocket of desire to make it better—whatever that was going to be. And supporting that desire, you had this visual, persistent object on the wall demonstrating in black-and-white or full-color factual details of the big mess. Argument over. We’ve got mess. And that led to more meaningful, cogent, and effective conversations with all the stakeholders about how to facilitate the change.

TM: Correct.

MM: I love it. In essence your physical wall-mounted map began to future-proof a change without actually having to make the change. It got everyone thinking about how to make a holistic change instead of a tactical change to one piece that might result in unintended consequences elsewhere in the business or, worse, among customers.

TM: Correct. Now, we took some interim steps. First, when we saw all the errors of in the current process, we took action on those things that did not require automation or a new system. We just said, “Okay. We’ve identified it. Let’s change these.”

MM: So you identified where in the process a change should optimally occur. For example, who in the process would now be accountable for data entry, and the quality assurance for what got entered.

TM: Yes.

Drucker’s Theory of Knowledge Work Productivity

MM: As a general principle, this validate Peter Drucker’s notion of Knowledge Worker Productivity. He defined it as, “How quickly can I ask for information from another person?” And/or, “How quickly can I provide information to another person,” with a specified time, place and format?

So, your work demonstrates another principle of innovation leadership: you optimize the productivity of individuals in the workflow by—first of all—identifying my upstream (value chain) providers of information, and my downstream recipients of good, high-quality information for which I am responsible.

TM: Yes.

MM: So, as you begin to understand who contributes what, this produced many conversations or arguments about specific deliverables, hand-offs, and who is responsible for what—and what continues to drives the Internet revolution: transaction costs or the costs of communicating or delivering a unit of work to your downstream “customers”.

TM: One of our biggest discoveries was the level distrust. That was probably the largest obstacle we had. For so long, people had dealt with other peoples’ mistakes that they didn’t trust the other people to get things done right upfront.

Going back to the accountability issue, when the process was optimized, it was drilled into the people that—”If this is your only chance to do this, then you have to do it right. Because nobody’s going to be checking your work any longer.”

That’s where we came into some obstacles. Because people would say, “No. I have to see that again. I don’t trust that these people are going to do their jobs correctly.”

MM: Now you’ve gotten to the root cause of why most change initiatives fail: distrust and the lack of transparency in overall process that reinforces distrust.

TM: Yes. And that’s why someone who has this change-management, psychological understanding and can facilitate is an important vehicle. He was able to identify those fears.

MM: Yes! Innovation leaders recognize the legitimate, fact-based, reference experiences that individuals project into the future, and assume will come about with a certain amount of cynical realism.

TM: Absolutely. ‘Cynical,’ is a very good word to use.

MM: Where “cynicism,” is simply the belief that the past will repeat itself.

TM: What’s past is prologue.

MM: Right. So effective change-management and innovation leadership must not start with the end-to-end visual depiction of the current big mess, project and executive leadership must address the deep-seated beliefs, “I don’t trust our workflow” and “I’m sure that I trust others to tell the real truth about what’s really going on around here.” The innovation-leadership process then entails building new trust in the proposed system.

TM: Building trust and—as this person used to always say—eliminating fears: It’s kind of the same thing, but… Fear-based activity is rampant during these processes.

Seeds of Failure Sown in Executing Well

MM: This gets to another underlying issue that you’ve set up beautifully, here.

After a while, most successful businesses become what I call, “execution systems.” From the annual strategic plan, most firms at the senior levels have well-defined goals, roles and responsibilities; everyone then supposedly “executes against plan.” There’s nothing wrong with that: companies must find and keep customers. However, in a larger context, executing against plan results in everyone keeping their heads down and getting their particular jobs done. Only, there’s no mental space to innovation, little or no freedom to change things for the better.

You could say that change and the special class of change—innovation—becomes sand in the gears of execution; that fundamentally most companies have constituted themselves as “change-resistant execution systems.”

TM: Not on purpose, I don’t think.

MM: That’s right. Not on purpose. But everyone got so focused and busy trying to survive, grow sales, and maintain profitability—all excecutional mindsets—that baby that got tossed out with the bathwater. We traded growth and security for our ability to change and adapt—we traded away our ability to innovate as a matter of daily habit.

We’re at the point now where the world continues to change so rapidly—because technologies and innovations change fundamentally how we find and serve customers—we now must bring into our execution system a new set of muscles: innovation leadership muscles.

Today everyone in an execution system knows—for the most part—to whom they contribute information or results in the workflow. Most everyone knows what outputs they owe to whom, and who owes me. What qualifies as good inputs and outputs.

TM: Right.

MM: But in the context of change, there’s no accountability. There isn’t any role clarity around “who owes what, delivered how, by what criteria of satisfaction or quality.”

I say the lack of accountability in the change context surfaces as the root cause of change resistance. No one knows what to produce, for whom, in a change context.

That was what was so brilliant about your end-to-end visual depiction of the catalog development and publishing process.

You made it clear exactly who does what for whom in the current state. The map also supported fact-based discussions, “In the future, interim or automated ideal, “Who should owes what to whom?”

You got everyone to agree, “Yes. That would actually work for me.” That really defines the art of futureproofing: getting everyone to accept a new set of accountabilities rooted in the holist improvement of the business as well as the improvement of individual productivity. Brilliant!

TM: Yes.

MM: So part of addressing fear-based behavior was replacing it with optimistic, forward-looking, pictures and images and experiences—as grounded by this visual depiction of the interim workflow, as well as the optimized workflow.

TM: Yes.

MM: Let’s get to another idea that you had shared with me. Tom, Hubert remains fairly unusual in that that they use activity-based accounting. Would you explain “activity-based accounting?” And how that clarified the cost of the current-state operation?

TM: Activity-based costing at Hubert involved an exercise that was completed every year that depicted the different activities cross-referenced with percentage-of-time-spent on those activities for each position in the company.

Then, as an additional caveat, there was an activity that was called, “IT Involvement.” You could gauge how much IT or technology needs were being done for that, as well. Another piece of that, of course, was how much building space you used—and different things like that.

On a yearly basis, we would look at the different activities, define different numbers to those, and then the accounting group would take those percentages—knowing what the overhead was, and additionally knowing what money you spent. For instance, in the catalog piece, you spent so many millions of dollars to print the catalog and to buy the paper. So those pieces were applied to that activity, as well.

Then you were able to say, “Well, if it takes us this much time activity-wise to produce a catalog and we need to produce another catalog, how much activity would that take?”

Then, apply that to the timesavings that you would anticipate to enhance that or to decrease that activity—based on a particular software like database publishing. Then you have a “soft dollar ROI.”

However, as everybody knows, once you commit to a soft-dollar ROI, it becomes a hard-dollar ROI.

MM: So when you looked at this visual depiction and then started to create an interim optimized workflow—at what point did you start applying activity-based costing to the workflow?

TM: Actually, the activity-based costing came after that. I’ll tell you why. It came when there was recognition of how much indeed the new process was going to be able to change the workflow.

MM: So let’s use this as an opportunity to shift into the optimized workflow.

TM: Sure.

MM: Over the course of nine months in this War Room, you developed a visual end-to-end depiction of the messy current-state operation.

TM: Yes.

MM: Out of this precipitated a number of interim changes that you could make, because they were easy, self-evident, and everyone said, “Let’s do it.”

TM: Yes.

MM: Then you developed a new workflow. An optimized workflow embracing some core principles—one of which you identified as, “Right upfront.” And enter data once and only once.

TM: Yes. Enter once, publish many times.

Getting the Right Job Done

MM: Yes. And “stay online.” So, as much as possible, keep the work online as opposed to going offline in an analogue or physical work activity. Is that right?

TM: Yes. Although I think you might cover accountability and enabling within the “right upfront,” the enabling thing was kind of a sticky point, there. It was important for people to do what we called, “Staying out of somebody else’s backyard.”

You can’t do their job for them. If they’re going to fail, they’re going to fail.

MM: So it’s kind of, “You’re accountable for your work, and you’re not your brother’s keeper.” Or—what’s the psychological term? “Enabler.” What do they call that when you enable somebody else’s addiction or bad behavior?”

TM: We call them “enablers.”

MM: Enablers. Okay. So, “Stand on your own two feet and get your job done,” is another core principle.

TM: Right. That doesn’t mean you can’t be helpful. But you can’t do somebody else’s job for them.

MM: Perfect. So that was your principle around enabling. No more enabling bad behavior or enabling shoddy work.

TM: Yes.

MM: You’re accountable for producing high-quality work now in this increasingly transparent self-evidently accountable workflow process.

TM: Right. Because people recognize that if nobody else is doing this…

MM: It ain’t gonna get done.

TM: Right. You can’t hide any more.

MM: So this has actually two dimensions to it. You just described the downside of it. That is fear of recrimination and ridicule and maybe some lost jobs.

But the upside of it is, I am now an acknowledged contributor. I’m needed. I make a difference. I contribute here in a very direct and now transparent and accountable way.

TM: Yes. We are dependent on you.

MM: Yes. And we are inter-dependent—that sense of being part of a team in and of itself provides a sustainable motivation for getting it right upfront.

TM: Yes.