I hope you had a good time thinking about and reading the Snow Brands case, an unbelievable story, but a real story. It did happen and there's a lot of lessons. In this debrief, let me share a few things that I want to make sure you've picked up on and maybe elaborate a little bit on as well. We often talk about competitive pressures facing companies, and they certainly existed here, but it was really the pressure from customers that made the biggest difference to launching D minus zero. Just because customers demand something, doesn't mean you need to give it to them. If you can't make it work or if it's if it's dangerous. This is a big deal because we talk about focusing on customers and of course, you want to listen to customers. Remember when we did the Johnson & Johnson case in Module 2 of this course, one of the things we said is, Johnson $ Johnson, they didn't want to listen to their customers, they new that was like a dumb thing, a mistake. But now we have an important nuance that customers are of course, extremely important. But leaders in a company still need to decide what they can do and what they should do to meet that customer demand, delivering milk at D minus zero with all the inherent risks in there, if you think about it, the truck is shipping milk before you've actually tested it. Delivering milk at D minus zero is simply too risky, no matter what the demands of Japanese customers for freshness. There's a nuance here about customers and it's easier to have an argument and a discussion around, when should you listen to customers? When should you not listen to customers? I think the default is you absolutely do listen to customers. You try to do everything you can. You try to do like Jeff Bezos at Amazon has always said, to delight customers as what you try. But if they're asking you for something that is going to be a big mistake for you, you have to back off a little bit and manage that. Not only did the Osaka managers take too long to inform headquarters in Tokyo about the problems they were experiencing, but the CEO himself really fell apart. I mean, that famous line that is in the case study of not being able to sleep and was recorded on video, was shown in the nightly news all over Japan. In fact, I remember talking to some colleagues and former students in Japan, they all knew the story. They all had watched on the news, the CEO talking about how he's been unable to sleep, it reminds me a little bit of Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, who was responding to the Gulf oil spill in 2010. Do you remember what he said? He said, I would like my life back, not good. Nobody really cares about your life and cares about whether you could sleep or not when you've done something really bad, just fix the problem, make sure it never happens again. Finally, a big part of this story is how maintaining quality and safety is a matter of culture. Snow Brands did well to keep the memory of that long ago first product contamination going to help ensure that the company would stay focused on safety. Remember that? That was a way back, I think, in 1955. But over time, people come and go and it's hard to maintain that attention. You have to keep reinforcing something and they did it for a long time but then they stopped. How do you do that? Well, I'll give you an example. I was at Chevron, the big oil company, a few years ago doing a workshop and in the morning before we started, one of the participants stood up and said, now we're going to do a safety moment. Now, just to be clear, I was doing workshop that had nothing to do with safety, it had to do with leadership. Nonetheless, every single meaning, no matter what the topic is at Chevron, would start with a safety moment. This one person stood up and he talked about some various things about safety. I still remember some of it. It was an everyday thing and it was a more complex thing. It probably took 10 minutes in total. The everyday thing was, you're walking down a hallway or down steps and you have a cup of coffee, use the handrail. I mean, it sounds so silly. But yeah, the number of accidents of people stumbling when they're sipping on coffee or talking to somebody else. It's very mundane and almost boring but important. Then he talked about some of the heavy equipment machinery and some of the safety factors around that. But the point here is, and Chevron is not the only example that do this, the safety moments are important because every single time you're meeting, you're doing something, you're being reminded of it and at some point, people stop scuffing and say, oh, not again and you start saying, yeah, I'm proud of this, I'm proud of our safety record and we have to keep talking about that. I often think that financial service firms should have moments of compliance. Like a compliance moment analogies to a safety moment, but they often don't. I asked you to think about your own company and you as well. Well, if you answered that, this Snow Brands thing could never happen to you. You might want to think twice. The reason is that such breakdowns are very human. They're almost natural. I know they're extreme in this case, but they're almost natural and it makes it all the more difficult to completely avoid unless you're tracking the early warning signs and unless you're ready to take remedial action as quickly as you possibly can. If you remember in Module 2, it sure helps to build a culture where it's okay to bring bad news up the hierarchy to your boss and to others, and to ask questions is required behavior asking questions. It's not something you shouldn't do. It's not as a troublesome behavior, and you definitely shouldn't be punished for that. There are other examples. The Snow Brands story is a particularly poignant example, but there are lots of examples. The pharmaceutical company, for example, they had a manufacturing breakdown in one of their facilities and it costs them literally hundreds of millions of dollars and because a pharma company has huge regulation on it, they had all additional regulations that were imposed on them by regulatory agencies. Another aspect of the story is, did you ever hear the expression, information is power? Well, I'm sure you have, what it means is that, sometimes information is purposely withheld because knowing something that others don't is a very seductive source of power. It makes you feel important, and so another piece of the puzzle doesn't get on the board but it's such a dangerous thing to do. Do you remember the Challenger disaster? That was the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986, where some engineers had identified a potentially fatal flaw with the O-rings in the space shuttle but that information was suppressed or was downplayed in the run-up to lunch because there's so much time pressure to get the lunch and to make it happen and the source of the leak was trace of this tiny rubber part called called an O-ring. It formed the seal between sections of the solid rocket boosters. The O-rings were never tested in extreme cold. On the morning of the launch, the cold rubber became stiff and it failed to fully seal the joint. Since 1986 when the Challenger disaster happened, technology has of course, advanced exponentially. We have all sorts of algorithms and the ability to create algorithms, to track key data. Maybe we feel a bit better about before we become too confident, don't forget that algorithms are simply computer programs that are based on inputs, these programs that determine what gets examined and what doesn't. Research has already shown how bias is part and parcel of most algorithms. Why should we expect perfection under these circumstances? Technology is light years ahead in 1986 from the challenger, let alone Snow Brands, even though that was 2000, it's very different type of story. But we shouldn't get too confident because algorithms and machine learning and artificial intelligence, they are gigantic improvements, but they're not flowers and we need to pay attention to that. Snow Brands, the company you probably never heard of before reading about it here in this Coursera course is fascinating. It's a case study full of important implications, full of important lessons. In the next video, we take up a bunch of stories and examples that go deeper into this very issue of organizational breakdowns and what you can do to avoid it.
