Proactive Problem Solving: The Organizational Engagement System Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Bourbon Distillery - Hardcover

Hall, Doug

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1578600022 ISBN 13: 9781578600021

Publisher: Clerisy Press, 2024

Synopsis

Proactive Problem Solving: Stop the Stupid and Build a Smarter, More Productive Organization

The way businesses operate is broken. You see it every day—inefficient systems, endless frustrations, and wasted time. Only 32% of employees feel engaged, while managers spend up to three hours a day fixing problems caused by flawed work systems. The result? Frustration, squandered resources, and missed opportunities.

In Proactive Problem Solving, Doug Hall—visionary founder of Eureka! Ranch and Brain Brew Distillery—delivers a bold solution to Stop the Stupid and eliminate what’s not working. His proven approach, developed through decades of innovation leadership, empowers organizations to find and fix problems by engaging everyone from the frontline to the c-suite in the problem-solving process.

Grounded in real-world success, this book draws from Doug’s experience leading more than 20,000 innovations at Eureka! Ranch and scaling Brain Brew Distillery from a startup to producing over 100,000 cases of bourbon annually.

Proactive Problem Solving dives deep to unearth proven methods for growth and profitability:

1. Defining the Problems and Solutions: Identify what the problem is, then focus on the “why.” Pinpoint the issues that matter, and build communication skills needed to implement effective solutions.
2. Creating Solutions: Understand the three principles that increase problem-solving capabilities: exploring stimulus, leveraging diversity and inclusion, and driving out fear. You’ll learn proven techniques for engaging employees, fostering innovation, and turning teams into problem-solving virtuosos.
3. Driving out Risk as You Bring Your Idea to Life: Discover Doug’s reliable system for decreasing risk and increasing success. Transform good ideas into game-changing results.

Whether you’re a manager striving to lead more effectively or an employee wanting to make a greater impact, Proactive Problem Solving delivers actionable insights to revolutionize how work gets done. By implementing these methods, your organization can reduce costly mistakes, enhance employee satisfaction, and drive sustainable growth in today’s competitive business environment.

About this title

About the Author

Doug Hall graduated with a degree in chemical engineering at the University of Maine. Doug’s work from a mechanical, electrical, and chemical perspective, plus his innovation experiences, landed him a job at Procter & Gamble, first as an engineer at their Mehoopany Paper Mill, then in brand management at the company headquarters on 6th Street in Cincinnati. Over 10 years he was promoted up through the ranks as Brand Manager, Associate Advertising Manager, and eventually as leader of the P&G Invention Team. Working together with Eric Schulz, a kindred spirit, they invented and shipped a record nine innovations for P&G brands in a 12-month period. His success wasn’t because they were smarter. Rather, it was because they focused on creating systems that enabled them to work faster and smarter.

After 10 years, Doug retired as an “employee” and founded what is known today as the Eureka! Ranch, an innovation consulting and training company. Multiple television appearances and several books later, he found himself wondering why some Eureka! Inventing sessions were more productive than others. Working with three statisticians, he embarked on two research projects.

The first study focused on the creation of ideas. It included surveys every 45 minutes as teams from Nike, Walt Disney, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi-Cola, and others came to Eureka! Ranch to invent big ideas. A team measured them before, during, and after each project. From this analysis they discovered how Stimulus, Diversity, and Driving Out Fear impacted project success.

The second study focused on what made ideas successful in the marketplace. Here he studied quantitative data on more than 20,000 ideas from the Eureka! Ranch archives and the database of AcuPOLL, a market research company Doug founded and eventually sold. From this analysis, he discovered how to quantify Meaningful Uniqueness as well as how to improve how ideas are communicated.

The studies were supplemented with real-world research on more than $20 billion in active improvement projects in our Innovation Engineering portal and a literature review of more than 2,000 academic articles. This research led to more books and articles. It also resulted in Doug receiving honorary doctorates from the University of Maine and the University of Prince Edward Island.

The research gave birth to a new field of academic study, management science, and business leadership known as Innovation Engineering. The core Innovation Engineering curriculum involves nine college courses of content and leads to associate degrees, graduate certificates, and Blue and Black Belt certifications by the Innovation Engineering Institute.

A few years ago, Doug started doing experiments on how wood interacts with whiskey. This work led to the creation of Brain Brew Custom Whiskey and WoodCraft Bourbon Blender franchising with co-founder Joe Girgash. Leading the whiskey business through rapid growth caused him to rethink the importance of Proactive Problem Solving. And thus, early one winter morning, the idea for this book was born. Doug’s goal is to use what he’s learned from more than 50 years of innovation to help everyone fix problems and find ideas for working smarter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction: 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, Gallup reports only 32% of employees are actively engaged. And the trend is negative. Eureka! Ranch research finds that 44% of managers feel employee engagement is worse since COVID.

The Eureka! Ranch study also found that 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 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 cofounder and CEO of the highly disruptive Brain Brew Bourbon Distillery. Despite the pandemic, by applying the lessons in this book to engage employees, Brain Brew grew from shipping a few thousand cases 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 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 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.
If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?
—NBC White Paper

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 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 because of 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, 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 was the need 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.

Joe Girgash, co-founder and president, quickly learned to think proactively about not just the current production increase but also the ones that will follow. He also engaged the team in the creation, testing, and implementation of system improvements. Just as the Walt Disney Company teaches employees to take immediate action to help frustrated guests, Joe taught the team to take action when they see something that is wrong. The impact of this cultural mindset is immense. In retrospect, committing to organizational engagement is one of the most important decisions we’ve made as a company.

Competing in the bourbon whiskey marketplace, we learned quickly that we would fail if we tried to follow the playbook of the multinational conglomerates that control 80% to 90% of bourbon whiskey sales. To win, we had to innovate our offerings, business models, and work systems to enable our “David” of a distillery to survive and thrive versus the “Goliaths” that dominate bourbon whiskey.

For the Brain Brew Crew, STOP THE STUPID means not accepting poor work methods, poor tools, or flawed work systems as being “just the way it is.” When our team members SEE SOMETHING that is a problem, they are enabled to TRY SOMETHING to solve it. The result: Their work is more meaningful, and our distillery is more successful.

To be totally clear, STOP THE STUPID is about STUPID WORK SYSTEMS, NOT STUPID PEOPLE! People of all ages and education levels have insights and ideas. There are no stupid people. There are, however, many people who have not been taught how to problem-solve, validate, and communicate their ideas. While the achievements of Brain Brew are amazing, the reality is we still have much to learn in our never-ending quest to work smarter than our competition. It is and always will be a never-ending journey of continuous improvement. Fortunately, we have laid the foundation of a culture that is ready, willing, and able to win.

Edition details

• Publisher: Clerisy Press
• Publication date: 2024
• ISBN 10: 1578600022
• ISBN 13: 9781578600021
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 232