Flickr photo courtesy of H.Kopp Delaney

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The 2010 football season is heating up, and now is your chance to get in on the action with all the members of the Football Experts Club game. Register now to compete for valuable prizes

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Step #1: Create an Account

Head over to the Registration page and complete the information to create your own account. Why do we collect all that info? So we can contact you if and when you win a prize. Don’t worry, we don’t give out your information to anyone!

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Lots of prizes. And more prizes.

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For every dollar invested in Cincom software and services our clients typically reap $30 in return – sometimes more.

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Interview with Dr. Charles Pellerin, Former Director of Astrophysics NASA

For this issue of Cincom’s “Ask the Expert” we caught up with author and principal of 4-D Systems, Dr. Charles Pellerin, Former Director of Astrophysics NASA, Author – “How NASA Builds Teams” (Wiley)_- and Founder 4-D Systems – http://www.4-dsystems.com .

In this interview Dr. Pellerin talks about the Hubble Space Telescope, a flawed mirror, what story-lines mean and shares his insight on the future of space program.

Nettie:. Can you tell us about your book and how you came to understand how the social issues affect leadership decisions and project failure?

Dr. Pellerin: When the Hubble Failure Review Board named a “Leadership failure” as the root cause of the flawed mirror, I became extremely curious about social factors and their effect on teams. How did something we never even discussed trump the work of many of the best technical minds in the world? After I assembled the space mission to fix the telescope, I began to research space failures.

I began my inquiry as a Professor in the University of Colorado’s Business School in 1993, reading the reports and books about space accidents. To my surprise, every failure had a social shortfall as root cause!

Why focus on space accidents?

First, when astronauts (and teachers) die in space accidents, the cost of the investigation is irrelevant. Superficial investigations find the technical mistake and move on. Space accident investigations run for months with dozens of experts engaged. Second, and obviously, I understand the technical issues and know many of the people these reports reference.

In 1995, I began experimenting with commercial workshops, coaching and assessments to manage team social contexts. Experimentation came naturally, as I have a PhD in experimental physics. Our assessments produce quantitative data that we analyzed every-which-way to see what works and what does not.

In 2003, NASA awarded us a large contract to apply our processes to NASA teams. Dr. Ed Hoffman, Director of NASA’s “Academy for Program/Project and Engineering Leadership” sponsors our NASA work. We now have data from over 1,000 project, engineering and management teams. About two years ago, my colleague, Skip Borst, showed me a graph he just completed that amazed me Skip had graphed the performance enhancement of the 198 NASA teams with multiple assessments. The lowest 60% of the teams improved performance an average of 5% per 15-minute “Team Development Assessment” cycle! Moreover, on average, every team advanced no matter where they started. That is what spurred me to write How NASA Builds Teams (Wiley).

Nettie: How do you define social issues and how did this ultimately impact your work as Director of Astrophysics at NASA for your almost decade long tenure?

Dr. Pellerin: The technical world has a well-defined and broadly understood vocabulary. I can go anywhere in the world and speak about entropy, critical mass, and first derivative and be completely understood. This is not true in the social world. There is no universally accepted terminology for social matters. In fact, teams often comment following our workshops, “Perhaps the most valuable take-away is a common language to talk about social matters.”

As I studied failure reports, I noticed variation in descriptions of the causes. A “leadership failure” caused Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror flaw. “Normalization of Deviance,” caused Challenger’s explosion. A flawed “culture” caused Columbia’s disintegration. I chose the term “team social context” because context powerfully drives behaviors, and the terminology has sufficient breadth to include all descriptions.

I used my intuitive understanding of “4-D” when I was leading my Hubble team through the horrible aftermath of the discovery of the flaw, and in assembling the space Servicing Mission. My insights were, however, nothing approaching the effectiveness of current “4-D” methodology.

Nettie: Can you briefly tell us about the flawed mirror found after launching the Hubble and how the communications/social issues contributed to this?

Dr. Pellerin: In 1990, in my 8th year as NASA’s Director, Astrophysics, we launched Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. I worried about this mission because of the daunting pointing requirement. The telescope needed to point with the precision of a laser on a 25-cent piece at 200 miles. If we missed this specification by a factor of 10, the telescope would be useless. During on-orbit testing, we found to our dismay that all the difficult systems worked fine, but the mirror had the wrong shape! This rendered the telescope useless for its most important research, cosmology.

NASA appointed me liaison to the Hubble Failure Review Board because the mirror manufacturing was in the late 70’s, and I became Director in 1983. Therefore, they reasoned, I had nothing to do with the flawed mirror. (As you will soon see, that assumption was incorrect.) The Board worked for months trying to figure out what happened. One morning, one of the Board’s optical experts said, “I have an idea. Last night I calculated that an error in spacing the “null corrector by a centimeter would cause the error we are seeing.” This was an unbelievably large mistake for an optics house to make.

The original null corrector was in “bonded storage,” so we pulled out and measured it, confirming the source of the error. I thought, great, I could go back home and do my job again. The Board Chairman, Dr. Lew Allen had other ideas and persisted in his inquiry. He found that there were numerous instances where the contractor dismissed hints of a problem with “fault tree analysis.” When he inquired as to why NASA never “ran these problems to ground,” he learned that the contractor (Perkin-Elmer) never told NASA of these occurrences. (We settled a lawsuit against the contractor for $25M.) He concluded that NASA failed in leading the program because we created an environment so hostile that the contractor only told us of problems they were sure were real and threatening. Moreover, I was the Hubble program Director. Ouch!

Fortunately, in the turbulent aftermath, neither NASA nor I connected me with the flaw, despite the Board’s finding. I proceeded to assemble the mission that repaired the telescope on orbit, exceeding the original performance specifications by 50%. NASA awarded me a second Outstanding Leadership Medal when the servicing mission succeeded. (It is a wonderful world when you can break something, and then receive a medal for fixing it.)

Nettie: Your book “How NASA Builds Teams” describes the concept of “story lines.” Can you talk about how that works with leadership and how what stories we carry with us affect an organization?

Dr. Pellerin: Our most powerful means of influence is what we say, to ourselves (self-talk) and to others. Story-lines are things we say that seem like the truth, but are not because they are arguable. Since Story-lines are not actual truth, we are free to change them. We teach people to color their Story-lines as “red” when they distract people from outcomes they want, and “green” when they improve focus on actions that take us to desired outcomes. Here is a “red” Story-line: My boss gives me too much work. It is “red” because it is a Victim Story-line, “It is useless, and there is nothing I can do. The “green” replacement Story-line is: “I am responsible for managing my workload. I will communicate with my boss in a way that matches my workload to my capacity.” (We have a communication methodology, “4-D Communication” for this conversation.”)

Story-lines can take entire industries to success or ruin. Can you guess which US industry ran this Story-line? “Improving quality is too expensive.” They only considered shifting their Story-line to “Improving quality is the best way to lower cost,” copying their main competitor, when they lost 65% of market share to a foreign country. It was the auto industry, of course.

Nettie: How did these stories affect the Hubble error? And how do stories contribute to decisions we make on teams and projects?

Dr. Pellerin: The NASA contract managers ran a Story-line that “the best way to get performance from our contractors is to beat them up.” This is ill-conceived. People perform complex tasks more efficiently when their contributions are authentically appreciated and they enjoy their work. This kind of Story-line caused “the biggest screw-up in the history of science.” When we encounter broken government-contractor interfaces, we initiate the team recovery with authentic appreciation exercises. You can download the PowerPoint slide we use (free) at NASAteambuilding.com.

Red Story-lines cause decisions that are detrimental to success, and Green ones bring success.

With a little training, people can “color” their Story-lines and make choices. I spent my first 8 or so years with about 50% of my time consulting for aerospace companies and 50% experimenting with the 4-D System. My consulting clients took the 4-D workshop and I observed them afterward. As I walked through their buildings I loved hearing people on a telecon ask, “If we ran that Story-line, what outcome would we realize.” All saw immediately that the story-line was red and replaced it with a green one. (Do not tell anyone but this is cognitive psychology, simplified.)

Nettie: What do you think are three common misconceptions about leadership and project management that organizations have?

Dr. Pellerin:

1. That you can safely ignore team social context, because you ignore this at great peril as in the examples of space accidents.
2. That there is no way to measure and manage team social contexts, when our assessments measure team social context by measuring eight behaviors against defined standards.
3. That managing team social context is expensive and only affordable by big organizations like NASA. This is not true. Developing individuals by managing team contexts is highly efficient. We offer wholesale assessments to 4-D Network Members (see NASAteambuilding.com) and routinely waive all fees for academia and organization who cannot afford to pay.

Nettie: Can you describe the 4-D system briefly and how it can be used as a tool to analyze team and individual performance?

Dr. Pellerin: The 4-D System is a Cartesian coordinate system based in work Carl Jung did in 1905. The 4-D organizing system has two essential functions:

1) It analyzes complex team and leadership characteristics into simple manageable components; and

2) It aligns all 4-D processes (assessments, workshops, consulting and coaching) around the fundamental four dimensions.

It is at the heart of why our processes are so powerful—repeating the same theme everywhere.

Nettie: What is one of your success stories using the 4-D System described in your book and what types of organizations have you worked with?

Dr. Pellerin: Actually, I have two favorites:

1. Our processes took a contractor’s fee pool from 67% to 96% in a $1B+ contract (HNBT page xix). This change was rapid and profound. Moreover, the contractors’ top management credited us with the change; and

2. The STEREO project (HNBT page 54), where the government and contractor team monotonically improved in near lockstep. The project leadership reported high correlation of our social context measurements with both team performance and customer perceptions. Perhaps this is a favorite because it was a dramatic early success for us, when we were not as confident about our effectiveness.

Nettie: What do you think about the space industry now, as it exists? Are you hopeful for the future in regard to space exploration?

Dr. Pellerin: I have given this a bit of thought, as I was head of NASA strategy for a time. Here is the difficulty. Human flight is the heart and soul of the agency. It is also expensive, costing perhaps 10 to 100 times as much as unmanned programs. NASA has not had adequate funding for human space flight programs since Apollo. At this moment, political turmoil confuses civil space. The Administration wants more NASA funding to go to “commercial” space programs with less NASA oversight. The Congress worries about losing jobs in their districts. While I remain hopeful for the longer run, it is not clear how the near-term will play out. Note: NASA spends 90% of its budget on contracted work.

END

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Did the Grateful Dead steal their iconic name from another band? Forensic investigation reveals one of history’s great mysteries.

By Steve Kayser with David Meerman Scott, and Brian Halligan, authors of “The Marketing Secrets of the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History”

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I was working on a story when I ran into a perplexing problem.  A total roadblock. How to simplify a complex story – one that involved quantum physics, cancer, depression, hope against all odds and the ephemeral topic of “making miracles?”

Photo courtesy of Stuck in Customs

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Are you glued to the TV every Saturday in the Fall, yelling yourself hoarse in the stands at your favorite university? Do your friends get tired of you arguing with sports analysts’ predictions each week?

If you answered yes to the above questions, Cincom Systems, Inc. invites you to join our Cincom 2010 College Football Experts Club.

The Cincom 2010 College Football Experts Club is a fun, 14-week competition following the schedule of the NCAA football season. Each week, players will log into the Experts Club website (http://www.cincom.com/football), created in conjunction with Athlon Sports, and attempt to accurately predict the winner of each week’s most competitive games.

Points are won for each correct guess, and those players at the top of the leader board are eligible for weekly prizes.

Cincom is also hosting a Bowl Championship Series contest starting in December. A winner will be chosen based solely on outcome of the BCS bowl games.

Chances are that even if you answered “no” to our above football fanatic questions, there’s a sports fan in your life who wouldn’t mind owning some memorabilia from their favorite athlete. Plus, you can even donate your prize to a charity of your choice if you choose! So why not join us?

Catch up with Coach Liz

You can join in on the fun and keep up to date with what’s going on in the game and the college football universe by catching up with Cincom’s Coach Liz on Twitter (@CincomFBGal) and on Facebook.

The Prizes

All prizes are gift certificates to the Athlon Sports online store. Athlon has memorabilia from ALL sports, so winners are NOT locked into a college football related prize.

Regular season competition (2 weekly winners)

First place: $175

Second place: $75

GRAND PRIZE (based on 14-weeks of results): $1000

Bowl Championship Series competition: $300

DON’T FORGET …

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You know about Intel’s Andy Grove – but do you know Andy Graves?

Probably not. This Andy is a retired USAF master sergeant, a natural leader, and a born (intuitive) manager who currently works for the U.S. Department of State.  This is a record of a recent conversation.

Woody: Some years ago, while riding my motorcycle along the Loch Ness, a definition of leadership came though to me so strongly I stopped to write it down:  Leadership is the creation of structures and processes through which people can contribute to the achievement of worthwhile goals. I still like it because it includes real things like structures and processes, not a lot of airy-fairy hoopla.

Andy: I can go with that.  It ties up the confusion about leaders and managers, you know, where leaders decide the right things to do and then managers do the things right.  Real life hasn’t worked that way for me.

Woody: How’s that?

Andy: Because among workers, someone is always taking the lead.  And who’s that?  It’s the man or woman who knows the most about the task and technology.  This is a lesson a lot of managers miss.  It doesn’t matter who has the rank!  What’s important is who has the most recent and relevant experience.  When I was an enlisted man teaching officer/pilots survival skills, I was the one with the most recent and relevant experience, and those officers knew that my job was to teach them how to survive disaster situations.  I was outranked, but that didn’t matter.  What I knew made them listen to me.

Woody: And did none of them resent being lectured to by an enlisted man?

Andy: Only a few, but they created another lesson – competence is so important that the other officers would tell the few to shut-up!  So I didn’t have to worry about that stuff.  The real leaders in any group will keep you covered.

Woody:  I got a similar lesson.  Once as a lieutenant, I was on a project with a bird colonel and working with a bunch of majors and light colonels.  My boss told me, “Woody, if any of these people give you any trouble, refer them to me.”  That taught me a lot about delegation, and that if I did my job competently, I was fireproof!

Andy: Isn’t that a great feeling?   And when you’re in that zone, do you need to be motivated?  Do you need anything more than knowing at the end of the day that you had a great day, doing your job for someone who appreciated you?  That’s the thing a lot of people don’t get.  I’ve seen a lot of senior people cripple programs because they let their need to be the boss get in the way of getting the job done.

Woody: I once asked a guy who was just standing around, doing nothing., what he was waiting for.  He said, “I’m waiting for my boss to tell me what to do!” I thought he was joking, so I asked if he was going to do something different than the day before.  “Of course not,” he said, “but my boss likes to tell me what to do, and I like to make him happy!”

Andy:  Sure!  If he made that decision, he would be taking his boss’ job.  That’s why the “structure and processes” part of your definition is so important.  You can’t have 15 or 20 people waiting to be told what to do.  They have to know, and they do know — if you involve them in planning  work and laying out schedules.

Woody: Do many managers do that, in your experience?

Andy:  Only the good ones.  Leadership is about taking people to new levels of performance, so they surprise themselves when they see how competent they are, and how much fun it is to hook up with others to win against the clock and the budget. Good leaders stretch their people, push them, and make them stronger performers.

Woody: How hard can you push them?

Andy: Right up the edge of what employment laws allow. Sometimes it’s giving them more work, or tighter schedules, or making them solve problems and implement solutions by themselves.  And when they win, you praise them and talk about what they learned.

Woody: But what if they don’t win?  If they fail?

Andy: Bullfeathers!!! If you pay attention to them, they don’t fail.  You see them struggling and you stop by to offer a suggestion or two.  If they’re afraid to fail, they work too slow. If you let them fail, you tell them that succeeding, being on schedule isn’t important! I don’t care what people write about the freedom to fail, but real leaders don’t let that happen to their people.  Not if there are any real chips on the table!

Woody: Real leaders, then, make sure people are successful at their work?

Andy: Nothing else is more important!

###

Andy Graves has worked in three embassies and a consulate in Eastern Europe and Russia, and is still at work out there, taking raw talent and turning it into professional precision, just as he did on A-10 “Warthog” flight lines.

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Too many salespeople view their buyers as anything but smart, especially those salespeople who deal with purchasing departments.  In far too many sales communities, there exists an attitude that buyers and purchasing departments are nothing more than barriers that need to be broken down.

Well, yes there are barriers.

Ironically, though, they are barriers that more often than not are there due to the very actions of the sales community.  One simple thing salespeople need to keep in mind is the fact the professional buyer sees far more salespeople in the course of a week or month than most salespeople realize.  Buyers have every reason to put up barriers, because the sales community in general can crank out some pretty pathetic salespeople.

How do I know this?

Simple – buyers have told me (not just once, but often twice. And not just in one industry, but in several industries).  As a consultant, I often have access to buyers in a way that most salespeople don’t. More importantly, the people I meet share with me insights they would never share with the sales community.  The buying community is really quite smart. They do their job well. Stop and think for a moment about this question: If they didn’t do their job well, wouldn’t their company let them go, especially in today’s economy?

Buyers are smart .

You should also know that they’ve seen every trick and every sales pitch known to mankind. I never cease to be amazed at how well many buyers can play back to me specific examples of sales techniques used by salespeople.  What’s even better is that not only have they shared with me examples of what they’ve seen, but they also have shared how they have responded to these sales techniques.

I know it may be painful to hear, but you are not as smart as you think you are, and the new trendy sales approach you have learned probably isn’t as revolutionary as you believe it is. It more than likely isn’t going to equip you to blast through barriers the purchasing department has in place.

It’s for this very simple reason why I tell salespeople the number one thing you can do when dealing with professional buyers and purchasing departments is to be yourself and be positive. Your buyer will see right through you if you’re not being yourself.  They’ll also see right through you if you’re putting on a front and not genuinely showing interest in their business and the concerns and needs they have.

If you’re not genuine, it will show. Sure, you might be able to pull off your trick for a one sales call or maybe even a couple, but your trick will be exposed. When it is, the consequences you’ll face will be severe.  This is something to always keep in mind. Many times when a professional buyer decides to cut you off, they may not tell you right away – they may leave you hanging in the wind for days, weeks or even months.  One reason they may choose to do this is to simply see how you’re going to respond or, more likely, to continue to gain information from you that they can then use to negotiate a better package with your competitor.

When a professional buyer does this, they’re doing their job. You may naively think they’re being stupid, because they’re not being more forthcoming with you. This is where the real stupidity starts to come out with the salesperson.  Because the salesperson believes the buyer is not smart, they start to play bullying games back with the buyer. Such examples include trying to go around them or opening up other doors.  The only thing this does if further alienate the salesperson from doing any business with the purchasing department, because the buyer with whom you first began working alerts the rest of the buying department about you and what you may potentially try to do.

All of this comes back to my original point: Buyers are smart and purchasing departments have a job to do and they do it well. They’ve seen the games that can be played and they know how to leverage such games to their advantage.

As a salesperson, you can thrive with buyers and purchasing departments if you follow these simple approaches:  Be yourself, be professional, and be engaged in genuinely wanting to help the buyer and their company.  If you can’t do these things, then you shouldn’t be selling. If you are not sure if you’re already doing these things, then I hate to tell you this, but you’re probably not.

Don’t walk around telling people you care about them and that you are so concerned about helping them. The salespeople who truly do care and are concerned let it come out in their actions day in and day out. Other people see it and do not need the salesperson to offer a verbal alert to it.

Do you think I’m way off base in these observations about the buying community? Don’t take my word for it. Ask your buyer. They will give you a straight answer – but only if you are being yourself, demonstrating trust, and genuinely caring for them and their business.

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So much has been written about healthcare reform lately, the complexity and costs, that we really need to step back and look at it with fresh eyes.

Where to start? At the beginning of course.

The Math

• $60 billion dollars of revenue are lost annually to patient registration errors.
• 31% of all hospital registrations contain errors.

Hard to believe but it’s true. Hospital and health systems lose money. The patients can overbilled … and underbilled. The hospitals charge too much – or not enough. To truly cut costs and deliver better outcomes and patient experiences, that complexity has to be addressed.

How to Fix it?

Healthcare registration has become increasingly complex over the years. What used to be a simple administrative function documenting patient demographic and insurance information has exploded to include denial management, payment collections and financial counseling.

When coupled with problems of high employee turnover and meager training resources, “access management” – as the function has come to be known – has struggled to keep up with the accuracy needed in such an important role in revenue cycle management.

The void between what is needed to meet requirements of patient access management and what has been provided by most technologies is referred to as the “complexity gap.”

But how have revenue cycle technologies evolved to address this challenge?

The Dark Ages

First-generation solutions for healthcare registration tended to be standalone or client-server applications. They were designed to address the growing demands for eligibility verification and registration data quality assurance. Patient payment calculators were normally self-developed by hospital information technology departments while address verification and financial assistance were outsourced to private vendors.

Major admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) systems allowed user-defined, “required” data-entry fields to be established, and emerging add-on quality systems began to track unpopulated fields.

There was a lot of technology working to maintain accuracy but little to none of it integrated with hospital ADT systems beyond error prompts. The result was a lot of rework and error correction further down the line eating up valuable time.

What followed next, in the present, were web-based platforms that broadened solution capabilities and shortened the complexity gap. However, these solutions still lack the capacity to answer all the needs of healthcare providers.

End Part 1

Part 2  -will cover Patient Access in the Present.

To learn the full history and future of Patient Access management, download the full report prepared by IMA Consulting - “How Rule-Based Process Automation Is Transforming Patient Access Management.”

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What are the leadership characteristic of integrity?

Several years ago, I worked for a leader who lived out that quality. In fact, if you looked up the word “integrity” in the dictionary, I think you’ll see his face posted next to the word. It was great working with a person I could trust—knowing I could believe what he said and that his motives were true.

I recently traveled to China with four businessmen to participate in an ethics and management forum for Global Partners in Hope (GPiH). During one of our luncheons, two of the men had a very lively discussion about honesty in the workplace, with both agreeing it was extremely important.

As I watched their animated conversation in which they talked excitedly and nodded their heads in agreement, I was blown away by how strongly they felt about this issue. One of the men said, “Hey, if an employee will lie about a small thing, then count on them lying about the big stuff, and I can’t afford to have employees who are dishonest.” The book of Proverbs in the Bible states,

During the forum in Beijing, one man told of how dishonesty had affected both himself and his family. He spoke with tears and it was clear he was wrestling with how to function with real integrity in his business.

Honesty is important in most cultures, but how we define honesty can be confusing. What one might call “negotiations” another culture might call a “bribe.” In certain cultures, negotiations are expected as a rule in business. For example, at the Silk Market in Beijing, a person is expected to barter for a certain product. If you don’t, it’s not “sporting” or much fun. Most of the fun is in the bartering, right? There seems to be a clear definition between a negotiation and a bribe. The merchant would not consider this process as being dishonest.

How about in the workplace when an employee who calls in “sick,” but he or she actually is just fine and simply took the “sick” day to play tennis. Is this acceptable? Should we just accept this in the workplace? Should an employee lose their job over a “little lie”?

A line should be made clear in the workplace about honesty and what is acceptable. The leader has the responsibility to model this for those they lead. Why? Because it builds trust, and trust is the foundation for healthy relationships. If trust breaks down, then the relationship will break down. Employees want a leader they can trust and employers want employees they can trust.

Regardless of the responsibilities of a leader, some leadership characteristics have universal value.

Honesty is a key component of integrity, and any leader looking to lead effectively will not overlook its significance.

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