Beyond Borders: Why Culture Is the Hidden Variable in Every IBP Implementation | Eric Wilson

Two regional business units run the same S&OP or IBP software, trained by the same team. One flies, one flounders. It's rarely the technology. It's rarely even the process. It's culture.

In this episode, Mark is joined by Eric Wilson, Director of Thought Leadership at the Institute of Business Forecasting (IBF) and author of Beyond Borders: Cultural Complexity in Global Business. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and over 25 years in planning leadership roles at Tempur Sealy, Berry Plastics and Escalade Sports, Eric explains why IBP is fundamentally a human, social process rather than an engineering one, and why so many organisations approach it the wrong way round: technology first, process second, people forgotten.

Mark and Eric explore Eric's 16 regional cultures and nine business dimensions, the contrast between fail fast Silicon Valley thinking and Japan's consensus-built, fail proof approach, and the difference between cultures that trust the process and those that trust the person, memorably summed up as "meat eaters and olive oils." They also dig into a real story of cross-cultural collaboration on an academic paper, the surprising links between trust and every one of Eric's nine dimensions, and a live debate on why AI adoption may divide along East-West lines.

Eric closes with three pieces of advice for any S&OP or IBP leader wanting to design a process that works with human nature rather than against it.

In this episode:

• Why organisations default to a technology first mindset, and what it costs them
• Eric's 16 cultural regions and nine dimensions for global business planning
• Fail fast versus fail proof: the US-Japan planning culture clash
• Trust as the golden thread running through every dimension
• The Sven Crone story: big D versus little d decision making
• Cognitive diversity, East-West AI adoption, and what it means for planning teams
• Three things to change on Monday morning

About Eric Wilson
Eric Wilson is Director of Thought Leadership at the Institute of Business Forecasting (IBF) and host of the IBF On Demand podcast. An Advanced Certified Professional Forecaster with over 25 years of experience, he previously held senior planning leadership roles at Tempur Sealy, Berry Plastics and Escalade Sports. He was named a "Pro to Know" by Supply + Demand Chain Executive and received the IBF Excellence in Forecasting & Planning award. He is the author of Practical Guide to Sales and Operations Planning and, most recently, Beyond Borders: Cultural Complexity in Global Business.

Links
Book: https://a.co/d/06lu6xuK
Eric's website: https://ericwilsonauthor.com
Eric on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilsondemand

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Transcript

Eric (00:00)
People are really the heartbeat of what runs a business - that makes decisions that collaborates. And if we don't look at that core, you're going to have problems down the road. And that's what we see consistently.

Mark Blackwell (00:17)
Hi, Everyone. Welcome back to the Arkaro Insights podcast. I'm your host, Mark Blackwell. This is the show where we help business executives thrive in a complex adaptive world. Now, if you've ever been in a large organization running an S&OP process or an IBP process, you may have seen something a bit bizarre.

You might have two regional business units both running the same planning software, both being trained by the same team. But one of them is floundering and one of them is flying. Why is that? One of them reaches agreement and acts on what they decide And the other one seems to have missed commitments and wonder if there's some resistance. Many people tend to think, hey, this is a technology problem. Maybe we've got some bad data or there's a process issue.

But today we're going to explore another factor which I think both of us on the podcast today would argue is the much more likely issue about that. - it's culture, culture and people. So today we've got as our guest and I'm really, really looking forward to this conversation subject so close to my heart, Eric Wilson. He's the Director of Thought Leadership at the Institute of Business Forecasting and author of the book

Beyond Borders, Cultural Complexity in Global Business Planning. Eric spent over two decades in the trenches of IBP and S&OP, and his message to leaders is simple. This isn't an engineering problem. We're working with a human social system, and that's what we've got to fix. Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric (01:59)
Thank you very much. I'm excited. We've talked a few times, but you always have great discussions. I'm looking forward to this discussion as well. I hope, I didn't prepare because I just thought we'd come and have a conversation.

Mark Blackwell (02:10)
It's a complete conversation. I've read the book and just every time - it's opening page - you go, yes, I remember that. And we've all got our own experiences that you brought back for us of where we've been. And I think one thing that we've just totally aligned on is the fact that IBP or an S&OP from now on let's just call it IBP for the sake of argument. It's a social process and involves people, right? And yet many people

I don't know about you, but when I sit down with a business leader say, okay, let's do an implementation, the first thing is, well, we've just got an ERP system in and I need to introduce you to the director of IT. Tell me your experiences of why people just get this so wrong.

Eric (02:53)
I mean, I agree with you 100%. That is consistent with what I see. When you're looking at auditing S&OP or IBP processes or people wanting to implement, they start with a fancy software, shiny penny, something they can touch and understand, they think, and they assume that's going to solve a problem. Or it's a process. They take out the textbook, which...

I've written textbooks about this as well. And that's an S&OP IBP process. They take out the book and templates and assume everyone's going to fit in this form. And they approach things as technology first process second. And they forget that. People are really the heartbeat of what runs a business - that makes decisions that collaborates. And if we don't look at that core, you're going to have problems down the road. And that's what we see consistently.

Mark Blackwell (03:45)
Well, I think we had a podcast with Karen-Marie Katholm who's had many, many senior leadership roles. And she says the default is if people spent a fraction on capability building and understanding cultures and working with that as they do on their IT systems, we wouldn't have these issues. We know we significantly ignore this. So let's try to help people and explain to them some factors. And why do they want to look at

culture and the issues just a little bit more if they want business results.

Eric (04:14)
Yeah, you're so right. mean, they'll spend thousands and thousands of euros or dollars on implementing a technology or creating a nice dashboard when, you know, for seven or eight thousand dollars for a workshop.

They could have gotten a lot more return on their investment, a lot more engagement of the people, a lot more understanding of how people interact and why I'm doing something and why you perceive something. You're going to get a lot more value sometimes from that than the than creating thousands of dollars on a dashboard.

Mark Blackwell (04:50)
Because for me at least, this whole process is about decision making under uncertainty. All the technology in the world won't eliminate the fact that we cannot predict the future. We've just got to make some decisions and trade-offs that we're all happy with, with the best available information, which will never be certain.

Eric (05:11)
No, no, if you look at what a S&OP IBP process is, it's a structured process that aligns all functional areas, unified set of assumptions for coordinated decision making. To reverse engineer that, you start with, it's a decision making forum It's not a supply chain forum it's not a demand planning forum it's not a finance forum it's a decision making forum that's gonna align all functional areas, unified set of assumptions. So.

There's people at the very heart of all those steps and all those parts.

Mark Blackwell (05:44)
So I think you did a very good job of pointing out that people from different cultures make decisions and collaborate differently. And I was amazed how you did it because somehow you managed to draw a map of the world

Eric (06:00)
Which wasn't easy.

Mark Blackwell (06:02)
by different cultures. You're never going to get it. The more you divide, the more you realize you can subdivide, I'm sure.

Just to the listeners, if they haven't read the book, can you just explain some of the ways in which you sort of divided the world and why?

Eric (06:17)
you have to, can't do every, every individual is unique. I mean, we struggle putting people in boxes and I don't want to say this, this puts this people in this box, this person goes this box. There's a normal distribution of every culture and you're going to see a wide range. And I talk about that in the book as well, the individuality and you can't judge everyone by one single bias, but it's helpful to understand what the most, the, the mean of that normal

distribution is and what I even go to is the majority of the minority which is what we perceive other cultures as. So with that I had to define certain regions. There's 16 different regions.

It's difficult and I've gotten a lot of pushback on that, but you have to do the cutoff someplace. You're going to have a Southeast Asia, but even then Japan is going to be different than a lot of the other Southeast Asian type because there's unique cultural differences. So you look at the similarities and dissimilarities. So it's a typical hierarchical cultural, I mean, type of disaggregation type problem. You find out where the magic number is 16. It's a dendrogram And I figured out here's my 16 different cultures.

Here's the most dissimilarities and similarities I have and I end up with 16 different regions. Four different ones in Asia. I have four different ones in Europe. We separate out North America and South America as separate. Then I have the Anglosphere, which England, guess what? You act more like the Anglosphere than you do other Europe.

So you're going to be included in Canada, New Zealand, Australia. You have your own culture, unique cultures there. It's not American, it's not Europe. It's unique to the Anglosphere. So you have its own culture there. And then we have Africa and Russia to kind of round things up. So we have 16 different cultures and I had to draw the line someplace and I think it really does a great job though. So, cause you can see elements of yourself in that culture. And then you can also see how you perceive other elements

and other cultures depending on where they are. And it seems to be a good kind of separation.

Mark Blackwell (08:25)
you're not going to get it perfect because it's impossible to do. But I think that's the point. All you're doing is you're making it more visible to us that we need to be much more aware of this. That's the real message - not to try to find it, because you're looking for individuals within this. I I'm a Brit living in France for nearly 20 years now, so I'm going to have my own view on where France should sit on the landscape, which may not be the same as yours.

You know, that so be it. It really does. think the more it matters, you are beginning to think of some of the dimensions that we should be looking out for and making us more aware of our differences, which is really the point. But so coming back to you, so you make the case and I think it's really as you dig down into your dimensions and we're going to explore that in future on.

No one national culture, regional culture or sub-national culture is the perfect for S&OP, IBP.

Eric (09:22)
now.

Mark Blackwell (09:22)
Each of us in our own way, in our own cultures is pretty good at some things that you need to be done. And the same things that make us good in some dimensions can also cause us to be bad in other dimensions. Is that the case? So we can accept that at one point of equality that no one's perfect.

Eric (09:42)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean to disagree with your little bit of your opening statement, you said that

we had these different S&OPs and some do really good and others

Mark Blackwell (09:50)
You

Eric (09:50)
kind of fail. No, I would say some people do it differently than others is what you see. I mean,

Mark Blackwell (09:56)
Yeah.

Eric (09:56)
if you look at some of those people when it comes to like decision making and agility, they, if you...

audit them, you talk to them, they think they are doing things right. They are the best. You audit this other region, they think they are doing things right and they're doing the best. It's this

this isolation with this is all you know, this is what you think is good. And to your point, it's different, not necessarily always better. Now there is some things that are better. And if we can take pieces of this, a piece of this, we can design a better global S&OP process. Absolutely. But the differences I think are the key.

Mark Blackwell (10:33)
So I said that no one was perfect, but one of the impressions I had, and it resonated for me who's worked in this region on S&OP, IBP myself, is one region, if you had to choose one, is probably a good base case, right? And if I'm right, that's the sort of the Scandinavian region, which you can, can you tell me some of the

reasons why this is?

is the case and then we can explore from there all in the other regions.

Eric (11:04)
When you look at some

of the Scandinavian type of culture, it is a lot more egalitarian. It's an open type culture. It breeds more collaboration. Decision making is more a consensus type, building consensus because of the less hierarchical and people are willing to challenge. You have that challenging where you have great discussions and people willing to not accept things at face value, but actually push back, which causes better decision making. You have those.

type of environment. So from the collaboration and consensus and transparency, which is three of the keys of a mature S&OP process, in my opinion, they do a really good baseline of that. Others do it differently. If you look at some of the like Latin America, you're going to have a good collaboration.

Once you build that familiarity, once you build the, you the, you know, the I'm comfortable with you. I trust you as a person, you're going to have good collaboration and good, you know, good aspects, but you need to kind of build those aspects first. Once you build those, you can't break them, but you have to build those types of things first. So it's a little bit different. You know, Scandinavia, they typically have those types of things in place culturally.

Mark Blackwell (12:21)
So we can maybe just start talking about some of the dimensions that you chose. And then once we've got that in place, think about why some of the regions are different. Maybe you want to highlight a couple of them and then we can talk about different regions in that context.

Eric (12:36)
Alright.

I mean, when I was putting together, not only did I have to come up with 16 different regions, but I wanted to make it a business focused and specifically with S&OP, IBP, or any kind of business decision making process. And through other research that I've done, other books that I've written, I really could highlight nine different dimensions. So it really focuses on the 16 regions over nine different dimensions. And as I said, you can look at these nine dimensions, they are then become different based on the regions, the similarities and differences.

is this? Anything from a workflow to agility to strategy to collaboration, consensus, transparency, decision making, how do you deal with conflict? And the last was presentation, the way you present and consume information. Those were my nine dimensions that I really highlighted. And I see distinct differences between those 16 different regions.

Mark Blackwell (13:28)
So let's maybe just do some compare and contrasts off the top of our heads.

Eric (13:32)
Welcome.

Mark Blackwell (13:33)
Let's see where we go, right? So let's just imagine what might happen. You've got a process, let's say for example, in northern USA, because you've got a chance because you split the USA up, right? And they're working with a lot of Japanese people, right?

What's sort of things that you're going to say, hey, we've got to watch out for things that are going on here?

Eric (14:00)
But typically if you're looking at that, that fail fast mentality, I'm going to say the North, let's say the Northwest Silicon Valley. Okay.

Mark Blackwell (14:08)
Yep. Yep.

Eric (14:11)
It's going to be a fail fast type of culture. We're going to try something. Does it work? We're going to stop and go to something else. We're going to immediately pivot, take our lessons learned and develop something else. I mean, this whole textbook's written about the fail fast type of mentality and business model. And you see it in a lot of the Silicon Valley.

type of you know businesses and it works well from a United States type of you know I'm willing to accept risk I'm willing to challenge I'm willing to try new things I'm willing to fail and failure is not a bad thing

It is rewarded if you learn and adapt from it. It's actually rewarded sometimes in our culture. Now take that same culture over to Japan where you apologize if you're two minutes late on a train. Failure is not an option. It is shame.

So that is the stereotype, but that stereotype is a stereotype for a reason. And you see it in the business culture as well. There is a culture of

you need to plan out everything in advance to succeed, which is almost the exact opposite of a fail fast type of culture and a fail fast type of mentality. So consensus is built on layers. It's built on, I'm going to prove out what everything at the lowest level, then we're going to build consensus at the next level, and then we're going to build consensus at the next level. And we're going to build this process that is fail proof. And that is how they're designing.

Sometimes it may take a lot of time. People in the US are getting frustrated because it seems like we're spinning a wheel or we're consistently having to navigate this pyramid of hierarchy to get a conclusion. And it seems like it takes forever to make a decision. Japan's frustrated because you're just shooting from the hip. You Westerners are just.

you know, wild, wild west. And you're just trying things without really understanding the consequences of them first. Those two cultures will crash if you don't understand those nuances and differences.

Mark Blackwell (16:21)
So again, I really want to emphasize that no one's perfect in this. that view, that long term view means that talking about planning within a 24 month horizon and giving equal focus to each component to that is typically quite easy in a Japanese culture once you've got it. My challenge when

I've been working with US colleagues is like, yeah, no problem about the three month in the next quarter.

Get them to think anything beyond that. Boy, it's hard work because what are you talking about? We just need to execute on the next quarter mark. Where are you? Yeah, for example.

Eric (16:58)
Right? No,

I, and it doesn't have to necessarily be the Japanese culture. I mean, you have that distinct US culture. I get it. I'm one of them. And part

of the, know, emphasis for this book, when I kind of realized there are these differences, I work with, you know, Dr. Sven Crone I don't know if you know, know, Sven

Mark Blackwell (17:15)
Yes.

Eric (17:17)
he's a German, brilliant mind, but he is German and he does a lot of teaching in the UK as well. But

we wanted to co-author a paper together and we're saying, okay, great. This is what we're going to write about the co-author paper. Great to him being an academic plays a lot into it, also with his culture, he wants to lay out everything, challenge every assumption in it, make sure we have the right research for it before it. And then once we have everything, we write the paper. I just want to start writing.

I'll start writing a rough draft, an outline, give it to you, tell me what's wrong. I'm that fail fast type of culture.

And he wants everything we're going to lay it out. It's that big D versus little d. What Erin Meyer talked about in her book, another great book on culture, where she talked about that big D, little d where I'm looking at a little d. I'm making small decisions that are pliable, that we can continue to adapt. He wants to create that big D. Once we get that decision, it's done. And think about that German culture. Once again, the stereotype, stereotype for a reason.

They come to a conclusion, they are not wavering. That is really what he was trying to do. He did all the work up front, so you come to a conclusion, you don't waver. Me, I'm little ds. I'm gonna consistently adapt and change and change and change. There's two different approach. I'm not saying one way is right or wrong. We both wanted to write a great paper. We both had ideas we wanted to share. We both had the same end goal. We just approach it two different ways. And we're both gonna get there.

Mark Blackwell (18:55)
And the other thing I loved, which is just a beautiful description, was trust. The cultures which developed trust by following the process, which is a very Germanic way of thinking, just south of the border of that in Italy. And it reminds me of the Latin American cultures. These are more Latin cultures. Trust becomes through our relationships with people first,

Eric (19:19)
Absolutely.

Mark Blackwell (19:19)
and then we do it.

As just one example, trust obviously is such a fundamentally important issue when you're managing uncertainty and decision-making on uncertainty.

Eric (19:30)
No, that's true. Trust is kind of that, I mean, I wrote the nine dimensions and I wrote the book, but after I finished the book, when I finished the book, I noticed something when I was kind of rereading it that...

I wish I would have highlighted even more. Trust is that golden thread that seems to go through almost every dimension and what I'm underlining, what I'm talking about seems to be trust. And you mentioned that Northern Europe versus South Europe. You're right. I mean, the way I could highlight that was, you trust a process or do you trust a person asking someone that you're going to get different responses? Of course you trust the process. Of course you trust the person. And that, of course highlights the need.

reading my book, but highlighting

Mark Blackwell (20:11)
Yeah.

Eric (20:11)
the need for understanding there's cultural complexities in the process you talk about.

So I did hundreds of interviews for this book. And one person interviewed had a great way of describing it. But

He called it the meat eaters in the olive oils. Which I love

Mark Blackwell (20:25)
Yes.

Eric (20:26)
because if you look at Northern Europe and some of the Scandinavian, it's meat. Give me the process. Give me the details. That is what I want with the Southern. It's more olive oils. It's the mixture is the blend. It's the relationships they trust the people versus northern trust the process. Put those together. You're going to have problems if you don't know your own bias and don't have that empathy or

develop processes that would incorporate both sides of that.

Mark Blackwell (20:56)
you're so right. There's a beautiful map that maybe I'll try to dig out and put on the screen of Europe, which separates not by meat and olive oil, but it's virtually the same thing, which is butter and olive oil and where the boundary

Eric (21:07)
There you go.

Mark Blackwell (21:09)
is and the boundary crosses countries. And the more you look at it, the more you get it. You know, that's it's such a good way of thinking. But tell me.

As you were doing your research, and you did it very methodologically, as you said, a hundred interviews, lots of dimensions, lots of data that people can call in the book. Was there anything that came out that surprised you that was against some of your previous thinking? You've traveled the world, you've seen a lot.

Eric (21:38)
The, I think the biggest surprise to me was I consistently learned about myself. I'm writing a book for others, but I think the biggest surprise was I kept saying to them like, that's me. I have that bias. I really didn't understand it. mean, okay, let's take an easy one for example, you know, if you look at like say India and their culture, it always drove me crazy the way they queue for lines.

never understood it. I mean, it's this branch type of attack. And I'm thinking, but I'm from a, you create a queue, you have line, you have order. And even in in, in, in the United States, we still have order with our queues, even though we're not really rule forward, we are actually rule followers. Just people won't admit it, but those I'm thinking they don't follow any rules.

It's a cultural thing and understanding that you can build empathy and understand what it is and why those things exist. That was just one highlight for me. I have other types of realizations when someone called me gentle from a Southeast Asia type culture and I'm like, gent me gentle. But I didn't understand what we look as confidence and projecting confidence.

means something else to them when we say that's gentle. When they look at gentle is I'm just listening to them. I'm just

Mark Blackwell (22:58)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (22:58)
hearing them. I'm giving them an opportunity to speak back. I'm not talking over top of them. That is gentle. understanding my own biases and building that empathy, biggest lesson for me was just introspection was the biggest lesson. Me, I was a problem.

Mark Blackwell (23:16)
Fascinating, very honest of you. Well done, I like that. Now here's maybe a tough question.

Eric (23:22)
I thought that was the tough question. Wow.

Mark Blackwell (23:24)
Here's a really tough one. So, we know that one of the biggest things that is changing integrated business, supply chain planning, demand planning, we can see the AI coming into our world.

Off the top of your head, which cultures are going to find this easier or harder than others? In terms of, know, like I've got something else which is mechanical. I've got my own view, but I'd be fascinated to see what you think.

Eric (23:51)
Well, I think I'm going to share your view because I...

kind of had opinions on it before and I thought of it, but I never really did that deep dive into AI adoption. I mean, yeah, I was at an AI Edge conference in April and I led a round table and I had the discussion about AI adoption with a good cross-cultural type of a table. And we talked about trust and I got a lot of feedback. But really what shaped my opinion is something you sent me.

the graphs and the information, I think it came from a prior podcast that you did that really shaped my thinking. So I think I'm aligned with what you're thinking now because I tend to agree with what is a prior guest or that data that you provided. Really, I think highlighted some of that adoption based on cultural where they are.

Mark Blackwell (24:43)
Well, for me, the way I look at it is there's two bits of data. So there's one bit of data where they asked everyone around the world by country, know, are you frightened of AI taking your job? I just looked at.

I put above 50 % know I'm not worried and you're the below 50 % where I am worried right and I just put it cleaned out all the best like there was this big east west dimension of the two of them right

Eric (25:09)
You're is big!

Mark Blackwell (25:11)
big difference right people in the east are going you know I'm not really worried right and people in the west are going no I'm really worried this is going to take my job right now I've got I've no enough data and if anyone's listening this podcast just

Give me some more insights as to what the answer is. I've got a hypothesis, right? My hypothesis is there's some very good science that shows that Eastern cultures are typically more right brain thinking. They're more holistic, see the big picture, put everything in context, right? There is good data to show that Western people

left brain thinking, which means we're more reductionist, we more break things down and we look at more the numbers. So if you think your purpose in life is reductionist, you probably are going to be worried by AI because that's what AI is really good at is the analytical breaking the stuff down into small component parts.

But if you are a right brain thinking, you go, I don't care. It can do all of that analytical stuff, but it's still not going to see the big picture that makes me human and makes me different as a human. So anyway, that was my idea.

Eric (26:29)
Yeah.

Mark Blackwell (26:29)
I'd love to find someone who knows more about this, but I think that's a pretty interesting thing to explore.

Eric (26:34)
I agree with some

of your aspects. Yes, you have the holistic thinking, which is definitely more of the Eastern versus very symmetrical linear type thinking, which is definitely more of the Western type thinking. And I think that does play into it. Other things kind of play into it as well is where typical, you know, Eastern it's like they look at others to provide freedom from, you know, for you.

So if you look at, let's say cameras, there's millions of cameras in China. Now that's not a problem because that makes you freer because now it's a safer environment. So they look for government.

businesses to provide freedom for them versus more of an Eastern. We provide freedom from something else. And you look at that from an AI perspective, they're more apt to adapt to an AI as well. So that could play into it equally then as well. But the other piece that I don't know is when you're looking at the innovation side of things.

If look at historically, typically a lot of the Eastern culture don't create the Einsteins, the Nikola Tesla's, the Plato, they don't create them. They will absorb that and make it their own and better, but they don't create those. That independent type of thinking typically generates more innovation. So less innovation possibly, but more adoption.

Over here, more innovation, less adoption. I don't know how these are going to work out. Maybe it's a maybe it's a good argument for collaboration and cultural complexities and global business. Maybe it's a good argument for my book. I don't know.

Mark Blackwell (28:17)
Well, I think for

me, I I value diversity and this is real diversity. Cognitive diversity is the type of diversity that we should be valuing within organisations.

Eric (28:31)
Absolutely.

Mark Blackwell (28:32)
Because that's where we're going to get supernormal results, when we can learn to respect from it and when we can learn to pick up from it. I think, you know, having been in large...

multinationals myself, it's all too easy to assume that your corporate culture will just merge towards where the centre of gravity of the organisation is. And what I loved about your book is this is a big reminder to say, you know, we might do a little bit of that, but we're still individual humans as a result.

Eric (29:03)
Yeah. And the key point I kind of want to leave people with is, I mean, yeah, a lot of research because I wanted to make sure I bring my own biases in it. Yes. It highlights nice stories of the differences between different cultures that you can relate to. It's therapeutic for some people to go, yeah, I'm not crazy. I do see that. I do feel that. But I also provide practical application and things you can use. How do you design your processes? How do you work with these other cultures?

do you integrate this into an S&OP process? So I don't leave you hanging at the end saying, this was a great story. I give you practical application that you can actually take and use too. So that's what I think makes this book different than a lot of the other theory books out there.

Mark Blackwell (29:48)
So, right, segue to my final question, Eric. So, this is a theme on this podcast. The last question we ask is, so you've got an S&OP leader listening to this podcast. What are the three bits of advice you would give him or her, on Monday morning to go to do things differently, assuming they've read your book or aware?

Eric (30:09)
One.

Understand you have your own biases. Other people have their own biases. Understand number one, admit that there is differences out there and then go buy my book. Obviously Beyond Borders, Cultural Complexity in Global Business because you need to help understand some of those. That would be number one. Number two, design your processes intentionally. Don't start with a technology that's then going to you're going to have to do this process to fit this technology and then these people

have to fit in this process. No, design your processes intentionally for cultural complexity. Design it in the beginning. Don't try to retrofit it after you have the technology in process. Design it intentionally. And then the last piece of advice, because you said three pieces of advice then, would be stay curious.

You have

Mark Blackwell (30:58)
See.

Eric (30:59)
to have that curiosity of others, of yourself, the introspection of others, of what else is out there, which includes new types of processes, new types of technology. You know, allow Mark to come in and challenge your thinking. That is what we need to do. The only way you're going to be challenged is if you're curious.

Mark Blackwell (31:19)
Well done, Eric. Fabulous bits of advice. Thank you so much for your time. Great. We're going to make sure your book and all the access on Amazon is in show notes as well as your podcast. I'm going to put a link to that if you don't mind.

Eric (31:31)
Please

Mark Blackwell (31:32)
it's been great. Wonderful. Thank you for your time. And I hope we've inspired some others to have an even better S&OP IBP process next week.

Eric (31:40)
Thank you.

Mark Blackwell (31:40)
Thank you. Bye bye.

Eric (31:41)
Alrighty.