MBA 101: Don't Be "That Guy"

[Brad Kenney]

I thought I'd start a series of blog posts giving you all the benefit of my perspective as a native Rust Belter who has grown up in and around manufacturing, has both blue and white collar workers in his immediate family, and is studying for my MBA at Kent State University.

As I learn, I discover I knew more than I thought about how manufacturing firms do business, with most of this previously existing knowledge base falling firmly under the "common sense" label. One great example of this concerns the costs of bad quality.

To illustrate this example, I'll first tell you about a summer party I once attended, up in the fisherman's paradise known as Lake of the Woods (up in Northwestern Ontario, Canada). The crowd at the party was a mix of locals and longtime visitors, with a couple of "out of towners" (obvious tourists) mixed in.

As with many parties of this kind, there was one guy there who stood out for all the wrong reasons. He started drinking early and often, got progressively louder and more obnoxious as the night wore on, and by the end of the evening had gotten punched in the face and knocked out cold, after which he woke up and then, after cracking another beer, passed back out. When I last saw him, he was slumped right outside the cabin's back door, with a cloud of hungry Canadian-size mosquitoes (they breed them big up North) jockeying for position on every square inch of his exposed skin (we joked at the time that he was better than a bug zapper, as the rest of us were relatively unmolested by the bloodsuckers that night).

When "that guy" woke up the next day, he had two black eyes, but you could hardly see them as they were recessed into a face that resembled a field of progressively larger, angry red, swollen mosquito bites.

His friends later told us that it took nearly a month for "that guy" to look normal again, as he had an allergic reaction and couldn't stop scratching his face, neck, arms, legs, etc. Supposedly, he had mosquito bites on the inside of his nose, and if those little buggers can climb up his nose, well...they can get anywhere. I'll leave it to your imagination.

Point is, "that guy" became a legend amongst my group of friends, who still talk about him -- even though we never saw him again.

What I'm learning as I move through school is, "that guy" has corollaries in the corporate world. Even above and beyond Ken Lay and Dennis Koslowski (two great examples of "that guy" in the boardroom), I have been somewhat surprised to see how many MBA textbooks regularly use the same company -- tire manufacturer Firestone -- as an example of the cost of poor quality. (If you don't know the story, check it out here.) The Akron, Ohio-based company was founded on and had a long heritage of top-shelf principles, but received not one, but two black eyes in the media (for tire recalls in 1978 and 2000) and has since found itself the poster child for bad quality -- and bad corporate decision-making as well.

Just to quickly illustrate how much brand equity one misstep can cost, a poll taken at the time of the 2000 recall noted that two thirds of consumers thought that the media blowout would make them extremely unlikely to purchase a Firestone tire.

However tough the short run costs were to its corporate reputation, the "long tail" of this issue in textbook form is just insult to injury, as an entire generation of MBAs learn about the cost of poor quality product from Firestone's bad example.

Now think about Mattel's precarious position last year -- how many anxious parents looked for that Mattel label, and put the company's product back on the shelf, because of high-profile product quality problems with China-manufactured toys? And how many textbook authors and college professors are using Mattel as an example of how not to manage your global supply chain?

The moral of the story is, don't be someone else's negative reinforcement.

Who will be "that guy" of this year? Will it be your company? I'd take extra pains to make sure it isn't, because the bloodsucking mosquitoes in the court of public opinion (and the textbook publishing community) have no qualms about attacking you when you 're down, and by the time they're done, like "that guy" in Canada, you won't even recognize yourself.