Thinking Edge Interview with Benito Piuzzi, Global Leader and Industry Transformer
Welcome to Thinking Edge with Ed Boudrot.
Ed
So we couldn’t be more grateful today to be with Benito Piuzzi. And he’s the head of operations strategy at Better.com. Just an incredible background with McKinsey. So grateful to be on with you today Benito.
Benito
Yeah, no very, very happy and excited to be here. And thanks for having me.
Ed
Great. So I’d love to start off really about you, your background, your passions, what drives you. Love to hear more.
Benito
Absolutely. And thanks for asking me. Well, I’m originally from Chile actually I’ve have spent most of my life here in the in the US, I came as an exchange student, and then ended up enjoying, I guess, the American life and decided to stay for college. And I guess growing up as a kid, one of the things that I enjoyed doing the most was solving problems, math problems, physics problems, numbers, I was a bit of a nerd. So going to college here in the US was very sort of a challenge, very exciting, and decided to get a degree in Industrial Engineering, which is where I thought I could learn how to solve all kinds of problems, I guess, at the time. I ended up going back to Chile for a few months and decided to go on another adventure and moved to Italy.
Ended up working out well, I got a degree in Management Engineering, which kind of kicked off my career in operations, which is an area where I wanted to be actually so I ended up back in the US and spent the last 10 plus years in a variety of roles. Always intrigued by solving problems, I had an opportunity to learn how to do consulting or move to a role within Alcoa. For those that don’t know, Alcoa is one of the largest aluminum manufacturing companies. Well, definitely one of the largest in the US. And I learned all about Lean Manufacturing, which I thought was fascinating. That’s when I got introduced to the Toyota Production System and some of the tools that are required to improve efficiencies across not only the operation, but different organizations.
And after learning quite a bit, I traveled across the country, I was able to jump into another great company McMaster Carr, which for those that may not be familiar, is one of the top players in the industrial distribution, MRO space, if you will. So think of it as an online hardware store, like Amazon for industrial companies. It was a great opportunity for me to learn now not only how to apply those lean tools that I advise others to use, but now apply them owning part of the operation while developing people while managing projects. So it was a different flavor of what it took to take an operation to the next level. I’ll learn quite a bit about the importance of customer experience. Some of the discussions we were having some times were about that one package that went missing, that’s how important it was for us to make sure that things were delivered on time and that we had the right operation in place.
And then after that, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to interview and get a job with McKinsey and Company where I was not only able to take some of the knowledge that I had to the next level and learning some technical requirements to take lean operations to the next level, but also from a leadership point of view, problem solving, communication, I mean all in all, McKinsey was a great experience that enabled me to truly understand what it took to drive change. From early on there I was working a lot in what we call large scale transformations. So for those that may not be familiar with what that means, most times you go into a company that really needs help. We do a due diligence, a diagnostic, we work with the client to develop a roadmap, and then we jump into execution. So we mobilize a large group of people, small group of people from McKinsey, usually, but large groups of people within the organization to truly start driving change.
And I did that quite a bit over and over in different industries. But spent quite a bit in like the high tech space Automotive in utility energy space. And that’s where I found a bit of a passion too now because as I was moving up, I think one of the things that I started learning more and more was about the leadership piece, because now you move away from looking at numbers. Now you have to make sense of numbers. And then you move on top of how you enable others to drive those numbers. And that’s something that through my case, they kind of start learning more and more. Always in the back of my mind, I had this sort of desire to jump into the entrepreneurial world. Now, I haven’t truly launched anything like many others have, but I had an entrepreneurial opportunity at McKenzie helping launch their Operations Academy, we understood the client needed more from us on the execution front. So we developed programs to help clients sustain themselves help execute with the right skills, we believe skills were the key component missing a lot of times. So if we go to a client and say you can save $100 million, for example, often they would save half or much less than the target. And part of it was they didn’t have the right skills. So we McKenzie used to go back every couple of years or so forth to fix the same problems. So we wanted to stop that and truly help the client so they can help themselves.
So after doing that we successfully scaled through a number of clients and then I had a very unique opportunity to do something special at Better.com. They’re truly trying to transform the industry and a lot of the the concepts that I’ve learned through my experience in operations, and the ability that I’ve had to lead others large organizations to change is what has enabled me to kick things off here to help Better.com really take the operation to the next level to continue to drive success and we’re continue to scale exponentially month after month.
Ed
What an incredible background, you know, from industrial engineering, to engineering to operations, Benito, how do you think about problem deconstruction? It’s interesting that you brought up you know, in working with some clients, there’s a kind of a multitude of factors. How do you lead? How do you lead change management? What are your setting for targets, but one of the opportunities could be that the skills so how do you how do you look at problems? How do you deconstruct them? And what are the key skills that you think are required?
Benito
Absolutely. I think that it is very, very, very important to start with a solid foundation and understanding what exactly are you trying to drive, it almost starts with, like a philosophical, existential question. And that doesn’t mean boil the ocean, as we say, to try to fix everything, this is not a let’s fix the full problem, it’s to truly understand and go deep. If you were to think about like, a page, and you think of the left hand side is the solution and the right hand side is the answer, you want to spend probably 80 to 90% of the time on the left hand side understanding what truly is the problem and make sure you don’t go deep into the root. So you are truly tackling the problem in a sustainable way, as opposed to the symptoms of the problem, which means the problem is going to repeat over and over and over.
So at a high level, when you have a problem in operation, typically the solution is not the hardest thing, interestingly enough. The solution to say what’s broken, people have usually pointing out the problem multiple times, even people at the lower levels of organization where the issue is is in the execution. Because a lot of companies that have been around long enough, have a hard time changing. And that’s where a lot of the issues are. So in terms of the skills and what is required to truly solve problems, you can think of it in terms of the technical skills, they usually are there. But you can also say you can either hire up-skill, re-skill your labor force, and you can quickly- it doesn’t take a lot of time, if you recognize it did- the technicality of a problem is the subject is the problem. But the true skill that is required is leadership. That’s how you mobilize companies and people.
And now we start talking about the complexity of driving change, we’ll talk about why do I go to work every day? What’s my incentive? What’s meaningful to me to go to work every day? And you will find that, as obvious as it sounds, everyone is different. They go to work for different reasons. And they believe that what’s important to them may not be important for someone above them, right? So understanding those things, in breaking those pieces apart, instead of a framework that- we used to use the word MECE a lot in consulting in McKinsey, right, mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. Basically saying, let’s make sure that we have an exhaustive list of things without overlap that tells me what are all the possible issues? And let’s try to drive some hypotheses to understand what are some of these issues. But we should do this not only on the technical side, when it comes to like a number, or a dollar problem we should do with our people too. What are the potential issues that are not allowing me to move past one year of change, and then I go back to the same issue? And that is what’s critical. And a lot of times people don’t know what they don’t know. And then that’s how consultants sometimes come in with frameworks and tools. It’s not that they’re breakthrough knowledge. It’s just that, like I said before, companies sometimes don’t know what they don’t know. And they don’t understand how to diagnose themselves and how to understand what’s missing.
Ed
Yeah, I love that. Almost a stack in a ways. Frameworks and tools, but breaking the problem down in an exhaustive way to understand root cause, and then applying potential solutions to that. But I think your idea around the people part is incredibly important, because what creates sustainable change, right? So you can actually have that stack and repeat the stack. But if you can’t have sustainable change, you’d end up calling more consultants and which is, which is a good thing. But talk more about the people part and if you were to you know, deconstruct that. So you mentioned a few things. So you know, leadership is really about understanding people there- you know why they come to work every day? What’s their motivation? But also the ability for change management’s probably an overused word, but how do you actually lead people in a true manner, such that for better outcomes?
Benito
Yeah, no, absolutely. And bear in mind, I don’t think there’s a silver bullet. I think if you were to put probably some of the top consulting companies, their frame works are going to have quite a bit of overlap. And they may have different flavors to some degree than others. But ultimately it’s very different as you can imagine, to try to influence a small group of people to do something different as you would with a very large organization. When you try to change the masses, that is very very challenging. So some of the things that truly start with leadership at the top, and what I mean by that is, there has to be a sort of a top down commitment. It’s almost like if you don’t believe from the top of what needs to happen, nobody will ever believe you underneath. Any truly that inspirational role become damaged, critical, right?
The precedence, there’s a lot of things that I’ve seen, for example, CEOs doing road shows, for example, when you have companies have multiple sites or plants, how do I go and listen and understand what’s happening provide the context to people they need for change? If you don’t have a case for change, you’re gonna fail. That simple. You have to have a need for change and it cannot be “we just want to make more money,” right? It gotta be a we have a mission here to have the best product out there, we have competition, how do we truly change the game now, so we have the best to deliver the best possible service to customers.
So there has to be a mission driven top down leadership that get others to get inspired. I think it’s something critical too that people tend to underestimate in my experience is how to leverage the influence model. So understanding based on the different layers and organization and your different roles, they’re truly different ways in which you can influence someone. I mean, technically, people can choose multiple things, right? But, you know, understanding, for example, how can I role model better? How can I truly get to inspire others, but I’m going to change the way I do things? Or how do I create better conviction through better communication, like I said, before, building that case of change. And usually you that will trickle down, like, in my experience, you start at the very top developing that change story.
But this doesn’t stop there, you have to find a path. So that change story trickles down all the way to the frontline employees. The also the ability of building talent and skill, which I highlighted earlier, through Operations Academy, that is also something that is very much undermined. Now we have a changing economy, we have sort of an industry 4.0, the digitization of products and services. So the ability to re-skill and up-skill labor force should be priority number one across the board. This is not about the person, the now is not required, therefore that person loses the job to a robot. The question is, how do I teach that person how to code or how to maintain that robot? So what skills are required for that person to still have a spot in this new organization? So it changes the way we think about labor and the evolution of operations. But there are gaps in the knowledge that we can fill by developing processes to build the knowledge in our different workforces. And the last one is incentives. I mean, to be frank with you, especially in operations, this is across the board, how do I truly build incentives to get people excited about going to work and if they are not always monetary, they can be and they’re very popular to have bonus structure and whatnot. But it could be recognition systems, it could be a lot of things to get people excited about going to work. That in itself, I think it can be very, very meaningful to truly start driving changes.
The last thing I would say when it comes to, to this piece is understanding and recognizing when and how to move from small scale pilot/experimentation, to scaling. Again, larger organizations, that’s when you start losing a lot of value. How do you scale a change across multiple sites across 1000s of people recognizing and understanding that the pilot is one stage and now you- how do you move quickly, requires very tight organization and governance to do it effectively.
Ed
I love that you hit on incredible topic areas there. You know, I love to drill down on on leadership. Everything from roadshows to say, create meaning for people and everyone you touch all the way down to the you know, frontline employees. How do you inspire people through a meaningful mission in creating that context of why are we doing what we’re doing? Simon Sinek’s Golden Circles come to mind, the why the how, and the what? I know that’s a very simple communication methodology. But if people understand that, it’s gonna have huge implications, you know, something I hear quite often as well as how do you educate and up-skill? But that to me is creating almost like the learning organization, right and inspiring people, hey, there’s a great career path here. And you know, I’m going to help you as a leader get there, and there’s different dimensions to that as well. So everything from the why of the company to the why of you as an employee?
Benito
Absolutely. And that’s a great question. And I’ll separate the question one talking a little bit about the building that sort of change story and making it stick in the organization. And then I’ll talk a little bit about the communication and engagement of employees and the sort of up-skill/re-skill world. When we talk about the change story. I’m a huge believer in the co-creation, and listening. So what does that mean? Is something that I truly enjoy doing. And I know every organization is different. But at McKinsey, a lot of what we did, which is sitting down in a room with a bunch of people and just talk. And where we would add values, is sort of creating the path and put a structure in the thoughts, but we’re going to get the people’s thought out there. What’s important, what’s the meaning of the mission of this company? Do we have the right mission? Why is this important? We wanted to truly ask those tough questions. So we truly start believing.
It’s almost like if you’re getting ready for a marathon, and I’m trying to test your your strength, your mental excitement, and strength, and I’m saying “why do you really want to do it? Do you think you can do it? What does it mean to you to win the marathon? Why do you want to do it now?” So by reflecting on those things, you start believing more and more, and you’re like, “yeah, I want to do it and this is important to-” and it’s sort of the same exercise that you start at the top with organizations to start thinking, why do I need to do it now? The cooperation is important, because now other people have a stake on it. I’ve been heard. So it’s not just a sit down with the CEO. And here we go. Here’s your one pager. Right? It’s a bit of a here’s what I’m thinking, guys. Why is this important to us and CEO and others should ask others underneath him to reflect? Why is this important to you?
I was lucky enough to be in workshops, when we had to build this with senior leaders and it was incredible some of the stories you will hear when people were asked why coming to work is important to you. Why is this transformation important? From health issues to being there when the company was nothing and now building a family with multi generations working on the place, there was a guy that I actually- I was part of a project with his son and his grandson, we’re all working on the same company. So it was very close to his heart that the company stayed alive and did well.
So there’s some of the things transpire is some of that co-creation transparency environment. And then that needs to happen to some degree all the way down in different contexts, you may not have always say CEO, you may not always have a two hour workshop, but you have to get all the way down and the leaders have to do a good job listening and opening the forum for people. So you add those flavors into that change story, the change story is going to change flavors a little bit as it trickles down. Because it has to be meaningful to those that are listening, that need the change. To the second piece around the learning and they up-skill and re-skill. This is a bit of a pattern that is unavoidable. Right now more and more companies, you’re going to start seeing chief learning officers, for example, and it’s going to be more embedded in organizations the ability to how do we truly maximize our talent, people are recognizing that recruiting, and building the right culture is tough. And bringing people all the time has this trade off. It’s not always bad, it’s not always good.
It is a lot about the company that some people know that you don’t want to just waste the raw skills that people may have. So yes, there are implications to this change in how do you help others truly become a better version of themselves? And for that there are different ways to do it. Right? I don’t think there is a single source of truth here. But one way to think about it is mapping out the future of an organization. I think now more and more people are at the right time to think about who do I want to become? What skills are required to get there, aka what is my journey, aka learning journey should be to get these people to this other level? How do we embed learning management systems? How do I leverage existing technology? I have nudges now that I can get through an app, for example, there are new companies coming up now, with ways to incorporate certain dynamics into how you learn leveraging adult learning principles, right? Which is not any more about sit down lecture base, read this book, homework go. It’s about how do I apply what I’m learning all the time consistently. And mapping that out is the way that it becomes real, that is an actual skill, that you are gaining over three, four five different levels. So whatever the case might be, and these are the courses, these are the tests and this is where there is a certification program or a promotion at the end of the path. There has to be some sort of roadmap building process. And now you communicate it with others, where people have a legitimate chance now to build towards this next generation sort of operating model that that some companies are going through.
Ed
That’s great. I love that the learning organization that drill down on that, if you think about the the workforce in general, what are we missing? Benito?
Benito
That’s a loaded question. It’s like the, the meaning of life.
Ed
*Laughs*
Benito
I think that the challenging piece, and this is sort of like call it the dirty work is to do that mapping. Where are we? Where do we want to go? What’s missing and how do I get there? Companies are busy. And in the current landscape, they’re busier, whether it is because they’re trying to stay afloat, or because they’re growing too much, you have both scenarios. And even if COVID-19 was not around, companies tend to not spend a lot of time reflecting. And sure enough consultants can come in.
But at the essence that the most pure essence companies should always reflect and think, where am I heading to? What do I need to build to truly take this to the next level? Have that sort of vision, that it’s not about how do I beat x, y, z, it’s how do I become the best at doing what I need to do to have the most efficient operation, the most customer centric service, you have to think beyond benchmarking, even though it sells 10 years down the road. But you have to start recognizing what are the gaps to get there, because that vision is going to enable the visualization of that path that is required to get there. But I think that we’re forced today, you have a lot of great, great skills. But unfortunately, in most cases, with the quick evolution of technology. I think we’re playing catch up all the time, and we’re not thinking ahead. How do we prepare the workforce? So we’re barely trying not to fire people not to get rid of people, we’re hiring new talent, but we can’t keep up or be ahead to truly prevent all this from happening and be more ready.
Ed
Yeah, that’s great. I love the coupling of map it out foresee the gaps, get beyond benchmarking, and create almost the, you know, a horizon plan. Where are we today? Where do we want to be? And where are we going that we’re not playing yet? Right, that full kind of end to end mapping as far as horizons are concerned. I love that. So Benito, couldn’t be more grateful to be on the on the line with you today. And I’d love to ask you, since this is The Thinking Edge, what advice would you give folks out there, given your incredible background around lean operations, your thought leadership, you know, what it is to be be a leader? What would give people the edge in terms of those three pieces of advice? You’d love to give people?
Benito
Yeah, no, absolutely, I think they’re, they’re actually, you know, the typical consulting fashion, there are three things that come to mind. The first one is, I’m a strong believer that you have to map out your future, you have to think ahead and think of what type of leader do I want to be? I think it’s not fair to say to be successful, you have to be a COO, a CEO. Leadership is not equal title. But it’s a proxy. And it could be a product manager, you can be a plant manager, you could be a supervisor, you could be a COO, whatever the case might be.
Ultimately, you have to start visualizing, who do you want to become, just like I talked earlier about companies should do the same. We can do the same exercise to understand what’s missing. How do I fill in the gaps to get there to that next level, whatever the case might be, in doing that exercise is very enlightening, because sometimes you started finding patterns. I used to back in the days look at LinkedIn profiles when I thought, who do I want to become. And then I start seeing some patterns of some profiles of where people have gone through and the different experiences and what not and, you’re not copying, but you get some inspiration and how you should think about yourself.
The second piece that I think is very, very relevant, don’t try to solve everything yourself. Don’t go in a corner and think that you’re just going to solve all the problems. Sure enough, there are math problems. And sometimes you have coding and you feel you’ve got this, fine, I can be convinced otherwise. But let’s say most of the time, it’s not about knowing the answer. It’s about knowing where to find it. And that means learn how to rely on others. Learn how to delegate and rely on your teams know when to go for help and go to experts, because that’s going to enable you to have a perspective, which is more important than having the answer, have a perspective enables to open the conversation. And let others chime in and learn from others. It is very, very important to have that.
And with that leads me to the third takeaway for me, which is with being a good listener and learning from others, that means that it is important that you’re open for feedback. I’m a strong believer in I always tell my teams, I never take it personal and I never have, even if someone can be a little tough. I try to track there’s always something hidden, there’s some truth hidden in every message. But we should always take that feedback and see how you can truly turn this into something special. And it’s on all of us when we take that feedback to act on it. Right? We can argue “why did I hear that? That’s not true.” Sure, we can get all worked up. But if we truly listen, get rid of the tone. Hopefully there’s no tone, but there’s always some truth behind it. And the more it’s all about like repetitive improvement, like keep going, keep going, keep going. None of us will ever be perfect, but we’re going to be on a good path getting better and better and better and better.
Ed
Yeah, I love the three pieces of advice: map out your future. Don’t try and solve everything yourself, bring in experts, because you’re going to actually learn that way and you used an earlier word which I love co-creation, right? You’re actually bringing people along through the solving the problem and helping understand and elevate your game and the game of the team perhaps. And then always look for that feedback, whether it be circumstantial feedback or feedback about where you’re heading or feedback about your leadership no matter where you are in the organization for that kind of constant improvement. So, Benito, I just wanted to thank you so grateful to be on the phone with you today incredible innovator in the market space. So we appreciate you coming on Thinking Edge today.
Benito
Edward, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Ed
All right.
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