Playbooks

Playbooks have become a recurring theme in my life recently.  Thinking about the marketing plan, it can really be considered a playbook.  You evaluate your team’s own strengths and weaknesses, then potential threats or opportunities based on opponents’ (competitors’) strengths and weaknesses and other conditions, develop a strategy and implementation plan.  Entergy’s Chief Nuclear Officer, Jeff Forbes, chose to present this year’s business plan in the form of a playbook.
 

 

I was born in Philly and grew up in South Jersey; specifically Collingswood, just outside of Camden, across the river from Philly.  Unfortunately for me, I grew up an Eagles fan.  Speaking of Eagles fans and playbooks, did everyone get to see “Silver Linings Playbook”?  Better yet, has anyone read the book?  Although Jennifer Lawrence was incredible in the movie, I liked the book better.  Although it is fiction, the author, Matthew Quick, used real places in the book, mostly in my hometown of Collingswood and the surrounding area including Westmont and Haddon Township.  The reason he used that area is because he is a fellow graduate of my Alma Mater, Collingswood High School.  In fact, he graduated with my sister, who is many years younger than I am.  The diner scene is specified in the book as being the Crystal Lake Diner, where my wife and I take my mother for breakfast almost every trip we make back home.  Matthew refers to himself as “Q” – one, because of his last name and, two, same hairstyle as our CNO (he has a sense of humor about it). 

 

   

 

My father passed away in 2001.  He was a huge football fan.  One of the last and best memories I have of my father was him having a conversation in his hospital bed with my cousin, Jimmy.  Jimmy, who lives in Maryland, is a Baltimore Ravens season ticket holder and had just gotten back from the first Raven’s Super Bowl win.  My father asked him how much he paid for the ticket, Jimmy told him, then my father told him what an idiot he thought he was, but with more colorful language.  This past Super Bowl Sunday I was rummaging around my house and I came across another playbook.  My father was assistant coach for my midget football team, the Westmont Tigers.  I had kept his playbook. 

   

I started looking through the playbook remembering some of my old teammates.  Tommy Madden was our quarterback.  I was in the backfield and a bunch of friends that I later went to school with were on the team.  A couple of weeks into the season, a new kid, Steve, kind of replaced in the backfield (I was moved to end).  He also played defensive back.  We weren’t a very good team, but Steve turned out to be our star running back.  He later starred in baseball and also played football for the University of Pennsylvania.  Anyway, Steve ended up marrying Tommy Madden’s older sister, Karen.  They settled in another neighboring South Jersey town, Audobon, and had six children; four boys and two girls.  One of their boys went on to play quarterback for Audobon and then for another of my Alma Maters, the University of Delaware.  I was thinking that my father would have really enjoyed watching the Super Bowl this year with me.  My cousin Jimmy was at the game, again, this year, but this time with his wife, Joyce. 

Steve and Karen and most, if not all, of their children were there, too.  In fact, one of their sons played in the game and was later named Super Bowl MVP. 

  

A lot of success is coming from our little area of South Jersey.

Another playbook may soon become a big part of my life – Entergy’s Continuous Improvement (ECI) Playbook.  I interviewed for the Manager of ECI for Vermont Yankee and Pilgrim in February and I’ve been told that I am in the final stages of the HR process, but the position has since been put on HOLD.  Entergy has enjoyed a lot of success as a result of our ECI program, including the 2007 NEI (Nuclear Energy Institute) Top Industry Practice Award. 

http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/News-Releases/employeesofentergynuclearearntopindustrypracticeaw

The reason I want this job is that I see an opportunity to make the program better.  Currently, every employee is required to participate in two ECI’s per year.  Each ECI gets points depending on what type or size of improvement is made.  For instance, safety, standardization and quality related improvements will get you 4 points, customer experience improvements get 2 points and cost savings, both person-hours and dollars, improvements range from 1 (<$1,000) to 8 points (≥$100,000).  The goal is for each single unit site to earn 950 points, with a stretch goal of 1050.  ECI points account for 15% of the yearly plant incentive awards.  Both Vermont Yankee and Pilgrim have exceeded the stretch goal for the past several years.  While the ECI numbers indicate a lot of improvement the past couple of years, it isn’t really translating into improved outage or even operating performance or industry ratings.  Local optimization everywhere does not create global optimization.  Mark Graham Brown, the author of “Baldrige Award Winning Quality - 17th Edition - How to Interpret the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence”, is even more critical.  “Companies that tell every employee to go off and improve their processes frequently find that this leads to chaos, and the improvements in one area cause problems in others.”  I tend to agree.  We’ve seen ECI points awarded which restored processes back to the way they were before other ECI points were awarded to change that process.  We’ve also seen ECI points awarded for changes which completely bypassed other procedural requirements.  Knowing this, it appears our metrics aren’t really providing much useful information.  This has been acknowledged by upper management since there is now a charter team working on performance indicator improvements.  The numbers are astounding.  They’ve already identified 128 gaps between our indicators and NRC and INPO indicators; then they plan on looking at an additional 700 non-regulatory and non-industry indicators.  Of course, these are obviously not just marketing indicators, but I wonder how it got to be such a high number.  Mark Graham Brown has also written a number of books on metrics and balanced scorecards, which I plan on reading in my spare time.

I already had most of this written when we got the instructions for the final post.  The second sentence of this post was “Thinking about the marketing plan, it can really be considered a playbook.”  Drucker says that the purpose of any business is to create a customer and that every business has two basic functions; marketing and innovation.  I think that there is for room for innovation in marketing, but the basics of marketing remain the same 4P’s; product, price, promotion and place.  Drucker says that customers define quality, so it is a good thing that quality improvements efforts have moved towards the customer focus rather than just process improvements.  Drucker felt that the most important questions that you should ask about your organization are 1) What is our Mission, 2) Who is our customer, 3) What does our customer value, 4) What are our results, and 5) What is our plan?  This, of course, should be in our playbook or marketing plan.  Implementing Drucker’s Marketing View involves four major instructions; 1) Market marketing to all internal organizations at all levels (cross-functional view), 2) Understand the difference between sales and marketing (sales can be detrimental if you are coercing rather than informing customers), 3) Educate and lead, and 4) Approach the business from the customer’s point of view.  These seem to be good instructions to take into any leadership position.  Hopefully, I’ll have my leadership position soon – or is that showing professionalism, which Drucker doesn’t really like?  I guess it depends.     

Now it is over – one more class for MBA, but for the time being, a little Alice Cooper SCHOOL'S OUT FOR SUMMER…

http://youtu.be/XbNEOJMGFAo