Cardinal Initiatives Newsletter May 13 2023 6 min read

This week I share a story about selling a system that brought unintended and unwanted consequences.

What Do You Do When You Mess Up?

The technology supplier was Wang Laboratories, a high-flying office automation player with a famous tech founder, Dr. An Wang.

The customer was SOHIO, an American oil company and successor of the original Standard Oil of John D. Rockefeller. SOHIO had offices in Dallas to facilitate their partnership with British Petroleum in developing Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay reserves and constructing the Trans Alaska Pipeline.

The characters, all Dallas-based, were:

Millie - SOHIO’s Office System Administrator

Gene - SOHIO’s Direct of Office Automation

Ed - Wang’s Account Manager, formerly assigned to SOHIO, and now mentoring SOHIO’s new Wang salesperson (me).

Wang

In those days, Boston’s technology corridor, also known as Route 128, rivaled the emerging Silicon Valley in mindshare and the raw number of tech startups. Wang, located at the north end in Lowell, MA, drew upon the considerable talent pool found in the 100-plus colleges in the 50-mile radius around Cambridge (Harvard & MIT). This environment led to a cauldron of innovation and invention.

Wang is credited with inventing magnetic core memory and electronic word processing. Wang was also a pioneer for:

• Electronic mail (email)

• Electronic desk calculator

• Intelligent printers

• Integrated voice mail

• Sophisticated text retrieval (search).

Wang’s text retrieval in its Alliance line of Office Information Systems (OIS) has a unique place in business history.

History

In 1979, veterans of the VietNam War filed a class action lawsuit against Monsanto to compensate them for cancer and a variety of severe health complications found in their newborn children that they claimed were caused by exposure to Agent Orange.

Agent Orange was used as a defoliant by the U.S. Military. Deploying U.S. warplanes and helicopters to spray the chemical over the jungles of South VietNam, the U.S. destroyed large areas of vegetation that were providing cover to South VietNam’s Communist enemies. The lawsuit’s Discovery phase revealed that Monsanto was not the sole manufacturer of Agent Orange. Thirty (30) other companies, including Diamond Shamrock and Dow Chemical, were involved.

The legal department of Diamond Shamrock used the text retrieval capabilities of their Wang Alliance System to identify every document that contained the words “Agent Orange.” This saved them thousands of hours in the Disclosure process of that lawsuit.

In a recent discovery session, we used this real-life example to showcase the power of these features to SOHIO. SOHIO owned a Wang OIS system. We thought SOHIO could save time and money by applying what they saw in the Diamond Shamrock example to their other applications.

Gene

Gene was the economic buyer and decision-maker and enjoyed the relationships with technology vendors that came with his role. Gene was a person who looked forward to getting away from the office when developing these relationships. When SOHIO was reassigned to me, Ed arranged a dinner meeting to introduce me to the account and transition his responsibilities.

SOHIO had a large install base of DEC minicomputers thanks to decisions made at their headquarters in Cleveland, OH. It was easier for Gene to choose DEC for their needs than Wang. We had fought hard to win this single system in Dallas and performed well for them long after the sale. We were making Gene look good for deciding to introduce Wang.

We took Gene to a nice spot in North Dallas and arrived 25 minutes early for our dinner reservation. We went into the bar for a pre-dinner cocktail. This was Ed’s playbook. I’d seen him execute it over a dozen times. Our drinks would be a smidge under half-empty when we were seated for dinner. The initial small talk will have advanced to the next level of more interesting conversation. And, when the waitress arrived to take our drink order, nine times out of ten, the response would be, “Bring me another one of these…”.

You get the picture. Ed was very good at his job.

I learned that Gene was well-connected at SOHIO. They had sent him to Africa for about a year to oversee a project. Algeria, Egypt, and Libya are in the top five of the world’s top oil-producing countries. But, he did not live on the African continent while he was over there. SOHIO put him and his wife up in Majorca, an island between northern Africa and Spain.

Gene’s eyes sparkled as he recalled his time in Majorca. I was so enthralled with his storytelling that I was utterly unprepared when the conversation turned to me. Gene left that dinner knowing that I grew up in the Midwest, put myself through school, began my professional career in computer programming, was not married, and played competitive tennis as a hobby.

From my point of view, I was boring when compared with Gene. Yet, the following week Ed pulled me aside and told me that as they were leaving the restaurant, Gene said to him: “Oh, to be Jeff….what I wouldn’t give…”. That caught me totally off guard.

The Mistake

The users had shared plenty of use cases where text retrieval could help SOHIO. Millie prepared a report and got time with Gene to discuss it. She received his okay to proceed, but Gene wanted to upgrade to our VS product line. It supported more users and could run more applications than just word processing and that text retrieval. (We had discussed this a little bit at that dinner.)

Millie and I met to discuss this, and I prepared the paperwork. Their new VS system arrived about ten days later, and I received a call from our Customer Engineering team. While we were wise to configure a couple of archiving workstations to mimic the outgoing OIS system, there was no way to back up SOHIO’s new Wang VS. There were no removable disk drives, just the larger 288 MB ones. There wasn’t a tape drive, either.

Uh Oh.

I started dialing. We had a loaner tape drive that could be at SOHIO before the weekend, but if we wanted a removable disk drive, we would have to place a new order or change order.

I sought Ed’s advice.

Ed thought the loaner was the best immediate move but suggested we get the smartest people we could find to provide the ideal outcome and path to get there. Ed then told me that if he were me, he’d get over to their offices and physically “camp out.” Even if you are merely re-filling their coffee mugs, just being there during this uneasy time is the thing to do. Make sure that Gene knows you’re there.

I immediately cleared my calendar and showed up unannounced, and asked for Millie. She accepted the meeting, but her demeanor was a little chillier. I told her that I messed up and was very sorry. I asked if there was anything I could do to help her. She asked me how this could have happened.

My answer to her was that I must have missed a step or failed to follow a process that was in place to prevent something like this from happening. I thought it best not to share that Wang had no “configurator.” It did not seem appropriate to speculate that our technical group may have thought that since I had recently switched to sales from technical pre-sales, they did not need to review the configurations that came from me.

The little surprise from Wang that morning had created more work for her, and she needed to end our meeting and attend to it. I asked her if it was okay for me to stick around in case something else popped up, so I could jump on it and escalate on their behalf from their offices.

She was okay with that.

I stayed there until she left, around 6:00p. Our loaner tape drive would arrive tomorrow, Friday.

Making Things Right

I was waiting in the lobby the following day when Millie arrived, and she signed me in. She wasn’t chilly, but she wasn’t back to being friendly to me either. I let her know when to expect the tape drive to arrive.

At noon, the tape drive had yet to arrive. Millie asked me to join her in her office. She had been able to take the time and assess the situation before her. She had a plan of action and could use another pair of hands.

The archiving media on the VS system was a different format than the OIS. They wanted to duplicate what they had been doing on the OIS, which required using an archiving workstation to copy every document on the system onto these eight-inch disks. There were two archiving workstations, one for Millie and one for me.

When the tape drive arrived, we would use it to back up all of the system files on the VS.

Millie knew much more about using Wang systems for real work than I did. I told her this, and she became a willing and able teacher. Once I had the process down, the task was monotonous. Millie and I archived all afternoon and well into Friday night. I returned on Saturday morning, and we were done by noon.

Millie

I learned a lot about Millie in those 24 hours. We were together in the same room, in front of our respective Wang workstations, monotonously archiving away with plenty of “wait time” for conversation.

She was originally from Brazil. She attended Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and received a Hospitality and Hotel Management degree. She had gone to work for a global hotel chain and married a man in the same industry. The nature of their work caused frequent relocations to receive promotions. She had put her career on hold when they had their first child. She could see herself resuming her career at some point in the future. When her husband was transferred to Dallas, she applied to an opening at SOHIO in word processing and was recently promoted to Office System Administrator.

I remember thinking this promotion was more important to Millie than one would think. Indirectly, it was a substitute for what she had given up to support her family. Millie was only a few years older than me, but she was much more mature in my eyes. I felt like a “kid” in comparison to her. SOHIO was very lucky to have Millie.

A couple of weeks after things returned to normal, Ed asked me if I had popped in to see Gene while camped out at SOHIO. I had totally forgotten and said so to Ed.

He smiled.

Gene had called and thanked Ed for selecting me as his replacement on SOHIO. Apparently, Millie had grabbed time with Gene to share how I had handled the “mess up.”

Wow! There’s that Millie, once again.

By accident (unconscious competence), it was better to let Gene find out on his own.

Leadership is doing the right thing when nobody’s watching.

I had done the right thing, with Ed’s help, without Gene watching (or knowing.)

Millie had done the right thing (putting in a good word for the sales rep that turned her world upside down by messing up her order) without me knowing (or asking).

Summary & Lessons Learned:

1) Own your mistakes.

2) Switch your language from “we” to “me”.

3) Be there and overcorrect.

4) Do the right thing when nobody's watching.

Thank you for reading,

Jeff

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