Due to the pandemic, the lack of supplies caused a supply chain chaos. Prices started to rise and it became harder and harder to purchase different items.

 

To explain the crisis and how different businesses were able to get over them in the past, Justin welcomes Alan Amling. Together, they speak about turning supply chain disruptions into innovation. Alan also opened about persistent advantages and what are the usual problems between already established companies. He talks about the different ways to make sure that businesses are utilizing their supplies and infrastructures, as well as the future of the supply chain.

 

Listen to more episodes and subscribe to the podcast on Apple.

 

Highlights

• How did it all start? – 0:43
• Start ups view the world differently than established companies. – 2:40
• What’s the usual problem with already established companies? – 4:27
• The focus of his research and consulting. – 7:59
• What is a persistent advantage? – 12:30
• Going through the supply chain chaos. – 18:16
• What’s gonna stay with us? – 23:24
• How to make sure that you’re fully utilizing your supplies and infrastructures? – 29:27
• What’s exciting for Alan – 31:51
• Investing large in an old way: What happened to Blockbuster? – 35:23
• Humility is one of the most important qualities of a leader in today’s digital economy. – 36:21
• Where are we at right now? – 39:23
• New process: How can you find an ideal individual to test the product? – 44:46
• Where can people find him and his book Organizational Velocity? – 47:50

 

Episode Resources

Connect with Alan Amling

• https://www.alanamling.com/

Connect with Justin Smith

• https://smithcre.com/ 
• https://www.lee-associates.com/ 
• jbsmith@leeirvine.com 
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbsmith  

 

Justin Smith: There he is, how are you doing Alan?

Alan Amling: I’m doing fantastic.

Justin Smith: Well, thank you for joining me. I figured we’d just jump right in. So we got Alan Amling and then now you’re with the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and their global supply chain Institute. How I found you was listening to the dynamo podcast, which I thought was awesome. And as soon as I had heard that, I was like I got to get to know Alan. I got to reach out to him. I figured a great place to start is. That was Santos Sincar, I think is the person who as you were on podcasts with. How did you guys get all connected and maybe where did that start? Or how did you get on the show?

Alan Amling: When I was still with UPS, I was running UPS benches. It was the corporate venture capital group at UPS. We were investing in startups and in a variety of different areas. Traditionally, startups adjacent to our core business but more and more we were looking at companies in autonomy, IOT, things that might’ve been adjacent to the core at one point and are quickly becoming the core.

Justin Smith: Yes.

Alan Amling: Or will be at some point. He has a group kind of a bootcamp that he puts together for all of his startups, and he invests in startups in the supply chain. I would go up there and mentor some of the startup. Help them make connections in the industry and loved doing it.

Justin Smith: You know one of the guys that’s a at the tip top of our company that I always look to as a great example. In commercial real estate we as brokers, when you’re successful, you usually invest in industrial property and then you’re invested in something that’s connected with your craft. And then what he’s also done is started to invest in startups that are in his ecosystem and in his space. So, I’m in industrial, not in office. So I was contemplating what’s that mean to me? And it’s, this is that space. And where I would know it from a space perspective because I see all these people as customers. I thought that was intriguing. So it’s exciting to see you and him in that space and learn about that space a little more.

Alan Amling: It’s great. From a cultural perspective as well because startups just view the world differently than established companies. Right? They have nothing to lose. So they’re all about exploration and when you’re with a company that has expectations from investors. It’s a different animal. You have to balance proficiency and exploration. You tend to err on the side of efficiency and making sure that you get the numbers right.

Justin Smith: You have to protect them, maybe play a lot more defense.

Alan Amling: But in that process, you run the risk of becoming the most efficient, that processes that are no longer relevant. You think about like the folks said at blockbuster. I just had this conversation with one of my master’s in technology classes at UT last night. We were talking about digital transformation. And they always use the example of blockbuster and the example of Kodak and what so many people miss is they think their executives just weren’t all that bright that they were asleep at the wheel. How could they not see that? And nothing could be further from the truth. These are real, you don’t get to the top of a company like that being asleep at the wheel. They had some really, really talented people. The problem with established companies typically is not that the senior executives are not smart. Actually, the problem is they are smart. They are smart. They are successful. They’re very good at accomplishing what they set out to do. The challenges over time when you get put in situations, you’re going on your past experience. You’re saying look at this situation is similar to something that I’ve done before I’m going to do this or I’m going to focus on this. Some of the research that I’ve, that I did for my book, I really kind of dug into that question. How is it that successful companies slipped up? It was a surprising finding that it wasn’t because they weren’t doing the right things. They were doing the right things. They were executing but the problem is when the impossible becomes possible. When things change that allow you to execute in ways that weren’t possible before. Or the external environment somehow has changed. That’s when established companies get tripped up. And the other thing that I talked to them about while we’re on the subject is courage. Because GE is another tragic story. They’ve got a nice turnaround, but Jeff Immelt inherited, the company from one of the legends Jack Welch. For all the issues the GE had. It wasn’t because Jeff Immelt wasn’t brilliant, he was. He won a very public fight for that CEO role. And what he said is, hey, we’re going to try to transition out of these industrial slow growth, low margin businesses. And transitioned to higher growth, higher margin businesses and to do that we’re going to double down on innovation. That doesn’t sound like a crackpot to me right. That doesn’t sound crazy to me, but along the way they probably got a little too far over their skis. There were a number of things that happened that were beyond their control. There were the issues with the financial arm. But the lesson is balance. We’re talking about effectiveness and efficiency; is you have to have balance.

Justin Smith: That’s why UPS has ventures or Prologis has ventures or anybody else has that right. It’s so that you can balance and explore that a little further. In addition to teaching, that’s an extension of your last career, maybe the next manifestation, but you still go on to consult with companies and then to also participate with other startups. Those are your other roles right now.

Alan Amling: That’s right. The focus of my research and my consulting is on kind of the disruption in last mile, logistics, a lot of this e-commerce driven.

Justin Smith: There’s plenty of work to do right now, I’m sure.

Alan Amling: Plenty of work to do for sure. And I’ve been digging in on the supply chain disruptions that we’re all feeling right now. Then a third topic that has really exploded over the last six months is ESG. The Environmental Social Governance and the impact that it’s having on companies globally. And kind of what they need to prepare for. I think logistics is a big part of the problem, and also part of the solution. The logistics industry contributes a good portion of greenhouse gases, but there’s also a great opportunity for improvement there, especially around the social part. The business round table a couple of years ago, all of the executives, lots of fanfare sign this. Hey, we’re, we’re going to break away from Keynesian, the shareholder rules to have a more balanced view. They sign this stakeholder agreement; they’re going to look at all stakeholders. Well, first of all, most of those companies didn’t get board approval to sign that. And second of all, most of those companies haven’t done jack squat in over two years. And that’s true in the sustainability aspect too, because a lot of companies pound their chest and their sustainability reports that say, we’re going to accomplish X by 2030, and X+Y by 2040. And they made these back in 2015 and it’s 2021. Then they’re still no further than they were in 2015. You were able to get away with that in 2015, those days are coming to an end. So anyway, so that’s the third area of research that I’m doing, and that’s all-supply chain related. And then I’m fascinated with disruption, what we started to talk about. How is it that we’ve known about disruption, disruptive innovation for 25, 30 years? We have books and seminars. We have a lot of examples of disruption and yet the Fortune 500 is turning over at a faster pace than they ever have. Why is that? Why is it that companies know about disruption, but yet they don’t change? What is it about the internal process of companies? And it actually pursuing that line of research had nothing to do with necessarily my profession in supply chain. It had more to do with that I was just curious. I just wanted to know. That’s what drove me and that’s what I’ve kind of wrapped up in this book.

Justin Smith: And that’s where your title comes from right. That’s why your title is fitting for that.

Alan Amling: That’s right. That’s right. So organizational philosophy, right. That’s what the title of the book is and that’s what it’s about. And I’m really excited, some of the startups that I’m working with, or I’m invested in are very much embraced the rapid emerging culture. Based on my research it’s really clear that the age of sustainable competitive advantage is over. There is no sustainable competitive advantage. There’s only what I call persistent advantage, which is you’re continually recreating your advantage. And the companies that are succeeding are doing that. They’re not paying attention to conventional industry boundaries

Justin Smith: Yeah, protocol or ways of doing things.

Alan Amling: They are looking at new revenue streams. And one of the big areas of disruption in last mile is precisely that. Probably the biggest disruption during COVID in last mile was the rise in ship from store because you already had the 800-pound gorilla Amazon, investing 60 billion plus in building out their one-day network. And so they’re putting all of these, what they call delivery stations in every locality in the country. And then you have Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Bed Bath and Beyond, Pet Smart, you name it. They’re all doing ship from store. They’re all leveraging assets that they’ve had for decades right.

Justin Smith: With the brick and mortar.

Alan Amling: The brick and mortar, the inventory that they have in the store. And now they’re dual utilizing that inventory, not only for customers in the store but also for e-commerce fulfillment. Target has been prolific. Over 90% of their e-commerce orders they fulfill from store.

Justin Smith: The concept of I’m moving inventory closer to the customers.

Alan Amling: Absolutely. Absolutely. And from a real estate standpoint, that’s one of the areas where you’ve seen a lot of demand. You’re still seeing demand for regional distribution centers. You’re really not for centralized distribution centers or regional you are. That’s been true for a long time. What’s new is these urban and suburban industrial facilities. And those are much harder to come by and it’s fueled another kind of an offshoot industry in the logistics industry. Which is these kind of Airbnb for warehousing type models.

Justin Smith: Totally, they are getting pretty popular. They’ve taken over a considerable amount of space.

Alan Amling: Absolutely. And so you’re seeing that, and it makes perfect sense too because as you get closer to the customer you have to be really, really. smart about what products you’re putting in place because online the selection is incredible. Walmart, for instance they offer 10 times more products online than they do in their stores. And that’s true with everyone and it’s a real challenge. It ties back to kind of what I personified is Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I want it, I want it now. I want exactly what I want. I want it now. I want it. I want it. I want it. And so that’s all of us, right. That’s consumers now. It is not just the e-commerce consumers. I was talking to a logistics manager for big liquor distributor who was lamenting about it used to be I had eight major types of whiskey and then I was delivering to the liquor stores and now I’ve got dozens and so it’s a wider selection. And fewer numbers of each product in the stores. So what that’s requiring doing, they might’ve gone to a liquor store once a week or once every two. Now they have to make more frequent runs like a couple of times a week because they just don’t have the stock and that’s the challenge that a lot of businesses have that aren’t big box retailers. That are trying to keep up and push products closer to consumers. The big issue that they have to deal with is having too much inventory and watching their inventory carrying costs through the roof, which would be really easy to do.

Justin Smith: I feel like inventory is one of the names of the games right now. How much should you have and where should you have it? People are trying to rework their networks and they’re trying to make those adjustments and there’s no right answer. And so, that seems like a terribly difficult challenge right now for people.

Alan Amling: It is and what’s really fascinating Justin is most retailers, most supply chain managers will tell you that inventory is the devil. You really got to control inventory, but this supply chain chaos that we’re going through right now has changed some tunes because for decades everyone has been trying to have lean inventories, just-in-time. In the span of nine months, we’ve gone from just-in-time to just in case. Part of the issue with the supply chain chaos and what we’re seeing with the ships backed up at the port. You know, everyone wants to like point to the port and say, well, what’s going on there? Why is there a backup? And they’re just one con in the wheel right. There are not enough containers. Containers in the wrong place. They can’t get the equipment. The truckers and the trucks to the courts to actually move the freight. It’s up and down the line. And the fact is they are processing more containers every day. The challenge is actually not so much on the supply side. It’s on the demand side. We’ve had just historic demand. It’s not global, right. Demand has gone up globally but the increase in consumer spending is very concentrated in the US. There’s like three big reasons for that on the demand side. One is if you’re on the higher end of the wage scale, you’ve probably been investing in the stock market. And if you’ve been investing in the stock market, you’ve done really well over the last two years and actually longer than that. If you’re on the lower end of the rates you’ve seen your hourly wages go up faster than you’ve ever seen before. In the logistics industry it’s not uncommon to see wage hikes over the last year of 20% plus. And so you have extra money in your pocket. We see this huge run-up in consumer spending in both the top and bottom end of the wage scale. And that consumer spending is skewed towards goods. Which hasn’t been the case in the past. We’ve been more of a services economy. But people are going out to eat as much. They’re not traveling as much. They’re not going to see Mickey mouse as much.

Justin Smith: Service, service, service.

Alan Amling: So they’re taking that money and channeling it towards goods. So you have more money. That’s going to consumer spending skewing towards goods. And then the third area is you have this whole just-in-time to just in case. Businesses essentially are doing what consumers did with toilet paper a year ago. There saying, okay, I’m not going to be out of stock anymore. So they’re over ordering, which it’s just adding to the supply chain chaos that we’ve had. Now, that’s going to normalize over time. The last time I checked when the pandemic hit people, didn’t actually go to the bathroom more, maybe a little more, I don’t know. But that commensurate with the amount of toilet paper that was sold. And so that’s a challenge, but I think those things are transplanting.

Justin Smith: You only buy so many TVs. You only buy so many couches. You only buy so much toilet paper.

Alan Amling: Yeah, that’s right. The demands going to normalize over time but there are going to be somethings that really last from this chaos. One is that the wages, they only go one way, right. They’re not going to go back down 20% within normalize. And so, especially as it impacts inflation. That’s going to stay with us. The other thing that’s going to stay with us is consumers got used to getting delivery same day, next day today at the latest. They’re not going back to two to five days; it doesn’t work that way. It only gets better; it doesn’t get worse. So that’s going to be a real challenge for more companies because it has impacts on real estate as well, because you’re trying to balance two competing needs of the consumer and that is a wide selection and fast delivery, because for a wide selection you want to have regional warehouse space, 500,000, a billion square feet or more where you can have thousands of skews. For speed you want to push that inventory closer to the consumer. If you don’t have the room, right. Where I see a lot of innovation coming is in the middle mile, between that you know, that urban fulfillment center or store in a big regional warehouse.

Justin Smith: Can you go over to the state of the middle mile right now? Or that’s where you’re going with that? That’d be helpful because I feel like a lot of people don’t, like that doesn’t get it’s time in the light. When you talk about all things last mile.

Alan Amling: Yeah, the middle mile is really important. So the middle mile is essentially taking products typically from a regional distribution center and then getting the right selection of product to the right store at the right time. And increasingly it’s not just to stores it’s to urban and suburban fulfillment centers. The challenge there is as we’re seeing more turnover in the stores in terms of the inventory turnover in the stores. That’s become increasingly difficult. The best companies are doing a really good job using AI and machine learning to be predictive in what products go to what place at what time. I do think that there’s going to be a role eventually for drones, for heavyweight drones. One of the companies on advising its company called Airflow and they do take off and land electric aircraft. And so think of 2000 pounds maximum cargo for range of 500 miles and they can land at the smaller regional airports. There are other companies that can actually land on the top of the building.

Justin Smith: What would be a product example that would fit that, when you think of a 2000 pounds, 500 miles, that could be a pallet of any product.

Alan Amling: Here’s what I think is potentially transformational and what I think about disruptive technologies that change the way we do things. Today in the middle mile, it’s all ground. So you’re subject to whatever barriers are on the ground from just straight traffic to weather, to road construction. You have all of these issues and you have more and more trucks on the road creating more and more congestion. If you want to fly it, if you want to fly the goods, you have to fly airport to airport. So you have to do a trucking move to an airport. You have the flight and then you have a trucking move from the airport to wherever you’re going. But what if you didn’t have to land at an airport or take off in an airport. What if I was Walmart and I could take off not just one flight a day to think of dozens of flights a day of kind of a pallet or two goods of special selections. Maybe things that were ordered that day. Now need to be delivered that day. And instead of going to an airport, voted at the regional distribution center and it lands on the top of the Walmart building. And by the way there’s already approvals and plans to make that happen. To make that infrastructure happen. They can get the goods and so now you’ve got an order that’s placed, and you actually have a same day delivery of a product that started the day at a million square foot regional warehouse. That’s transformational. Now, we’re still a ways away from that. What’s happening right now companies are getting really good at becoming more efficient in the middle mile and one of the ways you get more efficient is making sure that any leg your trucks are traveling you’re reducing dead air in the truck. So how do you make sure that you’re fully utilizing those trucks? Quite honestly, from a cost and a sustainability standpoint there’s nothing less costly and more sustainable than the truck that doesn’t need to go. Because you’ve done a better job utilizing the empty space and the moves that are already going from point A to point B.

Justin Smith: Saving the trips. We were helping a logistics company that brings in product from the port. That’s close to the port now, triple. And if you want a triple, you oftentimes go east where there’s more availability of larger buildings, newer construction, lower rates. As we were out there looking to triple and looking at buildings, and we’re going to the tour. We finished the tour. We find all the right buildings. And on our way back we sit in traffic in between big rigs for what is an hour and a half. And when you imagine that’s just us at 1:30 or 2:00 in the afternoon in the busiest place where all the trucks are in the world. And then thinking through the value of going east to where there’s land available and buildings available. Then when you imagine what it really costs you in time to travel from the port and to go that extra leg of the journey. That’s just to get it to your building, much less to repackage it, turn it around and send it back down that same road in a different configuration, in a different truck at a different time that sits in that same traffic. That sure speaks to the transformational need for anything that’s like the new dimension of anything that has like a vertical lift component. And then just like the challenge of efficiency of like, how can we do that better? If we had a 50 near the port and a hundred out there, or 200 out there rather than having it all out there. How would you then like optimize your network? What could you use as a resource to help you crunch those numbers and to help figure out what data sets do you need in order to even figure out that in the first place?

Alan Amling: One of the things that’s been so like exciting for me is all of the innovation that has happened over the last couple of years. People like to be in their comfort zones. People that are comfortable being uncomfortable are the exception, not the rule. And the pandemic or people out of their comfort zone. They couldn’t do what they’ve always done, and they had to improvise. They had to innovate; I think of the things that companies did to convert operations to make hand sanitizer. And then you have all of these companies that again, had this inventory all along in their stores and now have become delivery companies. So Walmart a couple of weeks ago, announced Go Local. Go Local is their third-party delivery service. So just like Amazon built, fulfillment by Amazon by doing their own fulfillment, mentoring it as a third-party service. They did the same with AWS. Walmart’s doing that with delivery. I mean, these are things that we just have contemplated. One of my favorite stories is DoorDash. I think most people still perceive DoorDash as delivering burritos to college students at 2am.

Justin Smith: That’s exactly right.

Alan Amling: They do that, but do you realize that DoorDash’s market cap is equal to FedEx?

Justin Smith: Wow. Okay. No, I would have never thought that in a million years.

Alan Amling: And that’s not because of the burritos that they’re delivering. It’s because they’re align with this new same-day economy. Like PetSmart, for example, they do a lot of fulfillment store, most of that goes via DoorDash. That’s why they’re getting the valuation and so I still think it’s a crazy valuation

Justin Smith: It’s a great name, DoorDash when you then are like, your head is in logistics and you’re like, okay, got it. This is like, they’re really a logistics company in disguise.

Alan Amling: Well, here’s the deal, you can be a traditional logistics company and pound your chest and talk about how great you are but at the end of the day, the problem hasn’t changed. Someone has something at point A, and they need to get it to point B. And so what has changed is the ways that is possible to do that are changing. When you’re invested in the old way and the way that it has worked for decades of getting products from point A to point B, and you have a lot of capital invested in that old way, it’s really hard to change. That’s one of the issues that Blockbuster had it’s not that Blockbuster didn’t see streaming. It’s not that they didn’t see that. They saw it but they were just so invested in their stores and the way they were doing it. If you remember, they hired a bunch of 7-11 folks because they wanted to drive more people into their video stores so they could sell candy and knickknacks to them. It wasn’t like Kodak didn’t know about the digital camera they invented it of course they knew about it. But they were very invested in the way things had always happened. I talk about courage. It really does take courage because then it takes you melody. One of the things that I talked about in my book is about humility being, one of the most important qualities of a leader in today’s digital economy. Because if you’re not willing to admit that you might not be right, you’re going to have your eyes close to new ways of doing things. The smarter you are.

Justin Smith: It delays your ability to have an opportunity to see that.

Alan Amling: That’s right. You look at a guy like Satya Nadella, who is a career Microsoft guy. He breaks the mold. It’s not like you have to bring someone in from the outside. It’s not that he had all of these crazy ideas from the outside and was able to change Microsoft. He was humble. He opened up his mind to new ways of doing things and very much broaden the best thinking from executives to change the culture of that company. And it’s been one of the true success stories. But it just goes to show that you think that all I’ve got. Companies always do this, they say, okay, we’ve got to throw the baby out with the bath water. It’s not working. It must have something to do with the people that we have or the culture that we have. And typically it’s not. Typically the best people in your organization know as much or more than anyone you would bring in from the outside. But they’ve been stifled for some reason whether it’s bureaucracy or status quo or whatever it is. And you have a leader that’s humble and it breaks through that status quo, boy great things can happen.

Justin Smith: There’s a new book, Courage is Calling by Ryan Holiday. I’m not sure if you heard about this, but he writes s a bunch of books on stoicism. And so it says if you released the past 30 days, I would imagine there’d be all sorts of source material that you could look through that might be inspiring them and provide some more examples and illustrations that you might find interesting. I just finished reading it and I’ve read all his books and have enjoyed them, but I figured you’d probably enjoy and learn from that one too.

Alan Amling: Oh, absolutely. No, I’m not familiar but I just made a note.

Justin Smith: Yeah, I’ll send you a copy of it, happy to. One thing from our notes from when we had talked the last time that we didn’t explore a little bit was reverse logistics. And now that we’re getting into like heavier inventory, that was something that you had some experience on. And where it was interesting for you. Where are we at in the state of that right now?

Alan Amling: We are in the dark days. I’m serious, that’s where we’re at. Even the most advanced companies, you go into any reverse logistics warehouse and its pure chaos. It just is you see shoes, a big screen TV s as far as the eye can see. There are companies that are making big improvements. I think what Amazon is doing and using AI to look at a return and say, okay, I’ve got all this history about this customer. I know whether they’re a good customer, whether they just return things all the time. I know what it costs me to process that return. I know what the likelihood is of me being able to resell it. And if the cost of that return is higher than the salvage value or what I think I can get, I’m just going to tell you to keep it. And you’ve seen that right and they’re not the only company that’s starting to do that. The other thing is if you recall a couple of years ago, if you’re returning something from Amazon or any retail, they would either put a return label in the box or you go online and print out a label for that item. You don’t do that anymore for Amazon. They give you a QR and then you typically bring it into a UPS store or to a Kohl’s. They don’t ship those things back one at a time anymore. Those are all shipped back to return centers as bulk shipments. So they’re finding ways to reduce the costs of reverse logistics. There are companies that are getting that right. I think there is huge opportunity for new companies to come in. And I really do think politically it is so hard for a retailer to get the funding they need to do their reverse logistics right because the funding priority is always going to go towards outbound, towards making the sale. The reverse is always going to be an afterthought, but I do think there’s great opportunity for startups and there are startups getting into this game to take over parts. You know I look at returns as three kind of core components. Initiation, so how do you get the package from the consumer into the system? Process, how do you process it? How do you determine what the next step is for? If it needs some refurbishment or repair, how do you do that? And then disposition, does it go back into stock? Is it recycled or are you going to donate it? How does that work? And I think that one of the areas that we were talking about big and bulk. You know people are getting very comfortable ordering appliances and furniture online. Which is relatively new, right over the last few years.

Justin Smith: Mattresses is a big one.

Alan Amling: We talked about the returns of like mattresses and refrigerators. Those are tough. And if a refrigerator for example, is returned, it’s a good working order it is either put back into stock or it’s sold as a factory second or something like that. But if there’s anything wrong with it, it’s typically not repaired. It typically goes in the landfill. People don’t know that. As soon as people start understanding how much returns end up in landfill this is going to become a big issue. We need more companies focused on this and I think one of the areas that using AI and machine learning, that I think there’s some great possibilities are when there is a return of any product. How do you find someone that may be able to use that product in the general city, geographic area? So you don’t have to do the big transport. You don’t have to store it. And you extend the useful life of the product because that is the most sustainable thing you can do. Is extend the useful life of products that are already in the market. And so I think there’s huge opportunity that is essentially a marketplace opportunity. It’s a matchmaking opportunity. We know that it can be done. It just needs the focus of a lot of smart people that it will be done.

Justin Smith: That’s such a great idea for sure. Of being able to just like you become the shipper then if you’re then shipping it to the next guy that can use it.

Alan Amling: Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.

Justin Smith: And then you may have a pickup for the old one from the next guy’s house instead of your house. And then how they match up with recyclers and it seems like it’s a logical extension.

Alan Amling: Yeah, that’s what I really like. I was actually on the phone with a big technology product provider today that was talking about they used to do all their own repairs. And now what they’re doing is they’re just like software developers get trained in how to build apps for a certain for the iPhone or for Android that you trade lots of smaller companies to be able to repair your items. And so instead of having to ship it to this one repair shop and then ship it all the way back, products stay local. They get repaired local by small businesses and then put back into the value stream. Those sorts of things you think about the connecting and thinking technologies it all includes blockchain and that all of this is possible now. It’s just a matter of breaking out of old ways of thinking and putting a concerted effort to it and it can happen.

Justin Smith: It must make you excited for the future I imagine. It never has more of impossible.

Alan Amling: Every day. Every day.

Justin Smith: I think we covered a lot, but I’d love if we part with knowing more about your book and when it’s on shelves and where people could find it and everything to do with that.

Alan Amling: Oh, thanks. So Organizational Velocity should be on shelves in January. It looks like it might get pushed till February but right now looks like January you’ll be able to find it on the Amazon both paperback and digital.

Justin Smith: And you’ll be making the circuit I imagined promoting. So we’re excited to see you out there telling people about it. Spreading the good word.

Alan Amling: Yes, I am really excited about it. I think that I became an academic late in life and there’s a lot of research. There’s a lot of really kind of grounded research in there. But I’m all about pragmatic insights and so I tried to make it really digestible. The reality is most business books, people don’t read, cover to cover. They just don’t. And so this is built, you can read it cover to cover but you can also look at it as a reference book, if you want to. If you’re dealing with issues around leadership, around structure, around innovation, around breaking out of silos, you can just go in that part and that’s the way I set it up. At the end of every chapter, it ends with the what, so what, and what now? What did we talk about? Why is it important? And what should you be thinking about?

Justin Smith: Actionable. Well I am excited for you Alan. I’m looking forward to it.

Alan Amling: All right. Well, you’re my inspiration there, man. You led the way.

Justin Smith: We all got to help each other and get that out there so that we can all do the best that we can for sure. Well, I appreciate you making yourself available.

Alan Amling: Thanks Justin, I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.