0114. Triumphs in Team Bonding and Strategic Vision at Sigma Lab Consulting

- Unexpected team bonding and strategic planning during a snowed-in off-site retreat at Sigma Lab Consulting
- Reflecting on past year's successes and future opportunities
- Team cohesion and unique problem-solving approach leading to repeat engagements with diverse clients
- Integrating Lean Six Sigma with deep industry knowledge for success in pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical consulting
- The importance of relationship building and personal connections in niche consulting
- Balancing AI with the human touch in streamlining processes
- Teasing upcoming challenging projects
- Aligning team goals with the overarching mission for 2024
- Personal growth and goal alignment anecdotes
- Comparing cultural upbringings (Latino and Asian traditions)
- Strategies for setting and achieving realistic goals
- Excitement about networking and learning opportunities at industry events hosted by Sigma Lab Consulting

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Transcript

Oscar Gonzalez: 0:00

Take those facilities and change all those different pieces of equipment and assets and put people in there, and that's that's how I end up seeing this Welcome to Lean by Design Podcast. I'm your host, Oscar Gonzalez, alongside my co-host, Lawrence Wong. We are former MBA classmates turned business partners with over 25 years of combined experience in life sciences, from R&D through manufacturing. Our experiences have shed light into the complex, ever-changing challenges experienced by this industry and many others. We took a risk quit our six-figure paying jobs in Boston Biotech and Pharma to start Sigma Lab Consulting. Journey with us as we explore the relationship between people and workflow design. The goal? To learn, inspire and deliver practical tips to navigate these ever-changing challenges. Stick with us and learn to work smarter, not harder, and be lean by design. So here we are 2024.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:08

This, this episode, should be coming out early February, so fresh on people's minds. I think it's important to always have this reflection, something that you don't see a lot of people do. I was recently talking about this when it came to looking at company goals and what happened in the previous year, what didn't happen. In most instances, I find that people, departments, functions, organizations are always forward looking, where you don't really reflect on what happened, which there's a nice quote that I really enjoy that talks about. Wisdom comes from people that reflect on what happened, that self-reflection, reflection of what occurred, what your assumptions were, what actually happened and it doesn't really happen too much. You do some retrospective looks after the end of a project, but if your project is three years old, your memory is about as good as the last six months, because everything else is somewhat chaotic. So are you really getting that look back at what happened and what could be changed? And that's what we're here for today.

Oscar Gonzalez: 2:37

We want to talk about what our look back was for 2023. Sigma Lab Consulting had a great first full year in operations. We had the pleasure of working with, I think, how many different clients do we have Five, I think, five different clients and where I would say that they were successful and in many cases, they have become repeat clients. So I think that's a testament to what we have been putting out there in terms of how we work better, how we think through some of these problems and create these spaces that allow for our teams to really truly be successful without stress, overload, overworking, working on the wrong things, working on things that don't have value. So I think 2023 was a fantastic year, especially for us to start. I mean, what do you think?

Lawrence Wong: 3:51

Yeah, I think the year went by incredibly fast.

Lawrence Wong: 3:54

I think we had a lot of more ups and downs, fortunately, I think, when I think about what we did last year, it was more again like how we started in 2022, more about setting up the business so that we could survive. But I think our mindset has shifted for the year and not so much can we survive, but more how do we grow, what are the things that we should be doing to move forward, not only for this year, but also 2024 and beyond? So I think that was a big part of the weekend Just really retracing our footsteps that we took in the last year, but also planning for okay, where is it that we want to go and what direction are we heading in. And then looking at, okay, what can we do in a year? And then really establishing those steps to get there.

Oscar Gonzalez: 4:48

Well, let's set people up. You said the weekend. I don't think I brought up the weekend yet, but go ahead and set up people. What happened? What did we do? This was two weekends ago. First weekend in January, we went to a small cabin that Lawrence found in Hill, New Hampshire, was it?

Lawrence Wong: 5:09

Yeah, I didn't even know where Hill was, I just knew that it was within two hours from your house. So then that's kind of what we did, and we found a place that was not too far but, I think, isolated enough, where we could kind of focus on what we needed to accomplish as far as reflections and planning for the new year. But it was a place that just took us out of our normal day-to-day routine. But obviously we talked about business for the better part of the weekend, but that wasn't the only priority. The other priority was just to hang out with each other and kind of learn about where we were and in our own lives and kind of reflect on how we were thinking about different aspects, about things that were going on that we don't necessarily talk about when we see each other every other week.

Lawrence Wong: 6:01

And it just kind of put us in an environment where we could just spend hours talking about whether it was work related or non-work related, and I think that was very beneficial, because I learned a lot of things about you and you properly learned stuff about me, and we'll get into that later in the episode, but that's kind of how we spent the weekend.

Oscar Gonzalez: 6:21

Yeah, I mean it was a really great experience. I mean it was a beautiful home that was sort of up on a mountainside, and this actually happened the weekend that the first snowstorm happened. So of course we get up on Sunday morning in my air maxes and I think I don't know you had some low-toed shoes as well.

Oscar Gonzalez: 6:46

Yeah, it was like, hey, let's go outside and start shoveling eight inches of snow to get to the truck, to where we can then get out of the town. It was a small town, the snow was coming and I think our top speed for that two hour drive back home was probably about 35, 40 miles an hour. So we were fortunate enough to stumble upon a little barbecue joint and have some delicious barbecue and have that extended time to sort of riff on what happened and sort of take in that entire weekend. But I think it was super critical for us to find a space that had low distractions or no distractions. I've seen other folks that do off-sides, that are just locally somewhere in the city. They do an off-site for a half a day or something like that.

Oscar Gonzalez: 7:45

And I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that there was more than just one purpose of the business. It's how well we can connect together, because it's not just the business, it's the partners within that business, it's the leadership within that business. How much are they? You know, essentially you become a part of each other's lives to some degree because you are establishing a workplace, you are building a workforce together to create this successful company, this successful organization, in whatever metric that means for you. So I think it was super important for us to be able to. You know, take that weekend, you know, and I mean I think the first night we went down we grabbed some food, and you know, we grabbed food, we grabbed snacks, we grabbed drinks, and we were working until almost 11 o'clock at night and then we figured, whoops, we got to do this again tomorrow. So let's back it up and get ready for the next day, because the next day was also a big day as well.

Lawrence Wong: 9:02

Yeah, and I think there's something to you know if you ask me a question before we started recording about hey, could we have done this at your home or my home and maybe stayed locally? We probably could have, but we would have had to broken up the day into pieces and, like I would have to travel to where you are and you would have to travel to my place or maybe you sleep over, but I think, at the end of the day, being somewhere that we're not you know, that's not home and being away from the normal yeah, you have a two year old and just being away from family and friends it's nice, because then my sole focus is on the business, but also you, right. So you know we have a business relationship, but we also have a friendship that deserves just as much attention as that. So I think it allows us to grow both of those things.

Oscar Gonzalez: 9:57

It solidifies the trust and it creates, I think, a relationship outside of what does Lawrence do for my business and more of what can we do for each other as a person, as a thought leader, because that's, you know, I think our ability to us becoming and building more of this friendship has allowed us to have more candid conversations.

Oscar Gonzalez: 10:29

You know, quite frankly, I think, when you know the good thing is that we started Sigma Lab Consulting together, because that gave us sort of, you know, the same launching pad I can't speak for other organizations that maybe have been in business for 10 years and then they bring another senior executive that's like hey, welcome to the club.

Oscar Gonzalez: 10:52

You know there may be some lag in time there, but you know, I think that the start that we had together really benefited us in putting us into a position that we can sort of negate each other without having this feeling of he doesn't like my ideas, like why won't we do this? You know, I think there's a very good, you know, 50-50 where it needs to be, maybe 75, 25 in other places, or 60, 40 in other places, and we've sort of had this friendship, this partnership, that allows us to have that dance, depending on what it is. You know I may say something specifically to your field, but you're the expert, so you know I may throw in 30%, but you're the 70% that's going to determine which direction to take it, based on some of the feedback that I've given and I think in the same way, vice First, and I think that that's a really powerful and not always common thing with organizations, especially smaller ones.

Oscar Gonzalez: 12:02

We don't really look at ourselves as who has the most ownership of the company. Everything they say is what happens. That's just not what we do, yeah.

Lawrence Wong: 12:13

I think we're fortunate enough at this early stage to be able to do those things right.

Lawrence Wong: 12:19

I think the larger you get, the harder it is to be in this environment where you're able to say, hey, let's go spend a weekend wherever and kind of figure out what we want to do in the future and also for the upcoming year.

Lawrence Wong: 12:31

So we obviously reflected on the year past and, being the size that we are now, I think a lot of our mindset was around de-risking the business in the form of coming up with a better strategy for the new year, but also beyond. And what does that look like? Right? But what is the mission essentially for the both of us and as we grow the company, what should the mission be? We talked about not going away from designing and optimizing workflows that drive operational excellence in biopharma, but more around, okay, let's put building a team in front of that, right. And so now our mindset is not only like finding work for each other, but also, okay, when we go out and speak to people, are there potential hires that we need, or mentors or clients, right? So not looking at some of the things that we're doing as going to like.

Lawrence Wong: 13:30

An example is going to a networking event Like, if you go to a networking event and the only thing you're looking for is to make a sale or a pitch. You lose out on maybe meeting somebody that you could hire or maybe meeting somebody that could give you some insight on the landscape of the business and just giving you an outside perspective on what you could be doing better. So I think that new strategy kind of really will pivot a lot of the things that we do for the upcoming year.

Oscar Gonzalez: 14:01

And I think, if we can go back a little bit, we didn't start off with that. You know, when we first arrived on Friday evening, we originally had this agenda planned out, that we were going to review 2023 numbers and things that we did that didn't work out, or conferences we went to that we didn't find the value that we wanted. And I will say, when we go back and we look at our 2023 goals, they sort of were spread all over the place. Now, mind you, we were only in business for three, four months prior to that, but I felt that important for us to anchor certain things so that we can sort of see where these components go. I mean, we had goals for social media postings. We had goals for you know how many people we can get to be on board. We had goals for people we can get into our LinkedIn pages. We had goals for revenue, and most of these things were arbitrary because we didn't really know what healthy meant for us.

Oscar Gonzalez: 15:14

Yet there's a Boku number of consulting firms out there, but they all do things differently. They all do different things. They all consult for different purposes. Some of them are, for I'm going to help you get from your IND to your first. You know, first, in human clinical trials, you know that is a very specific window that those consultants are going to work. We're sort of in this like when things are kind of, you know, when shit's hitting the fan, who are you going to call? No, I'm kidding, I mean, ghostbusters was on just last night, but you know, really looking at that and saying who can I get to help me figure out the best way to make this work? How can I figure out the best way to leverage the people in my team, to leverage the tools, to leverage the knowledge, that type of information? You know. That's where we sort of step in to kind of say you need to start pulling on these threads that you haven't been doing before. But within that, you know, if I could go back to that first day, I think what was really important for us was to sort of just kind of riff on you know the year, riff on things that we had thoughts of, you know, ideas that were popping in, because that changed the nature of what we spent our time over the next 36 hours doing.

Oscar Gonzalez: 16:43

And that is where we sort of looked at this and said, well, if we want to grow, if we want to de-risk by growing the company, which means we need additional clients that are in different spaces, which meant that we needed to hire people, which meant, you know that we needed to establish these structures like this, all sort of drilled down into that strategy of we need to meet as many people and strengthen our networks and our partnerships as much as possible. To your point, we need to start going to these networking events not thinking can I get a client, thinking who are the individuals that are on board with our philosophy and the ways that we think? At some point in those relationships they may turn into a potential client, they may turn into a potential FTE, because in this line of work, in this line of consulting, if we do not have a client that is on board with how our philosophy works, we don't want to work with them. This is our philosophy, has been a combination of you know it's Lean Six Sigma at a highest level.

Oscar Gonzalez: 18:06

But then you know, in this particular space, what does that mean? Am I going to create a Lean Six Sigma for how quick you turn over contracts, you know, and create the statistics. There's so many variables that go into that that are out of control for the client? So probably not. However, the principles of what those two methodologies bring are what is at the crux of what we bring to these organizations. So, you know, being able to sort of take that time to riff and then turn around and say we need to make sure that people really know and understand what is Lean? What is Sigma Lab Consulting? Who are they? Do I want to know these people? Do I want to be friends with these people? Do I want to connect with them as a client? Maybe I want to work with them, and I think that was a turning point for us in how we approached the next 36 hours.

Lawrence Wong: 19:08

Yeah, I think we've said it beautifully like this blend of operations and strategy and being able to apply it, like in a very specific area that we've been able to gain a lot of experience in in the industry. Right, for yourself, I know, you know project management in drug development and then for myself, asset management in biopharma facilities. Being able to, for us, I think, understand okay, what is the landscape. Look now for this type of work in our perspective projects, but also what are the types of people that would welcome our philosophy and thinking? And you know, how do we find those people? Where, where, where are they? How can we reach them? How can we help them without actually meeting them?

Lawrence Wong: 19:56

But I think, at the same time, we realize that we know a lot of people and we did a very I'm not going to say poor job, but not a great job with keeping up with our network.

Lawrence Wong: 20:08

Right, I think that kind of forced us to look at, okay, what can we do to not only attract those potential people to come to our tribe, but also what about the people that we already know? And how do we leverage our network and build stronger relationships, as you said, absolutely One of the things that we had also talked about not only increasing the face-to-face interactions, but we realized we spent a lot of time looking at a screen. I think some of the most valuable conversations we've had all year have been with people, like in the office or at an event. They were all face-to-face. If you look at our client portfolio now, all those projects have been because we were talking to somebody face-to-face. We really looked back at how much time we were spending last year. I think the mindset wasn't in the right spot. I think we just need to double down on being in person and just understanding what the challenges and opportunities are with our current network and meeting new people to find out what other interesting things are going on in the industry.

Oscar Gonzalez: 21:24

It was a learning experience. We were fortunate enough that we had made the right connections early on. That sort of powered our portfolio of clients through the end of the year. Now that we're realizing that we want to deleverage that by obtaining additional clients that we can continue to work with, and we'll need the workforce to do that. The way that I sort of equate this is almost to I don't necessarily want to say to like a therapy session, but when you have a face-to-face interaction and it really gives you this, you're feeling what that other person is saying to you. It's more than just someone who is virtually in there. You can really understand with them what those root challenges are. Not only that, I'm very excited for some of this work that's coming up, that we're going to be doing a full six-month project coming up in about a month. Now I'm doing some prep work there, but our face-to-face interactions have shown me how passionate my client sponsor is for this project that is so critical.

Oscar Gonzalez: 22:58

It's not every day that you're going to get the opportunity to work on a project directly with the decision maker. The decision maker may be chief of operations or some similar SVP, where you're only getting one 30-minute time slot in a given month. That's not enough to create that relationship. What we realized that we need to do and last year gave credence to that was spend this additional time with those functional people, that these are the individuals that are really doing this work day in and day out and they're seeing the challenges that they're struggling with, connecting with them and helping them convey the messaging the right way to their leadership To say, hey, these are the things that we're having problems with. We have a group here that we've looked into that can help guide us. I like to think of our method of working as being really these guides. We have a level of expertise based on our backgrounds, but ultimately it's the way that we ask questions of what the needs are, of what the client really is looking for.

Oscar Gonzalez: 24:27

Just yesterday had a meeting and when I came in originally to one of my clients, we had to fix what another company came in and did. The comments that they were making yesterday was yeah, they never even listened to us. They were telling us what we needed to put into these spaces and not asking us what was important to us. That's a huge red flag in any business, let alone consulting the way to really and this lens back into that human-centered design. You are not the one that is going to work there they are. You need to work with them to say how do you do what you do? What is it that you guys are doing? We're going to make suggestions of. I would suggest to do these four steps as well, because it allows for this downstream effect, et cetera, but in terms of what they're doing, that is up to the organization. How they do it is what you're trying to influence.

Lawrence Wong: 25:35

We'll be right back after a quick break. Is your team constantly fighting fires? Are you struggling with productivity and think it's due to inefficiency in your operations? These challenges can be difficult to measure, but not impossible. Sigma Lab Consulting can help you define and prioritize the issues that are negatively impacting your team. We partner with stakeholders to redesign workflows so you can work more efficiently. Find out more at sigmalabconsultingcom.

Lawrence Wong: 26:09

Yeah, I think to your point. We've been reading the win without pitching the NFS. So there's a concept. It's not so much the tactical steps that were necessarily asking our sponsors but also team members to give input on. It's more of understanding what is the goal here, why do you want to do this, understanding all the motivations behind it, really clamping down on that problem statement, and then you're able to design whatever it is that you need to do to get you to the end. But you're right, there's a lot of and this is a lot of your average consultant is probably going to say, oh yeah, what is the task and I'll go do it, and no questions asked.

Lawrence Wong: 27:05

When there is a question, it's really about nitty gritty details from the team, and then you're not really providing what you would call subject matter expertise, and so where we really differentiate ourselves is being able to ask those questions and being able to point out okay, well, why do you want to do that? What is the goal for the organization and who is involved in this? Who are the decision makers? Asking those right questions to really make sure everybody is on the same page about the problem, so that, once the ship starts to move, we're all going in the right direction, because you can't be on a boat where everybody's rowing in the wrong direction. You're just going to be spinning circles and nothing gets done. And then people get cynical and we spiral down this dark, dark alley of oh that's how it's always been, and no progress is made. Right.

Oscar Gonzalez: 27:50

Remember I used to row and it is so exhausting when you're not rowing together, you can actually still row in the same direction, but when your oars dip into the water, to push no-transcript All eight people, their ore should hit the water at the same time and roughly be at the same depth in the water. I don't know if you've seen these rowing ores, but they're probably somewhere in the neighborhood of like 12 feet long, you know, and it feels like you're rowing through molasses. And it's the same concept in these projects of, just like you know, we're going nowhere fast. We'll use that age old phrase there we're going nowhere fast, doing a lot of work, not a lot of things are happening, and so you know, I think there's a lot of different strategies to alleviate that, but I want to go into a little bit more of what our strategy, what we intend to do in this 2024. You know, one of those things is that we've made a commitment not only to provide real world data and content into these podcasts, so we're starting to utilize additional resources. I found a couple through Deloitte, through all these other different firms that have insights. We can start to talk about how process improvement is changing our landscape and how advancements in our medicines or techniques are also modifying those process improvement.

Oscar Gonzalez: 29:36

I know AI is all over the place now, but there's a lot of concern for the security of that With all all do right. You know so there's a lot of folks that are using, you know, zoom and teams. We use Google Meet and all of these different meeting spaces are creating AI that really changes in such a dramatic way the amount of time. You know that project managers even spend on crafting minutes for a meeting. Now, again, there's a lot of security concerns there, but I do believe that those are things that will eventually be addressed within AI, so that's something to look forward to. That. There are these other components that are advancing in technology that will allow some of these, some of this more rote work, to become more streamlined.

Oscar Gonzalez: 30:32

You know so, in 2024, we're really hoping to we're really planning to attend a number of meetings, so we'll need to make sure that we are letting you all know the meetings that we're going to be attending. We are looking to have coffee with you, have a drink with you, share a meal with you, you know maybe a couple laughs, or talk about, you know, sports, whatever. It doesn't even have to be business related. We just want to get to know you If this is something, if this space of making your work in biopharma space more efficient, more optimized to where you're not coming home exhausted because you spent three hours looking for something, if you want to get rid of that sort of those sort of challenges that still happen small, medium, large business, it does not matter, they are still there, they're still happening.

Oscar Gonzalez: 31:28

That's what we want to do. We want to meet with you and so you know we're punting around a couple of ideas, even internally. So you know, I would say one of the most, one of the things I'm most excited for this year is is the opportunity to to create sort of a networking event sponsored by Sigma Lab Consulting that we can bring in folks from similar mindsets and really bring them together, sort of as like a melting pot of ideas and people and expanding networks. So you know, that's something that I'm really excited to do and hopefully we'll have the opportunity to do that within 2024.

Lawrence Wong: 32:12

Yeah, I think to your point.

Lawrence Wong: 32:14

For the people that we know already that we haven't seen in a while, we will make a very conscious effort to see you again and we will be catching up and then having conversations and sharing a meal or whatnot.

Lawrence Wong: 32:25

I think I want to take a step back and kind of, you know, just revisit the whole podcast direction that we're going into. So not only are we getting outside sources from some of the stuff that's going on you know that you might see in the news, or some some of these more I would say, specialty websites. An example would be like Bioprocess International, where they it's like a magazine and they have articles about some of the new trends in the industry. Or even DIA has their own database for all sorts of things that are going on in the industry. But I think we're taking this opportunity also to teach each other and also learn about something that we did not know about our respective areas of work, and using this as not only a professional development thing, but also we find that if you're able to teach something that you do not know, it just helps you understand it better. And so we'll be learning new things and hopefully you'll be coming with us along the way to kind of learn stuff that we don't already know.

Oscar Gonzalez: 33:30

I think it's going to be a fantastic experience and something that will strengthen our specialties. You know it's always. It's always a benefit when you can learn from like-minded individuals things that you didn't know before, because you start to see different perspectives and you start to see challenges that occur in adjacent I don't want to say adjacent industries, because it's biopharm, but adjacent functions. I guess you can say Biopharma goes anywhere from early stage concept R&D all the way through manufacturing and facilities. So we're literally at the two polar ends of biopharma, with a little bit of our expertise sprinkled throughout the middle as well, through the clinical and earlier stage facilities. So I think it's going to be a really fantastic, you know, learning experience and I'm excited to take that journey. So hopefully we can bring a number of you all for the ride as well and bring these learnings to you guys.

Lawrence Wong: 34:45

Yeah, how much time do we have, or I don't know how long we've been recording, but I wanted to talk about, to keep it more light.

Lawrence Wong: 34:56

I learned a lot about you over the weekend. I wanted to kind of go about talking about that. So after spending a whole weekend with you, I found out two things. One is that you take like the most comprehensive notes that I have ever seen for like all sorts of things right, and what surprised me the most is that, like when you explain the whole, I would say like the smart sheet, like Death Star, essentially this crazy workspace with all these connections and sheets and reports and dashboards that you don't write any of that down at all, like how you created that. But yet you'll write notes for all these little meetings that we have. But the most complicated thing that you've ever done, like you write no notes for it. I find that fascinating, because I'm the complete opposite, where I don't write notes at all, for all the day to day stuff, but all the big things I will write.

Lawrence Wong: 35:54

I'll write notes to remind myself hey, you got to do this and do that, but at the highest level you just it's like this program in your brain that you're just able to do all these things, which I find is incredible. So that's number one. Number two is that you make incredible chicken wings, like to be like from the dry seasonings to the sauce, like I was. It was amazing and I really enjoyed the chicken wings and I can say that your family is very lucky to have you as the person making meals sometimes.

Oscar Gonzalez: 36:28

I'm the meat eater man. I'm a meat eater. My wife doesn't eat a lot of meat now, but my son he has been as a two year old. He's very adventurous when he sees or smells something that's good and he's like he's a dead-ass. He's doing the eat sign language and I'll give him. He was licking up some barbecue wings that I had made the other day, so he was going to town and it was fun to see.

Oscar Gonzalez: 36:54

I'm glad that I could share that with you. It's a technique that I've sort of perfected since college and just sort of. I always find disappointment in recipes that I find online, so this was a little bit more of like it was experiments that eventually got me to come up with like I have a thing in my mind for a recipe, in my mind at least, for the time and the temperature Now, in terms of like what we add in there. You kind of you know that's a crap shoot every single time, whatever's in your pantry in your fridge, but I'm glad that you enjoyed those. You know the there's something about the work that I've done within Smartsheet to generate this understanding of how these R&D and clinical processes work. You know I've been fortunate. I think it's more of a strength than a weakness that I have been in these program and project manager level roles without necessarily being, you know, the soldier ants that are doing all of the paperwork, all of the you know, because when you're so close to a problem it's hard to see the problem. You know when you can, could you. You know there's so many things that distract you. They're not always. You know you're going to see something, you're going to see an error happen somewhere, but because you're so close, it's going to be a challenge to to figure out where exactly that error happened. You know you'll see when things are wrong, but you may also get used to this. Yeah, it's a little bit of a muddy process because, well, that's just that's the process they showed me when I got here. That's a very common Well, that's how they showed me, how we had to do it and usually, and with that's what you should be doing, you go in, you take it in, you do it a little bit and then you say, okay, I know where this can be fixed. So I've just always had this I won't say always, I would say, since I've been using that system.

Oscar Gonzalez: 39:17

It sort of creates this mental map of what are all the similarities and that I mean that lends credence into what we did with our strategy for 2024. We needed more clients and we needed more people, and we realized the the. The mutual factor in there was that we need to know people that are in agreement with our philosophy. It doesn't matter if they're going to be a client or an employee. So that's where we sort of kind of you know, aha, this is now going to be an approach to meet anybody that thinks in that way. That can go into either one of these windows, and so the you know it's been. I love it, man.

Oscar Gonzalez: 39:58

I absolutely love taking chaos and showing the organization behind it, showing the schematics behind it, because, quite frankly, you may see this in facilities, because there's pipes, there's gaskets, there's pressures, there's control panels, there's all these different systems that are all working. I see that with people, all these systems, all these giant tanks that you have in your facility, that giant tank is a VP, that giant take is a director, all these little spouts and gauges, those are, you know, entry level workers. These are once just a step above it. So when I look at these individuals, when I look at these project teams, that is that same mechanism that you have in your facilities is what I see with people. So I draw, you know, in my mind I start drawing these mental maps of like okay, well, this person has this information, that person needs it, this person can also transfer that information over. So, you know, it's sort of building this network.

Oscar Gonzalez: 41:12

That is not the hierarchy and this is the challenge that people face is that we are delivered. Here's the project team, here's the organizational chart. But that is not your working chart, that's not how you work, that's how you report, but it's not how you're working. And even the teams, the teams are great, but the teams are siloed as a team. And then you start to go, well, this is not the, this is the core team and this is the. You know the extended team. And it's like, well, you're kind of creating little silos with these extended team and unless you have the understanding, the communication should be going back and forth. You can't just assume, oh yeah, they should be telling they should be transferring all the core team stuff into that new team. Well, ask them. I've been in those extended team meetings and I don't hear any recap of what we talked about. I don't hear anybody refer to any of the minutes from the core team, which is where the decisions get made, you know.

Oscar Gonzalez: 42:25

So it sort of came to me at some point as I started to work in clinical operations. That's very, very matrix teams between pharmacovigilance, between legal team, between CMC, between clinical leadership, medical affairs. All of these groups have one thing in common, one major thing in common the sites. Everybody refers to the site. Some people may refer to the doctor, some may refer to the hospital, some refer to the site number that is given to them, but everything funnels into those spaces. So how do we connect the information so that it flows to the right people and that's a whole. Again, take those facilities and change all those different pieces of equipment and assets and put people in there, and that's how I end up seeing this. So it's funny because I never really said that out loud, but it's, oh my gosh, it's just really sitting with me there.

Lawrence Wong: 43:28

Yeah, I think it makes complete sense. And we're not saying that people are equivalent to machines. They're machines, don't have a heart and they don't have a motion. But I will say that you, really, I think the idea is understanding the relationships, right, that, like, each piece of equipment has with each other, and how does it interact with another system that may not be in the same building or whatever. Right, right, understanding, okay, what's the impact of this thing if it goes down?

Lawrence Wong: 43:55

In the same way that you understand, okay, what if one functional area doesn't do that one task? How does that impact some other timeline that has been built, based on how the project is going? So, yeah, I completely agree. Really, our, the thing that has made us successful, right, is really understanding those relationships and orchestrating the right interactions with them so that you decrease the risk, right, right, so no one critical path is impacted by a very minute thing that maybe nobody is being aware of, right, we actually bring that to the forefront and say, hey, that thing that you purchased, or maybe that task that you told somebody to do, that has a really big implication on the long term trajectory of wherever you're trying to go. Yeah, I completely agree.

Oscar Gonzalez: 44:53

You're listening to Lean by Design Podcast and we'll be right back after a quick break. Do you suspect your life sciences company could do things more efficiently? Maybe you're seeing costly workflow issues or maybe the work feels more difficult to perform than necessary, affecting team morale. If any of this resonates, reach out to the team at Sigma Lab Consulting for a free consultation on how we can develop and launch a custom solution fit for your team. Our consultants will build a custom workflow solution for your team to reach peak efficiency. Find out more at wwwSigmaLabConsultingcom.

Lawrence Wong: 45:34

And so I want to kind of keep us back on track. Was there anything like that? You learned about me that you didn't necessarily know.

Oscar Gonzalez: 45:41

I learned a lot about. We talked a lot about on the drive in, a lot about family and how we grew up and what was. There were some differences, but I think there's a lot of similarities too in the strength of the parental units within a Latino and an Asian family. They're very much there. We're not messing around. You're going to go to school. You're going to either become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, Exactly, and guess what? I originally started trying to go to med school. You became an engineer. So you know, maybe everybody happy.

Oscar Gonzalez: 46:25

You know, and I think it was what I learned about, I would say, some of the things that you find oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. How did I almost forget this Time out? Let's hold the phone. I need to make this known that for the very first time at our weekend summit, lawrence watched the movie happy Gilmore.

Lawrence Wong: 46:57

Oh my God, I totally forgot to watch that.

Oscar Gonzalez: 46:59

I do not understand how I partnered with someone that has not seen happy Gilmore, I mean, let alone we haven't even stumbled into Billy Madison yet. That's not even a thing yet. But we're going to need to bring that to the forefront. But it's interesting because it's easy to make assumptions. I mean, you were born, you were raised in New York, I was raised in Virginia.

Oscar Gonzalez: 47:25

So even myself, for a long time I didn't catch a lot of these movies or shows that others watch, because growing up my parents didn't watch those movies. So I never saw, I didn't watch all of these slaps that you know Will Ferrell comedies, owen Wilson, adam Sandler, david Spade, all these comedies that were sort of like earlier in you know, I would say, middle school, high school age for me, you know, late 90s. I didn't really see a lot of those things until I went into college and I started to look at, watch all these movies. But that was one of the most astounding revelations that I had of you. But I also could read your personality and I knew, okay, he's going to appreciate this, because this is a bad shit, crazy movie that is hilarious in so many aspects. So that was man. I mean, how did you feel after watching that movie?

Lawrence Wong: 48:35

Yeah, I mean, that's a great movie and you're right, like it's this person who just says whatever he's thinking at the time and like normally you wouldn't be able to do that in an office setting, but in a movie he's just like, he just says it. And I think that was like I was like this is awesome, this movie is great. I mean, how come I've never seen this and I realize I had this conversation all the time with some people that I worked with this have you ever seen this movie? And I'm like no, I've never seen that movie. And they look at me like have you been living under a rock? Like what's wrong with you? Where have you been? Yeah, that's the same reaction that you gave me. So, yeah, I was. Yeah, it was a great movie and I would definitely watch it again.

Oscar Gonzalez: 49:12

You know, and I think I, what I really enjoyed was, you know, just the time being around each other, and you're a very positive person. That is also, I don't see a lot of things I don't want. I guess frazzle you would be the word that I would say. You know, you tend to state take a step back, take a look Me. I'm going to have an initial reaction to something in some way. It might be internally, but there's something that I'm going to go like oh dear God, this is a nightmare.

Oscar Gonzalez: 49:50

I know things will always get figured out. You know, there's a saying that I say there's obviously. There's a saying that I say there's a saying with my wife and my son, who's too, you know, we tell him that there is nothing that we can't figure out together, and I think this last weekend really made me believe that with you that, as we riff, as we have these conversations, you have this fantastic way of distilling a lot of the specifics that are coming in my head and kind of drilling down. Okay, well, it sounds like it's more of this and it's, and you come up with this concept that is on par with exactly where I'm trying to get to, and I think that that's been super helpful for me.

Oscar Gonzalez: 50:46

And as soon as you know, you kind of create that into a ball of like this is what you're talking about. All of a sudden, my ideas should start coming out the wazoo of now I have another perspective and now I know. Now I'm sure of what direction I want to go to. So there's. Have you always? Has that always been kind of like your thing, where you sort no-transcript, take things in and obviously we're I'm learning that too with you know how to ask questions and take that into, distill it, but sometimes I can't get out of my own way.

Lawrence Wong: 51:18

Yeah, I think I'm the opposite, where, like, I I enjoy like, but I find a lot of, you know, things that are Simple and beautiful to me are being out in nature and being able to observe things and and really just reflecting on them, right. I think where I struggle is like having those ideas and thinking outside the box, right. I think that's where you come in, where you have like, oh, I think we should go in this direction, and then I go, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and then I kind of distill it. But I think I struggle with having those, you know, being more creative, being more imaginative of what the future could be. I think for me I'm always like, oh yeah, the simple thing is this, and then that's kind of like where my brain is is let's keep it Stupid and simple, and like that's.

Oscar Gonzalez: 51:59

I gotta be my boat here a lot of my work.

Lawrence Wong: 52:02

Yeah, I just try to keep things as as stupid and simple as possible, but being able to explore possibilities and go down those rabbit holes I think that's why I read so much, I listen to all these podcasts, I like talk to people because I just don't have those ideas. But I think you're in the opposite, where you constantly have all these like organic thoughts that come up and then I go well, that's amazing. Yeah, keep telling me about it, and then I'll just distill it and then we create this thing right.

Oscar Gonzalez: 52:31

It's, it can be a wait. I will say that it can be a wait, but you're right, it's being able to To come up with those organic ideas, and we we had that discussion during During the weekend and that is where we came to this idea of what we were gonna focus on in 2024. You know if I could kind of tie that back in we looked at, you know, these ideas and these desires that we wanted to do. You know these, these desired spaces that we wanted to open up into. There's a lot of Possibilities with what we're doing, with educating with. You know, how do we take the data of working with these clients and showing people what the what impact this really does.

Oscar Gonzalez: 53:19

You know, the one thing that I tend to say to folks is that we are on the cusp of innovation in so many spaces. In biopharma, accept our operations. We're using Excel to do reports, we're using Microsoft Word to do our minutes that don't tie actions to anything automated that notifies people that. You know, it's like we can be as innovative and as forward thinking and as New technology as we can be on the science front, but if we're not doing anything to cultivate that from an Operations perspective, we'll be left in the dust. We're gonna go. This is fantastic. I don't even know like we're gonna spend now three hours trying to figure out what that means, because the only way we know how to process that data is by using these.

Oscar Gonzalez: 54:15

You know macros on Excel or something rather, so you know, I think that the your ability to kind of Corral me a little bit really Helped us focus on on 2024 and beyond. You know, I don't think our mission and our vision changed for the company. I think our near term mission changed and that's important. We can have a 10 year, 15 year plan, but we also got to figure out how we're gonna get through the next three years, and I think we did a fantastic job for doing that. So we're we're pretty much at time. But I wanted to see from you Is there anything that you would Suggest for for people that are trying to do their own planning whether it's in their Organization or whether it's for them personally or professionally that they could take away from from our experience?

Lawrence Wong: 55:11

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is getting out of the normal routine, right, whether it's getting out of the office or or maybe just spending a few hours Together eating a meal or something like that, just being able to Take a step back and look at how do things go, what can we do better, what should we be doing right?

Lawrence Wong: 55:32

Having those more Candid conversations will allow the, I would say, the flow of the organization to flow faster, flow more efficiently. But whatever word you want to use and I think something that I Think we should do, maybe for the future summits and is Again, like you said, right, be again doing the same exact thing, being somewhere that's not within the normal routine that you have. But also, I think I would want to spend a little bit more time just outside right and just maybe going for a walk and Just being Undistracted, right, like we spend an enormous amount of time in front of a screen. I think we need to spend more. Less screen time and more people time is what I'd like to say. Mm-hmm, talk to people, right? I think a lot of people, when you are typing responses through a computer or something like that, you're having to pause and think like is this grammatically correct and like did I miss anything?

Lawrence Wong: 56:33

But, when you're just having a conversation, you can let those ideas, ideas flow more pure. Right, it's more pure. And if for a person like me, I'm like this is amazing because it's just flow of ideas and I'm able to kind of distill those things to go Okay, I think what he's trying to get at this is and then you feed, you know off of that and then we're able to create something right. But if you just spend your entire time in the office and it's always like the one hour meeting they have to have an hour catching up you just don't have those, those, that quality of interaction.

Oscar Gonzalez: 57:05

Right, you know, on on that note, to kind of throw this in there as well, we just had a strategy discussion and I kept getting you know what's the agenda, what are we doing, what are. And I'm like, well, we had two strategy sessions like let's recap that, and then we need to just talk about this. We need to just talk it out together, like if these people say that we don't have a plan yet, we don't have a plan yet, but we should have this communication with everybody, and then at the end of that session yesterday I got Well, that was, that was fantastic. I feel really great about the direction, about what we're going, and blah, blah, blah. And it wasn't even a solid Line in the sand that this is what we're doing. It was these are all the considerations, this is where we believe the industry is taking it, etc. But it was that opportunity. We held a two-hour meeting and we and we finished in about an hour and ten. But just having that free will talk is super important, especially, especially in a virtual environment.

Lawrence Wong: 58:13

I think there's. Yeah, you were. You were explaining the whole concept behind Marinating and I found that a facet, because you were like, no, we have to, we have to take the chicken out and we have to, you know, put the seasoning on that it marinated in the fridge and then we have the, the other things and we cook it for a little bit.

Lawrence Wong: 58:30

Then you add the sauce and there is there's Something to be said about letting these ideas marinate and like, have you think about something else?

Lawrence Wong: 58:37

And then coming back to it that maybe you miss something or maybe there's something else you want to add, right, but allowing these ideas to kind of soak into your brain and reflect on it and then come back to it again and, you know, iterating on it, right, that's what.

Lawrence Wong: 58:51

That's where you really create something special. And I think it's it's a yeah, it's something that will continue to do and to have these sessions where we separate ourselves from the day-to-day and Really talk about these, these big ideas, but then really come back down to earth and say, okay, tactically, what are we doing for the next? You know, 12 to 18 months, and we we had this conversation about we don't know if this is gonna work, but I have a feeling that this is going in the right direction and if it doesn't work, we'll pivot and we'll change directions. But I think a lot of the information that we've gathered from the past year and Things that we've been seeing in our own network and just having conversations between ourselves is that we need to spend more time with people and less screen time.

Oscar Gonzalez: 59:39

Absolutely and, if I can add, for, for those that are looking to Really find you know they're North Star. That is a that is a metric that's now getting floated around, and we looked at our North Star as Strengthening our networks and our partnerships. So if you're looking to try to find a way to, you know, plan for your own year. For me, I like to start small. There's a lot of things that you know that have to happen within the, within the year. There's a lot of things that you know you really need to execute within that year. Perhaps it's not completely ironed out, but you can do that and then step back and say what is all this mean? Where does this take me? Where is the value here? And that is what will drive that North Star for 2024 for you.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:00:31

What do all these things mean? Does it mean that you want to spend more time with your family? Does it mean that you want to Advance in the workplace? Does that mean that you want to, you know, become closer to your brothers and sisters or your parents, or come closer to a best friend? Or you want to, you know, looking at you know you want to be. Everybody wants to be healthier, but what does that mean for you? Doesn't necessarily mean being in the gym five days a week. It might just mean, hey, on any day, that is, you know, good weather, I'm working at home, I'm gonna go walk outside for 20 minutes and just do a lap around the neighborhood. You know finding out what those mean for you and, and you know, having all these small pieces, looking at the similarities, going big and, at the end of every year, reflect. Reflect on what that looked like.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:01:21

Your goals don't have to necessarily match up to the goals of your organization where you're trying to hit a hundred percent, Shoot for 80. Throw a couple in there that you know maybe a challenge to get to, but be proud of what you did. Don't look at what you were not able to accomplish, because that is Gonna fuel you the next year. They say you know what? Man, I can't believe I miss these things. However, I crushed on all these other pieces and I was just moving and grooving. That felt Really good. That felt really good for my mental health, for my physical health. Let me see where I can amplify that the next year. Lawrence, I'm really excited for this year. Go ahead. You have one thing.

Lawrence Wong: 1:02:06

Yeah, I was gonna say the, the. If this is your first time doing this or maybe you've done it in the past and hasn't worked out, I Think the the practice of setting goals. It's gonna be shit at first, but you kept better over time, right? So don't even worry about oh, what is this the right format? Do I have the right categories? Like, forget all about that, just just write it down and Over time, that'll get better and you'll iterate and you'll figure out. Okay, these are the things that are actually important and I think that's something that we've been able to learn. Right, we were looking at our goals from last year and we're kind of cringing at it going like this didn't make any sense.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:02:43

Where are we going? Yeah, what was the point?

Lawrence Wong: 1:02:46

Yeah, yeah, and so now I think we've come a long way from there, and Each of the things that we're about to do in the next 12 months Are aligned with where we want to go completely, and there's no question about it, and it's more about okay, what's, what's the plan to get this done, and and, quite frankly, when we went back and looked at it, our Tentative goals that we'll have for 2023.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:03:11

I believe, shrink from the number of goals that we had in 2020 or 2024. I think they shrink from what we had in 2023. Yeah, because there is more of a focus. All of those other things will come, the revenue will come, the clients will come, the employees will come when your focus is on strengthening those partnerships and those relationships. So when you look at your goals, don't set them up to be so individual, because they should all go into one direction, the purpose of all of that, that North Star. So find that North Star. All the other things will fall into place. I'm excited for 2024. I'm excited to connect with our peers. I'm excited to connect with new people at conferences. Lawrence, you're heading to a conference soon. Let's hear about that real quick.

Lawrence Wong: 1:04:03

Yes, so I'm heading to the ISPE facilities of the future conference in San Francisco, so I'll be there January 29th to January 30th or whatever this episode airs. But yeah, so that's on the books and I know you're going to something in February.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:04:21

Yep society for clinical or summit for clinical operations executive scope 2024 in Orlando, florida. I'll also be attending the fundraiser golf tournament. My expectations are mediocre because I have not golfed in about four years, but I'm really looking forward to Connecting at the golf tournament, at the Superbowl party. That's before the conference. During the conference, I hope to see a lot of familiar faces. If you see me, pull me aside. Let's chat, let's have a drink, let's have coffee, let's have a meal. I'm super excited to attend. Awesome. I am looking forward to 2024. Lawrence, thank you.

Lawrence Wong: 1:05:06

Yeah, let's get it going.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:05:12

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