Fixed in six weeks.

I’ll tell you as much about this one as the lawyers will let me. The client was a major player disrupting the healthcare industry, and the NDA on this work is genuinely ironclad, so there are no names and no numbers in this story. What I can tell you is what the work looked like, because the work is the same everywhere.

Their distribution facility was stalled, and for a business whose entire promise is getting product to the people who need it, a stalled site is an existential problem rather than an operational one. The site was being run from an office instead of from the floor, and you already know how I feel about that, because a desk is a terrible place from which to view the world.

I went in with a three-person team, and we spent our six weeks where the work was, out on the floor with the people doing it. We found the same thing I find nearly everywhere, which is a gap between what leadership believed was happening and what the frontline had known for months, and we closed it the same way we always do, by simplifying how the site ran, resetting the standard, and letting the people who carry the knowledge fix the things they had been pointing at all along.

Six weeks after we walked in, the site was running cleanly.

I was an advisor on that engagement, and I run advisory work the way I believe it should be run, which means the CEO got the credit publicly. The note I received afterward is one I’m not allowed to show anybody, and I’ve kept it anyway.