Talent vs Tenacity with Adam Bahret, Founder of Apex Ridge Reliability

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Adam, founder of Apex Ridge Reliability, all about why the concept of time to market is a lie. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) Man, man, this is exciting. This is time number three. You're entering a top 1% of guest area where you've been on several times. So I really appreciate you coming on.

(Adam Bahret at 00:00:26) Oh, I love it. I was so excited that you invited me back on. Yeah. That's funny. It feels like the SNL where they're like, "How many times have you hosted SNL?" or "You're five-timer club, six-timer club?"

(Adam Bahret at 00:00:34) I'm the three-timer club.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) There you go. That's awesome. It's rare, but it's amazing. And honestly, I've enjoyed getting to know you, and so I'm glad our paths crossed. What is new since the last time that we saw each other?

(Adam Bahret at 00:00:48) Yeah. Exciting stuff. So I'm continuing on my journey from hardcore reliability engineering best practices in product development, electromechanical product development, to helping leadership of technology companies do better at creating organizations and programs that just by default create highly reliable products. So when we talked last time, you know, two years ago, my book Reliability Culture had just come out, which was written for executives to build organizations that make reliable products. Well, apparently, I can't stop writing because my third book is going to be coming out sometime this year. It's in editing. And I believe the title is going to be Time to Reliability. Seems like what we settled on because it's kind of a core principle. But first, I'll tell you the funny—it's cliche, but, you know, I'm always creating content. I always just enjoy creating content and talking to people and ideas. And in my work, I document like, "Oh, there was this good idea," you know, idea from people, with people collaborating. And I was like, "Oh, yeah. I think this is becoming another book." And there's also some big lessons learned I've had from the last one. Right? That's kind of it. It's this journey. And with the last book, I'm like, it didn't quite hit the way I thought. And it took a while for me to realize. I'm like, "Why is it when I'm talking with people and I'm talking with executives, they're always like, 'I love it. I love this stuff.'" But I kind of had this fantasy when the book came out, there'd be this surge of these methods being implemented. You know? And there was an increase in it, and I saw language change, but it wasn't like this—like I imagined. And I wasn't being grandiose. You know? It just—I was like, "Oh, it's kind of strange." And then it clicked. It really clicked. And that was that I was writing to the people who want it to happen, but not the ones who do it. Right? A CEO, you know, or even a lot of CTOs in organizations or COOs, they want the product development program to, by default, make highly reliable products. But they're not going to do it. That's not—you know, they're worrying about the quarter. They're worrying about profits. They're worrying about other stuff, and they really don't want to be a part of that process directly as much as I was kind of picturing they might.

(Adam Bahret at 00:03:07) And what I realized is, "Oh, the real value of this content is the level beneath them, the people that they're asking to do it." And sometimes I don't like to use titles too much because in different organizations, the titles and what they do can be very different. And I was like, "Oh, this is really the people at the top of the business organization and top of the technical organization still connected to engineering working better together." And I was like, "A lot of this content is the catalyst to them working better." And I realized that that's kind of where I was going after this last one. And yeah, so that became—you know, I was like, "Alright. I feel like this is a book." And I started writing it in January, starting to really make it a book. And I found myself kind of being hesitant, avoiding it a little bit, sitting and kind of writing slowly and getting off track. And I was like, "What is going on?" You know? It just didn't feel right. And if you know me, you know I like doing a lot of motorcycle and car trips. And I did a couple big trips, and one of the big ones I did was from the Pacific Coast Highway from Seattle down to LA, 1,700 miles, camping at night on the ocean bluffs, the Redwood Forest. It was amazing. And those eight hours a day in the helmet alone is just this weird epiphany at the end of it. And I came back, and I threw out the other book entirely, and I dropped out another 26,000 words in four weeks. And it just felt so good. And I'm very excited about this, and it feels like, you know, just the learnings in the last one. This is going to—I feel like this is really going to help a lot of people that are a couple different levels at the top of the technical organization, you know, directors, VP, senior VP, CTOs. I even have a COO who's very excited about it. But, again, organization size and structure changes that. And then on the business and program side, and then finally connecting in that way where you're just making the best decisions through the whole program. And that's really the end result is that this stuff is working when you are just making the right decisions through the whole program from the beginning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) I agree. I'm curious. I want to talk a little bit more about the epiphany or the clarity. So you said you're in a helmet. You're going up and down the coast. Can you explain more about what you're doing there?

(Adam Bahret at 00:05:20) Yeah. With the trip or—? Yeah. Well, so the trip is just fun. I love doing these—I don't know, work hard, play hard a little bit. So I do these different random—I've lately been doing a lot with motorcycle trips. So I had an important meeting in Eastern Montana. So, you know, and I knew the people pretty well. And it was kind of a mix to get together, some different people, even from different companies, some executives and some other stuff we were working on. And, you know, they were like, "You need to be in Columbia Falls, Montana on this day." And I was like, "There's a small airport in the same town. You can fly in there." And I was like, "No." I was like, "I'm going to fly into Spokane, Washington and drive all the way across—700 miles across—Idaho and Montana." And I'm like, "I'm not going to stay downtown at the hotel with you guys. I'm going to rent a—somebody had a trailer out in the middle of a field, and that's where I'm going to stay so I can look at the big sky at night, you know, Montana." So I did this awesome motorcycle ride across all that beautiful landscape and everything. And so I've been enjoying that. And the trip, this kind of trip of a lifetime to do the Pacific Coast Highway, which is one of the most beautiful roads in America, came about because a close friend of mine who also rides, when his father was passing away, he asked his dad. He's like, "You know, Dad, I'm not asking about life regrets or anything, but is there anything you wish you had done that you didn't get to do?" And his dad who also rides was like, "I always wanted to do the Pacific Coast Highway." And, you know, "I kept putting it off, and it never happened." So my buddy Dan was like—he was in his mind. He's like, "I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it for you. I'm going to do it for me." You know, seize the day. And he told me this story, and I'm like, "I'm in. I'll go." You know? And he's like, "Oh, I'd love that." So we, you know, we both have kids and families and all that, and it's a lot of time off to do it. And we planned it. The pandemic hit, postponed it a year. Pandemic continued, postponed it another year. So we kept putting it on the calendar, and we put it on the calendar for September this year, and it happened. So it was really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:28) What is your family doing? Are they just back at home, or do they go with you?

(Adam Bahret at 00:07:32) No. I was on a motorcycle. It was just me on a GS 1200 motorcycle and him on his bike.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:38) Oh, nice. So just—

(Adam Bahret at 00:07:40) Yeah. Yeah. This is a motorcycle trip. This is Easy Rider. Right? These are two guys with their sleeping bags tied on the back of the bikes. All your gear for the week, your tent, your tarps, and your loofa sponge to dry it out is the best way to not have it in the bag. And we're sleeping on the cliffs. So we were doing—we only stayed in a hotel one night, but we did that to dry out our gear. So, you know, we have all our gear on our bike, and we're riding all day, and it gets dark. And we're tired. And we're right near the ocean, you know, going right past it, and it was always on our side. And so you could find a campground, but sometimes I was like, "Let's just turn right and go through this field till we come to the edge of the cliff." And we'd pitch our tent on the edge of the cliff over the water and, you know, just that kind of romantic, just amazing, you know, great experience. And, you know, and then that was after a day of riding through the Redwood Forest, you know, or whatever. So it's really fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:34) That is pretty cool. When did nerds become cool?

(Adam Bahret at 00:08:39) Am I a trailblazer?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:40) I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I just look around and all of these people that I know in technology, they have really interesting backgrounds. They have—

(Adam Bahret at 00:08:47) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:47) —fun hobbies. And, you know, I guess I caught the tail end of growing up and it kind of being odd. I think the generation after me was a lot more acceptable.

(Adam Bahret at 00:08:58) Yeah. Yeah. I guess I don't know how to answer that. I think everybody just—you just are all the different dynamic aspects of you. Don't put yourself in a box.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:07) We were always cool. It just took everyone else a little bit to catch up and figure it out. Let's go with that.

(Adam Bahret at 00:09:14) Exactly. That quote. Yeah. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:17) So you go on this trip. You have this epiphany. You come back. Have you gone on trips before and it provided you clarity around a project that you were working on?

(Adam Bahret at 00:09:25) You know, actually, it's funny. I've really, especially since that trip, noted how important that is to get out of work mode. It was an eye-opener. It was really an eye-opener because I've been driving really hard this past year because I'm also building a new CTO community, actually, called T3 and creating that and some other fronts and, you know, big work projects and a lot of things. And, you know, I didn't realize that I actually had gotten in—even with the trips I was doing, you know, because I had mixed in three really good motorcycle trips over the past 12 months before that. But, again, there were work-associated a little bit, some of them, and I didn't realize how much I was never turning off my mind from work, you know, even when I'm not doing it. Right? I know that, you know that. So I've kind of, in a moment of growth, realized I need to really mix in those times where it's really turned off. And then the irony being, that's where I deliver the best content is when I turn it off. Right? In some ways, because I guess, I guess in truth, I can't totally turn it off. But if I turn off the burden of it or the—this kind of slave driver I have, right, my boss is a jerk who just kind of keeps me going all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:40) Mine too.

(Adam Bahret at 00:10:41) Yeah. He's hard on me. Yeah. Hate that guy. Yeah. It just—it's interesting. So I'm sure you've realized that too. Especially, I mean, you have a new baby. You're, you know—things are moving fast. And, yeah, it can be intense. And it's kind of like if you're a runner, there's a huge difference between—you know, you can run a marathon, but you can't run three in a row. You should take a day off or whatever. You know, you've got to take that break. It makes a big difference. So I'm realizing that if I have to sell to myself as better performance, then that's fine. That's how I sell to myself, but it's needed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:14) When you don't have a high work ethic, you imagine that being able to focus and clamp onto something and just beat it to death is the skill because you don't have a high work ethic at some point in your life. Right? When you're trying to become better and learning about how to do that and improve yourself. Then your next stage is you're clamped. Right? You're just beating it to death, and then you have to mature out of that to realize that you can't just beat it to death all the time. And so it's this difficult maturity process that you have to go through.

(Adam Bahret at 00:11:46) Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting, the growth side of it too. And it's funny too. I was even just talking with a friend of mine today. I have the—it's just, you know, as a consultant, you know, it's a little bit of a lonely world or I think for executives too, and it's great to have peers that you can confide and trust in, which is actually one of the reasons why I'm creating T3 for CTOs is that it's going to be a confidential place with NDA signed for both personal and professional sharing of information. The groups are no bigger than six, and they are able to use that space. They're all going to be on this type that are on the same journey where the content that I'm creating in my facilitation is aligned with their goals, but it allows that space of camaraderie and people helping people. But that comes from how much I've benefited from that. And the example I was going to give is I have, you know, a friend that we talk every week just to share. We're both consultants. He's, you know, he's unbelievable. He's at the age where people usually retire and rest, and he's expanding his consulting business. Unbelievable. And he's been an executive and all these different things. Very inspirational. Hi, Henry, if you're listening. You know, we really open up about things, and I was really telling him how it's kind of interesting that as you grow and do new things, how much the fear can inhibit you, and you don't realize it. And it's funny. No matter how much you've accomplished or can look back on and say, "Oh, that's great what I've done," or "I like my resume," there's still that weird first day of kindergarten fear when you take a big step forward. And it's all in your head. You know? And so that's why it's great to be able to have peers to talk about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:25) Absolutely. And for me, I have to remind myself that when I do get comfortable, I need to associate that with fear so that I get to that next stage. Because I've noticed sometimes that I'll get comfortable and hang out in a spot for a couple months. And luckily, I have this recurring event in my calendar from this mentor a few years ago who invested in me. He said every three months, put in your calendar a recurring event that asks, you know, several questions that he gave me. And that really helps me step out of myself so I can get a different perspective.

(Adam Bahret at 00:13:58) That's so great. Isn't that mentor thing great? Because there's people I mentor just out of caring and giving and people who mentor to me just out of caring and giving, and it's such a wonderful cycle, you know, and it's really good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:11) For this T3, first of all, super cool name. Have you talked to Etienne de Bruin at all about this?

(Adam Bahret at 00:14:17) Who?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:17) Do you know him? Etienne de Bruin?

(Adam Bahret at 00:14:20) No. I don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:21) You've got to meet this guy. Oh, he's taught me so much about how you do it. Because you—it's really clear how you will do it with one or two or three groups. But then when you try to get five, six, 10 groups, you have all the scaling problems that you normally have.

(Adam Bahret at 00:14:35) Yeah. Yeah. I'd be more than happy to write that email and make an introduction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:35) Oh my goodness. Talking to him today.

(Adam Bahret at 00:14:40) I greatly appreciate that. And your confidence that I'm going to do one or two, three groups. Well, I don't know. We'll see how that goes. I'm going to have most of my questions about that. I'm not going into it thinking, okay, there's a lot to figure out there for me too.

(Adam Bahret at 00:14:55) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:55) I always go to infinity. I always scale it up and out as far as I can. Let's give the call to action there. If people want to learn more about T3, where do they go?

(Adam Bahret at 00:15:05) So you contact me directly. So it's my email address, [email protected]. And the process right now is I'll share with you a summary of high-level information about it. If it's of interest to you, you know, I want to talk further with you. We're going to see if it's a good match. And do I feel like you're a good match for the group? Do you feel like it's what you're doing? And then you'll get an official invitation before March 1st.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:35) Nice. That is really cool. And so what does T3 stand for?

(Adam Bahret at 00:15:38) T3. So you're going to see a continuing theme here. I wanted to—this actually came from—this happened with a really good friend of mine, another person who I greatly admire, an amazing consultant, Rich Litvin. We were drinking and smoking cigars in Little Havana in Miami not that long ago because we were down in Miami doing some work. And I was telling him about how I want this community, and I told him the name I had for it, whatever. And he's like, "You know, Adam, there's no story. Where's the story? Where's the thing that got you excited about this?" And he's like, "Just tell me a story about something you think emotionally that relates." And I was like, "You know, I think one of the most amazing sports right now on the planet is the Isle of Man TT." And it's a motorcycle race that's been going for 104 years, and they do 200-plus miles an hour on the city streets and country roads for a 34-mile course, and it's the last true gladiator sport. It's the boldest sport on the planet. To be able to do that, you're in another stratosphere. That, you know, you're to me in the same category as astronauts. So it's the boldest sport. It's people that are dedicated to accomplishing something and put everything in. Nothing's left behind. Everything's there on the line. And that's the mindset and the people I'm looking for for this. I want that kind of boldness. I don't want to be working with—you know, let's get you past if you think you want to do this, if you think you can—is it safe politically to push things a little bit? Is it—I want people that are past that and are ready to commit to evolving their organization to where they just design products that are highly reliable by default, period. You need to be bold. You need to push your other peer executives. You need to push your groups. And, you know, you're not doing it in a careless way, but you are going to—you can't be timid about it. So that's—so then I'm calling it the CTO's Tourist Trophy, the three T's. And I actually changed the name to Technical Officer's Tourist Trophy because I don't want to limit to CTO. COOs are welcome, senior VPs, even CEOs, because that title doesn't always—isn't always the exact same responsibilities and accountability in the organization in different organizations. Because I've talked with people who are COOs who are like, "That's what I need to do. That's what I need to accomplish." You know? I talk with other people, other organizations where it's the senior VP, and they're—that is on my desk. I need to do it. My CTO assigned it to me. So since the title shift, you know, I changed the name to Technical Officers instead of just CTO and saying that anybody's welcome who wants to accomplish that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:23) I agree with you on the title shifting. That is one of the most difficult things that I've tried to figure out how to solve as a speaker, because everyone's listening and I'm going around, I'm interviewing great leaders, you know, learning about you and product reliability or leadership or whoever it may be, whatever their specialty is. And the information is always so specific, and to provide the context to make it useful for everybody, it's almost one of those things where I know, when I started out, it was really easy because I had this view in my head of how everything was from, you know, my position and my experience. After I talked to a couple hundred people, I realized this thing is crazy. It's across the board. It's everywhere. And so I know exactly what you mean as far as it's really hard to say, "Hey, we're welcoming all CTOs," because it could be if you're at, you know, $50 million, you might be the COO with these responsibilities. If you're at $5 million, you might be the CEO with these responsibilities. And so it's really something, I guess, that we would need to build around the responsibility. But the thing is, building around the responsibility is a harder marketing challenge because everybody identifies better with the titles. Right?

(Adam Bahret at 00:19:38) That's why the interview process. That's why I'm not just, "Hey, first six people are it." I'm like, "Nope. Here's a high-level summary. How does this fit with you? All right, let's talk about it." Because this doesn't work if those six people don't jive with each other, you know, in the sense of who they are, what they're trying to do, and all the other peripheral aspects of that. So that's—I want to be very careful about that. And that's also why I want to limit it to six. And that's funny you picked the number seven. That's funny we're thinking the same thing. And I picked that number very specifically from my experience with all my engineering stuff, where when I'm working with teams to do risk assessment, which means to hypothetically break down how failure modes can occur and what can happen, what can cause them. And there's a lot of creativity in there too, and trying to discover and figure things out. And I found some magic numbers for the group sizes with that. You know, I found that less than four, it kind of becomes singular. More than 12, it's just a toast. It becomes one or two people over-talking everybody else. Other people aren't listening, then they jump in and it goes a different direction. And that kind of—four is my minimum, 12 is my maximum, six is awesome. So I chose that number very specifically based on my experiences with groups that are fleshing out things and working towards a goal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:57) And so right now, you're taking more of an artisan approach, this very specific thing with you and these six people, and you're building your first group right now.

(Adam Bahret at 00:21:07) Exactly. I'm trying to formalize something that's been happening informally in the sense that, you know, I've been working with executives on this. Right? This is part of what I do. And so often, I'm like, "Oh, if these two people could talk, they really could help each other." I mean, maybe it's a weird analogy or not, but it's what Alcoholics Anonymous proved of people figuring stuff out, helping each other. Right? Because before, Alcoholics Anonymous is a horrible example other than it's such an amazingly successful thing for one specific problem that nobody else could create progress with. I mean, there's no doubt that when people who are struggling with something similar work together in a constructed format with a facilitator, the results are amazing. Because you can't have a facilitator who's not in that exact same position at the time provide that same kind of interesting insight and shared experience from the front line at the same time. That's an important element to growth. And that's why, you know, that is an unbelievable, big challenge if you have something like that, like alcoholism or addiction or whatever. What an unbelievable challenge to try to overcome that. And it's never over. Right? It's just very continuous, and you need to be very diligent and aggressive. And that is the one thing that stuck, right, through all these decades. So there's something very powerful about a group working together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) I'm glad you explained that, because I saw in my meeting prep notes from Josh a line in there, a bullet point in there that says, "It's his new group is like AA, but for acknowledging leaders." All right? And I go, "How is Adam going to do this? How is he going to explain that?"

(Adam Bahret at 00:22:46) I get it. You did—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:47) You did a great job, though. I get it.

(Adam Bahret at 00:22:49) Josh. Josh, we're going to talk later. Um, no. No. No. No. I'm glad you did it because that's that was the thing, because it's funny. It's really the best example I can think of of that extremely powerful dynamic. Right? Which gets used in many other places, but I guess it's the one everybody knows.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) Well, it's smart. You're taking a format everybody's familiar with through their either own life experiences of having attended or in the movies. You can't not understand. If you consume media to some degree, you can't not understand the format and what AA is. Right? It's in—

(Adam Bahret at 00:23:20) Yeah. I guess that's—yeah. Right. Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) I mean, because—it's an easy connection.

(Adam Bahret at 00:23:25) Yeah. But the reason why I'm inspired to use it is I've never had an addiction or used it, but that exact same method I found so valuable in some of the other groups I have done. Right? So for whatever the collaborative groups that, if they allow the bandwidth to also go to people helping each other, it's always this big step up, this big level step up in results. Because that continues after too. It doesn't just—it doesn't stop when the meeting closes. So I'm also going to be creating an online—for those groups, they're going to have the ability to continue the discussions online between our sessions as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) When you have bold people doing bold things and they're all together and sharing, they're building bonds. I mean, that's how relationships are built, is when you go through life together.

(Adam Bahret at 00:24:14) Yep. Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:16) I love it. And I love that every time I talk to you, you're always creating something new. Whether it's a book or a piece of content, your email newsletters are hilarious. I opened one a couple weeks ago, and it was "I Was Drunk Doing Math," and I'm like—

(Adam Bahret at 00:24:30) I know what you're talking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:31) I'm like, "What is this?" It was funny, though.

(Adam Bahret at 00:24:35) Yeah. Yeah. So that is the article, and I did in my podcast too. The title of it is "How I Almost Got Punched in the Face at Work."

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:43) Yes. That's what it was.

(Adam Bahret at 00:24:44) That was it. And then the punch line at the end was the individual who I had frustrated greatly at work—we ended up out in the field, actually was in Italy, Milan, trying to solve this problem together. And we did, and we were very excited about it and ended up going to a very high-end fancy restaurant to kind of celebrate the night before we were going to go back. Unfortunately, when I drink, I become even more dorky. When my filters go down, I'll tell you more math stuff. It's like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:13) So fun. Come to my party.

(Adam Bahret at 00:25:15) I'm just kidding. Yeah. Right. Exactly. "This guy? Stay home."

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:19) Stay home, dude.

(Adam Bahret at 00:25:19) I know. Stay home, dude. But no. No. But then here, let me describe to you how I ended up—how, you know, how it manifested and you'll reinvite me to your party. So I was talking to him. I'm like, I was like, "You know, Monte Carlo statistical simulations are amazing because you can calculate things with random number generation, whatever." And he's like, "Oh my God." So I'm like, "No. No. No. I can show you." I was like, "Look. I can calculate pi, you know, 3.14, by throwing bread crumbs in the air, setting up a plate and napkin and three menus, and I can actually calculate pi by just doing that." And he's like, "All right. I've got to see this." So we're in a fancy restaurant, two Americans who've drank a bunch, and I'm throwing breadcrumbs in the air, you know, with a bunch of menus and napkin or whatever. And of course, I can't remember. I'm trying to keep count of which landed where in the plate versus the napkin because that's the ratio for the number generator. And I can't remember. He's laughing at me, and I'm laughing at myself. And yeah. So I guess that's good article content. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:14) Well, I loved it. And I laughed as I was scrolling through it, and I definitely read through it. One of the things that I like about you is you are highly intelligent, but you're also self-aware, which means to your point of that story, you immediately notice when the eyes glazed over. There is a large number of highly intelligent people that don't have that ability, and they will just keep going. But the fact that you have it is one of the reasons why I believe that you're so successful.

(Adam Bahret at 00:26:43) Oh, thank you. I greatly, greatly appreciate that. And I attribute that to the fact that I have just as hard a time learning this stuff as other people. I think when people are so brilliant that it's effortless to learn it, they can't imagine other people not getting it. I think that probably I've struggled just as much as the average bear to learn these things. I think maybe why I appear different is my passion for it is so big. I just won't give up. But I'm sharing with you probably the process I had to go through in my mind to try to understand it too. So kind of to some degree, maybe there is a disability that I've leveraged to be an advantage in that I can communicate things well because I had a hard time learning or I was slow to learn it myself or whatever. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:27) Well, I firmly believe that for myself, it's not my—it's not a high level of intelligence that causes me to be successful. It's that I'm just relentless. The best way to explain it is when I was young, I had an older brother, and I specifically remember this one day where I was probably eight years old. And my brother had his friend over, and they were roughhousing with me. Right? Not beating me up, like, bloody fists and knuckles, but, you know, like, pushing me down and things like that and messing with me. And the friend that he had over, they pushed me down. I was on the ground. I got back up, and they did that several times. And finally, he just started laughing. He was telling me not to get back up, and I kept getting back up, and he was just laughing. And then finally, he's just like, "You are awesome." And he ended up loving me. It's so funny because if you—it's such a great connection to life, because if you—you're getting beat up. And in those moments when you're getting beat up, it's just like, "Give up, man. Just give up." But those people who don't, those people ultimately, it's almost like you get respect from the universe, respect from God, and they—and then you get a little, you know, mystery thing where you get a little plus one, you know, and then you just slowly start to build those up and you keep going. And then life turns out a lot better than it was when you were getting beat up a lot.

(Adam Bahret at 00:28:53) Yeah. Tenacity is, without a doubt, I agree with you, the most essential element of success. There's so many people that I've come across that are unbelievably talented, and I'm like, "Oh my God. If I was only a quarter as smart as they are." But I've accomplished and gone farther because of just the tenacity. You know, if they had the same tenacity, you know, they would have gone as far.

(Adam Barrett at 00:29:14) And so it really is tenacity. You know? And I think it is the key element. I don't think you'll find a single person successful who doesn't have the tenacity. Like, there's never just a talented person who's chill about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:25) I think it's more common to find the talented person who just doesn't have a work ethic than it is to find other things. Yeah. Because so many times, I've heard people, you know, maybe just out in life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:40) One is a really great one: singers. People who are really good singers.

(Adam Barrett at 00:29:43) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:44) And then they'll—I mean, look, American Idol made a whole show about it. They'll be working at Subway, and they're a world class singer. It's like, if you just go out and apply yourself—

(Adam Barrett at 00:29:52) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:52) You could be, you know, Beyoncé-ish. Yeah. Kinda be Beyoncé. Yes. You'll—

(Adam Barrett at 00:29:57) At least find out how far you can go. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:01) Yeah. Oh, man. Change of topic. What's your podcast about? I wanna tell people about your podcast.

(Adam Barrett at 00:30:06) Oh, yes. So my podcast is Reliability Leader. The focus for Reliability Leader is—because it's about how leaders can, you know, like my Reliability Culture book and this content, how leaders and people who create product development programs can do things differently to fundamentally make better products. But, of course, I don't just constrain it to that. I'll go wherever the conversation goes or wherever my guest wants to go. I always find lots of fun guests, people who wanna go over different things.

(Adam Barrett at 00:30:32) I should track down the guy who did wanna punch me in the face from, like, fifteen years ago. That would be a great guest to have. Yeah. I should find them. Oh my god.

(Adam Barrett at 00:30:41) That's a great idea. Because that was a popular article. I did get a lot of comments on it. And then I did the follow-up one about—I actually drew out the equations and how to do it. But yeah, it's Reliability Leader.

(Adam Barrett at 00:30:53) It's in—just finished my fourth season of it. So it's moving along. I enjoy doing it. And, you know, my article series there, you can go to apexridge.com. And at the bottom, you know, there's a sign up sheet for the article series, and I know people enjoy it.

(Adam Barrett at 00:31:04) And, of course, I post them on LinkedIn as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:07) Have you gotten to meet any of your favorite authors on the topic by having them on the show?

(Adam Barrett at 00:31:12) Authors on reliability?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) Reliability. Leadership. Yeah.

(Adam Barrett at 00:31:16) Yeah. There's people I've—I would say that I've known them and then invited them. I haven't invited—I generally invite people I know, I guess, would be the way I've put it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:25) People you don't know.

(Adam Barrett at 00:31:27) I haven't invited people I don't know, which I should do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:30) So people wanna go look it up in the podcast store or wherever they listen to podcasts. What is the title of it?

(Adam Barrett at 00:31:38) Reliability Leader with Adam Barrett.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) Do you do video podcasts too or just audio?

(Adam Barrett at 00:31:43) Yeah. I don't do video podcasts. I've never taken my podcast and done video. But I generally, as far as video, it's when I do webinars or seminars, you know, speak places, I tend to record them and have them up on my site as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:56) And that's just Apex. What's the website again?

(Adam Barrett at 00:31:58) It's apexridge.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:00) Yes. Yes. We wanna bring value to the audience, and you're subject matter expert on making products more reliable. If you have to focus on just one thing, if somebody were to walk away from this conversation with just one thing to think about other than buying your book, what would that be as far as making products more reliable?

(Adam Barrett at 00:32:21) Yep. It would be time to reliability, which is a term that I created because I felt everybody was just flat out lying to themselves and getting themselves in trouble. And what they were lying to themselves about was time to market. So one of the biggest driving factors in any product development program is time to market. You know, we—this thing has to be out in November 2024, and that is very much not negotiable or there better be an unbelievable reason.

(Adam Barrett at 00:32:52) And a lot of decisions get driven by that. And so in product development, sometimes things come up and, you know, you do need to negotiate time. We found this issue that's very concerning. We wanna do these types of testing or analysis that may yield issues even though we don't see them right now. And those things can easily get turned down or pushed aside.

(Adam Barrett at 00:33:13) So this is where the dishonesty is. Time to market is when you released a product, but you're implying that that's when the engineering team moves on to the new product. Right? You're implying that that's when you stop spending on development. But so often, that's not the case because the product has a lot of issues, and some you know of and some you don't. And the team stays on the—you know, and they are continuing to fix things, and you're quickly releasing updates, you know, and trying to get the next revision out there and even replacing stock or sending something to the customers and then sending them a new one even before something breaks because you know it's a defective item.

(Adam Barrett at 00:33:48) And then, of course, there's all the issues the customers are finding that you could have found in development. And I call that the recovery period. So then when the recovery period concludes, when the team really can move on—let's say 90% of your development team really can move on to the next product—the budget does really drop to just what you expected.

(Adam Barrett at 00:34:07) And so I was like, it needs a name if we're gonna talk about it, and that's time to reliability. So time to reliability is time to market plus the recovery period. And it's amazing when you start to really honestly measure what that time is of truly releasing the product, which means you've concluded the development program, you start making smarter decisions. And then what you find is all of a sudden time to reliability becomes shorter. Then time to reliability becomes that time to market that you originally wanted, and then it actually—you start making products even quicker than the way you used to.

(Adam Barrett at 00:34:40) So you all of a sudden start to be able to have product development programs that make better products with less investment, and you release them quicker. And that seems, you know, not believable that you can have it all, but you truly can. And it really starts with just honestly measuring, you know, when you are done developing a product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:58) Have you come across companies that do this really well?

(Adam Barrett at 00:35:01) It's something newer that I—I would say I first used the word time to reliability probably ten months ago, and it was because I needed a name for it. Because I just over and over saw the inability to really make good decisions without true, you know, true honest feedback. So there's companies that do better than others. Unfortunately, those companies usually have had to have been burned a bunch of times, right, to where they really have to be like, alright, let's be honest.

(Adam Barrett at 00:35:34) You know? Yeah. We pushed it out the door, but do you remember that extra $5,000,000 we spent, an extra eight months? Like, this time when somebody comes forward and says, I found these issues, you know, you can bring that up as evidence of when there's the pushback of, like, is it really that bad a thing? Be like, yeah.

(Adam Barrett at 00:35:51) Remember last time when we showed you this thing and you blew past it, and then it cost us another $5,000,000 later, and we could fix this right now in a week? So quite often, the companies that do this better, unfortunately, have the scars, and that's where the lessons came from. And what I wanna do is help companies be able to operate this way without having to experience all the scars and hardships.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:14) So what type of problems are they experiencing when they find you?

(Adam Barrett at 00:36:18) So, you know, there's new product development and then helping with existing products. And so I would say, kind of in practice, one of the things is so often when a new product is developed, you know, like, the prototype is made, leadership wants to know how reliable is it. And they push hard to do a lot of testing to measure the reliability of the product, and this takes resource and time. Well, I can save you six months of testing and $300,000 right now and tell you it's crap. It's a prototype.

(Adam Barrett at 00:36:49) Like, why are you—it's not gonna be good. It's gonna have tons of issues. So instead of creating that situation where for the teams, they're in this horrible—they're backed into a corner where, one, they are measuring something that they know isn't good. So you pretty quickly, just by human nature, start dismissing things. Oh, that's a one off.

(Adam Barrett at 00:37:08) That won't happen again. Or you kind of start putting more nominal stresses on it or making excuses for observed things that could be issues. And secondly, you're losing your resource and your time to be doing the testing that actually improves the design. Because the tests that improve a design are not the same tests that measure a design. So you're having the precious little bit of time you have and resource being directed away from the tools that can actually make the product better that we know is not good.

(Adam Barrett at 00:37:34) It's a prototype. And you're being forced—really almost forced—to be a little bit dishonest, not in a nefarious way, but you're seeing issues and you're like, we'll just—okay, we'll try to do our best to fix that later on. And it's so much more difficult to fix it later on. Or you're just changing the criteria just because, really, your job's on the line, and the executives don't understand that they are forcing a situation that is tying the hands of the people who can make the design better and also making them measure it in a way that, again, is the beginning of the dishonest, you know, dishonest metrics that just hurt you later.

(Adam Barrett at 00:38:09) And it's all done in sincere—you know, in sincerity of trying to do the best thing, but this is where the growth—this is why I want the executives to grow. This is why I'm switching my focus from the technical teams to adding—you know, this over and over again, I've seen how executives can do things better. And that's where the next level of growth is. That's where the next generation of companies come in that dominate markets and destroy their competitors. Competitors cannot keep up if leadership is structuring programs in these ways where you are rapidly growing the robustness of a design very early in the program, and you are steering and driving your program decisions based on real honest metrics that are really looking at the full picture. You're gonna make the best decisions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:51) It reminds me as you're talking, it reminds me a lot about—I believe his name's Eric, the founder of Zoom, the video conferencing system. Right? I believe he was at GoToMeeting or WebEx, one of the big players before, and he was suggesting these new, you know, technology features to implement, new ways to go about doing this. And they said, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:11) No. No. We've already made such a big investment. We're just gonna ride it out. And then he left, and then he started this, and look at what it is today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:19) Everybody knows Zoom. And so it's no surprise to me that you'll have these large organizations that are doing these somewhat backwards processes or at least highly inefficient ways of working, deadlines, and, you know, brushing stuff off because you have to hit the deadline. And then those people that are the practitioners there getting frustrated with that, leaving and either joining a startup that has better practices or starting their own company that has better practices and doing it the right way off the bat. Do you see that happening at all in the industry?

(Adam Barrett at 00:39:51) Oh, yes. You'll find—so there's more than one where I've been brought in to a company to help them. And they effectively—leadership doesn't listen, you know, and the technical people, the engineers, the directors, even the VPs, like, are like, oh my god, this is it.

(Adam Barrett at 00:40:07) You know, this is the right thing. But executive leadership just won't let them do it. You know, it's like, no. Like, the little example I gave of, like, no, I want you to measure the reliability of this. I wanna start measurements.

(Adam Barrett at 00:40:16) And they're like, it's not good. Like, let me—I found this issue. Let me fix it. I wanna do some other test that helps me know how to make it more robust. And they're like, no.

(Adam Barrett at 00:40:25) No. No. So a lot of times, eventually, I might choose to disengage. I mean, I've fired customers. And, you know, I'm kinda being funny.

(Adam Barrett at 00:40:31) But I've had people say, okay, you know, what do you—we finish this phase. You know, what do you propose next? And I've actually, in a written response, said, I suggest we disengage at this point and if you wanna reach out to me at a later date—just because I want satisfaction.

(Adam Barrett at 00:40:47) And then what'll happen is six months, a year later, some of these people who really understood what I was doing and wanted to happen have left, gone to another company. And if it's a smaller company, they take a higher position or maybe it is a startup. And the first—you know, early on, they say, hey, we need to call this guy Adam. I worked with him before.

(Adam Barrett at 00:41:07) This is what we need to do. And so they've moved themselves to an arena where they see the open-mindedness or they have the ability to direct to do it. So in the end, it's a success for me because I got through to people and they saw it and got it. They just had to go somewhere else where they could participate in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:25) Oh, it's funny that you say that because on both of our product lines, sponsorship and making podcasts for other companies, it doesn't happen all the time. But there's at least been one instance on both of them where we were selling into somebody. They wanted to do it, but management wasn't on board. Then they ended up leaving and a couple months later reaching out to us and doing the deal with their new company because they knew that's what they wanted to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:49) And it made sense, and the other team wasn't on board. So I think that that doesn't get talked a lot about in leadership. A lot of leadership, personal development, and we talk about relationships, but and we talk about how relationships can be useful and valuable and profitable. But that actual aspect of people moving and changing companies and understanding your product or your brand, I don't hear that talked about a lot. Maybe I'm just in the wrong circles, though.

(Adam Barrett at 00:42:13) You know, I think the thing is that when you look at when people leave companies, they're never leaving a company. They're leaving their immediate leadership. Almost always. Like, I've rarely seen somebody leave a company and be like, you know, my boss and my boss's boss were amazing. We're totally on the same page.

(Adam Barrett at 00:42:32) Like, that doesn't happen. It's that, you know, there's just this difference in philosophy. And things do change fast, you know, and even like you said with the Zoom thing where even, you know, he was in an industry that was brand new and booming, but you had people at the top who weren't, you know, looking out at what else was out there and weren't looking within their organization to be open-minded. But, you know, but on the other hand too, I mean, we can complement, you know, the idea of listening to your people, but that doesn't always work out too. Right?

(Adam Barrett at 00:43:02) I mean, there's also times where sometimes the leaders do really have—you know, I don't wanna poo-poo the idea that leadership doesn't know what's going on. You could probably come up with just as many examples where the leaders stood their ground and were spot on, too. And a lot of people underneath left and they were wrong. You know? But when there is something that is a very consistently well-supported area of growth and improvement, that's not the case.

(Adam Barrett at 00:43:27) Right? So for example, if you go to—when, like, you know, I'm a big car guy, you know, the Japanese invasion of the seventies. Right? Toyota and Honda, Nissan showed up. And all of a sudden, we're showing how you can make an extremely reliable car that is, you know, high—good gas mileage and at a good cost point.

(Adam Bahret at 00:43:46) And, you know, a lot of the American car companies were like, nobody wants that, and it doesn't matter. And then sales took over. You know, they clearly began to dominate to where at one point Toyota became the number one automotive manufacturer in the world, you know, replacing GM. And so of the American or Western car companies that did realize that, you know, and follow, that survived, and the ones that didn't didn't. So, you know, it's not that every idea is great, but sometimes it's very obvious that the tide is rising because of something new, something to the degree what I said. You know, you will, I think you'll dominate any market if leadership really begins to measure the results of activities associated to reliability and making decisions based on the correct metrics.

(Adam Bahret at 00:44:28) I think you won't be able to compete. I think if within any industry, if there's somebody doing that, it's gonna be very difficult to compete because you'll be spending more effort in getting less results.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:39) So the one takeaway is to focus on time to reliability, making your product reliable.

(Adam Bahret at 00:44:44) Time to reliability is to honestly measure when a program is truly completed. It's not when you put it on the shelves and then you're still developing. It's when, you know, you can set something like when 80% of our development resource comes off the program. You know, something like that is your time to reliability. It's the traditional time to market plus the recovery phase, which is really still continuing to develop. So be honest with yourself.

(Adam Bahret at 00:45:09) Make honest metrics that really are what you are saying they are and imply they are, and you'll just make better decisions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:16) What's your favorite book on the topic that you didn't write? On reliability as a whole.

(Adam Bahret at 00:45:21) Well, here's the thing, is that good reliability in any good growth in area, you look out the topics outside, and you bring them in. And I love, and know him personally, Steven Spear's High Velocity Edge. And he wrote about how the reason why all the western manufacturers, he studied Toyota in great detail. He's at MIT now. And in his PhD thesis, went and worked on the product develop, on the actual production lines in Toyota, worked on the actual production lines in GM, like assembling seats and stuff like that, and went into that level of detail.

(Adam Bahret at 00:46:00) And what he realized is that one of the reasons why the Western companies really never caught up was because they were replicating what, let's say, Toyota was doing, the steps they were doing. They never replicated the mindset that makes you grow. They never replicated the mindset where you were always looking to improve, where you are. They were just copying the steps. And I just thought that that was just a brilliant idea, and he called that the high velocity edge, and I really enjoyed that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:30) It's hard to get that at your company. We've got about 15 people now, and it's taken me years to get the people that have the same mindset. Yeah. It's tough, man. Dude, this is exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:41) We did it. Podcast number three. You're in the top 1% now.

(Adam Bahret at 00:46:46) I'm a three timer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:48) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.