What have you changed your mind about over the years?

Swiss cheese.  That’s the first thing that came to mind.  When I was a kid, Swiss cheese smelled so bad I wouldn’t get close to it much less add it to my sandwich.  I avoided Swiss cheese until my thirties and only then due to an experience in Paris, France.  My co-worker Jeff and I were sitting out at a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées and he ordered us a plate of cheeses to go with our glasses of wine.  The cheese was fabulous and far “stinkier” than the Swiss of my youth.  I realized that my taste buds had changed, or perhaps weakened, over time, along with the rest of me, and I needed to revisit tastes, smells, sounds, etc. to see what else my older self now appreciated.  Getting older is the first key component of mind changing.

People.  Like most people I grew up in a sheltered environment, meaning people that were raised in similar economic, religious, and moral backgrounds.  Not having a greater perspective, I naturally thought most people were more or less like me.  While I think I had a great childhood, it didn’t prepare me for the greater world.  I have since learned, generally the hard way, that this absolutely not true.  There are some really bad and stupid people in this world.  There are reckless drivers weaving their way at one hundred miles per hour through four lanes of traffic.  There are people that seemingly have no control of their emotions or their actions.  At a recent petit jury selection, where about forty people were present, randomly selected from throughout our county, maybe one or two others dressed in anything that I thought was appropriate.   Most looked like they were pulled for a lineup.  I no longer just think someone will be anything like me.  I make no assumptions.  Getting experiences outside your little world changes your mind about things.  Lots of things.

Left-handed.  I grew up right-handed where the logical, left side of your brain is dominant.  But along the course of life, I began to perform some tasks left-handed.  It started quite logically.  If I could eat with a fork in my left hand, I could simultaneously use a knife with my right hand and avoid all that wasted switching time.  This reduced the time it took to eat and get excused from the table to resume playing or watching a TV show.  It takes a bit of practice to get that other hand to cooperate, but it’s really not that bad.  I became a switch-hitter in baseball and could shoot baskets with either hand.  I would throw a baseball to my daughter right-handed, but left-handed to my son. Sometime in mid-life, I decided to use my computer mouse with my left hand, really improving its fine motor skills.  For the most part, I tend to use whichever hand is closest or has a better angle.  I believe this constant drive to be ambidextrous fundamentally changed my mind, bringing out the right brain’s more creative side and achieving a better balance.  Perhaps this, more than the others, has literally “changed my mind”.

What is your definition of love?

Like many other powerful words in the English language, love has been used to describe those strong feelings you have about your football team, pair of jeans, or flavor of ice cream.  That description of “love” is better described as “I really like this one the most”.  But my definition treats it as a noun, not a verb, and is a real thing that lives deep inside you.

I believe love is formed when a person opens their heart to another and lets that person become a part of them.  Open long enough and carefully nurtured, that person becomes an internal part of you, as important, if not more, than yourself.  You want for them everything you want for yourself, safety, happiness, security, and more.  You will put yourself in danger so they’re not.  You’ll put their feelings ahead of yours.  They become a part of you.  When you lose them, it’s unbearable, at least for a while, because you’ve lost a part of yourself, not just them, and you miss that dearly.  

Are you more like your father or your mother? In what ways?

This is a really tough question.  I clearly look like an Otto, my mother’s side of the family, as does my sister and youngest brother.  I got my hairline from my grandfather Maurice Otto.  My Dad was six foot tall, had dark hair, and weighed a constant 150 pounds, none of which describes me at all.  My mother was about 5’2”, had blond/brunette hair, liked Manhattans, and was a frequent visitor to her chiropractor.  So while I’m 5’9”, the rest is a perfect fit.

My Dad was a pretty smart man, being an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Dayton.  I think I have similar smarts, at least those kinds of smarts.  My SAT scores for math and science were right at the top, calculus was my favorite college course, I dropped philosophy and couldn’t manage better than a “B” in English.  Computers and programming came easily, all that logical stuff fit neatly inside my brain.  

As I was raising kids I came to the realization that Dad primarily taught me to be responsible and my Mom taught me to be happy.  To me, being responsible is how you treat other people, and being happy is how you treat yourself.  They are not opposites but work together.  I don’t see how you can truly be happy if you treat others badly, but living your life solely for others without ever considering yourself is foolish.  That balance is who I think I’ve become.

By the slimmest of margins, I think I’m a bit more like my mother.  That probably wasn’t true in my 20s and 30s, but as I grew older, Mom’s wisdom was the guiding light I used to navigate all sorts of personal and professional challenges.  

Best of all, I had both of them.  And I miss them dearly, even after all these years.

 

What was your best boss like?

I’ve had the fortune of working for not only some very excellent bosses throughout my career but also the companies themselves.  The relatively few moments I spent in malfunctioning companies made me appreciate how building an organization that is morally rich is really hard but the benefits to its employees and customers are enormous.  You’re engaged, excited to start another day at work, and know you make a real difference.  These companies listen more than they talk, push decision-making down to the people that know best, and never push their responsibilities or blame on others.  My best bosses exemplified these attributes.  

Most of the CIOs I reported to did not have technical backgrounds but understood it well enough to make good decisions.  The CIOs that did understand Information Technology knew they weren’t the experts but recognized when the experts did not appreciate the bigger picture.  Their biggest value was knowing the right people throughout senior leadership, what was important to them, cultivating relationships, and understanding the politics.  This was critical as the 1980s and 1990s were filled with centralizing data centers, consolidating software, and combining staff to reduce costs.   Standardizing the technology enabled the organization to work together instead of being siloed.  Imagine a corporation with a dozen email systems, multiple domain names, and then trying to sync it all together.  Companies with good CIOs brought email and many other disparate technologies stacks together more quickly and they benefitted sooner.

The best bosses are easy to recognize.  They are the ones that you remain in contact with and look forward to the next time together.  Friends for life.

What is the longest project you have ever worked on?

Mead Corporation’s implementation of the SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system began in the year 2000 with a four-year timeline and a $125 million budget.  Mead had looked at ERP systems a couple of times earlier in the 1990s and decided then that the company wasn’t culturally ready for a single, process-oriented system like SAP.  But late in the 1990s, multiple divisions began requesting funds to implement their own ERPs, different ones, of course, and corporate had already purchased an ERP called PeopleSoft, so another look was taken and SAP was the ultimate decision.

The key focus of the project was change management, from executive management to division leadership to the employees that would transact in SAP every day.  Four years is not a long time to implement a $4 billion company and executives tend to lose their enthusiasm towards the end.  To jumpstart the project, a preconfigured SAP system was purchased from Monsanto, the chemical company, which was also in a continuous process manufacturing business.  Eighty percent of what Monsanto configured for “Source and Support” processes, for example, accounting, finance, and purchasing was adopted by Mead and led to the first implementation only nine months after the project launched.  That implementation was at the Coated Board division, selected because it produced paper, a critical proving ground to show that SAP would work in our core paper businesses, but also less risky than the larger and more complex white paper business.  After implementing Source & Support, the project would follow up a few months later with the “Order Management” processes, for example, accepting orders, manufacturing and shipping the products, and collecting money.  All this was supported by process training, local expert (“Super Users”) training, and finally just-in-time end-user training.  We were within a year of finishing the project when the MeadWestvaco merger occurred, extending the timeline a couple of years, but at that time I took on the newly-created Chief Technology Officer role, and while still involved, I was no longer officially on the project.

My role during the project was the SAP Technology Director, having the BASIS, ABAP, and Data teams reporting to me, and I reported to the Vice-President in charge of the SAP project with a dotted-line reporting relationship to the CIO, my previous manager.  The BASIS team was responsible for the installation and support of the core SAP software, the ABAP team wrote programs, interfaces, and reports for the team, and the Data team extracted, cleansed, and loaded data from legacy applications into SAP.  I worked a lot with the I.T. organization and to meet the project’s aggressive timeline we had to use what we knew best, IBM mainframes, the DB2 database management system (DBMS), and Windows servers.  The “usual” technology stack back then was an Oracle DBMS on large UNIX servers, but we had almost nobody on staff familiar with those, much less an expert.  To support the large DB2 virtual memory requirement for SAP, Mead bought three of the first 64-bit mainframes that IBM rolled off their production line, and while that was a somewhat risky move, we encountered only a few manageable issues.  We had to figure out how to manage an application with over 100,000 tables and indexes.  We had to move to an integrated, once-a-month, four-hour data center outage, perhaps the most difficult change management effort.  We had to create real-time, queued, and batch integration architectures and address locking and performance issues.  

It was a very energy-filled, fast-paced, and continually challenging project which resulted in lots of great memories and lasting relationships.