What "Dignity of Work" Means for Supply Chain Operations W/ Robert Martichenko

0:01Robert Martichenko: Hi, I'm Kelly Barner and this is the Art of Supply podcast. Every business story has a supply chain angle and those stories deserve to be told. This show digs deep into news headlines and interviews thought leaders, executives, and newsmakers to capture their perspective in their own words. with no agenda to lead us in any particular direction. We'll offer you objective coverage of geopolitics, innovation, and competition. Facts will always take precedence over hype. The rest is up to you. Today on the show, I'm glad to be joined by Robert Martichenko, board chair of Trailpath Workplace Solutions.

0:48Robert Martichenko: Robert's experience has given him a rare combination of frontline supply chain credibility, as well as people-centered operational thinking, with experience that spans organizations like Toyota, LeanCore, and now TrailPath, where he is focused on dignity of work and the frontline workforce. Robert, thank you so much for being with me today.

1:10Art of Supply Host: Kelly, it's absolutely my pleasure. It's been fun to form a friendship with you.

1:15Robert Martichenko: Absolutely. And because I already know a little bit more about your background, I want to bring my audience into the loop with us. I talked a little bit about your focus, some of the organizations that you've worked with. But what else do you think it's interesting for people to know about your background?

1:35Art of Supply Host: Well, if we go way back, I was born in Timmins, Ontario, a small mining town that's north of about eight hours north of Toronto. And then let's fast forward for sake of time. and I ended up with a degree in mathematics and then when I went and this is now early 90s when I went to look for a job I didn't nobody was calling for degree in mathematics and so I called an uncle of mine who ended up being my mentor and said I really need a job and he made a phone call and I got a job at Challenger Motor Freight in Cambridge Ontario two incredible men Dan Einwechter and Gene Moser gave me an opportunity.

2:19Art of Supply Host: And that took me into the logistics and supply chain industry. And I just absolutely loved it from day one. It was a perfect industry for somebody like me who, you know, just wanted to kind of stay active and come up with ideas. And then that led in 1998, my wife and I moved to the United States, to Evansville, Indiana. Ann and I participated on a huge team of people at a startup at a Toyota facility. And that introduced me to the Toyota production system and lean thinking. And then fast forward to 2005, I left the corporate world and started LeanCore. And LeanCore was a training and education company, a consulting company, and we were a managed logistics provider as well.

3:06Art of Supply Host: So we actually did the work, which was very important to me because I really believe that if you're going to offer people advice or teach people on things, you need to be having at least done it or are actively doing it because the doing changes so fast as well. Um, then fast forward that to two, to 2020, uh, lean core was sold. And, uh, after a little bit of an employment agreement, I was, uh, unemployed or retired, or as my wife says, I don't know what this is, Robert, but whatever it is, it's not going to last much longer in the way I think we call it. Yeah. In the way. And then, and then, and that was how trail paths started because what happened was when, when lean core was gone i actually got a phone call from a couple of uh people that are friends and they own warehousing and transportation companies and they were really struggling with turnover of frontline employees and and and what but and what's important to know though is that these particular business owners these friends of mine they are the good people they treat their people well they do everything they can within the constraints of their industry to give their people everything they can and they're still dealing with 50 60 turnover and they just said to me because our we were friends for decades and trust was already built they just said robert come on in have some fun talk to our people look at the look at the numbers and uh and see if we can come up with anything here and and that led to uh to building a platform that we're calling uh Next Path and it's a learning and participation and workplace involvement platform.

4:55Art of Supply Host: And then that led to going and in the spirit of the Blues Brothers, we've got the band back together. And the senior leaders that helped build Lean Corps are now building Trail Path. And we're working with several organizations who have a lot of frontline team members. But it's not just about frontline team members. As I'm sure you know, because every single person has had a job where they were thriving and every single person has had a job where they were declining and just surviving. We've all experienced that, regardless of whether you're a CEO or a frontline worker. Um, so we built a platform and, uh, and we're learning so much about the workplace and we're questioning everything and we're not allowing myths to stay myths where they're, where they're untruths and they're not, it's not true what people have been thinking and saying for decades.

5:54Art of Supply Host: and we're listening to people and we have a lot of work to do in many respects even right now there's been a new assault on the working person you know in the form of new technologies and everybody believing that that every job is going to be taken away and so forth so that's where we're at that was the kind of the the 30 35 year journey well and I have to say if if I had known you were

6:21Robert Martichenko: going to reference Blues Brothers. I would have completely reconfigured this whole conversation to keep dropping Blues Brothers references. I love that movie. But the one that I can't resist because of my branding. Should I ask you if you would like an orange whip, Robert? Orange whip, orange whip, orange whip, right? Absolutely. Getting the band back together. And I think, you know, before we dig in, we're going to have an opportunity to do something really interesting today. So we're going to leverage your experience working in supply chain operations, but we're going to bring that together with this concept of dignity of work.

6:55Robert Martichenko: Before we actually make that connection, can I just give you an opportunity to talk about how you define dignity of work? We're going to use that phrase a lot, but what does it really mean to you at its core?

7:09Art of Supply Host: So the word dignity and dignity of work is kind of a different word that we're using. A word that's very common and is known in industry is respect for people. In the lean world and the operational excellence world and in the continuous improvement world, there's a lot of talk about respect for people. And I'm part of that community. So I'm not going to suggest that the word's wrong, but I am going to suggest that the word is incomplete. lead. Because when you think of respect, respect is actually a decision that we make. Like I can choose to respect you because of your accomplishments and you're a great person and I've got to know you and I know we're like-minded.

7:56Art of Supply Host: So I choose to show you respect. And I'll treat you with value because I'm choosing to. Dignity is very different. Dignity is that I need to treat you like a human being for no other reason than you are a human being and I don't get to decide that it's not I I'm not the person that gets to decide whether you should be treated with humanity or not and and this is what we're saying so and then that's the aspect of dignity in the workplace which is it's not the leader's choice to decide whether somebody should be treated with respect then there's another whole avenue of the dignity of work and that is if you if you look back into the just just human beings in general um we are a working animal we are a creature we have a body we have a mind and we have a soul and whether you're talking about your your physical uh work or you're talking about your mental work or you're talking about your spiritual work.

9:02Art of Supply Host: We are workers. And this is where we really need to understand that as we continue on this drive for competitiveness and efficiency and all of these things that we have to do, and I'm not naive. 20 years building a business, I tell you what, it was the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. I get it. However, we as a species need to understand that if we remove the dignity from all of our work, then this is going to have a really bad impact on our organizations and our world in general. And what I mean by that is if we remove the person understanding the value, if we remove the person understanding the purpose of the work, that they see how they're connected to something bigger than themselves.

9:57Art of Supply Host: This is the aspect of dignity. What part of your work makes you human? And we need to really understand these things.

10:05Robert Martichenko: Yeah, no, absolutely. And so I think, you know, you talked about your friends that own the company that said to you, hey, Robert, we could really use some help here, and they're good people. I'd love to talk more broadly about people working in the logistics space. Now, whether this is warehousing, whether this is actually transportation, what would you suggest are some of the signs that while we all say and agree to the idea that people matter, maybe operationally, maybe in terms of decisions that are being made, it's a little bit more talk and a little bit less action?

10:42Art of Supply Host: Well, so that's such a big, big one too, right? And I wish we had a couple hours on that, But let's just start. Let's start at the easy stuff. You walk into a facility and there's posters and slogans on the wall that all have some theme around. People are the most important part of the business. There were people first culture. And then you walk through the you walk through the facility and you see no indication that that's the truth. or you look at the poster and you ask an executive, okay, well, that's great that you're a people first organization. Tell me what, what processes, what, what, what infrastructure is in place that is intentionally showing people that they're first.

11:29Art of Supply Host: And often we just get, well, you know, we do this and we do that, but it's not, it's not nearly as intentional of how they manage inventory or how they manage finances or how they manage, you know, other, the product development or engineering. So that's the first thing. Then the second thing is if you want to just get into the true numbers and metrics and stuff like that, the first and easy one is turnover. So if you have a thousand employees and 800 of them are frontline workers and you're churning 400 a year, then you've just got something is wrong in the environment and uh and and that's a sign and and that one while it's the easiest one to understand because we do measure turnover what we don't measure is the cost of that turnover we we're working with organizations to really show them what that actually costs them and it's easily it's easily five to twenty thousand dollars uh per uh team member depending on the tenure of the team member um and then uh and and the other challenge there though is that it's not just like inventory i know a lot of the work that you do is in procurement and procurement people the progressive uh advanced thinking procurement people have been trying to educate on total cost for years for decades and and and we struggle because the cost of inventories are not on the PNL laid out.

13:01Art of Supply Host: They're everywhere in the organization. Well, the cost of turnover is everywhere. There isn't a line item that says cost of turnover. Yes, there's the cost to attract, recruit, onboard, and train. You can capture those, but you can't capture a service failure, a safety incident, a lost customer, and trace it back to the fact that the employees were not really participating in the business. And that's what caused those costs to the organization. No, I think turnover is such a great metric.

13:37Robert Martichenko: I was also thinking as you were talking about sort of walking into a space and being able to either see or feel indications of how true it is that people matter. I also think there's probably something associated with a cost of the people that are unhappy but don't leave, right? I think we've all been in a position where maybe it's a restaurant, maybe it's a store, but maybe it's a corporate work environment where you go in and you interact with someone and you think, whoa, this person hates their job. So they've stayed, but they're miserable. And that in its own way affects the workforce and what everybody can accomplish together because it sort of brings down any chance for productivity or happiness in the workplace.

14:23Robert Martichenko: I imagine that has to be a real challenge for organizations as well.

14:28Art of Supply Host: Well, you know, Kelly, you mentioned, you know, what are some things that you can look for or see? You can just look to see if people are smiling. Are people smiling? Are they engaging with each other? Does it look like there's camaraderie? Does it look like they're problem solving and seeing something? I remember I walked through a place once after the daylight saving changed and like four weeks later, nobody had changed the clock. and I'm just like you know what like obviously nobody nobody nobody cares right but but more to get it to more of a so what what do we do with this what's really interesting is that in our research and the work we're doing we've learned that people are in four places in their workplace they are either declining which means that they are out of there uh they may be depending on the environment they may be out of their break without telling anybody or they may be out of their next monday and give you some warning they're declining then there's people that are just surviving and just surviving means i'm not going to quit because i have bills and responsibilities so forth but i am not i am not having any joy here i'm miserable but they're just surviving and then you have people that are growing that are saying you know what this may be working for me i'm not sure because I've had some bad experiences, but this may be, I'm growing here.

15:50Art of Supply Host: And then you have thriving and people that are thriving are people that are saying, I can't imagine not working any place else. So we are now, we now have the ability to find out how people are feeling. And it's not an annual engagement survey. Those are an absolute waste of time. And I don't mean to be rude to people that do those. And because there's some amazing companies and they know too that we can do better. Anything that deals with human beings that's on an annual or six month cycle means nothing. We have to be connecting with people in the hour, in the day, because we are a 24 hour animal.

16:29Art of Supply Host: Our cycles are 24 hours. And with our platform, people can tell you whether they're declining, just surviving, growing or thriving. And we can show you data now across thousands of employees that in most organizations close to 50 % of the people are either declining or just surviving. Half of your workforce is not growing and thriving in the workforce. And to your point about seeing somebody in a restaurant, I'm talking to any chance I get now, I'm talking to people, working people, just to understand. I asked, do you like your job? If they say yes, I'm like, why? Tell me why you like it. I need to know.

17:15Art of Supply Host: But I, you know, on the sadder side of things, I had a young lady in a restaurant when I was quizzing her once, literally say to me, you know, Robert, I have no expectation to ever be happy at work. I just, I just hope, she said, I just hope to be a little less miserable. Oh, that's rough.

17:36Robert Martichenko: Yeah.

17:37Art of Supply Host: You know, and that's that was her. That's the movie she's watching. Right. Like from from her her upbringing to to the experiences she's had in the workplace, to the opportunities that people have given her or not given her to the coaching she had not had. that is how she sees the world. And I like that one in particular is stuck with me. And I'm just like, look at, you know, if we've been blessed with, with the ability to do something, which many of us have, then I think we owe it. And, and in my case, it just happens to be great, because it's all part of operational excellence. It's all part of lean thinking.

18:19Art of Supply Host: It's all part of making businesses better. So, you know, it's easy to go after it.

18:25Robert Martichenko: Now, what's interesting about that, because I think we can all relate to that sort of one-on-one connection that you have in some kind of setting, but in order to drive massive organizational operational change, you do need to be gathering this data at scale. I appreciate your point about, you know, an annual employee happiness survey is simply not going to affect what most companies and teams are probably looking for. But I'd be interested in your thoughts. So if you're gathering more data at scale over time, to what extent is the improvement solution also at scale? And to what extent is the improvement solution taking that data and applying it in either one-on-one or much smaller group situations?

19:15Art of Supply Host: yeah great question so the first thing is is we have to know what we're looking for if we're going to go if we're just going to go on blindly go on a fishing expedition uh then you're just going to get so many things and they're going to be conflicting and you'll never understand the system that you're trying to improve so so we so we we've created a framework so we understand what we're looking for we're intentionable about what we want to know about people and so let's start with dignity so the first aspect is dignity and that branches down into trust and fundamental needs so under trust we just we're we need to know do people know each other do people understand each other and are people trying to improve each other so we can we have those questions and we can go investigate secondly uh the second part of dignity is fundamental needs if you want to treat people with dignity then you need to provide for their fundamental needs and the three areas that we investigate there are physical safety.

20:15Art of Supply Host: Do people feel physically safe? And the good news is in North America, we've done a reasonably, like a really, really good job from a safety point of view, the improvements we've made. The second is emotional safety, which is fear of making mistakes, fear of speaking up, you know, just are they safe, feel safe to be themselves? themselves um and then the third aspect is financial security which is a whole conversation in and of itself because the the compensation part of this is a very complicated thing and and we can't be naive about it uh and we can't just say well we need to pay people more but at the same time we have to admit that people are not making enough to survive and if somebody's if somebody's worried about whether they're even going to be able to pay their rent or feed their kids there's no way you can ask them to be involved in some continuous improvement initiative in the workplace their head is just not there and we just need to recognize these things but then the other aspect is the meaningful work so once we've taken care of trust and fundamental needs then the work itself uh has to be meaningful and that gets to the participative environment and the work itself so for the environment we actually look at we look at do people have autonomy do they have some ownership of the work and do they have a social community are they actually do they see people at work as friends as as a support system and then on the meaningful work now we're actually at the work because the fact is is that in an eight hour day your seven hours of the day is you're doing the work so even if you feel like you're being treated as a human being and even if people are engaging you in that if the work sucks then there's a good chance your day's going is your day's not going to be very uh enjoyable and on the work side how do we make work meaningful recognizing that so much work has been through efficiency uh drives for efficiency all of the dignity has been taken out of it we need to understand whether we can put some things back into it do people understand the value of the task they're doing if somebody's paying them to do it then somewhere there must be some value there do they even know um uh and uh and do they is it purposeful for for who they are can they even remotely get into a sense of flow where where their skills um and their contribution um meet with the challenge of the work so they go you know what like like this lines up with with what my capabilities and i see my contribution and it's and it's challenging it's not so challenging that i'm anxious and it's not so unchallenging that i'm bored it's that sweet spot and that's where we find flow um and and those so these are the things that we're intentionally looking into every single day and we're teaching people about these things and we're because this is not if you if you look at the the leadership world so much of it unintentionally is if you just train, let's train your leaders and then somehow they're going to be these geniuses that motivate all these frontline workers to do what the organization does.

23:35Art of Supply Host: It's just such a false vision. People are going to do what they want to do. And to have a really high functioning workplace, you do need strong leadership. But team members need to participate. They need to say, I'm in. I like this place. This is working for me. And a pizza on Friday to grown adults? Like, come on. Come on.

24:05Robert Martichenko: How about cake on birthdays? Is that enough?

24:08Art of Supply Host: Well, but that's the social community part. So that's good, right? That that's that that's friendships do that. But the idea that, you know, that that we're all college kids, and if you feed us, we'll come to the meeting like this is there just we there are a lot of behaviors and habits that aren't it's not like we're intentionally doing the wrong things people want. Like most people are not evil. Most leaders want people to be happy. But we just need to understand that the building of the environment requires some hard work and it needs to be very intentional that that's what you're doing.

24:49Robert Martichenko: Well, and I think to your point earlier about flow, I think anytime we're talking about operations, it's ultimately the processes that are put in place, how they're improved, what level of ownership or feedback people have an ability to give. Do you see some of the people happiness issues being connected to maybe there's process investments being made without the corresponding people investments? Because ultimately, yes, your process exists as a lovely flow on a chart, but it's actually the people that are going to carry that process out and help it continue to evolve that are going to lead to the operational excellence that everybody ultimately wants.

25:30Art of Supply Host: No question. So if you just think of the operational excellence and continuous improvement and the lean worlds that have been, we've been at it for a long, long time. The historians in this would say we've been at it for centuries. But you can really show that we've been at it for at least 30 years as evidenced by books written and workshops done and so forth. And it started off as half process, half people. and it migrated to 95 % process, 5 % people, because processes are easier. You can map them. A process isn't alive. A process doesn't have a soul. And so you can get it on paper. You can go, here's the inputs, here's the outputs, fix the machine in between the two, and you'll expect a different output.

26:24Art of Supply Host: Dealing with people is a whole different thing. Like if you deal with somebody on Monday morning, that person could be totally different on Wednesday afternoon or Friday. If their dog is sick, then they'll be a totally different person. Like we are unpredictable. We are emotional. But so we can't just go at the process. You have to go at the process recognizing that people are engaged in this process. And truth be told, and not to bring out the math nerd in me, but we need to understand a little bit of physics, too, as leaders. And I'll give you an example, like on the myth busting. So often you hear this thing where, you know, leaders want to introduce a new process and they get some resistance from the people.

27:11Art of Supply Host: And then they just say, oh, the people don't want to change. And I'm saying, well, you know what? Stop for a minute. How long have you been doing it the way that they're doing it? 20 years, that's a lot of momentum. That's a concrete ball the size of a building. And it's been rolling for 20 years. And for 20 years, you've told the people that that's the way to do it. That you've rewarded them. You've had them on the back. And now all of a sudden, you parachute in and go, oh, that's all wrong. We need to do it this way. And they're like, oh, okay, that's fine. It's not like we don't understand we need to get better to stay competitive.

27:55Art of Supply Host: But you've got a ball that has been growing that has momentum. It doesn't just stop. You have to recognize that. And the way that you do that is to teach people why this is important, to allow people to participate in the actual solution before you decide that's the change that we're going to make. um and then and then we need to make sure that people are growing and thriving this we're as as as people the very very first thing that we do in anything is we say and it's a survival mechanism and it makes sense is that we say how does this affect me and if you're telling me this is going to be wonderful because the business is going to make more money but it's going to make my life miserable then i i'm not i'm not signed that's not something i'm going to sign up for.

28:51Art of Supply Host: And we just need to understand these things and work through them. Yeah.

28:55Robert Martichenko: Now, one of the things that we know about supply chains specifically is that over the last, I mean, I'll say decades to be safe, but I have a feeling it's a lot longer than that. There's been increased emphasis placed over and over again on efficiency. It's how these supply chains got so long and so lean and so fragile. We certainly saw a lot of things break or come to the breaking point during COVID. But I think probably on a similar schedule, the more efficient things have become, the less dignity has been left behind in a lot of these roles. Can you give us a sense of, I don't know, maybe a sort of an art of the possible here?

29:33Robert Martichenko: How can we certainly balance the need to keep things efficient while also ensuring that the appropriate amount of space is created for that dignity of work that we're talking about?

29:47Art of Supply Host: So, Kelly, like a lot of your work I know is with procurement and purchasing people. And if we think of just the global supply chain that's been developed, and it's not fair to say that that was an efficiency drive. That was a cost drive, right? If 60 % of your cost of goods sold is purchased material and you can reduce that by 20 percent 60 percent it's 20 percent of some of the 60 percent is a big number and so we chased unit cost there's no question and I'm not saying that that it was wrong in all cases uh um but we chased it without understanding what we were doing we chased it by by saying you know we yet like yesterday we had a supplier that we sent them an order and we got this stuff in five days.

30:40Art of Supply Host: So we had to forecast our production for five days. Now we send an order and we get the material in three months. So now we have to forecast our production for three months. And that forecast is going to create huge variability, huge instability, and that results in all of the madness that we see in our supply chains. And not just inventory, it's madness of schedule changes and supplier changes and relationships getting damaged because everybody is just so miserable that we think it's everybody else's fault. And now it's got nothing to do with that. The fact is that the longer the supply chain is, the more opportunity there is for drift and entropy.

31:28Art of Supply Host: And let's remember something about processes. When I said processes don't have a soul, I didn't mean that they're not alive. They're alive in that they get up every morning with one goal, and that is to fall apart. That's the second law of thermodynamics and processes. Processes do not like to stay stable. Their job is fundamentally to fall apart. And we don't understand that as human beings, because we haven't been taught these things. But let's just go back to the global supply chain and the person. So you've got a materials manager or a purchasing coordinator that when the supplier was next door, they knew them.

32:13Art of Supply Host: They went to lunch. When there wasn't a problem, they could drive over and they could work it together. Now, you don't even know where the people are. You don't know who they are. There's no relationships. you don't know the value the value proposition you don't know how they actually make the product some people will because you'll have that of them and those things but i'm talking about the day-to-day stuff we is like as soon as we lose the human interaction and we lose the value of what we're doing and we don't understand the purpose then it just becomes a box if you're in a warehouse and all you're doing is moving a box then there is no dignity in that work other than that you need a paycheck.

32:50Art of Supply Host: If you know what's in the box and you know where the box is going and why that in consumer needs the box, and it may be medical supplies or a car parked or whatever the case may be, and there's somebody on the other end who's saying, I'm depending on that. I need that. All of a sudden, that value proposition can become a little stronger for you to understand your part in the supply chain. Your job is still to move boxes, but you're doing it in a fundamentally different way.

33:21Robert Martichenko: Yeah. Now, I always like to sort of wrap these conversations with a piece of advice that people can take away. And I think given what we've talked about today, I would love to get your perspective on an example of a practical change that someone can make if they're looking to deal with the realities of that supply chain process that gets up every day looking to fall apart, but they genuinely do care about ensuring that their people, their team have the opportunity to experience dignity of work without losing sight of the fact that the business has to remain profitable and successful. Is there a place to start?

33:57Robert Martichenko: Is there a piece of advice that we can leave people with that if nothing else sets their thought process moving in the right direction on all these different fronts?

34:07Art of Supply Host: So absolutely. And let's go to the process part first, which will draw from the lean core days, the supply chain days, the fundamental thing that organizations have still not tackled, or if they've tackled it, they haven't matured it, is to actually connect the enterprise, to have a true end-to-end supply chain and to have your metrics and your processes connected so you have flow through the supply chain. Stop trying to micromanage every function in the supply chain where your KPIs are sub-optimizing the whole. You're trying to minimize or maximize every little piece. And we know mathematically, if you try to maximize or minimize the pieces of a system, you will sub-optimize the system.

34:53Art of Supply Host: And that end-to-end, it's got to start with finished goods. You have to have a strategy, a plan for every finished good. You have to have a stocking strategy, whether it's a made-to-order or made-to-stock. And then you have to have pull systems for when there's consumption of those finished goods that has to go into a sales and operations planning process a sci-op process and an snop process and then you have to have one pace setter whether you're a distributor it needs to be orders to your suppliers or if you're a manufacturer it needs to be the manufacturing schedule the master production schedule that needs to set the pace for the upstream processes and you have to stick to it and then you have to have healthy relationships with your suppliers and flow material based on velocity and not unit cost where velocity is increasing delivery frequency leveling the flow of those deliveries and um and uh and reducing lot sizes to be able to to manage to that uh increased delivery frequency that's the end-to-end the end-to-end process that we have to implement so you optimize the supply chain and then on the people side of things we have to teach people how to do this because they're the ones that are going to do it.

36:09Art of Supply Host: You're not going to optimize and create end-to-end supply chains with technology. I'm sorry. It's a myth. And it's not going to happen. People are going to do it. People are going to do it. They're going to use technology to scale the learnings that you're doing. But if we go and throw a whole bunch of advanced technologies at the supply chains that exist today, all we're going to do is amplify bad data and waste in the system. It'll be a dog's breakfast, as they say, up north.

36:46Robert Martichenko: Yeah. Well, and I do think that's such an excellent way to look at it. Because when we go back to this process, and I've never thought about it that way, that every process gets up every day looking to just fall apart on you. When you think of even the visuals that we so often use to represent supply chain, it's a cargo ship. It's an airplane. It's a train. It's a truck with a trailer on the back. None of those pieces of equipment care if that process falls apart or not. The technology coordinating them all does not care if the process falls apart. Your best bet is to have people operating, directing, strategizing all of the tech and the equipment that goes together because they're the only ones that are going to care if the process survives the day and has another opportunity to get up to its hijinks tomorrow.

37:36Robert Martichenko: And that absolutely makes the case for ensuring that certainly business metrics, notwithstanding, but that that dignity of work is there. What a fascinating look into all of the different facets of your experience, Robert. I've really enjoyed this conversation.

37:52Art of Supply Host: Absolutely. Now, just on a closing note, the process is, it's not that they don't even just don't care. If they didn't care, you could think, well, then it would stay the same. And if it's working, they actually have universal pull to fall apart. It's entropy. They drift. So the process is actually falling apart. And the only thing that will keep it stable and improve it is energy you know as i as i look outside here and i see the beautiful trees and and the uh you know the life of summer um if the sun if we if the sun didn't come around every day all of that would instantly die it's it's it's it's because because without new energy life will not sustain itself and and life is a process in many respects and so we say so go to the workplace if people are in the dark then they're going to die and so what what it metaphorically what is the sun what is the energy in a in a workplace and that's dignity that's leadership that's participation those are the things that represent the sun and it has to come out every day if you don't you know we've got a lot of plants that if you don't water them and they don't get sunlight, we know what happens, right?

39:17Art of Supply Host: So we are no different. We're no different.

39:20Robert Martichenko: Yeah. Well, Robert, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your expertise on all of this. If people are meeting you for the first time through this conversation and they would like to connect, would like to learn more, what is the best way for them to get in touch?

39:35Art of Supply Host: I'm on LinkedIn, and you can go to Trailpath Workplace Solutions, and both of those places will find me. And I look forward to chatting with people because if people have opinions and ideas and if people are disagreeing with things I'm saying, bring it on. Because look, we just want to get it right. We're not here to prove ourselves. We're students here. I'm telling you, we are absolute students here. We are back. We are back with our books and our pens. And so if somebody's saying you're getting it wrong, we want to know because we don't want to go down the wrong road. So I would really welcome.

40:17Art of Supply Host: We want to build a community. There's a lot of really great people out there that do want to bring dignity back into the workplace. And those are the people that we're working with because there's enough of those that we don't have to go and spend 20 years convincing the unconvinced. We just need to find the convinced and start working with them.

40:41Robert Martichenko: Art of Supply is part of the Art of Procurement family of brands. To ensure you never miss new content, I invite you to sign up for our newsletter at artofsupply.com. If this episode of the Art of Supply podcast made you think, please spread the word. You can support the show by giving us a thumbs up, a star rating, or a review wherever you find your podcast audio. Join me next week for another deep dive into the art of supply.