61. Strategies for Achieving a Successful ERP Implementation | Brad Feakes, President of EstesGroup

Karthik Chidambaram: Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Driven
by DCKAP podcast. I'm your host, Karthik Chidambaram, CEO of DCKAP. We make
systems talk to each other for distributors.

We are here in Nashville, Tennessee. And we have with us Brad Feakes, the
president of EstesGroup. EstesGroup is an ERP implementation partner for
Epicor. EstesGroup implements ERP solutions, and they also host ERP
solutions on the cloud.

Brad, welcome to Driven by DCKAP.

Brad Feakes: Thank you for having me, Karthik. This has been great.

Karthik Chidambaram: Thank you for joining us today, Brad. It's great to be
chatting with you. And also, I bumped into you yesterday, so it's always
nice to see you in person. And I'm glad we're doing this in-person in
Nashville.

So Brad, tell us about the EstesGroup business. What do you guys do and what
do you specialize in?

Brad Feakes: Sure. So, EstesGroup, we're celebrating our 20th anniversary in
June, and historically, we've been focused primarily on ERP implementation
and optimization and the consulting activities that come along with that.
Over the years, we found ourselves kind of transforming slowly into, kind
of, a combined ERP implementation provider, but also a bit of a managed IT
Services provider.

We found our customers wanted from us a broader set of skill sets and
capabilities, and these bled into IT Management, cloud deployments. We found
ourselves moving into a lot of cloud deployments for our customers and
helping support them in those areas. So it's been an interesting evolution
over the course of my life here at Estes.

Karthik Chidambaram: So, you started then in 2016 or 2015 around that time
frame? And then you became the President of the company. Tell us about that
journey, because whenever I talk to people- The theme of this podcast is
Driven. And I see that you are a very driven person. You work hard. You
travel and I really love hanging out with you.

Tell us about your journey at Estes. What made you the President of the
company, and tell us about that journey.

Brad Feakes: Luck and attrition. So, I’ve been with Estes now for ten years,
because I joined in 2014 and in March I celebrated my tenth year.

So, I started off as a business consultant, started off kind of working in
the trenches as it were, and over time I found myself getting promoted and
moved around and given additional responsibilities, and I found that just by
taking on more and being willing to try and parlay my previous experiences
into use in the current world at Estes, I was able to take on more and find
myself eventually in the spot I'm in now.

Karthik Chidambaram: So whatever challenges were thrown at you, you were up
for it, and then that made your career go up?

Brad Feakes: Oh boy, the big challenge is always, you're always diving into
a situation, you're diving into a swimming pool without great confirmation
that you can swim and having to throw yourself in the water anyways with the
belief that one, you have a lifeguard somewhere out there who can throw in a
raft in the event that you, you get a, so you start taking in water and two,
that, that you will pick it up and be able to keep your head above and
eventually become provisioned at those new disciplines as they, as they
approach.

Karthik Chidambaram: DCKAP and Estes Group have been partners and we love
partnering and working together. And you do a really good job with respect
to partnerships. You really build on it. Tell us about how you manage and
build on partnerships?

Brad Feakes: Sure. So for partners, for us, it has just been this really
exciting ability to get into a group of people and really just kind of
expand and open. For me, the partner community and distribution is
incredibly collaborative. This is between customers, distributors
themselves, even, you know, customers themselves. Competitors, you find them
collaborating because they can achieve more by working together, even if
they're after the same market.

And I think that spirit is of collaboration. It tells the rest of us how we
should be behaving. And I find when you're working with other partners, you
learn so much about the market and its intricacies, and you get all these
different perspectives by working with different partners because they're
all addressing this market and its needs differently. And when you take all
those together, there's so much benefit in that collaboration that when you
couple that with your own customer experience, you learn so much.

So for us, it's just a great benefit for all to be celebrating like DCKAP’s
capabilities. It's not some, it's not a zero sum game. Like, because when
we're celebrating what you guys can do and how you can help people, it helps
us in intangible and intangible ways. So for me, it's- that kind of activity
just fosters a lot of fun for everyone involved.

And in my mind, the idea of, you know, work hard, have fun and get along
with people. If you can do those three things, boy, you got a pretty good
work life. And for us, that's kind of, I think, the pillars that underscore
our partner work.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, one plus one equal to three. And it's also about
when it comes to partnerships, it's not about what you get. It's about what
you get. And the more you give, the more you get.

Brad Feakes: Right. Yeah, that's implicit. That, that idea of, of that work
that comes together when you're collaborating with another group, another
person, the unexpected things that can come out of that. And if you just
take that in good faith and not always worry about, well, what's in it for
me, you can have so much more fun. And yeah, the ultimate outcomes are so
much better.

Karthik Chidambaram: We are in Nashville, Tennessee, a very nice resort, at
the Epicor Insights Conference, and let's talk a little bit about ERP. When
it comes to ERP, a lot of customers struggle with it, right? Especially with
respect to implementations.

But even before we get to implementations a little bit, how do customers
choose an ERP?

Brad Feakes: Oh boy. ERP selection is a real challenging discipline, and I
would say the- 50 percent of a successful ERP implementation is proper ERP
selection. It's much harder to implement the wrong system than it is to
implement the right system. So if you can get on that, on the right footing,
that's great.

I think successful ERP selection is all based on business requirements.
Understanding what your business does, what it needs to do, and then mapping
those things and doing that systematically. All right, systematically going
department by department, understanding what you do, what the needs are to
support the business and how that overlays to the capabilities of the
systems in question.

Quite often, having like a selection partner who can help kind of walk you
through that. We have some friends in the market that are very good at that,
at helping to walk you through that comparison process and using that as
understanding your business is kind of the first step, not only to
selection, but to everything that follows.

Karthik Chidambaram: So having a selection partner will help, but you know,
again, it's a big decision because your entire company is going to run on
the software you implement, but is there a way where you can test it and do
some test projects or do some pilot runs? Have you seen customers do that,
or not really?

Brad Feakes: Really the degree to which you can get under the hood is kind
of specific to the vendor. Interestingly enough, I'm an Epicor consultant by
trade because Epicor did the best job for my previous company at
demonstrating Epicor's value compared to its competitors. Epicor was going
up against some of your classic big ERP systems and those big customers
were, and those big vendors were not really interested in closing that gap,
bridging that gap for the company I worked for. And Epicor was much better
at that.

And it came through. Kind of systematic prototypes, presentations. It wasn't
so much- The level of depth that you can normally get into is not what I
think a lot of people would hope for but Epicor definitely came to the table
with much more of that.

So I think the key is, you know, taking business requirements, sample data,
and trying to model that in the future state system to give people a first
pass understanding of, hey, this is how your business might look like inside
of our system. And if you're a solution provider, a vendor, and you can't
demonstrate that, you're going to have a hard time convincing the customer
that your system is the right system for them.

Karthik Chidambaram: A lot of times, ERP implementations take a long time.
So, I mean, it just takes forever to implement and I've seen some customers
spend a lot of money with some really expensive softwares out there. And
then, you know, it just takes 15 months or it takes like 2 years to
implement and then there's also a cost to maintain it.

Brad Feakes: Right.

Karthik Chidambaram: Where do you see the ERP industry heading right now?

Brad Feakes: Oh boy. So I would say the first thing that I think is really
important is an understanding of the difficulty of an ERP implementation.
It's about the most difficult thing that a business goes through. I've been
through lean implementation Six Sigma implementations in prior lives, and
those create challenges.

I'd say ERP is even more fundamental to a business. So I'd say an
understanding of the difficulty of the road ahead. If you were running a
race and you want to know ERP, you're running a marathon. Right? What is an
ERP implementation? You run all day and you throw up on the finish line. And
that's the unfortunate reality of an ERP project. They're difficult.

So the idea of making an ERP project successful is a challenge, but it needs
to be level set with an understanding. I was talking with a customer just
yesterday, and they were my golden child customer in terms of the best
implementation I had been a part of.

I was a project manager and an ops consultant on it, and they never thought
of themselves as successful. And for me, it was just kind of pulling them
back and saying, hey, you don't realize how much you did right. And some of
that might be that the business did not acknowledge all the work they did.
They only acknowledged the time, the cost, the difficulties, not realizing
that the end product they ended up with in the successful implementation,
good data, good business process, good system, maintainability, ROI. All
those things were there. And I think that's- it starts with that
understanding of the difficulties. And then from there, where you can go to
keep that business moving forward.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, I was chatting with Frank Heenan, Vice President
at Epicor, and just talking about implementations as well. And one thing he
said is, you know, start with ‘why’. Why are you really doing it? And what's
the purpose? And just don't leave it to the IT folks. Just get the entire
business involved, right?

So it needs to be a part of the game plan. It needs to be a part of the
strategy. And, yeah, I mean, it is a very important part of the strategy, if
you think about it. Because great softwares can make, actually, a big
difference to running a company.

Brad Feakes: It's interesting. Yes, I was thinking of, you know, in prep for
this session, some of the managerial lessons that you have in one of them
was exactly what Frank said is, when you disrespect someone, you only tell
them the ‘what’. We need to do this. We need to implement ERP. If you give
them the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, you're showing respect and you're pulling
them into that discussion in terms of that initiative, in terms of we need
to implement ERP because our existing AS400 system is going to die soon.

We need to implement ERP because we can't keep living on spreadsheets if we
want to grow and be successful. That ‘why’ is always there, conveying that
as part of the ‘what’ can really help remind people of, you know, the goal
to be achieved and the value in doing so.

Karthik Chidambaram: So, tell us three hacks to do a successful ERP
implementation.

Brad Feakes: Okay, so if I was going to look at three, I would say one has
to do with resource scheduling. Now, when we talk about project management,
we're normally thinking of a Gantt chart and a project schedule. That's
where people's brains go to. I would say the resource schedule is as
important as the project schedule.

And that is, who from the team is going to be involved in an ERP
implementation. Now speaking quickly, there are two major ways you can
implement a project. You can have a consultant driven implementation or a
customer driven implementation. In the former, the consultants coming in are
kind of a proxy for the organization, defining requirements, surfacing
requirements, and configuring the system to handle them.

Those are costly, those are cumbersome, they don't involve, have enough user
involvement, company involvement, and the final solution quite often misses
the mark. Now, what Epicor taught me and what I like about Epicor is they
have what is much more a customer driven solution with a core team that is
trained up and ramped up.

The consultants are more in kind of the ‘teach them to fish mode’ where
you're helping those customers learn how to use the system, make business
decisions, understand their business requirements, combine them with the
system, and then develop business processes. It's more of an oversight role,
educational role, and slowly kind of ramping off the ownership of the
application to that core team.

In my mind, that is such a key piece to the resources. If you've got to have
resources in that project that are working on that project. Now, customers
that commit less to resources tend to suffer later. So that's really one is
key is resource planning. The next tends to be, I would say
interconnectedness, collaboration.

ERP systems are integrated. The way you enter a sales order will have great
impacts on the work orders or jobs downstream and how they will flow
through. So, delivery and sales are intrinsically linked in an ERP system.
This is new for a lot of organizations that are implementing ERP for the
first time.

So the collaborative aspect of- I might be entering a project as a
purchasing agent, but if I know a little bit about order entry and a little
bit about production management, I know so much more about how that
integrates with my buying activities. I'm buying this product because this
work order requires it because this sales order has asked to have this
product delivered. So you understand those interactions, you can
troubleshoot, you can ask questions, you can define processes much, much
more rapidly when everybody is in collaboration. So, I'd say that's number
two.

The three would be clear expectations and guidelines. So this requires more
project management oversight on the hand of the customer, most often is, the
importance of an onsite project manager is really important because they can
help break down the work into detailed deliverables so that people from a
week to week basis know what they have to work on and don't feel like
they're just kind of toiling around, fiddling with the system and not
exactly sure what to do is trying to define that work breakdown structure
into detailed things that we need to define these processes.

Once those processes are defined, we need to define the data that needs to
be happening. From there, we need to define the end user procedures and
document the details. These are the things that you're responsible for. When
you know what you're responsible for, now you can go and you can chase that.
Now, kind of a subset, so we'll call this 3B, or maybe it's a fourth bullet,
is filling your project with good people.

If you have people who are the type who really want to take on things and
like expectations, like that responsibility, like to check things off as
completed, those are the people that are going to be really successful and
drive a successful project over the finish line.

Karthik Chidambaram: So, resources? Collaboration, and set the right
expectations.

Brad Feakes: That's fair.

Karthik Chidambaram: So why do you think ERP projects fail or how do you
avoid failures? Three things to do to avoid failure.

Brad Feakes: Alright, to avoid failure. Three things. This is great. So why
do projects fail? One, you pick the wrong methodology and most often I'm
saying, you didn't select the resources. You wanted a consultant driven
implementation. You let the consultants just do it for you. There are a lot
of great consultants out there, but I find that it's easier to teach a core
team member how to use an ERP system than it is to teach a consultant how a
business runs.

Those intricacies of a business. I think those are things that it's- those
are best kept in the domain of the subject matter expert and then the
consultant is best served in that training role versus doing it for them.
You know, it again, it's the ‘teach a man to fish’ parable over again. So,
that's one. There's pick the right methodology.

Two, pick the right system. Epicor is a great system. I love Epicor as,
well, I don't know the distribution side as well as manufacturing.
Manufacturing is my blood in terms of discrete manufacturing with a branch
of configure to order, make to order environments. Epicor is such a sweet
spot, right?

You need to know, does my business processes fall within the sweet spot of
the right ERP system, right? So if you're a plastics manufacturer, if you're
a steel manufacturer, if you're an electrical assembly manufacturer, you
need to make sure that you're taking the needs of that industry, mapping
them appropriately onto the right system because the needs vary from
industry to industry. If you're discreet, if your process, et cetera, can be
very different picking the right system.

Avoiding failure beyond those two, I think, really, at that point- Boy, this
sounds too wishy-washy. I like management commitment. You know, the
management has to be committed to getting this project finished. And that
sometimes means this product development initiative is going to be shelved.
This lean initiative is going to be shelved. One of the challenges with an
implementation are competing projects. And as an organization, you can't do
it all at once as much as you want to.

So you have to kind of figure out- priorities is not a matter of, of saying
yes, but it's a matter of saying no. And if ERP is truly the priority, you
have to be saying no to some other things.

Karthik Chidambaram: Say no to other things so that you can focus on ERP
implementation.

Brad Feakes: Yes, because ERP sucks a lot of oxygen out of the room.

Karthik Chidambaram: Absolutely. Just have a clear focus in terms of what
you're doing?

Brad Feakes: Yes.

Karthik Chidambaram: And do you have a lot of customers asking you about AI?
Does this ERP AI-enable? Do you have customers talking to you about AI?

Brad Feakes: Yeah, AI is becoming a huge talking point inside of the ERP
community.

I think AI has connected itself to a lot of existing talking points in terms
of automation and integration, most often, because of the idea of
automation. Can AI help take mundane tasks, automate them such that my end
user is now focused on more value added tasks, better customer
communication, because some of the underlying steps were completed by a bot
or what have you. That is something that comes up very frequently.

I think the idea of smart integrations are becoming more and more a thing.
Integrations are great. As long as all the data lines up, but if there's
some nuance in there, sometimes the system will work correctly, but the
output is not what you expected. Now, where can AI sit amongst them, to say
can I evaluate the conversation going back and forth?

Look at some of those intangibles and apply some intangibles. Intelligence
against them such that the output is now is more often what you're looking
for. So those are kind of two key areas where I see right away people are
looking for some assistance there.

Karthik Chidambaram: Talking about integrations, that's what we do. We make
systems talk to each other for distributors.

Brad Feakes: Right.

Karthik Chidambaram: So Brad, talking about the cloud strategy, this is a
question I always had. Let's say I'm doing an implementation. It doesn't
have to be, it could be anything, right? So where are you hosting it? You
know, there are big clouds in the market. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud.

How do you decide, right? You know, which cloud am I going to host it, or am
I going to have my own cloud? How do you define that, or what advice would
you give there?

Brad Feakes: Sure. So I tend to think of it as a conversation about access
and control. Assuming that you have a bunch of different options with the
cloud deployment, let's assume it's an ERP system.

You have some different options to deploy it. Understanding the degree of
access and control that you want is really important in terms of making the
right decision. So if you are a hands-off customer in terms of ERP
administration. You don't need a lot of control over the back end in terms
of the data. The application itself.

Finding a public cloud option is quite good. And what people find there is
what you call SaaS based licensing software as a service where you only
consume the application as long as you keep paying for it. So it's more of a
monthly recurring strategy and for customers who don't need that back end
responsibility. Perfect. That is often a good solution.

Now, if you are looking for a degree of access and control that's different
than that, that might be because you have reporting requirements, you really
want to get in and access that data from various directions, or you have
integration requirements, where you need to integrate the software at
varying different levels.

You might want a model that is more, kind of a perpetual license based
approach, which is kind of the traditional approach where you buy that
license, you own it forever, and then you can deploy it however you want,
whether it's in an on-premise environment, whether it's in a private cloud,
from there you can play with a bunch of different options there.

So I think with customers, that's the most direct first option. Now, from
there, you know, there are a lot of different capabilities of where you can
stick your software. From there, you're talking about things like uptime
egress fees, overall total cost of ownership, ease of maintenance and
administration. Those vary pretty significantly, if you're looking at
Google, versus AWS versus Azure versus some of the other independents out
there.

Karthik Chidambaram: You guys at Estes do both private and public clouds?
You manage them both?

Brad Feakes: We provide private cloud access and support and deployment for
our customers. That's kind of where our sweet spot is.

Our work with public cloud is really all functional because when you're in a
public cloud at this point, all the technical instantiation, the backend
deployment is all managed by the vendor. So you're not worrying about that
really at that point, you're just worrying about base functionality. So our
support there is all functional in nature.

Karthik Chidambaram: What do you mean by a private cloud? Does it mean that
you're setting up your own data centers, you're hosting everything, you're
not going to an Amazon, you're not going to Microsoft, is that what you mean
by that?

Brad Feakes: Good question. So it’s kind of a nuance point. So the idea of a
private cloud is a private virtualized server architecture within a firewall
protected network space that operates like an on premise environment, but
can be deployed pretty much anywhere.

And we use US Signal as our data center provider, so we have clouds inside
of that, so the server instantiation is separated from the physical servers
themselves. You can do the same thing in Amazon. You can do the same thing
anywhere. The key there is partitioning, that you're creating an air gapped
environment that operates independently of what everyone else is doing.

That's really where private cloud has its key, is that there's one firewall,
one set of in and outs that governs that environment, that allows for great
control, access, and security.

Karthik Chidambaram: So you guys then don't use Amazon or Google at all? You
use US Signal?

Brad Feakes: We use US Signal, a combination of US Signal and Azure, are the
places where we play. And you can do basically the same kind of deployment
in either of those. Now, the decisions of where to go down one direction
versus another might have to do with customer requirements, costs,
scalability, location, etc.

Karthik Chidambaram: Switching gears a little bit, what are some leadership
principles that have guided you? How are you driven? The theme of this
podcast is driven. How do you be driven and how do you keep yourself driven?

Brad Feakes: Well, I can give you a couple of principles that I think should
drive me, and if they have driven me in the future, that's a little more
iffy. But I would say, for one thing, I like frankness. I like the idea of
being very clear and honest with people and not talking around subjects.

If something's not working, we can all say that it's not working. We don't
have to save face and create convoluted, beat around the bush language that
obscures that fact. I'm a very frank person, and I appreciate people who are
frank to me.

I would much rather have someone be frank at the risk of being brusque than
to not convey their true message, right? Because when you're not frank,
there's a big concern that the message being conveyed gets lost in
translation. So that, to me, frankness is really important.

Principle of Meritocracy, I think, is really important. Ultimately,
everything you do as an individual is based on your own merit. There is a
lot that's happening, I find, right now that obscures that basic fact, that
people need to be good at their jobs. They need to get capable. They need to
accept criticism and do more and get better.

People who don't understand that basic concept of, you know, I need to have
certain skills and I need to get better at those skills are going to
struggle. And if you're staffing yourself, if you're working with teams, and
if you find yourself making personnel decisions for reasons that are not
primarily based on merit you're gonna run into a lot of challenges, because
people struggle with that. If they feel like they're doing the right job,
they're doing the best job, and they're not finding the opportunities
available for that, for auxiliary reasons.

And it could be anything from, you know, simple someone knowing someone
friends of friends You know, there are all kinds of things that can override
basic merit And so for me, it's always I'm trying to understand who are the
best people for the job I want to surround myself with the best possible
people because I think when you put people together That's where you get a
lot of success now with that comes- one aspect of merit that we don't always
consider. Merit is collaborative capabilities, ability to work with others
and the ability to have a little bit of humility when you work with a lot of
capable people. Sometimes egos get high. We got a high ceiling today, which
is good, but sometimes egos can really go over top.

So you really need to have some humility. Understand that there are
limitations to what you can do and how you approach. Yeah, you try to close
those up, but you have to be able to look at yourself, you know, Objectively
and say, you know, I'm not all I could be. I'm not all I should be and
having that basic capability is so fundamental. When you work with people
who can't look at themselves in that manner and be willing to criticize
themselves, you could struggle as an organization.

And how do you keep yourself motivated? How are you driven?

I would say clear goals. And clear things. And what is the goal? It's a
thing that I haven't been able to do yet. So having those out there, I think
is really important in terms of this. These are the things that I'd like to
see happen. These are the places I'd like to go.

And keeping those things out in front of you, I think is really important. I
think the very fact that we're getting older, you know, getting old is, you
know, we don't want to die. We want to live as long as possible. I think as
a general rule, so the goalpost is always moving, right? Because you get a
certain level of comfort in your life.

Now you have to worry about your health. Now you have to worry about, how do
I sustain this? How do I build a future for my family so that I'm setting
the stage for them as those things come? I don't, I think complacency is a
natural thing to take you over. But complacency only happens in the absence
of awareness.

So if you're keeping yourself aware of where you truly stand in the world,
there's always new goals to be setting.

Karthik Chidambaram: Don't stay in your comfort zone.

Brad Feakes: No, not at all.

Karthik Chidambaram: And can you talk about some mistakes you've done? If
there's one thing you would have done differently in your career, is there
anything like that?

Brad Feakes: Sure. I’ll give you a short version and a long version. If I
would do it again, early in my life and career, I probably would have jumped
through more of the hoops in front of me rather than kind of shirk them off.
I had a certain iconoclastic tendency that’s common to people lacking
maturity and humility, and I thought I don't need to do that. I'll find my
other way.

What you learn is those hoops that you could have jumped through are
actually tunnels, and those tunnels are shortcuts to get where you want to
go. So, if you don't want to jump through those hoops, you want to take the
long way around, you might find that you've wasted a lot of time.

And I think out of some absence of humility, what is iconoclasm? But the
combination of ignorance and immaturity. And so I think that was probably
for me a tendency that cost me some time and cost me some valuable lessons
that I had to learn later than I should have.

Karthik Chidambaram: So, Brad, we interview a lot of leaders for this
podcast, and one question we like to ask them is what is a question you
would like to ask the next guest we interview? And we recently interviewed
Frank Heenan, the Global VP of Distribution at Epicor. And the question he
wanted to ask is: What is the technology disruption you are seeing with
respect to distributors?

Brad Feakes: Biggest technology disruptor that I'm seeing with regard to
distributors quite often has to do with when the ERP system hits the shop
floor and the distribution floor. That is an area that I think is still-
there's a lot of work that can be done to make shop floor activities and
distribution warehouse activities more efficient, more effective, more
connected.

I know that's an area that Epicor is pushing on. Better device management,
better user interfaces that connect to devices, better ability to take
information from the shop floor, whether it's scanning, visual learning,
that's obviously another place where I has a place in the ability to pick up
visual cues in the absence of clear barcodes or 3D barcodes, or any kind of
insignia, the ability to scan information intelligently, bring that
information into the system. I think both in manufacturing and distribution,
those are areas of great- I don't know if they're disruptive right now, but
they are areas that need to be disrupted further.

Karthik Chidambaram: Make sure everything is connected, and connected
devices.

Brad Feakes: Yeah, more efficient, more effective really is the key there.

Karthik Chidambaram: So, what is a question that you would like to ask the
next guest we interview?

Brad Feakes: Sure. So, I'm a big Star Trek fan, and I was watching the movie
Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan. I'm an old school Trekker. And there's this
great theme that comes out of the movie - The needs of the many outweigh the
needs of the one. And this theme was brought out great in the movie where
the character, Mr. Spock sacrifices himself so that he can save the crew and
the enterprise from certain destruction. Of course, there's got to be
certain destruction. Otherwise, it doesn't matter. But he says that - the
needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.

So my question to the next person would be: As a manager, how do you balance
the needs of your team overall with the needs, the rights, the
responsibilities, the dreams, the hopes and the aspirations of each
individual team member because they're not uncommon that those things can
find themselves in conflict.

And you know, Spock's answer was personal sacrifice. But as a manager, of
course, we can't always be throwing ourselves into the fire. What does that
manager do to try to balance those challenges?

Karthik Chidambaram: It's a great question, Brad.

How do you keep yourself updated? What are you reading right now?

Brad Feakes: Oh, sure. So, for me, the book I'm reading right now is called
‘The Final Countdown’ by Eric Kimberling.

Eric Kimberling's with third-stage consulting, his company. They are a
software selection company. They help customers figure out ERP systems, and
he wrote this book called ‘The Final Countdown’. It's about digital
transformation. And as we all know, digital transformation is a very
overused term.

We call it a drinking game term, right? Every time someone says it, you have
to take a shot. We'd all be on the floor drunk by now. But I think his book
really cuts through a lot of the fluff and gets tangible about how business
culture, and the needs of the organization, and a good future state roadmap
really come together.

So, I've really enjoyed that.

Karthik Chidambaram: The book I'm reading right now is ‘Multipliers’ by Liz
Weisman.

You know, it's a great book on leadership. How do you be a multiplier and
how do you make your team be multipliers? How do you get more out of your
team? And how can you even do more?

Brad Feakes: Nice.

Karthik Chidambaram: That's the book I'm reading right now.

So Brad, it's been great having you on Driven by DCKAP podcast. Great to see
you in Nashville. Thank you for joining us!

Brad Feakes: Thank you. I loved this.