Breaking Bad Business Systems - Input, Process, Output, Feedback

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. We are finishing up our series on business scandals and hoping you can look at systems you operate in through a different lens to spot the zombie problems that could rise from the dead and damage your business and reputation. And yes, we'll be talking briefly about those zombie sea urchins again. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher. Hey, guys.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:44)
Hey, everybody.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:47)
So we've looked across business scandals from a variety of sectors. In the last episode, we went over parts of that make up a system, right? So these could be any part of a system that you have at work. And depending on your company size, maybe you've got as few as five systems and maybe as many as 50, 100 or more. We broke down the bad systems in the last episode, and it really stuck out that system purpose was often a problem that we saw. So just real quick, recapping those parts of the systems, you've got components, interconnections and purpose. And that's what we talked about in the last episode when looking at scandals, those three. And then you have boundary inputs, process output, feedback loop and environment. So basically, we defined what the system purposes were in the last episode, and then we redefined what they would look like with more of a Bliss mindset. And that would have completely changed the outcome, I think, of a lot of these. The system that went bad, most had some sort of foundational element like that, that it was just wrong from early on.
When you're trying to build love into your system, you don't have to be as granular as this, right? So just find an area where you can input kindness or empathy, and make sure it's not just one of those single random acts of kindness, but that it's part of a system, that it's something that you repeat. So one act of kindness and love is great, but it's fleeting. So we're proposing something that's continual and should carry on even if you aren't there. You should be able to step away and the impact, your impact will be made and felt in an ongoing passion. So we want to dive into these different parts of the system. So that you can question things yourself at work, and perhaps this will help you find elements that you could examine. The previous episode, as mentioned, we went through system components, interconnection of purpose. Today, we're going to focus on inputs, process, and outputs, and finish up briefly talking about feedback. So if you think your system is healthy right now, it may not be. So thinking back to last week, remember, I had the example of how the kelp beds in California are kind of out of whack. We've lost 95% of our kelp for us because humans are so disruptive. We have few sea otters and all the sea stars are gone, and they are what feed on the urchins. And in the absence of that, urchins fed on the kelp and thrived. And you think, you know, urchins, maybe they'd go away when there's no food. But what happens, they sit in this zombie mode and they just wait. And so they could wait decades for their next opportunity. And so we want to make sure your business isms don't have zombies waiting to cause problems, even if they aren't noticeable right now. So Tullio, kick us off here. Let's go through each of these scandals and look at input process and output, and see what the most impactful area was.
You'll see a trend, I think, only one company really had a flawed input as part of their system. Which was that, Tullio?

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:18)
Well, that was Wells Fargo, the system-wide creation of fake accounts, that the input was sales targets, employee performance metric. That was the cause, if you will, that started all this, and then the process was basically opening accounts and processing customer information, and the output was massive number of fake accounts to go with the real ones, and bonuses for the employees for doing this.
So really, when you think about it, the most impactful area on the input side was the aggressive sales targets and performance metrics pressured these employees to engage in unethical behavior directly leading to the scandal. So this is really the only one where the input was absolutely the failure.

**Stephen Sakach** (5:13)