The Elixirs to Breaking Bad Business Systems

**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.

**Steven Zakash** (0:17)
Hello, and welcome back to the show. We are talking about zombie sea urchins and how they relate to your business. That and how to improve your business systems, but real zombie sea urchins are going to be a topic here. I'm Steven Zakash, here once again with Julio Saragusa and Aashmar. Hey, guys.

**Julio Saragusa** (0:36)
Hello.

**Aashmar** (0:37)
Hello.

**Steven Zakash** (0:38)
So here's what I want to try to do. So if you've been following along on the series, we went through bad systems for financial services, automotive, healthcare, and travel. We're going to take a look at the basic components of what a system is, and then we'll take a look at where these companies fell apart, what part of the system failed. So I want to start with, last week I attended this talk. It was on the health of our coastal ecosystems, and a good chunk of that was based around the kelp beds. And I'm going to use that to illustrate systems in a way that might be a little more interesting. In fact, they talked about zombie sea urchins, and I'll get to that in a minute. So to set the table here, the basic parts of a system are this. You've got components, interconnections, purpose, boundaries, inputs, process, outputs, feedback loop, and environment. We're going to focus on the first three today, hopefully, the components, interconnections, and purpose. And we'll continue with another episode to cover some of the others. Or if we go long today, we're continuing anyway. The goal here is really to help you flex the muscle of examining your systems from the perspective of love, empathy, and compassion. So if I go back to the kelp beds and the zombie sea urchins, by components of a system, the components of a kelp bed, we mean things like living organisms, the kelp, the herbivores like sea urchins. You've got snails and limpets in there, and then you've got carnivores like sea otters, fish, omnivores like crabs. You also have some other living things in the mix there. So you've got non-living, you've also got non-living things too, like white water, ocean currents. These are all the components of the system. Now, when you have something like sea otter populations disappearing like they did over the past century by hunting, or other creatures that suddenly disappear, then you have this system breakdown. And so sea otters, for example, they eat a lot, and they eat a lot of sea urchins. And without them in the mix, now you've got sea urchins feeding on the kelp, and suddenly everything that depends on the kelp is impacted, disappears along with the kelp. So we've had unprecedented temperature issues in the oceans recently. Kelp might have made a comeback from that, but now pretty much all the sea stars on the West Coast are wiped out, and they eat sea urchins. So 95% of California's coastal kelp forests are gone. So this past decade, you've got this explosion of purple sea urchins. And if they aren't eating, they're unattractive to predators like sea otters, for example. So you've got these large dead zones in the ocean where there's nothing but purple urchins, and these aren't the red ones that people eat. Those disappeared with competition from the purple ones. So you've got this ecological and economic collapse here. So you might think, you know, with nothing to eat, these sea urchins would naturally die off. Well, no, they go into a different mode where they can just sit there for decades, waiting to reactivate when kelp comes along. In some cases, they think they can stay in the state for about 70 years. This is why they're called zombie urchins.
In a way, they are like the problems in your business systems. They won't go away unless they're addressed. They'll just sit there waiting for their opportunity to cause problems. So when we talk of systems and the component parts of systems, in business, this is things like employees, management, customers, the equipment, of all the scandals we covered, there was nothing inherently wrong with the components of their system all but one.

**Aashmar** (4:45)
The RONOS was one, I would say.

**Steven Zakash** (4:49)
Yeah, that was the one of all the systems we covered, Ash. Tell us a little bit about it.

**Aashmar** (4:54)
Well, it was essentially them pushing the fact that they had this lead testing machine that could sample with a very little blood sample. They spent their entire business model was spent fraudulently making up that this thing existed when it did it. And I think they were trying to fake it till you make it. But there's only so much faking it you can do to the point where you're now lost in delusion.