Transcript

Rapid Response: A playbook for when "there’s no playbook," w/CEO Ellen Kullman (Carbon, DuPont)

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In a crisis or in any situation, focus on what you could control. Create your own trajectory. The world's gonna change. Write your own story. Don't play the hand you've been dealt, play the hand you want. If you want change and you want people to move in a direction, you really have to be very consistent and communication.

Constant communication listening is critical. Whenever big change came or whenever crisis came, if you centered on core values, if you centered on the mission of the company, that gave people hope. And it gave people something to help them focus their energies. These things have proven to be valuable to me in my entire career and I think that's why I keep coming back to them.

Hi, listeners, this is Bob Safian, Masters of Scale's editor at large, former editor in chief at Fast Company, and your host for Masters of Scale Rapid Response. Today our guest is Ellen Coleman, the former CEO of DuPont and now CEO of digital manufacturing company Carbon. which was founded in twenty thirteen to bring three D printing to industrial scale. Carbon has since grown to more than 500 employees globally, best known for partnerships with Adidas and football helmet manufacturer Riddell. But now they've pivoted in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Working with alphabet company Verily, Carbon recently began printing face shields and nasal test swaps. They've already gotten FDA approval for the face shields and are sending them out to hospitals, and they intend to post the open source design on their website so anyone can start printing them, including other 3D printing companies. This is a great example of how you can act quickly, stay nimble, and focus on what you can control in times of uncertainty. We wanted to talk to Ellen about this because she has a lot of experience in dealing with crisis as the head of DuPont and now as CEO of Carbon. There is so much we can learn from Ellen about leadership, and we're excited to have her on Rapid Response.

Watch out for Ellen's full episode on Masters of Scale coming this spring. And now Reed is handling today's interview, so Reed Over to you. So here we are on a Zoom call that is Of course.

part of the shelter in place and the way that modern business is working, especially here in California, but in many areas of the world. And I've been looking forward to this for a while to interview Alan Coleman of Carbon. Alan, welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. So you started at Carbon five months ago. And then of course

January, February rolls in, and now we have a Global crisis that makes the two thousand eight crisis look a little soft and cuddly. You know, it's funny, friends and family have noted that maybe I should not take a third CEO role for that exact reason. that it seems to be happening again right after I take a role as a CEO. But you can't change what's happened. What you can do is figure out what you're gonna do about it. And my team looks at me and they say, You know, you're amazingly calm.

And I'm sort of like, well, yeah, this seems to be worse than the other crises I've had, but I've been through quite a few crises. Yeah, it doesn't really help to get all angst ridden over it. You just gotta focus on what you can control. So it's real. It's happening. There's no playbook for it. There's no And that we can count on. Nobody that I know is planning for a May 1st restart, and nobody's planning for it to be a light switch that turns on.

It's gonna be a Rio stat when we come back and it will come back in a very I think a very methodical way to protect people. And so it's really engaged us in planning and different flexibility around that planning. I mean, I tell you the real positive Араун та культур. At carbon. And I Think this is widely in a valley.

Is its adaptability. That if okay, this is the situation then Then let's get after it. There's just a quicker pace, it's a quicker turn. People seem to absorb the information And move and get on board more quickly than maybe my experiences were in big companies.

And I think that's a real positive. Not that we know what the answer is, but we all talk daily. You know, I call it a stand up meeting, although we're all sitting in different places. Um but it's a quick meeting just to check in what's working, what's not working, what's the situation. And what's changed. And more importantly, how are people doing? It's very stressful. You know, people are home with small children. And how do they

handle the kids, the schoolwork. Life kind of thing. It's quite the challenge. Stepping into this crisis, one of the maxims is to not waste a good crisis. And one of the key things that people start with is looking at threats and challenges, but that also becomes

An opportunity, an opportunity to really Express the mission and opportunity Two Do something important. And unique.

How is that playing out in carbon?'Cause there seem to be lots of different ways that Innovation in printing and manufacturing. can be essential to what the years ahead look like. I think it's been really interesting because in life sciences, in medical applications, the timelines are usually very long. and very prescribed by the FDA and other regulatory bodies. And we've been working on some great areas there with J and J and with other companies around how to use our technology.

And this is an area where when we What You know, not knowing how long this crisis will last. How can we turn our technology to be useful within days or weeks, not within months or even years? And so in just discussions among

our people inbound calls we were getting from our networks. You know, can you help make ventilator parts? Well, that's a longer term thing. Well, what can you do? Or short on PPE. I mean I knew the P PE side because DePont's in that business with the gowns and drapes and things like that. And so the face shields came up as a opportunity. Can we print the frame? And the band.

and then just snap into place and so people can use them. Can they reuse them? You know, we had interest from both Stanford and Kaiser Permanente to trial. I mean, within days we had a design. it kind of started with conversations with Verily, the alphabet company. behind project baseline. And we came up with this design for face shields.

The next thing we did was engage three hundred of our partners, our customers who own our printers, whether they're in the dental space, the industrial space. You know, contract manufacturers. We engaged them and said this is what we're doing. We'll put this file out on our website. You know, open source it. And this is a great opportunity for all of us to produce locally, use the power of three D printing, use the cloud, download the file, produce locally.

We turned our own laboratories. We have a large not a large, but for us it's large advanced development facility in Santa Clara, and then we have our labs in Redwood City. We can produce this there. We can utilize our printers instead of sending our people home. We can utilize them to produce these things. And within, I mim, literally two weeks, two and a half weeks. We ship seventy five hundred face shields last week. We'll ship I don't know, fifteen, eighteen thousand this week and

Just our production, just what carbon owns in our labs will probably be producing twenty thousand of these shields a week for as long as You know, the demand is there. We have customers who downloaded the file and start it producing locally. We've seen on Twitter and on other social media feeds. companies as far away as the Netherlands showing how they're using our technology to produce these face shields.

And so I mean to me the thought of doing something like that that quickly at a company like DePont, where your assets are large, your assets are not very adaptable. It just shows the power of being able to really pivot our organization and move from producing literally samples and midsoles for Adidas on different designs or Reddell football helmet liners, you know, our lattice material absorbs energy, dampens energy. So you know the NFL and Reddell's been looking at that. And to pivot from there within Days.

To make face shields to alleviate the shortage. for medical personnel and and healthcare systems and even first responders. So I think it's a real proof point on the power of the technology. Yeah, it's really amazing and great. Anything that your customers are doing that surprised you in their ability to use the technology to to respond to the crisis? You know, I tell you we have designers who work for us that work with our customers and

I was worried that they wouldn't be busy. And they're very busy. We're getting calls in all the time. You know, I'm trying to help this guy out to produce this. Can you help me? How do I optimize this design? What material should I use? Things like that. So we're using our resources to help all of our customers see how they can support and be part of a solution. And there's just a lot of energy around it. Yeah. Say a little bit about the handling of ambiguity,'cause one of the things that I think

If I kind of draw the the line between the dots your career You seem to take on crises Spectacularly. And this seems to be one of the early crises that You navigate it in a super strong way.

Look, we're all gonna hit bumps in the road and have positives and negatives and I have learned so much more from the tough challenges that I've handled that I've learned from the successes. And you know, one of my mantras I've developed over time is focus on what you can control. And that might come from my engineering background,'cause I'm a mechanical engineer as an undergraduate.

And I think it is that look, the world's gonna throw at you a lot of things. Now the question is, what do you do about it? What can you do? in order to improve your company, your situation, your business. And I learned that. I could control my actions in terms of pricing, in terms of availability, in terms of my relationship with key suppliers and key customers.

And so focusing the organization in times of great uncertainty helps free them, right?'Cause a lot of times the paralysis steeps in. You know, oh my gosh. The world is falling apart, my business is falling apart. You know, what do I do? Well, what you do is figure out what you can do, what you actually have some modicum of control over

And figure out if it's gonna help and get after it and get the team focused. And I think that was the first of a series of opportunities I had to really learn and develop myself as a leader. And so it's true, ambiguity does not bother me. As much as it does sound. Well that's the first of I think what I've read as your four crisis principles.

Do you want to do the other uh three as well? Yeah, so I mean it's sort of we all learn, right? And we all Think about these things as time goes on, but You know, in a crisis or in any situation, focus on what you could control. I think the second one is create your own trajectory. The world's gonna change. I mean, I can remember during the global financial crisis back in oh eight

when I was first chosen lead as CEO. I mean, people really believed the world was gonna go back exactly like it was before, and it didn't. And so, how do we create our own trajectory? What do we invest in? And it is really being very thought and almost forceful with the organization about you're not gonna just ride this out and things are gonna be the same. What you have to do is really

Write your own story. Don't play the hand you've been dealt, play the hand you want. Right. So I think creating your own trajectory is another key one. I think the third is about communication. I mean

It's amazing to me when I first learned that about the fifteenth time I said something, people were finally starting to believe I was serious. And that when you're in a company with an old culture, I mean DePont was two hundred and fifteen years old when I became CEO. You know, people have been through a lot, and they don't always believe that the new or the shiny is always the best. And you really have to if you want change and you want people to move in a direction. You really have to be very consistent and communication

Constant communication. Listening is critical. And the fourth is about maintaining pride about the company's mission. You know, people talk about this current generation being very mission centric. I don't know. I've found that throughout my career. People wanted to know that what their company did made a difference and what they were proud to be able to work there.

That took many forms. But people at DePont were really proud of what we created over the hundreds of years we were in existence. You know, things like Kevlar to the bullet resistant material, and Nomex, the fire resistant material. And that's just a couple of the examples of what they've done. And whenever big change came or whenever crisis came, if you centered them on our core values, if you centered them on the mission of the company. That gave people hope.

And it gave people again something to help them focus their energies. And these things have proven to be valuable to me in my entire career and I think that And that's why I keep coming back to them. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position.

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Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. What were some of the things that either at Titanium or DuPont That you thought would be good. things to navigate crisis. That

Turned out to be Negative lessons. What were some of the things that you thought Would be good. in crisis management that actually turned out to be less

Less effective. Well you know Sometimes you try to get maybe too cute or maybe too too bold, and I'm not saying bold's bad, but I'm saying bold has to connect. So what people want to know is why, right? Why, if we're here, do we need to move there? And the more you separate here from there, and the more you just talk about there.

They're not gonna get it. You have to take them on that journey of moving from here to there and there has to be a connection. It's like In my life a lot of times it's follow the science, right? If we were entering a new area things like that. It's how the science moved us in that direction or the research moved us in that direction. But it has to connect in if it's so far afield.

Of people's comfort zone. that they're not going to get there very quickly or maybe at all. And that you really can't just Paint the Future picture.

And I've tried that several times and failed, without connecting it back to how it's a natural progression. from where we are and why it is a better place to be. So I do think that connectedness is really important and if a movement, if a strategy doesn't connect, it's gonna be very difficult for the people to really move with you. I think the other thing is I watched a lot of people

Coming at a pont mid career. And The ones that succeeded were the ones that honored the culture that honored the parts of the culture that were good. The ones that failed were the ones that came in and said, You know, wow, you guys that's not the way I did it back at

And you know, people want to know that their history has meaning. And again, it's that connectedness, but it really is connecting it to this is what you guys do great. Let's keep that.

But if we added this This is how much better we could be, or let's try this. Let's see. And so I think people are willing also many times and change to go along with something if they think it's an experiment as opposed to a an edict. I mean edicts Sometimes work?

You know, and the more authoritarian the leader is, maybe the more they can ram that through. But I think if you want people to follow you. And this is where I learned a lot from going from more of an authoritarian style of leadership to a more inclusive and or influential style of leadership. is that you know I used to laugh and say, Okay, next experiment, let's go try this and you know, not all of them worked out, but enough of them did that we really created some great opportunities and growth. What are some of the principles about making those experiments?

work generally in the field. Well I think that you know, first of all I find that common language is really important. I find that any time I go into a different company or even going into customers or vendors that making sure you have that common language. And I think the other thing is, and again, I I learned this from studying engineering, is that if you don't have a hypothesis on what the outcome is, pretty specific hypothesis. Then you're not gonna know whether you're winning or losing.

You know, a lot of times I've had teams that'll say, We're gonna try this and see what happens. So I said, Okay, what do you expect the outcome to be? Yeah, well better than we are today. Well what does that mean? You know, if you can gain alignment on what the goals are, specific goals are. And what winning is That allows you, depending on what the outcome is, to say, Okay

Didn't work out at all. Let's go back to square one and start over, or hey, you know, about fifty percent of this work. Let's Back off and look at it and then take it from there. But it gives you that common language that it becomes not personal. I succeeded or I failed. It becomes that, okay, this is what we did, this is what we tried, and it didn't work, so what are we gonna do again?

It's one of the things I use when I started the safety and protection business at DePont. 'Cause we would literally get in a room every Friday afternoon and said, What worked this week and what didn't. And okay, based on that, let's change these things and let's go at it again next week. And you know, when you're starting a new business, as you well know, you have to have that kind of pace of play, that kind of openness and Trust in each other.

That we have each other's backs and that we're all in this together. I mean, even when you're starting a business in a big company like De Panas, same kind of principles hold. And uh This is I think a good point to ask to go into a little bit more depth on What are the ways you apply focus on what you can control? What are some of the key learnings about like here is questions to ask yourself, here is things to do, here's things to avoid.

In tuning That focus on what you can control. Yeah, so you know, people get really excited about ideas around the ability to scale or to do different things. And you know, I I guess the example of the swab that are in short supply is a good example of that because that obviously needs a lot more clinical input.

It is inserted into the patient's nasal cavity. It's what they use to determine whether you have the virus or not. It has to work with the PCR machines and different Hospitals have different kinds of these things that actually turn that sample into a test result. And so sometimes you gotta slow it down to go fast, right? And so

What can we do? We can create the designs, we can overnight them to clinicians, we can get the feedback the next day, redesign. You know, we can work in a matter of days. Let's not get out there and explain, oh, we're gonna solve the world's problem on swaps. Let's make sure we have something. And let's make sure we can create a supply chain very, very quickly. In order to be able to deliver. And then we're not a medical device company, right? You know, face shields are one thing, but these nasal swabs are another. So we partnered with Resolution Medical, one of our customers.

They've partnered with some of the dental labs that have capacity on our larger printer to print these. And we're Crafting how this would all work in a very practical manner. So people have a tendency to want to run.

But when they're running they can't control all the aspects of it, and if something falls off. then you certainly don't want to be sitting there having to regroup and step back and start all over again. And so the swab's taken us a little longer. It was like three weeks, but it's Yeah, but now as the launch has occurred, it's in a much better place from a supply chain standpoint, from ability to liver, from clinical feedback. And the ability to really have it work and make a difference.

So you know, one of the things about crises is their lessons. They're how you can reset, how you can refocus, you can change directions about where you're going. Clearly one of the things that the you know, the whole world is kind of pivoting on, Oh my gosh, we need Medical equipment we need

Uh tests, we need a bunch of other things, and that Is Part of the agility. that the supply chain of manufacturer needs to have. Carbon's clearly a key part of that. What's the deployment of this technology

Ботнал, посо. What's the really key lessons for how we build this agility? In the one. our industries of the future look like. When we think about surge capacity or things like that, whether it's in the medical community or other things, usually and you've seen it with some of the longer supply chains, it can take a year. It could take longer in order to be able to really change the the math.

Right, in terms of how much of a needed product you can get and what kind of time frame. And I think there are many industries, and I think medical is one case in point where you could have a baseload and then you could create surge capacity that is multiples of that base load. By pivoting the or utilizing the agility of the manufacturing production network. And having not only these files complete and agreed to by clinicians and you know, FDA class one exempt or whatever the the right regulatory level is in them. And we have to be better prepared and we have to be able to then move very quickly. And you can't move quickly if you haven't done all the basics. And we're doing a lot of the basics in weeks now.

There's some things that are gonna take longer as you talk to the people who are trying to move Like for instance in ventilators and things like that. So what are those critical supplies and how do we need to change not only the base capacity, but the surge capacity? in doing that. And I think three D printing can play a very important role there. You know, we've seen it with our production network. They've really

done a phenomenal job at engaging at changing what they're doing. Getting the things done and and doing things like we've never Source PET for that part of the face shield.

But our people figured it out, got a supplier, got it in, and made that happen. And we need to create more of that surge capacity capability. And that's where, you know, if you're only looking at this quarter's earnings, if you're only looking in the very short term, you're never going to make those investments. And I think we're seeing the result of that at this point in time. That that's short sighted. So one of the things that is a

kind of a call it a cultural theme within the valley. is the power that revolution in software and revolution in bits is bringing to everything. And you know, obviously some of that is just purely within software itself. You know, that's you know the cloud and whatnot.

Some of that's Applying software to things like autonomous vehicles. But one of the things that's kinda stunning when you begin to think about this lens when it comes to carbon is like well Actually now we have this kind of agile massively increased agility in manufacturing, but we also Are bringing the power of

software and design and iteration and learning and change directly into the construction of scale manufacturer. Is there any lessons that you and Carbon have had so far about what is that new world? What What is the the view of that new world? from this increase of software and

Digits. Into this world of atoms. pretty much there are not many out there today of how software can impact manufacturing. I mean it's just not about optimizing your supply chain. It literally is about iterating on designs and creating real prototypes that can be dust tested, and then you can manufacture

Large volumes in the same material on the same printer. And take it to a scale, right? And so I do think that the historic ways That even, you know, my customers at DePont. Created automotive parts, optimized those automotive parts. They took months to get a tool. They had to line out the production.

And that type of time frame And like a year, eighteen months can be shortened. Two weeks or months. And I think that's the power of software, too. The other power is when a disruption occurs.

And one part of the world, a natural disaster, a hurricane, right? You can take those files and be moved anywhere else in the world to produce those parts. And so you're not reliant on just one manufacturing site or in an area of the world that had a very difficult natural disaster occur.

And so it allows more continuity. when you can do that and have that power. That is on a broader scale than where we are today. Yep, makes total sense. Alright, Alan. It's very uh

Pleasure meeting you on the uh on Zoom and I look forward to meeting you in person. Uh thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. And I will look forward to meeting you as well. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely for From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.

I hope to see you there. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a Wait What original. The show is recorded remotely, using sanitized audio gear. It's hosted by me, Bob Saphian, Masters of Scales editor at Large, and Masters of Scale host, Reed Hoffman. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi.

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