Ep 3: Fast and Focused Decision Making in Manufacturing Intelligence

Episode 3: Fast and Focused Decision-Making in Manufacturing Intelligence
This is the Integrate Intelligently podcast from CADTALK Software, a podcast about the people, programs, and processes that come together to make businesses successful. At CADTALK, we're a software integration company, but we believe this idea of intelligent integration goes much deeper than software. On this episode, we discuss CADTALK Core Value Number 3, Fast and Focused, and how that mindset impacts our company and the manufacturers we work with.

How do you find the balance of making intelligent decisions without falling into analysis paralysis? In this episode of The Integrate Intelligently Podcast, Jeff and Scott Brickler discuss the importance of taking action and making decisions in a deliberate and strategic manner. Jeff and Scott share their own experiences striving to find the balance of being Fast and Focused, one of CADTALK's five core values. They also expand the conversation to manufacturing intelligence — how can manufacturers systemize this kind of decision-making to achieve growth?

Catching Up
Jeff: Welcome to Episode 3 of the Integrate Intelligently podcast. I'm Jeff Brickler, Chief Revenue Officer at CADTALK, accompanied by my brother and fearless leader, Scott Brickler, CEO of CADTALK. Scott, what have you been up to lately?

Scott: Today we had our all-call with the team to discuss Q2 and initiatives for the upcoming quarter.

Jeff: What's been going on with you besides work?

Scott: We just have some family in town this week — my wife's cousin and his family are visiting and hitting the local music parks. I also announced on today's call that I've been on a weight-loss journey — down about 30 pounds this quarter, looking for another 25 to 30 next quarter. And I'm doing another Spartan race in about a month, another 10K. So it might be a short podcast if I don't make it through that one.

Jeff: Right, it might just be the Jeff Show.

Scott: I feel confident.

Jeff: It's good to see you taking on those initiatives, those races. I'm a much more boring guy — very routine. I get up every morning, exercise, and just get it done without overthinking it. I thrive when things are even-keeled and the same every day. Not exciting, but it keeps me on track.

Scott: That's actually a great topic for a future episode — how we're different that way and how it's worked for both of us.

Jeff: It's funny — you and I are brothers with different backgrounds, but I think we're very much alike. A lot of people who see us say we're just so different in so many ways. I don't see that big a difference, but I guess to the outside world it is. I think we think a lot alike, even though our life experiences leading up to now were different — we didn't even live together for a while in college and high school. But when I talk to you like this, even with different experiences and backgrounds, we still seem to think similarly.

Scott: I think you can start with similar thinking and have it manifest differently in personality. People who get to know us more start to see the commonality. But on the surface — I talk fast, you talk a little slower — those are the things people notice first. You used to give me grief for the pregnant pauses where I'd stop and think.

Jeff: I do it again. President Obama got a lot of grief for that too — that long cadence of pauses people love to joke about. I think about that versus you — your mind and mouth go a mile a minute, whereas I'm a little more deliberate, slower to speak or articulate.

Scott: It works better on the podcast, your style.

Jeff: We'll see — the gift of AI to fix me, so people listening now, it's much worse. That would be an interesting topic to discuss sometime — our backgrounds, how they play off each other, how we tend to complement rather than fight against each other.

Introducing CADTALK and Today's Topic
Jeff: Before we get into it, I want to make sure everyone knows who we are. This podcast is sponsored by CADTALK, an integration platform for engineering software, design software, PDM/PLM systems, and popular ERP systems. It's been around since 2006 — Scott's the founder, and I came on in 2015. I'm happy to be working with my brother to build this company together and to build that relationship. Anytime you're working with family, for some it's hard, but for me it's been great to share the microphone and build something together — kind of like a family building a house together.

Scott: It's cool when it works out. People have mentioned many times that our dynamic is really good, and that's not always the case with families.

Jeff: I'm very fortunate in the relationship you and I have. When people find out we're brothers who work together, they often say, "I couldn't work with my brother," and I don't really understand why.

Scott: It's worked out really well. It's been nine years now — hard to believe.

Jeff: It's that age-old joke about the years going faster as you get older. When you're younger, time feels like it goes so slowly. Now in my mid-40s, time goes so fast.

Scott: It's relative — time is a bigger fraction of your life when you're younger.

Jeff: Totally agree. In the first couple of episodes we talked about our tagline, Integrate Intelligently, and some of our values. Today we're continuing that with Fast and Focused — another alliterative value that goes back to the emphasis you put on swift action combined with strategic thinking. It reminds me of a quote from Emperor Augustus: festina lente — "make haste slowly." Same idea as Fast and Focused: get on to doing something, but do it deliberately and smartly, with focus.

We try to find people who have that balance, because you tend to get two types of people — those who act fast and just get out there, breaking things to see where the chips fall, and those with what I'd call paralysis by analysis. Having worked with a lot of engineers, in software and mechanical engineering, they tend to be much more deliberate and slow to make changes. Truly marrying those two — that balanced, "hurry slowly" approach — is what we're after. What does Fast and Focused mean to you? What drove you to make it one of our values?

Where "Fast and Focused" Came From
Scott: Like all good things, I borrowed it from someone else. Years ago I read blog posts from Joel Spolsky — Joel on Software. Joel founded Stack Overflow and also worked at Microsoft, where he was the product manager who created Excel macros, among other things — his work is pretty pervasive. He wrote about how to build software companies in the early 2000s, and his hiring philosophy was "smart and gets things done," especially for developers.

What I found is that people can be smart but never get out of their own way — they never make progress because they keep thinking there's a better way. They make perfect the enemy of good. We see this a lot with customers who have engineering minds. Then there's the other type who just runs full-tilt into the wall over and over, like running east looking for a sunset — running fast but never going to see it.

The idea is you want someone with a good mixture of both: smart, with a good strategy, but who also moves the ball forward. I thought, that's not just good for developers — that's good for anybody. So it became a company value: take the time to figure out what you should do, then get about getting it done. That's the key, because otherwise you spend all your time saying "tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow."

Jeff: That's a good one to dig into for me too — I know I've suffered from over-analysis in the past. We're never perfectly balanced as humans; I try to find that balance more as I get older. I went through periods of being more fast than focused, and other periods more focused than fast — it's just the waves of life. How have you dealt with getting to that balance of fast and focused together?

Recognizing When You're Avoiding the Hard Thing
Scott: There are a lot of good frames for this. One of my constant struggles is the dichotomy of: how do you know if something isn't working, or just isn't working yet? It ties into this because it's hard to know if you've done enough research to make a decision, or if you're just stalling.

Alex Hormozi talks about getting distracted by something shiny instead of moving forward. The frame I use most is this: when I notice I'm avoiding something uncomfortable, I ask whether I'm turning a two-way door into a one-way door — using Bezos's framework of one-way versus two-way decisions. Usually I'm doing that when I'm avoiding a hard conversation or a decision I don't want to make, or I'm scared of the outcome.

So I ask myself: do I actually need to know more, or is there a hard action I'm avoiding? You can read about working out all day, but it doesn't do much good until you actually start doing the thing. I look at whether I'm doing something for entertainment or to avoid discomfort, versus actually needing to learn something new — because a lot of times you already have the knowledge; you just need reminding.

Jeff: Good point. I think when you're smart and hardworking, you can convince yourself you need more information, need to study more, read another book. But the reality is you don't. I wasn't big into sports as a kid — much more academic — and sometimes it just takes doing the thing. When I was learning Latin, I used flashcards — boring, not necessarily the best method, but I didn't know a better one, so I just spent hours and hours on it. At some point there's nothing left to figure out — there's just action.

Scott: People think research feels like progress. One interesting thing about Fast and Focused: sometimes the highest achievers are the worst at getting things done. We used to hire a lot of co-ops for development, and the straight-A students would actually struggle to get things done. In school they could understand a simple, scoped project completely. Then they'd get into a codebase like CADTALK's — massive — and try to download how it all works into their brain before starting, and they'd realize quickly that isn't possible.

They struggled because they couldn't deal with the uncertainty of not understanding everything before they started. Most things in life are very complicated, and you won't know how everything works — but sometimes you just have to start. I used to describe it with a "dark room" analogy: think of the codebase as a dark room you can't see into. All you have is a book of matches and some kindling. You light a small fire in one corner, and now you can see a bit more of the room. You build the next fire at the edge of that light, and that's the next piece of knowledge that connects to what you already learned. Eventually you've built enough fires to see the whole room, and the action you take from there is far more efficient — but you had to take a lot of inefficient action to get the room lit.

Jeff: Similar to when I was teaching foreign language — students wanted to learn all the grammar and rules first. It's too big, too complicated; you can't do it that way. You have to start on something small and let it fill in like a paint-by-numbers picture — you don't know what it looks like until you start filling in pieces, and it slowly takes shape. You can't just look at it and know. Sometimes it's horribly inefficient and boring, but it's the fastest way to get the understanding you're looking for.

Learning to Fail Faster
Jeff: It's that "crappy first draft" concept. I think school sometimes rewards getting it right the first time instead of training people to be okay with failing early. A lot of learning, especially at scale or in real life, requires a bunch of failing and iteration. People end up thinking, "I want to learn everything and understand it all before I start, because I don't want to fail" — and they can't deal with that first failure.

I had a similar experience as a kid. I wanted to make movies — had a Super 8 camera and finally got film for it. But I told myself I needed to learn everything about filmmaking before using it, because the film was expensive and I didn't want to waste it. So I read books, watched movies, told myself I was "doing the work." Five or six years later, I found that film still in a drawer, never used. I would have been better off making a crappy movie, learning from it, and moving forward. I was so afraid of making a mistake that I never actually did the thing.

Scott: That ties into CADTALK too. When I started, I kept thinking I needed to learn how the whole language worked before writing anything. Eventually I decided the code might not be great the first time, but at least I'd learn something. I didn't want the "film in the drawer" problem to happen again. The version of CADTALK we're on now is the third iteration — it took three times to get it right, and that was okay. Unlearning the "you can't fail the first time" mindset from school is part of the process.

Jeff: Failure really is a big part of it — a bunch of micro failures. I did the same thing in school, taking forever to write papers because I didn't like the idea of wasting time on an idea that didn't go anywhere. In school, you submit something once and get a grade — there's no opportunity to iterate on it. In life, it's much more iterative than that.

How This Applies to Manufacturing
Jeff: Where do you see Fast and Focused playing out in manufacturing companies? Are manufacturers typically fast, typically focused, or where could they learn from this?

Scott: Manufacturing is a cornerstone industry — we'll always be making things as long as humans want to consume things. But it tends to be more conservative and slower to adopt new technology than, say, tech or software, where everything evolves quickly because moving bits around costs little. Manufacturers tend to do things that are proven, until competition forces change. So they lean more focused than fast.

A good history lesson here: people think of Toyota and the "Japanese way" in manufacturing and assume the Japanese figured this out on their own. Actually, after World War II, when Japan's economy was decimated, a man named Deming — considered the father of industrial/manufacturing engineering — couldn't get American automotive companies to listen to his new manufacturing theories. He went to Japan to help with the rebuild instead, and the Japanese embraced everything he said and implemented it. It fit their culture of continuous improvement and perfection. That's largely how they overcame American manufacturing quality through the '70s and into the '80s — the Toyota Way ironically came from an American with fast, innovative thinking, applied by a culture built for focus. Now the manufacturing quality we enjoy today largely traces back to Deming's ideas. It makes sense that manufacturers are more conservative — when you're cutting metal, there's real dollar cost to getting it wrong, unlike moving ones and zeros around.

Jeff: We keep coming back to this idea of balance. How do manufacturing companies actually find that balance between fast and focused, given the real cost of getting it wrong?

Building Continuous Improvement Into the Process
Scott: The Japanese did a great job with Kaizen — continuous improvement. Instead of hoping improvement happens as a side effect of R&D, they build it directly into the process. If you assume a certain amount of R&D, plan Kaizen events, and budget time to listen to ideas from the shop floor and implement at least one of them, it becomes much easier to systemize than to treat it as a one-off event.

We see this with customers too — they treat a change as a single event that happens once, rather than something they plan for and repeat iteratively. The best companies — manufacturing or otherwise — make continuous improvement a system they follow and repeat, not an event they do once every five years. An event feels costly and outside the normal routine; something built into your regular process becomes part of what you do, and innovation becomes ongoing rather than occasional.

Jeff: We see this with customers who buy our software too — it becomes this big event, a "big bang" go-live, and then they're off and running, expecting a big surge and then being done. It's like saying, "I'm going to go to university, get my degree, and never learn again," or "I'm going to go hard-keto for six months and then be done." That's not sustainable — it's a huge cost, arguably bigger than a slower, iterative process where improvement is just built in.

Scott: That make-haste-slowly mindset — get on to doing it, but don't make it a short burst; keep it going. Slow and steady, chipping away, leads to long-term improvement, whereas a one-time push typically falls off. It'd be like saying, "I'm going to have one meal so good I'll never have to eat again." As if you arrive and the thing is done and you never have to come back to it — that isn't how things work.

People tend to be slow and scattered, and the way out is to take action. What keeps you from taking action is fear — fear that you can't change it once it's done. By making these things more systemized, you get more reps at getting it wrong, which removes some of that fear.

Even with our own project management, I had a paralysis-by-analysis moment trying to build a roadmap — I got too deep into details because I'm an engineer. A consultant told us to just do a SWAG (a "scientific wild-ass guess"): pick a number, pick a date, and course-correct from there. It's like a flight from New York to LA — the plane is off course something like 90% of the time, but it course-corrects constantly and still lands within a few minutes of the estimate. They probably didn't get it exactly right the first time, but they measured and adjusted. Being okay with an imperfect guess, an imperfect first draft, is usually the thing that gets people out of analysis paralysis.

Why Companies Resist Change as They Grow
Jeff: Do you think manufacturing companies avoid this because of real cost, or is it the same fear we see everywhere?

Scott: The cost is real — cutting metal, you don't want to make a mistake. But there's also a growth-stage issue: the things that got a company to one stage don't work at the next stage. Early on, you're cost-conscious about everything, cutting anything that feels superfluous — a great strategy when money is tight. But it becomes a bad strategy as the company matures, because eventually a competitor figures out how to make the same thing cheaper.

At that point you have to reintroduce what feels like a wasteful cost — investing in figuring out how to make things better tomorrow — back into the process. Companies often put this off. We see it with ERP implementations, where businesses stay on the same software for 20 years, sometimes only forced to change by something external, like Y2K. If something worked in the past, the instinct is to assume it'll work forever — but like marketing, strategies have a shelf life. Businesses have to evolve their approach as they grow, recognize when those stages happen, and know when to add R&D budget or change course. It'd be useful to have a model for recognizing the right stage to do that — the community can help with knowing when.

Companies often just keep doing what worked when they were a startup, even once they're a hundred-million-dollar business, and they stop investing in the next stage.

Jeff: We're all struggling with that same behavior — resisting change, resisting the idea of making small changes and iterating over and over. I think it's in our DNA to want consistency, to put something in a box and not have to worry about it again. Evolutionarily, our minds are built to categorize and move on. So it's hard to be fast and focused, hard to keep improving continuously, because we naturally want to set it and forget it.

Scott: Everything in our biology wants to save resources. Your brain creates neural pathways once it recognizes a pattern — that's learning. Once that pathway exists, your brain just follows it, and creating a new pathway to relearn or change something takes resources our biology evolved to conserve. Everything in our DNA pushes us not to do the very thing we need to do, and you have to consciously resist that. The only way to overcome it is to bring it into your conscious awareness: recognize the tendency to keep doing the same thing without questioning the result, and systemize a process that forces you to reevaluate and make real movement instead of staying stuck in the same rut.

Closing Thoughts
Jeff: Scott, this has been a great conversation — I didn't expect Fast and Focused to lead us down these paths, but I've enjoyed it. Any last words?

Scott: Just do the thing. It's really easy to fall into analysis paralysis, and I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast lean toward the more intelligent side, which tends to suffer from exactly that. Be okay with making a mistake and learning from it, rather than spending all your time researching. Make an informed decision, don't act wildly — but take action, see what happens, and adjust as needed. A lot of that resistance is built into our own egos, our fear of mistakes and failure. We're all human — we want to avoid that because it feels painful.

Jeff: Awesome, Scott — really thrilled to be here. To sum up, Fast and Focused was our topic today, and it was a great conversation. We'll be back next week with another episode. Please subscribe — you can find us on YouTube, Spotify, and other podcast apps. This was brought to you by CADTALK; visit us at cadtalk.com. We're looking to continue the podcast and eventually bring on guests, with real conversations at the intersection of software and manufacturing. Anything else from you, Scott?

Scott: No, just a great time as usual — looking forward to the next one.

Jeff: Thanks everybody, have a good week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Integrate Intelligently podcast from CADTALK Software. Don't forget to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss future episodes. Video versions of the podcast are available on CADTALK's YouTube page, linked in the show notes. The Integrate Intelligently podcast is hosted by CADTALK CEO Scott Brickler and CRO Jeff Brickler. Our producer is marketing manager John Thomas. If you have a story you'd like to share on the podcast, or want to partner with us, email marketing@cadtalk.com and be sure to mention "podcast" in the subject line.