Dan Corbett

StrengthsFinder 2.0 and Personality Reflection: A Look Inside (Part 1)

Dan Corbett — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 03:35:30 +0000

Since completing with my undergraduate degree at Lehigh University, my employers have put me through an array of personality and strengths assessments. I have taken the Myers-Briggs multiple times, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, and the Clifton StrenthsFinder 2.0, amongst others, in the last few years; I am an INTJ, a Mastermind, and have Strategic, Ideation, Competition, Analytical, and Maximizer as my top 5 themes/strengths.

StrengthsFinder 2.0

I have found StrengthsFinder to be the most interesting and valuable of the assessments; the themes are well identified and can be readily integrated into my career. According to this assessment from Gallop, my top five strengths are Strategic, Ideation, Competition, Analytical, and Maximizer.

Strategic: I describe engineering as finding the solutions to questions; I describe being strategic as finding the right questions to answer. Whether applied to product marketing, with which markets to play in, or engineering, with what features and benefits are critical to success, I find defining and selecting the appropriate strategic approach extremely rewarding. Evaluating the alternative scenarios and obstacles, I can identify the ideal situation and attack it.

Ideation: I love finding new solutions. When a problem has not been solved, or even one that has been solved sub-optimally, I enjoying playing at the whiteboard with new concepts to create the solution. In partner with my analytical and strategic focus, I quickly create, develop, evaluate, and categorize ideas. Group brainstorming session, with everyone throwing out and then building upon ideas, truly excite and fascinate me.

Competition: I love to compete, perhaps even more than I love to win. It is not that I have to win (though I do hate losing), in fact the competition becomes boring if I always do win. Rather, it is having the challenge and opportunity to win and ability to learn from the losses (and win the next time) that drives me. If it becomes obvious that I can never win, then competition needs to change. For example, I did not try to play minor league hockey after college. Instead I play in recreational adult leagues. Unfortunately I do not have this in my current position. I have tried to “win” by achievements in workload and project impact, but these give incentives for my colleagues to “lose” and have less work. This is a theme that I intend to incorporate in my future career.

Analytical: While sometimes in conflict with my ideation skills, I have found that my analytical talents have proved invaluable gleaming insights out of seemingly unrelated data and making decisions based on logic over sales skills. After much practice I have been able to integrate my analytical abilities with ideation by allowing the creation of new ideas and then integrating the analytical analysis to evaluate the new concepts and structure the future path.

Maximizer: From utilizing individual skills, talents, and knowledge within my group at work to organizing the dishwasher to accommodate the maximum number of dishes, I always try to find the most efficient way to all people, groups, and even machines, succeed. I would far rather provide extra resources for someone struggling outside of their zone of knowledge than force them to acquire new skills that go against their existing personality.

Myers-Briggs and Keirsey Temperament Sorter

Having completed the Myers-Biggs test on three different occasions, it appears I am firmly situated as an INTJ. I am a weak level of Introversion; I do mingle well in groups and enjoy vocal, group creative sessions. a moderate level of Intuition and Thinking, and a strong level of Judgment. As with most INTJs, I am fine working individually but will take over leadership positions as required. For example, during my MBA business plan course my team was floundering during the first few weeks as our leader liked to dream ideas but was poor at implementing them. I took over all leadership functions, defining and maintaining schedules, retaining focus, and managing conflicting viewpoints; similarly with underperforming teams at my job I will take over leadership to ensure that goals are met.

Knowing the traits of an INTJ, I have specifically worked on my empathy with others. When someone is passionate about their ideas and beliefs, I try to understand what drives these opinions to help me better understand and adapt to working with them.

Unsurprising given my Myers-Briggs assessment, I score as a Mastermind with the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. The two personalities, Mastermind and INTJ, are extremely similar. I really relate with the contingency planning aspect of Masterminds; I always like to have multiple plans to minimize the overall risk of my projects. Additionally, Masterminds like to conduct extensive research before making decisions and as my wife will attest to with the multiple regression analysis I used when purchasing our house, I certainly subscribe to this trait.

Personal Reflection

I certainly agree with most all of the assessments and am trying to leverage this knowledge in my career. Particularly from the StrengthsFinder assessment, I feel the challenges of a Product Manager with a new product development focus will be an excellent fit to both my skills and career aspirations. As most of my strengths encourage me to work with an Activator, I hope to find a colleague in my next position exuding this trait to help both of us succeed.

Medical Device Tax: Tax Minimization and Rise of the Distributor

Dan Corbett — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:38:12 +0000

*Legal Disclaimer: All thoughts on this site are mine and do not represent any organization I am involved with in any way

Recently I read through the healthcare bill (H.R. 4872, Public Law 111-152, Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010) to learn more about the tax that will be imposed upon medical device companies. While I am not an accountant or a lawyer, as I read the extremely slim text regarding the tax it appeared that there may be a simple way for domestic medical device companies to minimize the tax.

IN GENERAL.—There is hereby imposed on the sale of any taxable medical device by the manufacturer, producer, or importer a tax equal to 2.3 percent of the price for which so sold.

This text, along with some minor content regarding definitions and exemptions, is all that currently defines the excise tax.

I take this to mean that the manufacturer, even if they do not sell the finished device to the end user, will be responsible for the tax. In the case of OEM or contract manufacturers this will likely be a boon as the tax will be taken prior to the final sales price, as opposed to adding the tax at the final sale. Distributors will experience a similar relative benefit as the tax will also be added prior to the final sale. Perhaps most interesting will be the response by companies that both manufacture and sell their devices. Theoretically a company could form a new subsidiary that engages exclusively in manufacturing and subsequently sells the finished product to the parent company for final distribution.

What does this mean in terms of real dollars? Let’s take the case of ablation antennas, a high margin product. Radio frequency ablation device manufacturers, such as Boston Scientific, Celon, Integra Lifesciences, and AngioDynamics amongst others, sell their products at a range of price points around $2,000 per unit; for this example I will assume they all sell at exactly $2,000. Similarly the standard cost likely varies from $100 to over $400 per unit; I will assume a constant standard cost of $250.

Undoubtedly the healthcare bill was intended to tax the devices at the $2,000 final sales price, resulting in an approximate $46 price increase due to the excise tax (assuming the seller passes the tax on to the buyer as intended). However a company that manufacturers the device in the United States, such as Boston Scientific, could form a new subsidiary (which I will call it Boston Sci Mfg). Boston Scientific could then act as the distributor for Boston Sci Mfg and the tax, now paid by Boston Sci Mfg, would be an approximately $6 on the standard cost of the $250, reducing the net tax to 0.3%. If Celon wanted to compete in the US market, as an importer the tax would have to be on the $2,000 final price, resulting in a $40+ larger tax than the domestic competitor.

While an approximately $40 difference on such a device is seemingly small, the effect is similar to implementing a 2% import tariff on the foreign manufactured device. And in the $95 billion US medical device market that is a lot of cash. Certainly, for example in the young microwave ablation market American startups such as NeuWave against the UK's Acculis, domestic companies will enjoy the advantage over foreign competitors.

Of course many devices have lower margins, resulting in a lower difference in effective tax rates. Further, the difference will be slightly diminished as the tax can be considered as a cost of the device sold, though this will have a minimal affect. But what will be the long-term effects of the medical device tax? A new version of transfer pricing? Last minute changes to the legislation? A slowing of manufacturing moving to low-cost countries? What are your thoughts?

MBA Lessons Learned #4: Time Management and Project Scheduling

Dan Corbett — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:19:42 +0000

I recently completed my MBA at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business and have been looking back at my notes from the effort. While the courses have decidedly improved my knowledge base, perhaps the most important lessons occurred supplementary to the classroom. The next few posts will be a chronicle of the lessons outside of the textbooks that I took from my MBA program. The previous three installments include Team Building, Performance, and Leadership, Project Selection and Definition, and Team Collaboration Tools.

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Create a schedule and stick to it. Really, that is all you need to do.

As for why, after your first semester you will discover that many of your projects come due at the same time and/or your teammates are unavailable at a critical point in the project. This is miserable, at least for me. I desperately hate spending every last moment working on a project when, with a little planning, all of the resulting stress could have been prevented from entering my life.

Task Manager in Google Docs

By defining the project(s) schedules upfront you will be able appropriately divide up the project, assign parts to each team member, track progress, and prevent last minute conflicts (disasters). While there is a wide array of project management software, you can get by with any spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheets). What worked for my teams would be to break down the projects into tasks and assign them to the team members with due dates (eventually I started using conditionals to change the cell color depending on the task status relative to the due date - an easy way for everyone to make sure they are on track with their tasks). Be sure to include time for group reviews and that your due dates tie directly into the deliverables you agreed to in your project definition. The only tricky part, and relative advantage for formal project management software, was tracking prerequisite activities; even then it is not too difficult.

By developing your schedule at the beginning of the semester work overload and last minute scrambling can be avoided by you and your teammates. Again, a few minutes of planning upfront can prevent hours of headaches further in the semester.

MBA Lessons Learned #3: Team Collaboration Tools

Dan Corbett — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:55:20 +0000

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Continuing on the MBA projects theme, today I am going to discuss team collaboration. As a part-time student, how to work with your team given schedule constraints was always a challenge. Very few of the full-time students liked to physically meet every time they were going to work on a project either. Further, emailing files back and forth is confusing (what version are we using?) and troublesome (which sections did you just edit?). During the MBA program my system has evolved to the point where, in the last two semesters, collaboration was near perfect; below are some of the key tools.

Documents - There are very few projects that do not require a written document as a deliverable. It is incredibly frustrating and near impossible to merge multiple MS Word files into one when multiple people are working at the same time. My solution - Google Docs. Google Docs allows the entire group to view and edit the same document at once; for example I can be working on the addressable market size while my teammate is editing the competitive positioning tables. Additionally, when someone accidentally deletes a paragraph you can find it again with the see revision history feature (this can take some searching as the final deliverable for my business plan class had 778 changes). Of course some people have a hard time breaking away from MS Word and others do not want to be constantly connected to the Internet. Thankfully there is a solution to this in OffiSync. A Microsoft Office plugin, OffiSync allows you to use MS Word (along with the rest of the MS Office/Google Apps overlapping applications) to view and edit files stored on Google Docs. Further, using OffiSync you can edit a file while offline (you do have to store a copy locally for this) and it will automatically merge the changes when you next connect.

Spreadsheets - As with documents I tried to use Google Docs as much as possible for spreadsheets. Unfortunately there are a few MS Excel functions that do not exist (or at least I could not find) in Google Doc; some functions I could use OffiSync to pick up whereas others did not seem to translate. I did have much better luck using MS Office Live. While it does have the same functionality as Google Docs for documents (including being able to edit on your local copy of MS Office; I am less certain of the offline editing ability), I only preferred it for MS Excel. You may be different.

Conferencing - If you are in a part-time program, someone on your team will undoubtedly have work travel to Japan, Norway, Brazil, New Jersey, or some other equally exciting destination during the project. Assuming you can get your schedules to match, Skype provides an excellent way to video conference in your lost teammate. While there are other services available (such as dimdim) that lets you share documents during the meeting, using Skype with Google Docs (or Office Live) eliminates the need.

Additional Random Information - Often you have tracking, notes, and other random information that you need to store and share. Just for simplicity I try to use something in Google Docs (or Office Live) as much as possible. Otherwise I use Dabbleboard or Google Sites. Dabbleboard is great if you love whiteboards as you can use shapes, freehand, or text to communicate. Alternatively Google Sites is simple way to organize and store lots of notes and text. Both are useful if you cannot come up with a simple solution in a document.

While this list is far from exhaustive (for example many of my classmates preferred Zoho for documents and spreadsheets) and technology continues to rapidly evolve, it should offer you some excellent tools to assist in team collaboration.

MBA Lessons Learned #2: Project Selection and Definition

Dan Corbett — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:05:13 +0000

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One of the great things about a MBA program is that you get to try out a wide array of fields; not just by reading case studies or listening to guest lecturers, but actually completing a project in the field. Projects are a fantastic opportunity to reach out to area companies and find opportunities to learn and employ new skills while giving you exposure to and networking opportunities with potential future employers and partners. Often you can find projects with your previous employer (or current if you are going to school part-time) in a different field where you would like to gain experience.

Generally on the first day of class (or sometimes before) your professor will go over any class projects and hand out a syllabus with relatively detailed requirements. Even though the project work is likely not expected to start for some weeks, I recommend you start you search for a project sponsor company immediately. This will allow the companies you contacted to see if they have a potential project and the resources to support your group (and don’t be surprised when often they do not) as well as the opportunity to ensure your team and professor agree that the project is worthwhile. Of course, some projects are dictated completely by the professor and you get no choice in the matter. Alas.

Along with learning new skills you have additional measures of success for your project. Most obviously is your grade. Less apparent is success for your sponsor company; the results from your project will reflect on you, your teammates, your school, and the perceived value of a MBA. A well executed project can result in internship and job offers; a failed project can result in a poor reputation in that career field. It is critical that your selected project gives you the opportunity to learn, achieve academic success, and provide value to your sponsor company.

Though Project Management is far from my favorite subject, I appreciate many of its tools and techniques. I am not advocating that you take a formal project management system with you on everything but there are some tools that you should (almost) always make use of when starting your project. At a minimum I recommend including project planning to define objective(s), scope, and deliverables; having agreed to these three areas prior to the beginning of a project will drastically increase the likelihood of success and reduce the amount of future angst during the semester.

Objectives
A project should have a clear set of objectives, that is what your group wants to achieve. Typically the objectives are largely defined by your professor and the company’s business needs. Your objectives should be as well defined as possible; this detail will ensure that you, your group, your professor, and the sponsor company all know and agree on what the project is supposed to accomplish. All of the objectives should be measurable, either quantitatively or qualitatively. For example, in your business process design class your project may be to create the baseline for an existing process and then develop an process that is at least 20% more efficient. For a qualitative example, your organizational management class may have you working on a regional expansion plan and you have to determine employee attitudes and fit between opening a new office and purchasing an existing business. Finally, a well defined objective will ensure that the project is reasonable given your very specific timeframe, particularly important as your grade has a deadline associated with it.

Scope
As frequently after a project is underway new features or requests are added the limits and exclusions of a project should be clearly defined. If you need to operate under any assumptions, they should be made clear while defining the project scope. Tied closely with the project objectives, the project scope should be limited to only what is required to complete the objectives. For example, you may limit the project to dealing with only one product or to the sales in a specific region. Of course your sponsor company may request that you do something additional midway through the project, in which case you need to remind them to what was agreed to upfront as the project is critical to your grade. That said, you should try not to just ignore these requests as you want to develop a good relationship with the sponsor company. If it is apparent that you can easily incorporate the change without affecting the schedule, you should do so. Otherwise acknowledge the request and state that, if the team has time at the conclusion of the project, you will work on it. Of course many times you will not have the extra time but this will help the company understand that you need to get something (your grade) out of the project as well.

Deliverables
The purpose of the objective is to deliver something (a tangible and verifiable result, outcome, or similar) and it is important to have all parties agree to what the final deliverables will be at the beginning, lest someone comes out disappointed. The project deliverables will be driven from two sources, your professor and your project sponsor. Each will have their own needs from the project results, likely with some differences. Further, while some deliverables may appear to be identical, the sponsor company may want a detailed summary and well formatted copy of your source data whereas your professor is fine with the information in it's raw form. Another example might be where, in your New Product Development course, the sponsor company is fine with just the final design while your professor needs a documented trail of how you reached the design. Detailing the deliverables up front will ensure that everyone receives what they need. With this knowledge you will know what to produce and where/how to document your journey along the way.

MBA class projects are a fantastic way to learn new skills and discover which fields may be an excellent fit for your future career. In general, working with your group, professor, and project sponsor to define the requirements for success upfront will ensure that you accomplish the project to the satisfaction of all involved parties.

MBA Lessons Learned #1: Team Building, Performance, and Leadership

Dan Corbett — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 04:31:33 +0000

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In a MBA program just about every class will have team projects (I cannot remember a class that we did not have some sort of collaborative efforts). Below are some of the keys I took from the program for team success.

1) Team Selection
Sometimes you get a choice in your teams, sometimes you do not (in which case, you can skip past this section). If you do, use it wisely. You want to make sure your team is stacked with a group that is diverse (more on this shortly), flexible, compatible, and engaged with a comparable work ethic. Selecting a really smart person who is “always” right can quickly kill any team unity; the same goes when half the team just wants to pass while the other half is trying to maintain a high GPA. By selecting a group with similar expectations and desires (project related - not career), your team will be better able to function to succeed. A haphazardly assembled and ill-advised team is sure way to set up failure.
The team formation is a good time to assign a leader. Almost all teams need a leader to manage the process, resolve disagreements, and be a point of contact with the class/professor amongst other things. Only once in my program did I have a team where my partner and I worked so well together that virtually everything below was a moot issue for us; we could challenge each other and yet still work almost perfectly in sync (if I ever have the need and opportunity for a business partner, I will be calling him first). On every other team, we definitely needed a leader. Sometimes this will be the person with the most passion for the project, others it will be a randomly selected individual. You should not always be the leader, nor should you always be a team member; doing both will allow you to practice and observe good (and bad) leadership techniques. Of course sometimes the leader will not be effective. In these cases you might have/need to assume leadership; while this may not be the best to help the leader develop you might be surprised how many times they are grateful you took over and saved the project. This too is an important lesson to take with you outside of the MBA; sometimes to save a floundering company project you may just have to assume the authority.

2) Diversity
Diversity is not just about ensuring different genders and cultures are represented; diversity includes an individuals' entire background. So you have been an engineer and are most comfortable around other number crunchers; this will do nothing for you in an Organization Behaviors class. Similarly a group of marketing communications specialists will have a miserable time in quantitative economics courses. By diversifying your team, you will have access to a vast array of thought processes and problem solving methods; additionally these are the sorts of teams you will work in the real world. Sure, this will cause some strife and challenge your assumptions (probably with good reason) but you are in school to learn, right? A diverse team will provide fresh thinking and improved critical analysis of your group problems and solutions.

3) Distribution of Work
Doing all the work yourself is not the solution. It may be successful for a class, but it can cost you your sanity, reputation, and learning opportunity. Your sanity will suffer because, seriously, do you have THAT much time? Your reputation as while your teammates might be happy with the grade (assuming you earn everyone a good grade) you will get a reputation as a poor team member. Finally you will lose out on a learning opportunity because, in the real world, you WILL work on a dysfunctional team and this WILL help you learn to handle it.
This is a great time to evaluate team and individual strengths, to make both the optimal work assignments and to allow people to develop different areas of interest. While there will be times to let the engineers crunch the numbers and the philosophy majors write the papers; most of the projects should allow for some diversification from stereotypes. You, and your classmates, are in the MBA program to learn; make sure everyone has the opportunity to do so.

4) Communication and Collaboration
You will need to communicate with your teammates. Seriously. This is even more important if you are in an evening program (you will have some meetings while one of your team members is in India or another far off place such as Ohio). Thankfully due to technology, there are plenty of ways to deal with this. Google Docs, Windows Office Live, Skype, Zoho, AIM, email, and an array of other options all make this easy. Like most everything else listed here, at the beginning of a project get together with your team to evaluate what technologies will be the best for the group and to avoid issues such as unfamiliarity with a tool or a corporate computer that prevents installation or use of a service. After your system is set up, be sure to use it; you will just annoy everyone if you keep asking for updates when the latest group version of a presentation is being shared on Google Docs.

5) Management of Work
Everyone has been assigned their initial tasks; these tasks all need to have expectations assigned to them. Expectations can include timeliness, quality, quantity, format, and an array of others. Without this definition up front, people will have different ideas of acceptability (you might think your section needs to only be a draft whereas your teammates have tripled edited theirs) and deadlines (a paper due in a week might make you start working tonight while your partner waits until the night before) to effectively do their work. Make sure your team defines these expectations upfront and develops a monitoring system (a spreadsheet with tasks, due dates, status tracking, and other expectations is a simple yet invaluable solution).

6) Recognition for Accomplishments
No, it will likely not help you get a better grade in this class. So why do it? It will help you get a better grade in your next class. Everyone (almost) likes having someone say thank you for a well done job; think of it as positive reinforcement. If your teammates feel their contributions are being recognized, the recognition will help their satisfaction and increase their contributions to the project. Sometimes I would continue the recognition after the project, sending an email to the professor (CC your team member(s)) after the project turned in with a detailed and glowing review of your teammates’ contributions to the project. Recognition will help build camaraderie and loyalty to the group. Your teammates will want to work with you in future classes and will give you positive reviews when other students ask (and trust me, they will ask) if you are a good team member, all of which should help ensure you get the best possible team for the best possible project results.

While this is far from an exhaustive list on the keys to successful teams, hopefully it will help you succeed from the start with your MBA (and future career) teams.