E118: Supply Chains for Good – Interview with C.J. Nord
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In this episode, we interview C.J. Nord, a passionate supply chain manager and consultant, who shares her journey towards driving societal change through supply chain.
As the founder of Supply Chains for Good, C.J. discusses her extensive career in supply chain management, her recovery from cancer, and how that inspired her skills to launch impactful projects like eliminating ethnic shooting targets and the “There’s Cash in that Trash” initiative. She also delves deep into her legislative efforts to ban ethnic shooting targets used in training within the GSA, highlighting her collaboration on California Senate Bill 1020.
This episode is a must-watch for those interested in leveraging supply chain methodologies to drive systemic and sustainable change for society!
- 00:24 Her Journey in Supply Chain Management
- 00:55 The Power of Supply Chain in Driving Change
- 03:36 Challenges and Rewards in Supply Chain
- 09:47 Process Improvement and Supplier Development
- 18:25 Ethical Dilemmas in Supply Chain
- 19:49 The Fight Against Racially Biased Training Targets
- 34:04 Understanding Legislative Processes
- 35:03 Community Safety and Budget Challenges
- 41:28 The Power of Advocacy
- 44:21 Addressing Racial Bias in Law Enforcement
- 50:38 Introducing “There’s Cash in that Trash”
- 52:10 Circular Economy and Sustainable Solutions
- 01:05:02 Conclusion and Call to Action
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Links
- C.J. Nord – LinkedIn
- Supply Chains for Good
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Have you ordered the book, “Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 2)?” The book is made up of 8 chapters written about experiences from Lean and Six Sigma practitioners, to give you tips and tricks to help you work with nonprofits in your area. All proceeds donated to charity. Now available in audiobook as of Feb 2024. You can also order Volume 1 released in 2019.
Transcript
Note: We’re using a new AI transcription service built into our video/audio editing software, which does a decent job, but doesn’t do punctuation and sentence breaks very well. Hopefully it’s good enough to be helpful.
Brion Hurley: . Welcome everyone. Today on the podcast, I’ve got CJ Nord. CJ is a supply chain manager and consultant, and has a lot to talk to us about related to sustainability.
And a couple of special projects she’s been working on for the last couple of years that she’d like to give us an update on but first I’d like to welcome you to the show, CJ. Thanks for joining us.
C.J. Nord: Thank you. I really appreciate being part of this show. I’m the founder of supply chains for good.
And when I first learned about six Sigma for good, I thought, Oh, there’s my brother from another mother, right?
I’ve spent the 1st 30 years of my career running supply chains for manufacturers. And most of that has been all week. I’ve always had the procurement role. To handle whether or not I was managing the entire department end to end, or just that single function that’s always been part of my duty.
In 2019, after recovering from cancer, I started to think about, over time, over the last few years, I’ve been able to use my supply chain skills, my job skills to drive pretty substantial changes societal level changes. And giving some thought to that, I realized why not?
Because supply chain is the science of systems. And we’re really talking about systemic change. And what I have found throughout the years is that supply chain methodology, and for me that includes the methodology of Six Sigma, Six Sigma Lean that, that’s the tool for the job to drive large scale change, and I feel like that’s something that if A lot more people realized how powerful their skills were, their job skills were, and what a difference they could make in their communities, I think that if a lot more supply chain people were out there volunteering in their communities or for the things that they care about, that we’d find that we’re immensely powerful in driving positive change.
Brion Hurley: Maybe a lot more skill set than they realize, but it’s needed out there, how many things have that connection look of understanding who your suppliers and vendors are.
C.J. Nord: Yeah, exactly. And and I’ve used supply chain if you think about it in the role of the procurement manager I am managing my supplier of services and infrastructure.
Which is the government. And if you take it from that approach and hold your ground like you would if you were negotiating to protect the factory that you serve, You find that it’s just incredibly powerful, surprisingly powerful. In 2019, I founded Supply Chains for Good and it helped me convey that message.
And then in 2021, I decided, you know what, I’m going to see if I can make a living out of this. I read Simon Sinek’s book, The Why, Leading with Purpose. It really took that to heart in the first two years, I just really focused on what I wanted to achieve and put to the side about how I could make a profit on it.
Just first, how could I achieve that? And then in this year, my third year in business all kinds of good things have started to come through and now I’ve really got wheels underneath this supply chains for good thing.
Brion Hurley: That’s awesome. How did you get into supply chain in the first place?
C.J. Nord: It was one of those things where I was 19 years old, took a temp job putting shelves on, or putting stock on a warehouse shelf. And they just noticed she, she does a thorough job. She shows up every day. We have this opening for a buyer. Let’s see if we can train her into it.
And like many people from my generation, we fell into supply chain. You find that a lot for those of us that are, I think, probably over 45 that we fell into supply chain because at that time. There weren’t degrees in supply chain, right? Not anywhere. And as opposed to today, where I have a high school level supply chain program that’s being taught.
So now I’m talking to kiddos, and they’re saying what is this supply chain? How do I know if I like it? And the first thing So the first question that I asked for them is, do you hate to be beat by a problem? And if they look at me like, yeah, as a matter of fact, I do hate to be beat by a problem.
You can come on over here because we’re the, we’re the problem solvers, right?
Brion Hurley: Seemed like a good fit.
C.J. Nord: Yeah. And I enjoyed being. An instrumental part of the organization. I enjoy making a very big difference to my fellow employees.
Because we really do hold in our hands, the company’s profitability. So if I did my job well. Then they had a much better chance of getting raises of more people getting jobs, and eventually not too long after I started in procurement, I shifted over to manufacturing and I’m the daughter of a steel worker.
I’ve had a real love for manufacturing since I was a little kid and that first minute when I went out into the factory. and saw the manufacturing process and realized, man, I’m really a critical part of this. It just captured me. And I think you hear that from a lot of people when they first go into manufacturing that just nothing is more exciting than manufacturing.
It’s just got a different sort of vibrant feel to it. And at the end of the day, I’ve made something, it’s just a great feeling. I’ve enjoyed my career in manufacturing.
Brion Hurley: And there’s so many moving parts and so many challenges. And I think from those outside, it feels like a simple thing.
Like how hard is it? You even have machines and robots to do stuff all I gotta do is put stuff in and out comes the back end.
C.J. Nord: How hard can it be, right? It’s a career where you cannot predict all of the variables. You try to, the more that you predict the better your life will be, right? But you cannot predict COVID, right? Our most recent one you don’t know if there’s going to be a labor disruption at the port, you just really don’t know.
You don’t know if a quality problem is coming, that’s your corner of the world, right? And here’s one of the things that I think in supply chain really makes us so powerful on driving societal level changes. is that we cannot fail. It’s not really an option. If I failed and didn’t get a part in, people went home without a full day’s pay.
I met a container at a factory once at 2 a. m. to avoid that happening. And that sort of, boy, that just really builds. A skill set. And I’ve written an article called there’s grit in integrity, and it gives us that grit, you know that I’m not going to be beat by this problem persistence.
Brion Hurley: Yeah, I think that pressure builds that grit, to be able to Figure out something and challenging every aspect. What about this? What can we do here? Can we get this done? What do you mean it’s held up? Where is it held up? trace this down and come up with an answer. It’s easy to get no or get a logical explanation of why something can’t be done to say, but that’s not acceptable.
And it’s not good enough. What else can we do? That does take a special skill to keep working those issues in a way that doesn’t just, Beat on people either,
C.J. Nord: it isn’t always easy to do that. It’s not always easy. I have one quick funny story. I had my late husband came to me to, came with me to a trade show.
Once it was in Las Vegas and it gave me a chance to gamble and while I went through the show, and one of my suppliers who we had we were just finishing a very difficult quality problem. For months, we’d struggled with it, right? And that strains a relationship really hard. And this fellow who was from Mississippi met my husband, shook his hand, and as loud as he could say, he said, Bob, ain’t she hard to take?
And I could hear people laughing. I could hear my other suppliers in that row going, sometimes he’s hard to take, but that’s just part of pushing people and you can say, please. And you can be polite about it, but you’re still pushing them to a direction they really don’t want to go, this is really hard.
They’d really rather walk away from the problem. Holding people to addressing problems is one of my superpowers. Not letting us walk away from a problem that needs to be solved.
Brion Hurley: Very cool. So when I started working, I have process improvement background. And so my involvement with suppliers was. Only related to specific issues we can prove or figure out that we weren’t causing the problem and then it would start to go back and we’d start asking for data or.
Understand what are we getting from suppliers? How are we receiving in? How are we inspecting stuff like that? As our company matured and started to solve these internal problems, then we were exposing more of the challenges that used to get hidden up or covered up with inventory or our own internal problems would hide and mask some of the supplier problems.
As those started to get lessened internally, we started to see the challenge show up more and more in the supply chain. And so my role ended up actually shifting towards the end to working and developing suppliers so that they weren’t causing problems and working on their internal improvement program, teaching them process improvement, working their own internal challenges of yield and delivery performance.
And so I spent most of the last couple of years When I was in corporate doing work at suppliers, and so I thought that was very interesting to see how my career went from internal to the external supply chain and seeing that, wow, we really have to develop the skill set of the suppliers for us to be successful.
Yes, you do. It really brought out important it was from my standpoint on supplier selection, just, are they easy to work with are they open to learning a with dealing with problems do they want to. Accepting assistance from us all those things go into it and you got a whole wide range of suppliers you work with from small shops of 10 people to companies bigger than yourself,
That you’re trying to influence and say, yes, I know you’re 10 times our size, but you also have quality issues you’re sending or you’re delayed in your shipments
C.J. Nord: you reminded me of it when you had said when you’re dealing with a company that’s so much larger than you, right? Here you are a speck of dust,
pounding on a mountain, right? You reminded me of one of the supply chain conferences that I went to and I attended a session on negotiating. And this lady was just an incredible negotiator. And she was also a scientist, which I thought was very interesting. And the point that she made was you must negotiate on deep logic.
Your logic has to be completely sound, and if your logic is completely sound, and you’re this, a speck of dust negotiating with 3M or some enormous company, your logic can be carried all the way up their food chain, right? It’s the strength of your argument. It’s the strength of the logic, and that’s why you can’t force suppliers just by the strength of your will.
To do something, you’ll get maybe a temporary solution out of that has to be a strong logical argument. For example, you found the quality problem was on there and you can prove it. Oh, no, they have to fix it. No matter how big they are, they still have to fix it.
Brion Hurley: Yeah.
C.J. Nord: So
Brion Hurley: So for supply chain. What is typical process improvement training. That they go through or get because I found that there was a lot of overlap too with our supply chain managers and professionals that were also trying to get them to a point where they didn’t have so many challenges and issues.
So I don’t, and I’ve talked to students who are coming out with supply chain degrees and
they’re getting an introduction to lean or six sigma, but probably not very deep. Maybe it’s a class that they take one course on the topic. And I didn’t know what you had gone through with a company or employer that had a process improvement program, or is this just skills and tools you picked up over the years saying that would be helpful or useful?
C.J. Nord: Yeah, all the manufacturers. I’m sorry to talk over you. All of the manufacturers that I’ve worked for w all practiced lean and supply chain is part of the operations team. Even though I was the supply chain manager, I also if there was an injury on site, I was one of the people that would take that person to the hospital.
Any aspect of manufacturing is definitely part of the supply chain. And if you’re, whether you’re a buyer or the supply chain manager, materials manager, purchasing manager, you have to have a strong background in Six Sigma Lean. To be able to solve complex problems.
And that’s the thing, supply chain we solve complex problems. And one of the, one of my go to tools that is just, it’s hard to understate how powerful it is. It’s just the five whys. You just get to, you get to the root cause of the problem or the root cause of the resistance to solving the problem really quickly.
I’ve also had a specific problem with a past employer where customer orders were dropping out of the system. When there was a quality problem with one of the components and we would consistently drop those orders and customers will call up and say, Hey, it seems like my order should have been here.
It wasn’t even in the system anymore, like really bad. You don’t want to have that happen. And so that was the first time that I actually did the DMAIC exercise. And it worked. We solved that baby. And one of the most exciting things was seeing how strongly all of the employees bought into it. That they really drank up that feeling of, This is, you know what, I can fix this problem.
I’m in control of this situation and we had weekly meetings where we’d call back and we’d realize maybe we hadn’t documented a certain part of the process or we had mistakenly Documented we learned a little bit more and over a couple of months of those reoccurring meetings and working on that problem.
We not only solve that problem, we improve the overall operation. Everybody had that problem solving skill now, and they could understand how that power lied in their own hands.
Brion Hurley: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to look at it or think about it is almost like a road map or some kind of guide for people says, I know this sounds difficult, but if you follow through these steps and check these.
Aspects of the process and go talk to people and collect some data, like it will almost get you to the answer at some point. It might take a little longer because it’s challenging but this tends to work if you follow the steps of it. And so I think that can give people confidence to say, I don’t know how we’re going to fix this, but I think we have the tools or skills that will get us there or help us figure it out.
C.J. Nord: Yeah, exactly. Not every problem can be fixed. Sometimes a company has to change their strategy, sometimes they’ve designed a strategy that is not supportable, and that’s just the God’s honest truth, right? Part, at one point actually with the same employer we determined that we could not consistently produce a subset of finishes.
It just, I couldn’t tell you when that order was going to be ready, because the part would fail, and then it would pass, and then it would fail, and it was just enough where we could say, scientifically, we can’t do this. And so the company dropped those finishes.
Sometimes that’s the right solution. If you’ve tried your best. Sometimes that’s the right solution because you got to keep your promises.
Brion Hurley: Can you tell us the background on this project that you’ve been working on the last couple of years?
C.J. Nord: Yeah, 29 months I tell you what, man, it has been a journey. I’m going to quote one of my friends, Ronald Wright.
He describes procurement as being the moral compass of trade, right? In California, there’s the supply chain transparency law, where the professional purchaser is personally responsible for knowing that there’s no harm in their supply chain, such as child labor, and that applies to larger companies, you may have heard of Nestle frequently violating the child labor rule in Cocoa Bean.
There’s also the conflict minerals law where the purchaser is on the hook for making sure that there’s no human harm happening through their supply chain. So I’m at the age now where I’m not looking to the textbook for the answer. I’m part of the team of people who write those textbooks.
At some point when we have enough gray, we start transition over to that and we have to be able to handle bigger that aren’t just written down in a book for us. So in May of 2022, it hit my radar. That shooting targets, which depict specific ethnic groups, such as black men, Mexican American men, Islamic people, those are the top three that I saw, that those shooting targets are sold through GSA.
Now, for those folks who are listening and may not know what that is, GSA is the General Services Administration. This is a federal agency with an annual budget exceeding 30 billion dollars. And it functions very much like, Amazon for tax funded agencies. And a tax funded agency can’t spend unless the item that they’re buying or the service that they’re buying is in the GSA contract or another similar type of state or county contract, these municipal contracts, right?
And the reason that they exist is to essentially keep tax funded agencies out of trouble, right? They are supposed to be the pinnacle of ethics. for procurement. And they’re also supposed to make sure that the taxpayer is getting the best deal for their dollar, right?
So it, if shooting targets are sold through those agencies, then that means that they’re sold to agencies like law enforcement, highway patrol military any sort of all of the guardians of our society are buying shooting targets through those those online contracts. We’ve all heard, unfortunately, of mistakes that law enforcement officers make in the field where an innocent person gets killed.
And most of the time, it’s somebody who is African American, that an innocent person was killed. I started to research this issue and the more and more I researched it the most important thing that really floated to the top is that armory training, shooting target training, trains motor skills.
So it trains our reflexes. To react before thought. If something goes wrong in the factory, Ryan, one of the first questions that we ask Is was the process followed, right? So if a law enforcement officer kills an innocent black man in the field in his training, included using the target that depicted a black man was the process followed.
And when I saw that issue, I also remembered a couple of stories that had been recounted to me by people who I had just known on a personal level. One was a Los Angeles Police Department officer who, in the most anguish you could imagine, described his role in the wrongful killing of a black man in L.
A. He wasn’t the one that pulled the trigger. The man that they were trying to restrain had picked up a small tree branch and the officer yelled, look out, he’s got a stick. Stick is also a slang word for gun and his fellow officers interpreted it as the person having a gun and that person got killed.
When the officer finished telling me that story, he said, ask any cop about the black man shooting target. They train us. to shoot using black men shooting targets. And he very strongly associated his training with that tragic accident. And that officer had heart problems, he had stomach problems, he couldn’t sleep, his marriage fell apart.
And the reason that I’m really emphasizing that is because this harms the guardians. If we’re training them to make that mistake in the field, That’s a dirty trick that we’re playing on them. I’ve also had an army veteran who himself killed an innocent Afghanistan citizen in front of that man’s child, and he said in recounting this story, I don’t know why I popped the guy, he looked like the targets we trained on.
Speaker: Now, our viewfinder segment, a story shared with us by the San Francisco Chronicle and their columnist, Justin Phillips. Meet Tracy Brown, an artist and activist in Oakland, California. Over the past year, Brown was thinking about buying a gun and was researching her options online. In many of the videos, she saw people shooting a target dummy with some very identifiable features.
Speaker 2: Seeing the facial features of a black person on this figure was startling for me and seeing it brutalized and seeing it be shot over and over. There was so much symbolism caught up in it, but also just watching it was very startling. More troubling to Tracy. The rubber dummy was being made available through the General Services Administration website sold to the U.
Speaker: S. Military Border Patrol and local police departments. That’s when she jumped into action. She premiered an art installation and transformed one of the dummies into a commentary on police killings. I also added wings. And upon the wings, I wrote the names of people who were murdered by those who were arguably desensitized.
Speaker 2: So both by um, the police, but also folks whose behaviors were hidden by and reinforced by the system. Brown has also launched an online petition demanding the GSA stop selling the targets. A spokesperson for the GSA sent a statement saying in part, GSA is committed to advancing racial equity and we look forward to following up when we have more information.
Speaker: As for Tracy Brown, she says she’ll continue to create change through her art.
C.J. Nord: There’s a very important book written by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman called On Killing, and it’s about the psychological cost of being trained to kill and in that book, he points out that the use of realistic shooting targets is It’s not recommended by the NRA, and that the more realistic shooting targets are used, the higher the in the field kill rate is.
So in World War I, we largely used just the circle, Shooting targets, what most people envision as a shooting target. In World War I, the kill rate was 15%. We continued to use more and more realistic shooting targets, and by Vietnam, the kill rate was 90%. I set out to change the system. Because you could, you have to change the system in a way that causes lasting change. And usually when you’re talking about something like this, that involves legislation. I had set out to have legislation created that would make the use of ethnic shooting targets illegal across the board in the state of California.
Illegal for anybody’s use. I also investigated getting a recall. It didn’t fit into the parameters of a recall. After about a year and a half of work, Senator Stephen Bradford partnered with me to create California Senate Bill 1020, which applied only to law enforcement and would require that whether on duty or off duty, That they train only with race neutral shooting targets and what that really meant was that the targets would be largely featureless and in colors that human skin, any human skin doesn’t come in blue, things like that.
We we left to, to make sure that we didn’t impede upon their training. We left live action training, which is like a video training alone. So they would still have been able to do that live action video training, but any stationary shooting targets would not, you couldn’t confuse it for a black man, a white man.
You couldn’t confuse it for that. That bill passed the California Senate and it passed the California assembly, and then on September 29th of this year, Governor Newsom vetoed the bill.
So that’s the point that I’m at now after over two months of work. And I’m back to being just one person. Trying to drive this change again because Senator Bradford turned out. He completed his service. And he can’t run that bill for me again. They also didn’t, they being the elected officials, there’s a way to challenge a veto.
They decided not to do that based upon the fact that it hasn’t been successful since the 70s. But I would like to, at least for the logical people listening to this. podcast. I’d like to really say that if you don’t try, of course you’re gonna fail, right? It sounds like
Brion Hurley: a challenge.
C.J. Nord: Yeah. So I’m back to, it’s not really square one, I’m sure that significant good has gone on from the two plus years of work. We received letters of support from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, from the mayor of Los Angeles. I’m very grateful for a letter of support in the earliest stages from the ILWU Local 13, which is the Port Union for the LA and Long Beach Port.
And before the bill was even created, they showed up as my heroes. Anyway, so that’s where that stands today. And boy, what a journey it has been. Along the way, I have had enough of a concerning threat made to me by somebody from the shooting community to call the FBI, I’ve had a professor with Cal State University of Fullerton threatened me with cease and desist if I continue to raise it in his presence because I served on the advisory board for their supply chain program and the point that I was making is we need to talk about this as a live example of a supply chain ethics violation and that I will hold till until the day I die this is a ethics violation.
For our field, and we should not as people from this field stand for it
Brion Hurley: and have those allow the students in school to have those debates because these aren’t like these things are even, this one, maybe a little more clear. I hope, but there are a lot of things that come up where ethical decisions, what better way that talk through a real life example and say, it’s not easy.
It’s difficult. There’s no like simple answer.
C.J. Nord: Yes, exactly. Oh, you know what? I love what you just said, because when you, when earlier we were talking about how supply chain, it seems easy, right? You just order the part. What’s the problem, right? But when you really start to unfold these things, they are intensely complex.
And at the same time, we want our officers. to be able to shoot with a very high degree of accuracy when they need to, right? That same police officer who had told me the story about his wrongful involvement in a tragic loss of life, told me about his fellow officer walking in to a rape in progress.
And the man’s head was very close. To the woman’s head and he was holding something sharp up to her temple and he killed the man and as gritty as that sounds. I’m all for that cop. Thank you guardian for taking one more rapist away from the field. And I think that, when law enforcement pushed back about this, that they really undervalue how good of a shot your average cop is, right?
And they undervalued how good their instincts are to protect. When that’s clearly the right decision. I don’t think that they need to train with a target that looks hyper realistic and especially one that looks like a black human being where we know that we have a problem we have a quality problem in manner of speaking.
Brion Hurley: On the whole black past three years almost work, can you explain a little bit of that process of getting to bills resolutions because I think that’s. Some of these bigger challenges that I think about are, sustainability as a society and addressing these huge problems. Some of that will require legislation.
I’m sure you’ve learned a lot about that whole process and journey. If you could maybe educate some of us who have never gone through that or don’t understand that, and you’ve already explained some of that already. I think that’d be really interesting as we look to ways of getting things done that help.
A broader group of people or something affects the whole state or country.
C.J. Nord: I’m glad you asked that because, the big goal is to inspire people in our field to step up. And to know how much power they have. That you know that this is part of their natural skill set. Let me use a simpler example.
In 2018. I was serving as my community’s neighborhood watch captain. I also served as the public safety commissioner and committee member. And in multiple committee meetings and this is the head of public safety had highlighted that the budget cuts weren’t working.
And this city that I live in was actually managing their finances pretty tightly. You couldn’t look at it and say oh they’re wasting here and they’re wasting there it’s really lean. And he is interesting when you’re in these meetings with people who are part of the government structure.
It’s very interesting to me about how they can state major problems, major, and then just move on to the next thing and really ignore solving that critical problem. And that’s a government issue. They ignore major problems. And at that so for a couple of the committee meetings, the director of public safety had said we can’t complete that patrol or we can’t repair that piece of equipment.
And quite frequently, it was that we couldn’t patrol our community’s bike path. And then in one of the meetings the lieutenant reported that a woman had been raped on that bike path and my stomach just hit the floor. So with. 30 years of experience being the lead negotiator for my companies, right?
I had the fight there at that meeting and I said, okay what will it take to be able to fund law enforcement? Cause there’s, believe me, there’s a minimum amount of officers that any community needs on the field at all times. So that community is not safe or your response time will not be high enough.
And I literally used the five why’s. There, Brian and you know how, skipping around, the old Wizard of Oz movie where Oz is behind a curtain and he’s going, I’m the great and terrible Oz, right? Really at the end of the day, that’s your elected official. They got a nice suit.
It’s a fancy title. They’re telling you they’re the great and terrible Oz, right? But then you say, yeah, but Oz, why aren’t you raising the taxes? If it takes raising taxes, why aren’t you raising taxes? And then it got to the city council doesn’t want to do that. Why doesn’t the city council want to make our city safer?
They think it’ll threaten their election. And so I said, okay the public safety committee here, we, what if we, Give them a recommendation, then isn’t it my fault? Can’t they blame it on me? Doesn’t that take away that I’m afraid I’m not going to be reelected problem. And using that argument, I had what was really a very grueling negotiation at that committee meeting where one of the members really didn’t want to raise taxes.
And so it was me against. This other person he was shouting, nobody stuck up for me, not one. It was just like, CJ’s just got to handle it, right? And again, I could do that because I trained for that lifting for three decades. That wasn’t my first rodeo. That wasn’t my first heavy negotiation.
And so I had my own motor skills. To fall back on. And at that time, I had cancer, and I was going to be losing my hair about a week from then. But I still had that skill, because I, again, I trained for it. And at the end of the day, the guy who was fighting with me, he said even if they say yes, it won’t go on the ballot for two more years.
And I said we better start now. Let’s vote on it. And all of those people who were kicking me to the curb, they all voted yes in that meeting. And then our city voted that sales tax increase in by a wide margin, by a wide margin. So what the elected officials thought would be unpopular was actually popular because it solved the problem, right?
And we had seen in our community. that businesses were moving that our property values were lower than just the neighborhood, the neighboring city. And our crime was part of that problem. And that’s where I really put together that if you fail to protect, you will fail to prosper sequentially, right?
As all things in supply chain, there’s an order for this protect first, just like we say safety first. And then once you have that in line, You’ll prosper.
Brion Hurley: I think it sounds like you did a good job of kind of explaining. It’s not just a tax increase. It’s going to provide these other benefits that’s worth.
It’s an investment into the community and to our residents. It’s, there’s, just like anything we buy things, we think there’s some benefit for doing that. Personal benefit, or it’s saving us money. It’s no different than, taxes, no one wants to pay taxes, but if we know what it’s going for, and it says this alleviates a problem or concern or a risk or a fear I have, it’s worth some amount of money.
And connecting the dots helps people understand that this is apparently the residents agreed.
C.J. Nord: We’re good at connecting the dots. So to answer your question if somebody has a concern in their own city that they really want to find out more about the first step to learning more is to contact your city council member.
And your city council member, he’s like your sales rep, right? The sales rep for your supplier. The city council member is the one that, out of all of the whole city structure, will be the most willing to talk with you, meet with you, and discuss the problem. And then, once you have that insight, To what the problem really is, what’s making that be a lasting problem, then you can work with your city government to drive change on the municipal level,
it’s really pretty doable. Over the years I’ve gotten a traffic light installed at a dangerous intersection. I’m helping a community in South LA work with the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation on their infrastructure, their public safety and infrastructure in that region of South LA.
Most of the advocacy work that I do is really boring stuff like that. Just, okay we just need to talk to each other. But getting the first meeting with the engineers at the city of Los Angeles took me two months, well over 24 attempts. And I was told again and again, Ms. Nord, if we choose to return your call.
Now, who in the supply chain is going to take that as an answer?
On the state level, driving the state law, If you want to have a state law created, then you need to find a lawmaker to be your partner in that. So that’s going to be a senator or an assembly person. And my friend, it is damn hard to get their attention. It’s so hard, even when you’re dealing with things that are so obviously a problem.
we supply chain people, again, we don’t walk away from problems. We have a tenacity for problem solving that I don’t think really exists. in other fields like it does in supply chain.
Brion Hurley: And that persistence I’m sure has just gotten it to this far, and I know you feel disappointed so far with the results, but do you have any insights on why it was vetoed? Is there any kind of explanation on that or is there something specific in there that held it back or?
C.J. Nord: Great question. We presented significant data, right? Again, earlier, as I was saying, if you negotiate using deep logic. So we presented a psychology study from a leading psychologist organization. I think it was the American society of psychologists called the police officers dilemma that had proven out that when an officer was faced with a target.
That was representing a person of color as opposed to a target that represented somebody who looks like you or me that they shot at the target of color one second faster than the targets representing white people. And that’s life and death. That one second is life and death. We also provided. Input from Captain Mikael Ali, who was a he at that time was a captain with the San Francisco Police Department.
He’s currently running to be captain in the city of Vallejo. He is one of our nation’s most distinguished armory instructors. He is certified to teach any law enforcement agency in the country. He is a certified NRA instructor. He provided strong arguments about how it wasn’t necessary to do this, and how it is inherently dangerous.
So we covered the mental aspect of it, the mental health aspect of it. We covered the law enforcement training aspect of it. The only, and we had significant written support for the bill. The only opposition came from the California Police Chiefs Association and the California Sheriffs Association and the reason that I just got a little smile here is because there are arguments about why.
The bill shouldn’t go into place, were actually supply chain arguments. It was that they were afraid that they couldn’t get the target, or that what would they do with the inventory. I’m just like, guys, really? You’re gonna give me a supply chain problem? There were no other problems that they put forth.
backed by data. And at the end of the day, Newsom’s, Governor Newsom’s veto said that it wouldn’t, that our wording was too broad and that it wouldn’t give them enough training tools. But again, our data was strong, and there was no data that said that it was essential to use realistic shooting targets that represented, black human beings, Mexican American human beings, Islamic human beings, there was no supporting data for that.
And I don’t think that those two organizations really speak for every California police chief or every California sheriff, because the sheriff for Los Angeles County Robert Luna, did not oppose that. California Board of Supervisors did a specific motion of support without his opposition for it.
So we’re. It’s the most important thing is at this point is to get another lawmaker to say, Yes I’ll write version two of bill. And when I finally not if, but when I finally do get somebody to do that, then I will go to the California Police Chiefs Association and the California Sheriff’s Association face to face.
And we’ll talk this through and we will address all of their concerns. And at the end of the day, I think their concerns really come down to, look, we don’t want our image associated with the use of these targets. It’s You know, it feels like more of an emotional trying to hide this problem response on their side.
And having served for seven years as my community’s neighborhood watch captain, having had the argument to fund our law enforcement when everybody else was saying defund the police, I feel like I’m in the middle. And that I’m fulfilling my role as. A supply chain professional and being the keeper of balance between these two sides, right?
We have to find where’s our balance point, right? And that takes, it takes hard conversations. It takes having the conversations that nobody wants to have.
Brion Hurley: Which is your skill set.
C.J. Nord: Yes, I hate it. That’s the God’s honest truth. I really don’t like it. I really do not like to to put that hat on. But look, if it means somebody’s life gets saved, I can be uncomfortable for a little while.
Brion Hurley: We’ll link up to a lot of the other videos you shared copies of legislation updates, sent other documents.
So I’ll link those up as well. Is there anything else you wanted to share about that? I wanted to also. Learn about cash for trash.
The other things you’ve got going on.
C.J. Nord: – thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this thing with the targets. We, there are so many problems with horrible racism in the United States, and there are so many aspects of that we can’t fix.
You can’t change hate that people hold in their hearts. I can’t fix that, but I can fix this, right? And those things that we can fix, we must. So that’s my wrap on that. You want to switch, you want to switch to happier subjects?
Brion Hurley: Yeah, let’s do that. Very inspiring and very great, awesome work.
And maybe some other people listening to this can join in and help out too. So we’ll give everyone your contact information,
Speaker 3: how they can
Brion Hurley: reach you, and maybe they’ve got their own challenges or things that they’ve identified that they’d like to work through and you could assist them with.
C.J. Nord: I would love to have conversations with people about the problems that they want to solve and to talk to them about how they can solve this problem, right? I invite that anytime somebody wants to say, hey, I want to solve veteran homelessness, or I want to solve litter in my community.
Let’s work it out. We can, heck, if we can solve the toilet paper shortage, right? That’s right. Anyway.
Going on to my sustainability program, which is called There’s Cash in That Trash, Profit Driven Circularity. I sit around a lot and think about how to solve problems that are enormous. And the way that I get my head around that is ridiculous and audacious as it sounds is I put in my mind, okay, I’m the supply chain manager for earth, and I got to solve these problems and that gets the thought process rolling correctly in my head.
That’s also the application of one of president Eisenhower’s principles. Which is he paraphrasing it, it was that if he couldn’t solve a problem, he would make it bigger, and he’d make it bigger, and make it bigger, and once he made the problem big enough, then he could see his way to a solution. So we have to think on scale with world leaders if we are going to solve world problems.
And the problem that I wanted to solve is this circularity thing. We’re just throwing too much stuff away. And that, for 30 years of running supply chains, nearly everything that went into the dumpster, I would walk by and go, Can I find a better use for that? It just always bothered me that we were throwing material away and I tried to find solutions for better uses for that material, but they just weren’t in place.
When I started really running supply chains, it was the late 80s, early 90s. I and other people through this period of time, we pioneered, we created the global supply chain that’s in place right now. It was our work. It was calling up a supplier and saying, I think you can make that even though you don’t think you can make it.
It was sending in Brian to solve their quality problem, right? There’s boots on the ground work. To form a supply chain, so we did that and we created the global supply chain that is in place today. But what we created was a linear supply chain extract from natural resources, make something from it, throw it away, right?
That’s what we created. We didn’t build the second half of the supply chain where materials are instead of being thrown away, are routed back into the factories to make something else. And the best example of a profit driven supply chain that I think most people are familiar with is metals, right?
Out here, I can put my scummy old beat up barbecue on the sidewalk and somebody’s gonna pick it up, right? About 50 percent of the metals in the United States are recycled back into the process. So I started thinking about this. How do we tackle this? How can we create circularity on a grand scale?
What if we wanted to get it done inside of a decade? What would that take to do that? And I realized we are Expecting this to happen one company at a time, and that’s too small, that was mistake number one. That we’re expecting individual companies to be the solution to creating circularity.
It’s too big for a single company. But an industry has the same kind of product that they make, and therefore they have the same kind of waste that they produce. So if, what if we, instead of trying to drive this one company at a time, decided to drive change a whole industry at a time. And then I started thinking how could we organize that?
How could that be done? And I realized that it’s the trade associations, right? The trade associations, they’re already in place. They are already the hub of their industry that all the spokes come out of. They’ve got everybody on the mailing list. They have lobbyists that work for them, right? And trade associations today don’t really have a 21st century mission.
They need something like this to be relevant. So I went to the Association of Woodworking and Furnishing Suppliers. and I’m very fortunate that a lot of my manufacturing years were spent in that industry. So I had old friends that I could say, Hey, you know what? Here’s my nutsy idea.
What do you think? And they said yes to it. And in July of this year, we started the research. And that’s. First, the first thing that we started with is researching how can the ways that this industry generates be put to a profitable use and so often we’re expecting to create circularity driven by taxes.
That didn’t work. It’s a temporary solution, right? We need a trade profit driven circularity so that everybody’s motivator to get that material back into the factory buy the profit that they get that then feeds their family, right? There’s nothing shameful about making a profit. So we started doing the research, we realized that we needed to focus on what the largest amount of waste was, and that’s wood waste that’s mixed up with resins and laminates, so it’s not pure wood.
Pure wood has lots of uses for bead landscaping, that problem is fairly well solved. Now, California is known for its stringent clean air and we really have such a reputation for that it never occurred to anybody in the business cycle that California would allow us to build small waste to energy plants.
And so just within the last 30 days or so, I discovered some legislation that passed in 2016 and 2022 that where the state said, if you generate energy from biomass, we call that clean energy and utilities are required to purchase a certain amount back from you.
And once I saw that legislation, I thought, Oh, my God, like we can, I’m not talking about open air burning. Of course, these are controlled biomass boiler burn that have add on systems that scrub the air. So I’m not compromising clean air quality for this project, but then I started to look into it and talk to various agencies like the California Air Resources Board, the Air Quality Management District, and their responses where I expected them to say, Oh, hell no, you can’t do that.
Are you crazy? Try it in Michigan or try it in this state or that state, but you’re not doing that in California. And their response was yeah, the permitting’s hard, but we can send you a checklist. You can do it. And then as we started to investigate it more and more, we realized fairly recently that the state actually has four major sources of power coming offline and our emphasis on electric vehicles and electrifying the heavyweight fleet.
Really strain our electrical grid. So we’ve got four sources of power coming offline, nothing replacing that, and higher usage of the electrical grid. And I realized, oh my god, the woodworking industry can be a major part in solving this problem. And if a woodworker puts in a small waste energy plant, even if our communities have some kind of major lasting blackout, they can be their community’s power resiliency center.
That’s where you can charge your phone. That’s where emergency vehicles can be charged. So it’s turned into something that is. It appears to be more and more feasible, necessary for the communities, and business owners, to quote a couple of business owners when I first talked to them about what can we make with this wood waste, maybe it’s engineered wood, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that they’ve each said CJ, if the state had let me burn it for power, I’d start that tomorrow,
right? It’s literally their idea, making the implementation of it easier. So now actually today I went to one of those woodworking factories who’s a participant in the project, and I have a big stack of his power invoices and his wood waste disposal invoices. And I’ll be able to hand that over to the Bioenergy Association of California.
And they’re going to help do some kind of rough penciling to see, is there enough wood waste there? To generate the power to cover that whole facility or would it possibly be more power than that facility needs? And then in that case, they can sell it back to the grid and that facility that decides that they can generate power can also be now a nearby waste disposal site for their smaller competitors.
So instead of hauling away truckload after truckload after truckload of wood several miles away from the factory, we can just move it a few miles, right? So we also make a difference on, on vehicle emissions.
Brion Hurley: Less the resiliency or the disaster management aspect of that. It’s like we start seeing the other benefits.
Not only just is there an ROI on this investment, but it creates these other opportunities and also reduces transportation. Keeps. Vehicles off the road reduces traffic congestion. It’s hard to quantify that sometimes. But then you see this project and it’s almost the other benefits around it.
Make it more appealing than the direct benefits of the energy generation.
I think it’s really cool to connect all those dots to show that this is more than just cost savings or, cost reduction for the company. It’s actually handles lots of solutions. So that’s really cool.
C.J. Nord: Yeah. And we learned that because we went above and beyond. The problem, right? Because we looked at it for a whole industry and because we do that too, we’re able to get meetings with senators with lots of elected officials and go to them unabashedly and say, Where’s the funding for this?
Is there grant funding? Is there any help that you can give us to take away some of the sizable investment? I’m sure that it will be for each factory. But manufacturing people really well. And I just love people in manufacturing there. And I think that when we turn to them and say, you can be your community’s power resiliency center.
I think they’d love that.
So that’s all about there’s cash in that trash.
Brion Hurley: Very cool.
C.J. Nord: Thank you. Amazing.
Brion Hurley: I think those are exactly the type of Initiatives and programs that, trying to figure out how do we get more people like us engaged in looking at those challenges and using our skills to move these forward and show like, hey, we’ve got a skill set that can help with this and approach it maybe differently than how it’s been approached in the past.
Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story and look forward to all the future activities and projects you’ve got going on. Hopefully people reach out to you and join you and help you out because we can’t do it ourselves.
C.J. Nord: Too many things to
Brion Hurley: deal with.
C.J. Nord: We need an army, I will work on the elimination of ethnic shooting targets until the end of my days.
And justice is a relay race, so we need to train the next generation to take over, right?
We need those high school kids studying supply chain to know how powerful they will be.
Brion Hurley: Great, thank you so much. Anything else?
C.J. Nord: They’re more than welcome to reach me LinkedIn or they can look up supply chains for good dot org Contact me there,
thank you.
Brion Hurley: Okay. Thank you so much.