Discovering a Local on LinkedIn
On a typical day, I spend at least a few minutes browsing this blog and the LABVANTAGE social communities on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. I’m looking to see who is talking about what and who is new. While browsing our LinkedIn group, I noticed something a bit out of the ordinary. In a community composed of customers, employees and other interested followers from all over the world, I noticed a new member of the latter type who had much in common with me. His name is Jon Wetzel, and it turns out that, like me, he lives in Southeast Michigan and is a graduate of my alma mater, Michigan State. Go Spartans!
John is also a lean evangelist and experienced biobanking professional. Since we often work with laboratories to help them improve the quality and efficiency of their operations, I was quite interested in learning more about Jon. We exchanged messages on LinkedIn and ultimately arranged to meet for lunch this past Friday.
UPDATE, 5/5/2011: Jon is now VP of Operations at AdeptBio, a human biospecimen repository. Congratulations, Jon!
The Lunch Conversation Takes an Unexpected Turn
I arrived at noon at the Baja Fresh located midway between our two offices. I looked around but didn’t see anyone who looked like Jon’s profile pic on LinkedIn. Perhaps he had decided to grow out his hair, shave his mustache, or was wearing dark sunglasses? I gave him a call and didn’t hear anyone’s phone going off in the restaurant. So I gave him a call and learned that he was running late due to the unpredictable metro traffic.
Turns out Jon looks just like his profile pic, so I instantly recognized him as he entered the restaurant. We shook hands, greeted each other and then joined the line to place our orders. As we approached the counter, Jon began to talk about a new opportunity with a biobank that was looking for a hosted biobanking solution so that they don’t have to get into the data center business. Well, this was quite interesting to me, as we have a caBIG certified biobanking solution and are working with SHI to provide hosted and SaaS cloud solutions to laboratories (watch my interview with Henry Fastert of SHI). So immediately, the conversation took a turn away from lean process improvement and towards hosted biobanking solutions.
LABVANTAGE is working hard to be able to offer hosted and SaaS deployments of our solutions by the fall of this year. We are beta customers for the SHI enterprise cloud, which will be our cloud platform for such offerings. The beta period begins mid-May and lasts through July. This is when we will be building our initial cloud-based offerings, which include a SaaS biobanking solution. Just as SHI is eager to work with us to get feedback and finalize their cloud services prior to a commercial launch, we are interested in finding customers who are willing to work with us pre-release in defining and refining our SaaS biobanking solution. Based on this conversation, we may just have one. Talk about serendipity!
A Double Lean Lunch
So we agreed to stay in touch regarding our cloud-based biobanking solutions. We found a table, sat down to eat our healthy, low-fat (lean!) Baja chicken salads and the conversation turned back to lean process improvement. He talked about how he got started in the lean discipline and the process improvement work he has done within various laboratories. It is immediately apparent from talking with Jon that he is passionate about applying lean practices, not only within the lab, but also in all aspects of life (you can also get a sense of this passion by reading Jon’s blog on lean practices). In fact, our discussion was interrupted by a loud clatter that resulted when a customer put one too many trays on the two foot high stack of trays on top of a trash can; Jon began to talk about the lack of attention to clean-up during a busy lunch hour and how lean practices could be applied to help the restaurant run more efficiently!
With both of our salads now consumed, we decided that we should get back to work. But we agreed to talk again soon, and in fact, Jon agreed to an interview for this blog on using lean principles to achieve efficiencies within the laboratory. I am used to meeting people in person and then finding them on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. This is the first time that the process was reversed and I “met” someone in the online social media, and it resulted in a valuable face to face meeting. I would have to say that it was quite a positive experience and reaffirms for me the value of social networking.
For those involved in biobanking, you might want to read Jon’s recent blog on the findings of the NCI commissioned review of the caBIG program: Lean Biotech – Scope Creep, VOC and How caBIG got ca-tooBIG. It includes a nice (and completely unsolicited) endorsement of the LABVANTAGE BioBanking solution. Thanks, Jon!
