Podcasts about Gemba

BONUS: Maria Chec Explores the Divide Between Agile Leaders and Practitioners In this BONUS episode, we explore Agile leadership with Maria Chec, author and host of Agile State of Mind. Maria shares insights from her analysis of Miro's Agile Survey, revealing a concerning disconnect between how Agile leaders and practitioners experience agile methodologies. We explore the roots of this divide, discuss practical approaches to bridging the gap, and consider the implications of recent industry developments like the PMI-Agile Alliance merger. Maria offers valuable perspectives on creating truly collaborative environments where frameworks serve the teams, not the other way around. The Disconnect Between Leaders and Practitioners "Practitioners feel pressured to comply with agile practices when they don't seem to add value." Maria highlights a stark divide revealed in Miro's survey of 1,200 agile practitioners and leaders. When asked if agile is living up to its original values, leaders and practitioners gave drastically different responses. For example, 69% of practitioners felt processes and tools overshadow individuals in their organizations, while only 43% of leaders shared this view. Similarly, 58% of practitioners believed documentation was prioritized over delivering final products, compared to just 39% of leaders. These disparities point to a fundamental disconnect in how agile is experienced at different organizational levels, with practitioners often feeling frameworks are imposed rather than collaboratively implemented. When Frameworks Become the Problem "The framework is too rigid... The framework is too complex... We have to change too much to use the framework." The issue isn't with agile frameworks themselves but how they're applied, Maria argues. Leaders often implement frameworks like SAFe without sufficient practitioner input or adaptation to organizational context. This creates an anti-pattern of "magical thinking" where companies believe they can install off-the-shelf solutions that worked elsewhere without considering their unique circumstances. The practitioners, who must live with these frameworks daily, experience frustration when rigid implementations fail to address their actual needs. Conway's Law comes into play here – the structure imposed by leadership often doesn't align with how teams naturally need to collaborate based on the systems they're building. The Role of Psychological Safety "Can I really admit that something the leadership made me do is not working for me? Will I be the only one admitting it?" This disconnect reveals deeper issues around psychological safety and trust within organizations. Many practitioners fear speaking up about framework problems, especially when they've just endured yet another organizational transformation. Maria emphasizes that without psychological safety, feedback loops break down, preventing the continuous improvement that's central to agile philosophy. Leaders must create environments where teams feel safe to provide honest feedback about what's working and what isn't, without fear of being singled out or dismissed. Without this safety, frameworks become rigid implementations rather than adaptable approaches that evolve with team needs. Reconnecting Through Gemba Walks "Be there where the value is created and know what's going on." To bridge the gap between leadership vision and practitioner reality, Maria strongly recommends Gemba walks – a concept from Lean and Toyota where leaders go to where value is created. This practice helps leaders understand the actual work being done and build relationships with team members. Maria references Project Aristotle at Google, which found that trust and psychological safety are fundamental to team success. She also notes the importance of leaders articulating a meaningful mission to inspire teams, sharing her experience at a taxi-hailing app where the CEO's vision of reducing urban parking needs made her feel she was "building something for the future." Leaders should regularly spend time where the actual work happens Teams need to understand how their work contributes to a larger purpose Open communication channels must be genuine, not just symbolic In this segment, we refer to Management 3.0 and Managing For Happiness by Jurgen Appelo.  The PMI-Agile Alliance Merger and the Future of Agile "Have we really found better ways? Why are Agile Alliance and PMI merging?" The recent merger between the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance represents a surprising development in the industry. Maria takes an optimistic view, wondering if this indicates PMI recognizing that agile is truly the way forward. She acknowledges the perception that "Agile is dead" discussions highlight a crisis in the movement, but suggests the merger might be an opportunity to influence project management with agile values. She emphasizes how AI is creating massive changes that require experimentation and adaptation – precisely what agile approaches enable. This industry shift offers agile practitioners the chance to shape how traditional and agile methodologies might complement each other in the future. The merger could be seen as closing a circle or as an opportunity for cross-pollination "Agile is dead" discussions reflect growing pains rather than true failure Rapid technological changes with AI require more experimentation, not less Breaking Down Silos with "Glue Roles" "What are the 'glue roles' that you need in your organization?" Maria introduces her concept of "glue roles" – positions that help break down silos and foster collaboration regardless of what they're called. Whether they're RTEs (Release Train Engineers), Agile Coaches, or Technical Project Managers, these roles can transform organizational effectiveness when focused on enabling teams rather than enforcing processes. She observes that nature constantly changes, yet we expect our companies to remain static. This mindset prevents the adaptation necessary for true agility. Instead, organizations need individuals who can facilitate communication, remove barriers, and help teams collaborate effectively across boundaries. Focus on the function of collaboration rather than rigid role definitions Adapt roles to organizational needs rather than forcing organizational change to fit frameworks Use these roles to foster psychological safety and open communication Learning Through Experimentation "We need to experiment." Looking toward the future, Maria emphasizes the importance of experimentation in the face of rapid technological change, particularly with AI. She notes that while tech professionals are often thought to be early adopters, AI tools like ChatGPT are being embraced across all industries. The accelerating pace of change means we can no longer plan years ahead with certainty – what we use today may be obsolete in two years. This reality makes agile approaches even more relevant, as they embrace change rather than fight it. She encourages agile practitioners to openly discuss how they use these new tools, adapting their practices rather than clinging to outdated methods. The accelerating pace of change makes long-term planning increasingly difficult AI is already transforming work across all industries, not just tech Agile principles of adaptation and experimentation are more relevant than ever About Maria Chec Maria Chec is a seasoned Agile leader, ProKanban Trainer, and creator of Agile State of Mind. With over a decade of experience, she specializes in transforming teams through SAFe, OKRs, and process optimization, achieving remarkable productivity gains. Maria's mission is empowering teams to thrive through collaboration and adaptability. You can link with Maria Chec on LinkedIn and subscribe to Maria Chec's Substack.

How do you pivot your career to the commercial side of sport so you can grow the game you love?Kiri Madhani breaks down how she transitioned from game development roles to become a Senior Commercial Partnerships Manager at DAZN growing women's football in Europe.If you feel like your career is a bit stuck, this is your roadmap.About the guest:Kiri Madhani Senior Commercial Partnerships Manager at DAZN, and is part of the team recently short-listed for Football Business of the Year Award at the 2025 Women's Football Awards.Plenty to look out for in this conversation including Who is DAZN and what makes them a massive player in the sports media world. How Kiri consciously pivoted her career from game develop roles across university sport and charities into the Commercial world working with $Million deals and major rights holders. Plus tools on how to handle difficult conversations and work with others effectively. Kiri is one of my oldest friends in the sports industry, so naturally we go off topic a little from time to time, but I hope you enjoy.We cover:(00:00) - Interview begins(03:05) - Introduction(08:35) - Quick fire questions(20:01) - Kiri's role at DAZN explained(29:58) - Kiri's involvement in branding & pitching process(32:14) - Selling brand deals(37:25) - Understanding DAZN's offering(41:00) - Working with FIBA Media growing Women's Basketball(45:10) - How Kiri landed the role at DAZN(50:09) - How the FISU Forum in France influenced Kiri's career(58:07) - How a side role at London Rowing Club helped Kiri in landing a job in commercial sport(01:04:03) - Tips for a successful interview(01:10:10) - How to have tough conversations with colleagues(01:20:11) - Advice to her younger selfIf you like this ep, give these a go next:#289: How to move from London to Australia and work in Sports Marketing | George Ludlow's journey to Gemba#290: Inside the 2025 FISU World University Games with Mirinda Kidman#309: How I landed a dream job at Cricket Australia | Reuben Williams, Founder of SportsGradWant a job in sport? Click here.Follow SportsGrad on socials: LinkedIn | Instagram | TikTok Follow Reuben on socials: LinkedIn | Instagram | TikTokBig thanks to Deakin University for making this episode possible. Check out their Master of Sport Management, ranked #1 in Australia.Thanks for listening, much love! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New research from The Gemba Group suggests a credibility problem for the sports sponsorship industry arising when agencies both advise brands on sponsorship opportunities and sell rights for those same properties, leading to potentially biased recommendations. The discussion highlights the increasing involvement of procurement departments, the need for greater transparency and better analytical tools, and the importance of long-term, sustainable relationships between brands and rights holders. Our guests view these issues as crucial for sponsorship to continue growing as a vital revenue stream for sports organizations. Guests:Rob Mills, Global CEO, GembaClaire Kelly, Managing Director of Europe and Middle East, Gemba.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner' on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you're interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

What if everything you thought you knew about transformation was wrong? In this episode, Marcus Cauchi and Matt Gaskin cut through the nonsense and dive into the brutal truths about why most change programs flop—and what Lean really looks like when it's done right.

Join host Andrew Stotz for a lively conversation with Cliff Norman and Dave Williams, two of the authors of "Quality as an Organizational Strategy." They share stories of Dr. Deming, insights from working with businesses over the years, and the five activities the book is based on. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, we have a fantastic opportunity to learn more about a recent book that's been published called "Quality as an Organizational Strategy". And I'd like to welcome Cliff Norman and Dave Williams on the show, two of the three authors. Welcome, guys.   0:00:27.1 Cliff Norman: Thank you. Glad to be here.   0:00:29.4 Dave Williams: Yeah, thanks for having us.   0:00:31.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a while. I was on LinkedIn originally, and somebody posted it. I don't remember who, the book came out. And I immediately ordered it because I thought to myself, wait, wait, wait a minute. This plugs a gap. And I just wanna start off by going back to Dr. Deming's first Point, which was create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and stay in business and to provide jobs. And all along, as anybody that learned the 14 Points, they knew that this was the concept of the strategy is to continue to improve the product and service in the eyes of the client and in your business. But there was a lot missing. And I felt like your book has started really to fill that gap. So maybe I'll ask Cliff, if you could just explain kind of where does this book come from and why are you bringing it out now?   0:01:34.5 Cliff Norman: That's a really good question, Andrew. The book was originally for the use of both our clients only. So it came into being, the ideas came out of the Deming four day seminar where Dr. Tom Nolan, Ron Moen and Lloyd Provost, Jerry Langley would be working with Dr. Deming. And then at the end of four days, the people who some of who are our clients would come up to us and said, he gave us the theory, but we don't have any methods. And so they took it very seriously and took Dr. Deming's idea of production viewed as a system. And from that, they developed the methods that we're going to discuss called the five activities. And all of our work with this was completely behind the wall of our clients. We didn't advertise. So the only people who became clients were people who would seek us out. So this has been behind the stage since about 1990. And the reason to bring it out now is to make it available beyond our client base. And Dave, I want you to go ahead and add to that because you're the ones that insisted that this get done. So add to that if you would.   [laughter]   0:02:53.0 Dave Williams: Well, thanks, Cliff. Actually, I often joke at Cliff. So one thing to know, Cliff and Lloyd and I all had a home base of Austin, Texas. And I met them about 15 years ago when I was in my own journey of, I had been a chief quality officer of an ambulance system and was interested in much of the work that API, Associates of Process Improvement, had been doing with folks in the healthcare sector. And I reached out to Cliff and Lloyd because they were in Austin and they were kind enough, as they have been over many years, to welcome me to have coffee and talk about what I was trying to learn and where my interests were and to learn from their work. And over the last 15 years, I've had a great benefit of learning from the experience and methods that API has been using with organizations around the world, built on the shoulders of the theories from Dr. Deming. And one of those that was in the Improvement Guide, one of the foundational texts that we use a lot in improvement project work that API wrote was, if you go into the back, there is a chapter, and Cliff, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's chapter 13 in this current edition on creating value.   0:04:34.3 Dave Williams: In there, there was some description of kind of a structure or a system of activities that would be used to pursue qualities and organizational strategy. I later learned that this was built on a guide that was used that had been sort of semi self-published to be able to use with clients. And the more that I dove into it, the more that I really valued the way in which it had been framed, but also how, as you mentioned at the start, it provided methods in a place where I felt like there was a gap in what I saw in organizations that I was working with or that I had been involved in. And so back in 2020, when things were shut down initially during the beginning of the pandemic, I approached Lloyd and Cliff and I said, I'd love to help in any way that I can to try to bring this work forward and modernize it. And I say modernize it, not necessarily in terms of changing it, but updating the material from its last update into today's context and examples and make it available for folks through traditional bookstores and other venues.   0:05:58.9 Andrew Stotz: And I have that The Improvement Guide, which is also a very impressive book that helps us to think about how are we improving. And as you said, the, that chapter that you were talking about, 13, I believe it was, yeah, making the improvement of value a business strategy and talking about that. So, Cliff, could you just go back in time for those people that don't know you in the Deming world, I'm sure most people do, but for those people that don't know, maybe you could just talk about your first interactions with Dr. Deming and the teachings of that and what sparked your interest and also what made you think, okay, I wanna keep expanding on this.   0:06:40.0 Cliff Norman: Yeah. So I was raised in Southern California and of course, like many others, I'm rather horrified by what's going on out there right now with fires. That's an area I was raised in. And so I moved to Texas in '79, went to work for Halliburton. And they had an NBC White Paper called, "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?", and our CEO, Mr. Purvis Thrash, he saw that. And I was working in the quality area at that time. And he asked me to go to one of Deming's seminars that was held in Crystal City, actually February of 1982. And I got down there early and got a place up front. And they sent along with me an RD manager to keep an eye on me, 'cause I was newly from California into Texas. And so anyway, we're both sitting there. And so I forgot something. So I ran up stairs in the Sheraton Crystal City Hotel there. And I was coming down and lo and behold, next floor down, Dr. Deming gets on and two ladies are holding him up. And they get in the elevator there and he sees this George Washington University badge and he kind of comes over, even while the elevator was going down and picks it up and looks it up real close to his face. And then he just backs up and leans, holds onto the railing and he says, Mr. Norman, what I'm getting ready to tell you today will haunt you for the rest of your life.   0:08:11.8 Cliff Norman: And that came true. And of course, I was 29 at the time and was a certified quality engineer and knew all things about the science of quality. And I couldn't imagine what he would tell me that would haunt me for the rest of my life, but it did. And then the next thing he told me, he said, as young as you are, if you're not learning from somebody that you're working for, you ought to think about getting a new boss. And that's some of the best advice I've ever gotten. I mean, the hanging around smart people is a great thing to do. And I've been gifted with that with API. And so that's how I met him. And then, of course, when I joined API, I ended up going to several seminars to support Lloyd Provost and Tom Nolan and Ron Moen and Jerry as the various seminars were given. And Ron Moen, who unfortunately passed away about three years ago, he did 88 of those four day seminars, and he was just like a walking encyclopedia for me. So anytime I had questions on Deming, I could just, he's a phone call away, and I truly miss that right now.   0:09:20.5 Cliff Norman: So when Dave has questions or where this reference come from or whatever, and I got to go do a lot of work, where Ron, he could just recall that for me. So I miss that desperately, but we were busy at that time, by the time I joined API was in '88. And right away, I was introduced to what they had drafted out in terms of the five activities, which is the foundation of the book, along with understanding the science of improvement and the chain reaction that Dr. Deming introduced us to. So the science of improvement is what Dr. Deming called the System of Profound Knowledge. So I was already introduced to all that and was applying that within Halliburton. But QBS, as we called it then, Qualities of Business Strategy was brand new. I mean, it was hot off the press. And right away, I took it and started working with my clients with it. And we were literally walking on the bridge as we were building it. And the lady I'm married to right now, Jane Norman, she was working at Conagra, which is like a $15 billion poultry company that's part of Conagra overall, which is most of the food in your grocery store, about 75% of it. And she did one of the first system linkages that we ever did.   0:10:44.5 Cliff Norman: And since then, she's worked at like four other companies as a VP or COO, and has always applied these ideas. And so a lot of this in the book examples and so forth, comes from her actual application work. And when we'd worked together, she had often introduced me, this is my husband, Cliff, he and his partners, they write books, but some of us actually have to go to work. And then eventually she wrote a book with me with Dr. Maccabee, who is also very closely associated with Dr. Deming. So now she's a co-author. So I was hoping that would stop that, but again, we depend on her for a lot of the examples and contributions and the rest of it that show up in the book. So I hope that answers your question.   0:11:28.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and for people like myself and some of our listeners who have heard Dr. Deming speak and really gotten into his teachings, it makes sense, this is going to haunt you because I always say that, what I read originally... I was 24 when I went to my first Deming seminar. And I went to two two-day seminars and it... My brain was open, I was ready, I didn't have anything really in it about, any fixed methods or anything. So, for me, it just blew my mind, some of the things that he was talking about, like thinking about things in a system I didn't think about that I thought that the way we got to do is narrow things down and get this really tight focus and many other things that I heard. And also as a young, young guy, I was in this room with, I don't know, 500 older gentlemen and ladies, and I sat in the front row and so I would see him kind of call them on the carpet and I would be looking back like, oh, wow, I never saw anybody talk to senior management like that and I was kind of surprised. But for those people that really haven't had any of that experience they're new to Deming, what is it that haunts you? What is... Can you describe what he meant when he was saying that?   0:12:42.9 Cliff Norman: I gotta just add to what you just said because it's such a profound experience. And when you're 29, if most of us, we think we're pretty good shape by that time, the brain's fully developed by age 25, judgment being the last function that develops. And so you're pretty well on your way and then to walk in and have somebody who's 81 years old, start introducing you to things you've never even thought about. The idea of the Chain Reaction that what I was taught as a certified quality engineer through ASQ is I need to do enough inspection, but I didn't need to do too much 'cause I didn't want to raise costs too much. And Dr. Deming brought me up on stage and he said, well, show me that card again. So I had a 105D card, it's up to G now or something. And he said, "well, how does this work?" And I said, "well, it tells me how many samples I got to get." And he says, "you know who invented that." And I said, "no, sir, I thought God did." He said, "no, I know the people that did it. They did it to put people like you out of business. Sit down, young man, you've got a lot to learn." And I thought, wow, and here you are in front of 500 people and this is a public flogging by any stretch.   0:13:56.1 Cliff Norman: And it just went on from there. And so a few years later, I'm up in Valley Forge and I'm working at a class with Lloyd and Tom Nolan and a guy named, I never met before named Jim Imboden. And he's just knock-down brilliant, but they're all working at General Motors at that time. And a lot of the book "Planned Experimentation" came out of their work at Ford and GM and Pontiac and the rest of it. And I mean, it's just an amazing contribution, but I go to dinner with Jim that night. And Jim looks at me across the table and he says, Cliff, how did you feel the day you found out you didn't know anything about business economics or anything else? I said, "you mean the first day of the Deming seminar?" He said, "that's what I'm talking about." And that just... That's how profound that experience is. Because all of a sudden you find out you can improve quality and lower costs at the same time. I'm sorry, most people weren't taught that. They certainly weren't taught that in business school. And so it was a whole transformation in thinking and just the idea of a system. Most of what's going on in the system is related to the system and the way it's constructed. And unfortunately, for most organizations, it's hidden.   0:15:04.2 Cliff Norman: They don't even see it. So when things happen, the first thing that happens is the blame flame. I had a VP I worked for and he'd pulled out his org chart when something went bad and he'd circle. He said, this is old Earl's bailiwick right here. So Cliff, go over and see Earl and I want you to straighten him out. Well, that's how most of it runs. And so the blame flame just takes off. And if you pull the systems map out there and if he had to circle where it showed up, he'd see there were a lot of friends around that that were contributing. And we start to understand the complexity of the issue. But without that view, and Deming insisted on, then you're back to the blame flame.   0:15:45.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And Dave, I see a lot of books on the back on your shelf there about quality and productivity and team and many different things. But maybe you could give us a little background on kind of how how you, besides how you got onto this project and all that. But just where did you come from originally and how did you stumble into the Deming world?   0:16:08.9 Dave Williams: Sure. Well, sadly, I didn't have the pleasure of getting to sit in on a four-day workshop. Deming died in 1993. And at that time, I was working on an ambulance as a street paramedic and going to college to study ambulance system design and how to manage ambulance systems, which was a part of public safety that had sort of grown, especially in the United States in the '60s. And by the time I was joining, it was about 30 years into becoming more of a formalized profession. And I found my way to Austin, Texas, trying to find one of the more professionalized systems to work in and was, worked here as a paramedic for a few years. And then decided I wanted to learn more and started a graduate program. And one of the courses that was taught in the graduate program, this is a graduate program on ambulance management, was on quality. And it was taught by a gentleman who had written a, a guide for ambulance leaders in the United States that was based on the principles and methods of quality that was happening at this time. And it pieced together a number of different common tools and methods like Pareto charts and cause-and-effect diagrams and things like that.   0:17:33.1 Dave Williams: And it mentioned the different leaders like Deming and Juran and Crosby and others. And so that was my first exposure to many of these ideas. And because I was studying a particular type of healthcare delivery system and I was a person who was practicing within it and I was learning about these ideas that the way that you improve a system or make improvement is by changing the system. I was really intrigued and it just worked out at the time. One of the first roles, leadership roles that emerged in my organization was to be the Chief Quality Officer for the organization. And at the time, there were 20 applicants within my organization, but I was the only one that knew anything about any of the foundations of quality improvements. Everybody else applied and showed their understanding of quality from a lived experience perspective or what their own personal definitions of quality were, which was mostly around inspection and quality assurance. I had, and this won't surprise Cliff, but I had a nerdy response that was loaded with references and came from all these different things that I had been exposed to. And they took a chance on me because I was the only one that seemed to have some sense of the background. And I started working and doing...   0:19:10.1 Dave Williams: Improvement within this ambulance system as the kind of the dedicated leader who was supposed to make these changes. And I think one of the things that I learned really quickly is that frequently how improvement efforts were brought to my attention was because there was a problem that I, had been identified, a failure or an error usually attributed to an individual as Cliff pointed out, somebody did something and they were the unfortunate person who happened to kind of raise this issue to others. And if I investigated it all, I often found that there were 20 other people that made the same error, but he was, he or she was the only one that got caught. And so therefore they were called to my office to confess. And when I started to study and look at these different issues, every time I looked at something even though I might be able to attribute the, first instance to a person, I found 20 or more instances where the system would've allowed or did allow somebody else to make a similar error.   0:20:12.6 Dave Williams: We just didn't find it. And it got... And it became somewhat fascinating to me because my colleagues were very much from a, if you work hard and just do your job and just follow the policy then good quality will occur. And nobody seemed to spend any time trying to figure out how to create systems that produce good results or figure out how to look at a system and change it and get better results. And so most of my experience was coming from these, when something bubbled up, I would then get it, and then I'd use some systems thinking and some methods and all of a sudden unpack that there was a lot of variation going on and a lot of errors that could happen, and that the system was built to get results worse than we even knew.   0:21:00.7 Dave Williams: And it was through that journey that I ended up actually becoming involved with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and learning about what was being done in the healthcare sector, which API at the time were the key advisors to Dr. Don Berwick and the leadership at IHI. And so much of the methodology was there. And actually, that's how I found my way to Cliff. I happened to be at a conference for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and there was an advertisement for a program called the Improvement Advisor Professional Development Program, which was an improvement like practitioner project level program that had been developed by API that had been adapted to IHI, and I noticed that Cliff and Lloyd were the faculty, and that they were in my hometown. And that's how I reached out to them and said, hey can we have coffee? And Cliff said, yes. And so...   0:21:53.1 Andrew Stotz: And what was that, what year was that roughly?   0:22:00.3 Dave Williams: That would've been back in 2002 or 2003, somewhere in that vicinity.   0:22:02.0 Andrew Stotz: Hmm. Okay.   0:22:06.8 Dave Williams: Maybe a little bit later.   0:22:06.9 Andrew Stotz: I just for those people that are new to the topic and listening in I always give an example. When I worked at Pepsi... I graduated in 1989 from university with a degree in finance. And I went to work at Pepsi in manufacturing and warehouse in Los Angeles at the Torrance Factory originally, and then in Buena Park. But I remember that my boss told me, he saw that I could work computers at that time, and so I was making charts and graphs just for fun to look at stuff. And he said, yeah, you should go to a one of these Deming seminars. And so he sent me to the one in... At George Washington University back in 1990, I think it was. And but what was happening is we had about a hundred trucks we wanted to get out through a particular gate that we had every single morning. And the longer it took to get those trucks out the longer they're gonna be on LA traffic and on LA roads, so if we can get 'em out at 5:00 AM, fantastic. If we get 'em out at 7:00, we're in trouble. And so they asked me to look at this and I did a lot of studying of it and I was coming for like 4:00 in the morning I'd go up to the roof of the building and I'd look down and watch what was happening. And then finally I'd interview everybody. And then finally the truck drivers just said, look, the loaders mess it up so I gotta open my truck every morning and count everything on it. And I thought, oh, okay.   0:23:23.7 Andrew Stotz: So I'll go to the loaders. And I go, why are you guys messing this up? And then the loaders was like, I didn't mess it up. We didn't have the production run because the production people changed the schedule, and so we didn't have what the guy needed. And so, and oh, yeah, there was a mistake because the production people put the product in the wrong spot, and therefore, I got confused and I put the wrong stuff on by accident. And then I went to the production people and they said, well, no, it's not us. It's the salespeople. They keep putting all this pressure on us to put this through right now, and it's messing up our whole system. And that was the first time in my life where I realized, okay, it's a system. There's interconnected parts here that are interacting, and I had to go back into the system to fix, but the end result was I was able to get a hundred trucks through this gate in about 45 minutes instead of two hours, what we had done before.   0:24:18.8 Andrew Stotz: But it required a huge amount of work of going back and looking at the whole system. So the idea of looking at the science of improvement, as you mentioned, and the System of Profound Knowledge, it's... There's a whole process. Now, I wanna ask the question for the person who gets this book and they dig into it, it's not a small book. I've written some books, but all of 'em are small because I'm just, maybe I just can't get to this point. But this book is a big book, and it's got about 300... More than 300 pages. What's the promise? What are they gonna get from digging into this book? What are they gonna take away? What are they gonna be able to bring to their life and their business that they couldn't have done without really going deeper into this material?   0:24:57.7 Cliff Norman: Dave, go ahead.   0:25:01.4 Dave Williams: Well, I was gonna joke by saying they're gonna get hard work and only half because this is just the theory in the book and many of the... And sort of examples of the method. But we're in the process of preparing a field guide which is a much deeper companion guide loaded with exercises and examples of and more of the methods. So the original guide that that API had developed was actually about an eight... Well, I don't know how many pages it was, but it was a thick three inch binder. This, what you have there is us refining the content part that explains the theory and kind of gets you going. And then we moved all of the exercises and things to the field guide for people that really wanna get serious about it.   0:26:00.3 Dave Williams: And the reason I say hard work is that the one thing that you won't get, and you should probably pass it if this book if you're on Amazon, is you're not gonna get an easy answer. This is, as a matter of fact, one of the things that emerged in our early conversations about was this project worth it? Is to say that this is hard work. It's work that a very few number of leaders who or leadership teams that really want to learn and work hard and get results are gonna embark on. But for those, and many of our clients, I think are representative of that, of those people that say, gosh, I've been working really hard, and I feel like we could do better. I feel like I could make a bigger impact, or I could serve more customers or clients.   0:26:44.0 Dave Williams: And but I am... And I'm in intrigued or inspired or gotten to a certain point with improvement science on my own, but I want to figure out how to be more systematic and more global and holistic at that approach. Then that's what QOS is about. It builds on the shoulders of the other books that you mentioned, like The Improvement Guide which we talked about as being a great book about improvement, and improvement specifically in the context of a project. And other books like The Healthcare Data Guide and the Planned Experimentation, which are also about methods, healthcare Data Guide being about Shewhart charts, and Planned Experimentation being about factorial design. This book is about taking what Cliff described earlier as that... I always say it's that that diagram that people put on a slide and never talk about from Deming of production views as a system and saying, well, how would we do this if this is the model for adopting quality as strategy, what are the methods that help us to do this?   0:28:01.3 Dave Williams: And this book breaks that down into five activities that are built on the shoulders of profound knowledge, built on the shoulders of the science of improvement and provide a structure to be able to initially develop a system, a systems view of your organization, and then build on that by using that system to continually operate and improve that organization over time. So the book describes the activities. The book describes some of the things that go into getting started, including being becoming good at doing results-driven improvement, building a learning system, focusing in on the things that matter to your organization. And then working towards building the structure that you can improve upon. The book creates that foundation. It provides examples from clients and from people that we've worked with so that you can see what the theory looks like in practice get, kind of get a flavor for that. And we hope it builds on the shoulders of other work that I mentioned in the other books that compliment it and provides a starting point for teams that are interested in taking that journey.   0:29:26.5 Andrew Stotz: And Cliff, from your perspective, if somebody had no, I mean, I think, I think the Deming community's gonna really dive in and they're gonna know a lot of this stuff, but is gonna help them take it to the next level. But for someone who never had any real experience with Deming or anything like that, and they stumble upon this interview, this discussion, they hear about this book, can they get started right away with what's in this book? Or do they have to go back to foundations?   0:29:49.6 Cliff Norman: No, I think that can definitely get started. There's a lot of learning as you know, Andrew, from going through the four-day to understand things. And I think we've done a pretty good job of integrating what Dr. Deming taught us, as well as going with the methods. And one of the things people would tell him in his four-day seminars is, Dr. Deming, you've given us the theory, but we have no method here. And he said, well, if I have to give you the method, then you'll have to send me your check too. So he expected us to be smart enough to develop the methods. And the API folks did a really good job of translating that into what we call the five activities. So those five activities are to understand the purpose of the organization.   0:30:35.6 Cliff Norman: And a lot of people when they write a purpose, they'll put something up there but it's usually we love all our people. We love our customers even more. If only they didn't spend so much, and we'll come out with something like that and there'll be some pablum that they'll throw up on the wall. Well, this actually has some structure to it to get to Deming's ideas. And the first thing is let's try to understand what business we're in and what need we're serving in society that drives customers to us. So that word is used not need coming from customers, but what is it that drives them to us so we can understand that? And then the second part of that purpose needs to define the mainstay, the core processes, the delivery systems that relate directly to customers. And just those two ideas alone, just in the first activity of purpose, most people haven't thought about those ideas.   0:31:27.8 Cliff Norman: And can somebody pick up this book and do that? Yes. And that will answer a big challenge from Dr. Deming. Most people don't even know what business they're in, haven't even thought about it. And so that we... That question gets answered here, I think, very thoroughly. In this second activity, which is viewing the organization as a system contains two components that's viewing the organization as a system. And that's difficult to do, and a lot of people really don't see the need for it. Jane Norman reminded Dave and I on a call we did last week, that when you talk about a systems map with people, just ask 'em how do they know what's going on inside other organizations, other departments within their organization? How do they know that? And most of us are so siloed.   0:32:11.2 Cliff Norman: Somebody over here is doing the best job they can in department X, and meanwhile, department Y doesn't know anything about it. And then three months later the improvement shows up and all of a sudden there's problems now in department Y. Well, somebody who's focused on the organization as a system and sees how those processes are related when somebody comes to a management meeting said, well, we've just made a change here, and this is gonna show up over here in about three months, and you need to be prepared for that. Andrew, that conversation never takes place. So the idea of having the systems map and this book can help you get started on that. The second book that Dave was just talking about, there are more replete examples in there. I mean, we've got six case studies from clients in there than the practitioners and people who actually are gonna be doing this work.   0:33:01.7 Cliff Norman: That's gonna be absolutely... They're gonna need that field guide. And I think that's where Dave was coming from. The third activity is the information activity, how are we learning from outside the organization and how do we get feedback and research into the development of new products and services and the rest of it? And so we provided a system there. In fact, Dave took a lead on that chapter, and we've got several inputs there that have to be defined. And people just thinking through that and understanding that is huge. When Dr. Deming went to Japan in 1950, he was there to do the census to see how many Japanese were left after World War II. And then he got an invitation to come and talk to the top 50 industrialists. And he started asking questions and people from the Bank of Tokyo over there and all the rest of it.   0:33:52.4 Cliff Norman: And Dr. Deming says, well, do you have any problems? And they said, what do you mean? He says, well, do customers call up and complain? And he said, yes. And he says, well, do you have any data? And he said, no. He says, but if they complain, we give them a Geisha calendar. And then Dr. Deming says, well, how many Geisha calendars have you given out? So it's like, in 1991, I'm sitting here talking to a food company and I asked him, I said, well, you get customer complaints? Oh yeah. Do you have any data on it? No, but we give 'em a cookbook. I said, well, how many cookbooks are you giving out? So I was right back to where Deming was in 1950, so having the information activity, that third activity critical so that we're being proactive with it and not just reactive.   0:34:43.7 Cliff Norman: And so I think people can read through that and say, well, what are we doing right now? Well, I guess we're not doing this and move on. Then the fourth activity is absolutely critical. This is where you know that you've arrived, because now you're going to integrate not only the plan to operate, but a plan to improve. That becomes the business plan. For most people in business plan they do a strategy, and then they have a bunch of sub strategies, and they vote on what's important, and they do some other things, and then a year later they come back and revisit it. Well, what happens here is there's some strategic objectives that are laid out, and then immediately it comes down to, okay, what's gonna be designed and redesigned in this system? Which processes, products and services are gonna be designed? 'Cause we can all see it now, Andrew.   0:35:31.6 Andrew Stotz: Mm.   0:35:31.6 Cliff Norman: We can, it's right in front of us. So it's really easy to see at this point, and now we can start to prioritize and make that happen on purpose. As an example when Jane was a vice president at Conagra, they came up with five strategic objectives. Then they made a bunch of promises to corporate about what they were gonna do and when they were going to achieve it. When she laid out the systems map for them, they were horrified that over 30% of the processes that they needed to be having precooked meat didn't even exist. They were gonna have to be designed. And so Jane and I sat there and looking at 'em and said, well, if you'd had this map before you made the promises, would you have made those promises? No, no, we're in trouble right now. I gotta go back to the CEO of the holding company and tell 'em we're not gonna make it.   0:36:22.4 Cliff Norman: But there's a whole bunch of people that sit around in goal settings. We're gonna do this by when and have no idea about what they're talking about. So that's a little bit dangerous here. And then the fifth activity, it's probably the most important. And where I want people to start, I actually want 'em to start on the fifth activity, which is managing individual improvement activities, team activities. And what I mean by that is, nothing can hold you up from starting today on making an improvement and use the model for improvement. The three basic questions, you can write that on an envelope and apply it to a project and start right away. Because learning the habit of improvement, and when you identify, and this is typical in the planning process, again, a chapter that Dave took a lead on in the planning chapter.   0:37:03.8 Cliff Norman: When you lay that out, you're gonna come up with three to five strategic objectives, but that's gonna produce anywhere between 15 and 20 improvement efforts. And when people start three improvement efforts, and they see how difficult that is to traffic through an organization, particularly if you have a systems map, makes it a lot easier. If you don't have that, then there's all sorts of things that happen to you.   0:37:21.3 Andrew Stotz: Hmm.   0:37:22.8 Cliff Norman: But the, the idea of that all coming together is critical. And where you... Where that really shows up for the reader here is in chapter one. So Lloyd Provost took a lead on chapter one. If you read chapter one, you got a pretty good idea of what's gonna happen in the rest of the book. But more importantly, in that book, in chapter one, there's a survey at the end. And every time we give this out to people, they feel real bad.   0:37:48.1 Cliff Norman: And well, Cliff, any, on a scale of one to 10, we only came up with a four. Well, what I would tell 'em is, if you can come up with a four, you're pretty good. And those fundamentals have to be in place. In other words, the management needs to trust each other. There are certain things that have to be in place before you can even think about skating backwards here. And quality as an organizational strategy is all about skating backwards. The people who don't have the fundamentals can't even start to think about that.   0:38:15.0 Cliff Norman: So that survey and the gap between where they are at a four and where they're going to be at a 10, we've integrated throughout the whole book. So as you're reading through the whole book, you're seeing that gap, and then you have a good plan forward as to what do I need to do to get to be a six, an eight, and what do I need to do to finally arrive at a 10? Dave, why don't you add to what I just said there, and I gotta turn on a light here, I think.   0:38:39.2 Dave Williams: Well, I think one of the things that, and Cliff has probably been the one that has helped me appreciate this to the biggest degree is the role in which improvement plays in quality as an organizational strategy. So, I mean, I think in general, in our world, improvement is seen as kind of like a given, but in our case, what we've found is that many times people are not working on the things right in front of them or the problems in which they have, that they are on the hook... I like to say, are on the hook to get accomplished right now. And like Cliff mentioned, many of my clients when I engage with them, I say, well, what have you promised this year? And they'll give me a list and I'll say, well, okay, what are you working on to improve? And they'll be working on projects that are not related to that list of things that they've got to affect. And so usually that's a first pivot is to say, well, let's think about what are the things that you're working on or should be working on that are either designing or redesigning your system to achieve these strategic objectives.   0:39:48.8 Dave Williams: And the reason to put the attention on that fifth activity and get people working on improvement, there's a good chance that the improvement capability within the organization currently isn't to the level that you need it, where you can get results-driven projects happening at a clip that will enable you to chip away at 20 projects versus four in a year. And that it's not well integrated into the leadership, into the support structures that you have. In addition, if you're trying to use improvement on things that you're on the hook for, and Cliff noted, especially if you've got a system map while you're on that journey, you're gonna start to pick up on where the disconnects are. Similar to your example, Andrew, where you were describing your experience working backwards in the process, you're going to start to recognize, oh, I'm working on this, but it's linked to these other things. Or in order for me to do this, I need that. Or... And so that amplifies the project to be kind of just a vehicle to appreciate other things that are interconnected, that are important in improving our work together.   0:41:05.1 Dave Williams: And so I think that that's a critical piece. I mean, I sometimes describe it as the disappointment that people have when they open QOS because they want to have a new method or a new thing to work on. I said, well, there's a lot new in here. And at the same time, we want to build on the shoulders of the fundamentals. We want to build it because it's the fundamentals that are going to be able for you to activate the things that are necessary in order for you to skate backwards, like Cliff was describing earlier.   0:41:36.2 Cliff Norman: I got to add to what Dave was saying because this actually happened to me with a... I'm not going to mention the name of the company, but it's a high-tech companies worldwide. And we got up, a good friend of mine, Bruce Bowles, and we were introducing the idea of quality as an organizational strategy. And one of the guys in the front row, he says, Cliff, this just sounds like common sense, why aren't we all doing this? I said, that's a real good question. Let me put that in the parking lot here. So I put it up on a flip chart. And so we went through the idea of... We were working on Shewhart control charts. And so we showed him one of those. And at the end of all that, he raised his hand and I said, yeah, he says, Cliff, this is hard. I said, well, let me put that up here. This is hard. Then we went through the systems map and he says, look, this is hard. By the end of the two days, it was, this is hard, this is hard, this is hard, this is hard. This goes back to what Dave was saying earlier about once you open this page, there's some work that takes off, but more importantly, there's something new to learn here.   0:42:40.3 Cliff Norman: And that's frustrating to people, especially when they've got to quit doing what they've done in the past. It's what Deming says, you got to give up on the guilt and you got to move forward and transform your own thinking. So there's something here for the management to do. And if they're not willing to do that work, then this is probably not a good thing for them. Just go back to the blame flame and circling org charts and that kind of stuff and then wonder why we're losing money.   0:43:11.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and I think that that's one of the things that we see in the Deming community is that, why are people doing it the way they are, dividing things up and doing KPIs and saying, you take care of that. And we're gonna optimize by focusing on each... We see how that all kind of falls apart.   0:43:27.9 Cliff Norman: It all falls through reductionism.   0:43:29.8 Andrew Stotz: [laughter] Yeah.   0:43:32.5 Cliff Norman: It doesn't understand the system, yeah.   0:43:32.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, so what I want to do now is I was just thinking about a book on my shelf called "Competitive Strategy" by Michael Porter. And there's a whole field of study in the area of strategy for businesses. Now you guys use, and you explain a little bit about the way you come up with... Why you come up with organization rather than let's say company as an example. But let's just talk about strategy for a moment. Generally we're taught in business school that there's two main strategies. One is a differentiation strategy. I like to teach my students like Starbucks. It's very differentiated from the old model. And you can have a low cost strategy, which is like McDonald's, where it's all about operational efficiency.   0:44:18.4 Andrew Stotz: And those are two different strategies that can get to the same goal, which is to build a strong and sustainable business that's making a good profit for the employees to get paid well and for shareholders. And so for somebody that understands some of the foundations of typical strategy, it's hard for them to think, wait, wait, wait, what? You're just talking about just better quality is the strategy? How should they frame this concept of quality as a strategy in relation to what we've been taught about low cost and differentiation and other types of strategy? How do we think about this book in relation to that?   0:45:03.2 Cliff Norman: When Deming wrote his book, his very first one of the four "Out of the Crisis", which was the whole idea about quality and competitive position. But he was kind of answering that. And at that time, what we had is we had three companies in the United States that were going at each other, Ford, GM, and Chrysler. And they'd call each other up, well, what are you doing this year? Oh, we're making cars that don't work. Sometimes they break down. That's why we have Mr. Goodwrench to repair them. That's an extra revenue source for us. As one of the executives that are challenged, a colleague of mine, he said, you don't realize how much money we're gonna lose here taking the repair business out because we make a lot of money out of repair. So making cars that don't work has been a good revenue stream for us. Well, all that works out great, until somebody shows up like Toyota that has a car that works and doesn't need to be repaired by Mr. Goodwrench all the time.   0:45:58.8 Cliff Norman: So the mind shift there, and what Dr. Deming was saying is that he was focused on the competition's already licked. And I don't think Porter's thought about that very much, not to be overly critical, because I'm an admirer of his, but the idea of focusing on the need and why is that customer coming to us so that we make a journey, and the Japanese call that being in the Gemba, being in the presence with the customers as they use the product or service and doing the research and the rest of it. And then coming back and then redesign that product or service so that it not only grabs the current customer, but we start thinking about customers that are not even our customers and innovate and actually come up with a design that actually brings new customers to us through products and services that we haven't thought about yet. So if I show you three products just to make a picture of it, we often show like an abacus, which was a hand calculating machine about BC. Then there's a slide rule that came out about the same year that Columbus discovered America. And that was good till about 1968.   0:47:06.0 Cliff Norman: And then the calculator, the handheld calculator came out. Well the need for all three of those products is to do handheld calculations. So we've had that need since BC. Now in 1967, K&E Calculator was making that slide rule, which I used in junior high school. If you'd have come up to me and said, Cliff, what do you need in the way of a better slide rule? I said, well can you get me a holster for it? 'Cause I don't like having to stick me in the face. I put it in my pocket and it sticks me in the face. And if you can give me a holster for that, that would be my view of that. I wasn't about to come up with the TI calculator. That wasn't gonna happen. Not from Cliff. It's gonna come from an engineer at TI. Now, K&E Calculator, if they'd been doing research in the marketplace and saying, is there something that can totally disrupt us going on here? Rather than just looking at figuring out a way to make the K&E slide rule better, they might've discovered that.   0:48:07.0 Cliff Norman: Most people don't do that. They just go back. They just lose their business. And it was interesting in '67, their annual report put out, what's the world gonna look like 100 years from now? So they had dome cities, they had cars flying, they had all sorts of things going on that were great innovations, but they didn't have the TI calculator in there, along with the HP calculator. And that wiped out their business. And so if people understand the need, and that's what Dr. Deming is getting at, he says, they really haven't thought about what business they're in. So why are the customers coming to us? He says, no customer ever asked for pneumatic tire. No customer ever asked for a microwave oven. That came from people with knowledge that were looking at how the customers are using the current products and services and say, now, is there technology innovation going on that we can actually do a better job of providing a better match in the future?   0:48:56.9 Andrew Stotz: And can you explain why you use the word need as opposed to want?   0:49:06.5 Cliff Norman: That's a good question. The idea is that there's a need that's constant in society. So that need of having to do handheld calculations or needing healthcare or to pay bills, that need is constant throughout civilization. And so if I want something that's interesting, that might be the match. That might be something to do with some features what I'm offering and so forth. I'd like to have this, I'd like to have that. But the need and the way we're using that is it doesn't come from customers. It's what drives customers to us. And it's always been there. It's always been there. Need for transportation, for example. Whether you're walking or driving a bicycle or a car or a plane.   0:49:53.6 Andrew Stotz: And Dave, how would you answer the same question when you think about a person running a business and they've had many strategy meetings in their business, they've set their corporate strategy of what we're doing, where we're going and that type of thing. And maybe they've picked, we're gonna be a low cost producer. Thailand's an interesting one because Thailand had a ability to be low cost producers in the past. And then China came along and became the ultimate low cost producer. And all of a sudden, Thai companies had a harder time getting the economies of scale and the like. And now the Chinese manufacturers are just really coming into Thailand, into the Thai market. And now it's like, for a Thai company to become a low cost leader is almost impossible given the scale that China and the skills that they have in that. And so therefore, they're looking at things like I've got to figure out how to get a better brand. I've got to figure out how to differentiate and that type of thing. How does this... How could this help a place like that and a management team that is struggling and stuck and is looking for answers?   0:51:07.0 Dave Williams: Well, I go back to what Cliff said about that many organizations don't pause to ask, why do they exist? What is the need of which they are trying to fulfill? Much of my background involved working in the service industry, initially with public safety and ambulance systems and fire systems, and then later in healthcare and in education. And in many of those environments, especially in places where in public systems where they've been built and they may have existed for a long time, when you ask them about what are they trying to accomplish as an organization or what is it that they... The need that they're trying to fulfill? Typically, they're gonna come back to you with requests or desires or wants or sort of characteristics or outcomes that people say they expect, but they don't pause to ask, like, well, what is the actual thing of which I'm trying to tackle? And Cliff mentioned like, and we actually, I should mention in the book, we have a list of different strategies, different types of strategies, all the different ones that you mentioned, like price and raw material or distribution style or platform or technology.   0:52:30.9 Dave Williams: There's different types of strategies, and the one that we are focusing in on is quality. But I think it's important for people to ask the question. Cliff mentioned transportation. There's a number of different great examples, actually, I think in transportation, where you could look at that as being an ongoing need as Cliff mentioned from the days when there was no technology and we were all on foot to our current day. Transportation has been a need that existed and many different things over time have been created from bicycles, probably one of the most efficient technologies to transport somebody, wheels and carts. And now, and you were referencing, we've made reference to the car industry. It's a fascinating experience going on of the car world and gas versus electric, high technology versus not, autonomous vehicles. There's, and all of them are trying to ask the question of, are there different ways in which I might be able to leverage technology to achieve this need of getting from point A to point B and be more useful and potentially disrupt in the marketplace? And so I think the critical thing initially is to go back and ask and learn and appreciate what is that need?   0:53:58.6 Dave Williams: And then think about your own products and services in relation to that. And I think we include four questions in the book to be able to kind of think about the need. And one of those questions is also, what are other ways in which you could fulfill that need? What are other ways that somebody could get transportation or do learning or to help sort of break you away from just thinking about your own product as well? And that's useful because it's super tied to the system question, right? Of, well, this is the need that we're trying to fulfill and these are the products and services that are matching that need. Then the system that we have is about, we need to build that and design that in order to produce, not only produce the products and services that match that need, but also continually improve that system to either improve those products and services or add or subtract products and services to keep matching the need and keep being competitive or keep being relevant. And maybe if it's not in a competitive environment where you're gonna go out of business, at least be relevant in terms of the city service or community service, government service that continues to be there to match the need of the constituents. So I think it's a really important piece.   0:55:17.0 Dave Williams: It's that North star of saying, providing a direction for everything else. And going back to your original comment or question about strategy, and many times people jump to a strategy or strategies or, and those might be more around particular objectives or outcomes that they're trying to get to. It may not actually be about the method or the approach like cost or technology that they may not even think that way. They may be more thinking about a plan. And I really encourage people to be clear about what they're trying to accomplish and then start to ask, well, how's the system built for that? And later we can bring a process that'll help us learn about our system and learn about closing that gap.   0:56:05.1 Cliff Norman: Yeah. Just what I'd add to that, Andrew, because you mentioned China, a few other countries, but I think the days are coming to an end fairly quickly where somebody can say, oh, we can go to this country. They have low wages, we'll put our plant there and all that. There's a lot of pushback on that, particularly in the United States. And if that's your strategy, that hadn't required a lot of thinking to say the least. But in 1966, over 50% of the countries in the world were, let me rephrase that, over 50% of the population of the world lived in extreme poverty. So there were a lot of targets to pick out where you want to put your manufacturing. And in 2017, and you and Dave were probably like myself, I didn't see this hit the news, but that figure had been reduced from over 50% down to 9%. And all you have to do is just, and I worked in China a lot, they're becoming very affluent. And as they become very affluent, that means wages are going up and all the things that we want to see throughout the world. And I think that's happening on a grand scale right now, but you're also getting a lot of pushback from people when they see the middle class in their own country, like here in the United States, destroyed, and say, I think we've had enough of this. And I think you're gonna see that after January. You're gonna see that take off on steroids.   0:57:31.7 Cliff Norman: And that's gonna happen, and I think throughout the world, people are demanding more, there's gonna have to be more energy, every time a baby is born, the footprints gets bigger for more energy and all the rest of it. So it's gonna be interesting, and I think we are going into an age for the planet where people as Dr. Deming promised that they'd be able to live materially better, and the whole essence of this book is to focus on the quality of the organization and the design and redesign of a system to a better job of matching the need and cause that chain reaction to go off. When Jane and I went over to work in Sweden, Sven Oloff who ran three hospitals and 62 dental clinics there and also managed the cultural activities and young shipping. He said, Cliff, I report to 81 politicians. I don't wanna have to go to them to put a bond on an election to get more money for my healthcare system, I wanna use Dr. Deming's chain reaction here to improve care to the patients in my county and also reduce our costs. A whole bunch of people that don't even believe that's possible in healthcare.   0:58:39.9 Cliff Norman: But that's what Sven Oloff said that's what you're here for. And that's what we proceeded to do, they launched about 350 projects to do just that, and one of their doctors, Dr. Motz [?], he's amazing. We taught him a systems map, I came back two months later, and he had them in his hospital on display. And I said, Motz, how did you do this? He said well Cliff, I'm an endocrinologist by education as a doctor, of course, that's a person who understands internal systems in the body. So he said the systems approach was a natural for me. But I'd like to say it was that easy for everybody else, that systems map idea and as you know, being in the Deming seminar, that's quite a challenge to move from viewing the organization as an org chart, which has been around since Moses father-in-law told him, you need to break up the work here a little bit, and the tens of tens reporting to each other, and then of course, the Romans took that to a grander scale, and so a centurion soldier had 100 other soldiers reporting to him. So we've had org charts long and our federal government took that to a whole new level.   0:59:46.1 Cliff Norman: But the idea is switching off the org chart from biblical times to actually getting it up to Burt [?] about 1935 and understanding a system that's kind of a nose bleed in terms of how much we're traveling there to get us into the 21st century here.   1:00:04.0 Andrew Stotz: And I left Ohio, I grew up outside of Cleveland, and I left Ohio in about 1985, roughly. And it was still a working class, Cleveland had a huge number of jobs and there was factories and all that, and then I went to California, and then I moved to Thailand in 1992. So when I go back to Ohio now, many years later, decades later, it's like a hollowed out place, and I think about what you're saying is... And what's going on in the world right now is that I think there's a desire in America to bring back manufacturing to bring back production and all of that, and that's a very, very hard challenge, particularly if it's gone for a while and the skill sets aren't there, maybe the education system isn't there, I talk a lot with John Dues here on the show about the what's happening in education and it's terrifying.   1:01:05.9 Andrew Stotz: So how could this be... Book be a guide for helping people that are saying, we've got to revitalize American production and manufacturing and some of these foundational businesses and not just services, which are great. How can this book be a guide?   1:01:25.8 Dave Williams: One thing I would say that I think is interesting about our times, many times when I reflect on some of the examples that you just provided, I think about how changes were made in systems without thinking about the whole system together. And there may have been changes at various times that we're pursuing particular strategies or particular approaches, so it may have been the low-cost strategy, it may have been to disrupt a marketplace. And oftentimes, they don't think about... When somebody's pursuing one particular view, they may miss other views that are important to have an holistic perspective. One of the things that I appreciate about QoS in the methods and overall as a holistic view of looking at organizations that it's asking us to really think initially about that North Star, what we're trying to do, our purpose, and what are the tenants. What are the things that are important us, the values...   1:02:38.7 Dave Williams: That are important to us in pursuing that particular purpose? And in doing that, really thinking about how does the system work as it is today, and if we make changes, how does it move in alignment with the values that we have and in the direction that we wanna go? And appreciating, I would say, part of the value of the scientific thinking that is in the Science of Improvement is that it encourages you to try to see what happens and appreciate not only what happens in relation to the direction you're trying to go, but also the... Have a balanced view of looking at the collateral effects of things that you do, and I think that systems do is really important there. So I think from that perspective, the quality as an organizational strategy brings a holistic picture into these organizations, or at least...   1:03:45.1 Dave Williams: To be paying attention to the system that you have, maybe the direction you wanna go, and what happens as you... What are your predictions and what do you see when you study the results of making changes in the direction of the vision that you have. And I think that's at a high level that is one of the ways that I think about it. Cliff, how would you add on there?   1:04:09.1 Cliff Norman: Your question made me think of something that happened about two years ago, Jane and I got a call from a lady that worked for her in one of the chicken plants, and she said, Jane, I had to call you because I need to order some of those Shewhart charts. But what happened today, you should have been here and Jane said, what... She said, Remember that 10 year thing we buried in the ground that we're gonna open up in 10 years, and she said, yeah, said, well, we opened it up today, and the new plant manager was here, and those Shewhart charts came out, and he looked at the costs on them. He said, you were operating at this level? She said, yeah, routinely. And he said what happened? He said, well, they had new management come in and they got rid of the charts, that's the first thing they did, and then gradually they try to manage things like they normally did, and then they forgot everything that we had learned. And that's kind of where we are right now.   1:05:11.0 Cliff Norman: So just think of that a decade goes by, and it just as Dr. Deming said, there's nothing worse than the mobility of management, it's like getting AIDS in the system. And they basically destroyed their ability to run a low-cost operation in an industry that runs on 1 or 2%. And when you watch that happen and understand that we still have food companies in this country, and we have to start there and start looking at the system anew and start thinking about how it can actually cause that chain reaction to take off, and that comes from focusing on quality of the system. And then as Dr. Deming says, anybody that's ever worked for a living knows why costs go down with two words less rework, but instead of people will put in extra departments to handle the rework. Next thing they start building departments to handle...   1:06:01.8 Cliff Norman: The stuff that's not working because the system they don't understand. So that was a... What do they call those things, Dave, where they put them in the ground and pull him out?   1:06:11.0 Dave Williams: Time capsule.   1:06:13.4 Andrew Stotz: Time capsule yeah.   1:06:13.5 Cliff Norman: Yeah. Time capsule. The a 10-year time capsule.   1:06:19.2 Andrew Stotz: It's a great, great story. And a great idea. We had a company in Thailand a very large company that the CEO of it came upon the idea of the teachings of Dr. Deming and over time, as he implemented it in his company, the Japanese Union of Scientists have their prize and his company won that prize and then he had about 10 subsidiary companies that also were doing it and they also won over time. And so Thailand is actually is the second largest recipient of the Japanese Deming Award outside of India. But he left and he retired and another guy took over, a very bright guy and all that, but he threw most of that out and focused on newer methods like KPIs and things like that. And just at the end of last year, maybe six months ago, they reported a pretty significant loss, and I was kind of made me think how we can spend all this time getting the Deming teachings into our business, and then one little change in management and it's done.   1:07:26.9 Andrew Stotz: And that made me think, oh, well, that's the value of the book, in the sense that it's about building the concept of quality as a core part of strategy as opposed to just a tool or a way of thinking that could go out of the company as soon as someone else comes in. Go ahead, Dave.   1:07:41.9 Dave Williams: I was gonna say, Andrew, you raise a point, I think it's really, really important and Cliff mentioned this in terms of the problem of mobility of management. One thing that I don't know that we outline probably in dark enough ink in the book is the critically important piece of leadership, building the structures and the capability. I know we talk a little bit about it, but doing it in a way that both builds up the people that you have... So Cliff emphasiz

Mael Dodin a été expert en Infrastructure pendant des années avant de devenir coach en transformation des organisations IT.Dans cet épisode, nous creusons des solutions concrètes et éprouvées pour améliorer la performance de votre équipe : Gemba, Just in Time, rôle du manager, mesure de la performance.Accès rapide :00:01:50 - Expériences professionnelles dans l'infrastructure00:06:20 - Challenges et incidents en gestion Middleware00:12:10 - Discussion sur le cloud et la migration d'infrastructure00:17:50 - Application des concepts Agiles dans le RUN IT00:19:55 - Transformation Agile au sein de Société Générale00:29:15 - Importance du droit à l'erreur et culture Blameless00:40:15 - Rôle crucial du mandat pour les transformations réussies00:47:30 - Postures de coach : Haute et Basse00:49:20 - Mise en place du Just-In-Time dans les équipes de production00:55:00 - Les concepts du Lean Management et leurs impactsRecommandations"The Goal", d'Eliyahu Goldratt"The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win", de Gene Kim, Kevin Behr et George Spatford"Born to Run", de Christopher McDougall"Can't Hurt Me", de David Goggins Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Join guest host Antony Widjaja, Associate Director of Executive Degrees Programme Recruitment & Partnerships at INSEAD, as he sits down with TIEMBA'17 alumna Levenza Toh and current GEMBA participant Rachid Ouazizi to uncover the transformative impact of the INSEAD Executive MBA.   In this insightful conversation, they explore diverse approaches to funding the programme—whether through personal investment or securing employer support—and share valuable strategies for building a strong business case to gain company backing. They also discuss the unique challenges and rewards of the Executive MBA experience, offering a holistic view of the programme's value that extends far beyond financial returns.   Tune in for practical advice and inspiration, whether you're self-funding or seeking corporate assistance for this pivotal career investment.

Meet Sam Waring, a Strategy Consultant at Gemba. Sam assists brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Netflix with with their sponsorship strategy across sports and entertainment.Before he was mixing in the big leagues, Sam started his journey as a Marketing Intern with the NZ Breakers before making his way to Australia. After getting rejected for his current role once, Sam stepped away and addressed his skill gaps, only to return and land his dream job.Sam's story is packed with advice on overcoming rejections, staying persistent, and building your skillset. If you're eager to understand the behind-the-scenes of a career in sports marketing and strategy, you're going to love this episode with Sam.We cover:(6:57) - Introduction to Sam's career and journey(11:23) - Breaking into the sports industry and early experiences(16:45) - Challenges of landing jobs in competitive sports roles(21:30) - Importance of sponsorships in sports marketing(27:15) - Developing strategies for brand partnerships(33:00) - Insights into working with high-profile clients like Coca-Cola(38:20) - Bridging creative and commercial strategies(43:50) - How agency work differs from in-house roles(48:30) - Examples of successful sports campaigns(54:00) - Advice on networking and career growth in sports*If you like this ep, give these a go next:#175: Gemba, Senior Strategy Consultant | Oliver Gilbert#287: MKTG Sports + Entertainment, Sponsorship Manager | Jeffery Leong#99: Octagon UK, Managing Director | Joel Seymour-Hyde#236: Sports Marketing Consultant | Danny Bowerin*-Follow SportsGrad on LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok -Follow Reuben Williams on LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok -Subscribe to the SportsGrad newsletter for job and networking opportunities -Become a SportsGrad Member to shortcut your next job in sportBig thanks to Deakin University for making this episode possible. Check out their Master of Sport Management, ranked #1 in Australia.Thanks for listening, much love! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you ever feel stuck as a leader? It may seem like no matter how many problems you solve or tools you implement, you're still not seeing progress toward a sustainable organizational culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence.Maybe you have been leading change the wrong way.In this episode, Cindy Hinds shares what she's learned from 25 years of experience about how to lead organizational change the right way. She highlights what she has learned from her journey from being a technical expert to becoming a transformational change leader within a global organization who is equipping leaders at all levels to solve problems and innovating to drive business performance.Transformational leadership isn't about knowing all the answers. Connect with your purpose, step away from being the "doer," and empower others so that you – and they – can see better results.YOU'LL LEARN:How to implement transformational leadership practices that create lasting organizational change, not just short-term resultsThe importance of using simple terms instead of technical jargon to help get buy-in and help others understand the problems they need to solveStrategies to manage burnout by surrounding yourself with a supportive community and focusing on what truly mattersHow to bring your whole self to the workplace to fulfill your complete purpose and build trust within the organizationThe benefits of the maturity model to help leaders close the gap between their current condition and the results they want to achieveABOUT MY GUEST:Cindy Hinds is the Global Director of Enterprise Excellence at A.O. Smith, manufacturing company with sites based across North America, Asia and Europe, where she is responsible for architecting A.O. Smith's journey to create a culture of highly engaged people who are aligned in solving problems and innovating to continuously improve.IMPORTANT LINKS:Full episode show notes: ChainOfLearning.com/28Connect with Cindy Hinds: www.linkedin.com/in/cindyhindsMy website: KBJAnderson.com/Download the Change KATALYST™  Self–Assessment to discover the 8 competencies you must master to become a transformational change leader: KBJAnderson.com/KATALYSTFollow me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kbjandersonTIMESTAMPS FOR THIS EPISODE: [5:13] Leading the right way and asking questions for a continuous improvement culture[8:12] Finding gaps through Gemba to transform your approach as a leader[11:18] Franklin Covey's Speed of Trust Curriculum to connect behaviors to business outcomes[15:06] Using “Nemawashi” to prepare for future actions or business decisions[18:30] Focusing on a people-centric culture to avoid conflicting values[21:16] Real-life examples of implementing sustainable practices for continuous improvement[24:31] The maturity model to understand your current condition and ideal state

Boost team results by measuring carefully and using consistent methods to move toward your goal–with “scientific thinking” “the Improvement Kata” and “the Coaching Kata”. In this bumper episode, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss quality and delivery the Toyota Way. Links: - Toyota Kata: https://public.websites.umich.edu/~jmondisa/TK/Homepage.html - Gemba: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba Other relevant episodes: - Episode 214 - Get Your Reps In: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/get-your-reps-in -------------------------------------------------- You'll find free videos and practice material, plus our book Agile Conversations, at agileconversations.com And we'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show: email us at info@agileconversations.com -------------------------------------------------- About Your Hosts Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick joined forces at TIM Group in 2013, where they studied and practised the art of management through difficult conversations. Over a decade later, they remain united in their passion for growing profitable organisations through better communication. Squirrel is an advisor, author, keynote speaker, coach, and consultant, and he's helped over 300 companies of all sizes make huge, profitable improvements in their culture, skills, and processes. You can find out more about his work here: douglassquirrel.com/index.html Jeffrey is Vice President of Engineering at ION Analytics, Organiser at CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, and is an accomplished author and speaker. You can connect with him here: www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick/

In this episode of WLEI Podcast, we welcome Sandrine Olivencia, author of Build to Sell and expert in applying Lean principles to software development. Sandrine shares her journey from waterfall to Agile and eventually to Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD), which she sees as a more holistic and sustainable system for building great products and lasting businesses. The conversation explores:    The importance of Gemba and why leaders at all levels need to stay closely connected to customers and the problems they face.  How Lean thinking can help companies avoid “feature frenzy mode” and maintain a clear focus on delivering customer value.  Why even mature tech companies often struggle to develop people and the steps leaders can take to build a culture of problem-solving and continuous improvement.   Practical advice on where to start implementing Lean principles, including Sandrine's three key strategies for building a more product-led company.   The limitations of so-called “founder mode” and “manager mode” and how an alternative “Lean management mode” addresses the shortcomings of both.   

In this episode of the Habitual Excellence podcast, host Ken Segel interviews Dr. Paul DeChant, an expert on physician burnout, with a focus on how workplace dysfunction rather than personal resilience drives burnout among clinicians. Dr. DeChant explains that burnout arises when clinicians spend too much time on administrative tasks and not enough on meaningful patient care. He highlights cynicism as a key dimension of burnout, stemming from lack of control, recognition, and a breakdown of community and fairness. Leadership plays a crucial role in addressing these issues by empowering frontline workers and aligning them with organizational values and processes, such as using lean management systems to improve workflows. Dr. DeChant emphasizes the importance of leaders "going to the Gemba" to understand frontline challenges and build trust with clinicians. The episode also promotes the upcoming Enduring Excellence CEO Seminar, where leaders can learn more about these frameworks and their practical applications.

В этот выпуске мы с гостями обсудили силу сообщества, то, как окружение меняет жизнь, и как связи могут повлиять на успех. Гости подкаста: ▪️Анжелика Кожевникова Предприниматель, блогерhttps://www.instagram.com/anzhelika_e...▪️Николай Пак Медиа-предприниматель, сооснователь канала AIRANhttps://www.instagram.com/serial_prod...▪️Джанабеков НурахметПредприниматель в сфере международной логистики https://www.instagram.com/nurakhmet_j...▪️Гайникен Аманжолова Руководитель Кайдзен Клубаhttps://www.instagram.com/gainikenn?i...▪️Санжар Курбанов СЕО “Платформа Маргулана”https://www.instagram.com/sr.kurbanov...Таймкоды:00:00 - Интро00:22 - Вступление02:36 - Знакомство с гостями08:56 - Как избавиться от старого окружения10:36 - Рекламная интеграция 11:03 - Из гос-службы в бизнес. Джанабеков Нурахмет16:14 - Учиться нужно всегда. Гайникен Аманжолова18:55 - Оставьте свое ЭГО за порогом. Николай Пак24:22 - Ищите ту среду, которая вас драйвит. Санжар Курбанов30:17 - Сообщество имеет огромное значение. Анжелика Кожевникова 36:40 - Что случилось с той средой в который были? Джанабеков Нурахмет45:45 - Родственников мы не сможем поменять. Маргулан Сейсембай48:46 - Я в позиции ученика. Николай Пак51:12 - О ученике-хейтере. Маргулан Сейсембай53:43 - О принятии решения о смене сообщества. Санжар Курбанов55:52 - У меня в жизни все складывалось органично. Анжелика Кожевникова 1:01:54 - О свойствах развивающего сообщества. Маргулан Сейсембай1:02:17 - Сообщество про сотворчество. Гайникен Аманжолова1:10:10 - В первую очередь нужно проявлять себя. Санжар Курбанов1:13:57 - О влиянии обучения. Анжелика Кожевникова 1:17:50 - Как научиться получать обратную связь? Джанабеков Нурахмет1:20:25 - Как определить, здоровые это отношения или нет? Маргулан Сейсембай1:22:43 - По каким метрикам можно определить, что вы растете? Маргулан Сейсембай

Boost team results by measuring carefully and using consistent methods to move toward your goal–with “the Coaching Kata”. In part three of this mini series, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss quality and delivery the Toyota Way. Links: - Toyota Kata: https://public.websites.umich.edu/~jmondisa/TK/Homepage.html - Gemba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba Other relevant episodes: - https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/get-your-reps-in - https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/toyota-kata-part-i - https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/toyota-kata-part-ii -------------------------------------------------- You'll find free videos and practice material, plus our book Agile Conversations, at agileconversations.com And we'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show: email us at info@agileconversations.com -------------------------------------------------- About Your Hosts Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick joined forces at TIM Group in 2013, where they studied and practised the art of management through difficult conversations. Over a decade later, they remain united in their passion for growing profitable organisations through better communication. Squirrel is an advisor, author, keynote speaker, coach, and consultant, and he's helped over 300 companies of all sizes make huge, profitable improvements in their culture, skills, and processes. You can find out more about his work here: douglassquirrel.com/index.html Jeffrey is Vice President of Engineering at ION Analytics, Organiser at CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, and is an accomplished author and speaker. You can connect with him here: www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick/

Boost team results by measuring carefully and using consistent methods to move toward your goal–with “the Improvement Kata”. In part two of our Toyota Kata series, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss quality and delivery the Toyota Way. Links: - Toyota Kata: https://public.websites.umich.edu/~jmondisa/TK/Homepage.html - Gemba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba Other relevant episodes: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/get-your-reps-in https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/toyota-kata-part-i -------------------------------------------------- You'll find free videos and practice material, plus our book Agile Conversations, at agileconversations.com And we'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show: email us at info@agileconversations.com -------------------------------------------------- About Your Hosts Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick joined forces at TIM Group in 2013, where they studied and practised the art of management through difficult conversations. Over a decade later, they remain united in their passion for growing profitable organisations through better communication. Squirrel is an advisor, author, keynote speaker, coach, and consultant, and he's helped over 300 companies of all sizes make huge, profitable improvements in their culture, skills, and processes. You can find out more about his work here: douglassquirrel.com/index.html Jeffrey is Vice President of Engineering at ION Analytics, Organiser at CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, and is an accomplished author and speaker. You can connect with him here: www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick/

Boost team results by measuring carefully and using consistent methods to move toward your goal–with “scientific thinking”. In this episode of Troubleshooting Agile, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss quality and delivery the Toyota Way. Links: - Toyota Kata: https://public.websites.umich.edu/~jmondisa/TK/Homepage.html - Gemba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba Other relevant episodes: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/get-your-reps-in [previous episodes in this mini-series] -------------------------------------------------- You'll find free videos and practice material, plus our book Agile Conversations, at agileconversations.com And we'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show: email us at info@agileconversations.com -------------------------------------------------- About Your Hosts Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick joined forces at TIM Group in 2013, where they studied and practised the art of management through difficult conversations. Over a decade later, they remain united in their passion for growing profitable organisations through better communication. Squirrel is an advisor, author, keynote speaker, coach, and consultant, and he's helped over 300 companies of all sizes make huge, profitable improvements in their culture, skills, and processes. You can find out more about his work here: douglassquirrel.com/index.html effrey is Vice President of Engineering at ION Analytics, Organiser at CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, and is an accomplished author and speaker. You can connect with him here: www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick/

Adam discusses three (new-ish) ideas from time on a new gemba. Want more?

Interested in making the move to Australia to land a job in sport? Meet George Ludlow, an Account Manager at Gemba who has just made the move from London!George has transformed his life from leaving behind a career in property he wasn't passionate about, to now working on some of the most lucrative partnerships in Australian sport, including Toyota's sponsorship of the AFL, Australia's biggest sport. To arrive at what he describes as his dream job, George started his quest for a role in sport in Australia almost 8 months ago and has been extremely proactive in his approach.Today we dive into exactly how he made the move overseas, what he did to stand out, how he felt taking such a big risk, and his best tips on how you can take your career around the world.Enjoy the episode!We cover:(00:32) Who is George Ludlow?(01:53) Hello and welcome to the SportsGrad Podcast!(03:25) What's going on inside the SportsGrad Community?(07:46) Welcome to the SportsGrad Podcast George(09:10) Quick-fire questions(13:56) What is George's role at Gemba?(15:45) George's career journey post-university to when he decided to move to Australia(19:54) What made George initially choose the property industry over sports?(21:06) How did George decide to make the jump to work in sports overseas? Was he nervous?(22:08) How did George find out about SportsGrad whilst in the UK, and how did it benefit him once he arrived in Australia?(26:49) What was the interview process like at Gemba?(30:17) How have George's feeling towards moving overseas changed now that he has landed a job?(31:20) What has he loved most about being in Melbourne?(32:21) Was it easier for George to find roles when he arrived, or was it possible while it was overseas?(34:18) What can people be doing to reduce the time job hunting in a new country?(36:59) George's advice for someone who is thinking about moving overseas(41:52) ASK SPORTSGRAD---Additional episode you may enjoy:#251: How to move to London and land a job in sport with Chris Dobson---Want a weekly dose of career inspo? Get industry stories, upcoming events, and the latest sports jobs in your inbox each Friday.

Unlock the secrets to future-proof healthcare design as Jessica Sweeney, Senior Planner at BWBR, takes us behind the scenes of an ever-evolving industry where the stakes are nothing less than our collective well-being. Jessica's unique blend of healthcare leadership experience and design expertise reveals how creating spaces that serve both today's needs and tomorrow's possibilities is more art than science. We traverse her professional journey, uncovering the critical role these spaces play not just for patient care, but as cultural and financial pillars in our communities. Her insights bridge the gap between healthcare providers and architects, ensuring the spaces they create together are not only functional but also nurturing and responsive to the demands of a shifting landscape.Step into the world of operational efficiency in healthcare, where Jessica illustrates the transformative power of Gemba walks and close partnerships with staff in discovering cost-saving opportunities. This episode peels back the curtain on the meticulous strategy that defers major capital investments without compromising care quality. We delve into the real-world implications of operational changes, balancing them with empathy for the people they touch. Jessica also introduces us to the effectiveness of mock-ups in helping staff transition to new workflows and environments, emphasizing the ultimate goal: crafting spaces that are as comfortable for patients as they are functional for providers. Join us for a journey into the heart of healthcare design and efficiency with a visionary guiding the way.If you like what we are doing with our podcasts please subscribe and leave us a review!You can also connect with us on any of our social media sites!https://www.facebook.com/BWBRsolutionshttps://twitter.com/BWBRhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/bwbr-architects/https://www.bwbr.com/side-of-design-podcast/

Join us on Sales Lead Dog where we're joined by Larry Gordon, Managing Director of Emtec Inc., for an enlightening conversation on what it takes to be successful in the world of sales and leadership. Listen in as Larry breaks down his three essential drivers for success: capitalizing on technology inflection points, collaborating with exceptional CEOs, and prioritizing leadership actions over titles. His unique insights on fostering relationships with top-tier CEOs, alongside reflections on his own journey through sales and business development, offer a wealth of knowledge for anyone looking to thrive in the tech industry.     In our chat with Larry, we unpack the transition into sales leadership and the invaluable lessons that come with it. Discover the traits Larry values in potential leaders, including integrity and a deep understanding of the intricacies of relationship-driven business. He shares his strategies for assembling a balanced team, with a mix of personalities to lead effectively. This episode is brimming with Larry's advice on keeping the focus on customer engagement and sales results, offering listeners a blueprint for fostering strong, accountable leadership within their own teams.     We also tackle the sometimes challenging world of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Larry and I explore the delicate balance between the advantages of centralized customer information and the potential drawbacks of CRMs becoming overly complex or disconnected from sales team needs. Learn about the philosophy of "walking the Gemba" to truly understand front-line requirements, and the pursuit of a streamlined CRM that empowers rather than encumbers sales professionals. If you've ever felt weighed down by your CRM, this episode will guide you towards reassessing and reinvigorating your approach to drive your business forward.  Larry Gordon is Managing Director at Emtec and has been co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer and CEO of several successful start-ups in the IT services and digital engineering and AI spaces. Larry has held senior leadership positions at Cognizant and Capgemini.  He has had successful exits and built enduring customer relationships in the AI, security, devops and digital transformation segments. He has also been a successful angel investor in the energy and cloud spaces.    Quotes:  "I love identifying good opportunities at an inflection point in the technology industry. It makes things a lot easier to market, easier to recruit salespeople, and it's exciting."  "Leadership comes down to doing leadership things as opposed to being a leader. That's one of my themes."   "Offering [CEOs] things that are really useful, in my case, it's about driving revenue... I say I can do this and be accountable for it and spend the money the right way."     Links:  Larry Gordon's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurencemgordon/   Emtec, Inc. - https://www.emtecinc.com   Get this episode and all other episodes of Sales Lead Dog at https://empellorcrm.com/salesleaddog/     

В этом выпуске Мы с гостями обсудили, как добиться успеха, прилагая совсем немного усилий, и возможно ли это вообще. Выяснили сколько времени нужно уделять отдыху, чтобы не чувствовать себя виноватым, а главное, когда стоит реально «пахать»? Приятного просмотра!Таймкоды:00:00 - тизер 01:21 - Что такое Gemba? 02:28 - Сегодня в гостях…. 12:56 - Что для вас успех? Слово гостям. 13:22 - Успех фильма «Дәстүр» или как купить Рай? Алмас Жали 16:47 - Как состояние счастья прямо влияет на ваш успех? Жексен Васильевич20:00 - с 5 лет мечтала попасть в телевизор. Анжелика Кайратова 22:14 - Успех - это быть нужным. Бахт Ниязов 24:55 - Успех, навязанный обществом. Как не потерять себя? Маргулан Сейсембай27:44 - Сколько вы «пахали», чтобы прийти к тому, что сейчас у вас есть? Слово гостям28:30 - Как «пахата» стала привычным темпом жизни. Алмас Жали32:50 - Как современный мир поменял подход людей к “пахате”. Жексен Василевич 36:59 - Работала до потери сознания. Анжелика Кайратова39:54 - Пахать надо только в спортзале. Бахт Ниязов43:00 - Что такая рывковая эффективность? Маргулан Сейсембай44:44 - Когда нужно пахать? Маргулан Сейсембай49:00 - О точках приложения усилий. Маргулан Сейсембай57:00 - Остался в долгах на 2 миллиона долларов. Бахт Ниязов1:02:30 - Я часто рискую. Анжелика Кайратова1:07:00 - Почему надо искать смысл? Маргулан Сейсембай1:09:20 - Как откидывать все лишние дела? Маргулан Сейсембай1:04:35 - Об умении отдыхать. 1:18:45 - Сейчас время не умных людей. Жексен Васильевич1:22:21 - Совмещаю приятное с полезным. Анжелика Кайратова1:29:10 - Отдыхать нужно каждый день. Бахт Ниязов1:31:10 - Для чего нам нужен отдых? 1:39:30 - Фишки управления энергией. Маргулан Сейсембай1:42:50 - О духовной энергии. Маргулан Сейсембай1:47:30 - Количество работы=количество результата? 1:50:55 - Что такое легитимный бизнес? Маргулан Сейсембай

Strategic planning is vital to successful healthcare management. President & Co-Founder of The American Healthcare Journal, Cole Lyons, explains his goal of fostering a community of education to Jim Cagliostro.    Episode Introduction Cole explains why transfer of knowledge is a key goal of the Journal, why healthcare strategy can be described as moving from checkers to chess and emphasizes the importance of thinking before you speak. He also explains the importance of competition in healthcare and identifies humility as an essential leadership trait.   Show Topics   Redefining healthcare strategy A strategic alternative for nonprofits  Breaking down silos in healthcare Join Cole's community on LinkedIn Applying economic theories to healthcare strategy Leadership tip: why humility matters     05:36 Redefining healthcare strategy  Cole explained why thinking about the impact of your actions matters.  ‘'For me, it's kind of thinking before I speak. I think that's the best way that I've come up with how to explain it. In operations, day-to-day, things are quite hectic, especially at high volume clinics. And you have to make very quickly, fairly educated decisions based on standard operating procedures. But sometimes that doesn't always lead us down the best path. So part of that is creating standard operating procedures that allow you time to think about how it impacts things long-term. So, thinking before you speak for me means instead of just saying what I need to say in the moment, I think about what I say, how it will impact the person hearing it, how it'll impact my image. And if you apply that kind of thinking before acting approach to your actions in the operations space, it means taking a step back and looking at the competitive landscape in your industry, looking at the competitive landscape in your institution, different departments competing for funding, different departments competing for exposure, and looking at how even small actions in the operations world will impact that.''   08:12 A strategic alternative for nonprofits Cole said the Journal aims to foster improvement and education in strategic thinking for nonprofit institutions.  ‘'… the problem right now is VC-backed healthcare firms, those that are backed by venture capital. They have a high concentration of MBAs who have really good strategic insights. So don't get me wrong, and we can always go into this anytime, but there's a problem with a lot of the strategy theories out there in general that are taught to MBA graduates because it's based on economic theories that don't always play out in the real world. But still when they make decisions, it is much more strategic than in nonprofit healthcare. And so, one of the issues is that I'm not a fan of government-run healthcare, which is a little contrarian. I'm just not particularly a fan of it. I think that free market healthcare is good, nonprofit institutions are my favorite. I love nonprofit institutions. I think that that's the best form of delivering healthcare. But they don't act very strategically, especially compared to VC-backed or for-profit healthcare, which employ all these MBAs, they recruit MBAs from the top schools, they can pay them. …I'm not saying that they're any less educated, they're just educated differently. They have MHAs, they have MPAs, a lot of them have MDs, and they are educated in a very different way. So the journal's purpose is how can we foster this community of improvement and education in strategic thinking for these people who are educated in a much more practical way? An MHA isn't sitting in their office thinking and going into philosophy a lot of times. A lot of times they're figuring out, how can we solve this problem? How can we deal with this emergency situation?''   13:36 Breaking down silos in healthcare  Cole said administrative fellowships can help to develop a well-rounded approach. ‘'One of the ways that this is going to work out really well, and a lot of programs are doing this, is through administrative fellowships. I actually have a lot of different things that we're involved with with that, trying to get fellowship certified, trying to get fellowships publicized a lot because administrative fellowships have to rotate through every department in the organization usually. They know all the leaders. And so when they go and work in operations, they are very well-rounded. They have a much better strategic vision of the organization. They know clinicians, they know the house staff, they know the janitors, they know everybody. A lot of times they know the people who are on construction teams building the building. And so that gives them a huge, well-rounded approach that's also going to massively improve strategy. So yeah, the majority of organizations are still struggling. They're siloed or they don't even have really a strategy team, but there is a good trend for improvement I think on the way.''   16:32 Join Cole's community on LinkedIn Cole said anyone who wishes to get involved with the Journal can connect on LinkedIn and YouTube.  ‘'LinkedIn is one of the best knowledge communities. There's a bunch of knowledgeable people. All my mentors have come from LinkedIn. The past two jobs I've gotten, including the journal, so I guess my past three jobs, have all come from people I've met on LinkedIn. So I would say go to LinkedIn, the American Journal of Healthcare Strategy is on there. I am on there. Happy to network and connect with anyone. Also, just happy to be kind of a funnel connecting you to other people. If you want to meet someone in the Philadelphia region, I know most of the senior leaders here at least casually, so I can always connect you to somebody if there's somebody you want to meet. So yeah, LinkedIn is definitely the best way until we get that website and mobile app up and running…. I know sales teams have told me that they've benefited a lot, our YouTube channel and our LinkedIn, a lot of time our LinkedIn will link to the YouTube channel.''   19:08 Applying economic theories to healthcare strategy Cole said education is important to help hospitals adapt to strategy. ‘'I think the first reason that it's important is because if you're an MHA grad and you're interfacing with an MBA graduate or somebody who's a consultant, I guess classically trained in business, you need to understand the economic theories that they're going to be using and you also need to understand why they seem flawed. So when you go through a strategic plan and you utilize one of these theories, it could be like Blue Ocean or you utilize Porter's Five Forces, I like them, I think they're excellent, but they are flawed in some situations. And coming from operations, you'll identify, "Oh, there's something wrong with this," but you might not exactly know how to explain it. And it'll give you the language, it'll give you the techniques. You'll be able to construct these Five Forces plans, the Blue Ocean Plan. There's another one I can't remember off the top of my mind. But then it'll take you and say, "Okay, here's the problems with some of them. Here's how you can identify what the issues are, and here's how you can fix them as well." So, when a consultant comes in and gives you this awesome plan, it'll not have you throw plan in the trash. It'll have you say, "Oh, here's how I can adapt it to fit my organization."    21:55 Leadership tip: why humility matters Cole said humility enables leaders to make connections.  ‘'Humility is really, really important. I've been so privileged to sit with most of the CEOs of hospitals in the Philadelphia region. I think that the humility of some of them is really astounding and it leaves a lasting impact on me. I also think that those are usually the ones who are most respected, being down to earth and being humble, speaking with all the members of staff because you actually need to and want to and not just because it makes you look good…Also, the other lesson Six Sigma, the Gemba walk, the... Before you can become a manager in Japan, you have to go through all the departments…When these people rotate through these departments, I was talking to one the other day that she was in the parking lot looking at the road signs in the parking garage and working with the builders in the state to make sure that these parking lot road signs were constructed correctly. A few years later, she's going to be a hospital administrator, but that experience in the parking lot looking at the road signs, invaluable, because now she has a connection to the whole organization. And you can only make that connection if you're humble.''   Connect with Lisa Miller on LinkedIn Connect with Jim Cagliostro on LinkedIn Connect with Cole Lyons on LinkedIn    Check out VIE Healthcare and SpendMend    You'll also hear:    Transfer of knowledge, the goal of the American Journal of Healthcare Strategy: ‘'It's really essential that we think of things differently. …. what we're trying to figure out is how to transfer knowledge around in a better way, whether that is through consulting one-on-one, whether that's through one-on-one coaching, or whether that's through podcast or video. How can we get a community that is knowledgeable and is empowered by that knowledge? That's what our real goal is at the end of the day.‘'     From checkers to chess; another way of looking at healthcare strategy: ‘'So with checkers, you're kind of looking at the very next move. With chess, the best players are looking many moves ahead. And how one move in one side of the board will affect the move in the other side of the board. It's a pattern of thinking that's very hard to develop even. In the first way I mentioned with thinking before I speak, it's very challenging.''   The role of competition in American healthcare: ‘'Even though we have problems with our population care, our actual procedures that we perform, there are lots of medical tourists coming from other countries to receive care in the United States because our healthcare is really excellent in terms of a lot of the quality. We want want these nonprofit firms to be able to compete really well against VC-backed. And so that's what motivates us.''   What To Do Next:   Subscribe to The Economics of Healthcare and receive a special report on 15 Effective Cost Savings Strategies.   There are three ways to work with VIE Healthcare:   Benchmark a vendor contract – either an existing contract or a new agreement. We can support your team with their cost savings initiatives to add resources and expertise. We set a bold cost savings goal and work together to achieve it.  VIE can perform a cost savings opportunity assessment. We dig deep into all of your spend and uncover unique areas of cost savings.  If you are interested in learning more, the quickest way to get your questions answered is to speak with Lisa Miller at lmiller@spendmend.com or directly at 732-319-5700.  

"A Common Sense Approach to a Continuous Improvement Strategy"

How does a high school dropout go on to earn a Ph.D. from the University Of Iowa and become the host of one of Apple Podcast's Top 15 shows on Management? Dr. Andrew Temte's mission is to Teach, Coach, Mentor, and Inspire, and today, the Scaling UP! H2O podcast is honored to feature him. In this transformative interview, Andrew discusses the foundational elements of building company culture, emphasizing that it starts with leadership. He shares valuable insights on why companies should prioritize defining their purpose before diving into marketing strategies. Additionally, Andrew explores the concept of leadership as stewardship and offers guidance on identifying core values while ensuring that everyone's voice is heard and valued. Discover the Value of People in Business: Emphasizing the importance of supporting and empowering employees, the conversation delves into how people are the most valuable asset in any organization. The need for leaders to embrace diversity of thought and opinion to create a culture where every voice is valued is highlighted. Explore Leadership Mindset: The transition from directive to non-directive leadership styles is discussed, emphasizing the importance of fostering an environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed and respected. Embrace a Stewardship Mindset: Advocating for adopting a stewardship mindset as a leader, the discussion focuses on the long-term success of both the business and its people, rather than personal power or ego. Learn about Compassionate Leadership: The concept of compassionate leadership is explored, which involves empathizing with employees and taking proactive steps to address their needs and concerns. Key Takeaway: Discover the importance of purpose and adopting a stewardship mindset, especially in cross-generational leadership, as highlighted in this insightful conversation. Everyone knows what it's like to work for a horrible boss, but what could your life look like if you had a great boss - one who viewed you as the greatest asset in the company, ensured everyone's voice was heard, and lived out the company values in their daily lives. A leader with empathy is what every team wants. If you're eager to enhance your leadership skills and empower yourself and your team in the water industry, join us to uncover essential insights on making your team flourish, regardless of the challenges you may face.   Timestamps 01:00 - Trace Blackmore welcomes you to the second quarter of 2024, a good time to review your goals and make a plan for the next quarter  07:00 - The Hang is coming up April 11, 2024 and Upcoming Events for Water Treatment Professionals  12:30 - Interview with Dr. Andrew Temte  48:00 - Lightning round questions 59:00 - Drop by Drop With James McDonald    Quotes “Values and behaviors go together like peanut butter and jelly. Values are the nouns that you are creating for the overall structure of what you want your business to be. Behaviors are the verbs, they are the actions, they are the ‘how' we should show up each day in the business. Don't shy away from that work, engage in that work, and pay it the attention that it's due.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “Far too many leaders leave the business world and take all of their accumulated knowledge with them; maybe it gets disseminated to a small group of folks, maybe they do a little teaching and coaching on the side. I wanted to do something much bigger than that. I wanted to reach a much larger potential audience.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “Go to the Gemba - where the work happens and how teams interact. Listen to the people who interact with your customers. Set your ego aside and go to where the work happens, and listen to where the work is going on.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “As a leader, you need to create clarity. Clarity for everybody involved: your customers, your vendors, your people, your investors, your stakeholders.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “As a compassionate leader, you need to hear the successes and the pain points across the organization.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “Compassionate leadership is Empathy + Willingness and the ability to do something about it. You are putting yourself into the shoes of your people, and you are pledging to make their work better.” - Dr. Andrew Temte    Connect with Andrew Temte Phone: 608.385.9050 Email: andy@skillsowl.com Website: www.andrewtemte.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/atemte   Links Mentioned Skills Owl Add a link to Andy's podcast show, The Balancing Act Podcast Listen to Episode 109 of The Balancing Act Podcast with Trace Blackmore HERE  Podify Episode 4 with Charlie Cichetti The Rising Tide Mastermind Scaling UP! H2O Academy video courses Submit a Show Idea AWT (Association of Water Technologies)   Books Mentioned The Balanced Business: Building Organizational Trust and Accountability through Smooth Workflows by Andrew Temte Balancing Act: Teach Coach Mentor Inspire by Andrew Temte The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington What the Heck Is EOS? by Gino Wickman and Tom Bouwer Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations by Jack Skeels The NEW ROI: Return on Individuals by Dave Bookbinder The People Side of Lean Thinking by Robert Brown   2024 Events for Water Professionals Check out our Scaling UP! H2O Events Calendar where we've listed every event Water Treaters should be aware of by clicking HERE or using the dropdown menu.   Drop By Drop with James  Today's topic is Reverse Osmosis data normalization. Over time, RO membrane performance changes. The quality and quantity of permeate water produced and the energy required to produce it will vary.  In Episode 339, Jane Kucera, author of the book “Reverse Osmosis,” said, “There are six things that affect membrane performance:  fouling, scaling, membrane degradation, temperature, pressure, and concentration.”    I really like that succinct list: fouling, scaling, membrane degradation, temperature, pressure, and concentration. The impacts of each of these are interrelated and complex. Changes in one of them can either hide or exasperate the effects of another. For example, dropping temperature may reduce the permeate flow rate while increasing pressure may increase it, thus canceling out the effects of each.  This makes it next to impossible to determine the true performance of an RO system by simply looking at the raw data.    So, what's the solution? If we lived in the world of scifi, we could take today's RO membranes, put them into a time machine, activate the flux capacitor like in “Back to the Future,” travel back in time, and install those membranes in the RO machine at the same time they were started up, replaced, or even cleaned so you could measure how they would perform under the exact same conditions as the baseline. The same pressure, same temperature, and same water concentration. I keep saying the word “same,” but that is key here.  How would today's membranes perform in yesterday's machine under the same baseline conditions? Then you could eliminate the influences of changes in temperature, pressure, and concentration and figure out the real impacts of fouling, scaling, and membrane degradation. Simple, right? Now where did we put that flux capacitor? It's got to be around here somewhere. Oh, wait.  Flux capacitors don't actually exist yet. Dang it! Now what?    That's where normalization comes into play. Normalization is a fancy way of saying you are going to MATHEMATICALLY take those membranes back in time and adjust for changes in temperature, pressure, and concentration. This will allow you to make an apples-to-apples comparison of permeate flows by calculating the normalized permeate flow (NPF) of today to compare to the permeate flow at the baseline conditions.  The same goes for normalized pressure differential (NPD) and normalized salt rejection (NSR).  Your next logical question may be, “Well, where do I get these miraculous normalization equations?” While there are ASTM standards for such calculations, your easiest route is probably to visit your RO membrane manufacturer's website to download their normalization tool. It may be as simple as an Excel worksheet. If you manage an RO system, it is worth your time to learn how to use these tools to normalize your RO data so you know when it is time to clean the membranes and to find problems as they occur.   

Unlock the transformative power of lean processes and join us as we explore their impact on business growth and customer satisfaction. Lean expert Catherine and Fabrice, CTO of Theodore, share their insights on human communication, team engagement, and the disciplined approaches that propel companies forward. Discover how the legendary Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos wove lean thinking into their corporate tapestries, and get an inside look at how these methodologies can revolutionize your business from the ground up.This episode is a treasure trove of strategic wisdom, where we dissect the evolution from Lean to Agile within the tech industry. Catherine's mastery of Lean tools like Kanban and Andon, and Fabrice's decade of experience incorporating these principles, provide practical examples of driving efficiency and nurturing a supportive work environment. By examining our own organization, we reveal the substantial benefits of adopting Lean, including revenue boosts and high employee morale—proving that success and well-being can indeed go hand in hand.Ever wonder how to sustain long-term growth in your business? It's not just genius and luck—it's about cultivating every team member's creativity. We delve into the heart of lean thinking and continuous improvement, emphasizing the importance of staying close to the 'Gemba' and nurturing craftsmanship. For those ready to embark on their own journey, Fabrice's candid reflections offer a roadmap for adopting lean principles and fostering innovation within your team. Tune in for a conversation packed with actionable insights and resources to guide your organizational evolution. Connect with Catherine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-chabiron-43ba6b16/

Read the blog post We often describe Kaizen as a way of looking at the world rather than a prescription for how to achieve positive change. Kaizen thinkers seek to make small changes to operations daily in search of higher quality, more efficiency, and less waste. But because the concept of Kaizen is so philosophical, it can be a challenge for people new to the idea to understand what it means in practical terms. Related: What is Kaizen? One useful tool for training managers to adopt the Kaizen mindset is called the 5 M's. By consistently examining the 5 M's, managers will be able to recognize when something in a process is not working and improve efficiency and profitability. This model can be used for risk mitigation, addressing safety issues, and improving quality. It can be used right alongside other Kaizen techniques such as the 5 Whys, 5S, and Gemba walks. Humanpower Machines Materials Methods Measurements

There is growing scientific literature on the benefits of red light therapy/photobiomodulation for a wide range of medical and and health optimisation strategies. This  is a comprehensive introduction to the topic and great starting point for anyone looking to add this practice to their health and wellness toolkit.Andrew LaTour is an expert engineer and owner of GembaRed, a company producing high quality red light therapy devices.I have no financial affiliation with Gemba red. I have enjoyed Andrews free education content and his dedication to transparecny of his operation.--------------------------------------------------------------LEARN how to GET HEALTHY SUN EXPOSURE  - PRESALE Offer !✅ Dr Max's Solar Callus Course

In episode 97, we released an excerpt by Elisabeth Swan from "Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 1)" This is an excerpt from the audiobook version Volume 1. I share the story of running a small nonprofit organization in Portland, called Recycling Advocates (now called Waste-free Advocates). We created a fundraiser conference called Zero Waste Conference, to promote the reduction of items going to the landfill. I was able to incorporate some Lean and Six Sigma principles to the event planning to prevent issues like parking confusion, sign-in delays, seating charts, predicting show up rates, and much more. The entire chapter requires the purchase of the book, but remember that the proceeds from the book sales supports the nonprofit organizations selected by each of the 8 chapter authors. Links ⁠⁠Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 1 and Volume 2)⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Need help in your organization? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Let's talk! Schedule a free support call⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Podcast Sponsor: Creative Safety Supply is a great resource for free guides, infographics, and continuous improvement tools. I recommend starting with their 5S guide. It includes breakdowns of the five pillars, ways to begin implementing 5S, and even organization tips and color charts. From red tags to floor marking; it's all there. Download it for free at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠creativesafetysupply.com/5S⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BIZ-PI.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LeanSixSigmaDefinition.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Have a question? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Submit a voice message at Podcasters.Spotify.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/leansixsigmabursts/message

This is an excerpt from the audiobook version of "Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 2)"Elisabeth Swan shares the story of volunteering with the Cape Cod Childcare Development nonprofit organization. She discusses getting a call from the CEO to help the organization utilize more Lean Six Sigma Green Belt skills and methods within the organization.In one of the examples highlighted in her chapter, she shares how they reviewed their expenses and processes, and managed to update the ordering process, consolidate vendors, reduce the number of steps involved in getting supplies to the people who needed them, all while ensuring the Finance Department received the right info to pay the bills. The savings from the monthly cellphone bill, combined with switching to a new vendor, was enough to afford the mortgage for the building to house the new Head Start program.Proceeds from the book purchase supports the nonprofit organizations selected by each of the 8 chapter authors. Links ⁠Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 1 and Volume 2) ⁠⁠⁠Need help in your organization? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Let's talk! Schedule a free support call⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Podcast Sponsor: Creative Safety Supply is a great resource for free guides, infographics, and continuous improvement tools. I recommend starting with their 5S guide. It includes breakdowns of the five pillars, ways to begin implementing 5S, and even organization tips and color charts. From red tags to floor marking; it's all there. Download it for free at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠creativesafetysupply.com/5S⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BIZ-PI.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LeanSixSigmaDefinition.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Have a question? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Submit a voice message at Podcasters.Spotify.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/leansixsigmabursts/message

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.Transcript: Agile F M radio for the agile community. [00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Thank you for tuning into another episode of Agile FM. Today, I have Dr. Jeffrey Liker with me. You probably know from a, I would say, famous book with the title The Toyota Way. That is a book we want to talk about today a little bit, but there's so much, much more about Jeff, he is a professor of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan.He's president of Liker Lean Advisors, and as I said, he wrote not only the Toyota Way, but he also wrote, if I did the count right, nine other books. That relate to Toyota, and there are two books that more recently were published and we'll have a chance in a different episode to talk about those.One was in June, 2023, Giving Wings to her team with Tilo Schwartz, and we have Engaging the Team at Zingerman's Mail Order and that's more like a comic if you want to see it this way, and he co authored that with Eduardo Lander and Tim Root, so that is the The list of books if I haven't missed anything, but we want to talk a little bit about the Toyota way before we do that.Welcome to the show though, Jeff. [00:01:13] Jeffrey Liker: Thank you. Joe. [00:01:16] Joe Krebs: Awesome. So the Toyota way initially released, I believe 2000, somewhere three, two, somewhere that this book we're talking about is the Toyota way. Second edition. This is also very important. We're talking about the second edition of which, which was released somewhere in the year 2021. Timeframe. [00:01:34] Jeffrey Liker: Yes. Three, about two years old. [00:01:36] Joe Krebs: Yeah. And but there is something that happened in that book that is fundamentally different in, in terms of I, I don't know all the change log and everything, but there's one fundamental change, and that is the inclusion of scientific thinking.[00:01:52] Jeffrey Liker: Right, right. A little over five years ago, Mike Rother than I jointly gave a presentation and the book hit my book Toyota Way was 20 years old. So the 20 year anniversary, and his book to Toyota Kata was, I believe, 10 years old, and. We started talking about the relationship between the two.Mike was one of my students and he had practiced lean transformation for many years and was very familiar with the Toyota way and all the concepts of Toyota and studied Toyota. And then he came up with this thing called Toyota Kata. And I had to kind of struggle to sort of figure out what it was and what he was trying to add to what we know about Toyota.And. What he really did was to reverse engineer what Toyota, we call him Toyota Sensei. Sensei is like a master teacher. So what the Toyota Sensei, who are experts on the Toyota production system, do when they work with a new client outside of Toyota, how do they teach it? And they always teach by doing.And he had a chance to see a lot of companies that these different Toyota masters worked with and their masterpieces. And. Asked the question, What do they have in common? And they're all very successful, like they almost won't even bother working on a project unless they can at least double productivity.And that just happens almost automatically. And so he knew that they got great results. But the question is, what are they doing. And in fact, each of these masters. It has a bit of an ego, and they think that they're doing it the right way and the best way, and nobody else can do it that way, the way they do, but he found an underlying pattern, which he called scientific thinking, and what he noticed is the first thing they do is they grasp, they call it grasp the situation in Toyota, they go in, they see what's going on, they talk to the top leaders, and they ask, what is it that they're trying to accomplish?What is their goal? What is their purpose? What are their goals? Why do they want to learn about lean management? What is their vision for what happened? If they were successful, then they go to the Gemba where the activity is, and it could be a factory that they work. They've worked with where they gave you injections for COVID 19.They've worked with where they made ventilators for COVID 19. They've worked with software houses where they develop software. They don't really care when they will go to the Gemba and they'll see the process and understand the current conditions. So then they'll go back, they'll grasp the situation generally, and then they'll go back and they'll say, here's where you're at.Here's the challenge for you. Yeah. And the challenge is always big, you know, like we will double productivity or we will reduce costs by 30 percent or something pretty big based on the needs of the company may have runaway late deliveries and there's paying a ton for a premium freight.And we'll say we will eliminate all shipping and then they will go back to the Gemba with a team of people from the company. And they will teach them how to see, how to understand the process as it is. And Mike calls this the current condition. And then the people in the company will basically wait and expect answers, solutions from the masters.So what do we do? And the masters will say, that's my question to you. What are you going to do? You see where you are, you see where you want to be. You see all sorts of opportunities. What do you think you should be working on first? And then based on what they say the students say, they they may ask them to go back and look some more.Or they may say, why don't we try it? Usually what these people come in the company, come up with, because it's a big challenge, they come up with a fairly big thing and they, it might be, for example, in a manufacturing facility, moving equipment around and laying it out as a cell and They said a personal last one.Can you do this? And they'll say something like, well, we have to talk to engineering and we have to make sure customers okay with this. We have to line up the maintenance people move the equipment. So, I think we really stretch it. Maybe we could do it in a week. And then the trade master will say, good, I'll be back tomorrow and that like starts the process. Now, of course they can't do it in a day what they might have to do it. They can't get all the approvals. So what the person is trying to get them to do is. You don't have to do a hundred percent in one step. Let's try something that's doable and then see what happens.And then we can learn from it. And then we can think about based on that, what our next step is. Usually what happens is the, like, for example, if they lay out a cell. It'll be a disaster. You'll move the equipment together and they'll realize that the equipment has maintenance issues and it's breaking down and everything stops because they don't have inventory anymore.And usually they can't, they barely make product and the you know, the mentors say, that's okay. Let's start working on the problems down now that we see what the problems are. You were hiding them before. Now let's start working on the problems one by one. So Mike saw that, and he saw it enough times, that he realized that what the, these Master thinkers were doing.We're not teaching tools and methods like most of the Westerners were doing with lean. They were teaching a way of thinking. Yeah. And it was actually very scientific. What's your goal? What's your current condition? Right. You know, fairly precisely with measurements and direct observation. And then let's not try to in one step get to the challenge.Let's break down the problem. And all we really need to understand is our first step. And then after that, our second step, our third step, and each of these steps were structured like experiments. They might ask them, what do you think will happen if we make the cell? And then, you know, the people will say, Oh, well, our productivity will go up or quality will go up.Let's see what happens. Yeah. It's a disaster. Yeah. So what did we learn from that? We learned that we have a lot of problems that we've been hiding. And now we can see the problems we have to solve them. So, and also they're trying to teach the value of running the experiment, learning from it, which then gives you the next step and gives you the next step.So that became the basis for what. Mike call Toyota kata. The other part of it was in the meantime, he was studying about neuroscience and cognitive psychology and how we learn and there's a lot of literature that suggests that none of us are natural scientific thinkers, right? We're driven more by biases and the desire to know things, whether we do or not.So we want a lot of certainty. And we want to be right. We're going to, in fact, fudge the data to make it appear that we're right. That's called confirmation bias, which is really strong in humans. So he realized that to change people, to start to think and act scientifically requires fundamental behavior change.That's right. Yeah. It means changing our habits. And then he asked the question, how do you change habits? And the literature on, on, on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, as well as Practical experience, for example, with coaching sports teams, it all says the same thing, which we have to practice repeatedly with feedback.And it's very common enough times it becomes a new habit. So then he said, asked, how do you, how can we practice scientific thinking? And he said, first, we need a model, which we have, which is challenge current condition, first short term target condition, then experiment, then second target condition and experiment.Then third target condition and experiment. And. Then he said, how can we teach this? And each of those steps has some associated ways of thinking and tools and think practice routines, things to practice. So he laid that out in what he calls the Toyota Kata practice guide, which is pictures and step by step instruction, like, Like a recipe book and he came up with kata, which comes from the martial arts, which mean small practice routines to teach us complex skill by breaking it down and trying the pieces one by one karate.They'll have the first kata and move the second kata until you learn the first kata. That's right. Correctly. So it's an evolution. Yeah, and usually think about, you know, taking a music lesson until you can play the very simple piece. They want. Go on to the next more complicated piece. All right. So, that led to the whole Toyota Kata, which is a model plus the practice routines.And as you practice them, you begin to think more naturally in a scientific way. [00:11:20] Joe Krebs: Right. So what's interesting is so when I started looking at Mike Rothers work right on, on Kata, and obviously I read your first edition, came in to the second edition and it just like became more and more eyeopening is these habit changes or like a habits we have and habits we want to change that's the same in the agile community, right?So we have certain habits of how we. build software or how we release software and go through transformation and all these cultural changes. So it's just like this meta skill. If you want to see it this way, that, that's that's fascinating when I came across this now, I do want to make sure that If I understand this right, this is obviously not that in 2021 Toyota started with scientific thinking.It was there before, right? It is like something that was carved out as something like it should go into the Toyota way as this core thing. So if you look at [00:12:10] Jeffrey Liker: Yeah. So that was the, we ended up giving a presentation where we said Toyota way and Toyota Kata play well together as if there were separate things.And then thinking about some more, I realized that scientific thinking really underlies. What I called in the Toyota way, the four P's of the Toyota way. The first was philosophy, which I refer to as long term systems thinking. And the second is lean processes. The process of trying to work toward one piece flow.And the third is developing people. In problem solving, which is the fourth "P" and I realized these all are connected through scientific thinking, right? And if you're not thinking scientifically, you can't do any of them. For example, you can't be a system thinker. Yeah. If you're a jelly non scientific thinking is reductionist.We assume every individual tool operates on its own. So we implement Kanban to get inventory reductions and we implement standardized work to get productivity improvements. So we're seeing isolated tools as opposed to a whole system, which is what Mike called the Toyota production system. So with that, I then started to rethink the book from the point of view of scientific thinking, being at the center.And also realizing that you can't really talk about lean as if it's a bunch of mechanistic pieces that you individually build and then they just all suddenly fit together. You have to talk about more of an evolutionary learning process. Yeah. Organization. [00:13:48] Joe Krebs: Yeah. This is interesting. So, I have never consulted for Toyota myself but I was told that the word Toyota Kata does not really, it's not a use, it use Toyota.[00:13:58] Jeffrey Liker: That was not their word. It was Mike's. [00:13:59] Joe Krebs: Exactly. Yeah. [00:14:00] Jeffrey Liker: Description from the outside of what he learned in Toyota. And then he went further and say, the Japanese sensei, they tend to be pretty mysterious Yeah. Yeah, it's light. For example, do it tomorrow. Yeah, we'll come and see. So what should I do now? What do you think you should do now?Yeah. So they tend to be mysterious, but he realized that if we want to mass distribute this to people that don't have access to those magical Japanese, we need a very explicit and simple methodology. So he developed in great detail, this methodology that in Toyota, they wouldn't think they had to use because they, what they say is that from the day you enter the company, the culture is so strong.You begin to learn Kaizen. [00:14:49] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Interesting. So, what was that one of the reasons why you decided to call that core scientific thinking, or was it more like, because it's the thinking and not the tool, it's not the pattern [00:15:00] Jeffrey Liker: thinking now it turns out. You go back to the first Japanese pamphlet. Really? It was a document for the first Japanese document that describes the Toyota production system.It says that it's based on scientific thinking. So for people in Toyota, that's not. Unusual. It's not a stretch, but they, and they think of scientific thinking more empirically than theoretically. So there's theoretical science where we just. In the abstract. And then we deduce from that things and we apply the abstract model to a problem.And then there's inductive science where we look at the phenomena and the empirical reality. And then we induce from that principles and solutions. And so in Toyota, they learned that you need very specific solutions to very specific problems. Yeah. Not general solutions to a whole general class of problems.So you need both to some degree, but they're much more focused than most on solving this problem right here, right now. Yeah. So when they see product development in software, we're developing a software program, they see it and maybe they see it as a part of product development, but they're not going to come in and say, here's your 10 step roadmap to great software.They're going to ask, what is your problem? What are you trying to accomplish? What's your goal? Let's go look at your current process. So they want to know the specifics of your situation and your goals. And they want you to learn how to think scientifically, to learn for yourself how to achieve whatever goals you have and adapt and adjust as the environment changes.[00:16:45] Joe Krebs: It is, it's fascinating also when I open up your new book, the second edition, right? There's also a thing where you design a I don't know if that's the content of your masterclass. I do know that you're teaching a lot of masterclasses but it's really the transition from a mechanistic lean, right?Organic lean. And if I go through the list of the organic lean, this is just like, it just translates for me, for somebody who has been now, you know, using, learning, applying Kata thinking more and more it just links like one, one, one to one, like two to the scientific thinking too, right? [00:17:17] Jeffrey Liker: Yeah, the other part is that whatever performance improvement program you have, Whether it's lean or agile or theory of constraints or whatever.If you look at it from what I call mechanistic point of view, then you're trying to fit square pegs in the round holes, you know, your problems, I want your problems to fit into my model. . and the other expression pill uses, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.So, You can apply Lean, you can apply Agile, you can apply Six Sigma mechanistically, or you can apply any of those things organically. You start organically, you start with a problem. You want to engage the people who understand the Gemba the reality the best. And you want to teach them how to think differently about their process.So they developed the skills of problem solving and performance improvement, and you expect to be surprised and you expect that you won't know the answers until you start digging in and trying things, Mechanistic point of view, you, I have the solution and I'm going to sell you the solution, even though I've never been in your place.I've never seen your process. I don't know anything about. Yeah, I have the solution for you. That's kind of taking this abstract solution and assuming it's going to apply in the abstract to any similar type of problem. Staying at that theoretical level. [00:18:49] Joe Krebs: This is this could I want to just take one example.You know, I want to hear your opinion about this as you do teach these classes, right? When you are surrounded by leaders in those workshops, and you do talk about something like, yeah, I find like the right line here. It's not about like organic, Lean. It would be, it's not a project. It's a journey.Right. And I would just like to hear like what kind of responses, what do you hear when you introduce a concept like this, in terms of continuous improvement and it's a journey or it's a. From a cultural perspective, it's not like an initiative that starts here and ends in by the end of March or any arbitrary date you, somebody might pick it as an ongoing activity that obviously shifts from a leadership perspective, entirely the view, like, what did you hear when you challenge people?[00:19:39] Jeffrey Liker: When I teach the masterclass, the people that usually come have titles like director of continuous improvement, vice president operations excellence and then I'll get some people who might be the head of operations or plant manager, but and you're probably this is self selection, but they all agree when we talk about it.That the approach they have used in the past was very mechanistic and the approach that they believe, particularly after they see it in Toyota. So we do this with Toyota is they see the value of engaging all the people and Leaders acting more as coaches than as disciplinarians. And they said, that's what we need.So they, they conclude they want to move toward a more organic approach, but then they also feel a little bit concerned and nervous because I said, you know, my boss's boss expects immediate measurable results from everything we do with lean. And if you're telling me that it takes time, if you're telling me that it takes investment in developing people.And there's a gap, a time gap between the investments we make in developing people, for example, teaching them using Kata and the results that we get, we're going to have a hard time selling that. So what we ended up concluding usually is that you need both, that there is some value in the experts coming in with the tools, eliminating waste and streamlining processes and getting.Quick results on a more expansive part of the organization. Cause these people are coming in with big companies. They might have 30 or 40 or 50 manufacturing plants and the, and that there's a value in piloting within a smaller area, some of the deeper approaches to changing ways of thinking and changing culture with the successes you have in those models.You have something to sell to the senior management, come and see this and see how much better they perform. So that's usually the kind of vision they have is that they have to somehow find a balance. And I have a slide that shows like, the balance of justice and they have to find a balance between the more mechanistic, quick, short term and superficial approach.Deep and a mile wide. And that's deploying the tools and then the more deep one inch wide, a mile deep, the more deep approach to developing people one by one that you would be doing with Kata. So they have to find a balance between those things, and they have to figure that out there through their own scientific thinking journey.They have to figure it out inside their company by trying things by experimenting. So I asked him instead of leaving here with a whole bunch of solutions. that you're going to bring and implement your company, think about one big challenge that would really make a difference. Your ability to deploy lean, sell lean and define that as a challenge.Then the next, what do you do next? And they said, well, we have to solve the problem. Okay. So how do you solve the problem? Do you go back there and say, we need standardized work. We need employ work groups that we saw at Toyota. And they said, no, those are solutions. We have to understand the current condition.First. That's a great, wonderful.[00:23:09] Joe Krebs: Back to scientific thinking.. This is awesome. Your book was initially the first edition came out as we said of. Several years ago, 2002 or something like that. Why do you think at least from the, from an agile perspective there's other terms floating around. I don't want to go into pick any, right, because it's not a complete list necessarily, but why do we.I see like a lack of of these terms actually like being used on a more broader level, right? You have sold so many books and people are looking at this and saying this is wonderful material, but the implementation, it seems to be slow in the transition. Like taking companies to lean or even in, in agile transformations, is it, do you think it has something to do with the the culture, like, like, for example, using Japanese terms or something like that?[00:24:01] Jeffrey Liker: Yeah, I don't think that so much. I mean, I think there is sometimes a sense that since this is a car company and you have a stereotype picture in your mind of what a car company does. And the first thing you often think about is the assembly line, where you have cars running down the assembly line and people are attaching things to the car.And you say, well, that doesn't look anything like what I do, so therefore, it doesn't apply to me. So there's a lot of that, you know, we're different. And it could be anything. It could be that we're a manufacturing company, but we make chemical products. It's not like cars going down the line. Or it could be that we're a finance company and we don't make any physical products.Or it could be that we work with a mining company that does iron ore mining in Australia and we go and we blast and we dig and we have this big batches of stuff. And how do we get to one piece flow? So, the the problem is that you have to shift your thinking from manufacturing. Mechanical solutions.Like I'm trying to look over here to get solutions that apply in an obvious way to me. You have to shift that thinking to there are some general principles here that have been abstract abstracted that I can then bring to my operations and the people who are well trained and lean or in Kata get very comfortable going into any new environment and not knowing What the solutions are, and then digging in and trying to understand the current condition of that operations.So this idea of I think the first easy thing to do is to copy solutions like a template. But if you give me a template, I'll just superimpose on my process and I know what to do. And the harder thing is to take a more abstract concept, like I need to define a challenge., even when I take my classes and I asked them to define a challenge, they struggle, you know, the challenges we want to have a culture of continuous improvement.Well, that's way too abstract. And then if they say, well, the challenges we would want, we'd like five suggestions per employee. That's way too specific. . So finding the right level of the challenge, you know, itself challenging challenges are thinking. And then what do you look at in the current condition?If it doesn't look like a Toyota plant where you can say it takes 60 seconds for each car and we can break down the steps of attaching window wiper into a reach that takes 2 seconds and, you know, They that's their current condition analysis. Your current condition analysis may be very different if you don't have a routine repeating process.But there are ways to understand the current condition in any sort of process. And even and I remember Deming saying that if you don't think you have a process, you can't improve anything. So, that even that idea that, you know, we develop software, and every software project is different. And the process is that we understand what the customer wants, and we do it.There's no process beyond that. You know, so that Just understanding there are processes, there are habits, there are routines that you have and you need to shine a light on them and understand them, and then figure out from where you are how to start to move in the direction. of the ideal model you have in your head.That, you know, it takes a, it takes thinking. Yeah. It's thinking is tiring. [00:27:36] Joe Krebs: Well, that's my recommendation to all of the listeners out there. When I went down the journey and extracted. By doing exactly what you just said, like looking at that material and extracting information saying like, okay, this is not about Toyota.This is not about this. This is about, you know, how would this apply a map to the agile world? I'm just calling it agile Kata out because of the making a dereferencing it to the Toyota. Brand, let's say in this particular case, but the thinking is the same in terms of the scientific thinking, but surrounding it with agile principles and, you know, [00:28:12] Jeffrey Liker: last thing I'd like to say is that as I dug into agile and you and I met.Menlo Innovations, which is kind of a benchmark for Agile and software development. And I looked at what they're doing there, which Richard Sheridan we're doing. And I saw lots of similarities to the Toyota way. And I saw also a lot of similarities to Toyota Kata. And I met, worked on Zingerman's mail order with Tom Root, who is one of the owners.He was originally an IT guy. So the backbone of the mail order business is the IT system. And what I discovered, and I've talked to you and I've talked to a lot of different IT people, what I discovered is that a lot of the concepts of scientific thinking are actually quite natural for programmers, you know, see, if I think in terms, if I say we need to think in terms of systems and how the parts interact, and I go into a manufacturing environment, they might think Treat me like I'm from another planet, but the software guy will say, of course, and then the idea that you have to have a vision for what the software is going to do and understand the customer.And then you have to break that down into small elements of some sort. Call them features, and then you need to develop one feature at a time and then compile them, make sure they work together as a system, and then build the next feature and compile it. And it's a step by step learning process, breaking the big problem into small pieces and then solving each problem one by one.That idea just you know, a software program said, how do you do it any other way? So the high level model of the Kata makes perfect sense. Within the world of software development, but how to do that in a sort of structured systematic way and make it part of the culture and natural.For example at Menlo Innovations, they do unit testing. And if I say unit testing to a software program and say, of course, we know what that is. Let's go and see your program and show me the unit test you've conducted. Exactly. And this kind of, yeah, and it's got to be hopefully more and more examples like this, right?Than than the one you're naming. And so I think somebody might be listening to this. Or reading the second edition of your book of the Toyota way might be building these bridges to whatever environment they are in, right? About in, in the Toyota way I do write about Menlo innovations. And so I, so that's another thing I did in the new edition is add more service examples and software examples and examples from other places, which I didn't have at the time I wrote the original book, I was just describing.So that's in the book. And it. The thinking way is still the same and one of the things that happened with Richard and to tell you the truth is that he started to get kind of turned off by a lot of the agile examples he was seeing, because they like the lean folks were often simply using a tool.Be that agile was almost equivalent to writing things on post it notes. Yeah, and he has all culture. He calls it deliberate culture. He had to develop the whole culture. Out of pairs, paired programming and programs learning from each other and sending what he calls technical anthropologists out to the customer to really deeply understand the Gemba and how they're using software and getting the customer in week by week, every single week to test the software and give feedback to the team.So there's a whole set of practices that he had to create as the standard for the culture of Menlo. That it took an awful lot of work and it was much more than buying a lot of post it notes. [00:32:08] Joe Krebs: Yes, and maybe that was one of the reasons why he decided when we all agreed on we're going to meet in Ann Arbor and it was in September 23 we'll all come together and it was Mike it was you and several others and Richard Sheridan was the first one who says and count me in and I'm offering my office space for this because it's so important.[00:32:25] Jeffrey Liker: So yeah, well he yeah so he didn't understand Kata at first but then I understood it. And he said, yeah, that's pretty much what we do. Isn't it? Then he had to, you know, he then added some things to what they do because they weren't working in a deliberate way using the scientific approach of kind, but the overarching way that they worked and developed all their software was very much the vision, current state, right down to small pieces, solve one problem after another with very quick feedback.Correct feedback, then get it to work. One of the interesting things about Menlo innovations projects, cause they're developing customer software, none of it's off the shelf. And they, if they do a one year project in the 52nd week, the only thing they have to get right is one week of work because 51 weeks of work works perfectly.So there's basically zero, almost zero rework and they have a hundred percent customer satisfaction. The customer takes the software out of the box and they just start using it.. [00:33:37] Joe Krebs: I want to thank you Jeff for some insights on the second edition of the Toyota Way. If the second edition is It's only somewhat successful as the first edition in terms of sales of books.Thousands of books will be sold and thousands of readers out there will be exposed to scientific thinking and it's a good thing through your materials. I want to thank you for that. And also, yeah, just like, to everybody out there, if you are interested go to the show pages, I'm going to list Jeff's books and obviously ways of learning about Kata in a way to apply that in the agile context, I have some additional pointers here of where to go, what to do first and second, and obviously the Kata Bookshelf is growing thanks to you, Jeff, too, and and many more ways to learn about scientific thinking.Thank you, Jeff. [00:34:27] Jeffrey Liker: You're welcome. It's my pleasure, Joe. Take care then.

Read the blog post As I recently shared on LinkedIn, I really appreciated the annual shareholder letter that was published and shared by Larry Culp, who has been CEO of General Electric for just over five years now (the first-ever outsider CEO in their 125+ year history). Read the full letter here. I've also archived it here as a PDF. First off, I can't help but notice that the photo shared at the end of the letter is not a corporate headshot of Larry in a power suit and tie. It's a photo from a "gemba" (or factory floor) with him wearing safety glasses, a casual shirt, and a high-visibility vest. He certainly looks to be in his element and enjoying it. How rare is that amongst CEOs of manufacturing companies of any size? How much better off would other manufacturers (or healthcare organizations) be if they had CEOs who don't just sponsor or support Lean, but are instead leading and driving the culture change? How many hospital CEOs truly enjoy donning PPE to be at the frontlines of patient care? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lean-blog-audio/support

Erin Ruane was vice president of content acquisition at Netflix for more than a decade, participating in the formulation and execution of the company's strategy, from the  launch of the streaming service, international, pricing and culture. Her responsibilities included negotiating and managing all studio relationships, over $350 million in annual spend. Joining Erin is Claire Kelly, General Manager of Gemba Europe.  Gemba is a strategy consultancy for the Sport & Entertainment industry, driven by data to support rightsholders and brands grow fans, deepen engagement and achieve their commercial goals.Topics include Netflix's recent ten year $5billion deal with WWE and the lessons for the sports industry to be gleaned from Netflix and Disney.You can hear our previous episode - If Tesco Ran Sport - in the archives. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 300 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner' on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you're interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

After labor, the supply chain is healthcare's biggest expense. Randy Subramany, Director of Supply Chain at New York Presbyterian Hospital, shares insights into 2024 trends and innovations with Jim Cagliostro.    Episode Introduction  Randy explains why there's more to his role than ‘'bandages and gauzes'', why people are the most important element of the ‘'three-legged supply chain barstool,'' and highlights why patient care, decision-making and retaining talent are the top supply chain challenges. He also explains why it takes an eco-system to keep people healthy and how tapping into the power of technology can improve slim hospital margins.    Show Topics   A day in the life of a Hospital Supply Chain Director Caring for patients with complex health needs Challenges in retaining and growing talent  The impact of digital transformation on healthcare Utilizing technology to promote a sustainable economy Supply chain management: improving margins Leadership tip: Going to the Gemba     02:26 A day in the life of a Hospital Supply Chain Director Randy explained the far-reaching impact of the role and his team.    ‘'People think about supplies in a hospital, I'm sure the basics, whether it's through a TV show or just walking through a hospital, you'll see the fundamentals, you'll see gloves, you'll see gowns, you'll see all the different forms of PPE, people think bandages and gauzes, but let's move beyond that now because that's some of the basic things. As a supply chain director, my team is also responsible for pacemakers, for skin tissue that we purchase for a patient that has a severe burn and needs to have emergency surgery, for all of the accessories used in robotic surgeries as well, for grafts and stents and meshes that are used throughout all different sorts of vascular cases. And to give everyone those numbers, to give a number, my team, on a daily basis, is managing 15 to 20,000 case-dependent, unique supplies. To take you through my day, fundamentally, I have 135 wonderful human beings who are responsible for all elements of supply reordering, replenishment, distribution, logistics, triaging, back orders, and really, anything disposable, and some reusable, but mostly disposable that's used on a patient is touching a member of our team. So as I'm sure you can imagine, as I'm sure anyone who's familiar with the hospital can imagine, as I'm sure anyone who's not familiar with the hospital can imagine, the role itself, it's quite impactful.''   08:52 Caring for patients with complex healthcare needs Randy said that caring for patients with complicated illnesses was the primary challenge.  ‘'But I think the primary challenge that we have, that we will have as an academic institution, is we're seeing patients with the most complicated illnesses and diseases that require, although state-of-the-art and groundbreaking, the most complicated treatments and the most complicated processes and procedures to care successfully for these patients. Of course, fundamentally, in a hospital setting, you're never going to be 100% ever. You're never going to cure anyone 100%. Sometimes care is more important than the cure itself. But putting that aside, I think we're what they call a tertiary coronary academic medical center, which means that we encounter the sickest patients in the world that come to us. So I think the first challenge is we are caring for humans who have very complicated illnesses and diseases.''   11:43 Challenges in retaining and growing talent  Randy said he expects to lose up to 40% of his experienced team members in the next five years.  ‘'From my direct lens internally, I think the main challenge is retaining talent and growing the talent. I say that from two lenses, I'll say that from the lens of 30 to 40% of my team members are within five years of retirement, 30 to 40% are within the first five years of their career. I think there's a gap. And we're noticing, universally, putting aside the supply chain industry, that talent is leaving the work environment or leaving the market because it's time for people to live on to their golden years and pursue other adventures. But for me, it's like how do I bridge the gap with that talent in X number of years from now where the majority of our workforce or my team will be relatively, it's wrong to say inexperienced, but will not have the same levels of experience as those who just have that anecdotal information of they know that this unit uses this supply. It's not something you directly can teach, it's just something that people learn.''   17:08 The impact of digital transformation on healthcare  Randy said moving to cloud-based systems will be vital for effective supply chain management. ‘'Why is that? I think it's because we think of, historically, ERP systems as transactional systems, systems that you use to order, sometimes to manage inventory, but as we move to the cloud, there is going to be this recognition. Cloud-based systems are built as well to be more of analytical tools that can offer forecasting services, that can truly offer inventory management visibility that get into a lot of those key metrics and KPIs that supply chain leaders such as myself look for. In the current ERP systems, at least the primary ones used in healthcare, like Infor, Oracle, and Workday, the non-cloud based systems I can tell you from firsthand experience, aren't there yet. And I'm not by any means saying anything negative about the products, they serve a key function of getting supply orders to our vendor partners and getting supplies in our doors. But moving towards cloud-based systems, which I think will be the centerpiece of this digital transformation for hospitals, is of the utmost of importance for supply chain leaders.''   24:17 Utilizing technology to promote a sustainable economy  Randy explained how a sustainable approach can also help to create a healthier society.  ‘'The last trend I'll say it's really around what we term the circular economy or the sustainable economy. I think when we think of... In the world of disposable supply, it's hard to kind of connect that to being sustainable because disposable, you associate with using once and then throwing away…. but the trend of using technology to accomplish the key tenets of forecasting more accurately to ensuring that what we have on the shelf is exactly what we need….creates a more sustainable environment because we're not over-ordering and we're not producing waste. One of the key things in healthcare we're focused on from a patient safety perspective, of course, is ensuring that an expired supply is not used on a patient for care. Having technology as an enabler helps us to track expiration dates as an example, and by doing so, we'd be better able to make better decisions about what we order, about what our warehouses, whether it's our own, whether it's our distributor, what's being stored in the right quantities, which in the end creates a more sustainable environment for everyone. Of course, we have a lot of great vendor partners who are working on state-of-the-art packaging techniques that utilize recyclable materials. But just to bring in full circle, these trends of utilizing your talent and creating an environment, digital supply chain, one that incorporates elements of artificial intelligence and big data can not only just drive us towards being more sustainable, but in the end, it makes people healthier….. having a healthier world just creates a better place for everyone. … it takes an ecosystem, and it takes a lot of external parties as well to help us get there, but these trends are essential to keeping people healthy.''   31:50 Supply chain management: improving margins  Randy explained the importance of what hospitals buy and why they buy it  ‘'….when you look at the expense bucket, you have staffing, which is the primary expense, you have the best talent. Hard bucket to touch. The second-biggest bucket though is the supplies and all the efforts that a supply chain management team is involved in. And what I would say is how... Of course, by no means am I advocating for buying the cheapest stuff to reduce the margins, that's not the investment way to think about it. But I think one thing I will say is thinking of a supply chain team as an investment is the right approach to help build bigger margins. Now I say that from the lens of, coming back to my example of spine surgery, sure, we may buy a spine implant at a greater cost, could it yield a better outcome for our patient that reduces their chance of readmissions, which... And I'm not trying to get into the insurance world, which hospitals then get reimbursed less at a basic level if a patient's readmitted. So there are factors that tie to that strategic thought process that requires so many different parties from the revenue cycle, from finance, from clinical care, to be involved and from the billing and coding, all of that ties into the supply chain. So I think thinking about supply chain from that operational lens as an investment, it's like, "What do we actually buy. And why are we buying it?" And of course, economies of scale come into play. If you can standardize, and you know this, Jim, if you can have your physician and clinical teams on board with utilizing as much stuff from one supplier or one vendor over another, it naturally will just yield the economies of scale and reduced rates. ‘'   35:47: Leadership tip: Going to the Gemba  Randy said going to the source and engaging with people is a pillar of success.  ‘'So what I would say is a lesson I try to embody and carry every day, it's centered around this theme of going to the source. So when I say that, and I mean, like literally or geographically, if there's an issue on a unit and a hospital, going to the unit, engaging with my team who's there to maybe help resolve supply chain need, engaging with the clinical team, again, as human beings, are there to help care for a human. But also, when in critical emergencies, as humans, we can't help but feel you have a variety of different emotions that go into the care of caring for others. So I would say as leadership lessons is going to the source and engaging with people. I think fundamentally it's working with people, that is the pillar of my success, or I dare to say, my success is being able to work with others. And when there's a moment to praise someone, when an opportunity arises to improve something, going to that source. My source just so happens to be a clinical unit in a hospital. And you know what? Going to the source, it's more often than not gratifying because then you really get to see, hey, my team orders this product, here's how it's used to help make life better for this person who's receiving care. So I think Toyota coined it as going to the Gemba, so I'll leave our listeners with go to the Gemba.''   Connect with Lisa Miller on LinkedIn Connect with Jim Cagliostro on LinkedIn Connect with Randy Subramany on LinkedIn Check out VIE Healthcare and SpendMend    You'll also hear:    A focus on the ‘'three-legged bar stool'' of people, processes, and tools: ‘'People is the most important bucket of what the supply chain does here.''   Why decision-making in patient care can be a challenge: ‘'….we need to have the right people per se at the metaphorical table or the virtual table to make those decisions. But getting everyone to one direction is not always easy.''   Supply chain is at a tipping point: ‘'But I think we're approaching this tipping point in supply chain, specifically in the healthcare and even in the hospital sector where innovation and technology as an enabler is going to come to the forefront.''   The impact of AI on payment systems and profit margins: ‘'Many operate at less than 3% (margin). So when you think of being able to pay your partners, your suppliers or vendors quicker, but to get a greater discount, it just directly connects to the bottom line.''   Successful change management incorporates listening to feedback: ‘'….allowing the team to be heard with their feedback, even if their feedback upfront is resistance, finding some layers of compromise. … team members are rational and they will understand why the new process, one that uses technology more, will make things more efficient. And they realized that the process became 30% shorter per se, approximately 30% shorter, minutes-wise, which gave them time back to assist with other responsibilities that were directed to patient care.'' What To Do Next:   Subscribe to The Economics of Healthcare and receive a special report on 15 Effective Cost Savings Strategies.   There are three ways to work with VIE Healthcare:   Benchmark a vendor contract – either an existing contract or a new agreement. We can support your team with their cost savings initiatives to add resources and expertise. We set a bold cost savings goal and work together to achieve it.  VIE can perform a cost savings opportunity assessment. We dig deep into all of your spend and uncover unique areas of cost savings.  If you are interested in learning more, the quickest way to get your questions answered is to speak with Lisa Miller at lmiller@spendmend.com or directly at 732-319-5700.  

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.Transcript: Agile.FM radio for the agile community. [00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Hi everyone, I'm back with another episode in the Agile Kata series. We're going to explore the topic of cultural and learning and how that relates to color and scientific thinking. And today I have Katie Anderson with me, who wrote the book, learning to lead, leading to learn lessons from Toyota leader Isao Yoshino on a lifetime of continuous learning.And there's a lot of words in it that are relating straight with Kata. Katie, you have been on this podcast before we talked more in depth about the book. This is a little bit more in depth about Kata and how it relates to your book that doesn't mention the word Kata, but there are so many connections and synergies.We got to explore that area a little bit, but first and foremost, welcome. [00:00:53] Katie Anderson: Thanks, Joe. It's great to be back and dive into this conversation with you. I'm so passionate about how, as individuals, leaders, we create learning in our organizations and the patterns and routines about how we do problem solving and coach for problem solving is just so fundamental to that.[00:01:09] Joe Krebs: Absolutely. Now, I have to admit, I listened to your book recently the audio version of it. And in the, so I was listening and in all aspects of life, but then it all came together in the last chapter when you summarized the learnings from the book and summarized, and the word kata wasn't mentioned in the book.But it just screamed cut up everywhere. And I was like, I have to have Katie on the show again, and we need to talk about this because it is about continuous learning. It is about failure. It is about what is it failing or falling seven times and getting up eight times. Why? And things like that.So all of those characteristics you're mentioning in the book are important. Did Isao ever mention the word cut out in your conversations? [00:01:52] Katie Anderson: So no, and actually when Mike Rother's book came out and, it was a little before I met Mr. Yoshino, but we as caught the term Toyota Kata and the word Kata, actually means something in Japanese.It's the routines and practices that, support something usually used in martial arts. And the way Mike Rother used it was around how do we create learn habits of learning the patterns that we go through for problem solving and coaching for problem solving. And in the English language, that's now become ubiquitous with, with Kata means that around problem solving.Mr. Yoshino though, there isn't something called Toyota Kata it's what Mike Rother and other researchers, when they went to Toyota to observe what was happening, trying to undercover that, uncover that secret sauce. They, he observed this pattern of how leaders and managers were showing up.To help people go through a problem solving process. And he said, there is this unspoken or undocumented routine that people are doing. And if you read my book, you will see from Mr. Yoshino's 40 years at working at Toyota. So we cover from the late sixties to the early two thousands, all of his experiences about, how to learn how to problem solve and then how to coach other people through problem solving. Go through this same format. How are you asking really effective questions? How are you guiding people through a learning process and not coming up with the answers? How are you setting the direction, providing the support, and then also continuing to develop yourself as a coach and a leader as well?So the reason I didn't use the word Kata or Toyota Kata in the book was because it didn't exist at the time. There wasn't that label that we now have at the time that Mr. Yoshino was in Japan, or at Toyota. [00:03:35] Joe Krebs: And the book itself was called Toyota Kata because of publishing, not necessarily something that is Like a tool that was developed from [00:03:43] Katie Anderson: no, absolutely.So I take people to Japan on my executive Japan study trips and I'll have people in the past. I've had different participants say, are we going to see Toyota boards up at Toyota? I'm like, no, you won't because this was a framework that was developed to help us outside of Toyota. To learn the pattern to practice the kata, the routines that support this.And so then there, there are a variety of tools that can help us do that, but they don't, that's not what exists at Toyota, but that pattern of the mindset and the behaviors exist, but there, Toyota leaders are not walking around with the five question card and going through this. That's a tool to help us learn that pattern that is inherent.I opened the book, you'll remember this Joe of a quote from Mr. Yoshino from early days when I was interviewing him, half a decade ago, he said the only secret to Toyota is its attitude towards learning. And that's exactly what Mike Rother was documenting and Jeff Liker and others and Jim Womack and so many people, they were documenting and seeing this attitude towards learning, but it's really hard to describe that, right?It's easier to see the tools and the outputs of it. [00:04:52] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So this is very interesting, right? Because you actually in that chapter, right? In, in that final chapter of your book, you do mention words like setting the direction, a challenge. Personally or for the organization or as a team is important experimentation is important.Now, within the book, there is I don't want to take the entire book away. There's a ton of things to be explored, but there is an example of a failed experiment, a very costly failed experiment from Mr Yoshino. And that is from a Kata perspective. Obviously an experiment that failed that's at a large scale, right?And a big learning, I would assume would come out of this exploring new business ideas within an organization, even on smaller scales, I'm sure there were tons of experiments going on in his life and what you have observed, obviously working with the organization and with him directly. How important is that from a learning perspective, that experimentation piece?[00:05:51] Katie Anderson: It's fundamental, right? The reason we don't know the answer is because we don't have the answer yet. And so we need to know directionally where are we trying to get to and then learn our way forward. And so a lot of, if you take away the, the terminology, so much that you've learned through reading this book and from my conversations in the series, are those same patterns?Like, how do you set a target? But doesn't don't worry about it being too precise. You'll learn your way forward as you start doing the experiments. It's about how do you ask those questions? How are you go through the process of learning? You'll remember there's a story where Mr Yoshino was asked to Put together a report and a document and his boss who had asked him to do this.When he went forward to present, he said, what was the process that you took to prepare this report? And he knew he should have gone out and actually done interviews, gone to that quote unquote Gemba and said he went to the library because he didn't feel like he had time. And the boss said, no, that's not the right process for the learning.And so it's that same model in the Kata Kata world or Kata framework that. You want to coach people through the process of learning and not necessarily giving them the answer, but giving them the framework and the structure to be learning their way forward to that answer as well, or to a new answer that you don't even have, right?Oftentimes we're in these complex environments. We're not just giving people assignments for learning their way to us, a set predetermined answer. It's about learning our way forward to innovation and to continuous improvement. [00:07:16] Joe Krebs: I remember that that scene in the book.And it was also, it was interesting for me coming from an agile and from a cutters perspective. One thing was in, in that particular dialogue, I remember it crystal clear now that after you said it is probably not enough research was done on the existing current condition, right? So like, where are we right now in, in terms of the process?It was just not enough to read about it and go to the library. So one of those learnings, right? And that is the scientific thinking of Kata to say step back, slow down, go through where you are in, even in your learning journey. Now that's a key aspect of this one. [00:07:54] Katie Anderson: Absolutely. And I want to emphasize too, that like Kata, as we, that using that term Kata, it's nothing new.Absolutely. Different. So it's not separate from like how we approach continuous improvement, how we approach the scientific method. It is the routines and practices that help us get there. And there's people in the lean world or the agile world. And honestly, it doesn't what we label it.Those are like the tools and the processes. But Fundamental thinking and human behavior aspects are all interrelated there too. And so again, Kata is just those routines and practices that help enable us to be better problem solvers and better coaches of problem solving. [00:08:33] Joe Krebs: I always refer to it as a universal pattern rather than a tool.It could be described as a tool, but sometimes people feel like a tool is like a, like an actual thing, a tangible thing. It's a thing. It's a thinking pattern, in my opinion, most likely gets you through scientific thinking. And if we can agree on that scientific thinking is a good idea it's a good idea.[00:08:53] Katie Anderson: Yes, absolutely. And so there are tools that support that you can have a kata storyboard or a question card that helps you practice, but it's the same thing with anything like learning a sport or something. You have tools that help you practice that pattern in that routine. So it becomes habitual.[00:09:08] Joe Krebs: By in a second, second nature of what you do and then sit, therefore you don't need the clients anymore. I think that's a, that's an important thing. Now, what you just described, this is also something I found as a quote. Be patient, it takes time to develop people and accomplish challenges.That was one of those things I carved out and I think that plays very well with what you just said. It's even though it Kata the routines, the questions, it might be simple. There might be a card, there's a starting point. It's not a quick fix. No. Why is that to establish a learning culture like to stay here on topic for culture and learning and everything.What makes this so fundamentally simple, but it is so hard to do so patience becomes an important thing. Absolutely. It's a long term it's a long term way, creating new habits. It does take time. And we, and I talk about this a lot in recent episodes on my own podcast chain of learning.We are caught in this like doing trap opposed to the being trap we get. Very focused on the achievements, the goals, the outcomes that we need. And it's not that we don't have this vision that we want to be someone who's, taking the time to ask the questions to coach, but we just get stuck in this, focused on the outcomes and the doing.And so when we can take a step back and say. Actually, when we do slow down to ask more questions to help other people learn how to solve problems, we collectively actually will ultimately get there faster because we're going to have better ideas. We're going to have more clarity on what's the real problem we're even trying to solve.And then the creative input. of people on how to get there. So we'll come up with better ideas as well. And so we just started this, we get this short fix, cycle, vicious cycle where the practices of the kata really can help us slow down and remind our, remind us to ask those questions.Have we clearly defined a target? Do we really know what that next step is? Have we defined what the gap is? What are the next steps we're taking, doing? And just get us into that pattern opposed to just jumping to solutions or to action when we really don't even know where we need to go.And also to frame things as experiments. And I think that's a really important part of this is framing everything that we're doing as an experiment. If we do this thing, what do we expect to happen? And then it gives us a place to come back and say what did we learn from that? And how is that helping us move forward?And I think let's stay with this experimentation piece for a sec, because I also think that's a cultural thing, right? So we, or I have observed that failure in an organization of an experiment is very often as a negative. Association with it right within the business world. Not so much within laboratories or so.I would assume that's not my that's not my expertise, but it's not very common to have a culture within organizations to foster like. So when you're saying like I don't know if I quote this right here for seven times, get up eight. How many people can fail for seven times within an organization without ramifications within an organization?So how important is that from a leadership's perspective? And obviously Isao Yoshino was part of a leadership team to create a culture like that. So that experimentation is happening and But not tolerated, but encouraged, right? And also the failed experiments that go along with it.Potentially. [00:12:21] Katie Anderson: Yeah, there's so many different ways that I could start going into that framing of that. But absolutely. So starting with absolutely moving from a culture of blame to a culture that embraces failure as a source of learning is critical. So if we're looking at the process and not blaming the person.Second, it's about. Making sure that our experiments are not so like we're doing micro experiments so that the failures are more of a micro level, right? Opposed to, sometimes we do so much planning, planning for this massive thing. And we haven't done any tests of along the way.And so then, it's much more the impact of a failure is so much bigger at that end, rather than if we had done some micro tests along the way and having that learning. And I think in our culture we do we put so much emphasis on the planning side. The plan and the do, and we don't have as much of that study and reflect.And so because of that planning, then we're taking action, but if we fail on that, it's so much bigger. And so then it feels more, catastrophic. And of course we don't want people getting hurt, things happening. Like we don't, we need to, those are bad. Those are really bad failures.And that's hugely problematic and we should have been doing better tests of change before that. But even as you, you mentioned, earlier in this episode, that. Mr. Yoshino was in charge of this large new business venture that ended up costing Toyota like tens of thousands of dollars when it failed, but also you have to be willing to run those experiments because if you're, if you want to create innovation in your organization, you have to be willing to take some risks.You don't know if something's going to succeed or not. And so they also knew that they, Mr. Cho, who was the president of Toyota at the time said to Mr. Yoshino, You were something, you tried, we gave you a mission and you did your best. And thank you. And the Toyota too, there were some things, some management decisions that impacted the business venture not working out.It wasn't just the result of one person. So that's super important from an organizational standpoint as well. [00:14:16] Joe Krebs: It's also leadership, right? You have a challenge for a team or an individual to be able to experiment within certain boundaries, right? And be safe and knowing what the challenges are and have a direction, not just experimenting for the sake of experimenting.[00:14:30] Katie Anderson: Absolutely. Yeah. And the leader's job is to set up the working conditions for people to be successful. And so that's part of their role. What are the structures and conditions that allow people to do their best work and to learn along the way? Yeah. [00:14:43] Joe Krebs: It was also interesting for everybody listening to this from a lean perspective, like this plan, do check act kind of cycle would be part of each of those experiments that would be taking place within the Kata, within the pattern.You will find lean concepts in what we're talking about here as a general thinking process. What's also interesting was the words you used throughout your entire book about Lerner and coach and coachee or learner in this environment, because that is all, when I started reading or listening to the book I was like, always reminded is this about learning.This is not about a manager and a subordinate. It's about a learner from a cultural perspective. And that obviously links directly to Kata as well, whether it's a learner and as a coach from an agile perspective, the learner could be a group of people. rather than a single person.How important was that in your conversations? And by writing the book and what you have learned since the book was published that this, the constant reminder of that we're learners in a day to day practice of improvement. [00:15:45] Katie Anderson: It's so interesting. You haven't, I haven't thought about that terminology. That's something I think I brought in more in terms of describing you, Mr. Yoshino, when he taught, he does talk about, being a manager and a subordinate, and those are just terms that they use, but because this pattern was already embedded into their ethos of how they are, that, that terminology doesn't matter, but it does matter more for us.And so I was really intentional when I was writing the book about how can I translate. These 40 years of Toyota and experience in a way that's really going to resonate and connect with people and our generation who didn't grow up in the Toyota world to understand the real meaning behind things.And so I the word learner and coach are, are, those are really important to me to really emphasize that this is all about the only secret to Toyota is its attitude towards learning. And so how do we stay in that mindset? And so the words that we use can really be helpful and yeah. [00:16:41] Joe Krebs: What was interesting though, was that the roles shifted with throughout the book, right? So sometimes we saw him being a learner versus a coach, right? So we saw the change of the roles, which was fascinating. And that is also what we have in an agile, in a Kata environment all the time.[00:16:57] Katie Anderson: Absolutely. And that's where the, how I came up with the title of learning to lead, leading to learn. And it's. It's a cyclical situation because you're always you're if you have the learning to lead with a, first thing you learn to do this, learn the practice, the kata routines, you need to learn how to be a leader, how to be a manager, how to be an agile practitioner, all of those things, but you also need to lead with an attitude towards learning.And then as Mr. Yoshino said to he was always learning how to be a better leader at the same time. And so we're never stopping learning. We're just in different roles. Sometimes we're the one being mentored or coached and other times we're doing that coaching or we're in teams and we're like doing it all together.So it is, and that's where that concept of that chain of learning. It's actually a phrase that Mr. Yoshino said to me about how he felt so grateful to be joining Toyota. This is in his early years in his twenties, joining a company that really. Emphasize this chain of learning, how are we all learners and leaders together helping improve and grow and become better people solve more problems.And that's, that was really the inspiration for my podcast title too, because how do we all, we're all connected in that way. [00:18:02] Joe Krebs: Yeah. And we all connected through Kata, through your book, through the work we're doing through podcast. This is awesome. Katie, I want to thank you for some of your thoughts and also bringing, thinking to everybody who has read your book and maybe listens to this podcast. It's Oh yes, I've listened to Kata and this is the connection to it. But also for everybody in the agile community to say wow, man, maybe I can use the basic pattern of Kata to improve my role within the organization, right? So I myself have worked with agile coaches that are using Kata for improving their own personal development within an organization. And then they're using it also for teams to improve for high performance. So the sky's the limit, apparently. [00:18:47] Katie Anderson: Absolutely. It's the pattern. It's the pattern of problem solving. It's the pattern of innovate, how we create innovation. And it's the pattern of how we help each other get better. at getting better. And so no matter what you call it, just practice the routines and the patterns. It's going to help you no matter what your industry is, what your, the focus of your work is, whatever challenge you're moving towards, these routines and patterns are just so transformational.[00:19:13] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Katie, you mentioned it already. There is a podcast out there. You have the chain of learning. There is a website that is a kbjanderson. com and uh, but if somebody just Googles the title of your book, learning to lead, leading to learn, they will find you as well. So thank you for coming back on the show and do that Kata special with me. . [00:19:33] Katie Anderson: Thank you. Thanks Joe. It's a pleasure.

For those of you who have struggled with using Lean tools, or who have felt like they have done more harm than good, today's guest Matt Colby is going to help you learn what you can do to use Lean systems to increase engagement, solve problems, and get real business results! Download the Leader's Guide    Thank you to our episode sponsor, Wipfli. They are the firm whose perspective can change everything for your business. Learn more at https://www.wipfli.com/manufacturing  

В этом выпуске мы с гостями обсуждали как запускать стартапы, какие ошибки часто допускают начинающие предприниматели, к чему стоит обратить внимание и как использовать возможности для роста. Приятного просмотра!Гости подкаста: ▪️Артур АскарулыБлогер, СMO Qtab Блогер, СMO Qtab  / archibaaalt  ▪️Мадат КаримовПредприниматель, Сооснователь Qtabhttps://www.instagram.com/iamadat?igs...▪️Досжан ЖусуповПредприниматель, Основатель Cerebra.ai▪️Мадияр ТолеугалиОснователь UvU Shuttlehttps://www.instagram.com/madiyarr?ig... ⏱️ Тайм коды00:00 Тизер00:26 Начало02:05 Гости выпуска06:15 Стартапы в бизнесе07:39 Как найти нишу?11:15 Откуда приходят возможности?28:12 Рекламная интеграция28:40 Как приходят идеи?37:10 4 основы для успешного стартапа.41:58 Как прийти к открытию стартапа?52:05 Когда нужно идти до конца?1:02:21 Вы готовы заниматься бизнесом или нет?1:11:12 Как создавать команду?1:33:35 Правда ли нужно высшее образование?

My guests for Episode #495 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Catherine Chabiron and Fabrice Bernhard, who are discussing her new book Learning to Scale at Theodo Group: Growing a Fast and Resilient Company. Episode page with video, transcript, and more Catherine Chabiron is a board member for the Institut Lean France, a member of the Lean Global Network, like the Lean Enterprise Institute. Catherine is an established expert in Lean management with a professional journey spanning over 40 years. She has experience in a range of service and support functions, including IT, Logistics, Sales, Finance, and HR, both in France and globally. As a Lean executive coach, her expertise in Lean thinking has been largely shaped by her experiences within the automotive industry, where she has lived and breathed the Lean philosophy. This has been further enriched by her regular visits to the Toyota supply chain in Japan, an experience that has offered her unique insights and an in-depth understanding of how a learning culture operates. So, speaking of Theodo Group, we're also again joined by their chief technology officer and co-founder, Fabrice Bernhard. He co-founded Theodo in Paris in 2009, which has grown on average 50% yearly for the last 8 years and generated 90M€ revenue in 2022. He is now based in London to help with the international expansion. We delve into the broadened application of lean principles in our discussion with Fabrice Bernard and Catherine Chabiron. Bernard shares how Theodore Group implemented Lean as a strategic pillar in their operations, using it as a toolbox to create sustained growth and maintain competitive edges. They systematically addressed business challenges using TPS, Extreme Programming, and Scrum to conjure the “agile magic” of a small, integrated team at scale. Don't miss out on the chance to hear about cultivating a Lean culture that goes beyond strategy and tool adoption. By fostering an environment of continuous learning, teamwork, and the relentless pursuit of excellence, Theodore Group effectively established Lean as the backbone of their company's culture. We also expound on broader societal challenges that can be addressed through Lean methodologies and the journey of A3 thinking in fostering deep understanding and collaboration. This episode takes an expansive look at Lean practices, demonstrating its adaptable, innovative, and ethically conscious nature across different industries, proving its potency in driving companies towards sustained growth. Questions, Notes, and Highlights: What are your Lean origin stories? Lean as a strategy at Theodo Group? How did the two of you come to work together? First met in Japan, right? What led to the book? Startup vs Scale-up? Six Planet Lean articles – LINK Sharing Lean thinking with your CEO and other leaders? How do you embody Lean? A lot of virtual work now? If so what does Gemba mean? What does continuous improvement mean to you? How do leaders foster a learning culture? How does continuous improvement address not just the scaling challenge but societal challenges? Why are the current ways of scaling a company broken? Big Company Disease? Silos and process trumping customers, compliance over initiative The podcast is sponsored by Stiles Associates, now in its 30th year of business. They are the go-to Lean recruiting firm serving the manufacturing, private equity, and healthcare industries. Learn more. This podcast is part of the #LeanCommunicators network. 

Gemba walks are an increasingly popular management technique. By visiting the place where work is done, leaders gain valuable insight into the flow of value through the organization and often uncover opportunities for improvement and learn new ways to support employees. The approach is a collaborative one, with employees providing details about what is done and why. Great results depend on thoughtful planning, execution, and follow-up. Here are the most important steps you can take to ensure that your next Gemba walk is successful. Written by Kade Jansson and read by Mark Graban Read the blog post

If you're an operations leader who has been wondering about the life of their equipment or when it's time to start looking at replacements, you're going to love today's episode. Our guest Simon Malinski is here from Bremer Bank to answer these questions and more!  Learn more about Bremer With bankers who know that in business, relationships matter more than ever. And understanding is everything. Find a Bremer Bank today at www.Bremer.com

Quick question, have you ever wondered what it would be like to listen in to these “hallway” conversations to discover what leaders say and reflect on with each other?If you're curious, you're in the right spot. In this episode, I take you behind-the-scenes with exclusive conversations I had with transformational change leaders and executives in attendance at GE's The Lean Mindset. This exciting event, hosted by Larry Culp, Chairman and CEO of GE and GE Aerospace, brought together executives from some of the world's top companies, professional athletes, and thought leaders all focused on pursuing excellence through continuous learning. Thanks to GE's generosity, I was invited to both share my knowledge and to collect knowledge, by bringing my microphone to glean insights from the leaders in attendance during the spaces between the mainstage events. I can't wait to share them with you! You'll hear highlights from my conversations with leaders including:  Chef Eric Klein – Culinary Vice President and Partner at Wolfgang Puck Catering  Dr. Lisa Yerian – Chief Improvement Officer at The Cleveland Clinic Betsy Bingham – Vice President of Lean Operations at GE Aerospace  Phil Wickler – Chief Transformation Officer for GE Aerospace Pat Byrne – Senior Vice President for Operational Transformation at GE What you'll learn: The importance of embracing and learning from failure The power of humility, empathy, and making daily connections with your team Strategies to empower problem-solving and teamwork, including going to gemba, leveraging meaningful metrics, and created structured approaches to improvement The mindset and behavior shifts leaders need to make to build effective leadership habits and lead by example Being an effective leader doesn't mean you have all the answers; it means you're willing to ask questions, go see, and always keep learning. If you are trying to create a high-performing learning organization, you won't want to miss these invaluable insights. Hit play now to be inspired about how you can embed a lean mindset in your organization and accelerate your impact as a change leader.Important Links: Full show notes and links on: http://chainoflearning.com/6 GE's The Lean Mindset Event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP2WkL0W-BA  Katie's key takeaways from The Lean Mindset event  https://kbjanderson.com/highlights-the-lean-mindset-event/ Katie's Book: “Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn”: https://kbjanderson.com/learning-to-lead/  Follow Katie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbjanderson/ Timestamps  00:55 – Delving into the Insights from GE's The Lean Mindset Event 01:27 – Reflecting on Personal Interactions at the Event 01:40 – A Deep Dive into the Principles of Lean Management 02:38 – Presenting the Esteemed Lineup of Leaders 03:10 – Overview of Themes Covered at The Lean Mindset 04:14 – Excerpt from Chef Eric Klein: Exploring the Lean Mindset in a Kitchen 05:14 – Emphasizing the Importance of Humility and the Willingness to Embrace Failure to Evolve as a Learner 05:59 – Dr. Lisa Yerian Discusses Balancing Humility and Hunger in Leadership 07:16 – Betsy Bingham on Problem-Solving and the Human Element 08:04 – Phil Wickler Shares Insight on the Significance of Gemba 08:55 – Pat Byrne Explores the Importance of Gemba for Both Employees and Customers 09:35 – Betsy Bingham on Problem-Solving Efficiency 10:57 – Recognizing the Value of Repetition to Build Lean Mindset Skills 11:42 – Dr. Yerian Reinforces the Importance of Quality Repetition 12:35 – Leveraging Metrics to Drive Operational Improvements 15:35 – Embracing Challenges and How to Approach to Problem Resolution 16:35 – Benefits of Breaking the Telling Habit for Effective Leadership 17:35 – Insights on Cultivating a Lean Mindset within Your Organizational Culture 22:30 – Larry Culp's Three Key Takeaways 23:50 – Closing Thoughts on the Event and Inspiring Team Dynamics

Plans for improvement have become an expectation. The challenge for some is scaling up that plan to impact and include everyone across multiple site locations.   On today's episode Nate Aguilar shares his first-hand experience of how to develop a scalable improvement plan, reach your profit goals, and engage everyone in improvement.   Download the Leader's Guide    This episode of the Manufacturers Alliance Podcast is sponsored by The City of  Monticello. In Monticello Life is Good. Business is Great.  Find out more at www.ci.monticello.mn.us or by following us on social media @Monticello_MN.   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monticello_mn/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/monticello_mn YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Monticello_MN Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CityofMonticello LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/city-of-monticello-mn

Part of creating a culture of continuous improvement begins with developing people so that they fight less fires and work more towards identifying and addressing the root cause. The problem is that this takes more time, doesn't come naturally for a lot of people, requires discipline, and certainly can't be done in a conference room.   Enjoy this week's episode featuring Eugene Arrington, as he shares how he has overcome these issues and unleashed the power of problem solving so that you can, too!   Download the leader's Guide    Thank you to our sponsor: Blue Key Media specializes in helping manufacturing companies increase sales, recruit more efficiently, and cut through the noise with the power of video. Learn more at www.bluekeymedia.com

Catherine Chabiron is an expert in lean management and an author. She recently wrote a book called Learning to Scale at the Theodo Group, which describes how a company faced with dramatic growth used lean thinking to avoid what Catherine calls Big Company Disease. She joined me at the Edges of Lean to discuss what she learned when she went to the Gemba with this company and its founders.   Catherine Chabiron      Catherine is an accomplished Lean executive coach in France and plays a significant role in leading the Lean Service community at Institut Lean France. She is also a renowned author and teacher, specializing in problem-solving and sharing her experiences from Gemba walks in lean companies through her publication Notes from the Gemba on Planet Lean. With 40 years of experience, Catherine is considered a Lean Management Sensei. She has authored numerous books and articles on lean methodology, focusing on helping companies transform their culture and enhance employee engagement to adapt to growth challenges.       KEY TOPICS IN THIS PODCAST:   00:00:11 Lean management drives rapid growth. 00:05:42 The differences between Lean vs Agile in software development. 00:08:10 Why is it important to focus on the customer and not just process in growth situations? 00:13:51 Flexibility is the key in processes. 00:24:02 The importance of employee engagement and problem-solving skills. 00:25:00 Lean principles drive company success. 00:28:21 The need to keep learning as a leader. 00:29:03 Continuous learning drives organizational improvement 00:35:20 The importance of visiting the gemba.     KEY TAKEAWAYS   Lean management can help companies avoid the big company disease that often occurs with rapid growth. Agile and Lean are complementary approaches, but Agile alone may not address all the challenges of scaling a company. Leaders should ask about normal and abnormal conditions to encourage problem-solving and learning. Talent can be identified by the quality of the countermeasures proposed by employees to address problems. Scaling a company requires a balance between challenge and competence to drive growth and development. Watching and observing the actual work happening in the company is essential for understanding the challenges and opportunities for improvement.     Memorable Quotes From Catherine Chabiron   "Identify talents when you visit by looking at the quality of the countermeasures they propose.”     CONNECT WITH Catherine Chabiron     LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-chabiron Twitter:https://x.com/CathChabiron?s=20 Book: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Scale-Theodo-Group-resilient/dp/2958357023  

Nick Korwin, a seasoned operations and engineering professional with a background in mechanical engineering shares his career pivot from manufacturing to a remote career in tech. Nick's diverse experience spans various industries, including medical, automotive, and chemicals. Currently, he manages virtual data operations for a tech company based in California, all while residing in the Midwest, specifically the Chicagoland area. Nick delves into his motivation for transitioning from a traditional in-person career managing large-scale operations to remote work. The catalyst for this shift was the unexpected news of expecting twins while already having a one-year-old. Working for a conservative family-owned manufacturing company, Nick faced challenges balancing his responsibilities as a dedicated father within a rigid work-life mentality. Seeking more flexibility, he explored remote opportunities, eventually landing a fully remote position with a tech company. Addressing the initial hesitation about the career pivot, Nick discusses the adjustments required for the new role. Moving from manufacturing to tech, he navigated cultural shifts, adapting to a virtual environment. He shares insights into managing a global workforce of over 1000 people remotely and the expectations set in a tech-centric operational landscape. Nick reflects on the challenges of remote work, highlighting the trade-offs, such as missing spontaneous interactions and Gemba walks that were integral to operations in a physical setting. He emphasizes the importance of building a personal brand on LinkedIn, sharing expertise around Operational Excellence (OpEx), and being a realistic OpEx professional. In the discussion, Nick ranks people, plant, and intellectual property as the three significant components in manufacturing, stressing the paramount importance of prioritizing the "people" aspect. This episode offers valuable insights into Nick's journey, from navigating the challenges of remote work to building a personal brand and addressing critical components in the manufacturing industry. Connect with Nick on LinkedIn. Love the show? Want to support the show? We've got merch. Visit us at ⁠wfhforever.com/shop⁠. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/workfromhomeforever/message

(NOTAS Y ENLACES DEL CAPÍTULO AQUÍ: https://www.jaimerodriguezdesantiago.com/kaizen/180-modelos-mentales-20-liderazgo-exploradores-puertas-de-embarque-y-snafu/)Hacía demasiado tiempo que no dedicaba un capítulo al tema de los modelos mentales. Claro que después de diecinueve, tampoco te creas que es fácil, uno se va quedando sin ideas. Pero estos días, preparando el Programa de Desarrollo Directivo y Liderazgo del Instituto Tramontana del que te hablé hace unas semanas, me di cuenta de que habíamos hablado de modelos mentales procedentes de muchas disciplinas y útiles para muchas cosas diferentes, pero que nunca los habíamos vinculado a eso, al liderazgo y a la gestión de personas. Y había que ponerle remedio, porque hay unos cuantos y son muy útiles. Y por el camino se nos cuelan: 

In this week's episode, we talk with Brad Konik, CEO of Konik and Matt Kanz, SVP NA at Jack Links, as they share their leadership experience, how to avoid micromanaging, practical leadership tools, and some of the biggest surprises they faced going from manager to senior leader.  Download the Leaders Guide  >> Whether you're seeking a direct-hire or contract employee, Konik's technical talent network can quickly build a high-caliber team to meet your needs.  Contact them today at www.koniknetwork.com

For those of you who have struggled with inconsistent results, turnover, or just need to make sure you're on the same page as your leadership team, you're going to love this conversation. We've invited the CEO of Konik, Brad Konik, to talk about what he has done to establish a vivid vision for his company that is engaging and inspiring for his employees, clients and community.  Download the Leaders Guide Learn more about Konik by visiting www.konik.com  

In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare technology, humility is the compass that guides successful change management. It reminds us that the journey towards seamless adoption of health information technology is a collaborative one, where the wisdom of many outweighs the knowledge of one.  The humility to acknowledge one's limitations fosters an environment where collaboration and learning thrive. In the context of clinical informatics, allyship and teamwork are indispensable. Effective clinical informatics demands a diverse skill set, often spanning healthcare providers, IT specialists, and administrative personnel. Allyship within this multidisciplinary team is essential, and applied clinical informatics can be the linchpin in the transition to value-based care.  Through successful HIT implementation, leaders can illuminate the path to better outcomes, reduced costs, and patient-centered excellence. A new era for Clinical Informatics is upon us and will empower healthcare with data-driven insights, AI capabilities, virtual care at scale, and precision medicine to ensure that quality triumphs over quantity in our pursuit of healthier communities. On the Race to Value this week, we are joined by Brittany Partridge, a national thought leader on health data management and informatics.  Brittany is passionate about implementing technology that impacts clinical workflow in a positive way and increases patients' access to care. Join us for an informative discussion on Clinical Informatics, the importance of allyship to mitigate medical technology risk, the impact of Generative AI and virtual care on health system transformation, and change management best practices to lead your organization to successful healthcare innovation. Episode Bookmarks: 01:30 Introduction to Brittany Partridge, an industry leader in Virtual Care Technical Architecture and Informatics Implementations. 03:00 Recent book collaboration with Ed Marx – “Voices of Innovation:  Fulfilling the Promise of Information Technology in Healthcare” 04:30 The sub-disciplines of Health Informatics (e.g. Nursing, Pharmacy, Public Health, Biomedical, Medical, and Clinical Informatics). 06:00 AMIA: Why Informatics? -  “Informatics is the overarching field of study that pulls all these subdomains into one discipline focused on improving health and healthcare.” 06:30 Applied Clinical Informatics – the frontline of healthcare innovation with direct clinician interaction. 07:00 Early experiences in e-prescribing implementations that led to other care delivery innovations such as virtual care and remote patient monitoring. 08:00 The intersection of Clinical Informatics and VBC (ensuring tech usability to optimize care workflows for clinical quality improvement). 09:00 Best Practice Advisories (BPAs) – pop-up alerts to empower clinicians to make the best informed decisions at the point-of-care. 09:45 Leveraging technology innovations to improve patient access and affordability. 11:30 The importance of shadowing and workflow analysis as a catalyst for innovation. 13:00 How shadowing is incorporated into user validation, user design, and Lean (“Go to the Gemba”) 14:00 Simply asking clinicians to describe a workflow is insufficient in understanding the entire process. 15:00 “Get a robust current state workflow before you implement any innovation project because you need to know what you're going to be replacing.” 15:45 How virtual interactions with providers can complement provider shadowing in an embedded CI model. 16:30 Non-judgement in applied clinical informatics is required to build trust. 17:30 “The most important part of rolling out any technology project is clinician trust. They need to know that you have their best interests at heart.” 19:45 Allyship is key to reducing medical technology risk because the inclusion of diverse perspectives yields the greatest rewards. 21:30 “Fail fast and iterate” and “Perfect being the enemy of good” philosophies don'...

Episode 049 - Greg Hughes, President & CEO, Beam Suntory (2022) On this episode of the Executives' Exchange, we are thrilled to rebroadcast our interview with Greg Hughes in honor of his promotion to President & CEO of Beam Suntory! He will be stepping into this role on October 1st. Dive into this conversation between Greg and Andy Callahan, President and CEO of Hostess Brands, as they discuss the profound influence of Japanese-style Gemba on their leadership. 00:41 – Greg discusses the origins of “Gemba”  03:27 – Leading from the front—Greg & Andy discuss developing leadership skills  06:55 – Greg discusses what Gemba is not    08:40 – Four ways to scale up across a broader footprint of people  13:06 – Andy and Greg discuss the challenges of leadership during the pandemic    17:48 – Andy discusses the silver lining that provides the opportunity for something better   21:41 – Message from our sponsor, Shure    22:10 – Greg discusses implementing Gemba in the social media space   23:56 – Connecting brands with culture and employee base; the need to be empathetic & inclusive   27:07 – Building global brands while acknowledging there's no global consumer—understanding what's universal about brands and what's local that's adaptable    30:05 – What are some of the trends you see in your business?    33:55 – Gemba intersects everything you do—team, business strategy and provides the very foundation of how you think.    35:44 – The most significant challenges with Gemba    38:12 – Greg discusses how his leadership translates into building the culture you want in the organization   43:20 – Gemba enables employees to engage    48:34 – Outro Episode Link: Beam Suntory Guest Host: Andy Callahan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Hostess Brands Producer: Eva Penar, Chief Content & Communications Officer, The Executives' Club of Chicago   Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts.      Thank you to our podcast sponsor, Shure Incorporated.     For nearly 100 years, Shure Incorporated has developed best-in-class audio products that provide high-quality performance, reliability and value. Headquartered in Niles, Illinois, our history of innovation and expertise in acoustics, wireless technology, and more enables us to deliver seamless, transparent audio experiences to a global audience. Our diverse product line includes world-class wired and wireless microphones, networked audio systems and signal processors, conferencing and discussion systems, software, a loudspeaker, and award-winning earphones and headphones. 

On this week's Industrial Talk we're onsite at Xcelerate 23 in Orlando, FL and talking to Emory Sullivan, Co-Founder, Gemba.AI and RealWare about "Building a world where technicians have critical knowledge at their fingertips". Get the answers to your "AR" questions along with Emory's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview! Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2023. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy! EMORY SULLIVAN'S CONTACT INFORMATION: Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emorysullivan/ Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/realwear-inc./ Company Website: https://www.realwear.com/ PODCAST VIDEO: https://youtu.be/qpJXR4Hg3W4 THE STRATEGIC REASON "WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST": OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES: NEOM: https://www.neom.com/en-us Fictiv: https://www.fictiv.com/ CAP Logistics: https://www.caplogistics.com/ Armis: https://www.armis.com/ Saviant Consulting: https://www.saviantconsulting.com/ Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/ Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/ Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/ We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/ YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX: LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/ Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/ Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader): Business Beatitude...