Podcasts about Juran

durée : 00:22:49 - Des vins de Jurançon vieillis dans la grotte de la Verna

durée : 00:19:47 - Les goûts d'ici en Béarn Bigorre

durée : 00:24:11 - Foie gras et Chutney de Pommes du restaurant "La Rumeur" à Pau - À Pau et à Lée, les restaurants La Rumeur célèbrent le terroir avec un plat signature : foie gras mi-cuit IGP Sud-Ouest et chutney de pommes maison. Le chef Maxime en détaille les secrets entre textures justes, gastrique maîtrisée et bel accord au Jurançon.

In 1951, Joseph Moses Juran published the Quality Control Handbook, a groundbreaking work that redefined how organizations approach quality. As a Romanian-American engineer and management consultant, Juran brought a fresh perspective to a world recovering from war and industrial upheaval. His handbook wasn't just a technical manual—it was a call to action for leaders to prioritize quality as a strategic cornerstone. Over 70 years later, its principles remain a goldmine for today's leaders striving for operational excellence, customer loyalty, and sustainable growth. This blog dives into the key takeaways from Juran's 1951 masterpiece, offering actionable lessons for modern leadership, with a nod to its historical impact. The Heart of Juran's Vision: Quality as a Leadership Priority At its core, the Quality Control Handbook challenged the notion that quality was solely the domain of inspectors or technicians. Juran argued that quality starts at the top—with leaders who set the tone, define the vision, and rally their teams around it. In 1951, this was a radical shift. Industries were focused on mass production, often at the expense of consistency or customer satisfaction. Juran flipped the script, insisting that quality isn't just about catching defects—it's about designing systems that prevent them. For today's leaders, this is a wake-up call. Whether you're running a tech startup, a manufacturing plant, or a service-based business, quality can't be an afterthought. It's a competitive edge. Juran's handbook teaches us that leadership isn't just about charisma or strategy—it's about embedding a quality mindset into every layer of your organization. Let's unpack the key principles and how they apply to you. Key Principles from the Quality Control Handbook While the original 1951 text isn't widely available online, its foundational ideas have been well-documented through Juran's legacy and subsequent editions. Here's what leaders need to know: Quality Means Fitness for Use Juran defined quality as “fitness for use”—a product or service that meets customer needs and performs as expected. This wasn't about perfection for its own sake; it was about delivering value to the end user. In 1951, this customer-centric focus was ahead of its time, pushing leaders to look beyond factory floors and into the lives of their customers. Leadership Lesson: Put your customers first. Ask: Does this solve their problem? Does it delight them? Whether it's a software update or a new product line, align your definition of quality with what your audience values most. The Pareto Principle: Focus on the Vital Few Juran popularized the 80/20 rule, suggesting that 80% of your quality issues come from just 20% of causes. He called these the “vital few” versus the “trivial many.” This principle gave leaders a practical tool to zero in on what matters most, cutting through the noise of endless problem-solving. Leadership Lesson: Don't spread yourself thin. Use data to pinpoint the handful of issues—like bottlenecks or customer complaints—that drive the biggest headaches. Fixing these delivers outsized results, freeing you to innovate elsewhere. Top Management Must Lead the Charge Juran was crystal clear: quality isn't a middle-management task—it's a leadership imperative. He urged executives to own the quality agenda, setting goals, allocating resources, and holding teams accountable. Without this commitment, quality efforts fizzle out. Leadership Lesson: Step up. Make quality a personal mission. Show your team it's a priority by investing time and budget in it—whether that's training, new tools, or process redesigns. Your involvement signals that quality isn't optional. Train Everyone, Everywhere The handbook pushed for widespread quality training, not just for specialists but for every employee. Juran believed that a shared understanding of quality principles builds a cohesive, capable workforce. This was a bold stance in an era when training was often siloed. Leadership Lesson: Empower your people. Equip them with the skills to spot and solve quality issues. A frontline worker who understands the “why” behind their role is your secret weapon for consistency and innovation. Improve Quality Project by Project Juran advocated a structured, project-based approach to quality improvement. Rather than vague goals, he recommended specific initiatives with clear objectives, timelines, and metrics. This methodical mindset turned quality into a tangible, achievable outcome. Leadership Lesson: Break it down. Tackle quality challenges one project at a time—say, reducing delivery delays or streamlining onboarding. Small wins build momentum and prove the value of your efforts. The Quality Trilogy: Plan, Control, Improve Juran's Quality Trilogy is a three-step framework that's pure gold for leaders: Quality Planning: Identify customers, understand their needs, and design processes to meet them. Quality Control: Monitor performance and catch deviations early. Quality Improvement: Continuously raise the bar by addressing weaknesses. This holistic approach ties quality to every stage of your operation. Leadership Lesson: Think systematically. Map out how you'll plan for quality, maintain it, and push it further. It's a cycle that keeps your organization sharp and adaptable. Mind the Cost of Quality Juran introduced the idea that quality has a price tag—costs of prevention (training, design), appraisal (testing, audits), and poor quality (returns, lost trust). He showed that investing upfront saves money down the line, a lesson rooted in economic pragmatism. Leadership Lesson: Play the long game. Don't skimp on quality to cut corners—it'll cost you more in rework or reputation damage. Budget for prevention and watch your bottom line improve. Why These Principles Matter Today In 2025, the stakes for quality are higher than ever. Customers have endless options and zero patience for mediocrity. A single glitch—a buggy app, a late shipment, a rude interaction—can tank your brand. Juran's handbook, though written in a different era, feels tailor-made for this reality. His focus on customers, data, and leadership aligns perfectly with modern demands like agile workflows, user experience (UX), and data analytics. Take the tech world: a SaaS company lives or dies by its uptime and user satisfaction—Juran's “fitness for use” in action. Or consider manufacturing: lean principles owe a debt to his project-by-project improvements. Even in service industries, training staff to deliver consistent excellence echoes Juran's vision. His ideas aren't relics; they're blueprints for staying relevant. Practical Steps for Leaders Ready to channel Juran in your leadership? Here's how to start: Set a Quality Vision: Define what “fitness for use” means for your customers and rally your team around it. Make it specific—e.g., “Zero defects in our next release” or “95% on-time delivery.” Dig into Data: Use tools like surveys, analytics, or Pareto charts to find your “vital few” problems. Focus your energy there. Lead by Example: Get hands-on with a quality project. If you're in the trenches, your team will follow. Train Relentlessly: Host workshops or bring in experts to upskill your staff. Make quality everyone's job. Launch a Pilot: Pick one process—say, customer support response times—and improve it step by step. Measure the impact and scale it up. Track Costs: Calculate what poor quality costs you (e.g., refunds, churn) versus prevention (e.g., better onboarding). Use the numbers to justify your investments. Historical Impact: A Legacy That Shaped the World Juran's handbook didn't just influence theory—it changed history. In 1954, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) invited him to Japan, where his ideas fueled the country's post-war quality revolution. Companies like Toyota and Sony embraced his teachings, blending them with local practices to create Total Quality Control (TQC). By the 1970s, Japan's reputation for precision and reliability had flipped global markets on their head, a feat Juran called “the greatest quality achievement in the history of mankind.” The 1951 handbook laid the groundwork for this transformation, proving that quality isn't just a tactic—it's a game-changer. Bringing Juran into 2025 As a leader, you're not just managing a team—you're shaping an organization's future. Juran's Quality Control Handbook offers a roadmap to do it right. It's about more than avoiding mistakes; it's about building something exceptional. Imagine your business humming with efficiency, delighting customers, and outpacing competitors—all because you took quality seriously. That's Juran's promise, and it's yours to claim. So, pick one principle—say, the Quality Trilogy—and test it this quarter. Plan for your customers, control your processes, and improve relentlessly. You'll see why Juran's work has endured for over seven decades. Quality isn't a buzzword; it's leadership in action. Let's make it happen.

Why would any leader choose to take on a transformation that requires rethinking how they lead, how their organization functions, and how they learn? In this episode, we dive deeper with Cliff Norman and David Williams, co-authors of Quality as an Organizational Strategy, exploring Chapter 11: “Getting Started.” They share powerful stories, practical steps, and the deep-rooted challenges leaders face when shifting from conventional methods to building true learning organizations grounded in Dr. Deming's philosophy. This conversation highlights why improvement cannot be delegated, why leadership transformation is essential, and how to begin the journey—with clarity, commitment, and courage. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 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 are going to continue our conversation with Dave Williams and Cliff Norman about their book Quality as an Organizational Strategy. I found this book fascinating because I think it's addressing something where there's been a bit of a hole and that is how do we think about the strategy of our business? And so we already had our conversation in a prior episode about the overview of the book, but today we're going to be talking about specifically, now this is kind of funny because we're going to be talking about the back of the book and that is chapter 11, getting started. Dave, why don't you take it away?   0:00:53.3 Dave Williams: Well, thanks, Andrew. Thanks for having us back on the Deming podcast. So, as you mentioned, part of the way that the book is laid out is that it describes kind of the foundations that are behind quality as an organizational strategy and begins sort of with an introduction that explains a good bit about how Dr. Deming had this provocation of a need for leaders to transform the way that they approach leading organizations. And part of that was to move not just from process based improvement projects, but to start to think about major systems in the organization and to pursue quality as the overall strategy and create a continuous improvement organization or learning organization. And so the book lays some of the foundation behind the science of improvement or behind profound knowledge that underpin the thinking, walks through quality as an organizational strategy, as a method of five interdependent activities. Then at the end it comes back full circle to say, well, this is great, now you've learned about these theories and methods. But a natural question for any leader would be, how do I get started? And one of the first things that we talk about in that section actually is about why leaders would want to do this transformation.   0:02:30.9 Dave Williams: And this actually came from a conversation that Lloyd and Cliff and I had in 2020 where we were talking about getting on this journey of building the book. And we all kind of recognized that this was really, really hard work. And we were curious or we, we didn't have a good answer of what was our theory about why somebody would deviate from the way in which they work today and embark on a transformational change of the way that they approach leadership, the way that they approach organizations. And actually I ended up going on a journey of interviewing a whole host of leaders who had been influenced by Deming, who had been involved in improvement in healthcare, folks like Dr. Berwick and Paul Batalden and Brent James. I interviewed some folks in the UK and other places, like John Seddon, and asked them, oh and I should Blaine Godfrey, who had been the lead of the Durand Institute, and I posed the question, what causes somebody to want to embark on this change? And many people actually had a hard time articulating it. But the answer that emerged, or actually Blaine Godfrey was the one that kind of framed it the best, I think, for us, was a number of things.   0:03:57.7 Dave Williams: Sometimes it's something like a book like this comes out and people read it and it's interesting and new. Sometimes it's an event happens, a patient safety event or a major accident or something of which causes people to have to change or do something different. Sometimes it's a discouragement with a desire that you know you could do better, but you don't have methods or know how to. So there were a host of things that we listed, and those are some of a sample of them that might invite somebody to say, the way that we're working today is not getting us to the level that we want to. And now we want to embark on something different. And we might look to something like quality as an organizational strategy as a method for us to transform the way that we're working and build on the shoulders of Deming's philosophy and the science of improvement and do it differently.   0:04:56.0 Andrew Stotz: And when I look at the book, you guys are bringing together a lot of different stuff. It's not just a Deming book. It's Deming is a part of this, and that's fascinating. One of the questions I have is when we look at, let's say, a business owner, a business leader is looking for answers, as you said, maybe it's an event, maybe it's a discouragement, maybe it's a feeling like we can do better. Maybe it's just being beaten by competitors. They come to a point where they start looking for answers and they find some fantastic books, authors, ideas, consultants, all this and I think about whether that's Peter Drucker or whether that's the Lean movement or whether that's, let's say Taguchi or something like that is the teachings that you guys are talking about - and I'm going to specifically ask about the teachings of Dr. Deming. Is it more or is it more difficult or less difficult to implement than other books or styles or methods that someone's going to come across?   0:06:08.7 Cliff Norman: I have to quote one of my colleagues here who probably knew about more about Deming than anybody in API or all of us combined, that's Ron Moen, who did, I think it was 88 seminars, four-day seminars with Dr. Deming. Dr. Deming once told him, he said, Ron, I believe you've been to more of these and I've been to. And it's kind of a joke. He had a great sense of humor. But you know, Ron told me the problem with Deming is he's asking us to change. And there's all sorts of things out there that require the management and the leadership, they really don't have to do anything different. And there are several things out there. In fact, Philip Crosby, one of the three gurus during when they launched, he was more the evangelical and had a way of talking to management so that they understood it, which that was his contribution to all that. But when Six Sigma came up and black belts and all that, and Crosby looked at him and says, that's not going to change the system. He said, all you're doing is killing a bear for management, killing a bear for management, and then you'll get a black belt.   0:07:19.9 Cliff Norman: You know, And I thought, wow that's pretty profound. Because the management at that point doesn't have to do anything, just have the black belt ceremony. There's absolutely no change on their part. Where Deming, as Ron says, he's kind of a pain. You've got to learn about variation, you got to learn about Shewhart charts. You've got to be able to put together a family of measures for your organization. You've got to understand your organization's system. You need to understand psychology, you need to understand theory of knowledge and how people learn how they change. And nothing else out there puts that on leaders. And so that was a question that Dave was lending back to. Why would somebody do this to themselves? You know, why would they take on this whole extra thing to learn and all the rest of it. And for the people that I know that have made that, that bridge, the pure joy that they get and the rewards they get from people who are learning and that they're leading and that they're changing and they're able to go to other organizations and repeat this and call them up and say, thank you so much for helping me learn how to be a real leader.   0:08:35.8 Cliff Norman: I mean, that's the reward in it. But it requires a real change on the part of the leader. And I don't know of anything else, Andrew, that actually requires that kind of in depth change. And there was one of our leaders, Joe Balthazar, he had Jane and I do four years in a row with his leadership team, teach them the science of improvement. The same curriculum, same leaders, four years in a row. And the second year I was doing it, I said, don't we need... No, no, Cliff, I want you to do exactly what you did last year. He said, it takes years for people to understand this. And I thought, wow, this is unbelievable. But on the fourth year, the VP of sales walked up to me and he says, I think I figured it out. And I thought, wow. And it does it literally... Because you've got to depart from where you've been and start thinking about how you're going to change and let go of what's made you successful up to this point. And that's hard, that's hard for anybody to do.   0:09:47.2 Cliff Norman: And anybody's been through that four day seminar knows when they crossed that path that all of a sudden they had to say, you know what I've been doing, I can see where I've been, the problem and not the solution. And that's tough for us. That really is tough. And Deming says you have to give up that guilt trip. And once you understand the theory of variation, once you understand systems, once you understand psychology and theory of knowledge, it's time then for you to move on and let go of the guilt. I hope that makes sense. But that's the difficulty in this.   0:10:17.6 Andrew Stotz: It reminds me of two, it made me think about two things. I mean, I was just a 24 year old guy when I attended the seminars that I did, and they weren't even four day. I think they were two-day ones at Quality Enhancement Seminars in, what was it, George Washington, I think. But the point that I remember, as just a young guy who I was, I pretty much admired all these business leaders. And then to see Dr. Deming really nail em to the wall and say it's about you changing. And whether he was saying that directly or whether that he was implying that through the Red Bead experiment or other things, it's about you shaping the system. That really blew me away because I had already read some books and I was pretty excited. And then it also made me think about, let's say there's a really good book, I would say Good to Great by Jim Collins that highlights some things that you can do to succeed and make your business better. And you can just buy that book and hand it to your management team and go, hey, implement what you learned from this book.   0:11:20.8 Andrew Stotz: Whereas with the Deming book, it's like there's just so much more to it. So I guess the answer to this is it is more takes time. There's more thinking going on. And I think that's part of the whole point of what your book does, is to help us map it out. So why don't we go through and think about this and kind of maybe step by step through what is the starting point and how do we go?   0:11:45.4 Cliff Norman: Andrew, I just got to add to what you just said there and go back to Joe Balthazar at Hallmark Building Supplies. He shared with me that, and he's the one that said I want you to do these four year seminars dedicated Deming's idea of Profound knowledge. And he said, Cliff, the day I made it, I knew I'd made it. Is my son Joey spilled his milk. He's about three years old. And he said, I started to do my normal leap across the table and he said I was about mid air. And I thought, oh my, this is what they do. This is part of their system. This is common. And I'm treating this like it's special. And that was so profound for him. And when, when you move beyond the Shewhart chart and you see events in your life around you relative to the theory of variation, common and special cause variation at a deep way like that, that's the kind of transformation you want to see in a leader. And Joe will tell you he's forever grateful for Deming and everything he's learned, and I think that's the reward. But people need to be willing to go on that journey, as Dave was saying.   0:12:53.0 Andrew Stotz: So Dave, why don't you walk us through a little bit of what you guys are teaching in that chapter.   0:13:00.3 Dave Williams: Sure. Well, one of the next steps obviously is if somebody, if a leadership team thinks that they want to go on this journey, there's some considerations they got to think about. As we've already sort of alluded to or touched on, this is a leadership responsibility and a leadership change. And so there's got to be will amongst the leadership team in order to say we want to work together and work hard to do this work. That this is not something that, similar to Cliff's example of say, having black belts, that we can just hand it off, somebody else will do it, and we can just keep going about our business and hope. It's important that leaders spend time recognizing and thinking about the fact that this is going to involve them doing work, doing effort, changing the way that they think, changing the way that they practice. And I like to say it's good hard work. I mean it's going to be something that's deeply rewarding. But it does require them to have that will. And with will then it's going to come time and energy, right? They've got to make the space, they've got to create regular routines and opportunities for them to learn just in terms of content, learn in terms of practice or application and learn in the process of doing the improvement work and doing the change to the way that they work in the organization.   0:14:38.0 Dave Williams: So there's going to be a need to build in that ability. And then a third thing is to ask whether you think this is something that you can do on your own or whether it might be useful to have help. And help may be an internal, a consultant, but likely not to promote consulting it but, but there's a good chance that you're going to need somebody that has both experience in improvement and helping people do results-driven improvement as well as somebody who has experience doing system wide change through a lens like QOS. And, and the advantage of that often is it it gives you as a leadership team to focus in on your job of thinking and looking and learning and allow somebody else to be an external intervener, somebody who comes in and creates some of the support, some of the context, some of the ways that can make it easier for you to step back and look at your organization in a different way. And so many times those are some of the things that should be considered as teams working through it. Cliff, what would you add or improve upon.   0:16:07.3 Cliff Norman: The idea of external help. Deming was pretty black and white about that. I was kind of surprised. I went back and read one of his quotes. He said, "I should mention also the costly fallacy held by many people in management that a consultant must know all about a process in order to work on it. All evidence is exactly the contrary. Competent men in every position, from top management to the humblest worker know all there is to know about their work except how to improve it. Help towards improvement can come only from outside knowledge." And I was reflecting on that today with Jane who's been involved in this for 40 plus years also. I said Jane, when he said that, I think it was accurate because at that time she and I were going to Duran seminars. There's only two books out there with methods. One was Ishikawa's book on Guide to Quality Control. And the other was Feigenbaum's book. And then of course you had Duran's book on The Quality Handbook, which was a nice doorstop. But there wasn't that much knowledge about improvement. And the worst part where Deming was really getting to was there's very few people you'd run into that actually under the Shewhart methods and charts and understand the difference between special and common cause variation.   0:17:27.0 Cliff Norman: And so you had to bring that kind of knowledge in from the outside. And frankly, we've had people go off the rails here. You know, Dr. Deming in the teaching of statistics has identified analytic studies which is focused on looking at data over time and trying to understand that and simple methods and approaches and then what he calls enumerative statistics, which is use of T tests, F tests and all the rest of it, which assumes that under the IDD principle that data is independent and identically distributed. Well, if you have any special causes in the data set, it blows up both of those assumptions and the use of those methods doesn't offer any help in prediction. And as Dr. Deming often said, prediction is the problem. And then go back to Shewhart. And Shewhart said, things in nature are inherently stable, but man-made processes are inherently unstable. So when Dave and I first do a Shewhart chart for a client, we don't expect for it to be stable. We expect for to have special causes. And as Dr. Deming said and also Dr. Juran, that when you get a stable system, that in and of itself is an achievement, that means nobody's messing around with the system anymore.   0:18:43.0 Cliff Norman: And you see this in the simplest things, like in an office, somebody will walk in and they think that their body is the standard for what the internal temperature should be for that room. So then they walk up and they start tampering with the thermostat. And by the end of the day everybody's irritated because we've had so many bodies up there with their standard. Moving the funnel on us here, and just leaving it alone would probably all be better off. But you have to learn that. And I think that's what Dr. Deming was saying, is that that kind of knowledge is going to come from the outside. Now the good news is is that since he wrote that in 1986, we've got a lot of people out there and some of them are in organizations that do understand the Shewhart methods and can understand the difference between common and special cause variation. They do understand the difference between a new and analytic studies and statistics and they can be of help. So the Deming Institute has a room full of these people show up, but they're at their gatherings annually. So we're a lot further along than we were in 1986.   0:19:45.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. So let's go through that for just a second. Some considerations you've talked about. You know that it's a leadership change. Right. And you gotta ask yourself, are we ready to work on this? And you know, this is not a hands-off thing. The second thing you talked about is time and energy. Are we ready to make the space for this? We have to have regular meetings. You know, we've gotta really... There's some work involved here. And then the third part you've talked about is outside help. And you mentioned about this story of Joe Balthazar and how he asked you to do the same topic over and over for four years. And imagine if he was telling his team, let's meet and try to implement some of this stuff on our own. Everybody dig into a book and then let's try. It would be very difficult to make that kind of progress compared to bringing an outside person. Which also brings me to the last thing that you said, Cliff, which was the idea that Dr. Deming had mentioned, that you need an outside person to truly change something. Everybody's got the expertise on the inside.   0:20:44.5 Cliff Norman: I appreciate you summarizing that because my job and working with Joe and leadership team, I was meeting with him every month. But what the four years that Jane and I spent were the next levels of his leadership. You know, it wasn't the leadership team. And I'm glad you brought that up because it was the very next level that he wanted exposed to this and the VP of sales that came in, he was new, so he had to be part of this group because he wasn't there originally. And so there was that ongoing... He wanted that next generation that was going to take over for him and the others to really understand this. So I'm glad you summarized that for me to help.   0:21:30.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think one of the starting points too, I mean, the body of work, not just this book, but the other books that you guys have been involved in and produced provide a lot of the starting points for this. So there's a lot there. Dave, where do we go after these considerations? And the people say, okay, yeah, leadership says, we want to make this change. We're ready to make some time for it. We're willing to get outside support and help. Where do we go next.   0:21:57.7 Dave Williams: Right. Well, one thing that we typically invite a leadership team to do is to take kind of a self assessment of where they sort of see their baseline in relation to the methods and activities of QOS. So in chapter one of the book, there's actually a table that is 10 different categories. And then each leader takes it independently and they rate their level of agreement with different definitions from 0 to 10. 0 being this really isn't present, and 10 is, I'm very, very far along on this journey that in the book that's out now, there's a summarized table, it's on a page. But actually in the QOS field guide that we're working on publishing this year, there's a much more detailed version that we use in practice that has deeper definitions, but basically it works its way through purpose and leadership and systems thinking and measurement and all the things that are tied into QOS and what... And as I mentioned, we have each individual member of the leadership team take it independently and then we bring those scores together to learn together.   0:23:32.5 Dave Williams: And there's different ways in which you can display it. In the book, we show an example of a leadership team's scatter plot where it shows the rating and then it also shows the standard deviation amongst that exists between the leadership team. It's very, very common for leaders to not be in agreement in terms of their score in each of the different areas. You know what I said, It's a 0 to 10 scale. Typically, in my experience using the tool, people tend to be between a 2 and a 6 and hovering around a 2 or a 4. But it sort of looks like a buckshot or shotgun blast where there's a very... If you were to put dots where everybody scores, where there's variation that exists. And that's good because it's useful for the team to pause and think about why they assess the organization the way that they did. Looking at it through this new lens, where are the places that there's agreement and also where are the places that there's variation? And that helps them to be able to think about the fact that through this process, they're likely to both improve their assessment of the organization, but also increase their agreement about where they are and what they need to do to move forward and what they need to do to improve.   0:25:05.2 Dave Williams: And so that's a useful starting point, gets everybody kind of on the same page, and it's something that we can use at intervals as one of the ways to continually come back and evaluate progress towards the destination of pursuing quality as an organizational strategy.   0:25:23.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, I imagine that self assessment, it helps you too when you work with companies to be able to really understand, okay, here are starting point with this company is really, they just really don't know much about all of this stuff, whereas you'll have some other clients that basically, wow, okay, there's a lot of knowledge here about it, but how's the implementation and all that? So are we ready to change? Are we prepared to devote the time and energy? Are we going to get outside help? And where are we now? What's our starting point that's great to help us understand exactly how you step through it. What comes next?   0:26:03.5 Cliff Norman: Well, in that very first milestone, in that table, is it table three, Dave? Anyway, the very first milestone is to establish formal improvement efforts. And the reason for that is that unless people experience what it takes to develop, test and implement changes in the organizations, they really can't appreciate the structure that comes with quality as an organizational strategy. Because it's very difficult for many organizations to launch three or four improvement efforts and then bring them to fruition. And there's all sorts of stuff that happens. And then you find out very quickly whether you have managers or leaders, and organizations they've brought me in, they say, let's do some leadership training. I said, no, let's just do some improvement and then we'll find out if we have leaders or not. And one group, I won't mention who it was, but they had five people on their leadership team and they had to replace two of them because they found out they couldn't actually manage an improvement effort. And then the CEO was wondering how they actually manage their organization, which they weren't either. And so it's a rather, it's an important test in the front.   0:27:22.2 Cliff Norman: But as Dr. Juran says, it's real important to develop the habit of improvement. And if you don't know what that is, if you've never experienced it, then it's hard to say to people, gee, I need a purpose that aligns my improvement efforts. I need to understand my system so I know where those improvements are going on. I need to build an information system, get information from customers outside, people inside. I need to put together a strategic plan that actually makes improvements on purpose. That's a lot of work. And once you understand how complicated it can get in terms of just doing three or four improvement efforts and then all of a sudden you got a portfolio of 30 to do your strategic plan. Now that needs some structure, that needs some guidance and all the rest of it. But I'll just go back one step further. My own journey. I was sent by Halliburton at Otis Engineering to go see Dr. Deming 1982 in February. And coming back, I had an audience with the president of our organization, Purvis Thrash. And I went on and on about Dr. Deming. He said, Cliff, you know what I'd like to have? I said, what's up, Mr. Thrash?   0:28:27.5 Cliff Norman: He says, if you'll take this 50 million dollar raw material problem and solve this for me, I'll be a happy man and I'll give you all the quality you want. But go take care of that problem for me first and then come back to me and talk about Deming and Juran and anything else you want to talk about. So I put together four or five people and over about three months we solved his 50 million dollar raw material problem. And then he had a meeting of all executives and I was sitting with the managers in the back row and he called me to the front and he says, Cliff, will you sign this card right here? And I says, well Mr. Thrash, what is this? He says, well, I'm giving you authority to sign $50,000 anytime you need it to get all the quality we can stand here at Otis Engineering. One of the vice presidents said, well, I don't have that authority. He said, you didn't save me $50 million. You know, but once that happens, Andrew, once you do that, then you've got people that are willing to help you. And then once that takes place, I can't tell you how important, it allowed me then to bring in Lloyd Provost to help me.   0:29:36.2 Cliff Norman: And they weren't about to pay out money. They didn't like consultants, in fact, they were anti-consultant. But you saved us $50 million. I gave you $50,000. And Lloyd doesn't make that much. So get him in here, do whatever you need to go do. And I just think it's so critical that we have that demonstration project that people understand at the leadership level what we're talking about when we talk about design and redesign of the system.   0:30:00.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I mean, I appreciate in the book you're talking about this concept. I'm not going to call it quick wins, but the idea is we need to get results. You know, this isn't just about talking about stuff so that's one thing that as you just illustrated, that's one point. The second thing you mentioned, is this person a leader or a manager? You know, and I think for the listeners or viewers out there, they're probably... When they heard you say that, they're probably thinking. Okay, wait a minute. Are my team managers or leaders? How do I know? What would you say? What differentiates the two?   0:30:37.2 Cliff Norman: I was fortunate to hang around Dr. Maccabee, as Deming did, and I asked Dr. Maccabee that question. He said, Cliff it's actually pretty easy. He said leaders have followers, and if you have followers, you can be anywhere in the organization, be a leader, but if you don't have followers, you're not a leader. You might be a manager with authority. You're not a leader.   0:31:02.7 Andrew Stotz: Can I ask a little bit more on that? So I'm thinking about my own business, which is a coffee factory, and I have people that are running the business, but I also have people that are running departments like the roasting department. And that area when they're overseeing this and they're doing a very good job and they're keeping things up and all that. How do I understand in a sense you could say, are they followers? Well, not really. They're people working for them and they have a good time and so do I view that person as not necessarily a leader, but more of a manager, or how do I look at it in my own company?   0:31:35.5 Cliff Norman: It could be a manager, which is essential to the organization. And that's another big difference. You see, the leader can't delegate their relationship with the people who are followers. You can't do that any more than a teacher can dedicate her class to a substitute teacher. Anybody that's ever watched that knows that chaos is getting ready to break out here because that teacher has a relationship with those students. She knows them all in a big way. And when the substitute comes in is game time in most classrooms and so forth, the managers have skills and things that they're applying and they can actually delegate those. Like when I was a foreman, I could have somebody come in and take over my department and I say assign all my people tomorrow. And they could do that. Now, in terms of the people that I was leading that saw me as a leader in that department, they didn't have that relationship.   0:32:30.2 Cliff Norman: But management or skills and necessary things to make the organization run like you're talking about, the coffee is not going to get out the door unless I have people with subject matter knowledge and competent managers to make sure that the T's are getting crossed, the I's dotted and the rest of it. But the leadership of the organization that has followers, that's a whole different person. And I think it's important. That could be anywhere in the organization. Like I had at Halliburton, I had a VP of engineering. Everybody went to him, everybody. He had 110 patents. You know, he built that system. He built the whole organization. So the CEO did not have the followers that the VP of engineering had. And it was well earned. It's always earned, too.   0:33:16.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Okay, that's great. Leaders have followers. Leaders cannot delegate their authority. They have a different relationship.   0:33:24.0 Cliff Norman: They can't delegate the relationship.   0:33:25.8 Andrew Stotz: The relationship. Okay.   0:33:27.4 Cliff Norman: Yeah. Very important.   0:33:34.3 Andrew Stotz: So now let's go back to what, where we were. So we were saying some of the considerations. Are we ready to change? Are we prepared to devote the time and energy? Are we ready to get outside help and where are we now? And that self assessment that you talked about helps us to understand what's our starting point. I always tell a joke with my students about this when I talk about. I'd say, imagine you go to London and you're going to go visit your friend and you call your friend up, you say, I've arrived and I'm calling from a phone booth and just tell me how to get there. And the friend says, well, where are you? And you say, I'm not really sure. Well, do you see anything around you? Yeah, well, there's lots of buildings, but I don't really, you know. Well, do you see any names of any streets? No, I don't really see anything. But just tell me how to get there. There's something missing. If we don't know where we are, it's very difficult to get to where we're going. So now we understand where we are. We got that scatter plot that you guys have that you've talked about. Dave, where do we go next?   0:34:26.6 Dave Williams: Well, so Cliff already mentioned one of the fundamentals. And sometimes I think this is something that people struggle with because they want to jump into something new. But one of the best starting points is to focus in on improvement. And there's a number of different reasons for that. So one is that I don't know about you all, but in my experience, if I ask people, like, hey, I want to create some improvement projects and get started on improvement, I always tell people, like, if you remember the old Stephen Covey exercise where he put the rocks and the stones and the sand into a jar and poured water. And like you would do it in different orders. And I'm fascinated that people will stare at the big rocks or the things that are right in front of them, or the things that are on their agenda, or the things that are part of their strategy. And then they'll look to the side and grab some rare event or some extra thing that isn't related to that, but they've always wanted to work on. And where we try to focus people's attention is one, what are you already working on? Can you look through your and ask around, what are the things that are currently in play, projects that exist? And sometimes we won't ask, what improvement projects do you have? Because if you do that, you get a short list.   0:35:51.4 Dave Williams: Those are the things that people defined as an improvement effort, or maybe use some kind of framing to decide it was an improvement project. It may be better to in the beginning of the book, in the first chapter, we talk about different ways that you improve. And there's designing and redesigning a process. There's designing and redesigning a service or a product. There's changing a whole system. And so it can be useful to say, well, what are we doing in these areas? And that may actually create a bigger list of the various things where people are working on something that's about change to the system that may lend itself to be better activated through firing it up as an improvement project. And then, of course, there's a good chance that any organization, especially if they've done some kind of strategic planning, have some strategic objectives or some strategic priorities which they've committed to or already said, these are the things we're going to work on. So kind of crowdsourcing or bringing those together helps us to potentially find the early portfolio of projects without having to look much further, without having to say, what else do you want to work on.   0:37:07.0 Dave Williams: And then if we've got that, if we've got that list, a second thing that we can do is invite people to use the three questions of the model for improvement and reflect on can you answer these three questions? Do you know what you're trying to accomplish? Do you know how a change will result in improvement? Do you know what changes you'll make? What's your theory about how you'll get to improvement? And so having a list of the things that are already present or existing may be one first step. Another second step in the firing up a portfolio of improvement projects is asking the three questions for the model for improvement. And then a third one, if it's an active project is we have a project progress scale that you might use that can help you gauge. So I've got a project where is it on its journey towards achieving its aim or getting results? Those three can help us to sort of get a sense of the work that is at hand and that has already been sort of started in some fashion that is already in progress and maybe to get a sense of the level of definition and the progress that exists.   0:38:22.3 Dave Williams: They may not be the right projects, but that's a good place to start before trying to create new ones. And I'll hand it to you, Andrew.   0:38:30.4 Andrew Stotz: I find that interesting. Both the story that you told Cliff about fix my raw material problem and then, Dave, what you're talking about is as you talk in the book, focus first on improvement. What are we already working on? What's an improvement project we've got? What's a problem we've got? Because a lot of times, let's say in the teachings of Dr. Deming, it's like, no, get your mind right, read this stuff, read this, figure this out, think about this, go to a seminar, talk to other people before you do anything. I feel like that is oftentimes where people get caught is they get caught up in, I need a year to think about this. And can you explain a little bit more about why once we've done our self assessment and we're ready to go, that you focus on improvement rather than the thinking process?   0:39:21.7 Dave Williams: Well, because we want to... Well, one, we know that in order to get results or to get a different result than what we want, we got to change the system that we got. Right. So in order to do that, we've got to do improvement. The other thing is that there's already energy that's being expended here.   0:39:41.4 Andrew Stotz: That's a good point.   0:39:42.7 Dave Williams: The risk that often I find people run into is that they then add other projects that are not strategic into that bucket and take up more energy. I'll tell you an example. I was working with the health system here in the States and we crowdsource just the things that they were calling improvement projects. The health system had 25 active teams that were just the ones that were called out as improvement projects. When we looked at those 25 teams, the vast majority of them were not actually... They had been meeting for months and doing things for quite some time, but they actually weren't doing any changes and, or they've been testing changes for quite some time. So, now just this exercise alone by only asking, what improvement projects do you have? You realize you've got 25 teams that have been resourced or are spending energy or going to meetings or focused on something. They may not be the strategic thing that matters, but that's irrelevant right now. We just know that we already have invested some interest here. The second thing is these folks have been on this journey for quite some time and are not making progress.   0:41:01.7 Dave Williams: So that tells me something about maybe the way that they framed it. Did they charter it well? Did they have the right people in the room or the right team? Did they have the right tools and methods to be able to break down the problem and then figure out what to test and learn? So there may be some difficulty...   0:41:19.4 Andrew Stotz: Or did they even just dissipate their efforts across 25 projects too? Right in their resources, yeah.   0:41:26.1 Dave Williams: Yeah. Or there are overlaps? So there's a number of different factors. There's actually a paper that was published by a health system in the United Kingdom, and it was really interesting. They spent a lot of attention on generating will through training and getting people in the classroom and teaching them about improvement methods. And they fired up all this energy. They had a massive explosion of the number of projects that were started or where somebody went into their software. They had a software platform. Anybody could go and start a project. Well, something like 50% of those projects never actually got to PDSA testing where they changed anything. And then there were a slew of them that were stuck in PDSA testing but never saw any movement in their process measures or their outcome measures. And only a small number actually progressed in achieving their aim. And I asked the Chief Quality Officer about this, and and he admittedly said that it was very exciting that we we're generating will and getting things going, but that alone was only getting them to maybe some early design and some thinking, but they weren't getting them to results.                                                                         0:42:34.8 Dave Williams: And I said, well, what about the ones that were getting results? And he said, well, those are actually ones where we've got an improvement advisor who's got some skills and ability and improvement. There are things that are resourced, there are things that were prioritized. And man, when we did all those things, they moved from planning and organizing and thinking to testing changes and moving in a direction of goodness and getting at least results in their process measures, if not their outcome measures. And so in my mind, I was like, I appreciate you're trying to build this sort of culture, but it felt like a lot of burnt energy at the front end with all these teams getting into training and firing up their software and more energy might have been strategic in copying what was getting to results. And I think that's part of what we're trying to get to, is helping people learn. You've got if you don't have a method to figure out strategic projects, let's look at the ones you got. How are they going? Where are people at? And how effective is the capability that you have within your system right now? And the leaders want to be part of that, and they can learn within that to go, oh, wow, this is our current state.   0:43:47.2 Dave Williams: And so maybe we're going to agree to continue on with these projects. Maybe we're going to sunset some of them, but we're going to learn together about how do we get better at getting better, and how do we learn how to move projects forward and not to have them take two years. Let's try to get them down to four or six months, whether that's through scope or execution. But let's get better at getting better. And then as we're building... Developing the early activities of QOS, we'll eventually get to a point where we'll also be able to identify more strategic projects that are going to move us towards our aim or towards our purpose better. And this will help us as we're trying to build the capability to get there.   0:44:32.7 Cliff Norman: You know, Andrew, early on, when Dave went down this path, he said that we got to make sure that somebody's working on improvement. They're actually making changes. And Jane and I were working with a group, and the CEO said they've been meeting a long time. Could you down there and see what they're doing? Because nothing's happening. And we started looking through their agendas and they had everything well documented, and it was all about getting ready to get ready. And then they'd assign the dessert. Who's going to bring the dessert to the next meeting. And Jane looked at him and says this reminds me of something, Cliff. I said, what's that? Can I share my screen?   0:45:10.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Yep, go ahead.   0:45:13.7 Cliff Norman: I may send this to. You may know about it, but this is Dr. Deming's Diary of a Cat. And everyday...   0:45:20.6 Andrew Stotz: It hasn't come up yet. Hold on one second. Hopefully you've got permission now.   0:45:28.6 Cliff Norman: Let me go back and check here.   0:45:33.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay. It looks like it's coming up. One second.   0:45:38.4 Cliff Norman: It said every day is today. There's no theory days of the week. But today I got up some food in a bowl, it was great. Slept some too. Play with yarn, got some food in a bowl, had a good nap, slept, food, yarn, fun. Play with a shoelace. There's a big change right there. Went from yarn to a shoelace. Some people call that a job shop. And ate, slept, had a good day, slept, ate some food, yarn, so forth. So, and the team meeting looked just like that. But there's really no changes going on relative to improvement. So Dr. Deming would often share this into four days seminar to make sure that we weren't involved in the Diary of the Cat, but we were actually doing something useful in terms of making changes in the organization.   0:46:24.4 Andrew Stotz: That's a great one. And it helps us to understand that we could be busy all day long and not improve anything.   0:46:31.8 Cliff Norman: You know, or actually confuse that with improvement. In fact, we have an operational API that my team, we were embarrassed in our first, wait a second, our first improvement guide we wrote. And Dr. Adamir Pente, who's a professor at the university in Brazil, he sent us a note and he said, I know you guys and he said you're real big on operational definitions, but you've written this book on improvement and nowhere have you, you've defined what you mean by improvement. And then he put together a three part definition that there's a design and redesign system, there's system measures and the change is sustainable and lasting and so we put that definition in the second edition. But I was confronted at a university, I won't mention which one it was, but they had 30 Keystone projects for a advanced degree program for nursing and they were convinced they were doing improvement. And when I had them apply that definition, they came up out of the thirty. They only could find two projects out of the 30 where they were actually designing and redesigning the system, which, that's the first thing Dave said are we designing and redesigning and making real changes? And people think just showing up and going through motions and all the rest of it is improvement. No, it means...   0:48:07.8 Dave Williams: Looks like we've lost...   0:48:11.9 Andrew Stotz: We lost you at the last, the last statement you just made. People are going through all this stuff and thinking that they're improving, but they're...   0:48:22.8 Cliff Norman: Yeah, it's showing up and going through motions and you know, having the meetings and making sure we assign who's bringing dessert. But we're not really designing and changing the system. We're not getting measurable changes of improvement. In other words, we haven't tracked the data over time and we can't say that the changes that we've made are going to in fact be sustainable because we haven't known what we've done to the system to deserve a sustainable change.   0:48:51.4 Andrew Stotz: By the way, what a buzzword these days, sustainability, sustainable and all that. And you just think do people really think about how we're building something that's really lasting and sustainable?   0:49:04.8 Cliff Norman: Well, we have a checklist and actually Jane designed it for the first edition and it literally lays out what changes did you make, which processes did you change, what's going to change in the documentation, whose role statements have been changed in the organization because of this change. And once all that's answered on that checklist, which is in the book, then we can... But we're pretty certain that we've created the structure to make it easy for people to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. But unless that structure's changed, probably not much going to happen.   0:49:40.8 Andrew Stotz: Just for the sake of time, because I think we want to wrap up in just a bit. But there's so many stuff, so much stuff that we've been through. But I know there's even more in this chapter, but how would you start to bring this together for the person who is a leader, himself or herself, and they're listening to this and they're thinking, okay, I'm ready to make a change and I'm prepared to devote the time and energy because I see the outcome and I'm open to help, whether that's through the book and other books, whether that's through a consultant, whatever that is. And I can even do a self assessment to some extent and know where our level is, which is very low. We don't know much about this type of stuff and that type of thing. We talked about the first focus on improvement. How do they pull this all together and start moving on it?   0:50:35.0 Dave Williams: There's three things that follow the self assessment. The first one is this focus on doing improvement work and setting up a portfolio of projects. And we just kind of talked about many of the different methods that go into that. And like I said, sometimes that when you say that out loud, leaders don't initially get excited by it because they think they have it. But actually it's a powerful opportunity for you to learn about what's currently going on in the organization and about where this opportunity is to reduce a lot of the noise and a lot of the friction that's getting in the way from you getting to results. The second thing that often happens in parallel is that the leaders need to build a learning system where they're going to be able to learn together both about these projects and what these projects are telling them about their organization, about their culture, about their people, and about their capacity to get results, but also that they can start to be learning about the science of improvement and profound knowledge and the activities of QOS that are going to be part of what they're going to work on developing over the course of the first year or two.   0:51:50.6 Dave Williams: And so that typically is, that's making that space and energy. It's a blend of book learning and application and practical. Trying and looking at things within the organization. It's a very applied approach, but it's an ongoing piece of their discovery. And I often argue that this is a real opportunity for leadership because they're going to be able to see their organization in a way that they haven't seen it before. And when we talk about profound knowledge, they're going to gain this profound understanding and expertise about what they're charged with and what they own and what they want to change in a way that they haven't been able to have it before. And so it's a hard work, but rewarding work. And then third is that typically where the, where we invite people to start is to focus in on the first activity, which is to develop or establish or develop their purpose. When this work was initially framed, not everybody was as... Not everybody had a mission, vision and value statement or a purpose statement that wasn't as common, but today people do. But the difference here, and you'll see this in the chapter on purpose, is that organizations that are pursuing quality as an organizational strategy are organizations that are systems that are built to constantly be trying to match a need that exists out in the world.   0:53:34.7 Dave Williams: And so often a learning for people is to step back and have to reflect on, well, what is the need in which we are creating these products and services to match? And if we're creating these things to match the need, how do we understand what's important, what are the quality characteristics that matter? And then how do we define what our mission is in that context? And being able to say, here's why we exist and the need that we're trying to serve, and in what way? And how do we set a vision for where we want to get into the future and what are the tenants or the practical values that exist in our organization, that we want to define how we work together in terms of building in that way. And so purpose is a big focus. It's that clarity of the need, the clarity of the quality characteristics that it takes to match that need. Understanding what are the products and services that we have. I know that sounds a little trivial, but you'd be stunned how hard it is, especially in service organizations, for people to actually describe what it is that they do, what are the actual services.   0:54:54.3 Dave Williams: They might have the name of the service or the class or the whatever, but to actually say this is what we deliver, and then really think about how do I use this as our organization's sort of North Star, our aim, so that everything else that follows is going to be about building a system that produces the results that we want and produces the services that match that need. So going forward, that's going to be very, very important in instructing the direction and instructing the way in which we're going to work as a community of professional people together.   0:55:30.8 Andrew Stotz: So after self assessment, we're talking about focusing on improvement. We're talking about building a learning system, and we're talking about revisiting or establishing or developing our purpose?   0:55:43.3 Cliff Norman: Yeah, I'll just add to what you just said there, Andrew. There's three basic things that have to happen when we start working. Number one is create the habit of improvement. Start improvement right away. Second thing, Dave just went through some detail on building a system of improvement. And Dave called that a learning system, which I thought was interesting because that's what Dr. Maccabee called it when he saw the five activities. Said, these are really methods for building a learning organization. And he said, I've never really seen them before, but this is what will come out of this, which is the essence of what you want. You want people continually learning, as Dr. Deming said, so they can continually improve. But the third thing that has to happen is we have to develop internal capability for them to carry this on, because we're not going to be around with them. We've never advertised. We don't advertise for clients, and we only get word of mouth. And we're only in there to do those three things, get them started on the habit of improvement, start building the system improvement so they can take it over.   0:56:43.4 Cliff Norman: And the third thing, start developing internal capability so they can continue it on into the future. So those three things basically take off on day one. And depending on the organization, I think this is critical. Dave, you asked this question the other day, if the context is such they've got things in front of them are so bad and so challenging that they just need to work on improvement. That's where we're going to be focused. But now if they can chew gum and walk at the same time, we're going to start building the system of improvement. And the first people I want on those initial teams, I want people on there who are going to be future improvement advisors. And more importantly, they perceive them as future leaders in the organization. I don't want a cadre of a whole bunch of improvement advisors. I want leaders in the future who actually understand the science of improvement, understand these methods, so when they go to the next department, the next organization, they can carry this on. So those three things start improving, start building a system of improvement. And the third thing, start developing internal capability. Those have got to take off almost simultaneously, depending on the situation, of course.   0:57:49.8 Andrew Stotz: Well, on that note, that's quite a discussion. I'm so happy that we can have this to go in a little bit deeper into the work that you guys have done. Again, the book is Quality As an Organizational Strategy. I got mine on Amazon and it sent it to me. But I wonder if you have any last words that you'd like to share about what we've talked about today in relation to getting started.   0:58:18.3 Cliff Norman: So, Dave, why don't you talk a little bit about. Because I think this is critical. We've just finished Andrew, the book that's going to be for the people who actually have to build this system. So Dave, just say a few things about that if you would, because you.   0:58:32.0 Dave Williams: About the field guide?   0:58:33.8 Cliff Norman: Yeah.   0:58:35.5 Dave Williams: Yeah. Well, so when this body of work was first created, there was the content of which you see in this book. And then there were also a lot of exercises and methods and applications and examples that existed as well. And it was a pretty thick binder. We have created two volumes. One, the book that you have, which is the description of the theory and the method and gives you some of the tools. And we're now in the process of pulling together what we call the QOS Field Guide, which is a guide that is supporting people that are going down this journey. It follows the same structure as the book, with the exception of the, the Getting started chapter that we had at the end is now at the beginning. And it walks through in great detail various ways in which you leaders and practitioners can approach getting started and building the capacity and then working through each of the activities. And it's equal in size, I mean, it's about the same thickness. But what we tried to do is to give people really pragmatic things to do.   1:00:01.1 Dave Williams: So there are exercises where people are simulating an idea or a concept or a particular piece. There are what we call QOS applications, which are where you're actually taking the theory or the method and applying it to your own organization. There are case studies and things that have been built that might allow you to practice. There's wonderful examples of just about everything from all, from people that we have worked with over the years across multiple different fields, from my background in emergency services and healthcare to education to manufacturing to elevator companies, all kinds of great stuff. And so that will be helpful as people are trying to think about pursuing this journey and working through that first phase of developing QOS and moving into using it. And we're in the stages of having it done to be available later this year.   1:01:08.6 Andrew Stotz: Exciting.   1:01:09.2 Cliff Norman: We've tried to make it useful, Andrew, that the people have to stay overnight with the management and actually get something done and build it without being run off. That everything is there for them to make sure that they make it successfully. That's the thing we kept in mind as we kept writing this second volume.   1:01:25.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, I would say my experience with your guys's writing is that it's applicable.   1:01:34.1 Dave Williams: Well, Andrew, one thing I was going to add on you mentioned a lot of different examples. There are a lot of books in which people tell you a theory, but they don't tell you how to do it. Or they tell you about their own experience, but they don't actually convey the theory. The Quality as an Organizational Strategy book is laying out the theory and the methods of this approach built on the foundations of the science of improvement and profound knowledge and the Deming philosophy. The QOS Field Guide adds to that by giving you the methods and the tools and the things. It doesn't mean that that by itself you can't just go through like it's some kind of self guided tour and all of a sudden magic happens. There's a lot of work and learning and things that have to go into going through that process. But between these two volumes, a leadership team has the tools and methods that put them in position to be able to make this journey.   1:02:41.4 Andrew Stotz: Right. Well, let's wrap it up there. On behalf of everyone, I appreciate Dave and Cliff. All that you're doing and you're sharing with us and taking the time to do that. So from everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for joining this and bringing your discussion on these topics. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And you can find this book, Quality as an Organizational Strategy at Amazon and other booksellers. Are there even booksellers these days? I don't even know. They're mainly online these days. So this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, which is "people are entitled to joy in work."  

»Slovenska beseda je bistvo za narod, nam govorijo in odgovarjam jim: Potem jo pa tudi plačajte tako, kot je treba!« pravi pisateljica in antropologinja dr. Luna Jurančič Šribar, predsednica Ženskega odbora Slovenskega centra PEN – MIRA. Avtorica, ki je več kot desetletje delala z brezdomnimi osebami, tudi v svojih literarnih delih daje glas ljudem na obrobju. Najšibkejšim, najbolj spregledanim, tistim, ki ne ustrezajo družbenim normam in predstavam o družbeni »normalnosti«. V svojem publicističnem delu pretresa sedanji izkoriščevalski družbeni red, ki, kot poudarja sama, normalizira nehumanost in znotraj katerega človečnost postaja odklon. Tudi v svojih literarnih delih odpira težke tematike, kot so alkoholizem, revščina, zlorabe, odrinjenost in travmatične družinske razmere. Posebno pozornost namenja ženskim likom, upornim in močnim junakinjam, ki pogumno kljubujejo svojim težkim usodam. Dr. Luno Jurančič Šribar je pred mikrofon povabila Tita Mayer.

durée : 00:24:09 - CRIC de Jurançon: portes ouvertes et forum insertion/orientation pour les personnes en situation de handicap. - Jeudi 20 mars de 9h à 13h au CRIC Pyrénées de Jurançon, venez assister à la journée portes ouvertes et au forum insertion/orientation pour les personnes en situation de handicap. Vous irez à la rencontre d'entreprises, centres de formation et associations et vous y trouverez des offres d'emploi.

Die Solothurner Parteien halten an ihren Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten fest. SVP, FDP, Mitte, SP und die Grünen ziehen so in den zweiten Wahlgang, wie sie schon in den ersten Wahlgang gestartet waren. Damit kommt es am 13. April zu einer Stichwahl. Weitere Themen: · Die Solothurner Skigebiete Balmberg und Grenchenberg gehören ab nächster Saison zum Magic-Pass-Verbund. Man wolle auch kleine Skigebiete unterstützen, heisst es bei Magic-Pass. · Das Wetter: Wolken, Sonne und in Juranähe sind auch kurze Regengüsse möglich.

In this episode of Misunderstanding Quality, host Andrew Stotz and Bill Bellows discuss what not to measure when it comes to quality. Bill offers some great examples to show how organizations get it wrong, and how to get it right. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 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 I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, we're gonna have a lot of fun, who has spent 31 plus years now that it's 2025, helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities in the episode, today is episode 11, and the title is "To Improve Quality, Don't Measure Quality". Bill, take it away.   0:00:35.6 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And, so the title of episode 10, came from chapter 10... Chapter 1 of The New Economics, and I used a quote from Dr. Deming, which was, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality?" Which Dr. Deming says, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality? We can have a national referendum, yes or no?" Everyone says yes. Then he says... Then he say, "We could have a secret ballot." And... But I... At the beginning of the podcast, I had said, "Are you in favor of quality?" And it's... No, it's, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality?" And so today I wanna, in episode 11, share it with our listeners and viewers, more of the profound insights from Genichi Taguchi. But I think, what I was just thinking is saying, "Are you in favor of quality?" And I've used that quote, which now I now realize it's a misquote. It's not, "Are you in favor of quality?" It's "Are you in favor of improvement of quality?" But in seminars, what I've done is used the quote, the misquote, I would say Dr. Deming would ask, "Are you in favor of quality?" And he would say, "We're gonna have a secret ballot. Is everyone in favor of ballot?" In quality, everyone says yes. So I would go through that.   0:02:16.3 Bill Bellows: And then I would go to the next question, and I would say to the audience, I'd say, "Okay. Dr. Deming made reference to secret ballot. So I wanna do a secret ballot. I want you to close your eyes, and I'm gonna ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, raise your hand. But I want you to close your eyes when you raise your hand, 'cause I don't want you to raise your hand 'cause everybody else does. Okay, so close your eyes." And I say, "Are you in favor of teamwork?" And all the hands go up. [laughter] And it's not so much "Are you in favor of improvement of teamwork?" But it's the idea that, acceptability saying this part is acceptable, as we've shared in prior episodes, is the essence of looking at that part, my task, my effort in isolation. And what that has to do with teamwork, I question. Now, with a few of us at Rocketdyne years ago used to talk about, we would say, you give out a term paper assignment, the term paper must be between 10 and 20 pages long. And what happens? They're close to 10 pages. Then I would share, we'd tell Allison, our daughter, I'd say when she was in high school, "Be home by between 8:00 and 10 o'clock," and she shows up around 10 o'clock.   0:03:51.6 Bill Bellows: And I would show a distribution over there. Then I would say, "What about a machinist? The machinist is given a hole to machine. And what does machinist do is machine the hole on the low side, and then a machinist is machining the outer diameter of a shaft or a tube. And what does machinist do? Machines to the high side." And so I would show those four distributions either on the low side or the high side, and say, "What do they all have in common?" And people would say, "Each of those people's looking out for themself. They're focusing on their work in isolation." Then I would say, "So what do you call that in a non-Deming company or in a... " In the first podcast there is a, called it a Red Pen Company or a ME organization, or a Last Straw companies... What do you call that behavior where people look at the requirements and say, "What's best for me?" What do you call that? What do you call, people scratch their head? We say... You ready? "Teamwork."   [laughter]   0:05:00.6 Bill Bellows: And everybody laughs. And then I turn to somebody in class and I say, "So Andrew, are you a team player?" And Andrew says, "Yes." And I say, "Andrew, if you machine the holes to the low side, are you a team player?" And you might say, "I'm not sure." And I would say, "Say yes." And you'd say, "Okay. I say yes." And I say, "Okay, Andrew, who's on your team?" And you say, "Me." "So, oh, you are a team player, man."   0:05:24.2 Andrew Stotz: I'm a team player. Team Andrew always wins.   0:05:28.2 Bill Bellows: Yeah. And I would say, so I say, "In a non-Deming company, everyone's a team player. All right. But who's on the team?" So I would say to people, "You'd be a fool not to be on your own team. The only question is, who else is on your team?" All right. Back to Dr. Taguchi to improve quality, don't measure quality. And I was, got into this in an explanation with some others recently, and somebody was showing me a bunch of defect rate data involving some process. And the question was, how to apply this occurrence of defect rate data to Dr. Taguchi's loss function. And so, again, reminder to our listeners, acceptability is everything that meets requirements is okay. Either I am unaware of differences or the differences don't matter, any parking spot, any professor any Thermo 2, any doctor and desirability is "I want this doctor, this parking spot, this, this, this, this, this." And so not just anything that meets requirements.   0:06:50.3 Bill Bellows: And Dr. Taguchi's work has a lot to do with that thinking. And Andrew, yeah, I'm on a month, on a regular basis, meeting more and more people that are listening to the podcast and reaching out to me on LinkedIn. And one shared with me recently then, and he started to listen to this series, and he said, he never thought about desirability. He says everything he knows, everything he sees every day, is acceptability. And he's like, "You mean, there's more than that?" And it's like, "Hello. That's what our series is trying to do." So...   0:07:26.6 Andrew Stotz: And let me introduce you to door number three, which opens you up into this whole 'nother world of...   0:07:35.6 Bill Bellows: Yes.   0:07:35.7 Andrew Stotz: The interconnectedness and understanding quality from the impact on all the different parts of the organization, not just the one thing and the one area. Yep.   0:07:46.6 Bill Bellows: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.   0:07:48.9 Andrew Stotz: But that's door number three. Now, we don't wanna go through that right off the bat, but when you go through it, unfortunately door number three disappears as you walk through it, and it's a wall...   [laughter]   0:08:00.4 Andrew Stotz: And you can't go back because now you understand that what is a system, what is the interconnectedness of everything, and once you see that, you can't unsee it.   0:08:09.6 Bill Bellows: That's right. Now, it's like, it's a holistic view in which... And a from a holistic perspective, parts don't exist, parts of exist, but everything is connected.   0:08:27.4 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:08:28.2 Bill Bellows: And what does that mean? So anyway...   0:08:30.1 Andrew Stotz: And just to put that into context, let's just take a car. A customer never buys a part. And they don't buy a jumble of parts, they buy the car. So to the customer's perspective, it's even more meaningless, the independent parts of that.   0:08:50.3 Bill Bellows: When I would go to Seattle and do training when Rocketdyne was owned by Boeing, and I'd be doing training for people working on commercial airplanes or 737s, 47s and whatnot. And one of the jokes I would use is that, "Hey, 747... " People went, "What's a 747?" How about 787? If I was today, I'd say "a 787 is not a bunch of parts that fly in close formation." But that is, the mindset is that... But anyway, so acceptability is looking at the parts in isolation, looking at things in isolation, it's assigning a grade to a student, it's performance appraisals, that's all about isolation, it's thinking, "I won the game, I get an award. I lost the game." All of that thinking, from engineering to, how we look at human resources, the idea that the savings add additional only works when the activities are independent. So that's all acceptability, looking at things in isolation. Desirability in this idea of a preferred value, I don't know that anyone contributed to that, besides Dr. Taguchi. In fact, this morning, I was talking with some friends overseas about Joseph Juran's work. And, do you remember last time you and I worked, I was sharing with them that our last podcast followed the last meeting I had with these friends in Europe. And I said that conversation led to our podcast conversation about Quality 4.0, and it's all acceptability, acceptability, acceptability, meet, meet, meet requirements.   0:10:35.6 Bill Bellows: This very conversation. And I said, I went back and did some research on what Joseph Juran... How Juran defined quality. 'Cause I looked at the ASQs definition of quality and it gave two definitions of quality, one attributed to Juran talking about quality as fitness for use, and then Philip Crosby's definition is, meeting requirements. But you may recall, I said, there is no explanation of how Dr. Deming defined quality. Yeah, maybe that will come. But, so I was sharing that with them, and also shared with them a model I've used. And it might have come up in our first series, but I think the classic model within organizations is, I work, I follow a bunch of steps to make a part, a thing, a module, something. And if all the requirements are met, I hand off to you, you're downstream. And then likewise, there's others in parallel with me that hand off good parts, good things to you. Because they're good, we can hand off to you. And then the model is you take the parts that are good and put them together, and because they are good, they fit. And then you pass that integrated component downstream where other integrated components come together. And we progressively go from, it could be that we're putting together the fuselage, somebody else is putting together the wings, and it's all coming together. And at the other end, it's an airplane.   0:12:22.5 Bill Bellows: And on every handoff we hand off what is, so the parts that are good fit, the components that are good fit together with other, then we turn the whole thing on, it works. And I show this flow to people and I say, "So what do you see going on in there?" And what eventually they start to see is that all the thinking is black and white, because they're good, they fit, because they fit, they fit, and when you turn it on, it works. There's nothing relative about that. And so I was sharing that with these folks this morning, and I said, after you and I spoke last time, went back and looked, and Juran talks about fitness for use, and the question was, is Juran's definition of fitness, absolute fitness or relative fitness? Meaning that there's a degree of good in the parts associated with desirability thinking, and if we've got degrees of good in the parts, then there's degrees of fit. And, well, it turns out there's plenty of reason to believe that Juran had a model of acceptability that the parts are good, then they fit. All to come back to what Dr. Taguchi is talking about in terms of improving quality, is improving quality from a variable perspective that there's degrees of good. And so now we go back to, to improve quality, don't measure quality. And I remember when he said that and we were dumbfounded, "Well, what do you mean by that?"   0:13:52.5 Bill Bellows: And then he would go on to explain, that traditionally, we look at the quality... The lack of quality of something. An inspector says, "There's a scratch on the door. There's a ding here. There's a crack there. There's a, the weld has a drop in it. The weld has porosity." You know what that means is that's not a... The quality inspector is looking for the absence of a crack, the absence of porosity and things like that. And it also parallels with what I learned from Ackoff, Russ would say, [chuckle] "Getting less of what you want doesn't get you what you want." So you could say, "I want less waste, less defects." Well, what is it you want? Again, the clarification is, Russ would say, "Getting less of what you don't want doesn't get you what you want." And likewise, Dr. Taguchi talked about, what is the function of the process? So if you're talking about, imagine on a washing machine, when you have a... Or a dryer, and you have a motor that's spinning, and around the motor is a belt that's spinning the drum. Well, the quality problem, classic quality problem could be that the belt slips, or the belt cracks, or the belt is vibrating.   0:15:28.3 Bill Bellows: Well, then you say, "Well, okay, what's the function of the belt?" Well, it's not about cracking. The function of the belt is to transmit energy from the motor to the drum. And if it does that really well over sustained periods of time, then that suggests there's probably less cracking going on and less slipping going on. But if you don't look at it from a function perspective and ask, "What's the function of the belt?" And move away from, "Well, I don't want it to crack and I don't want it to slip." Well, then tell me what you want it to do. What is it you want it to do? Now, let's get into more of what we do want. And then, and this is what's neat listening to Dr. Taguchi as an engineer, you say, "Well, okay, so what is the belt trying to do? It's trying to transmit energy." So if I can design the belt, and by changing the materials of the belt to transmit energy, under wide-ranging temperatures, wide-ranging usage conditions, if I do a good job of that, then I should see less cracking problems. Absent that, if I try to reduce the number of cracks, I may end up with a belt slipping more often. So then what happens is you end up trading one problem for another, which is not uncommon.   0:16:57.7 Bill Bellows: You go from, the cookies being undercooked to overcooked as opposed to saying, "What's the role of the baking process?" And he would say, "To transmit energy to the cookie in the precise amount. And if we have the precise amount and distribution, then that should work out." Now, relative to welding. Welding, there is, there may be a dozen different weld anomalies that inspectors are looking for, with X-rays, they see porosity, they see, what's called drop-through with the material and the weld, drops a little bit, which could result in a fatigue problem leading to cracking. Well, here Dr. Taguchi would say, "Well, what's the function of a weld?" Say, well, to join two pieces of material together with a given strength. And so you join them together. And then once they're joined together, now you run tests and you say, "I wanna... " It could be, "I wanna heat and cool the weld to see how it does with that. I wanna introduce vibration to the weld." And if you can show that under vibration, under wide-ranging changes in the environment, that the strength holds up, then by focusing on the strength, which is what you want, you end up with fewer quality problems. But it's turning things around and saying, "Not what I don't want, what do I want?"   0:18:35.3 Andrew Stotz: And...   0:18:36.4 Bill Bellows: And that's what... Go ahead. Go ahead. Andrew.   0:18:37.6 Andrew Stotz: There's two things. The more I think about this quote that you're talking about, to improve quality, don't measure quality, sometimes I think I got it, but sometimes I don't. I just wanna think about a couple of parallels. One of them is sometimes we say in the field of sales and marketing, we may say, "Fill your pipeline and your sales will happen." So focus on the beginning of the process. If you don't have a pipeline of people coming in to your company, into your sales team, there's nobody to sell. So that's an example. We also say sometimes, focus on the inputs and the outputs will take care of themselves. That's another way that we would use something similar. But I'm just curious, what does it mean by "Don't measure quality"?   0:19:25.0 Bill Bellows: Yeah. And that's a good question. I'd say, Taguchi's used to quality being the absence of defects. And quality is what the customer's complaining about. So he's saying, quality problems in terms of don't measure quality, he's saying, "So what are the quality problems?" "Oh, let me tell you, we've got porosity, we've got cracks, we've got drop-through, we've got cracking, cracking of the belt and slipping and the... " This is what people are complaining about. And what he's saying is, the customer's not articulating, "Hey, Andrew, improve the function." They're complaining about the... You just have to interpret that what they're saying is, you have to take where they are. They don't want it to crack. They want it to last longer. They want all these things and say... And the idea is, don't get sucked into what they don't want. Turn it around to, well then, I'm the engineer, and this is what Dr. Taguchi would say, "As an engineer, don't be dumbed down into the complaint world. Turn it around and say, what could you improve? What is the function of that thing you're selling?" And if you improve the function, because again, the beauty of talking about function, if you focus on problems, you eliminate one problem, create another problem, then another problem. Now you're just... And what...   0:21:00.8 Andrew Stotz: So it's whack-a-mole...   0:21:02.3 Bill Bellows: Exactly.   0:21:03.6 Andrew Stotz: It's whack-a-mole in the back end of the process without the awareness of, "What are the customer's needs and how do we understand whether we're hitting the mark?" And...   0:21:12.7 Bill Bellows: Oh, and this is what Dr. Taguchi used to call as whack-a-mole engineering. It's what Ackoff would say, "Today's problems come from yesterday's solutions."   0:21:24.6 Andrew Stotz: So just just to visualize that, can imagine going into a factory and saying, "Look at all these charts and how we reduce the defects of this and that. And this is... " We've reduced all these defects, but in fact, that could be out of touch with what the customer really needs at the end of that production.   0:21:44.1 Bill Bellows: Yes, it is... The beauty is, it is saying... And he would get really angry with people who got sucked into the rabbit hole of eliminating defects, scrap and rework and things like that. And just say... What he's trying to say is, "I want you to be smarter than that. I want you to start to think about what is the function of the machining process? What is the function of the welding process? What is the... " And what was neat was, I spent... On three different occasions, I spent a week with him, watching him engage every day with four teams. A team would come in for two hours, and he would discuss with them whatever the hardware was. I'm not at liberty to say what company it was. [laughter] But it was a really cool company.   0:22:56.9 Bill Bellows: And the people there invited me in because I learned at Dr. Deming's... I attended Dr. Deming's very last four-day seminar, and there met some people that were very close to him. And one of them shared that, there were people for many years, traveled with Dr. Deming. They found out where he was gonna be a given week, maybe called up his secretary Ceilia Kilian and, once he became, bonded when... And somehow Dr. Deming liked you. And then you would say, "Dr. Deming, I'm gonna take a week's vacation next summer. Where are you gonna be in June?" And he'd say, "Well, I'm gonna be at GM corporate headquarters." And what these people told me is that, they would be with him that week, whether he is doing a four-day seminar in Ohio. Now, I don't know who paid for it.   0:23:50.8 Andrew Stotz: No.   0:23:50.9 Bill Bellows: But he gave them access to be with him wherever he was. And one guy told me he was at some high-level GM meetings that week, and he said, "Dr. Deming is there and he and some others." And I think they may have been called "Deming Scholars". I know that term was used. But anyway, this guy was telling me they were there, and this GM executive comes over to him and it says to him, "So, who are you again?" And you say, "Andrew Stotz." And he says something like, "So what might I ask are your qualifications for being here?" And he says, "If Deming overheard that, Deming would turn to the executive, snap at him and say, 'These are my people. What are your qualifications?'" So anyway, inspired by that, I walked out of Dr. Deming's four-day seminar, called up a friend of mine who worked for Dr. Taguchi's company and said, "Deming had people travel with him. I wanna travel with Dr. Taguchi. I don't wanna go to a seminar. I wanna see him in action."   0:24:56.1 Andrew Stotz: Yep.   0:24:56.4 Bill Bellows: And I said, "Can we make that happen?" And it happened, and I got to go inside a company. The lawyers didn't know I was there. And I asked him, I said, to the lawyer, "Do I have to sign anything?" He said, "No. If we let the lawyers know you were here, you wouldn't be here. So, here are the rules. You can't tell anybody what happened, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." So I get to be a fly on the wall watching him. So, a team would come in and say, "Here's this stuff we're working on." And he would... And they had an approach, which would be, reducing defects or scrap rework. And then he would turn it around for the next hour and a half and get them thinking about function. And after the first week of doing this four times a day for five days, I walked out of there thinking, "There's five basic functions." I started to notice the patterns. And then the second time I did this, a team would come in and I'm thinking, "I know what he's gonna do. He's gonna... He has in mind a function model. And all these things relative to how things come together." And so I did that three times. But, it was neat to get my brain adapted to, "Okay, what's the function? Where's he gonna come? Where's he gonna come?"   0:26:16.0 Bill Bellows: And then I would... The people would present it, and I'm thinking, "I think it's gonna go for function five. Yep. Bingo." So that's what I just wanted to share with the audience tonight. Again, there's a lot of depth. I taught two 40-hour courses at Rocketdyne in Taguchi Methods. So, a 40-hour intro and a 40-hour more advanced. So all I wanted to cover tonight, is that wisdom of not being defect-focused, but for our audience to start thinking about, start to think about the function. In fact, when I was having this conversation with a colleague recently and, 'cause he's talking about turning defect rate, he was thinking turning defect rate data into a loss function. I said, "No, defect rate thinking is acceptability thinking, the loss function is desirability thinking. They don't go together." I said, "What I wanna know is what's causing the defects." And we start diving into what's causing the defects, we can turn it into a variable data as opposed to a discontinuous data. Anyway. And I just wanted to throw out... Go ahead, Andrew.   0:27:34.4 Andrew Stotz: To wrap this up, I'm thinking about, I like what you just said, "Stop being defect-focused." Replace that with...   0:27:44.5 Bill Bellows: What is it we're trying to accomplish?   0:27:47.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:27:48.2 Bill Bellows: If you say, "Well, we don't want defects." I know we don't want defects. But what do we want?   0:27:52.9 Andrew Stotz: Do we say replace it with outcome focus, customer focus? What would you say?   0:27:58.1 Bill Bellows: Yeah, well, absolutely it's customer focus. The idea is that, now you start to think in terms of, is what is the greater system in which this is used.   0:28:11.0 Andrew Stotz: Okay. So...   0:28:11.1 Bill Bellows: The defect thinking is just saying it doesn't fit, it doesn't meet requirements. But that doesn't tell me what you're trying to do.   0:28:17.0 Andrew Stotz: Okay. So I think I know what you're saying. Stop being defect-focused, and please walk through door number three.   0:28:25.3 Bill Bellows: Yes! Stop...   0:28:27.7 Andrew Stotz: And in door number three, you're gonna be aware of the customer, the next process, the next flow, the customer of your area and the ultimate customer, and start focusing on the needs and the desires of them, and bring that back in the chain of your process. And you'll be improving, you'll stop being focused on "Fix this, stop this. Don't do that." Let's not have any more of that, and you'll be more into, "Let's do this because this is going to drive a much better outcome, or the exact outcome that our customer wants."   0:29:05.2 Bill Bellows: Yeah, it is, which changes the hat. That may not be the purview of people in the quality organization. So, they're out there counting defects. This is not to say it's their job. Not that they're not in the loop, but it's turning to the people that are more aware... That are more in tune with functionality, which is likely gonna be that people designing the thing, thinking about what's the role of the windshield wiper? Is it to skip across the windshield? Is it to, which is, that chatter. No, we don't want the chatter. So what is it we do want? We want the windshield wiper to move smoothly. And what does that mean? It means at a given second, we want it to be... And this is where the smoothness functionality comes in that I saw Dr. Taguchi many times is, is saying at a given interval of seconds, it should be here, here, here, here, here. And if it does match those positions, then what have we done? We have improved the smoothness of the flow of the wiper blade, or whatever it is that thing.   0:30:21.5 Bill Bellows: And that's the type of thing I'm trying to introduce, in this short episode, people thinking about function, not the lack of quality, but what is it we're trying to achieve? Now, otherwise, we can also say, Ackoff would say, and Dr. Deming would agree with him, is that organizations aren't in business to make a profit. They're in business to do something really well. That's the function of the organization. And then profit is the result of that. As opposed to being profit focus, in which case you start to... You run it as a finance company and misunderstand the focus and you start believing in addition and you end up with a mess.   0:31:04.2 Andrew Stotz: So, let's end it with a cartoon that I saw in The Wall Street Journal. And in that cartoon, it was a couple of guys, young guys wearing suits, and they were talking to each other, and they were either, it was either in an MBA class or they were in a factory or something, and it said, "Things? I don't wanna make things. I wanna make money." [laughter] And the whole point is, money is the result of making great things.   0:31:38.3 Bill Bellows: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And that's why... And this is why I so enjoyed about listening to Ackoff, conversations with Russ... Conversations with Dr. Taguchi. And then reading Deming. I don't have any conversation with Dr. Deming and thinking of that there. They, each were astute enough to see the process, the means leading to the result. Tom Johnson would say, "The means are the ends in the making." So you have organizations that are either means-focused, which is process focus, versus, "Did you deliver the report? Did you deliver the thing?" And Dr. Deming's big thing is, by what method? Tom would say, "By what means?" So...   0:32:25.2 Andrew Stotz: All right. Well...   0:32:25.2 Bill Bellows: Anyway, that's what I wanted to expose our audience to tonight.   0:32:29.4 Andrew Stotz: There it is. They've been exposed. Ladies and gentlemen, the exposure has happened. Bill, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. And this is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. And you know this one, you can say it along with me 'cause I say it all the time. People are entitled to joy in work.

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

Everyone is in favor of improving quality, but what does that mean? In this episode Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss stories of meeting requirements, missing the mark, and what Dr. Deming said about how to do better. 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, I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. And I guess now that we're into 2025, it's gonna be 32 years pretty soon. The episode for today is episode 10, are you in favor of quality? Bill, take it away.   0:00:33.5 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and Happy New Year.   0:00:35.1 Andrew Stotz: Happy New Year.   0:00:36.4 Bill Bellows: Happy New Year to our listeners. And yeah, so here we are episode 10 of Misunderstanding Quality. We got up to 22 episodes in our first series and then we'll have a follow-on series. One is I would like to thank those who took the invite to reach out to me on LinkedIn. And I've just started connecting with a few new people who are doing some interesting things involved in types of work that I'm not familiar with, it's just fascinating to listen to the types of issues they deal with. And they each come to me with an interest in Dr. Deming's work. So they're following the podcast series, this one, the others that you're doing, and they listen to all of them. And I'm not sure if they've contacted the others, but they've reached out to me. So I wanna once again say for those of you that are enjoying this conversation, my conversation with you, Andrew, then please reach out to me.   0:01:50.0 Bill Bellows: If you'd like to know more, that's one thing. The last episode was called Worse Than a Thief. And one thing I wanna mention, there's a bunch of meanings relative to being worse than a thief. One distinctly from Dr. Taguchi was... And I don't... He gave examples of manufacturers that made plastic sheeting for crops to protect the crops and his complaint was that they made it to the minimum side of the requirement. So there was a requirement on the thickness, so again, even if you have a 1mil thick here, we have in the States, there's you can buy plastic 1mil, which is 0.001 inch or something heavier. And so, and obviously, in the world of manufacturing, you're not gonna get exactly 0.001, it's gonna be a little low, a little high. So what Dr. Taguchi was referencing is companies in Japan that were making plastic sheeting that would be used for a number of things. But in particular, he talked about it, what if it's being used to protect crops?   0:03:19.8 Bill Bellows: And what if the manufacturers, to save money because they're buying the plastic by the pound, selling it by the yard, so they're gonna make it as thin as possible. And his concern was, so how much are you saving to make it as thin as possible? And what is the impact of being on the thin side when a crop is lost? And that was his reference to being worse than a thief, that you're saving a few pennies but costing the farmer the... Right? And so that could be... So that's a situation where there's a requirement, the requirement is met minimally. You and I reference that as leaving the bowling ball in the doorway, delivering to the absolute minimum, or I mean delivering to the minimum, the maximum of the requirement, whatever best suits me. So if I'm delivering to you a term paper and you as the professor say, "It must be between five and 10 pages," and I say, "Well, I'm gonna make it five pages."   0:04:23.9 Bill Bellows: If in another situation, [chuckle] an example, I guess is if when our daughter was in high school and we said, "Allison, make sure you're home between 10:00 and midnight," then she may move that to the high side of the tolerance and come home at 10:00 or 11:59. But in either case, what Taguchi is referencing is in the world of acceptability, the requirements have been met. But the worse than a thief aspect is, is what is the personal gain versus the impact to others in the system. So that could be picking up the nail in the parking lot or deciding not to do it. So I just wanna point out that I see that as a very broad statement, not just in terms of meeting requirements, but within your organization are you... To what degree are you focusing on your department at the detriment of the organization? That's another way of being worse than a thief.   0:05:28.7 Bill Bellows: It could be you're spending all of your budget just before the end of the year. 'Cause you know what happens, Andrew, if you don't spend all of your budget.   0:05:38.0 Andrew Stotz: Gonna get taken away.   0:05:38.9 Bill Bellows: So if you're 10 percent under, the next year you're gonna get 10% less. So I used to kid people is, so what will I spend... Again, so you learn the hard way, if you don't spend the entire budget then your boss the next year says, "Well, Andrew, you only spent 80% of the budget, so we're only gonna give you 80% of last year." So what's the... What message does Andrew learn? I tell people is you go a little bit over the 100%, right? You go a little bit over. And so even that I would say is worse than a thief 'cause what are you doing? You're withholding your resources that others may find. So I just wanna say that that statement is not as narrow as looking at a set of requirements, it is looking at things from what's good for me versus good for the system. All right, have fun to that one.   0:06:30.0 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:06:31.0 Bill Bellows: So relative to the title you mentioned. Are you in favor of quality? What inspired that? There's another thing I've been looking at recently, whether on LinkedIn or elsewhere on the internet. I'm a member of ASQ, the American Society for Quality, so I get regular notes from them. And I go off and look, and I'm just reminded of how most organizations think about quality, which is meeting requirements, and it could be much more than that. But anyway, in The New Economics, Dr. Deming's book, first edition, came out in 1993. In there in the first chapter, he says, let me pull it up, and I wanna read it exactly from the good doctor.   Near the end of chapter one of the New Economics, Dr. Deming, in bold text, our listeners will find a statement, “a look at some of the usual suggestions for improvement of quality.” And Dr. Deming says, "There's widespread interest in quality. Suppose that we were to conduct next Tuesday a national referendum with the question, are you in favor of improvement of quality? Yes or no? The results." predicted Dr. Deming "would show, I believe," and again, I'm quoting Deming, "an avalanche in favor of quality. Moreover, unfortunately, almost everybody has the answer on how to achieve it. Just read the letters to the editor, speeches, books. It seems so simple. Here are some of the answers offered, all insufficient, some even negative in results."   0:09:17.9 Bill Bellows: "Automation, new machinery, more computers, gadgets, hard work, best efforts, merit system, annual appraisal, make everybody accountable, MBO, management by objective as practiced, MBR, management by results." And I'll just pause. Dr. Deming, when he would read this list in a seminar, would also make reference to MBIR, management by imposition of results. All right, back to Dr. Deming. "Rank people, rank teams, rank divisions, rank salesmen, reward them at the top, punish them at the bottom. More SQC, statistical quality control, more inspection, establish an office of quality, appoint someone as VP in charge of quality, incentive pay, work standards," in parentheses, "quotas," comma, "time standards," end quote. "Zero defects, meet specifications, motivate people." And then in bold print, Dr. Deming adds, "What is wrong with these suggestions?" He says, "the fallacy of the suggestions listed above will be obvious from subsequent pages of the text," meaning The New Economics.   0:10:36.1 Bill Bellows: "Every one of them ducks the responsibility of management," Andrew. "A company that advertised that the future belongs to him that invest in it, and thereupon proceeded to invest heavily," 40 million, no, 40 billion, I'm sorry, that's ten to the ninth. "40 billion in new machinery and automation, results, trouble, overcapacity, high cost, low quality. It must be said in defense of the management that they obviously had faith in the future." And I asked some people that knew Dr. Deming far better than me. Once upon a time, I said, "So who was Dr. Deming talking about, the company that invested $40 billion?" He said, "Oh, that was General Motors." And I used to think when I was at Rocketdyne that you could not ask for a better competitor than one that would invest $40 billion to lose market share, right? Talk about self-inflicted gunshot wounds that they're gonna go off, invest heavily in technology gadgets. That's what Dr. Deming's calling 'em, gadgets.   0:11:55.2 Andrew Stotz: Gadgets.   0:11:55.8 Bill Bellows: Did you ever hear what Dr. Deming said about, he says, there's a couple of things he said. This is one of the things I heard him say live. He said, "Where's the data in the computer? Gone forever." And then he'd say, "the hardest thing in all the world to find..." You know what he said, Andrew, was the hardest thing in all the world to find?   0:12:24.0 Andrew Stotz: No, what was that?   0:12:27.3 Bill Bellows: "A piece of paper and a pencil." 'Cause his mindset was just put the data that you wanna plot on a piece of paper, as opposed to in the computer, gone forever. Now, I worked with a company as a consultant for three years. And one of the first things they had me work on, of course, was trying to learn about a problem that happened a few years earlier. A problem, meaning something that did not conform to requirements. And in the middle of working on that for about three months and working on that, and the issue was, let's learn about what happened a couple of years ago so it doesn't happen again. And what happened a few years ago was a very stringent set of requirements for this aerospace hardware, missed the requirement by 10%. It was close. It was close, but the customer would not buy it. And it was a multimillion dollar asset that they held onto 'cause they were hoping they can convince the customer to buy it. And the customer just said, "You keep it, you keep it." So the issue was, "Come over and help us understand what happened. We don't do that again."   0:13:54.1 Bill Bellows: Well, in the midst of that, the same product being produced a few months later, instead of missing the requirement by about 10%, missed the requirement by about 70%.   0:14:12.9 Andrew Stotz: Oh.   0:14:13.2 Bill Bellows: Oh, oh. It was a nightmare. And the company spent a whole lot of money chasing that. In the long run, it may have been a bad test. We never found exactly what it was. And when I caught up with them years later, they eventually went back into production. But the reason I bring that up is, after the incident, I was called over. It was a very intense time to go figure out what's going on, only to find out that the data was in a computer. So, the data was not being plotted real time. So after the incident, one of the things that happened within a few days of the incident was to go back and plot the data. So when I was in a meeting and they showed the data and I knew what they were saying was they had pulled it out of the computer. I thought, "Dr. Deming's not kidding. Where's the data, in the computer? Gone forever." So I wanted to...   0:15:23.8 Andrew Stotz: I had something I wanted to add to that, and that is I have a couple of great classic pictures in our family that were made 100 years, 120 years ago.   0:15:36.8 Bill Bellows: Oh wow. Lucky you.   0:15:39.9 Andrew Stotz: Great grandma, those old, really old pictures. And I was just showing them to my, to some of the ladies that take care of my mom and they just can't. And I said, "Now think about all the improvements that have been done in photography. What is the chance that one out of your 10,000 pictures on your iPhone that you've taken is going to survive 120 years like this picture?" And the answer is zero. There's zero chance.   0:16:14.4 Bill Bellows: That's right. Because even if you have kids, they don't want 4000 photos then... 4000...   0:16:25.0 Andrew Stotz: Nobody can deal with that.   0:16:26.4 Bill Bellows: No one could... You're absolutely right. They will not. Unless that photo is printed and turned into a keepsake. Gone forever.   0:16:38.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:16:39.0 Bill Bellows: Yeah. No, that's a good point. That's a very... And the fact that these photos lasted that long is pretty damn amazing.   0:16:47.2 Andrew Stotz: Well, there's a great book. I forgot the name of it, but I'll remember it. There's a great book about how slow this... The pace. It's called "Future Hype" is the name of it. It's all about the slow pace of innovation. And this is a great example. Going from no photo to a great photo 120 years ago was true innovation.   0:17:12.0 Bill Bellows: Oh, yeah. Yes.   0:17:13.8 Andrew Stotz: Just coming up with ways to do thousands of photos. And the author just basically crushes everything that you think is innovation. That there's millions of patents now that are coming out. We're much more innovative than we were in the past. And then his whole point is, "Yeah, and go and look at them, and what you see is that they've changed the color a little bit, they've changed this, they've changed that, and they're just doing modifications." So, every single area that you think there is innovation. And I think that's part of what Dr. Deming's talking about, about it's in the computer that doesn't. Tools and gadgets don't solve the problem.   0:17:56.1 Bill Bellows: No, it's... Well, they are tools. And as we've talked about in this series, in the first series, there are tools and techniques. Cell phones, computers, automobiles. These are tools. Techniques are how to use them. And tools, to borrow from Ackoff, are about efficiency, doing things well. But not to be confused with effectiveness, also from Ackoff, which is doing the right thing. And what I admire... I think what we both admire about Dr. Deming's work is the ability of the System of Profound Knowledge to provoke the question of whether or not something is... Doing something is worthwhile to do. And that has to do with not doing things faster, but stepping back and asking, "Why am I doing this in the first place?" Dr. Deming talked about. I think he used to say... He phrased it as, be, Dr. Deming saying, "Andrew, do you know how companies make toast?" And Andrew says, "No, Dr. Deming, how do companies make toast?" You ever hear that?   0:19:16.0 Andrew Stotz: No.   0:19:17.1 Bill Bellows: He says, "First, they burn it, then they scrape it." [laughter] And so what I see in organizations is the people who make the toast pass it off to the next person who does the inspection, and then upon the inspection, is sent to the toast scraper, then the toast scraper scrapes the toast and then sends it to somebody else, which could be a second toasting. [laughter] And then on to the next. And the person who makes the toast in the first place is none the wiser that X percent of the toast, they're just passing it on and so the technology is used to speed that up. And what's not happening is some type of feedback on adjusting the controls. It's just, it's... And this is what I saw when I worked in Connecticut, was immense toast scraping. Oh, it was just phenomenal. We had a machine making these plates for a heat exchanger for the Army's current main engine battle tank. A 1500 horsepower gas turbine engine. And half the volume, Andrew, of the tank is a heat exchanger to capture the exhaust heat to preheat the compressed air to improve the fuel economy.   0:20:52.4 Bill Bellows: Even when half the volume of the tank engine is a heat exchanger to capture every ounce of excess energy and convert it back to the efficiency of the engine. Even with that, the fuel economy of the Army's today main battle tank is measured in gallons per mile 'cause it drinks gasoline. Now, it's phenomenal performance. But they can't move too fast to outrun the tankers. So, these heat exchanger plates have, in the original design, I'm not sure what design is nowadays, had roughly 2 miles of welding in the heat exchanger. And the welding was what's known as resistance welding. And these very, very thin plates were welded together with a little dot of current to melt the metal to create a little bead, and then another one on, and they were overlapping melts, and that created a seam. And after these plates were welded together, you know, two together, each of them was put on to this under a bright light, a literally a Lazy Susan.   0:22:11.0 Bill Bellows: This thing had a 27 inch outer diameter and there'd be a bead around the outside and a bead around the inside. Two different diameters. And on a given plate one inspector would look under a magnifying glass to see, are there any gaps in the beads? And then flip it over and look at the other side, and then hand off to the next person to look at the same plate again.   0:22:37.1 Bill Bellows: So, every plate was 200% inspected. There were 10 machines making these plates. There was no traceability from the inspector. All the problems might have been coming from machine number one. There was no such awareness. And so, after the inspector, "I found a quarter of an inch where you... " "Okay. Then we send it to Andrew for a re-weld." There's no feedback and is that system any better today? I'm aware of systems today that are very similar to that. So, anyway, that's what Deming's talking about relative to the... Yeah. How do companies make toast? Well, the other thing I want to jump to, relative to this "Are you in favor of quality?" Which got it on my one is, I thought, is something really neat to include in this series that we're doing Misunderstanding Quality. But as I'm getting these prompts from ASQ on a regular basis, I was reminded of a few things that are near and dear within the world of the American Society of Quality. And one is what's known as Quality 4.0. Not, 1.0, Andrew, 4.0. 4.0.   0:24:00.1 Andrew Stotz: So, we're out of the crisis.   0:24:01.1 Bill Bellows: Oh, and so the phrase, Quality 4.0, this is today, right? And actually, the incentive, "Quality 4.0," this is actually five years old. So maybe they're on to Quality 5.0, Andrew. The phrase, "Quality 4.0," derived from the German industrialization program called Industry 4.0, is an evaluation of the role of quality in the increasing digital and automated world. One question surrounding Quality 4.0 is where increasing automation will leave quality professionals in the future. Technology, Andrew, has changed quality work and now offers useful statistical software that allows the Six Sigma quality movement to grow. Tons of data that allow quality professionals to act on quality issues in almost real time and new statistical methods. So, what I find is, "Quality 4.0" is artificial intelligence. It's the Internet of Things. It is technology. So if Deming was writing the, you know, the chapter on that we just mentioned earlier, the list of all the things on that list would be pretty much everything I see in "Quality 4.0." Right.   0:25:23.9 Bill Bellows: So, how far have we come in the professional world of quality? At least I am... I find there's a lot missing relative to what Dr. Deming was talking about 30 some years ago. So, that's what I wanted to put on the table is, you know, we're again not... None of us have said we're against tools and techniques. Whether it's chat GPT, artificial intelligence, those are fantastic. But if they're not guided with a System of Profound Knowledge, then you're going to improve uniformity in isolation.   0:26:09.8 Bill Bellows: And we've talked about that in this series and that is the difference between precision and not accuracy. It is making things uniform. Then you have to ask, again when I... What I challenge for those that are in the Six Sigma world is everything I've seen and I've been reading a lot about Six Sigma for the last 30 years. Everything I see about it when it comes to reducing variability, it is about reducing variability to shrink the distribution such that, what, Andrew? Such that we end up with acceptability 100% all. No red beads, all white beads. And then we get into... I went in preparation for a call today to the ASQ website to learn, just a reminder, refresher on Quality 4.0 and again, nothing wrong with advanced digital technologies, but what if we coupled that with a strong foundation that we're trying to offer people in the Deming ??? who are interested in what Dr. Deming's ideas bring to improve, to guide that technology. So anyway, that's, you know, Quality 4.0. Also, I'm on the ASQ website and their glossary section if anyone wants to go look there. If you're a member, you get free access to this. "Quality, a subjective term for which each person or sector has its own definition."   0:27:42.7 Bill Bellows: Okay. "In technical usage, quality can have two meanings. One, the characteristic of a product or service that bears on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. Two, a product or service free of deficiencies." Excuse me. "According to Joseph Juran, quality means fitness for use. According to Philip Crosby, it means conformance to requirements." And I don't see in here a reference to Dr. Deming and how he defined quality, Andrew. Huh? Interesting. What I enjoyed about being a member of the... In fact I'm still a member of the American Society for Quality. The reason I joined is I was excited by quality. Everything I was learning about Dr. Taguchi's work and then Dr. Deming's work and then began to wonder if the American Society for Quality was advancing and doc... So if anyone listening has access to the American Society for Quality and people that make decisions there, you might want to include Dr. Deming's definition of quality.   0:29:00.2 Bill Bellows: Where Dr. Deming would say a product or service possesses quality if it helps someone and enjoys a sustainable market. And what I find is unique about that is my interpretation, as Dr. Deming is saying a lecture I deliver, a podcast we present, that we are not the judge of the quality that our listeners, students are. The people downstream are the judge of that. So, it's not me handing off a part that meets requirements saying this is good. Even when Juran says fitness for use, what I would ask is fitness absolute or is fitness relative? And so that's... So anyway, I just thought it'd be fascinating to remind our listeners of the simplicity of Dr. Deming's message from The New Economics. You know, is everyone and anyone in favor of quality? Yes. And again, nothing wrong with tools and techniques, but what a Deming organization, a Blue Pen Company, a "We" organization. What they could do, guided by the Deming philosophy, with computers, where computers make sense, with AI, where AI makes sense, would seriously outpace what other companies are doing. It's interesting, but it's just not enough to compete with companies who will do that.   0:30:32.3 Bill Bellows: So, if nobody is following the Deming philosophy, then you can get by with Quality 4.0, doing AI and doing those things. But if you've got competitors and what Dr. Deming would say, Andrew, is be thankful for a good competitor, one who raises your game, right. And so, if you and I are playing tennis and you know, we're out there to become better tennis players, and as soon as I find out that you're out there so you can go brag to your mom about how you beat me last night, then I say, "Andrew, find somebody else to beat." But if you're interest and my interest is, you know, getting a lot of exercise and improving our game. That's a different story. So, that's what I just wanted to share with our ongoing listeners, is there's a lot to be gained by continuing to study the Deming philosophy. Add it to your repertoire, build a foundation guided by what The Deming Institute is doing and sponsoring podcasts like this, as well as DemingNEXT is, there's just a lot of opportunities for what Dr. Deming is offering. And I'm reminded of that on a regular basis that people are saying, "Boy, why didn't I learn about this a long time ago, what this can bring organizations?" So that's what I wanted to bring to the table today.   0:31:50.1 Andrew Stotz: That's wonderful. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion and for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You'll see DemingNEXT there and the like. If you want to keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn and reach out to him because he is responsive. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. I just never stop talking about this quote 'cause I love it. "People are entitled to joy in work."  

Po podelitvi zlatih globusov in pred objavo nominacij za letošnje oskarje smo se z mladimi pogovarjali o njihovem filmskem okusu. Se navdušujejo nad ameriškimi visokoproračunskimi uspešnicami ali imajo, ker so člani kluba Kinotrip, raje manjše evropske ali neodvisne filmske produkcije? Je uspešna literarna predloga ali kolekcija osvojenih filmskih nagrad že zagotovilo za dober film? Mora film ugajati, zabavati, sporočati ali provocirati? Gosti so bili dijaki Lenart Zalar Schroers, Gašper Macedoni, Maša Mramor, Tjaša Štern, študentka Špela Rotar (vsi člani 9. generacije Kinotripa), somentorica Kinotripa Marijana Kuljanac ter vodja in mentorica tega festivala, ki ga prireja Kinodvor, Živa Jurančič. Z nami je bila tudi tolmačka za znakovni jezik gluhih Tinkara Jerina, Špela Rotar nam je namreč približala tudi izkušnjo gledanja filmov gluhih oseb. Ste kdaj pomislili, da slovenski filmi nimajo podnapisov in so zato gluhim nedostopni?

durée : 00:18:12 - A Jurançon, l'Atelier de Babette vous initie au tricot

durée : 00:21:23 - A Jurançon, l'Atelier de Babette vous initie au tricot

durée : 00:22:22 - A l'approche des fêtes, la Cave de Jurançon à Gan ouvre ses portes - Comme chaque année juste avant les fêtes, la cave de Jurançon à Gan ouvre ses portes pour le plus grand plaisir de tous.

durée : 00:22:55 - Les goûts d'ici en Béarn Bigorre - 34 domaines des vins de Jurançon ouvrent leurs portes ce dimanche 8 décembre afin de faire découvrir leurs nouvelles cuvées et proposer des moments gourmands et festifs.

Au sommaire de l'émission "On marche sur la tête": Comparaison de l'audience et de l'ambiance entre un match de rugby et un match de football, le rugby attirant beaucoup plus de téléspectateurs et de ferveur dans les tribunes.Analyse des différences d'esprit d'équipe et de patriotisme entre les joueurs de rugby et de football, les premiers étant plus soudés et fiers de représenter la France.Débat sur les problèmes de communautarisme et de violence dans certains clubs de football, notamment dans les quartiers défavorisés, contrairement au rugby.Témoignages d'une hôtesse d'accueil au Parc des Princes sur le comportement plus respectueux et courtois des supporters de rugby par rapport à ceux de football.Intervention du maire de Jurançon sur les efforts menés pour maintenir la mixité et le vivre-ensemble dans les clubs sportifs de sa commune.Notre équipe a utilisé un outil d'Intelligence artificielle via les technologies d'Audiomeans© pour accompagner la création de ce contenu écrit.

durée : 00:03:16 - Où en sont les vendanges dans le Jurançon

Tokrat smo gostili mlado programsko ekipo, vsi so še srednješolci, 9. mednarodnega filmskega festivala Kinotrip – mladi za mlade, ki se otvori 17.10. s projekcijami v ljubljanskem mestnem kinu Kinodvor. Za podrobnejši uvod v filmsko festivalsko izkušnjo so se voditeljici oddaje Liani Buršič v studiu 51 nacionalnega radia pridružili Nadja Alymova, Mark Antonij Novak, Iva Pika Sirk, Tjaša Štern, Lenart Zalar Schroers in vodja festivala Kinotrip - Živa Jurančič.

durée : 00:20:42 - Le vin bio du Domaine de Tinou à Lasseube - Depuis 1964, le Domaine Tinou pratique une agriculture biologique pour produite du Jurançon doux « cuvée tradition », « cuvée spéciale », blanc sec, Béarn rouge et rosé.

Ok, I know this is an obscure show and I promise we'll get back to mainstream stuff next week, but there is a reason for doing this show now. PLUS, it's super dorky stuff and that's awesome!   I was putting together the Wine Access shipment with Serge Doré that is going out soon and one of the wines was from the small appellation of Saint Mont. I pride myself on having an awareness of most appellations in France, but I didn't have a clue where or what Saint Mont was, so this show is as much for me as it is for you!    In the show, I do an overview of the regions, which have a lot in common, so it won't overwhelm you to listen to (I hope!).   Source: https://www.vignobles-sudouest.fr/us/appellations/ _________________________________________________________The foothills or the Pyrénées have six wine regions, all with some similarities. All are in Gascony, a vast area in southwest France that stretches from the Pyrénées Mountains along the French-Spanish border.   The regions I discuss in the show are: Béarn, Madiran and Pacherenc du Vic-Bilh, Jurançon, Saint Mont, and Irouléguy. They are linked by common terroir, common history, and common wines.  The grapes are mostly all native, unique, and obscure (albeit often they make really tasty wine!)   Here are what they share: A mild, consistent maritime climate with a regular foehn wind – a dry, warm southern wind that prolongs the growing season. Varied soil types, but many of the vineyards have some pebbles and stones from colluvial wash of the Pyrénées. Grapes: Reds: Tannat, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc (Bouchy, here), and some Pinenc (commonly known as Fer Servadou) Whites: The main whites are Petit Manseng and Gros Manseng. Other grapes used are Petit Courbu (lower alcohol and acidity tames the Mansengs), Courbu (for sweet wines) and grapes like Lauzet and Camarlet.   In the rest of the show I get into the details of the regions -- from history to terroir to the interesting wines available. If you are looking to dork out and just learn about something new, this is the show for you. I know it's off the beaten path but there is a lot of history and a lot of great wine.     I wanted to learn about this region and I brought you along for the ride -- thank you for indulging me!    Full show notes (with producers!) and all back episodes are on Patreon. Become a member today! www.patreon.com/winefornormalpeople _______________________________________________________________   Check out my exclusive sponsor, Wine Access.  They have an amazing selection -- once you get hooked on their wines, they will be your go-to! Make sure you join the Wine Access-Wine For Normal People wine club for wines I select delivered to you four times a year!    To register for an AWESOME, LIVE WFNP class with Elizabeth or get a class gift certificate for the wine lover in your life go to: www.winefornormalpeople.com/classes  

durée : 00:32:30 - Emission spéciale en direct de la Cave de Jurançon à Gan

durée : 00:21:09 - Les Caves de Jurançon à Gan préparent leurs portes ouvertes vendredi 19 juillet

In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss David Garvin's 8 Dimensions of Quality and how they apply in the Deming world. Bill references this article by Garvin: https://hbr.org/1987/11/competing-on-the-eight-dimensions-of-quality TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is the Misunderstanding Quality series, episode two, The Eight Dimensions of Quality. Bill, take it away.   0:00:30.4 Bill Bellows: Welcome back, Andrew. Great to see you again. All right, episode two, we're moving right along. So in episode one, which the title I proposed, waiting to see what comes out, the title I proposed was, Quality, Back to the Start. And that was inspired by some lyrics from Coldplay. Anyway, but this is a, it's going back to my start in quality and last time I mentioned discovering Taguchi's work long before I discovered Dr. Deming. In fact, Gipsie Ranney, who is the first president of the Deming Institute, the nonprofit formed by Dr. Deming and his family just before he passed away, and Gipsie became the first president and was on the board when I was on the board for many years. And I spoke with her nearly every day, either driving to work or driving home. And once, she calls me up and she says, "Bill," that was her Tennessee accent, "Bill."   0:01:50.5 BB: She says, "It says on The Deming Institute webpage that you infused Dr. Taguchi's work into Dr. Deming's work," something like that, that I... Something like I infused or introduced or I brought Taguchi's work into Deming's work, and I said, "Yes." I said, "Yeah, that sounds familiar." She says, "Isn't it the other way around?" That I brought Deming's work into Taguchi's work. And I said, "No, Gipsie," I said, "It depends on your starting point. And my starting point was Dr. Taguchi." But I thought it was so cool. She says, "Bill don't you have it? Don't you... " She is like, "Isn't it the other way around?" I said, "No, to me, it was all things Taguchi, then I discovered Dr. Deming." But I was thinking earlier before the podcast, and I walked around putting together how, what I wanna talk about tonight. And I thought, when I discovered Taguchi's work, I looked at everything in terms of an application of Dr. Taguchi's ideas.   0:03:29.7 AS: And one question about Taguchi for those people that don't know him and understand a little bit about him, was he... If I think about where Dr. Deming got at the end of his life, it was about a whole system, the System of Profound Knowledge and a comprehensive way of looking at things. Was Taguchi similar in that way or was he focused in on a couple different areas where he really made his contribution?   0:04:03.9 BB: Narrower than Dr. Deming's work. I mean, if we look at... And thank you for that... If we look at Dr. Deming's work in terms of the System of Profound Knowledge, the elements of systems psychology, variation, theory of knowledge, Taguchi's work is a lot about variation and a lot about systems. And not systems in the sense of Russ Ackoff systems thinking, but variation in the sense of where's the variation coming from looking upstream, what are the causes of that variation that create variation in that product, in that service?   0:04:50.9 BB: And then coupled with that is that, how is that variation impacting elsewhere in the system? So here I am receiving sources of variation. So what I deliver it to you has variation because of what's upstream of me and Taguchi's looking at that coupled with how is that variation impacting you? So those are the systems side, the variation side. Now, is there anything in Deming, in Taguchi's work about psychology and what happens when you're labelling workers and performance appraisals and, no, not at all.   0:05:37.6 AS: Okay, got it.   0:05:38.4 BB: Is there anything in there about theory of knowledge, how do we know that what we know is so? No, but there's a depth of work in variation which compliments very much so what Dr. Deming was doing. So anyway, so no. And so I discovered Taguchi's work, and I mentioned that in the first episode. I discovered his work, became fascinated with it, started looking at his ideas in terms of managing variation to achieve incredible... I mean, improved uniformity to the extent that it's worthwhile to achieve. So we were not striving for the ultimate uniformity, it's just the idea that we can manage the uniformity. And if we... And we'll look at this in more detail later, but for our audience now, if you think of a distribution of the variation in the performance of a product or a service, and you think in terms of... It doesn't have to be a bell-shaped distribution, but you have a distribution and it has an average and it has variation.   0:06:50.4 BB: What Dr. Taguchi's work is about in terms of a very brief, succinct point here in episode two is how might we change the shape of that distribution? How might we make it narrower, if that's a worthwhile adventure? It may be worthwhile to make it wider, not just narrower, but in both cases, we're changing the shape of the distribution and changing the location. So Taguchi's work, Taguchi's Methods, driven by variation comes to me, variation impacts you is how do I change the shape and location of that distribution? So on a regular basis, as I became more fascinated with that, I started thinking about, well, how might I apply Taguchi's ideas to these things that I encountered every day? Well, prior to that before discovering Taguchi's work, when I was a facilitator in problem solving and decision making training, I did the same thing, Andrew.   0:07:52.4 BB: I started looking at, oh, is this a problem? Is this a decision? Is this a situation that needs to be appraised? And so prior to that, what I was thinking about is when I was just a heat transfer analyst working on my Ph.D., I didn't look at how the heat transfer stuff affected all these other aspects of my lives. I didn't think about it when I went into a supermarket, but there was something about the problem solving and decision making that just infatuated me. And I would look at, oh, is Andrew talking about a decision or is Andrew talking about a problem? So I started hearing things. And so when I went into Taguchi's work, it was the same thing. And then shifting into Deming's work, it's the same thing. And I've... There's nothing else that I've studied that I look at things through those lenses. Anyway, so in studying, getting exposed to Taguchi, I mentioned that I had some time away from work, I went out on medical for some reasons and went and bought a book, a bunch of books.   0:09:02.4 BB: And one of the books I bought by David Garvin had come out in 1987, is entitled "The Eight Dimensions of Quality." There's a Harvard Business Review article that I wanna reference in this episode, and I'll put a link to the article. It's a free link. And so when you hear people talk about a quality product or a quality service or quality healthcare. We think in terms of it's quality as things, it's either good quality or bad quality or high quality, or somebody calls it low quality, or we just say it's a quality product. But what does that mean? So what I find is very loosely, we think in terms of categories of quality, good, bad, high, low. What we'll look at in a future episode is what would happen if we thought about quality on a continuum, which I believe Taguchi's work really demonstrates vividly as well as Dr. Deming's work.   0:10:07.4 BB: But even to back up before we talk about the eight dimensions of quality, I wanted to give some background on the word quality. The word quality, and this comes from an article and I'll put a link to this article, I wrote it for the Lean Management Journal a number of years ago, the word quality has Latin roots, beginning as qualitas, T-A-S, coined by the Roman philosopher and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero. He later became an adversary of this bad guy named Mark Antony. You've heard of him. Feared by Antony, this guy was feared by Antony because his power of speech led, you know what it led to, Andrew, his power of speech?   0:10:54.5 AS: What?   0:10:54.6 BB: His beheading.   0:10:55.8 AS: Oh my goodness.   0:10:56.5 BB: So for those of you with great powers of speech, watch out for your Mark Antony. But meanwhile, he introduced fellow Romans to the vocabulary of qualitas, quantitas, quantity, humanitas, humanities, essentia, which is, essence, he also is credited with an extensive list of expressions that translate into English today. Difference, infinity, science, morale. Cicero spoke of qualitas with his peers when focusing on the essential nature, character or property of an object. And this is kind of interesting. I mean, you can count how many apples do we have. And again, he came up with the term quantitas for quantity, but he is also talking about the essence of the apples. That's the quality word. And then 2000 years later when writing "The New Economics", Dr. Deming provided his definition and a little bit different.   0:12:05.3 BB: He says, "The problem anywhere is quality. What is quality?" Says the good doctor, "A product or service possesses quality if it helps somebody, it enjoys a good and sustainable market." And I said in the article, "As with Cicero, Deming saw quality as a property." And then some other background on quality before I talk about Garvin, "long after Cicero and well before Deming, quality as a property was a responsibility of guilds." Guilds. I mean, now we have writers guilds, we have actors guilds, and it's kind of cool that these guilds still exist and they are associations of artisans who control the practice of their craft, each with a revered trademark. So here in Los Angeles, we have writers guilds, actors guilds. They were organized as professional societies, just like unions.   0:13:00.2 BB: And these fraternities were developed, and within these fraternities they created standards for high quality. All right. So what is this quality management stuff from David Garvin? So this article was written 37 years ago and reviewing it for tonight's episode and I thought it fit in really, really well. I was reminded of... First time I read this article, 1989, I knew a lot about... Well, I knew, I was excited about Taguchi as I knew a lot about Taguchi, didn't know a lot about Dr. Deming. So I'm now reviewing it years later with a much deeper, broader Deming perspective than at that time. But I do believe, and I would encourage the listeners to get ahold of the article, look at it, if you wanna go into more depth, there's Garvin's book. And doing some research for tonight, I found out that he passed away in 2017, seven or so years ago.   0:14:04.6 BB: He was, I guess from, most of his career and education he was at the Harvard Business School, very well respected there. And so in the article it talks about, again, this, 1987, that's the era of Total Quality Management. That's the era in which Dr. Deming was attracting 2000 people to go to his seminars. 1987 is two years before Six Sigma Quality, two years before “The Machine That Changed The World.” And in the article, he says, "Part of the problem, of course, is that Japanese and European competition have intensified. Not many companies tried to make quality programs work even as they implemented them." This is back when quality was an era of quality circles. He says, "In my view, most of the principles about quality were narrow in scope. They were designed as purely defensive measures to preempt failures or eliminate defects, eliminate red beads."   0:15:10.3 BB: "What managers need now is an aggressive strategy to gain and hold markets with high quality," there we go again, "as a competitive linchpin." All right. So in the article, he has some interesting explanations of... Highlights. In the book is more depth. He talks about Joseph Juran, "Juran's Quality Handbook". Juran observed that quality could be understood in terms of avoidable and unavoidable costs. Dr. Deming talked about the economics. The New Economics, right? But Juran is looking at avoidable, unavailable costs resulting from defects in product failures. That's very traditional quality today.  The latter associated with prevention, inspection, sampling, sorting, quality control. And so this is what I found fascinating, is 37 years later, this is still the heavy sense of what quality is all about. Avoiding failure, avoiding defects.   0:16:18.3 BB: Then he talks about Total Quality Control coming from Armand Feigenbaum, who was a big name in the '80s. Again Dr. Deming's work kind of created this big quality movement but it wasn't just Dr. Deming people discovered, they discovered Philip Crosby in a Zero Defects advocacy, Feigenbaum, Juran, sometime later. Again, mid '80s, Dr. Taguchi's name started to be heard. All right. And then the reliability. All right. Now I wanna get into the... Oh, here's, this is good. "In 1961, the Martin Corporation, Martin Company was building Pershing missiles for the US Army. The design of the missile was sound, but Martin found that it could maintain high quality only through massive inspection programs."   0:17:13.0 BB: You know what Dr. Deming would say about inspection? It's after the fact. Sorting the good ones from the bad ones after the fact. No prevention there. But Martin found that it could only do it with inspection. And decided to offer... Again, this is 1961, and this is still the solution today, decided to offer workers incentives to lower the defect rate. And in December, 1961, delivered a Pershing missile to Cape Canaveral with zero discrepancies. Buoyed by this success, Martin's general manager in Florida accepted a challenge issued by the Army's missile command to deliver the first Pershing missile one month ahead of schedule. He went even further, he promised that the missile would be perfect. Perfect. You know what that means, Andrew?   0:18:12.3 AS: Tell us.   0:18:12.8 BB: All good, not bad.   0:18:14.9 AS: All good, not bad.   0:18:15.9 BB: He promised missile would be perfect with no hardware problems or document errors, and that all equipment would be fully operational 10 days after delivering. And so what was neat in going back to this is we still have this mindset that quality is about things being good, not bad. What is bad we call that scrap, we call that rework. That's alive and well today.   0:18:45.0 AS: The proclamations are interesting when you listen to what he's saying, when you're quoting that.   0:18:52.4 BB: Yeah, no, and I remember, 'cause again, I read this recently for the first time in 37 years and I'm going through it. And at the time I was thinking, "Wow, wow, wow, this is a really big deal. This is a really big deal." Now I look at it and say, "This is what we're still talking about today, 37 years later." The absence of defects is the essence of quality. All right. But so I would highly recommend the article. Now we get into what he proposes as eight critical dimensions of quality that can serve as a framework for strategic analysis. And I think even in a Deming environment, I think it's... I think what's really cool about this is it provides a broad view of quality that I think Deming's work fits in very well to, Dr. Taguchi's work fits in very well to, and I think covers a lot of what people call quality. So the first dimension he talks about is performance.   0:20:01.4 BB: And he says, "Of course, performance refers to a product's primary operating characteristics." He says, "For an automobile, performance would include traits like acceleration, handling, cruising speed. For a television, sound and picture clarity." He says "A power shovel in the excavation business that excavates 100 cubic yards per hour will outperform one that excavates 10 cubic yards per hour." So the capacity, that could be miles per gallon, carrying capacity, the resolution of the pixels, that's what he calls performance. Okay. Features is the second dimension of quality. Examples include free drinks on an airplane, but not if you're flying a number of airlines they charge you for those drinks, permanent press cycles on a washing machine, automatic tuners on a color television set. A number of people in our audience won't know what those are, bells and whistles. Features are bells and whistles.   0:21:17.2 BB: There was a time people would say the number of cup holders in your automobile, a feature could be intermittent wipers. So these are features. So again, I mean, so performance is kind of cool. What is the capacity, is it 100 horsepower, 200 horsepower, that's performance. Features, bells and whistles. Okay. Fine. Reliability, now we're talking. The dimension represents the probability of a product malfunctioning or failing within a specified period of time. So your car breaking down, are you gonna drive to work every day and one morning you're gonna go out and it's... That's a reliability issue. Okay. That's... When I think about reliability, that's a Taguchi thing, that's a Deming thing.  And looking at time between failures, okay, fine. Reliability comes down to... And if importance for the impact of downtime, if you're looking at engines not working and you're sitting at the gate, that's a reliability issue. The reliability is, it can be repaired, but it's gonna take some time, perhaps. Conformance. All right.   0:22:40.4 AS: Is number four, right?   0:22:42.2 BB: This is number four, a related dimension of quality is conformance or the degree to which a product's design and operating characteristics meet established standards. "This dimension owes to the importance of traditional approaches," it says, "to quality pioneers such as Juran." All products and services involve specifications of some sort. When new designs or models are developed, dimensions are set for parts or purity, these specifications are normally expressed as a target or a center. Now it's starting to sound a little bit like Dr. Taguchi's work, an ideal value, deviance from the center within a specified range. But this approach equates good quality with operating inside the tolerance band. There is little interest in whether the specifications have been met exactly. For the most part, dispersion within specifications is ignored. Ignored. That's balls and strikes, Andrew, balls and strikes.   0:23:51.2 BB: As long as the ball is somewhere in the strike zone, as long as the characteristic is somewhere within requirements, conformance, this gets into what I talk about in terms of the question number one of quality management. Has the requirement been met, the requirement for the performance, the dimension, is it within requirements? And there's only two answers, yes or no. That's conformance. I used to think that the American Society for Quality might be better known as the American Society for the Preservation of Conformance. I find there's a lot of conformance thinking. I'm reminded of, I'm a member of the American Society for Quality as I'm on the Deming Medal Committee, so I have to be a member of ASQ. So I get a daily or every other day newsletter with comments and conformance is a big part of the conversation. Good parts and bad parts, scrap and rework. All right.   0:25:02.3 BB: Conformance is number four. And it's not to say there isn't a place for the conformance, but conformance is then again different from what Dr. Taguchi is talking about. All right. Durability, the measure of a product life. Durability has both economic and technical dimensions. Durability is how long does it work before I throw it away? So reliability is about, I can repair it. Okay. And that's an inconvenience. Durability is like light bulbs. It runs and runs or a refrigerator and someone says, "Well, it's time for a new one." That's a durability issue. Okay. Durability is the amount of use you get before you haul it off to the junkyard. That's durability. Okay. Serviceability. And back in the '60s, now I'm dating myself, there would be commercials for... I don't know which television brand, but what they talked about is, and these would be commercials. Commercials on television as to "our TV is easy to repair." And I thought, is that a good thing?   [laughter]   0:26:22.4 AS: Is that a foreboding?   0:26:24.4 BB: Yeah. And so... But again, the last couple of days I had to fix the sprinkler system in the backyard. And here in California we have, everybody has a sprinkler system. In the East Coast, people have above ground sprinkler systems. Here, they're all below ground. You don't have to worry about the lines freezing, at least in Los Angeles. And so anyway, one of the valves broke and I thought I was gonna buy a new one and take some of the parts from the new one to put it into the old one. And that didn't quite work. And so meaning to say, serviceability on the design was awful. I couldn't service it.   0:27:11.5 BB: I had to replace the whole damn thing, which was a lot more work than I was expecting. Anyway, however they designed it, serviceability didn't seem to be a consideration in the... That's dimension number six. Again, not to say there's anything wrong with thinking about serviceability. In terms of... Yeah. Okay, I'll leave it with that. Okay, serviceability. Number seven, aesthetics. The final two dimensions of quality are the most subjective, aesthetics, how a product looks, feels, sounds, taste, or smells is clearly a matter of personal judgment. Nevertheless, there seem to be patterns, a rich and full flavor aroma.   0:28:01.0 BB: That's got nothing to do with Dr. Taguchi's work. I mean, you can go off and do market research, find out what is the most appealing flavor, the most appealing taste, the most appealing aroma. And this is what I used to tell students is, and once you understand that or that vivid color that attracts the customer, then you could use Dr. Taguchi's work for, how can I reliably, predictably recreate, week after week, day by day, car by car, that aroma, that flavor, but Taguchi's work is not gonna tell you what it is. And then the last dimension of quality, you ready, Andrew?   0:28:45.8 AS: Give it to me, Bill.   0:28:47.7 BB: Perceived quality. "Consumers do not always have complete information on a product's attributes and direct measure is maybe their only basis. A product's durability can seldom be observed." And so we talk about perceptions of quality. Again, this is 1987, he says, "For this reason, Honda, which makes cars in Marysville, Ohio, and Sony, which builds color TVs have been reluctant to publicize that their products..." Ready? "Are made in America." Because the perception in 1987 is we want them to be made in Japan. And then we could talk about the perception of Cadillac quality, the perception of Jaguar quality.   0:29:35.7 BB: My father's gas station back in the early '70s, it was a block away from the nearby hospital. So a lot of our customers were doctors and they came in in their Cadillacs and Mercedes. And it was just a lot of fun. It was pretty cool. And one doctor against all of his peers' recommendations bought a Jaguar XJ12, V12, 12 cylinders, and they told him again and again, they said, "It'll spend more time in the shop than you driving it." No, no, no, he had to have one, he had to have one. And sure enough, it spent most of the time in the shop, but I got to drive it now and then, which was pretty cool. But that's perceived quality.   0:30:27.5 BB: So I just wanted to, in this episode, throughout those eight dimensions of quality. Again, I encourage our listeners, viewers, I think to get a broader sense of quality before you just look at quality from Dr. Deming's perspective, quality from anyone else's. I think that Garvin has done a really good job covering eight bases, if I can use that term, of quality. And then what I think is neat is to look at which of these tie into Deming's work, which of these tie into Dr. Taguchi's work? And that's what I wanted to cover in this episode.   0:31:01.8 AS: Fantastic. Well, let's just review that for the listeners and the viewers out there, eight dimensions. The first one is performance, the second one is features, the third one is reliability, the fourth one is conformance, the fifth one is durability, the sixth one is serviceability, the seventh one is aesthetics, how it feels and all that, and then the eighth one is perceived quality. Woah, that was...   0:31:29.4 BB: All about... Yeah. And it is reputation. You either have a great reputation or not.   0:31:38.3 AS: All right. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

durée : 00:19:14 - Canelés du 64 : présent au marché des Producteurs de Pays vendredi 5 juillet à Jurançon

durée : 00:23:58 - l'événement Terrasse en Jurançon avec le Clos Bellevue - La Terrasse du Jurançon accueillera 33 vignerons sur la place Royale à Pau samedi 27 avril dès midi. Parmi eux, Olivier Muchada du Clos Bellevue à Cuqueron. Tous vous ferons goûter à leur cuvée en vin blanc sec ou moelleux.

LAS NOTICIAS CON CALLE DE 18 ABRIL DE 2024 - No causa con agentes que mataron a menor, pero ¿los agentes actuaron en defensa propia?  - La conversión del gobernador y los resultados de Proyecto Dignidad - Cuarto Poder - La Primaria del PNP va, pero no solo por los votos adelantados - El Vocero  - Radio Maratón de JGo consigue casi 300 mil en las luces por ahí - Noti UNO  - Gobierno no va a botar empleados que no necesita, les va a pagar para que se retiren de por vida - El Nuevo Día - Renuncian casi todos los de las regiones educativas para descentralizar el DE - El Nuevo Día - Candidatas para dirigir Ciencias Médicas - El Nuevo Día - Pájaras detienen vuelo tras meterse en motor de avión de United - Primera Hora - No se pueden hacer querellas digitales en el Comisionado de Instituciones Financieras - El Nuevo Día - Seguros van a subir por desastres naturales internacionales, pero tasa de interés se espera que baje - El Nuevo Día - Piden al gobierno federal rechazar los casos insulares - El Nuevo Día - Pelea por plan de combustible entre Genera y el Negociado de Energía - El Nuevo Día - Gobernador empieza a ir a escuelas que van a reconstruir y para las que hay 1,500 millones  - Juran que problema de medición neta no será malo para la industria, otros dudan de eso - El Vocero  - Querella ética contra Memo - Cuarto Poder - Solo hay 1.3 millones de electores de los 1.9 millones realmente inscritos - El Vocero  Si tu teléfono móvil está pidiéndote un upgrade, es hora de pasar por tu tienda más cercana de Liberty. Llévate un Samsung Galaxy S23 FE por nuestra cuenta, sin necesidad de hacer trade-in con un plan de pago de 24 meses. ¡Así como lo oyes! Visita libertypr.com o llama al 1-855-655-0055 para más detalles. Ciertas restricciones aplican. Liberty, tu mundo mejor conectado. Incluye auspicio

durée : 00:27:20 - Fêtons les 40 ans de France Bleu Béarn Bigorre au marché de Jurançon

durée : 00:22:02 - Rencontre vigneronne au Cru Larose à Saint Faust samedi 12 et dimanche 13 avril - Une rencontre vigneronne vous attend chez Chantal Davancens au Cru Larose à Saint Faust samedi 13 et dimanche 14 avril. Elle vinifie son Jurançon : elle en fait du vin moelleux et du vin sec.

durée : 00:22:31 - La Terrasse du Jurançon #3 déménage place Royale à Pau samedi 27 avril - La Terrasse du Jurançon #3 déménage en 2024 sur la place Royale à Pau. Samedi 27 avril, le collectif des vignerons indépendants du Jurançon vous reçoit au cœur du centre-ville palois pour vous faire découvrir (ou redécouvrir) l'or du Béarn !

durée : 00:26:11 - Le Clos Labrée profite d'un beau terroir pour faire du vin bio en Jurançon - Installé sur les coteaux à Chapelle de Rousse, le Clos Labrée bénéficie d'un beau terroir pour faire du vin bio en blanc de l'appellation de Jurançon. Des cuvées variées qui ont maturés sur ce beau territoire.

durée : 00:44:36 - Les Délices de Céline à Jurançon : tout est fait maison - Les Délices de Céline à Jurançon : Biscuiterie artisanale, salon de thé, et produits locaux. Elle est installée à la Cour à Jurançon, 11 boutiques qui constituent un petit village dans une cour intérieure au 1 avenue Henri IV.

durée : 00:12:14 - Affaires classées FB Béarn - En avril 2000, Rodolphe, un jurançonnais de 28 ans, laisse ses proches sans nouvelle. L'inquiétude monte au fil des jours jusqu'à ce que Jeanine, sa mère, se décide à faire ouvrir son appartement. Ce qu'elle va découvrir soulève le cœur.

En ce début d'année, Yves Camdeborde nous raconte une tendance qui monte : le renouveau du Jurançon. Ensuite, Laurent Mariotte passe Gaëtan Roussel sur le grill des bons vivants. Il répond aux questions de Laurent Mariotte pour qu'on le connaisse mieux de l'autre côté de la fourchette. Quel est le plat de votre enfance ? Que trouve-t-on toujours dans votre frigo ? Quelle est votre adresse secrète ? Quel est le mot de la faim ? Voici quelques-unes des questions posées par Laurent Mariotte. On découvre que Gaëtan Roussel est un amateur de pâtes au petit-épeautre.

In this episode Join Us in France, Annie and Elyse embark on a remarkable journey through the Gers region in France, uncovering its hidden charms and age-old allure. And how about delicious gastronomy? It's all here! Our adventure begins at the serene Abbaye de Flaran, a historic Cistercian abbey now serving as an art museum, where we delve into centuries of history and art. The Gers region, with its seasonal attractions, reveals its best-kept secrets between March and early November. We weave through the picturesque bastide town of Montréal du Gers and the unique circular village of Fourcès. Here, we encounter the friendly local hospitality at a bakery, indulging in the delightful regional specialty, croustade. Our journey takes us to the impressive Roman site of Séviac, famed for its well-preserved mosaics, a testament to the region's rich Roman heritage. Time constraints lead us to bypass the museum in Eauze, but the visit to Séviac alone leaves us in awe of the historical depth of Gers. The day's exploration culminates in the enchanting village of Larressingle, a miniature version of Carcassonne. This small, circular walled village, complete with medieval ramparts and a church, stands as a symbol of historical preservation, partly restored thanks to international contributions, notably from American donors. Throughout the episode, we highlight the importance of planning, especially for dining options in these rural settings, and the role of global efforts in historical preservation. The Gers region, not just a stop on the Camino but a destination in its own right, is rich in both history and gastronomy. We delve into the culinary delights of the area, from its famous duck dishes to the renowned wines of Madiran and Jurançon. Join us on this enchanting journey through Gers, as we uncover the timeless beauty, culinary richness, and historical depth of this lesser-known French treasure.   Table of Contents for this episode Today on the podcast Services related to the podcast Bootcamp 2024 The magazine part of the podcast: the price of bread Annie and Elyse about The Gers Exploring the Gers Region The Beauty and Simplicity of Gers Le Bonheur est dans le Pré The Serenity of Rural Life in Gers How long to get to The Gers? Visiting the Abbey of Flaran Art Exhibition at the Abbey The Village of Montréal du Gers Electric car charging troubles Fources, small circular village When in the Gers, try a croustade! A visit to Montréal The Roman Site of Séviac The Preservation of Séviac's Mosaics The Villa of Saviac The Village of Larressingle Restoration work Gastronomy and agriculture in the Gers Le Festival du Gras (aka le Marché du Gras) The Town of Condom and Armagnac Thank you Patrons Itinerary Consult Service Feedback from Lucy Hicks Self-guided tours of Paris The Price of Bread in France Keeping your phone safe while touring Next week on the podcast Copyright

durée : 00:46:30 - Portes ouvertes de La cave de Jurançon à Gan ce jeudi 28 décembre

durée : 00:46:35 - Portes ouvertes de La cave de Jurançon à Gan ce jeudi 28 décembre

durée : 00:46:55 - Portes ouvertes de La cave de Jurançon à Gan ce jeudi 28 décembre

durée : 00:02:57 - Portes ouvertes de La cave de Jurançon à Gan ce jeudi 28 décembre

Shrapnel, not a missle hit the hospital area, protesters in Wahington D.C., US has 13 warships in the Middle East, Round 2 of the speaker vote didn't go Jim Jordan's way and Juran Vandersloot admits to killing Natalie Hollaway.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shrapnel, not a missle hit the hospital area, protesters in Wahington D.C., US has 13 warships in the Middle East, Round 2 of the speaker vote didn't go Jim Jordan's way and Juran Vandersloot admits to killing Natalie Hollaway.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shrapnel, not a missle hit the hospital area, protesters in Wahington D.C., US has 13 warships in the Middle East, Round 2 of the speaker vote didn't go Jim Jordan's way and Juran Vandersloot admits to killing Natalie Hollaway.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shrapnel, not a missle hit the hospital area, protesters in Wahington D.C., US has 13 warships in the Middle East, Round 2 of the speaker vote didn't go Jim Jordan's way and Juran Vandersloot admits to killing Natalie Hollaway.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Siete diputados por Irlanda del Norte, del partido republicano Sinn Fein, se niegan a jurar lealtad al monarca y a reconocer al Parlamento británico. RFI conversó con uno de ellos, Chris Hazzard. Chris Hazzard es diputado activo del Parlamento Británico desde hace seis años, pero nunca ha entrado al recinto de la Cámara de los Comunes ni participado en ninguno de sus animados debates. “Funciona en ambos sentidos” “El principio de abstencionismo dice que no reconocemos que el Gobierno británico interfiera en los asuntos irlandeses y, de la misma manera, tampoco tengo derecho a interferir en la política británica, por lo que funciona en ambos sentidos y, por supuesto, que para poder tomar mi silla en el Parlamento británico, tengo que jurar lealtad al monarca británico y como Republicano y como Republicano Irlandés eso es algo que nunca podré hacer”, afirma. Es uno de los siete diputados por Irlanda del Norte, del partido republicano Sinn Feinn, que no se consideran británicos ni juran lealtad al rey. “Soy ciudadano irlandés” “Soy un ciudadano irlandés. Nacido y criado en la isla de Irlanda. Tengo ciudadanía irlandesa. Tengo un pasaporte irlandés y, según el Acuerdo de Viernes Santo, se permite que las personas nacidas en el Norte o Irlanda elijan una identidad británica o una irlandesa. Puede tener un pasaporte británico o un pasaporte irlandés. Entonces, soy ciudadano irlandés y, como dije, mi lealtad política es con el Parlamento irlandés en Dublín”, recalca.     Explica que los principios del Sinn Fein van más allá de ser anti monarquía: “Supongo que muchas personas con las que hablamos piensan que no queremos hacer un juramento de lealtad al rey y es por eso que no estamos allí sentados. En realidad, tiene más que ver con el punto de que no reconozco el derecho del Parlamento británico para interferir en los asuntos irlandeses y eso es fundamental para lo que somos”. Como cualquier diputado, tiene oficina en este icónico Parlamento, construido en 1097. Aquí organizó un foro para conmemorar los 25 años del Acuerdo de Viernes Santo que trajo paz política a su región. “Directamente con el Gobierno” La paz y el impacto del Brexit son algunas de sus prioridades: “Lo más importante es que nos relacionamos directamente con el Gobierno británico, directamente con los ministros, directamente con Downing Street, sobre cuestiones políticas y, en los últimos años, eso ha estado dominado por el Brexit”, comenta. Hazzard asegura que no puede ni tocar la puerta de la Cámara de los Comunes: “Debido a que no hago un juramento de lealtad, no se me permite entrar en la Cámara de los Comunes. Si entro y me siento, inmediatamente pierdo mi silla y se convoca a una elección. Creo que también sería multado, no estoy seguro de cuánto, pero sería multado también”. Los líderes del Sinn Fein, considerado, en el pasado, el brazo político del IRA, y el partido más votado en Irlanda del Norte recientemente, creen que en la próxima década harán un referendo para la reunificación de la isla de Irlanda.

Siete diputados por Irlanda del Norte, del partido republicano Sinn Fein, se niegan a jurar lealtad al monarca y a reconocer al Parlamento británico. RFI conversó con uno de ellos, Chris Hazzard. Chris Hazzard es diputado activo del Parlamento Británico desde hace seis años, pero nunca ha entrado al recinto de la Cámara de los Comunes ni participado en ninguno de sus animados debates. “Funciona en ambos sentidos” “El principio de abstencionismo dice que no reconocemos que el Gobierno británico interfiera en los asuntos irlandeses y, de la misma manera, tampoco tengo derecho a interferir en la política británica, por lo que funciona en ambos sentidos y, por supuesto, que para poder tomar mi silla en el Parlamento británico, tengo que jurar lealtad al monarca británico y como Republicano y como Republicano Irlandés eso es algo que nunca podré hacer”, afirma. Es uno de los siete diputados por Irlanda del Norte, del partido republicano Sinn Feinn, que no se consideran británicos ni juran lealtad al rey. “Soy ciudadano irlandés” “Soy un ciudadano irlandés. Nacido y criado en la isla de Irlanda. Tengo ciudadanía irlandesa. Tengo un pasaporte irlandés y, según el Acuerdo de Viernes Santo, se permite que las personas nacidas en el Norte o Irlanda elijan una identidad británica o una irlandesa. Puede tener un pasaporte británico o un pasaporte irlandés. Entonces, soy ciudadano irlandés y, como dije, mi lealtad política es con el Parlamento irlandés en Dublín”, recalca.     Explica que los principios del Sinn Fein van más allá de ser anti monarquía: “Supongo que muchas personas con las que hablamos piensan que no queremos hacer un juramento de lealtad al rey y es por eso que no estamos allí sentados. En realidad, tiene más que ver con el punto de que no reconozco el derecho del Parlamento británico para interferir en los asuntos irlandeses y eso es fundamental para lo que somos”. Como cualquier diputado, tiene oficina en este icónico Parlamento, construido en 1097. Aquí organizó un foro para conmemorar los 25 años del Acuerdo de Viernes Santo que trajo paz política a su región. “Directamente con el Gobierno” La paz y el impacto del Brexit son algunas de sus prioridades: “Lo más importante es que nos relacionamos directamente con el Gobierno británico, directamente con los ministros, directamente con Downing Street, sobre cuestiones políticas y, en los últimos años, eso ha estado dominado por el Brexit”, comenta. Hazzard asegura que no puede ni tocar la puerta de la Cámara de los Comunes: “Debido a que no hago un juramento de lealtad, no se me permite entrar en la Cámara de los Comunes. Si entro y me siento, inmediatamente pierdo mi silla y se convoca a una elección. Creo que también sería multado, no estoy seguro de cuánto, pero sería multado también”. Los líderes del Sinn Fein, considerado, en el pasado, el brazo político del IRA, y el partido más votado en Irlanda del Norte recientemente, creen que en la próxima década harán un referendo para la reunificación de la isla de Irlanda.

This week I recount my recent trip to Girona, Spain with Trek Travel. Our knowledgeable guides took us on a 5 day adventure throughout the region exposing us to Girona's plentiful and diverse gravel. As a bonus, we were able to connect with a number of local cycling brands contributing to Girona's reputation as the hub of European cycling. Trek Travel  Support the Podcast Join The Ridership  Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: Girona Gravel Live [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello, and welcome to the gravel ride podcast, where we go deep on the sport of gravel cycling through in-depth interviews with product designers, event organizers and athletes. Who are pioneering the sport I'm your host, Craig Dalton, a lifelong cyclist who discovered gravel cycling back in 2016 and made all the mistakes you don't need to make. I approach each episode as a beginner down, unlock all the knowledge you need to become a great gravel cyclist. This week on the show, I'm releasing some recordings I did during the tractor on a gravel tour. I participated in, in November. It was a great trip. I encourage you to check it out on Trek's website and I appreciate Trek's support in getting the over there to have this wonderful experience. With my friend. Was able to sit down with our guides as well as some other members of the Jarana cycling community. To give you a flavor for this wonderful cycling city. I hope you enjoy and let's dive right in Day 1 [00:00:56] Craig Dalton: Right here we are, day one, Trek Gerona Gravel tour here in Gerona, Spain here in the hotel. Nord got set up on my Trek demo bike. Not the one you'd expect for these gravel trips, but it turns out the gravel roads here in Gerona are pretty smooth and you don't need the big wide tires that I typically ride at home. So we're riding a 35 C Pirelli tire on these Damani bikes. The great thing was, Sent them over. My fit measurements had everything dialed, so it was just some quick adjustments Right before the ride. Today we did about 25 miles today as a shakeout ride. Riding along, essentially along the river, out and back on either side of the river, which a lot of fun. We got into some single track. Super smooth. Not a lot of elevation today. That's gonna come tomorrow where I'm excited that we're riding off to the Mediterranean. So great first day. Great intro. The guides. Rafa and Mickey are awesome. Mickey's a local here in Jerron and Rafa's from London. Bringing a little bit of international flavor to the trip. We've got a group of about six of us, so it's pretty easy to keep people together. I've got two friends from San Francisco along for the ride, so that is a joy and a pleasure. More later in the week, and I'll get some commentary, a little bit more specifics about the writing from Mickey Rafa along the way to to give you an idea about what to expect. It's a five day experience here in the Jonah Gravel tour. They've got some other options I think, coming online next year, but super excited for the days to come as the mileage is gonna creep up, and I'm told the technicality is gonna creep up as well. So super excited for that. We'll see how these 35 C tires on the demos go, but I'm confident we've got the right equipment for the job. Day 2 [00:02:50] Craig Dalton: Okay, so on day two of the Trek Gerona gravel tour today, we did about 60 miles of gravel, about 1800 feet of climbing on our way to the Mediterranean beach, the Mediterranean Ocean. We started in Gerona and followed the prominent river all the way to the east. Surprisingly, the whole ride, we were on gravel roads, beautiful gravel. Started out getting outta town on some small paths right next to the river. Some real fun single track to wake you up and then onto some amazing roads through forests. There's a lot of forests here. We were told that the trees that were being planted there were for the paper industry. They were super beautiful tall trees and lined in rows, and we just weaved throughout them until 29 kilometers later. We met the van, the Trek travel van, and our second guide Mickey, who had water refills and food and everything we needed for the second half of our ride out there to the coast where we went through orchards, basically this incredibly smooth gravel road. Very, very little car traffic. I think maybe we saw a few, maybe three vehicles out there the whole day, but super pleasant ride. Relatively flat for 60 miles, only 1800 feet of climbing. We got to the ocean to meet Mickey in the van again. Had an amazing lunch and a few of us decided we were gonna jump into the. It wasn't exactly warm, but it wasn't unpleasant. It was so fun to kind of get off the gravel bike in the middle of your ride and go for a swim and play around. And one of the riders, James, my friend from San Francisco, took a nap on the beach while we were in the water and we had to rouse him to get him back on the bike for our 45 kilometer return home. Adding up to, as I said, 60 miles and no idea why I'm converting miles to kilometers and vice versa. Including them in the same sentences. But anyway, I'm a bit groggy from the ride. The legs are taken a little bit to get used to it, but it's been amazing. The town's been amazing. We, we spent sunset at, on the wall here in Jerome, next to the big church, and you can see the purities and the sun was setting right over the pys. Pretty incredible Second day. Getting ready for the third day, which I guess is a little bit more technical. I'll get some of the guides on to describe some of the terrain, excuse me, that we're going through and we'll see how the legs hold up. Day 3 [00:05:29] Craig Dalton: Day three of our Jer gravel cycling tour with track travel. Today was a little bit more technical, especially with the 35 Sea Tires. We got out into some rolling farm roads and definitely off into some single track and double track. That was pretty amazing, the first 30 K or so, rolling farm roads. Just a little bit punchier than we've been experiencing. A little bit looser gravel in most cases. But nothing too technical on the. 30 K of the ride. We had this amazing stop at Ro Roca corba cycling, a new 17th century Chateau kind of building that's being converted into a cycling. Kind of lodge and Airbnb pretty amazing. They took the kind of areas that used to house the cattle underneath the building and made them into kind of the bike room and a little cafe. It's a super like rustic arc, arc ceilings beautiful stonework on the grounds. This beautiful old building, it's being renovated by a couple professional cyclists, ones who's already retired, and one who's in the Women's Pro tour today. So that was really special. Kind of get to tour that facility and definitely something. It's about 30 kilometers outside of. Jer. So kind of an interesting place to stay. You know, the ideal might be stay in Gerona for, you know, four or five days and then go out there for three or four days, or two or three days to just get a little bit of different starting point. It's a little closer to closer to some of the climbs particularly for the roadies. So, you know, if you're interested in getting out and hitting some of those climbs and having a little less distance in your legs from Gerona, that's a good option. Once we left there, the riding got a little bit more technical through some farms. Took a lot of single track. Some punchier climbs actually reminds me of what I recently experienced at, at big sugar in Arkansas. Kind of loose gravel, the sense definitely some loose gravel pushed the technical capabilities. Clearly. Track is the, has done a really good job of making roots that are gonna explore different areas of your gravel cycling ability again today. Was definitely on the more technical side, particularly if you were a newer rider of which we had at least one in today's ride. And you know, you could. Some of them were, some of the dissents were definitely making them think, but everybody went through fabulously. We even got to stop at the property, which my one of the guides fathers owned, and I'll get him on to talk about that a little bit. But it was great being able to reminisce with him and he learned to swim up there. His father owned a restaurants, a typical Catalan food restaurant in this really beautiful building, which was kind of cool to see. Then we rolled back into, I'm always looking at the GPS and amazed that, you know, we could be within seven kilometers of Jerome and still in these amazing forests and woods, riding gravel, basically all the way back into town. So another great day out there. It's interesting how they've explored. The first day was kind of getting to know your bike a little bit. Second day was that long. Ride out to the beach. Not very technical. Beautiful, beautiful gravel roads today being more technical, and we'll see what the next two days have to bring us. Day 4 [00:08:46] Craig Dalton: All right. Day four, Gerona gravel. Definitely woke up feeling a little tired, not gonna lie. Fourth day riding in a row with some big climbs. Yesterday. Got a massage yesterday afternoon, which was awesome and quite affordable here in Gerona, which was a bonus. Got up this morning, got the bikes ready. We got the route loaded up. We were riding through the fields. Kesier de Las Selva known for the cork. It's cork production. So they actually, it was kind of interesting. They, the trees kind of about five feet kind of from the ground up. Five feet they chop and that's the cork that they used to make cork bottles, flooring, everything. So that was super cool to see. We continued rolling through some dirt roads through there, through the mountain range of Lis gravis. Then we tackled a famous road climb called Santa Aea, known as the George hie Climb for Local. This was awesome. I mean, I know we're here to talk about gravel and the gravel was great that first half of the morning, but that road climb was spectacular as well. I kind of felt like it was a bonus, obviously, like we signed up for a gravel trip, but to be able to do kind of a famous climb, road climb was amazing. It was great gradient, fantastic descent. Right at the bottom of it, we turned up another dirt road and had a a 12 K climb to lunch. Great climb kind of loose. Actually more similar to riding I do at home than the first couple of days. So that was interesting. Got up to a church where Salvador Dolly was married, had some lunch, then we dropped down the kind of backside of that climb. But before we got to the bottom in Jer, we took another hard right and got into a trail system right above. Rode some steep descents through and down back into town. Those steep descents were very much like mount ta. You know, maybe 12, 15% grade going down and loose. A lot of fun. I discovered by the time I got back to town that I managed to cut the sidewall of my. But fortunately the sealant held and it was all good for me to roll back into town. We dropped a few people off and ended up going on an extended loop, a pretty vicious climb on the extended loop they call extended loops for the avid riders. My legs were screaming at me, but it was a, it was a lot of fun. We were kind of just, again, in that same area going up into the ELs Angels climb area. Steep dirt climbs pretty loose. We grinded that climb for a while, but the descent was a hell of a lot of fun. Pretty gentle loose rock, but pretty easy to handle at speed. Fun. Coming back into the town the way that route did was a lot of fun. It really felt like you were kind of entering a village, not downtown gerona like we've done in some other, the the entrances back into town. Anyway, another great day out there for day four. Super fun, super varied. The team has done a really good job of kind of making each day feel different and like many areas around the world, kind of directionally where you head outta town, the, the dirt and the gravel. Has just a different feel to it. So it's been fun to explore. We've got one more day on the official tour, and then I've got an extra day here. So we're gonna do a sixth day of riding where I think we'll head back out to the Mediterranean Ocean. Cuz how, how cool is that? Day 5 [00:12:17] Craig Dalton: All right. Day five of the Jarana. The gravel tour with truck travel, bit of a shorter day, as most of the clients were leaving today, it's the end of the official tour. So our guides took us on a really fun kind of single tracky tour through a different part of the surrounding area that we hadn't visited before. Lots of fun. Just kind of a great community day where we got to interact with the other riders a bit, and the writing wasn't too challenging nor too long as the ideal schedule had you back by noon and getting checked out of the hotel. Fortunately, we don't have to leave today. So we decided at least a few of us who were staying on a couple extra days to go out and climb the LA angels. Road climb again. We had such a good time. The day before on that climb, we thought it'd be fun to go back up. And we had some energy in our legs and a little bit of time in the afternoon to go tackle that. So we said goodbye to the other members of our tour group and our guides and headed off on a road loop. It was great. We talked about the climb a bit the other day. Just a fun group. Growed climb we saw a bunch of pros climbing up at which was always fun got to the top crews back down and put another day behind us in the books Day 6 and 7 [00:13:31] Craig Dalton: All right. Well, the official tour from track is over at day five. We had a couple extra days on our hands over in Gerona and you better believe we wanted to go out there and ride Mickey. One of our guides that you'll hear from later in this broadcast was nice enough to share. Another route. Out to the coast for us. So we really enjoyed that ride out to the coast, just super satisfying to kind of hit the Mediterranean. I shouldn't come back. Over to Gerona, but he had us go over some great trails on the way out and then a really, really fun road climb. Just gradual great fun descent down into the Mediterranean. You got to the top and you could see the ocean just super satisfying. We sat around in a cafe for gosh. Probably an hour and a half, just drinking some teas and coffees and having some snacks. We were having a great time, but we realized we needed to head back to Gerona. And Mickey's rude had us go through some similar type of terrain that we were on in our coastal roots, a few days back, those nice long flat undulating gravel trails that seemed to be pervasive in this area. So we're super appreciative of Mickey. Sharing one of his favorite routes that he loves to do with his friends, with us. So we could get another big day. You know, on the bike. I'll move on to day seven. As I'm recording this after the fact day seven, we didn't have a bunch of time left. So we decided we were going to basically revisit the route from day one, some of that nice single track and double track along by the river, it was actually fun without the group with just two of us remaining on the bikes, the kind of rip the single track a little bit harder. We were comfortable with the bikes. We'd been on them for seven days at that point. So really fun to just kind of rip the single track and nail it a little bit harder. Knowing that we could go as hard as we wanted because we had an overnight in Barcelona and then we were going to be on a plane saying a sad goodbye to Gerona. Overall. It was a fantastic trip. Jarana is a very special community. There's a reason why so many cyclists flock there it's clear whether you're a gravel cyclist road cyclist, or even mountain biker that there's ample terrain every direction outside of Jarana. And then the town itself is just really special, special. Between the old world, the old town roads and the city. City walls, the church walls. It was just a really great experience. Our guides from track were phenomenal and I wanted to introduce you to them. So I've recorded some tracks. That'll play immediately after this commentary. So you can get to know Mickey and Rafa, who were our guides throughout the week for track travel. I also was able to capture a little bit of audio from a few different sources. We talked a little bit about Roca Corp, but cycling. Both the 17th century Villa that's being converted into a cycling Airbnb, as well as there's Roca, Corbus cycling clothing, which was founded by a gentleman by the name of a test who's happening to be opening his store this month in Jarana. So it was able to get him on the mic. I had Andrew from the Airbnb. Cycling house. And then also Oscar from Castelli Castelli just opened up a flagship community store in Gerona that week we were there as well. We witnessed a number of group rides going out from the facility. So it was great to hear what Castelli's perspective was for opening that facility. And I was surprised to learn it had. Had little to do with selling. Jerseys and clothing and bib shorts, as you would imagine, and everything to do with promoting the cycling community and creating yet another hub. In Jarana for cyclists. Which brings us back to why you should all go to Jarana. As i just mentioned it's a great place to go and i highly recommend it and i hope you enjoyed this overview of my experience there. With that said let's jump right into those conversations Rapha - Trek Travel Guide [00:17:33] Craig Dalton: Okay, can I get your name and what you do with Trek? [00:17:36] Rapha: My name is Rafael and I'm a second [00:17:38] Craig Dalton: guide for Trek Travel. And [00:17:40] Rapha: where are you from? Well that's a good question cuz originally from the Philippines grew up for most of my life, 20 years in London and now anywhere in Europe. So I'm a resident of France, but I gotta find a place to live , so. [00:17:54] Craig Dalton: And how long have you been guiding for truck [00:17:56] Rapha: travel? This will be my fifth year now, guiding for truck. [00:17:59] Craig Dalton: And what does that look like? Are you always based here in Jer or are you all over the place? We, we [00:18:03] Rapha: sort of congregate here in the beginning of the year and then come back at the end of the year, but in between, we're all over [00:18:09] Craig Dalton: Europe. And are you leading, I know Trek Travel has got many, many road tours. Probably a lesser degree of gravel tours. Are you leading trips on the road and gravel [00:18:21] Rapha: for now? Yeah, and we're, we're starting off gravel next year and so it's a mainly road for the beginning. Next year we're gonna bring in unpaved which is gonna be a whole gravel series. So we have a whole unit of bikes just traveling throughout Europe, and it's gonna be exciting for next year. Yeah, [00:18:37] Craig Dalton: it's exciting. I heard, I heard from the, the extended team that you're gonna really build out the gravel experiences for next year, which is great. I think if my experience in Jerome with the gravel tour is any indication there's gonna be a lot of magical trips across Europe, helping riders discover gravel all over the. [00:18:56] Rapha: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I do a lot of the road tours and I'll see just a patch of undiscovered area and I'm thinking, Hey, where does that go? Or I'll be traveling along the hills and in between you're gonna see these gravel patches of fires and you just want to go and explore. And essentially that's what the guides that went into design these trips or, or want to do, they want to do that. They want to find out those roads. Where does it lead to? Can I connect these dots and see the town and where am I gonna. [00:19:25] Craig Dalton: Yeah, I think it's one of the things I've talked about on the podcast a lot, just the power of local knowledge as we're following the GPX files or following you guys' guides through Jer here. You know, there's a lot of nuance, a lot of little trails that you can pop onto that would be easy to miss if you just sort of saw a heat map of the area. You might just choose the carriage way instead of the the nice trails. So it's really cool and important. I. To have guides that are local to kind of pick apart the best of the best for us to ride on. [00:19:57] Rapha: Yeah, I mean this is what we do. We, this is what we do for fun. So on our time off whilst we do a lot of road riding for work on our time off, we want to go out there and ride gravel. And so this is why we get to know the places. We live around here and in the places that we research gravel all we're doing is just riding and riding and riding and then through. Time, just knowledge. You build up tracks in your head and you wanna put that onto design and then maybe create a trip around it. Find a hotel, find a restaurant, the best restaurants, best hotels to stay and yeah, it's awesome. [00:20:30] Craig Dalton: Yeah, I feel that way. Whenever anybody comes to Marin County, I just wanna show them the best of the best and not the most obvious trails, but the, the ones only the locals know. Yeah. [00:20:41] Rapha: You, you wanna share it? I mean, it's, its more fun riding a gravel. It's more fun with people, friends and random people that you meet up on [00:20:48] Craig Dalton: trails as well. Yeah. When we were, when we first arrived during the week and you were giving an overview, you were talking about kind of the progression of roots that we'd be doing during the week. I thought it was very interesting, like the thoughtfulness in, in how you guys conceived of the roots and the, the relative challenges, whether they be distance or technic. Can you talk about, you know, if someone's come coming into one of the spring trips for the Trek Travel Corona gravel tour, what would how would you describe it? [00:21:16] Rapha: Well, so, well, there was no brief in the beginning, so actually when we rode this, For the research we rode 500 kilometers in five days and it looked like a picture of a lung with all the trees of just dead ends. But once we put it all together, we decided to, okay. Day one is a bit of an introduction. Let's get you used to the surfaces, the mixed surfaces, but we're gonna keep it flat. And on the second day we're gonna add on a little bit of distance just to make sure you have endurance for grab, because it's a lot of work. You know, you're doing a lot of cadence. Mind work as well, trying to figure out what's coming up. And then day three we add technicality. Now we're having multi services, soft sand, big rocks, technical climbs, and technical descents, which, you know, your wheels dig in, you gotta react to it. And then we put all of that together for the fourth day where you. Pick up all the skills you've had and we put it all in a fourth day for you to enjoy. Yeah. Right [00:22:11] Craig Dalton: on. And can you talk about the bikes that people are offered for this [00:22:15] Rapha: trip? Okay. For this trip, we are currently running Damani 2019 s SL seven. So it has gravel wheels on it for 35 millimeter. And it's just fun. That's what it is. So it's, it's not an all out gravel. It tests your limits on this ride and you get electronic shifting. So when you really need that gear on those technical climbs, you're gonna get it. Of course you're gonna prepare for it, but you're gonna get, get the gears. Yeah. When [00:22:39] Craig Dalton: I first saw that, that was the bike spec, I mean, it almost immediately had me thinking of more the trails that we took out to the coast when the carriageway, the, the, you know, the reclaimed rail line. Right. But at the end of the day, like now, four days into this, You're pushing the limits of these bikes and it's been a hell of a lot of fun. I mean, it, I really do think it's one of, it is kind of a perfect bike for this situation because it did everything you needed to do if you were ever on the road, it felt snappy and lively and it could withstand some of the abuse we were putting it through today. [00:23:11] Rapha: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, these, these can do rock gardens and slick rock on, on good terrain. Good. These bikes are perfect around your owner. Of course, you know, you can always go wider. You can get flat bars and you go, world is your oyster. When it comes to gravel. I mean, you ask anybody what is gravel to you and they'll give you a million answers depending on who you're talking to. So every, everyone's got their preferences, and next year, you know, who knows? We have Wider checkpoints next year and it's it's gonna cater up to 50 mil tires and it's gonna be amazing. So we have sneak preview, we have a few in the warehouse at the moment in, and we can't wait for next [00:23:48] Craig Dalton: year at a checkpoint. Yeah, I think it, I mean, the checkpoint's obviously like gonna be a little bit more versatile and you can imagine the opportunity if you have a rider on day one that's seeming a little nervous. Maybe you spec it with a 40 to begin with and maybe you swap out the wheels and maybe you put him or her on 50 millimeters just to give them additional comfort. And who knows, maybe it's even for day four, we put you on 50 millimeters cuz we know it's gonna be kind of more challenging, technically speaking. [00:24:17] Rapha: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. We're gonna, as guides, you know, we're gonna test write these. We have a few in now and we're gonna have fun and check it out. So to checkpoint with all this capabil. It's gonna be more forgiving and hopefully you'll get more people coming in and not be so scared about gravel and check it out and try, try something different from [00:24:37] Craig Dalton: road riding. Yeah, for sure. As someone who didn't grow up in gerona, what have been some of your favorite things that you've discovered in town? [00:24:43] Rapha: Oh, you know what? Last night was probably one of the best nights ever because it was random. Mickey invited me down to the cast Telluride, and we did a Night Gravel, which is absolutely epic. Like, it's add just a different layer of difficulty, not seeing too far around and the group dynamic and you know, getting to know people and. Absolute blast. [00:25:04] Craig Dalton: Yeah, we were more than a little jealous that we didn't have lights with us and our legs were probably cooked enough that we shouldn't go for another eye, but we probably would've been excited to do so. Craig, maybe next time we're gonna invite you around. Exactly. Outside of Jer, since you've done Trek travel trips in a bunch of different places, what would be like one other trip that you'd recommend? Gravel or road? Either way. Oh, that's, [00:25:26] Rapha: it's like choosing between your children really. Like I adore all the trips and, but for me, this. The classic climb of the Alps. It's so stunning. It's beautiful and it's challenging. That's one of my favorite trips. And what, [00:25:39] Craig Dalton: what classic climbs, if you can recall, some of 'em are on that [00:25:43] Rapha: trip. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, we start in a place LA Luce and the first ride you're doing quarter cord Qure. Okay. And, sorry, my mistake. Yeah. Qure. And it's a, it's a first. Already you're getting like 1500 meters of elevation in a 55 kilometer ride. So it's just day one and you're already getting straight up, okay, we're here to climb and we're gonna go all out the whole week. Nice. Of course, we, we do the epic outdoors at the end trip, sort of the icing of the cake and so that's the last climb of the, [00:26:20] Craig Dalton: of the trip. Yeah. It's certainly nice for anybody who's been watching the tour to come over and knock off any one of those climbs that are bucket list. [00:26:27] Rapha: Yeah, it is, it is a backless trip. I was fortunate, fortunate enough to climb outdoors on the TDF day in 2022, and the atmosphere there is unbelievable. Just the, the crowd cheering you on it, it just gives you an extra beat and you are just hammering up the hill just because of the people cheering you on. It's absolutely epic. And then of course you get more quieter climbs. So Wears is a great climb, but like Holyland. It's not celebrated enough for just Serenity, and it's, it's still challenging. It's 21 kilometers and but it's a good, it's a good time. Yeah. It's underrated my opinion. Amazing. My favorite call. [00:27:05] Craig Dalton: Awesome. I love your passion for it, . Thank you. Cool. And I, again, I wanted to thank you for all your help this week. It's been great getting to know you and riding with you. If it's, if it's unclear in anything we've said before, Each day we've had one of these guys riding with us and so one person's in the van and we've got one person on a bike with us. So we've had good camaraderie and lots of miles to get to know one another. So thanks again for everything [00:27:28] Rapha: this week. Thank you to, to you guys. Cause without you we wouldn't be here. And it's an absolute pleasure to be guiding you around here and it's so fun just doing own gravel. Cheers. Thank you. Miqui [00:27:38] Craig Dalton: All right, sir, can I get your name and what you do for truck travel? [00:27:42] Miqui: Yeah, so my name is Mickey Mic Reta, and I'm one of the guides of the truck travel ju gravel. [00:27:50] Craig Dalton: And not only are you one of the guides, you're a local here [00:27:52] Miqui: in Gerran. Yeah, I'm local. I'm born and raised in Gerran and I'm very happy to have you guys here in Gerona. Let's, let's [00:28:01] Craig Dalton: actually start with that. You've been in Gerona your whole life as you just. What's it been like growing up here? How has the town changed and as cycling has become more of a hub, how has it been infused into Gerona culture? [00:28:14] Miqui: So I would say cycling has always been a part of Ger. I remember as a kid going to a bunch of mountain bike races with my brother, probably. I did my mountain bike race, my first one when I was like six years old. And then, After that, it's just, it's been growing like crazy and I remember probably about eight years ago as one, it just went insane. Like all the pros started moving here and somehow it created a community that is just like a magnet for all the cyclists anywhere in the world up until the point that now I would say Juran is the cycling capital of the. [00:28:55] Craig Dalton: What is it about the roads and trails around here that you think attracted them people to gerona? Obviously, you've given us a great sample these five days of what the gravel has been like, and it's been spectacular. We've touched on some of these roads. I'd just like to hear in your words, why do you think everybody's coming here? [00:29:14] Miqui: So I would say Jona has everything you are looking for in. Or anything related to cycling? The weather is good all year round. It's true we have a rainy season, which lasts for a couple weeks or a month. We have a very few weeks in summer, which is very hot in very few weeks in winter, which is very cold. But the rest of the year is incredible. It has an. Endless options of road riding. If you wanna ride to the peer, you can, it's a long ride, but you can actually do it if you wanna ride from ju to the coast and do a nice short loop, short-ish you can do it if, yeah, I would say in ju you could be riding for almost a month and you would never repeat a single ride. [00:29:58] Craig Dalton: Yeah, I believe it. I mean, just from sampling it for this week. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, I think it's great that you've. Flat options. You've got hilly options. I think today we were up on kind of the local climb you would probably do after [00:30:12] Miqui: work. Yeah. You guys were up on Los Angeleses, which. I feel like it's just incredible to have a climb like that starting at three kilometers from the center of Una and yeah, it's, it's a long climb. It's about 10 kilometers and on top you get views of the purines. You get views of the ocean, well, the sea. Yeah. I feel like we are very lucky [00:30:33] Craig Dalton: in here. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it's like probably one of those climbs that every local athlete knows their exact time to the top. Yeah. [00:30:41] Miqui: I would say that. People's fitness, you always ask, what's their time of Los Angeles ? [00:30:47] Craig Dalton: Yeah. That'll tell you if you're a compatible rider with them. So let's talk about the, the Trek Jer Gravel tour. I think you had a hand in a lot of the mapping, being a local and figuring out all the roots. How did you go about kind of, I always say whether it's an event organizer or a tour, it's almost like a love letter to your community and your trails, right? You're. You've got guests coming in from out of the country or out of the area and you wanna show them the best of the best. How did you go about thinking about the, the trails and roads we were [00:31:17] Miqui: on? The thing about this trip is that I had, I had to think that I couldn't make it super intense cuz sometimes we are taking guests at not super experienced on, on gravel riding or they just come from the. So I couldn't make a trip very technical, but as you guys saw, we have a few avid options after the look we do every day, which are a little more technical. But yeah, I feel like I, I was really happy when they actually said, Hey Mickey, do you want to give us a hand with this trip? Because, It's Una, I'm, I'm, that's where I started riding and I love grow riding, so actually my favorite ride of the trip is the one where we go to the coast. So we start in Una. It's super flat. We actually did on an incredible day. It was super sunny and we stop at the at the sea and yeah, we have lunch by the sea. Then after you guys went for a little swim and then we brought back to Una, we tried to stop at the brewer, which was unfortunately close that day. But yeah, I just think it's, I was very happy when Trek Travel said, Hey, do you wanna give us a [00:32:23] Craig Dalton: hand on this? Yeah. It's interesting. I think it's, it's sort of, you know, I imagine Trek travel draws a lot of road athletes Yeah. Onto their trips. So I think it is very approachable, but definitely had moments where you needed some skill. Not, you know, I think for more experienced gravel riders, riders, there was, there was no fear. It was just fun and exhilaration. But for a couple of the newer rider, When they were going down the looser descents, they were probably a little bit scared but exhilarated when they got to the bottom. Yeah. [00:32:54] Miqui: I don't think it's, it's nothing crazy. We haven't put anything on this trip, which would be like dangerous or scary for like total beginners. We've had intellectual, we, we classify rider in four levels, four being the, the most expert. And we've had people on this trip, they're like level twos and they've. They've loved the descents, they love the writing. Yeah. I think it's, it's got a great balance of hardcore and not hardcore, so. Yeah. [00:33:23] Craig Dalton: Yeah, it's super interesting. I mean, we, we sort of weave through the farmlands and into little villages, and it's been a real pleasure to kind of pop out of some woods and go through some, you know, 17th century sanctuary buildings and then back out onto some trails. It's, it's super fun. So, [00:33:39] Miqui: and that's the thing about Juran, right? So everyone, Toronto is for road cycling, but as a local, I'm a hundred percent sure that there is actually a lot more gravel riding than there is road riding in Toronto. Yeah, I [00:33:56] Craig Dalton: believe you. I mean, I think within four kilometers of town every day we've been on the dirt. Yeah. [00:34:01] Miqui: The extension of like farm roads and Yeah, just unpaved roads. I mean, I'm not talking about single track, I'm just talking. Real, what I like to call the real gravel, which is smooth and fast. [00:34:15] Craig Dalton: Yeah. You were telling me about that railroad line that used to go from the Yeah. The sea to the purities, and now it's all a gravel road. Yeah, [00:34:23] Miqui: so I would say it's about 50 years ago when they removed the, the train line, the, well, the railway, which there was a train that went from sun follow g. Which is one of the towns on the coast. And then it run all the way up to Ola and now yeah, they just remove the whole railway and they lay gravel on it and it's just an incredible, it's, it's actually a bike path, so on the weekend it's gonna be full of kids on bikes and yeah, the extension to the Villa Verde, which that it's included on the Villa Verde, is just incredible. How [00:35:02] Craig Dalton: many kilometers do you think that that trail. It's over a hundred kilometers. That's amazing. I mean, to be able to cruise, I mean, and relatively flat presumably, until it gets to the purity side. Yeah. It's [00:35:14] Miqui: totally flat. But since a train used to Yeah. Be on it, so they made sure it was super flat [00:35:20] Craig Dalton: for it. Yeah. Miles and miles and miles. Going back to the community in Ger, what are some of your favorite kind of, if a cyclist is coming to town, what are some of the go-to businesses they should [00:35:30] Miqui: visit? So if a cyclist comes in, ger, I would say most people, they would come here for about at least a week. So you're gonna have time to visit all of them, which they are all a hundred percent worth visiting. But there is a couple of places. You should a hundred percent go see if you're here for a short period of time. One of them being a coffee shop called La Fabrica, which it's only open in the mornings and lunch, so it's, it's the perfect place to brunch. Yeah. [00:36:05] Craig Dalton: Quick aside, I literally ran into someone I know, know from the United States today, and they told us to go have brunch at [00:36:13] Miqui: Left Africa Till Africa is owned by Christian Mayer and Amber Mayer. He was, well, he's a, he's a former, Yeah, they were the pioneers in Una, so they were the first ones to open a coffee shop, only focused for cyclist, of course, for everyone. And now it has become like a super great, like it's, it's a tourist attraction right now, but that's what kind of triggered the whole cycling movement in Joran. Okay. [00:36:41] Craig Dalton: So La Africa, and what's the [00:36:42] Miqui: second one? La Africa. They also have another coffee shop, which is only for. Which LA Fabric is more like brunch and food. The other coffee shop is called Espresso Mafia, which is one meal walking from La Fabrica, and that's basically where Christian roast the coffee and then you can drink it at Espresso Mafia. And then another place you should go visit in general, well, mid January. Trek and track travel. It's opening the first track store in the world, which is gonna have truck travel inside of it. And with a rental fleet, we are going to be the biggest, as in space, we're gonna have the biggest bike shop in ju, which it's pretty exciting. [00:37:29] Craig Dalton: Yeah, that's really exciting. And then finally, what's one sort of cultural place within Jerron that a tourist should visit? [00:37:36] Miqui: The whole old town itself. If you go to Juna, I highly recommend getting a walking tour of the Old Town because you're really gonna see what our culture is here and how it was in the past. And everything around the old town is just, it's just incredible. [00:37:55] Craig Dalton: Yeah. That's fun. You recommended we go up onto the wall for sunset. Yeah. And we've, we missed it the first night. The second night we, we made it up. We may have had to like randomly climb over a fence to make it there in time because we couldn't find the way up. But we got there and it was spectacular with view. Is that the purities that you're looking at out there? Yeah. You [00:38:14] Miqui: get to see Purees, you get to see a bunch of things and yeah, there is a restaurant called Aro. Which is in one of the steps. Well, there's like, Juna has 200 million cathedrals, but in one of them. On the stairs there is a restaurant called , which they actually film Game of Thrones there. And the terrace of the restaurant, it's actually on a little like flat section it has on those stairs. And I think it's a really cool location. [00:38:45] Craig Dalton: That's super. Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for all the hospitality this week. It's been great to getting to know you and the local terrain [00:38:55] Miqui: here. Yeah. Thank you guys for coming. Girona Cycling Friends [00:38:57] Andrew - RocaCorba: All right. Can I let me get your name and let me know where we're at. What's this beautiful place? So my name is Edward Green. I'm the guest, the general manager slash I don't know what, at Rocka Culpa cycling. So we are a cycling tourism business just outside of Jer Corona in a town called Bans. We are based on a 17th century Catalan estate, or Maia as it is in Catalan. And we are basically trying to be a boutique hotel with some villas attached, which is exclusively for cyclists, road, gravel, mountain. Whatever you enjoy on two wheels is, is what we wanna do. And how far away from Ger are we? So we are currently 18 kilometers from Gerona, or 10 or 11 miles depending. Country. And about a 30 to 45 minute ride depending on, on how you get to us. Can you describe where we are in, in the villa right now? So we're downstairs basically in what used to be the old like area for the animals. So we've got some troughs around us, but we've done huge renovations to basically create our cycling dungeon down here. So we've got beautiful old vaulted Catalan ceiling. Rustic concrete floors, beautiful stone work, and then cycling history all around us with some beautiful frames. Cycling jerseys. Good coffee from the rocket espresso machine. Everything you can need for a good cycling stay. And what time of year is best to come here? Pretty much all, all year. To be honest. I don't think there's necessarily a bad month anymore, like December and Januarys tends to be quite quiet, but we see strong gravel riding in October, November, and the rest of the year is a lot of road riding. Summer is quite warm, so unless you like waking up early, probably avoid summer a little bit. But like June and September, October, probably buffer the. I'll note when you said strong gravel riding, you looked right at exactly a hundred percent. You are the epitome of what we see in November. . Tell us a little bit about the rest of the. So we are on 37 hectares and it's basically an old, what was an old family estate of the Campier family. The estate dates back to the 17th century, so 1673, and it was with the same family until 2018 when we took it over to create. What we want to create is basically cycling paradise all you need in one place. Out in the countryside, but close to Gerrin. And how many rooms do you have available here? So currently we're at eight rooms, but we'll be at 13 by April next year. So we're currently in the process literally starting today, which is very exciting of putting in five beautiful unsweet rooms in this main can poly manor house, partially they'll have views over down towards the lake onto some vineyards, but also into the courtyard and just generally over the rolling hills of, of Jerome. And tell us a little bit about the village. So just on our doorstep, we have the town of Olas which has a beautiful lake in it. It's where they had the rowing for the 92 Barcelona Olympic. It's a great place for like active people, for families, et cetera. But there's a lot of rowing. A lot of of the British university teams come out and train here. A lot of the national teams come and train as well, but generally just a fantastic place to be. Good quality of life and just down to earth and authentic. Amazing. And how do people find out about staying here? So if you have a look on Rocka coba cycling.cc, you'll find us and you can kind of do anything from there. Or if you are enjoy climbing, just Google Rocka Coba, you'll find the climb, and then you'll find us and the clothing. Amazing. Thank you. Perfect. That was great. [00:42:14] Oscar - Castilli: Okay. Can I get your name? Hi, my name is Oscar. And Oscar. Where are we standing today? Well, today we are in the, the first flag shipper store in the, in the war from Costelli here in Una. And what's the plan for the store? What are you trying to do with the community here? Well, una, you know, is the Jamaica for for European cyclists, I think all over the world. So, right now Castelli store, it's coming to. The big cycling club in Giona and well, why not in Spain? Nice. And we, we rolled by here last night and there was a big group ride going out on the gravel. Yeah. We have almost 40 people doing the full moon ride. It was amazing. So always we keep a surprise for all the riders. We stop in a food truck in the middle of the forest with fire. Some dinner and and beer. So it was super fun. That's amazing. And if someone's coming to Jerone to, to visit, do you have a calendar of events that they can look at? Yeah, they can, they can follow us on our Instagram and yeah, you can check. So, but every week we have a ride, so, and 2023, especially now it's coming a low season for the weather, but from February. So it's coming. A lot of events. Yeah. Amazing. Thanks Oscar, and congratulations on opening the new Castelli store. Yeah, big pleasure. Thanks for coming. [00:43:30] Mattias - Rococorba Clothing: All right. Right. Can you tell me your name and your shop? Mattias from Roco, COBA Clothing, Giron Mattias. Tell us a little bit about the brand. Yeah, it's a brand. It started in 2017 in the top of the mountain of Roco Coba. It's a very famous climb here in Giron, and I decided to, to put a food truck up there and to start at the same time closing brand called Roca corba. And yes, five years. Later. I just opened a new shop in GI selling all my stuff, selling online, gold wide, and really happy too. Have, what are some of the products that you sell? I sell Jersey t-shirts, shorts accessories, bags, Macs, beat ons. A lot of things sucks. Yeah. Amazing. These jerseys I see on the wall are beautiful, very colorful, very expressive. What inspires you and the, the designs? Yeah. Yeah. Right now I have like more or less 50, 60 different designs and I inspir it from everywhere. My slogan is cycling apparel inspired by the rob because we have so many different landscapes or different places and always I, I have inspired inspiration in the. In our region. Yeah. And when is the shop opening up? I hope next Thursday it will be open. Now it's ready and I have to do some things, little things, but next Thursday, big opening here in J in the center. Amazing. I'm excited. We got a preview. We are able to pick up some of your lovely clothing. You said you, you're available worldwide. Where can people find you on the. Yeah, we can find in ro.com. We have online shop with all the products and we we ship worldwide. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure, . [00:45:22] Craig Dalton: So that's going to do it for this first international version of the gravel ride podcast. I've been talking and dreaming about international gravel travel for some time. So I was super excited to have this opportunity with track travel. To explore Durona with their Gravel cycling tour. It was amazing trip. As I said before, I highly encourage you to check it out. As Raffa mentioned. They're unveiling a whole new series of gravel adventures for 2023. So they're really leaning into this gravel travel concept. What I loved about it was that unlike a gravel event where you might be focused on. Simply one ride when you visit somewhere amazing. Here. We were able to focus on riding every single day and there was no one ride that we needed to save ourselves for to get across the finish line. It was really about. Exploring as much as our legs could handle. I wasn't as fit as I had normally been when I've gone over to Europe in the, in the past, but it was still an amazing trip, still an amazing experience that I highly, highly recommend. If you're interested in connecting and learning more about the trip, please visit truck travel.com. If you're interested in pinging me, please visit the ridership's that's www.theridership.com. If you're able to support the show, please visit buy me a coffee.com/the gravel ride or ratings and reviews are hugely appreciated. Until next time here's to finding some dirt under your wheels

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is "Augmented Lean Prelaunch." Our guest is Natan Linder (https://www.linkedin.com/in/linder/), in conversation with host, Trond Arne Undheim. In this conversation, we talk about the background of our co-authored book, Augmented Lean (https://www.amazon.com/Augmented-Lean-Human-Centric-Framework-Operations/dp/1119906008), a human-centric framework for managing frontline operations, why we wrote it, what the process has been like, the essence of the Augmented Lean framework, and the main lessons of this book for C-level executives across industry. If you like this show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/). If you like this episode, you might also like Episode 96 on The People Side of Lean with Professor Jeff Liker (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/96). Augmented is a podcast for industry leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim (https://trondundheim.com/) and presented by Tulip (https://tulip.co/). Follow the podcast on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/75424477/). Trond's Takeaway: Industrial revolutions are rarely chronicled as they are happening, but this industrial revolution will be. There is an ongoing shift in the way technology and workforce combine to produce industrial change, and it is happening now. We are lucky to be situated in the middle of it. And I personally feel fortunate that I was brought along for the ride. It has been a life-changing experience to realize the power and impact of living through a shifting logic of manufacturing and, perhaps more importantly, to realize that as excited as we can be about automation, an augmented workforce represents the best combination of the most important technology we have which is human workers themselves with the second best machines that humans create. The fact that making humans and machines work together is no trivial task has been pointed out before but documenting what happens when it does go well in the biggest industrial companies on the planet feels like a story that deserves to be told. Transcript: TROND: Welcome to another episode of the Augmented Podcast. Augmented brings industrial conversations that matter, serving up the most relevant conversations on industrial tech. Our vision is a world where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is Augmented Lean Prelaunch. Our guest is Natan Linder, in conversation with myself, Trond Arne Undheim. In this conversation, we talk about the background of our co-authored book, Augmented Lean, a human-centric framework for managing frontline operations, why we wrote it, what the process has been like, the essence of the Augmented Lean framework, and the main lessons of this book for C-level executives across industry. Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, for process engineers, and for shop floor operators hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim and presented by Tulip. Natan, good to have you in the studio. How are you today? NATAN: I'm great. How are you? It's been a minute. TROND: It's been a little minute for us. It's crazy with book launches. It takes a little out of you. And you are running a company in addition to that, so you had some other things on your plate too. NATAN: Yep, running a company and having a book coming is an, I don't know if an artifact, but definitely, company is a lot about changing the status quo. And the book tries to capture a movement. So I think they go along nicely. TROND: Yeah, Natan. And I wanted to bring us in a little bit and converse about why this book was written. Certainly, that's not my benefit. You brought it up to me. But what were we thinking about when writing this book? So I want to bring it back to way before I came into the picture with the book because it was your idea to write a book. What was on your mind? What were the main reasons that you thought I really want to write a book? NATAN: When I was coming up as an engineer...and my background, I'm not a pure manufacturing production type engineer, but I've been around it my entire career just because of the type of products that I've been involved with whether it's mobile phones, or robots of all sorts, 3D printers. So you get to spend a lot of time in these operational environments, shop floors, machine shops, and the like. And when we started working on Tulip, it was pretty clear pretty quickly that there's a moment that is emerging in operations that no one has captured the story. And this is back even; I don't know, maybe five or six years ago. We are maybe one or two years old, and I'm already starting to think about this post-lean, or classical lean movement that I'm sure is happening. That really is the genesis of the book in the early, early days. And fast forward to when we started talking, I think we got Tulip off the ground. But really, that was a platform to meet all those different people who helped operations transform digitally, whether it's all sorts of consultants, or academics who are researching operations, or business leaders, you know, tons of factory managers and the engineers that work with them, and the executive, so a whole bunch of people. And they're all basically talking about the same thing and the deficiencies in lean, the complexity of technology, and how they're trying to change, and it is so difficult. So I think that's a good description of the landscape before diving in to try and capture what the book attempts to capture. TROND: Yeah, Natan, I remember some of our early discussions. And we were dancing around various concepts because clearly, lean is a very broad perspective in industrial manufacturing focused on reducing waste and many other things. It's a broad concept that people put a lot of different things into. But I remember as you and I were thinking about how to describe this new phenomenon that we do describe in the book, we were thinking a little bit that a lot of these new influences come from the digital sphere. So there's also this term agile. There are some people who say, well, you know, let's just replace lean because it's an outdated paradigm. And I remember you were quite adamantly arguing that that's not the case. And this goes a little bit to the message in our book. We are in no way really saying that lean isn't relevant anymore. NATAN: On the contrary. TROND: Tell me a little bit about that. NATAN: A really simple way I think to frame it is that whether you're practicing lean formally or some variant of it, of lean, or Six Sigma, or some program that formalizes continuous improvement in your operation...and we're talking about frontline operations. We're talking about factories, and labs, and warehouses, and places like that. You are practicing lean because this is how the world..., even if you're not doing it formally; otherwise, you're not competitive. Even if you're in a bank or a hospital, you might be practicing lean. And that's where agile comes to the picture, and it was adopted widely by operations practice in general and pushed into areas that are not pure manufacturing. So, in a way, lean is a reality. Some organizations are more formal about it, some are less, but definitely, they're doing it. Here's the issue, and this is the main thesis of the book. When lean came about...and we know the catalyzing text. We know the teaching of Taiichi Ohno. We know about The Goal. We know about The Machine That Changed the World. And those are seminal texts that everybody reads. And we know about Juran and lots of great thinkers who thought about operations as a data-driven game, some from the school of thought of quality, some from pure operation research, some from how do you put emphasis on classic just-in-time, Kanban, Kaizen, all those continuous improvement things. But at the end of the day, all of that thinking, which still holds true, was not done when digital was top of mind, where data is everywhere, where people need to live in such data ecology. It was done, so to speak, in analog times. And it doesn't mean that the principles are wrong, but it doesn't mean they don't need to get augmented. And this is maybe the first time where this idea of augmentation, which, to me, augmentation is always about...I always think about augmentation from a people's perspective or an org perspective. It's just a collective of people. That's where it starts, and that's where we had something to say. So that's one aspect to think about. The second big one is actually very simple. It's kind of like; we heard ten years of industry 4.0 is going to change everything, and all we got is this lousy OEE graph. And that's kind of like a little tongue-in-cheek on we were promised flying cars, but we only got 140 characters. I mean, come on, stop talking about industry 4.0. It's like, who cares? If the tools and digital techniques and what have you is not adopted by the people actually doing the work, that then collectively, one engineer, another engineer, another operator, a team lead, the quality lead, and so on come together to transform their org, if that's not happening, then that's not sustainable transformation, and it's not very relevant. Again, augmentation. TROND: Right. And I think, Natan, that's where maybe some people are surprised when they get into this book. Because it would be almost tempting to dismiss us as traditionalists in the sense that we are not really going whole hog into describing digital as in and of itself, the core of this principle. So there is a little bit of a critique of agile as an idea that agile or using that as a kind of a description for all digital or digital, right? That digital doesn't change everything. And I guess I wanted to reflect a little bit on that aspect because I know that you, as a business leader now hiring a lot of people, we are spending a lot of energy bringing these two perspectives together, and it's not very obvious. You can't just take a digital person who is completely digital native and say, "Welcome to the factory; just do what you do. And because you do things better than everyone else, we are now going to adapt these factories." How do you think about that? In factories, you could conceive it as the IT versus OT, so operational technologists versus information technologists and the various infrastructures that are quite different when those two things come into play. NATAN: So my frame of reference is the most value...and it's a very engineery frame of reference because I'm an engineer at the end of the day. It's like, the most value gets unleashed when people truly change how they work and adopt a tool, and that's true for operations and manufacturing. But, by the way, it's also true for the greater business perspective. And a lot of people, when I talk to them about Augmented Lean, really take us to the realms of what is the future of work, and I think it's very timely. We're kind of in a post-COVID reality. Working remote has changed many things, working with data. Big ideas like citizen development, you hear them all over the place. And use of advanced platforms like the no-code/low-code that allow people to create software without being software engineers become a reality. So there's a much broader thing here. But if I focus for a second on what you're asking, the way I see it is when people truly change how they work, it means that they believe, and that belief translates into action, that the tool that they're using is the best way to do something. And they become dependent and empowered by it at the same time because they're not willing to go back to a state where they're not thinking and working with data, or back to the clipboard, or back to being dependent on an IT department or a service provider to give them some technical solution. People have become more self-sufficient. And it turns out that if you do that, and sometimes people would refer to that as you let people hack or go nuts in the factory floor or in whatever operational environment, that could be a concern to people, and that's a fair observation for sure. And that's where when you look at the book, when we were kind of constructing the framework we call Leader HG where HG stands for hack and govern... We are used to Silicon Valley startups being like, oh yeah, you all just need to hack. And that's a very glorious thing, and everybody understands that. And they want them to hack when they are a 50,000-person software company. They're still hacking, but they're doing it in a much more structured way, in a much more measured way. So even in hacking, there's governance. And in operational environment, governance is equally important, if not more, because you're making real things. That is something we've observed very empirically. Talking to a lot of people seeing what they do, it's like, yeah, we want the best ideas from people. How do we get it? What do we do? We tried this approach, that approach. And I think we were sometimes very lucky to be observers to this phenomena and just captured it. TROND: Yeah. And I wanted to speak to that a little bit. I want to thank you, actually, for bringing me into this project because you and I met at MIT but from different vantage points. I was working at Startup Exchange working with a bunch of very, very excellent MIT startups in all different domains, and you were an entrepreneur of several companies. But my background is more on the science and technology studies but also a management perspective on this. But I remember one of the things you said early on to me was, "I want to bring you in on this project, but don't just be one of those that stays at the surface of this and just has like a management perspective and writes future of work perspectives but from like a bird's eye view. Come in here and really learn and go into the trenches." And I want to thank you for that because you're right about many things. This one you were very right about. And this clearly, for me, became a true research project in that I have spent two years on this project, a lot of them in venues and factory floors, and discussing with people really at the ground level. And for me, it was really a foundational experience. I've read about many things, but my understanding of manufacturing, frankly, was lacking. And you could have told me as much, but I actually, frankly, didn't realize how little I knew about all of the factors that go into manufacturing. I had completely underestimated the field. What do you say to that? NATAN: It's interesting because I feel like the last two years, everything I think I know [laughs], then I found out that I don't know enough. It just kind of motivates you to do more work to figure out things because it's such a broad field, and it gets very, very specific. Just listening to your reflection on the past couple of years, the reality is that there is a gap in the popular understanding of what operations and manufacturing is all about. People think that stuff comes from some amorphous factory or machine that just makes the things. And they usually don't see, you know, we have those saying, like, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, which is obviously very graphic. But you also don't see how the car is made unless you're a nerd of those things and watch those shows like how things are made, but most people just don't. And they don't appreciate the complexity and what goes into it and how much technology and how much operation process it consumes. And as a society and as a set of collective economies and supply chains, it is so paramount to what's actually happening. Just take things like sustainability or what happens with our planet. If we don't learn to manufacture things better and more efficiently with less people because we don't have enough people in operations, for example, our economies will start to crumble. And if we don't do it in a way that is not just sustainability from the perspective of saving the planet, also that, but if we don't become more efficient in our supply chains, then businesses will crumble because they can't supply their customers with the product that they need. And this thing is never-ending because products have life cycles. Factories have life cycles. And the human species, that's what we do; we take technology, and then we turn it into products, and we mass produce it. That's part of how we survive. What we need is we increase awareness to this. And I think The Machine That Changed the World and Toyota Production System unveiled those concepts that you need to eliminate waste to build better organizations, to build a better product, to have happier customers; there's something really fundamental there that did not change. The only thing that changed is that now we're doing it in a reality where the technology is out there; data is out there. And to wield it is difficult, and there is no escape from putting the people who do the work in the center. And to me, if we are capable of doing that, the impact of this is recharging or rebooting lean in the classic sense for the next three decades. And that's my personal hope for this book and the message we're hoping to bring in. We would love people to join that call and fly that flag. TROND: Yeah. I wanted to take us now, Natan, to this discussion. A lot of people are saying, "Oh, you got to market manufacturing better, and then people will come to this area because there are interesting things to do there." But more broadly, if we think about our book and why people should read that, my first reflection is building on what I said earlier that I didn't realize not just the complexity of manufacturing but how interesting it was. My take after two years of studying this is actually that there's no need to market it better because it is so interesting and fundamental for the economy that the marketing job, I think, essentially has already been done. And it's just there's a lag in the system for new employees, new talent. And society overall realizes how fundamentally it is shifting and reconfiguring our society. But I guess I want to ask you more. What is the reason a C-level executive, whether they work in manufacturing, in some industrial company, or really, if they work in any company that is interested in what technology and manufacturing is doing to their business reality...how they can implement some of those ideas in their business. What would you say to them? I mean, is our book relevant to a business leader in any Fortune 500? Or would you say that our messages are kind of confined to an industrial setting? NATAN: I think it applies to all of them. And the reason is that these types of roles that you're describing, folks will best be served if they learn from other people's experience. And what we tried to do in the book is to bring almost an unfiltered version of the stories of their peers across various industries, from medical devices, to pharmaceuticals, to classic discrete manufacturing, all sorts of industries. And they're all struggling with the same kind of stuff. And so those stories are meaningful and can contextualize the thinking of what those C-levels are actually trying to cope with. What they're really trying to do, everybody, I'd say, is why do people think about and talk about those big terms of digital transformation? It's really because they want to make sure their companies don't stay behind or, in other words, stay competitive. This stuff is an imperative for organizations that have real operations that span digital and physical, and I don't know many that don't. Of course, there are some service industries that don't have anything but still have operations. You can't avoid handling the subject and what it entails. It entails training your people differently. It entails defining technology stacks. It entails connecting using various technologies, protocols, what have you, across organizations and finding value in this data so you can make good decisions on how you run your billing cycles, or how you order your stock to build, or how you ship your end product and everything in between. And I don't think that the book is groundbreaking in the sense that we're the first people who ever thought about it. But I think if we've done anything, is we've observed long and hard. And we've listened very carefully to what people are telling us that they did, and they struggled. And it's a timely book. And maybe in a decade, it's a classic, and, wow, these are good stories. And it's like reading about the first people booting up mainframes or PCs. And if that happens, I'm actually pretty happy. But you know why I would be happy? Trond, let me tell you something, it's because technology, like, the human needs change much slower than how technology evolves and gets deployed, but still, good technological-driven transformation take a long time. TROND: That's exactly what I was going to say is that the future is an interesting concept because what's tomorrow to some people is today for others. So you say we're not writing about something that's so new or unique but to industry overall and to some manufacturers, what we're writing about is the future because they haven't implemented it yet. To some of Tulip customers, to some of the great companies that we have researched in the book, whether they be J&J, Stanley Black & Decker, DMG MORI, a lot of other companies in medical device side, and also smaller and medium-sized companies, even some startups that are implementing some the Augmented Lean principles, to them, this is of course not the future. And maybe, you know, we're not saying that leaders who try to implement Augmented Lean need to change everything around; we're saying common sense things. It's just that; clearly, all of industry is not human-centric, right? There are parts of industry where you adjust 80% to your machines, and you make economic decisions purely based on the infrastructure efficiency improvements you're trying to make. I guess what we're saying is the innovation argument; people are the most innovative, and you have to restructure around your workforce, even if you are making machine and robot investments. NATAN: Yeah, automation would always require strong reasons to automate that, you know, some of them are complexity, safety risk, things like that or throughput to like how much product do you need and that kind of stuff. But even if you have the best automation, you typically have people around it, and nothing is just only machine-driven or only human-driven. The reality is that most stuff gets made through a combination of several manufacturing technologies working in unison with people at the beginning, middle-end doing things from the planning, to running automation setups and machinery, to taking the output, doing assembly, doing tests, audits and checks, and packaging, and logistics, and at the end of the day, human-intensive type of operation in most of the areas we roam, at least. And as such, to think that in this day and age you don't focus on people is to me nuts when all those people carry a supercomputer called a smartphone in their hand and have uber-connected homes with a million CPUs streaming all this data, and we call that media, whatever. And they're so accustomed to interfacing to their world and their businesses through that. And you and I are Gen Xers, and let's just think about the generation that comes after us and after us. These are digital natives par excellence. They expect as much, and organizations that don't do that, whether they choose the Augmented Lean approach or any other approach, they're just not going to have employees. That's a little bit of a problem. TROND: Yeah. But it's important what you're saying in one respect which is there are many reasons to dismiss a book, a management book, a technology book. And one could be like; all these people are just that. And one, I guess, gut reaction when people look at the title or perhaps hear some of the things that you and I are saying is that, oh, these people are Luddites; they're against technology. But I wanted to, certainly on my end, just to state very clearly there's nothing in our book that's against technology. We're simply saying to optimize for the simplest technology, that is, you know, to our great inspiration here, who was a big inspiration, I know, for you and now for me because you brought her into my sphere. Pattie Maes' perspective from MIT on Fluid Interfaces and the importance, you know, no matter what advanced technology you're going to bring into whatever context, if that context of the technology, the use interface is not a fluid interface, you are simply doing yourself a disservice. You could have bought a $1 million CNC machine or maybe a $10 million whatever robot, but it has to work in your own organization, and this is just so important. So we're not against technologies. We're just saying these investments will be made. But you have to think about other things as you're making those investments. So I just wanted to make that point and hear your comment to that. NATAN: Yeah, look, I have a slightly...I guess a complementary angle to this is like when you think about it; I think that technologically democratized organizations in the day and age we living in the future. And what makes, I think, Augmented Lean span beyond the frontline operation perspective is because it tells a story of democratizing operation where fundamentally before lean...and we're talking about the mass production era. Mass production came from a military structure, you know, divisions, and battalions, and commanders, and ranks, and all that kind of stuff. Enters lean, and democratization starts. Forget technology. It starts because suddenly everybody on the Gemba Walk, you know, the walk where they have an equal voice to find problems on the shop floor, and list them up, and think about a solution, everybody has a voice. So these are fundamental things that shifted things like how you manage your warehouse, or how you do just-in-time, or how you are supposed to do continuous improvement. But you have to collect data to prove that this improvement is actually worthwhile doing. And this is exactly what agile took, and this is exactly the transition you saw in, well, because the market moves so fast and the internet is here, and clouds are real, why don't we not spend two years in a bunker doing waterfall software development? And, boom, we're now talking sprints and all that kind of stuff. And no one is even questioning that. And that's a lean approach we call agile, lean approach to how you do software development. And what I'm trying to say is, de facto, when I run a day in a company, like, I talk to my peers, and my leaders, and folks I work with on a daily basis. Everybody talks, yeah, we're on an operation sprint. We are on a marketing sprint. We are on a whatever sprint. What is that? That is a democratized organization with specific leaders owning functions and owning interfaces using tech stacks all over the place: the marketing stack, the sales stack, the HR stack, whatever. And where we roam also, we're part of the operational or OT stack, and that's what they're doing. And all this book is doing is saying, like, hey, it's actually happening. Let's give this a name. Let's put the beacon on this. Let's try and find what's the commonalities. Let's get the best stories that share the successes and the failures. We have plenty of failures there in the book that teach you something at this moment in time and set up the next decade. This next decade to me, is seminal. It's not very different to when technologies reached maturity, like clouds and what have you. 10, 15 years ago, you're talking about this thing, cloud, some people will go like, "What cloud? What are you talking about?" That's done. That's the disappearing edge of technology. Now we say AI and all that kind of stuff. And then the problem gets solved and disappearing, you know, it's like, so that's going to happen. I just think we gave it a good name and a good description at this point in time. TROND: Natan, I love the...personally, I'm a runner. I love the metaphor of a sprint, and for a couple of reasons, not just because I know what a sprint is and what it takes. But I love the fact that a sprint in a management context refers to sprinting partly together because it's a team-based effort. So some people need to sprint a little faster in certain aspects of that team process in order to deliver things that the team needs. But rounding up and thinking about how people can sprint with us, Natan, how should people think about learning more? So, obviously, reading the book. It's available on every bookstore, and Wiley published it, and it should be everywhere. There's even an e-book. But beyond that, what are your thoughts about how people can get in touch, join the movement, join the sprint of thinking about Augmented Lean? Which by the way, there is no one Augmented Lean principle. It's a menu of choices. There are ways that you can engage. There are ways you can implement it. It's not like a one, three-step process that everybody has to do. But there are ways that people can connect. We have this Augmented Podcast. What are your thoughts if people are gelling with this message? NATAN: I can talk about my heart's desire, okay, and my hallucination around this. And this is like, really, kind of living the dream and making sure democratization continues. If we are successful, at the moment, we are starting a movement. And there are millions of people who self-identify as lean Six Sigma quality professionals out there that know exactly what we're talking about viscerally. They spend their days trying to solve problems like that. They pore over data; they train people. They are the people creating the reports and trying to kind of help their organization take another step and another step in the never-ending journey of continuous improvement. We need to work on a much larger manifesto for Augmented Lean, and this is not for you and me; this is for a greater community to come together. So my recommendation is if you dig this and this is something you want to do, you know where to find us; go to augmentedlean.com. There's a contact email, our contact information. And I guess we can share it for that purpose somewhere in Augmented Podcast or our various other channels. And tell us what you think. And just join us. We're not sure exactly...we're starting from the excitement around launching the book with our close network of partners, and friends, and customers, and collaborators, and all our network. And it's a very exciting moment for us. But we're going to open it up, and it's going to be in the book tour, and it's going to be in various conferences. And the first law of creating a movement is show up. So I'm calling everybody to show up if you're okay with lean and the way it's going so far for you and Six Sigma. But if you feel the need to change and observed or experienced some of the stuff we're talking about in Augmented Lean, come tell us about it, and let's shape it up and get people together. The internet is the best tool on the planet to do that, and we'll get it done. Stay safe. TROND: Right. So, on that note, I want to round us off. I think that it should at least be clear from this conversation that both of us strongly feel that there are greater things ahead for industry and that manufacturing is not just a relevant piece of society, but there are things happening here that are coalescing that we are describing in the book, but that will happen independently of us and the very few examples we were able to put into the book. And folks that are interested in exploring what that means for them as individuals, as knowledge workers in the factory floor, or as executives who just want to be inspired the way people were inspired by the Toyota lean movement or other movements, they should come and contact us. Natan, thanks for spending the time today. NATAN: Yeah. Thanks, Trond. Always a pleasure. Will see you very soon. TROND: You have now just listened to another episode of the Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was Augmented Lean Prelaunch. Our guest was Natan Linder, in conversation with myself, Trond Arne Undheim. In this conversation, we talked about why we wrote a book and why C-level executives should read it. My takeaway is that industrial revolutions are rarely chronicled as they are happening, but this industrial revolution will be. There is an ongoing shift in the way technology and workforce combine to produce industrial change, and it is happening now. We are lucky to be situated in the middle of it. And I personally feel fortunate that I was brought along for the ride. It has been a life-changing experience to realize the power and impact of living through a shifting logic of manufacturing and, perhaps more importantly, to realize that as excited as we can be about automation, an augmented workforce represents the best combination of the most important technology we have which is human workers themselves with the second best machines that humans create. The fact that making humans and machines work together is no trivial task has been pointed out before but documenting what happens when it does go well in the biggest industrial companies on the planet feels like a story that deserves to be told. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, please subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co. And if you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 96 on The People Side of Lean with Professor Jeff Liker, who wrote the best-selling book, The Toyota Way. Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in these or in other episodes, and if so, do let us know by messaging us because we would love to share your thoughts with other listeners. The Augmented Podcast is created in association with Tulip, the frontline operation platform that connects the people, machines, devices, and systems used in a production and logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and is empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. You could find Tulip at tulip.co. Augmented — industrial conversations that matter. See you next time. Special Guest: Natan Linder.