Podcast appearances and mentions of tom root

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.Transcript: ​Agile.FM radio for the agile community. [00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Welcome to another episode of Agile FM in the Agile Kata Series here. Today I have two authors. I have an author on the call and I have a character. I have two characters from a book and a comic illustration, which is called Engaging the Team at Zingerman's Mail Order. That is Betty Gratopp and Jeffrey Liker.Thank you for joining me here today. [00:00:34] Betty Gratopp: Thank you for having me. [00:00:37] Joe Krebs: All right. So this is a book, the it's a comic. And this book was published in 2023. And it's really a book that illustrates the journey from, in, in terms of Kata up at Zingerman's mail order. And before we talk a little bit about the lean journey, What is Zingerman?Zingerman, I have visited Zingerman in Ann Arbor myself. It's a mail order business of a a company that is shipping the most wonderful cheeses and breads. I can smell it in the in the warehouse. And but there's much, much more to it. Betty, what is the size? What's the scope of Zingerman's?What do listeners have to picture? Not familiar necessarily with the service? What do you guys do and how big is the operation? [00:01:20] Betty Gratopp: Oh, excellent. That's a great question. We are a warehouse and a call center. The warehouse employs approximately 55 people year round, and then we grow to a peak of about 400.Warehouse staff people during our Christmas holiday at the service center. I would say is about 20,25 people and they have, they experienced the same growth during that peak season. [00:01:45] Joe Krebs: Yeah, excellent. In the comic, you are a warehouse manager. [00:01:49] Betty Gratopp: Yes, I am one of three warehouse managers that manage the warehouse and have been the three warehouse managers that have taken us through our lean journey and our transformation to trying to be better scientific thinkers.[00:02:05] Joe Krebs: And as a character, you were visualized by the illustrator, Jasmine Morales, who is visualized this entire comic, the book, and she did a really good job knowing you obviously listeners cannot see you right now, but this picture is really nice. So is. Jeffrey as a character also drawn in the in the comic [00:02:24] Jeffrey Liker: and Skinnier and better looking in the comic.[00:02:28] Joe Krebs: And Jeffrey, I do have to mention the other two authors on the book. That's Eduardo Lander and Tom Root, which are not on the podcast today. But we are talking about this book, the three of us. More importantly than the book itself, obviously describes a story that describes a bumpy story of introducing lean and Kata within a Zingermanwhen did your journey start? What was the situation like that led to it? And obviously the origin of the book, that's where everything started, basically. [00:03:03] Betty Gratopp: Yes. I think back to 2003 when our business was growing in double digits. So we were a bunch of. Intended foodies who started this business and then had to get better at process because we weren't doing very well.We were not schooled or learned in anything that had to do with process. That was the environment. So we didn't know how many people to hire. We didn't know how much space we needed. We didn't know how many sales we could take. Really basic things about our business were not clear to us. [00:03:40] Joe Krebs: Sounds like a startup kind of environment.Like everybody who has worked or seen startups, it sounds very typical. Doesn't it? [00:03:47] Betty Gratopp: Oh yeah. Everybody did everything. Yeah. [00:03:51] Joe Krebs: Yeah. And you guys had some form of a warehouse. Is it the same warehouse as it is, or did you guys relocate it over the years? Was there also like growth or. [00:04:00] Betty Gratopp: One of the major motivations to moving to a more, more scientific thinking and lean lean process was the fact that we were moving our operation every two years.So I was hired in 97. I think we moved twice in four years. And then that fifth year or so is about when we started to think about, we had to find a different way. It was too costly. Ten months of the year, our building was way too large for what we needed it to be. Two months of the year, it was way too small for what we wanted it to be.And so we had to make a commitment to stay in the building that we were, and we had to figure out how that was going to happen. At that time. My boss, one of the managing partners here was going to the University of Michigan and met a gentleman who you already mentioned, Eduardo Landers, one of the authors of the book, and they were going to U of M together, and that's how that connection was made.I don't remember actually whether we met Jeff first or Eduardo. [00:04:57] Jeffrey Liker: I don't remember either, but I did get contacted by Tom Root, and he explained that there were Kept on growing out of their quarters and they understood that lean would help you save space and use space more efficiently. And he said, you know, do you think that it might help us in our journey?And at the same time, Eduardo was my doctoral student and he was trying to define a dissertation topic. And his interest was in lean and a high variability business, but he couldn't find any that. I had implemented lean as a case study. So this came along and I said Eduardo Maybe you're not gonna be able to find a case study to study and maybe you're gonna have to create your own and become like a consultant and advisor to Zingerman's mail order.And that's what ended up happening. It was just kind of a coincidence marriage his need and their need. And I was watching the whole thing unfold. And when he first came, and I visited the warehouse and he visited, it was clear to both of us that we talk in the Toyota production system about the seven wastes.And there was seven ways every place you looked, it was just a complete disaster from our point of view. So in other words, it would be a target rich environment for improvement. You could practically, you could probably throw a lean tool any place and. something. But his, he had been, I've been teaching them that in the Toyota Way of leading, which is asking questions and guiding them step by step, taking the whole enchilada, the whole big problem and boiling it down to small pieces.And then starting with a first step and then guiding them and getting them to do the thinking and the work. And that's the approach he took, which turns out to be very consistent with Kata. We didn't know about Kata at the time, but it was very consistent with that approach. , [00:06:54] Joe Krebs: I just want to go back to that quick is I think this is an important comment you just made is the initial approach was more focused on lean rather than Kata because it was quite a while ago, like, when did this all start? [00:07:07] Jeffrey Liker: 2003 so 2003 he walked through and then he started going there like several times every week.And again, what he did was what he could have done is he could have said, here's the Toyota production system. I'm going to lecture you about standard work. I'm going to lecture about Kanban. I'm going to lecture. He didn't do any of that. He just went with them to the floor and say, what's your biggest problem.Let's start there. And then he would ask questions and, you know, example, why do you have to build up a whole, why do you have to build all your gift boxes overnight? So that they're ready when the shift starts. Why can't you build them as the customers are ordering them? And they said things like, because this is a Star Trek and we can't just beam stuff to where we want to instantly.[00:07:57] Betty Gratopp: I think my exact words were, because we're going to fail. [00:08:01] Jeffrey Liker: Yeah, exactly. So they didn't believe, you know, what he was suggesting was possible. So he would say, I understand. Is there something we can try right now? And they would say I guess, you know, and then pretty soon they were generating ideas instead of pushing back and they were trying it.And then they also found their own analogies, like in the book, the original book, lean and high variability of business. We have a case where one of the, one of Betty's colleagues said, I guess it's kind of like subway. Where they make the sandwiches to order, but they have a certain number of sandwiches in a case in a cooled case that you could pull off the shelf and maybe we could develop both kinds of situations.And so that's the way it got started. Again, there was no lectures about except for very brief introductions. There was not. Here's 15 tools. I'll teach you all the tools go apply them. It was here's a problem. Let's test some ideas and let's do it right now. And then what do we learn from this?And then most of the ideas came from the group, like Betty, not from Eduardo. Is that true? Betty. [00:09:16] Betty Gratopp: Yeah, what I remember when he was first teaching us, he was very he didn't give us a whole lot of, he didn't give us a whole set of tools at one time. The first thing we learned was pull, the second thing we learned was kanban, the third thing we learned was timed routes, because now you have kanban, so it's At the time, I had no idea that these skills or tools were layered and connected and making a whole system.Had he come at us with all of that. I mean, even just coming with us with one thing and saying, Hey, we're going to make gift boxes just in time. What do you guys think? That was enough to make our brains explode and us want to stick our feet in the mud. But once we got over that, once we tried it, once we said, yes, we'll at least give it a shot and we saw the value of that, that set the stage for the rest of our growth because we had a problem that we thought we couldn't do.We learned that we could do it, we did it, and it made us stronger for the next problem that was coming down the way. Yeah. And none of that was like, I had no idea any of that was happening as the person that was being taught and led. Yeah. It's really remarkable and . Cool.[00:10:26] Jeffrey Liker: So they were being, they were the students, but, and the, they're, they were the top management.So in a sense this was a top down approach, only teaching the top managements. On the other hand, if you only have 40 people and three of the managers are leading this, that's a large percentage of the workforce. Yeah. Getting deep exposure to the way of thinking of linear. So that went on to for about 10, 10 years till 2013 when Kata was first introduced.[00:10:57] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So that's an interesting thing. Why? So there was a transition towards Kata and I just want to. Check in with you. Like, how did, what was the trigger for that? And obviously, why did you adopt this approach? Kata most specifically, [00:11:10] Betty Gratopp: I remember, I can still remember Eduardo.I remember when he brought the book. I remember the day he brought the book and I remember it actually happening because we had been through three or four different programs iterations trials of things to get the frontline crew involved. So programs or ways of now that the managers were bought into this work and saw the value in it.And we wanted to bring more of the frontline crew along. But we weren't having much success with that. So we tried out. There was a. I forget the names of the initiatives, but there were two or three or four programs that we tried. [00:11:48] Jeffrey Liker: This was one practices one. [00:11:50] Betty Gratopp: Another one was was something Tom came up with where we were going to have extra.I forget the name of it. Sorry. [00:11:56] Jeffrey Liker: They're incentivizing with money. Yeah. You got some percentage of the savings. Yeah. [00:12:02] Betty Gratopp: So we tried a couple different things to get frontline engaged with the managers. So, and it didn't work. So the next thing that we were going to try was Kata. And I remember actually saying I was willing to try anything at that point that was different than what we'd been trying.And this stuck. So Yeah. Yeah. I can, I remember asking the crew one time to come along with us on a Toyota business practice thing. And they were like, literally, I'd rather go to the dentist. I'd rather go anywhere right now than come with you on this little project that you have laid out of when Kata came.And I don't know if it's because it's four steps and five questions, or if it was the time in the business or what the case was. But people gravitated toward it. And if I had to guess it's because it defaults to action, like we are not a team that likes to sit around in a room and strategize about what a word means.It would make us crazy with the like perfect problem statement and things like that. We're just not geared for that. We're warehouse folks who want to be out on the floor doing things. And I think that's part of it. So it looks simple. I look at the recipe, I'm looking at it on the wall right now, and I go, wow, 1,2,3,4, really cool, really simple.Then you get into it and you find out what, how challenging and engaging it is, and it's enough to keep you going, right? [00:13:30] Joe Krebs: Yeah, and that was 2012 2013, somewhere in that time frame, right? [00:13:34] Betty Gratopp: Yeah, right around 2013. [00:13:35] Jeffrey Liker: At the same time as Betty was adopting this, because Eduardo has suggested it. Yeah. I was being kind of indoctrinated by Mike Rother, and we live in the same town.He was one of my students, and I decided to change my graduate course. I taught a graduate course for about 30 years and on organizational theory. And I decided to change it to lean think lean thinking and use kata as the framework for the whole course and have the students do projects and local companies.So I approached Betty to ask if our students could do kata projects. And I was like, how do I say this to Betty, like, how do I explain Kata? She's going to think I'm from Mars. And I mentioned Kata and she said, that's what we're doing. On my list of things for the year is to introduce Kata. I think we need to talk.So then I went and visited her that same afternoon and it was again, a perfect meeting, coincidence of goals. And it was really my students. Working with her people on the floor on kata that really started driving it as well as her at some point. They asked if her student if her people who are warehouse workers, a lot of them didn't have a college degree, but she asked if they could sit in on my graduate course.And that's what happened. So I had about 15 of these Zingerman's Warehouse met people in my graduate course, and then we're having breakout discussions there with my students and we, and it was the discussions were really rich, and the students are working with them in the warehouse and they're the experts in the warehouse.So the course turned out great. And what we did is in that first semester turned out great. [00:15:31] Joe Krebs: I can only imagine how rich the conversation conversations were between, you know, people at a university, but also bringing the real life and real world touch into the conversation [00:15:41] Jeffrey Liker: And they brought food. We would have, of [00:15:44] Betty Gratopp: Of course, we brought food.I take food wherever I go. [00:15:48] Joe Krebs: That is fantastic. [00:15:49] Betty Gratopp: The relationship between the students and our frontline coaches or between the managers and the, our frontline coaches and the students is really where a really nice piece of the benefits of working kata come in. When you're first learning this thing together, everybody's new.I didn't know what I was doing and in order for me to help teach others, I had to be willing to kind of step in it a lot. Over and over again and do it wrong. That's an amazing example for anybody else who's trying to learn something. I think one of the biggest things that we've had to get over here and it still comes up.It's not something that we ever stopped working on is. Is the environment safe so that people feel like they can test, try, fail, learn, whatever word you want to put on it. This gave us something to point to that said, we want to do this and we're going to not do it right all the time. And that is to be expected.In fact, it's desirous. That's a really different mind frame than most or mindset than most people walk into a workplace with each day. It really does put us into a laboratory where, you know, we love our food. We love that we pack boxes, but it's so much more. What we do out there is so much more in the relationships that we build and the way that we learn to interact and work on challenging goals together.It's super cool. [00:17:18] Jeffrey Liker: The we needed challenges. They needed the first step is to find the challenge. So they had to find projects based on challenges. And at one point we had eight student groups in there. So they had to have eight projects, eight challenges going on simultaneously. But so they would find, and I said, it has to be something where they can make a dent on it.And run through several target conditions over a semester, you can continue working on it after that, but it can't be too big and it can't be too small so small that they have the solution immediately. So they would pick not redesign the whole warehouse problems, but more like there are errors that are made when people take things off the shelf and put them in the boxes, and you don't get exactly what you ordered.They call it mis picks. So that was a recurring project is reducing mis picks. And another one was that was in the book was that it takes too long to take bread off the shelf and bag it. And get it to the production line and just in time and sometimes we are too late and also we're going to have to scale up and we expect the busiest season Christmas season ever.And we're going to have to scale up to work to a fast, much faster tack time. So, that was in that book, so that there was significant problems. They tend to be within a process rather than across the whole warehouse. And they would have a bunch of these going on at one time, and there are problems that they haven't been able to solve easily.On their own. [00:18:51] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Betty, you have touched a little bit on that already from a Kata and cultural perspective, but I want to go a little bit deeper on that. And I was just looking at the timeframe you guys mentioned before, and it's kind of, it's interesting because like your, the original start 2003, Kata came 2012, 13.And if you want to look at this timeline right now, we're recording this in January 2024, somewhat in the middle. So you have been going like 10 years there and 10 years after. I want to talk a little bit about the culture, like the culture of the company, the teams, the crews what the culture was like that enabled Kata in 2013.Like what were the signals and the signs there that you would say Oh, these were like, you know, setting the stage for us to be successful. Because you are successful with this. And then also I would love to see from both of you obviously to what has Kata done to the culture and positively impacted the culture at a Zingerman's mail order.Can you explore a little bit both of you on this because I feel like that's an it's an important piece and from it's unique if you're thinking about a company being trying to do it, not trying to do this, being successful with this Kata approach, being in this journey for such a long period of time.[00:20:05] Jeffrey Liker: Maybe you should go back to the kind of unique people oriented culture of Zingerman's. [00:20:10] Betty Gratopp: Yes. Yes, absolutely. So, you know, when I hired on here, I hired on in Zingerman's, I'm not going to give you a year, a long time ago, because otherwise, I'm really old. That was 1997. And I worked in catering. So I hired on as a frontline employee at Zingerman's Deli, one of our sister businesses.And I was immediately taken by the culture and the people from day one, I felt valued. It was really apparent that they wanted more from me than just putting meat on trays or making nice catering trays, which is also a really great thing. But They wanted to know what I wanted to do. They wanted to know what I thought about things that we were doing at the time.I felt heard and I felt valued. There's not a lot of places when you walk in the door into a new job, I don't in my experience anyway, where I felt that valued from the get go. And I stuck around and as a result, I've been able to grow into the position that I have now. Mostly because I've been willing to learn and I've been given a really safe place and a really great learning environment to do that.So my, what I want to do is provide that for everybody else that I work with, and that's the culture I think that Jeff was describing, our unique people based culture, I think is how you said it, is that it's a cycle of everybody trying to help everybody else have a more engaging job. You know, we're all striving for that success [00:21:44] Jeffrey Liker: and they have profit sharing, very active profit sharing and they have, they call it open book management where everybody could see all the numbers and how much [00:21:52] Betty Gratopp: servant leadership[00:21:53] Jeffrey Liker: It is a very open culture.And they provide somebody who was standing behind a counter. That's who's making a sandwich for you. That person has benefits and they're making a living wage. [00:22:03] Betty Gratopp: So it is really is about respect for people and, you know, providing an opportunity for growth. [00:22:10] Joe Krebs: But if I understand that that was already prior to the arrival of Kata.[00:22:13] Betty Gratopp: Yes. So what's really fun about that story though, is even with that culture. Adopting Kata was not like one, two, three, four, go. Everybody was energized by it. Everybody wanted to learn to do it. It doesn't mean that it's easy. And that was true with even all the Lean tools as well. So Kata wasn't unique in that way.And when you're trying to learn new things, we expect that it's going to be fun. I always expect things to be fun or try to make it fun. And we want it to be easy, but that's not when we learn. And we're not advancing our knowledge as a warehouse team if we are not struggling in some fashion towards something.So there's a little bit of a disconnect between how America or whatever thinks that we want work to be like, we kind of want to come to work and check out if you're practicing kata. That's not what you're able to do. You have to be completely engaged. In your in whatever it is that you're doing. [00:23:11] Jeffrey Liker: Yeah. The Toyota Way. There's respect for people and continuous improvement and a lot of companies I've worked with get the continuous improvement part and the tools pretty quickly. But they're weak on respect for people. And Zingerman's was the opposite. It was very strong in respect for people and very weak on the tools and the concepts of continuous improvement.And we thought from the beginning that it was easier to teach the tools. Within a favorable culture, then to teach the tools and then try to change the culture. So we thought it was a very nice fit and it turned out that way. That the fit was very strong. Yeah. [00:23:54] Joe Krebs: Thanks for pointing that out, Jeff. I think that's a that's an important takeaway also to see that there was a specific culture there that actually enabled what was.About to happen with the introduction of Kata, but then once scientific thinking took over 2013 and following, how did Kata positively impact the culture? How did it drive forward? What happened to it? I would assume it did not [00:24:23] Betty Gratopp: stay the same. I was thinking of the years from 2000. We started in 2013, 2018 was our best year ever best year.When I say that, I think of in terms of capacity the quality of our work, internal mistakes, things of that nature. Those were the years that we were, we had an engaged warehouse team. That was working on Kata, we went to school every year that kept us accountable to Dr. Liker's class. We're still doing that.Actually, we were inviting people in for tours and things like that as a way of elevating our work, because when our crew on the floor sees people come and they're curious about what it is that we're doing, that's kind of new and different for a warehouse staff person to have that sort of experience.I just lost my train of thought, but I was going somewhere really good.[00:25:14] Jeffrey Liker: So you were talking about the peak. So what was different? 13 to 18. We're learning. We're driving down the stakes. We're engaged. What happened in 2019 is we took our the eye, our eye off the ball a bit because of the COVID epidemic.And we started ticking back up, but you can look at our year over year, both in our capacity and our quality. And you can see when we started Kata. Actively practicing it and then you can see, so you can see mistakes going down. You can see revenue, things like that going up and you can see when the pandemic stopped our practice and what the impact of that was on our business.Mistakes went up. We weren't paying a lot of attention. There was a lot of other things going on. So it wasn't that we weren't paying attention. It was that our attention was on other things, like keeping people safe. And that's when our scientific thinking kicked in again, only in a different fashion.So it wasn't that we had storyboards everywhere. But every day that we came to work, the three managers were very active in thinking, what is it I can do today to keep people safe? What is it today? I can do now that people are safe to increase capacity. What is our next goal? How are we going to get there?It was pretty fascinating. Yeah. One of the things that impressed me because I bet he was kind of reporting to me at the time what's happened with COVID. And one thing is that people had to think about their jobs and what they touched and using sanitizer. And. What I would see in companies is that somebody say in human resources, which is responsible for safety, would come up with policies and then they would spread the policies every place.But in Zingerman's, they had the group leaders who had a small group and each group leader had to study the job and find out where their touch points and find out how they should use sanitizer. And. They tailored the solution to the standardized work of that particular job, and it was much deeper than the kind of more superficial thinking of everybody has to use sanitizer, you know, and yeah, so I could see the thinking way, even though they weren't formally using the method or storyboard.[00:27:32] Joe Krebs: Yeah, just to that point you're making, right? So sanitizing people, keeping people safe, respecting people, right? As a cultural anchor, as well as having a scientific thinking pattern for continuous improvement. Those two things might be really good attributes for navigating through the COVID crisis.[00:27:58] Betty Gratopp: What was yes, and what was surprising to me is I remember thinking that I might have misstepped by not having a storyboard. And then I think it was Jeff that said, no, actually, it was like the thinking in action. Like you were doing it the workout. I knew that the work was outpacing the storyboard and I knew I couldn't keep it up to date.It was good. That's good. [00:28:18] Jeffrey Liker: But I have the I think often what happens if you have a company that's good to its workers and is strong in respect for people. Is they may lack discipline in executing in a sort of systematic way and also improving in a systematic way. And I think that's what lean and then Kata introduced was a lot more rigor and discipline in how they structured their daily work and how they structured their approach to improvement and reaching their goals.. [00:28:53] Betty Gratopp: It's interesting that you say that because It is true and when, you know, when coven did happen and we were, we had an amazing amount of demand and growth and we tried to, we were hiring during COVID. But so there was like, 3 years there where. I think we did what other companies may experience where the demand hides perhaps some of your missteps internal mistakes were creeping up.We weren't quite aware of that. Standard work wasn't getting used as much as it used to get used. And we weren't really aware of that. And I say all these things just, Because in 2022, when we came, when we started to come out of the pandemic and look at our situation, because of our Kata training and our scientific thinking and.Having advanced to where we had, we were able to look at those years with a different set of eyes, not to say that it didn't hurt to think that we didn't we weren't paying attention to internal mistakes and we weren't auditing our standard work and we weren't focused on growing our.Staff during that time, but we knew that it was just a break. We think of it as a, we had a critical break in 2022 and we had the observation also that we had been here before in 2013, ironically, 10 years ago, as Joe pointed out, and we knew how to do the work. So it wasn't so much it wasn't a self defeat moment.It was a moment of, oh gosh, it's kind of not great that we're here, but we knew how to do the work, and we knew the next step forward, and we knew what we needed to do. And that makes it okay. It makes it. It actually makes it inspiring. You're not inspired at first. At first, you're just okay. But by the time you walk through it and you're like, Oh yeah, we've been here before.And you start getting some traction and the crew starts coming along again. Then it starts being inspired. [00:30:49] Jeffrey Liker: Busy season. Betty was another, it was another pretty successful season, right? [00:30:54] Betty Gratopp: It was better than 2022 markedly. Yes, we had we saw good results of the work that we did last summer. So coming out of holiday 2022, we had our work cut out for us.We spent the summer or I'm sorry, 23. we spent the summer working on that. Yeah. And we had a better year because of it. And when I say by working on it, we were using our scientific thinking to reach our goals. [00:31:20] Jeffrey Liker: I think that one, yeah, one of the things that I think Betty's saying is that the Mike calls the kata starter kata.So the starter kata includes here's the four steps, your challenge, your current state, your target condition, and then experiment and put it on a storyboard. And there's a coach and the coach has a question card and every day ask these questions. And that's the, those are the kata to the tools to help you get started.But the goal of kata is actually to eliminate the kata, is to get to the point where it's just the way you naturally think. And you don't need to say, wait a second, I better write that down on a storyboard. Yeah. [00:32:03] Joe Krebs: What's the fourth question?[00:32:05] Jeffrey Liker: People like Betty had gotten to that point. Not everybody in the warehouse did, but the leaders, all the leaders really of the warehouse had gotten to that point where they're thinking scientifically not necessarily grabbing the tools.[00:32:20] Joe Krebs: That's right. Absolutely. It wouldn't be continuous improvement without continuation. The comic you guys have published is a snapshot in time. It had to end somewhere. It had to go to the printer and has to be shipped. But the journey is going to continue. I would assume that the Kata journey will continue.I don't know how much you can share. You're very open and public with tours and everything on the floor. What are some things you, I don't know if you can share of anything or Jeff by working with Zingerman's, it's just like, where's the Kata journey gonna go? Are there, what are the goals?What are you, what's on your mind if you're thinking about Kata and the next steps? There's another year ahead of us. 24. You just mentioned 20 coming out of 22 busy season. There were some changes. What's happening now for you guys in Kata,. [00:33:14] Jeffrey Liker: We started to address that at the end of the book, and I think it's pretty accurate still, but there's a concept in Toyota hoshin kanri.It's also called strategy deployment where you start top down and you say, these are our biggest challenges. And, you know, there's four big challenges and then for each of those this year, we're going to have a big challenging audacious target for the year. And then that cascades down. So everybody has a piece of that problem of that goal, and they have their own goals that are aligned with those goals at the top of the company.So far, mostly what you saw mail order was individual projects. And it wasn't guided by a strategic vision. So getting to that point where it becomes natural to have an annual plan. And to execute the plan through the year with people involved at all levels. That's one thing. I know that Zingerman's working toward.It would be a huge step forward. [00:34:23] Betty Gratopp: Yeah, that's interesting. You mentioned that we just rolled out a, I call it the big goal instead of challenge your vision. We've called it the big goal. So now we have a, it's written as a Zingerman mail order wide, and then we'll take it and it'll be more specific to the warehouse, but it has to do with capacity, quality, and cost.So it has a I could read it to you if you want. [00:34:45] Jeffrey Liker: Go ahead. [00:34:45] Betty Gratopp: It's not, it's just a challenge. The beginning of a challenge statement, it's two days old, so you have to cut us some slack too. . It says literally two days old. ZMO is a dynamic team able to meet demand defined as 9, 000 boxes in a single ship day.While maintaining an internal quality percentage of 93 percent and offering a Zing org experience. This is to be done by December 2023. So it's a one year challenge for the warehouse and mail order as a larger business. It's not perfect. It'll probably change. [00:35:26] Joe Krebs: It will probably change, [00:35:27] Betty Gratopp: It'll probably change.[00:35:28] Joe Krebs: The journey continues. [00:35:30] Betty Gratopp: Yes. But yes. [00:35:32] Joe Krebs: And I do want to thank you guys for sharing that story a little bit making it really real and building that connect from a mail order business, a floor, very actionable to everybody listening out there. Some of my guests on agile FM, we're talking about sometimes about organizational culture.This is real. This is the culture in, in action. So I want to thank you for spending that time here with me and with the listeners. Thank you, Betty. Thank you, Jeff. [00:36:01] Jeffrey Liker: Thank you. [00:36:02] Betty Gratopp: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

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

Tilo Schwarz is a leadership coach, former plant manager and co-founder of the Campus for Leaders at the University of Applied Science Ansbach. He helps managers to successfully lead change and empower their teams for improvement, adaptiveness, and superior results. During his time as a plant manager at a renowned German power-tool manufacturer, he started practicing Toyota Kata with his management team as part of Mike Rother's groundbreaking research in 2006. By doing so, Tilo and his team established continuous improvement as a daily routine throughout all processes and areas of the plant. That led to winning the A. T. Kearny operational excellence competition "Factory of the Year" and a WHU/INSEAD Industrial Excellence Award. Tilo is the author of several books on coaching and Toyota Kata.Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor Emeritus, Industrial and Operations Engineering at The University of Michigan and President of Liker Lean Advisors, LLC. He is the author of the best-selling book, The Toyota Way, Second Edition, and has coauthored nine other books about Toyota including The Toyota Way to Service Excellence and The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership. His graphic novel with Eduardo Lander and Tom Root tells the story of lean transformation at a mail-order company: Lean in a High-Variability Business. A more compact graphic novel, Engaging the Team at Zingerman's Mail Order, illustrates how Kata unleashed the creativity of their team. His articles and books have won thirteen Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence. He was inducted into the Association of Manufacturing Excellence Hall of Fame and the Shingo Academy.Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release dateContact CEOD@bmhcc.org if you have any questions about claiming credit.

In this episode, Dr. Jeff Liker and I dive into the fascinating world of Kata coaching and explore the key concepts from his novel on the subject What You'll Learn: 1. What led you to write a novel with Tilo Schwarz? 2. For the listeners that do not know, what is kata coaching? 3. What did Tilo add about coaching to Mike Rother's 5 question card? 4. Why a novel about kata coaching? I understand that Tilo already published a book about the coaching microskills. 5. What would you like to hear from readers that would really excite you? About the Guest:  Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor Emeritus, Industrial and Operations Engineering at The University of Michigan and President of Liker Lean Advisors, LLC. He is author of the best-selling book, The Toyota Way, Second Edition, and has coauthored nine other books about Toyota including The Toyota Way to Service Excellence, and The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership. His graphic novel with Eduardo Lander and Tom Root tells the story of lean transformation at a mail-order company: Lean in a High-Variability Business. His articles and books have won thirteen Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence. He was inducted into the Association of Manufacturing Excellence Hall of Fame and the Shingo Academy. Links: Click here for more information on "Giving Wings to Her Team: A Novel About Learning to Coach the Toyota Kata Way" ⁠Click here to connect with Jeff on LinkedIn⁠ ⁠Click here for The Lean Solutions Summit  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/leansolutions/support

Welcome to the podcast, where I feature some of the most talented artists in the industry. Today, I am thrilled to have Tom Root as my guest, a renowned portrait painter who has captivated audiences with his stunning portraits. Tom's journey from student to professional portrait painter is one of hard work, dedication, and a deep love for the craft. He has spent years honing his skills, refining his technique, and perfecting his ability to capture the essence of his subjects on canvas. Throughout the episode, Tom will be sharing with us his experiences as a portrait painter, from his early days as a student to the present. He will be discussing his creative process, his inspirations, and how he continues to push the boundaries of his art. If you want to see more of Tom's work or connect with him on social media, be sure to check out his personal website at www.tomrootartist.com, and follow him on social at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t.b.root/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tom.root.54/ So, sit back, relax, and join us for this captivating conversation with the incredibly talented Tom Root.

 Tom Root is an entrepreneur who originally envisioned Zingeman's Mail Order and started it up as a co-partner and then founded the Maker Works as his second business. In 2002, Zingerman's Mail Order and Zingermans.com merged and Tom took on the role of Chief Financial Officer of the resulting business (known simply as Zingerman's Mail Order). As CFO, Tom has championed open book management and taken the lead on educating staff about the financial ins and outs of the business. In 2004, Tom was introduced to the concepts of Lean Manufacturing popularized by Toyota. Building on his experience with open book finance, Tom worked to bring the philosophy of continuous improvement and waste elimination to Mail Order. For the last 10 years Tom has been practicing Lean thinking though process improvement, class development and teaching. In 2008, Tom was inspired by the financial crisis to start Maker Works. Maker Works is 11,000 sq ft manufacturing facility that is operated like a health club. Individuals or businesses purchase memberships to have access to high-tech tools like laser cutters, 3D printers and CNC plasma cutters. The mission of Maker Works is to democratize the tools of manufacturing to foster job creation, community and self-sustainability. In September of 2014, Maker Works celebrated its 3-year anniversary. It has attracted more than 700 members, added 16,000 sq ft of tenant space and played a role in a handful of start-ups including Sight Machine, a venture funded computer vision start-up. Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3 (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3) CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date Contact CEOD@bmhcc.org if you have any questions about claiming credit.

From 2015, This episode features Tamara Taylor who voices Wonder Woman in JLA Gods And Monsters, Justin Cavender of Geek Legacy chatting with Kevin Shinick and Tom Root of Robot Chicken's DC Comics Special 3, Spotlight has more with Face Off Judge, Neville Page.

The co-founders of Maker Works in Ann Arbor, Michigan have written an operations guide for makerspaces. In this episode, we talk with Tom Root, one of the authors of "The Intentional Makerspace: Operation" about how to think of recipes as a way of managing a makerspace, predicatably and safely.

SUPPORT Rama's Screen at https://www.patreon.com/ramascreen SUPPORT Rama's Screen channel at: https://www.gofundme.com/ramascreen Use this Amazon link to do your shopping http://amzn.to/1WVTckH Like me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ramascreen/ Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ramasscreen The copyright act of 1976 under section 107, allows the use of copyrighted material for “fair use” purposes which includes , criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and research.

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios veterans John Harvatine IV and Tom Root came-up with the idea for "Crossing Swords" about a decade ago. After quite a journey, the adult animated series is finally ready to be released, with Season 1 of the stop-motion show debuting this Friday June 12th on Hulu.

Spoiler alert! The food you just ate is not fresh. It was "sourced" longer ago than you'd imagine. And since that time, it's been handled in batch after batch. The same can be said for many lean transformations - one batch of improvement activity after another. Zingerman's Mail Order has been reducing batch sizes for 15 years, acting as a sort of "model line" for the entire food industry. Tom Root and Josh Howell discuss ZMO's lean transformation and their many lessons learned, searching for useful takeaways for you the listener.  

Robot Chicken co-head writer and executive producer, Tom Root, questions the cultural value of obscure references, the morality of Bitch Pudding, and the point of his extensive toy collection.

No one sent you a Zingerman’s Cheesecake? We’ve got the next best thing – an interview with Tom Root, the Managing Partner for Zingerman’s Mail Order and Chief Operating Officer for the larger community of Zingerman’s Businesses. Listen to the… The post Podcast: Just-In-Time Cafe, Episode 38 – Duct Tape and Standard Work – The Sexy Tools of Lean! Featuring Tom Root appeared first on GoLeanSixSigma.com.

Jimmy sat in on the roundtables for the stop-motion animated comedy series SUPERMANSION. He chatted with creators/producers Zeb Wells, Matt Senreich and Tom Root. What's up with the new Halloween special? Do they leave room for improv during recording sessions? What's coming up in the new season? Listen in to find out! Leave your iTunes comments! 5 stars and nothing but love! Also, get a hold of us! Thanks for listening!

INTRO [0:00:00]Nerf Herder 'At The Con' SEGMENT 01 [0:03:33]Broadcasting from the Jacob Javits Center' in NYC, on the floor of 'NY Comic Con'. Joined by Big Kev from 'Geek Stuff' sits in for this crossover show. Discussing the happenings at the con.  SEGMENT 02 [0:18:48]AMC 'Comic Book Men': Walt Flanigan, Ming Chen, Mike Zapcic, and Bryan Johnson. SEGMENT 03 [0:33:54]More from the floor of 'NYCC'. SEGMENT 04 [0:40:52]Hulu 'Futureman': Haley Joel Osment SEGMENT 05 [0:44:49]More from the floor of 'NYCC'. SEGMENT 06 [0:48:29]Adult Swim 'Robot Chicken': Matthew Senreich, Tom Sheppard, Tom Root, and Breckin Meyer. SEGMENT 07 [1:03:24]More from the floor of 'NYCC'. SEGMENT 08 [1:08:39]'Screen Junkies' / 'Honest Trailers': Hal Rudnick SEGMENT 09 [1:48:03]Wrapping up show #01 from 'NYCC'.   Hear ‘It's Erik Nagel' on iTunes, Googleplay, Stitcher, and anywhere you find podcasts. Amazon Echo: "Hey Alexa, play the program 'It's Erik Nagel'" SOCIAL MEDIA @ItsErikNagel on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube @Erockradio @GeekstuffOG @Gittlebass   

In our Pull List segment, Jay and Mike recommend "Moonshine" and "Southern Cross." Then for our Main Segment, we take a look at the instant classic, "Jughead" #200! Jughead Jones is given the deal of his life... but at what cost? Then we play "Would You Rather," and debate which would be better: an Avengers musical or a Justice League musical? And through this game, we all learn something that we wish we had never known...    Pull List:  Jay: “Moonshine" (Image), written by Brian Azzarello, art by Eduardo Risso.  Mike: “Southern Cross" (Image), written by Becky Cloonan, art by Andy Belanger and Lee Loughridge.    Main Segment:  “Jughead" #200 - "Something Ventured, Something Gained" (Archie Comics), written by Tom Root, pencils by Rex Lindsey, inks by Jim Amash.    Game: "Would You Rather... watch an Avenger musical or a Justice League musical?"    Listen to full episodes at PartialArc.com  Email us at becausecomics@gmail.com, and find us on Twitter at @partialarc  Read Mike's columns every Tuesday and Thursday at PartialArc.com, and follow him on Twitter at @supergeekmike   

In this part 4 of 4, Tom Root shares advice on adapting your culture…find a purpose. He shares how they orient and work with 500 part-timers over the holiday rush. And he discusses how open book management, the Zingerman processes/recipes all contribute to lean-like practices. Tom is Managing Partner, Zingmerman’s Mail Order, continuous improvement leader and creator of a business maker space called Maker Works in Ann Arbor, MI. Remember to go to http://inspiredandintentional.com to join the community, see show notes, and to listen to past episodes. Music is “LA All Night,” GG Riggs, Courtesy of Shutterstock  

In this, part 3 of 4, with Tom Root, he shares the benefits of using Open Book Management (OBM) in your company. Tom is Managing Partner, Zingmerman’s Mail Order, continuous improvement leader and creator of a business maker space called Maker Works in Ann Arbor, MI. Remember to go to http://inspiredandintentional.com to join the community, see show notes, and to listen to past episodes. Music is “LA All Night,” GG Riggs, Courtesy of Shutterstock

Radical Democratization of Financial Intelligence. Learn how to give your team the information they need to truly become engaged and empowered in this part 2 of 4 with Tom Root. He’s Managing Partner, Zingmerman’s Mail Order and continuous improvement leader and creator of a business maker space called Maker Works in Ann Arbor, MI.  Remember to go to http://inspiredandintentional.com to join the community, see show notes, and to listen to past episodes.   Music is “LA All Night,” GG Riggs, Courtesy of Shutterstock

Growing Your Business While Staying Small   Join me for the next four episodes as I speak with Tom Root, Managing Partner, Zingmerman’s Mail Order. Also continuous improvement leader and creator of a business maker space called Maker Works in Ann Arbor, MI.    In this episode we talk about the concept of managing partners and how they choose to create a new business to help keep their businesses small. Yet at the same time, growing the number of businesses to give their employees more opportunities.   Remember to go to http://inspiredandintentional.com to join the community, see show notes, and to listen to past episodes.   https://www.zingermans.com/   Music is “LA All Night,” GG Riggs, Courtesy of Shutterstock

CNI correspondent Keka Schermerhorn joined the roundtables for the upcoming TV show SuperMansion at New York Comic Con! You'll hear from executive producers Tom Root and Zeb Wells. The CNI mic is pointed directly at the talent so you'll hear them the best (and that's more important!) so apologies if the media questions are a bit muddled. They talk about the new saucy animated show and what to expect. Leave your iTunes comments! 5 stars and nothing but love! Also, get a hold of us! Thanks for listening!

Creators Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, Tom Root, and Tom Sheppard discuss the series with Adult Swim VP Keith Crofford.

Yet even more San Diego Comic-Con coverage! Jimmy sat in on the round table for the Cartoon Network series, Robot Chicken. It was held with a small amount of press so Jimmy got many a question in including some Twitter questions from some of our listeners!