GA 057 | The Lean Race with Dan Markovitz

You're listening to episode 57 with Dan Markovitz.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembaacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now then, today, I'm excited to welcome Dan Markovitz to the show. Now, we've been longtime friends with Dan over at Gemba Academy. He's actually done some videos for us. We interviewed him at the AME Conference last year, and he's a prolific lean thinker and just adds tons of value to the. To the lean community. So on today's show, Dan and I are going to explore a new book that he's written and plans to release later this year. And the book is obviously about lean thinking. And as you're going to hear, Dan shares some pretty personal stories in the book and then also on this episode. Now, I don't want to go into too many details about that story because honestly, I just can't do it justice. So you need to hear it from Dan himself. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com 57 and that's 57457. So gembapodcast.com 57 okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Dan, well, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to come onto the show. Where are you calling in from, Dan?

Ron? I'm calling in from Sunny Corta Madera, California, just north of San Francisco. And having spent a fair bit of time this winter in New York City, I'm very, very happy to be here.

Yeah, I bet. I bet. All right, well, Dan, let's start things off. Just tell us a little bit about your background and what you're up to these days.

Well, I suppose most recently, people know me as the author of A Factory of One, where I talked about the application of Lean principles to personal productivity, which tied into my original corporate work as a, as a time management, corporate time management trainer. And I do a bunch of Lean consulting, helping companies improve processes and really try to embed a spirit of continuous improvement into firms. My last three months have been spent primarily with my head buried in my computer writing. I've come up with a new book that I'm proud to say McGraw Hill will be publishing in September of this year. So just another few more months, six months, five months or so it comes out.

Fantastic. We're going to dig into the book here in a bit. So, Dan, we'd like to start our shows with our guest kind of putting you on a spot and seeing if there's a quotation that possibly inspires you or that you like that's related to continuous improvement or leadership. Can you think of one?

Well, you know, I'm a huge fan of Dilbert and there's this one Dilbert cartoon I have on my wall, so it's not quite a quote, but it is. It comes all the way back from 2001. It's Catbird talking to the pointy haired Bo. No, Dogbert. And he's telling the pointy headed boss that he's got to implement a Six Sigma program or he's doomed. And the boss says, aren't you the same consultant who sold us the worthless TQM program a few years ago? And Dogbert says, I assure you this program has a totally, totally different name. And the pointer boss says, great, when can we start? To me, it really hit home because people are constantly coming up with new names for things and trying to hypnotize. In fact, the pointer, your boss's eyes are sort of hypnotized and glazed over. They come up with all kinds of names when the fundamentals, the basic concepts about improvement are the same and you can call them what you want, you can try to sell things, but there is no easy road to embracing and implementing and deploying the continuous improvement that organizations need. Yeah, so it was a long winded answer. Sorry, nothing to Taichi Ono or anything.

Yeah, no worries. All right. Well, Dan, so I haven't read your full book yet, but I was happy to read the kind of the introduction that you shared with me. And I'll tell you, the first paragraph really jumped out to me and struck me. It was pretty powerful. Kind of shared a personal story from your life as a younger man. And I was wondering, could you maybe just share that story with the folks here on the podcast?

Yeah, absolutely. It started really in eighth grade. I went out for the school cross country team because of course cross country is a fall sport and I'd never done sports in school at all prior to this school. In Eighth grade, middle school. I went to an orthodox yeshiva. And as you can imagine, orthodox yeshiva and sports are not usually, they don't go together. I also had asthma and allergies. And when I first started running, I literally could not run more than three quarters of a mile without stopping. And that's kind of a problem because cross country races at that time was two and a half miles. So I was dead last in every single race my first year. Absolutely dead last. But I kept training. I was working on my form, I worked on my stamina, I worked on speed. I really became a student actually of running, not just how to race, but also how to train, training theories, training methods and so on. And by my senior year I was undefeated in my race, which was the 2 mile. I continued as a runner in college and I was pretty good. Now I wasn't all American and I wasn't world class or anything like that, but I did really well for a guy who started out not being able to run a full mile. And that really, that was really a singular experience in my life, that whole journey of going from absolutely sucky to pretty good.

So I'm curious if you don't mind sharing. So that eighth grade boy who's running maybe the last race of the season and you're like, great, I'm going to be last again. I mean, how were you feeling about that? Like, what was going through your mind? Were you pretty discouraged?

You know, I was so insecure about my. This feels like it's turning into therapy. I was so insecure about my ability as an athlete. I actually didn't mind it so much because I lived in fear of ball and stick sports where you might miss the critical shot or strike out or drop the ball if you're playing baseball. And what I loved about cross country was that there was always someone ahead of me to take the pressure of the final sprint. You know, who would, the guy who would actually score. So I was in the back and I didn't have, I was okay because I didn't have the pressure of, oh boy, I hope I don't get out kicked. And actually the thing that really kept me going was that now that I think about it, really kept me going is that I could get better every single race because I was racing against myself. And so if I was 2 seconds faster this week than last week, hey, I was two seconds faster. And it really, that's what I kept shooting for. Being better than me or better being better than I was, not being better than those other guys when I First started, that's what I. That's what I was focused on. Being better than me.

So, okay, so eighth grade, your last ninth grade. I don't know. Moving up.

Mostly last.

Mostly last. 10th grade, starting to get a little bit better, I'm guessing, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So what was that journey like then? Well, you're not last anymore. So what was that feeling like?

I was still really focused on my own improvement. I was really focused on becoming the best runner that I could be. But at this point, I was also able to take some pleasure in being able to think, hey, I'm not only better than I was, but I'm now better than some of these other guys. There's still a long, long, long distance between me and the winners. I don't know if I'll ever be able to catch up to them. But.

But you did.

Yeah, but eventually I did. Yeah. And I certainly. I never would have believed it. I absolutely would not have believed that I could have gotten up there. And so I was starting to take pride in my performance vis a vis the other guys, whereas when I first started, the pride was in my performance vis a vis myself.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay, so what's the story got to do with continuous improvement, lean, all this good stuff?

That's a good question. There are a couple of connections here. I think that a lot of people, a lot of organizations, when they start embarking on a continuous improvement or lean program, the first thing they do is look at Toyota. How many books are out there right now in the marketplace at Amazon with the Toyota way of this, the Toyota way of that, the Toyota way of the other thing. That's sort of like me starting out as a runner, saying, I think I'm going to model, and I'm going to model my running career, and I'm going to train the way Haile Geberselassie runs. Haile Gebrselassi, for those who don't know track and field, he was an Ethiopian runner, probably one of the greatest distance runners of all time. Multiple gold medals, multiple in both world championships and Olympics, multiple world records. And he was so inconceivably far in front of me that for me to try to even copy it would have led me to injury, would have led to burnout, would have led to frustration, or it would be like you, Ron, I don't know if you do any swimming, it'd be like you saying, you know, I think I want to start doing some swimming. I think I'll crib some of Michael Phelps's training Techniques. Well, good luck with that. Why don't we get to the point where you can swim like a couple hundred yards without stopping. Let's not worry about Michael Phelps. And I feel like companies are doing the organizational or continuous improvement of that. Hey, I've been on the Toyota factory tour. I'm going to install and on systems and very sophisticated software and I'm going to have cell and one piece cells and one piece flow and I'm going to have this and that and the other thing. And I think they're copying companies that are a company that is so far advanced that they're destined for failure. They're not training or they're not improving in a way that's sustainable and manageable and appropriate for them. That's not to say you can't aspire to greatness, but the first thing you want to do is not try to copy the best in the business.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I actually just wrote a blog article a week or so ago on a similar, I guess a similar storyline here. We, there's several companies that GEMBE Academy we kind of, we really admire and we kind of follow their sort of in the online learning space and you know, this sort of thing and, and they're really established and we've even used some of their products and another company, we use their, their customer software, relationship software. Okay, big company and great company. But, you know, we had a customer service issue one day and my colleague Steve called the software company and basically was told, no, we can't help you. You have to support, send in a support ticket and someone will get back to you. So, you know, he's like, well, I'm talking to you right now. Can you just help me? And they're like, no, you have to do this. And I had another experience where I sent an email in and I got an automatic one saying, oh, we'll get back to you in three days. And I said, three days? I'll forget what my question was in three days. You know, and so the point of that article was that, you know, we sometimes it's okay to look at other companies and, you know, study and learn what we can, but ultimately in the end, we have to find your own way. And, and that's scary, you know, because we want to be able to just copy the, you know, checklist of how to be lean, but there is no such thing. Right, as we know. And I think that's really what you're saying here.

You know, this will probably get me in trouble with some People. But I think that companies fail. I think their continuous improvements effort fail often because they're trying to copy Toyota. They're not trying to learn from Toyota, they're trying to copy Toyota. Toyota does this, we're going to do it. Toyota does that, we're going to do that. It's like worshiping at the church. Right? Let's get down on our knees and open up the Bible. And here's the Toyota way of this, that, and the other thing. And I think, to your point, what you need to do is say, I want to improve. How am I going to improve given the idiosyncrasies and the unique conditions of my business, my people, my industry, my country? It's not like Toyota opened up a book and found the Bible. They invented all the stuff they invented as countermeasures to whatever problems they were dealing with.

Yeah, well, in fairness to Toyota, I've never really once heard toyot to say, come to us and copy us, you know? You know, it's. Now, sure, there's tons of former Toyota associates who make a living, you know, trying to, you know, teach TPS and whatnot, but Toyota themselves, you know, they almost. I remember speaking to a Toyota associate, and he said, this is the. You know, it's a thinking production system, not Toyota production system. So don't copy, as they said, you know, just learn how to think for yourselves and solve problems. And that's. I think that's what Toyota really wants folks to do. Not, not, not cop.

Absolutely. And I think it's just. It's too easy. It's like the original sin. When you are trying to copy Toyota, you've automatically stopped thinking. You're just mindlessly, reflexively copying something that's been done. And you'll certainly make some improvements, because if you do copy them, I mean, if you were to copy Michael Phelps, you would definitely become a better swimmer in the short run, you'd make some strides. But I'm not going to expect to see you in the Olympics anytime soon. In fact, I might not even see you swimming again in another year. I mean, you're talking about a guy who burns 15,000 calories a day in his workouts.

Yeah, exactly. All right, so I get the idea of why you want to write the book, and maybe just give us a highlight of some of the key points that readers are going to kind of take away. And let's add some value here for the podcast listener. Maybe they won't actually read the book, so let's flood them with value. Now, what are some of the key points.

Well, the first point that I wanted to or would like to communicate is actually using an entirely different vocabulary. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but when you think about it, when any company goes down the road of continuous improvement, we're asking people to think and act and work differently. And that's already a heavy lift because we all know what the statistics are in change management. And then to make it even harder, we tell people that they have to start learning Japanese. Let me tell you about Kaizen and let me tell you about Gembas, and let me tell you about muri and mura and mura. Or we use English jargon. Well, let me tell you about 5s. And although they're English words, but they don't really work as English words because Shine, for example, right? I don't see anyone walking around with a bunch of brass polish and shining machines or shining invoices. So we. We give people English jargon, or we give them Japanese to learn, or we talk about Toyota. And then, of course, you end up with the resistance that people start saying, hey, wait a minute, we don't make cars, we make motorcycles. And that's totally different. So the first thing I wanted to do was, and I think it's important, is to use vocabulary and language that makes sense for your people. In my book, I use language that makes sense for me. I use the language of fitness. So I talk about a fit company. What's a fit company? A fit company is strong and nimble and agile and things like this. It's not anorexic, and it's not necessarily lean. It's fit. It's a company that is able to respond to market changes and to respond quickly. When I write about this, I use the language of fitness. The first thing you want to think about is if you're going to become a fit company, or if you will, if you want to pursue continuous improvement, the first thing you've got to do is to commit to improvement. If you went to the gym, busiest day in the gym is January 2. By January 22, the place is empty pretty much. In order to commit to improvement, it means that from the top down, particularly at the top, there has to be a commitment to embracing being in the gym every day, every single day. Maybe that's a half an hour, maybe it's two hours. But you have to make that commitment. In the case of continuous improvement, it means embracing making a commitment to improvement. And that means that people have to be where work is being done on a regular basis. It means that we have to help people solve problems. Mark Raven, I think, has done wonderful work with his consulting and his Kynexis presentations about making Kaizen and improvement easy and having Kaizen forms and so on. So making a commitment means making it easy for people to do improvement projects and to help them with it, to coach them through it, to support them, to celebrate them. It also means driving out fear. And this goes all the way back to Deming, of course. And not just the fear of getting fired, that's sort of the obvious one, but the fear of being ignored. It means getting rid of the fear of being made fun of. It means getting rid of the fear of failing. You know, I had this idea that would make this better and. But what if it doesn't and my boss gets mad at me or it shows up on my performance evaluation, I don't get a raise, Right? That's real fear. And we have to. Committing to improvement in my mind means. And committing to fitness means getting rid of that fear. It means, in my personal case, getting rid of the. Having my coach get rid of the fear of coming in dead last in every single race. He says, listen, as long as you're out there running hard, I don't care whether you're first or last. In fact, I want a team of people who run hard. I don't care if they come. I don't want lazy people or people who are slacking or people who don't treat competitors with respect, but who happen to be fast. I'm not interested in that. Yeah, he got rid of fear. And you know, if you want to talk about fear, let's talk about a 13 year old high school boy coming in dead last in front of his classmates.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, new vocabulary. Committing to improvement.

Yeah, what else? The second idea is focusing on increasing value and not focusing on costs. I like to think of this in the drawing the parallel again with fitness as focusing on strength or focusing on fitness and not focusing on weight loss. If you wanted to lose weight, the logical extension of that is anorexia. You'd be skinny, you'd be ready for a career as a model in Milan or Paris, but you wouldn't be fit. You'd be weak and you'd be thin and you'd be osteoporotic if you're a woman, but you wouldn't be fit at all. And you look at companies that think about expenses and costs and they end up often becoming organizationally anorexic. They lose the ability to create value chainsaw Al Dunlop is sort of the poster child for this. Right. If you remember him, he made his bones in the 80s and 90s as a guy who could cut costs and turnaround specialist. And his biggest, in my mind, fiasco and biggest catastrophe was when he was brought in as head of Sunbeam, the small appliance maker. First thing he did was cut, I think it was one third or one half of the workforce. He reduced expenses, profits went up, and within four years later, by 2001, they were bankrupt because he, I mean, they were leaner in the business press jargon of the day. They were leaner, didn't have all that overhead, didn't have all that fat, and they also lost the ability to actually create value for customers.

Yeah. No, I love that analogy of building strength. And that's a great analogy and great way to think about it. Because. Because you're right. I mean, it's so easy to go out and just lop heads and, you know, make that piano look a little bit better. But in the end, you don't have any brains or manpower left to, to move you forward. How are you going to, how are you going to grow?

Yeah. And to me, again, the connection with physical fitness is so obvious. And you know, if, if you are trying to bring continuous improvement to your organization, whether it's a for profit or nonprofit, I think that really resonates. Do we want to be anorexic or do we want to be fit? Yeah. And if you become fit, you are going to lose weight.

Yeah.

But you're not. You may not be skinny in the sense of, you know, ratio of overhead, SG&A to, you know, to sales or something, but you might have an incredible ability to create new innovative products and serve customers in a way that they haven't been served yet.

Yeah, yeah, got it. Love it. Anything else?

Well, another idea that I think about is training, is focusing on the event you're training for, again, starting with the fitness metaphor. So if I'm trying to run a marathon, I don't really look at my bicep girth or my quadricep girth girth or how many pounds I can bench press. Because all those things are, those measurements are relevant to running a marathon. They're really relevant for, let's say a bodybuilding competition, but totally irrelevant for running a marathon. I think of this as thinking horizontally. I'm focusing on the end goal, the end, the destination. When you look at the way companies are oriented, they tend to think vertically. They think about they've got their functional silos and so they focus on the stuff that's important to that silo. So if you're in the finance department, you're focusing on day sales outstanding. Well, that may not be the best way to think about serving your customers. Or if you're in sales, your focus is on selling as much as you can, regardless of what it does to your day of sales outstanding. If you're in customer service and this is where you really see the pain, you focus on call length as though that's some sort of measure of how well you're serving your customers. So you've got all this software that says, well, our average customer call time is 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Let's see if we can bring it down to 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Or let's ship that function off to India, which doesn't. That is not what you're not in business to reduce your customer service time. That's the important metric for the customer service manager, the VP of ops, but not good for customers. If you can start thinking horizontally, if you think about the goal, the goal is to serve this kind of customer as well as you possibly can, then you can start to get the vertical silos aligned with what's important to those customers. I was talking to Ori Fiume, who used to be the CFO at Wiremold, and he was saying, at Wiremold and all the top executives around the world had the same metrics. Because speaking of the day sales outstanding, the finance guy previously had gotten bonuses based on reducing the DSOs. The sales manager, this is the head executive ahead of sales. He or she was being compensated on the number of sales they were making and the sales volume. So they were trying to put into place sales programs that extended terms and dating and therefore increased the DSOs. They had sales fighting with credit and with accounting. Instead, they said, we're all going to work off of these common metrics. Back in my early career, I worked at asics. That was actually my first job out of business school. Although. Although we didn't use any lean language, we were having at Asics a real problem at the time. We were organized into functional silos like everyone else. And ASICS at that time, their sales had been increasing dramatically. In the previous three years, the company had tripled in size, but largely on the back of retailers like Foot Locker and Sports Authority and Foot Action. So great for the bottom line. But at the same time, ASICS business through the core specialty running channel had been plummeting. And this is really important because ASICS more than Anything else really is a running shoe brand. And Foot Locker picks up Asics as much because the specialty run shops pick up Asics as anything else. And so we didn't want to lose that core customer, but we lost them because all of our internal metrics were targeted towards. They were just sort of generic. So the credit guys wanted to reduce our days of sales outstanding, and the promotions guys were only focused on customers that were buying big volumes of stuff. And our warehouse was set up to do big shipments because Foot locker would order 20,000 pairs of shoes at a time. The little guys who were ordering 12 pairs or 18 pairs of shoes, they were getting lost. I came in and again, we didn't use any of this language, but really my job was to become the value stream manager for the specialty run customer.

Okay.

And what we ended up doing was creating a program to take care of the little guys. And that went from start to finish. So, for example, I worked with the credit, the finance department to say, hey, listen, these little guys, you know, they're lucky if they can pay their phone and electric bill on time, so let's give them longer dating. Yeah, it's not, you know, okay, so we're going to lose some money. Some of these guys aren't going to pay their bills. But the truth is it's about 5% of our business, so who really cares? It's not going to matter that much. We worked with the promotions guys. So the promotions, instead of just tying it to volume, we created a whole promotion program. We were working with the accounts not to give them money, but to help them sponsor their own running clubs, for example, we give them numbers, we give them T shirts, we give them socks, things like that, so they could be stronger with their running community. We created. This is one of the things I was most proud of. We created a special place in the warehouse for what we call the shoe bank. The problem with running shoes, I guess, is the problem with everything. You always run out of stuff that everyone wants, and you've got plenty of inventory. The stuff that no one wants. In the case of footwear, you always run out of size 9, 10, and 11 for men, and you run out of 7, 8, and 9 for women. The little guy, if you're a footlocker, you've placed these orders for six months out, and so you always have plenty of inventory. If you're a little guy, you can't afford to order that much inventory. They would buy a pair of shoes, some shoes, and then they call up in a month and say, we need a size 10 of this, and we'd say, sorry, we don't have any. We created a shoe bank. I did some analysis. I said, okay, we're going to keep 1000 pairs of shoes just for this specialty running customer. And now they can call us up and order a pair of shoes anytime they want. And we'll always have inventory. And then at the end of the season, we could give that to Footlocker and they could blow it out, no problem, so we wouldn't be getting hurt.

So it wasn't like the lean guy. Oh, it's overproduction or, you know, whatever, I guess, you know, if you can move it at the end, it's exactly, exactly.

Because we're dealing with size 10. You can always get rid of a size 10 of a pair of shoes. That's a piece of cake. So it's not like we were close. We'd end up having to close it out if it was sent off or something.

Right.

So we created a special customer service desk because when Footlocker calls, they don't ever need help right at that moment. They're calling because they need to change their order that's coming in in three weeks or something.

Yes.

But the little guys, they call up because they need a pair of size 11 shoes for you for your race this coming Saturday.

Right, right, right.

We wanted to make sure they didn't end up in a queue or in a voicemail system.

Got it.

And then when these guys had extra time, those customer service people could talk to the footlockers and so on. So we had people who are dedicated, but they could flex over to the main volume of customers. So we started, although we kept our functional silos, we changed the metrics they were using, we changed their focus. So they were focused on. Back to my fitness metaphor. They were focused on the race or the event. They were focused on the small running customer.

Yeah.

And the next. As a result, I've made a long story. Long or longer. But asics the next year took over the top spot in the running specialty distribution channel, and it was a spot they held for the next 18 years.

Nice. So the last question I have for you in this section, Dan, is I understand that you've covered a mutual friend in the book, Ted Makros and the team over at NFI Industries. So talk a little bit about what you share of their story.

Well, you know, Ted was terrific in NFI because they spent a lot of time creating. And this is one of the little bits of jargon that I do use a standard Work. And they have. Ted, of course, has asked all the folks in customer service, I suspect elsewhere in the company, the people actually doing the work are creating the standard processes and protocols. And what's really neat is that these guys have all the customer service people. They used to have what every company has. They used to have a three ring binder that was covered in dust, buried on a credenza called standard Operating Procedures or something like that that no one ever looked at. And it always came down to, we got a problem. Oh, ask Ron. He knows how to do this stuff. He knows how to work the system. Yeah. And these guys pulled all that. They got rid of all that stuff and they asked the frontline folks to create standards. And, and the frontline folks, first of all, they create the standards. They put it all up on the wall. So the wall is filled with little hanging folders and in really big letters it says things like, zoinks, the customer wants to make a return. What do I do? Or oh crap, there's a defective. How do we handle this? So the title of it, and it must be in, I don't know, 40 point font or something, so no matter where you're sitting, you can see exactly what it is. You can run over to it and pull out exactly what you need. So they're not just creating standard work, but they're using language that the people doing the job understand, as opposed to something like how to handle emergency customer returns or something like that.

Right, right, right. They make it real.

Yeah, they make it real and they work on it. And this is really cool. Once they decide after that something is good to go, then they laminate it. Until then it's just a loose piece of. And then if someone doesn't follow standard work, they immediately go into root cause analysis and they say, oh, do we have a problem with the person or do we have a problem with the standard work? Maybe our standard work needs to be changed. Or maybe the problem is that we haven't taught people how to do the standard work, but they, they don't. They always look into non adherence as a, as a signal that there's something they could improve.

Yeah, I remember actually when we in Gemba Academy has a full Gemba live episode with NFI, which NFI is a 3 PL in California there. So great company. When we visited them, I think they were a year into their journey. So they're several years into their journey now. But one story that sticks in my mind was, I think I was talking to one of their kind of human resources Office manager type person, and her name's escaping me right now, but she was telling the story of there's a young lady who made a mistake and she hadn't followed instructions. And apparently the old school nfi, that young lady would have been in big trouble and possibly been written up or worse. And so the manager brings her into the office and poor girl is devastated and very, very scared. And the manager went on to explain that she wasn't in trouble, trying to understand what was going on. Why was the mistake made? What could they do better? And you know, it was almost, if I remember right, an emotional situation for that young lady who thought, gosh, she was going to get it and she didn't. And that's how back to your story of trust and driving out fear in the organization. That was a huge step forward, I think, at least for that young lady and that story.

You know, if you use the fitness analogy, you could imagine how people would respond if they hire a personal trainer or they go to a gym and they get yelled at for doing a squat the wrong way versus hey, you did a squat the wrong way.

Yeah.

What's going on here? Did I not explain it right? Do we need a mirror in a different position so you can see what you're doing or you think about a coach? Right. You know, if you play golf. I don't play golf, but I know that coaches are taking videos. Oh, look, here's where. Look at your, the way your hips are moving or your elbows or your head or something. Or I'm a swimmer now as well. And our coach will sometimes take a video of us swimming so you can see what our arms are doing, where our hand is and the elbow is as we swim. So it becomes not a, hey, you're doing it wrong. But let's take a look at what you're doing, help you to understand why you're doing it and see if we can improve it.

Got it. Love it. All right, so Dan, let's go ahead and transition into the next section, which, which we call now the reflection section. And you know, we lean thinkers spend a lot of time talking about the importance of continuous improvement. But we also obviously really, really look to the whole respect for people aspect of lean. But unfortunately, you know, respect for people can be hard to kind of define. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you.

Beyond the obvious? Don't be a jerk and berate people. That's sort of the self evident meaning of it. I think respect for people really comes down to respect for Their ability to learn and to grow. And this gives us that whole Taichi Ono kind of sort of aggressive or sometimes brusque approach to challenging people to improve. I've never worked with any of those. Those old school guys or the guys from Toyota were saying, well, let's get down to a single minute exchange of dies. Why are you at nine minutes? You could be at three minutes or two and a half minutes. But I think it's respectful to say you can improve, you can do better. I know you can. And I'm going to ask you to figure it out and I'm going to guide you. I'll teach you what I need to teach you. I'll answer questions, but I know you can do better. My coach was incredibly respectful. I mean, I stunk. Let's be honest. I was dead last. I stunk as a runner. And my coach was respectful of my ability. He challenged me to go faster. He challenged me to do really hard workouts even when I was sucking wind and dying. And again, I'm only thinking about this now because you asked the question I think about. I probably would not have pushed myself to get through some of those workouts except that he said, Mr. Scott said, I know you can do this.

Now, I know there's no way to know this for sure, but do you think that Mr. Scott, I guess, was his name? Yeah. Do you think that the way he treated you back then has impacted you as a grown man and your career? I guess it's impossible to know for sure. But just curious, what do you think about that?

You know, outside of my mom and Dad, Mr. Scott is the person, the single most responsible person for making me who I am today in terms of a commitment to a goal, perseverance.

Yeah.

I have to tell you the greatest compliment I've ever received, and this is above anything my parents have said, anything my wife has said. Greatest compliments, compliment I ever received. When I graduated, he told my mom and dad that I was not the best runner he ever had. He said, but no one has come farther than Dan has. And this is what. I'm 51. This happened when I was 17 years old. And I still remember this. And I will take this to my grave, the fact that he said that I came that far. And I think he was so important to me for that, partly for that reason. And I. And I think about. I think about people in companies and organizations that they could go so far in terms of doing great things if they're given the right kind of a safe environment in which they can work.

Yeah.

If they're given the right challenge and the right coaching. Has to be the right coaching. Right. Mr. Scott was there every single, every, every day for 3:30 to 5:00'. Clock. He's there with me. And we have to. You have to have that. You can't just have a leader who phones it in and says, you guys, you know, start doing some of that improvement stuff.

Yeah.

And I think about where I came from and why can't our companies, why can't our organizations be filled with people who attain that level of greatness?

Yeah. Yeah. Very good. What's the best advice you've ever received?

The best advice I've ever received. I knew you were going to hit me with one of these questions that I couldn't predict. The best advice I've ever received. Man, that is a good question. Probably be sure to tell the people that you love that you love that as often as you can. Not a business thing, but to me, that's really important. We tend to take for granted that others can read our thoughts, that they know how we feel, that they know that we're appreciative or grateful or we value them.

Yeah. Even in a business context, maybe you don't go say I love you, but.

You can certainly say thank you.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, as you say that, it makes me think about how much it meant to me when I would work when I was in companies and my boss or colleagues would say, thank you, you did a great job. I thought, of course it was my job, but they actually expressed appreciation. They didn't just take it for granted that I would do it. And that made me want to work just as hard or harder the next time to get that compliment.

Yeah. All the.

I think that expression of gratitude is so important.

Yeah. Well, when we released our recent Culture of Kaizen course, we did a lot of studying on brain science and brain chemicals and whatnot. And you know, serotonin is released when you, when you pat someone on the back or give them public recognition. And that's a great feeling. You know, when you're, when you get that recognition and it's powerful, it's. Brain chemicals are being released when that happens. So it's profound.

You know, I don't remember if it was NFI or another company I talked to for my book, but I remember the person I was talking interviewed said that they have a Kaizen wall of fame and they even have a section for all the improvement projects that didn't work.

Yeah.

Because they want to show, hey, these Guys worked really hard and they tried something. Oh, and it didn't work. Who cares? They learned. They became better problem solvers, they tried to make the company a better place. And we should express appreciation for that. And the next time we're sure they'll, you know, next time, hopefully their project will pay off. But it doesn't matter because the exercise, the exercise of trying to improve stuff, that's where the value is.

Yeah, exactly. Now, this next one's a softball for you based on your factory of one book, but I'm going to ask it anyhow. Do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

Oh, yeah. You know, I think perhaps the single most important change people can make is to make their commitments to themselves visible. The work that they have to do to make it visible. Whether you want to use something like a personal Kanban, whether you want to use a calendar, however you want to do it. What I see people do all the time is make commitments to other people. I've got a one o' clock phone call with you, Ron. I've got a 2:30 meeting with a prospect and I've got a 4:00 client appointment. Well, what am I doing at 10:00 clock to 11:00 clock or 10 to 11:30? That's my time for my work. And that I've got to make that visible. I've got to be specific. This is really visual management, isn't it? I have to be specific and concrete about what it is I'm supposed to be doing. Nature horse, a vacuum. And if there's a vacuum in your calendar, someone is going to take it.

I figured you were going to say, stop managing your business from your inbox.

Well, there is that too, of course, but yeah, certainly living in your inbox is not a good way to go, but really, I think that making your work visible to yourself is incredibly powerful.

Yeah, no, I agree. Well, so you asked me, we were talking before we started recording and I just looked over to my little kind of. We have a podcast kind of schedule and Kanban board, if you want to call it, so to speak. And you know, I could tell you exactly when your episode's going to be released because it's right there beside me on a whiteboard. You know, it's so. It's so powerful. It's so. Yeah, there's. There's a lot of truth to that.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right. So, Dan, I'm curious, is there one thing that surprised you during your last year of practicing or implementing Lean?

Yeah, I think what surprised me so much, what surprises me is how willing people are to leaders are to abdicate authority and responsibility for leading improvement.

Give me an example.

I worked at a company that said, we're growing. We've hit a point. I guess they're about a hundred fifty million dollars. They have about 100 people or so, and they're now big enough where the president was saying, you know, I can't have people coming to me and the senior team to solve problems anymore. People have to learn how to solve problems on their own. Okay, great. So they embarked on a continuous improvement program, starting with A3s and problem solving and all of that stuff. The leader, the CEO, the president, she didn't get involved at all. Her work continued as normal. She didn't work on an A3. She didn't work on. Or if she did, she didn't share it with anyone. She wasn't involved in the A3 discussions or the meetings of the teams who were involved. The head of HR sort of rolled out the program and described it, but even she was not involved on a daily basis. And so this was really important to the company, again, because the senior team was acting as a bottleneck for all these decisions that were coming to them. And they couldn't necessarily make it because of their work schedules and travel schedules and whatnot. So this was really important. And yet they were not changing the way they worked. They were not actively involved in creating a new culture. They rolled it out as a program. HR rolled it out, design it, and ask people to do it. And of course, you've been around as long or longer than me. You know what happens. People said, wait a minute, I'm doing this A three problem solving business and you're not. This must just be one of these. That's the flavor of the month. Yeah, sure. In three months or six months, people aren't going to talk about it anymore.

Yeah.

And no one got committed to it.

Yeah.

And it's sad because there were people who really did want to improve the way things were done.

Yeah.

But there was no. It was clear that the company wasn't committed to it. It was something they were, you know, they farmed out.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Flavor of the month. All right.

And I think you see that a lot, by the way, with the Kaiser promotion offices and the Six Sigma super ultraviolet belts and things like this. You know, it's not anything I have to do, but we've hired 30 people who will go around the company to make the improvements. Well, you know, when you look at any Organization that is not only excellent but is constantly improving. They don't have that. They have everyone involved, top to bottom, side to side, is doing their piece of improvement. And it shocks me with that much evidence as to the importance and efficacy of having everyone doing it from top to bottom. It just shocks me and disappoints me that leaders still aren't going, hey, wait a minute, I know where this road ends. Why am I going to go down that? I should go down this road?

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, Dan, let's say that you're in a situation and things aren't going well and you need to recharge and possibly refocus. Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow to accomplish that?

Are you thinking about me as an independent writer and consultant or what I would do if I were working in a corporation?

I'm just thinking about Dan, you know, you're having a crappy week and things just haven't gone well and could be personal, professional, whatever, and you're just down. You're down in the dumps a little bit and you need to refocus. How do you do that?

I do a couple of things. One is I treat myself well. I'll just blow off work and I'll go to the movies. You know, I think there's a tendency. We all have this sort of puritan. I think because we're American, we have this puritan work ethic and we think we have to. If things aren't going well, we just have to flog ourselves to work harder. And I think there's time and a place to do that, for sure. But there's also time and place to say, gee, this has been a crappy week and why don't I just treat myself a little bit? That doesn't necessarily mean, you know, going on buying a $50,000 vacation, a safari to Kenya or something. It could be going to the movies or having a good bottle of wine or something.

Yeah.

So that to me is really important. Just sort of treating myself well. The other thing that I always do is spend more time with friends because I think we tend to. There's a tendency certainly for me to sort of spiral into my own misery. And when you start talking to other people, not only do you get support, but you start to think about other people, not yourself.

Yeah.

Less self absorbed and less narcissistic. And you start to see the world is bigger than the particular project that isn't going well or the client lost or whatever it happens to be.

Yeah, exactly.

Other people's needs. You see what's going well for them, which you can celebrate. You see their losses and setbacks and you can feel bad for them. And no, of a sudden, it's not just about me. It's about me as part of this larger community.

Yeah.

Couching myself or positioning myself as part of that community makes things so much different.

Yeah. Perfect. All right, last question I have for you, Dan. Do you have one knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become a more successful lean think?

Yeah. You know, I have to say that I'm terrified of factories. I've never worked in a factory. I've only been in a factory one or two times. And I feel comfortable on the office and administrative side. But I feel like I would be reluctant to say anything to someone who works in a factory, even if it's. Even if I know it logically. Well, think about one piece flow instead of badger. How about cells? Whatever it is. Because I don't feel that I've earned the right to talk to people there. I don't have any experience. I don't have any background. I feel like a fraud.

What's your countermeasure to that?

I haven't figured that out yet, honestly. Partly it's because it's just not important enough to me right now to deal with countermeasure for that. There's a lot of other things that I need for my personal growth, my business growth, to where I don't need to worry about the factory side.

Yeah.

So it's not a countermeasure that I need to put into place today.

Yeah, got it, Got it.

I would certainly feel better if I could have a more rounded view or more holistic view of how organizations operate.

Well, call up our friends Paul Akers or somebody like that and go spend the week at FastCap and it'll change your life.

So, Paul, by the way, I use so much material. My book should be subtitled, should be co authored by Paul Akers, because there's a whole bunch of stuff that I use from his videos and the things that he's said and written. Boy, does he get it there.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, Dan, well, it was so great to catch up with you and I can't wait to read the book. So one thing that we haven't talked about is the name of the book. And I know you haven't exactly nailed that down, but what are you leaning towards right now? No pun intended.

Leaning? Yeah. The leading contender is Building the Fit Organization.

I like that.

However, I know this podcast comes out on May 7, and I don't think I have to have a title by then, although the editor is pushing for that. So if any listeners have a better idea, please feel free to email Ron or email me and let me know what you're thinking. I'm going to crowdsource a good title. So Building the Fit Organization. I think the subtitle is something like six principles that will help you become more competitive and something like that.

Fantastic. Well, maybe you can throw together a guest blog or something and put it out closer to the time of the release and we'll really get help you promote this book because I can't wait to read it.

Terrific. Well, Ron, I really want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk with you again. It's always a pleasure.

So why don't you tell people how they can connect with you, Dan, over social media or your website, that sort of thing.

I tweet under my name. Danmarkovitz.

Go ahead and spell Markovitz just real fast.

Oh, yeah, right, because everyone spells Markovitz easily. It's M A R, K, O, V like Victor, I, T like Tom, Z like zebra. So an Markovitz. I am. Markovitz Consulting is my website and if anyone would like to reach me or has an idea about book title, Danarkovitz Consulting is how you get me.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, Dan, well, thanks again for taking time out of your day, and I look forward to reading a book.

Ron, thank you. I am looking forward to sending you a copy described, autographed and dated.

Can't wait. Thank you for that.

All right, cheers. Take care.

Take care.

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