GA 062 | Lean for the Long Term with Ken Rolfes

You're listening to episode 62 with Ken Rolfus.

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. For taking time out of your day and your week to listen to this podcast and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over@gembacademy.com now, today, I'm excited to welcome Ken Rolfus to the. To the show. Ken is a longtime Lean thinker, and he's really affiliated tightly with the AME and the AME Conference. So, as we've mentioned before, we're big friends and collaborators with ame, so it was great to have Ken on. And Ken's actually recently written a book called Lean for the Long Term. And so that's what Ken and I kind of explore in this podcast. We talk about what the book is, and he's got an interesting subtitle. Sustainment is a Myth, Transformation is Reality. And, you know, we kind of explore. What does that mean? And we get into a lot of different topics, such as kind of the importance of Lean leaders being multilingual, and certain things like that. So it's a. It's a great, great episode. It's. It's a little bit longer, so you may want to listen to it and a few different chunks, but I think that you'll gain a lot from Ken's wisdom and experience, so really encourage you to check it all out. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com 62 and that's 6. 2 for 62. So gembapodcast.com 62. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Ken, well, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from today?

Ah, sunny Carlsbad, California.

Man, we've had, like, a string of Californian guests here for, I don't know, like, last 10 episodes. I think five of you have been from California.

Oh, really? Okay.

Good part of the world to live in, I guess.

Well, it's a nice part of the world, except we're a little dry these days. You know, we're turning off the water.

Yeah, well, in Texas, we have the opposite problem. So we've about to Build an ark.

But yeah, yes, saw that, unfortunately. Yeah.

So. All right, well, Ken, let's just kind of get started by. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about your background and then what you're up to these days.

Well, by study, I'm an industrial engineer and an MBA in finance. But mostly I'm a learner and a change agent, really kind of a lifelong learner. And I started right out of college with a company called National Cash Register. And that was at a time when NCR was going through a huge transformation from mechanical cash registers to electronics. And that really taught me and impressed upon me the fact that business is really about transforming itself in order to survive. And, you know, so that was one of my key learnings. But the other part was that it has huge impact on people. And that particularly had a huge impact on people. And so I thought, you know, what I was trying to figure out is, gee, is there a better way to kind of do that? So later on, a group of us, we did a startup company, it was a technology company and in optical memory systems at the time. And that's where I really got my real mba, if you will. You wear a lot of hats and you learn a lot about what's going on besides working on technology and the people in the group raising money and such and learning the importance of customer input and managing cash flow. It was a rather interesting learning experience. So today I left the corporate world and went to the dark side of consulting, I guess about 12 years ago. And I do that. I've been director for ame, and that's a lot of my give back to AME because AME has been great for me. And I'm facilitating a continuous improvement consortium group here of companies here in San Diego. We're making really some great progress. So part of that I've learned a couple of fundamental things that have kept me focused here going forward is, you know, having, you know, approach lean from a department manager, a functional manager, and a corporate officer. I've learned that for a business to survive, it has to constantly transfer in transformation. And that engaged people, engaged people in the process versus people fearing the process is the real difference. And that's kind of what we try to build around in our book here.

Yeah, well, let's. Thank you for that amazing background. So sounds like you've had quite the journey. So, Ken, one of the things that we like to do towards the beginning of the episodes is have our guests share a quotation that inspires them. So do you happen to have One.

Well, I have a lot of quotations, quite honestly, because there's a lot of inspiring things. We built some of them into the book. But there's one that I'd like in this context that I'd like to use, and it's from one of my favorite management thinkers, Peter Drucker. It's a quote that says, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Now, the reason I picked this is that there's always this discussion that goes back and forth between the importance of the two. And they say, well, we have a strategy, we got to change the culture. Oh, we want to go in here and change the culture and such. And what we need to recognize is that both are vital and need to support each other. You can't, you know, you can't just walk in and plug in a strategy that the culture is not ready to handle. And secondly, you can't go in and say, okay, we're going to flip a switch here and change, you know, change the culture. You know, change culture is really developed and built around leadership and behavior. So I think as lean practitioners, and I consider myself one of them as well, is that I think we need to raise our game beyond the tools and look at Lean more as a management system. And the funny thing is that I think Ono back in the early 80s said about the Toyota production system, he says, don't look at this as a manufacturing system, look at it as a management system. And I think we've missed that over all these years when we said, when we talk about lean manufacturing, I think we've done a disservice to ourselves as, as a, as a group. And I think we need to raise our game and we need to look at this as a managed system that supports the culture of continuous improvement, continuous transformation.

Yeah, I totally agree, totally agree. All right, well, let's get into the book a little bit, Ken. So the title of your book is Lean for the Long Term. So I guess let's just start just at a high level. Maybe give us about a, I don't know, a two minute elevator pitch on what's the book about?

Let me start out by what motivated us very real quick because it'll align it pretty well. What motivated my co author Bill Baker and I to really go at this is we had seen some of our stalwart lean practitioner companies get off tracks and go in a different direction and generally not perform better because of it. But for some reason, and a lot of it we thought was because of leadership change, which that was part of it. Okay, so what the book's about is really to let we let others focus on the tools. Our main focus is to help readers understand how to go about adopting a management approach that's more effective in today's rapidly changing business environment. And we think that a lean management system does that. So what we wanted to do is go look at companies that have been in there that are long in the tooth beyond Toyota and say what are they doing? What's different about these companies? And so the main difference that we saw, there's lots of differences, but the main difference that we saw is that leading companies have everyone on the same wavelength of continuous improvement, respect for people and change from the employees, you know, the lean practitioners, if you will, executives and the board of directors. And a good example of this is Danaher.

Yes.

Okay. Danaher makes a practice of educating investors and analysts to understand the long term benefits of their, of their Danaher business system. So that's, that's what the book is really all about. And what we do is through the processor, we take the reader through examples and analysis how successful companies have transformed things, but also how to look at, how to look at it from a certain problem areas and how to use your lean tools and such, you know, to get, to get them focused. So one of the things that we talk about in there, and I'll talk about a little bit later on here is how to connect the dots between the lean tools that you're using, the organization and the financial results that you're trying to achieve as well.

Yeah, okay, good. Well, one question I have Ken, is. So the name of the book is Lean for the Long Term. So I understand long term that makes sense and sort of obvious why that's in there. But your subtitle is interesting. It's Sustainment is a Myth. Transformation is reality. What does that mean?

Well, I may have given you a little bit of a clue to that in the discussion about kind of my background in terms of what I've seen as business transformations. And let me just give it this way. First of all, less than 50% of companies that start survive beyond five years say. Well, that's small company stuff. How is that important? Well, take a look at the s and P500. Now these are companies that have huge resources, huge market caps and that sort of thing. Can you tell me how many of the original S&P 500 companies are still on the list?

Isn't it like 5% or something like that? Something?

Well, it's a little greater than that and you'd expect it to Be more. But it's about 12, 13%.

Yeah, I knew it was super low.

Yeah, I mean it is unbelievable, you know. And what we see here is that now one thing.

Stop you there. One thing I've always wondered about that statistic. I've never studied it and really, you know, challenged it. But I'm wondering if there's some mergers and acquisitions are included in that or is it really. They're gone, they went out of business.

You know, some, some are gone. I mean we've seen. Just recently, in a couple years ago, we saw Kodak. Okay. I mean everywhere you went was a, was a, you know, hey, this is a Kodak spot. The Kodak moment type of thing. You know, Kodak goes bankrupt. All right. Because they focused. And part of the issue that we have is that companies seem to want to focus on stability. People that are working in the companies are accustomed to stable activity. I'll give you a story. When I was doing my first plant conversion, if you will. And we were making a lot of changes. We were all the way from. We were unplugging the MRP system and building and moving to a build to demand model. We were putting cells in, we were doing 5s. We were creating pull systems for materials and all this. And I had the maintenance guy come in and we were moving things around. We'd make a cell and he'd hard wire the thing in. And then you know, six months later we'd move the thing. He came in one day and he says, he says, man, you're moving this stuff all the time. He says we're going to have to put these benches on wheels. I said, great idea. That's a good idea. And then another person came up to me. She walked up and said, look, we're doing all this changes and such, you know, when is this going to stop? And I happened to look at her, you know, nobody ever asked me that question before. So I looked at her and I scratched my head and thought for a second. I said, well, I think when we're all dead. Yeah. And she got this big wide eyed look and I said, we can't stop. There's somebody out there trying to take our business. There's somebody out there changing the technology that's going to make our business obsolete. If we're not changing, if we're not doing something about it, we're dead.

Yeah.

And that's what I think. Some of the S&P 500, their businesses died off. Some of the S&P 500 were acquired by other S&P 500 companies and such and then new companies, I mean Apple was never on there before. So new companies like Apple, new technologies are all, you know, come in there. And that's the kind of change that we've got to be dealing with. And you know, people in organizations need to, need to be in line with that. They need to be a part of that. It doesn't do the people in the organization or the management any good to quote, protect them from these, from these changes. And that's why I believe that sustainment's a myth, that really transformation is a reality and we've got to be constantly driving transformation in business.

I totally agree with that. I used to have long said that even within kind of the, for the more of a six Sigma framework, the C is control. And I've always said it's impossible to control a process. It's like the stock market, it's either going up or it's going down. It's never going perfectly sideways. So you're either getting a little bit better or you're, you're getting a little bit worse. So yeah, totally on board with that line of thinking. So another question I have kind of, it's really tied into what we've been talking about here. But you know, it's pretty common for companies that perhaps they're on the journey, they're excited, maybe they're going about it the wrong way, maybe they're a little bit tool driven and don't get the whole management thing, but they're making improvements. A lot of times we see them though kind of level off, maybe even decline. So in your research or maybe some of the companies that you visited, what have they done? You know, is it, is it simply just keep getting better? Is that it? Is that the answer or is there something deeper?

Why? I think the answer to that is really something deeper. And you know, if you look at typically how Lean originates in our companies that we have and that is it typically originates within the operations functions. In fact, just this morning I was at a company that's a year into the process and they're very tool focused and such and they're all excited about what they're doing. And the one question that I'd asked them, I said, well, okay, this is terrific. What are you going to do after leaning? And they, you know, they look, you know, after you get this 5s in place, after you get flow, you know, the flow here is what's next? And they hadn't thought about that. And I think what you see is that after, you know, initial successes and the successes that they talk about, for the most part, they talk about how much money they've saved and such. And you know, when the low hanging fruit has been plucked, if you will, it's hard to keep the initiative going if that's what you're focusing on, if what you're. And I think there's two kinds of lean efforts. The most common is the tool approach. All right? And the tool approach, you know, does wonderful things, eliminates waste with pull systems and kanbans and quick changeovers and that sort of thing. And what you see, many of them assume that, gee, if you just tenaciously continue to pursue waste elimination with your continuous improvement mindset, by default you're going to get operational improvements. What that does, however, is, is I think what that does is it constrains the impact of Lean to fewer departments. And what I've seen here is that companies are, if you look at the total company and the cost structure of the total company, you can put kind of a circle around the areas that they've been really focusing on leaning. And in many cases what you'll find is it's a fairly small percentage of the total cost structure of a company. So I think the second type of lean is where you look at Lean as a strategic business model. In other words, it's a customer centric business model and a management system to support it. And so if we look at companies that been at Lean for a while, and we looked at Danaher, of course, at Hillenbrand, Autoleaf, Toyota as well, okay, and what they have in common, I think, is that each company has adopted a management system that balances the culture and leadership and process to drive continued transformation. So for example, when I was working at Graphic Controls, one of the key things that we were wanting to do is to drive growth. How can Lean drive growth? How can it guide the sales rep? How can it guide our product introduction process? So we looked at that from the standpoint of the customer. So part of the product development, we said, why don't we. We were selling into hospitals and various different departments, cardiovascular, obstetrics, infection control and operating room. And so what we did is instead of looking at individual products, we went into the areas and value stream, mapped some of the work processes that the users of our products and other people's products were doing. We found that that gave us a better understanding of our customer and gave us a better understanding of how to bring really new products and not just copy products to the marketplace. It fed growth. So these are the kind of things that companies are doing. So instead of focusing on lean, on elimination of waste, I'd like to see us focused more on creating value.

What's interesting though, like just an interesting paradigm and it's always the balance that I think between tools and kind of the management system and the mindset is that even in the example you use just now where you really focus in on a customer, but you still use the tool value stream apps. Right. To help facilitate that. So I think it's probably. It's important for us practitioners to remember it's not either or. Right. It's not that you have to be a management system and forget the tools. No, no, you need the tools as well. I think you just. I think the danger is when you just become a tool head.

Right.

And all, you know, I have a solution and I'm just looking for a problem. Right.

I mean, you're Ron, you're right on the mark there. And that is this, is that, you know, but I think you have to look at it this way, is that the tools support the culture. The culture supports the business.

Yes.

Okay. In that order. So the business model, the culture, the tools.

Yeah, let the tool support you, not the other way around.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

It's kind of like when I was a kid working as a carpenter's helper, you know, we had a lot of tools there and that sort of thing. And two things that the guidance I got from is, one is, Ken, not everything's a. Not everything's a nail. Yeah, okay. And then secondly is take care of your tools and your tools will take care of you.

The only, only time I challenge that saying is when it comes to duct tape, that duct tape can solve anything. You can solve any, just about any problem with duct tape. You know, at least my kids think.

So I won't argue with that.

Now, one question that I've got, and it's. We didn't really talk about this ahead of time, so I'm just going to kind of pop this on you. But I'm curious, in your analysis of. And I know the answer for some of these companies, but maybe not all of them. What about the role of lean accounting versus cost accounting and these lean exemplars that you looked at, what's your thoughts on that?

Well, metrics, the accounting metrics are really important. One of the things, in fact, when I was first doing my first conversion, if you will, at graphing controls, one of the measures that I had was contribution margin for the plant. Now if you think about That I don't control pricing and I don't control the sales. What I control is the plant. So how's contribution margin? You know, how can I really control contribution margin? Well, I went at working to reduce the whip on the floor, increase throughput because basically what I was trying to do is really drive better customer service. And I was getting lots of, when I went in there, I was getting lots of calls about customer service. So that's what we're going. We put the customer first, we're going after it. So increasing the velocity through there reduced the amount of work in process. Now in accounting, they absorbed overhead in the work in process. So what I started to see on a monthly basis is, oh, I'm under absorbing, I'm under absorbing here. And luckily I was with a privately held company and my boss understood the value of, of cash flow, which we're generating cash and secondly the value of having happy customers. Okay, so otherwise if I was in a large company, I might have been in trouble. It's kind of career limiting when month after month you're under absorbing and showing unfavorable variances over time. What we saw at these companies is that they paid a lot of attention to the metrics that drove the kind of performance that they're looking to see. And consequently they're pulling, working very hard to pull those dichotomies out of there. And so I think you're going to see more. You know, I don't know as I want to say lean accounting, but what I'll say accounting that really drives superior performance. And we've seen that in a number of companies and such as they really move Lean into an enterprise management system. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, very good. So the next question I have for you is you talk a lot about the language of business and you mentioned that Lean leaders need to be multilingual. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, well, this one kind of comes from experience is that when I first started Lean and started talking about Lean and talking about what we're doing and such, I'd say we have to recognize is that organizations have a language of their own generally. And each site in a company can have their own language that they talk about little acronyms and shorthand that they use to communicate well. Okay, so, you know, you need to be into that language. But in the Lean vernacular, what we're talking about is some of the Lean terms become foreign to them. And then, so I'll give you two stories here. One is that earlier on I was trying to get the hoshin system put together. And I had a meeting with our president and I was going through the matrix and such and you know, I thought I was doing a really nice job of explaining it and talking about True north and all that stuff. And his response was, he says, ken, he says, I can tell you're an engineer. I said, yeah. He says, yep. He says, I can tell you're an engineer. And he says, we like what you're doing there. He says, but I think we want to focus our energies on the business and our business here. And so what I, you know, it was kind of like a kick in the head. I said, geez, you know, I thought I was really, really explaining this stuff well to him. And what I realized, you know, one of my direct bosses and he says, you know, you can't just dive into it. You've got to lead people down a path here. And when you're talking to the natives, you got to talk in the native language. So then I'm at the plant and we're talking about Lean and we're talking about cells and that sort of thing. And again, I thought I was doing really great and all that stuff. And one day I walked down the hallway to go out into the plant and there's this drawing pasted up on the wall. And it had cellular manufacturing. And this was before the first, this is when the first cell was just starting to get formed. It had cellular manufacturing. And here was a picture of a guy behind bars.

Oh boy.

I said, ooh, ooh, okay. And then Lean became less employees are necessary. So I knew I needed to communicate better. I had to change my language to language that they. And then introduce how cells lean and introduce it to them as they saw what it is rather than trying to feed them such from the financial side, the financial group, a lot of times they have difficulty seeing the impact of Lean. They'll see actually make it look worse.

As you used the example earlier with absorption or looking at reducing inventory or whatnot. And there goes our assets.

Right, right, exactly. Particularly if they use asset based lending on their revolver account. If they're doing that sometimes reducing inventory. So what I found was, is that I needed to, you know, and I had an MBA in finance, you know, I mean, come on, Ken, you ought to be able to talk to these guys. And what I found was, is that I went back in my book and I found that, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with the dupont model or the dupont analysis.

Yeah, a little bit.

Okay, well, it was. They developed that in the 20s to use it to connect the dots between show how operating efficiency and asset use efficiency leads to better return on equity. I looked at that and I said man, that's a good tool. And so in fact we highlight this in the book is taking and using that model and the model that they have really identifies that the non financial drivers are what get you the results. And that's where Lean makes a difference. But that's where we have to be able to communicate as Lean practitioners that those non financial activities that you do to improve customer experience, to help grow, to reduce inventory, to get asset turns, to create capacity on your equipment, to get fixed asset turns. So these are the kinds of things that we have to do as Lean practitioners. We have to be able to talk the language of business.

Yeah, no, I totally agree.

And it's money.

Yeah. You know, and I also think it comes down to it's, it sounds, it's much easier said than done, but it's something that we come across here again the Academy on a, on a daily basis, you know, we'll hear questions of, you know, we're in a video training business, right. So people are like well what video do I watch first? And, and so our answer is always what problems are you trying to solve? Right. And, and, and then the other problem that I, and I, and I fall. I'm an engineer by training as well. And we're the worst, right. When it comes to kind of charging in and, and you know, here's policy deployment, Hoshin Kalinary or whatever it is without even explaining why are we doing this. Right. It's like somebody says I want to do 5s. Why? What problem are you going to solve? You know, and they'll look at you like cockeyes. Well, it's 5s. We're going to 5s, the organization. Why, you know, and until you can really understand why you're doing it and what problem you're trying to address, then you're probably going to run into problems, maybe not short term. To your point earlier, I think it's kind of ties in with the whole sustainment thing. But if you have no purpose, you don't know your why. Simon Sinek Right. The famous what's your why? Then we're all going to fail. And I think that's something that the Lean world is starting to, to kind of awaken to a little bit right now. And that's why you're starting to see all this transformation away from tools and into why in management systems. And I think that's that's really good. And I think it's really healthy, and I think it's a natural progression. Right. I mean, we all started with the same lei workbooks and, you know, we all learn together. Right? And, and. And then finally everybody's starting to kind of, you know, eyes are opened. I think Rick Harris, I interviewed him back in April, and, you know, I don't know if, you know, Rick, you know, wrote the red book and the green book, the LAI workbooks, and. And former Toyota guy. And he said that, you know, he turns away more business than he accepts from his consulting practice and had a. Had a general manager called him up and said, hey, we're a tier one supplier to one of the big three, and we need to get lean. He said, well, why? He said, well, we got to win the Shingo prize or some. Some prize, you know, we got to win this thing within the next two years. And Rick said, I'm not your guy, you know, I mean, because he just totally wrong mindset of. Of why you're trying to do this. So. So I'm totally on board with what you're preaching here, Ken, because I think it's exactly what the lean world needs right now.

Yeah. I give you two things. One is I'm glad you started out with why. Because I believe that we have five key elements of a lean management system. It's fairly simple. That makes it hard to do, unfortunately, but first element is clarity of purpose. Why are we doing this? The second is standard work. How do we know what to do and expect from each other? Number three is transparency. I use transparency versus visual management because transparency extends beyond the current work. For example, GM had this ignition problem for 11 years before it came to light. And I can almost guarantee you that in their departments, people had their management by objectives, pretty clear as to what they were doing, but they didn't have the line of sight to the customer, the transparency to know what the customer experience was to be able to make the right decision on that. I think transparency is critical. Third, the fourth is accountability. Okay. You know, are roles defined and do people that do their job, do their jobs to be able to get the results in the line of sight, or do they just do their job to get done? And then finally, finally continuous improvement or innovation, however you want to look at it, but basically continually to drive, never being satisfied with the current look beyond your current business as well as in your current business. I think you got to have that. So those are the five elements that I think are part of a. Of A lean management system. And they're simple to say, but simple is almost never easy, particularly when what we're talking about here is human behavior.

Yeah, exactly, people. That's the monkey wrench.

Yeah. I'll tell you another story here that recently had a gentleman talk to me about. He said, an ops manager. He says, you know, he says, my CEO comes into the plant and he looks around. He says, ah, it looks nice. And he says, you know, we do this, and we. And he says, it looks nice. You guys done a nice job in 5s. And goes on. He says, how can I get him to understand the importance of what this 5s is and why we're continually working on it? So I said, well, you know, to get to the why, I said, well, what's your business? You know, what's your business like? And he says, well, he says, in the low periods of the year, we're operating at this level. In the other periods of the year, we're operating at five times that level. I said, how do you handle that? He said, well, I bring temps in, so. Okay. I said, what would happen if you didn't have the 5s in place? He says, what do you mean? I said, well, what would happen to your temps if they came in? I said, well, it'd be hard to, you know, it'd be hard to get them in. We'd probably have to bring them in earlier or work a lot of overtime. He says. He said, might miss some revenue. He says, but that's career limiting, so I couldn't let that happen.

That's what Saturdays are for, right?

That's exactly right. I said, well, you can convert that over time and that early, early hire experience into dollars and cents. That 5s is making your business.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what you've got to be able to communicate to your CEO, but.

But, you know, before he can communicate it, he has to understand it. And so that's what, you know, you helped him understand, get that understanding himself before he could even explain it to someone else. And so, you know how they say it, I found the problem. And he is. I, you know. Right. And so, yeah, all right, that's what.

We'Re trying to do with the approach that we took in our book here is really to look at, build a lot on the language of business and using the dupont analysis as a tool for operations goats, because it's visual and easy to relate to. And if you can start talking in that language at the senior level and if you have the opportunity to meet the board level, now you're talking a language that they understand and they can see why they're doing these things.

Yeah, got it, got it. All right, well, very good. So let's go ahead now and transition into the reflection section. So, you know, we talked about, we touched on this earlier, the how we lean thinkers spend a lot of time talking about continuous improvement and respect for people and continuous improvement. You know, it's always a little bit easier to put your finger on. It's the tools, it's Justin Ta and Jidoka, these things. But what about respect for people? It's a little bit harder to define. What does respect for people mean to you, Ken?

Well, to me, as I would go back to my favorite management author and that's Peter Drucker. And I think it was in 1959, he coined the term knowledge worker. He didn't necessarily mean people working out in the factory. He was really talking about where the worker, the primary capital that he brings to the table is the knowledge. But I think today respect for people is to look at everyone in your organization as a knowledge worker, whether they're a janitor or the chief technology officer, because everybody walks in that door has a brain and they can use it. And from my experience, if you give them the environment, a safe environment to be able to share ideas, they're going to have them. So listen to them and most of all provide them the tools to be successful in their work. Got it. So that's my definition of respect.

Very good. Ken, what's the best advice you've ever received?

You know, you told me you were going to ask me that question and I thought about it and thought about it and you know, I look over and I've over my career and I've been around some great leaders that I've learned a lot from and such. And so it's hard to really think about what's best. Many times the advice I've gotten has been kind of best for the time. And so I think the way I would answer this the most thing is that there is consistence among most of them was not to take a job for the money, but take it for what you can learn and what you will become. And in many cases that gave me the confidence to really kind of follow my own path. Okay. So I would say that's probably the best advice I got. But I would also say the best advice, and I don't know if anybody ever told me this, but find mentors along the way to help you clarify your goals and, and bring your confidence There because for me, that's been invaluable for years, and I still look to people to mentor.

Napoleon Hill and the Mastermind. Right. Back in the day. Yeah.

Love it.

All right. Hey, Ken, do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

Yeah, I think so. It kind of falls under the term consistency. And when I. When we did our leverage buyout with graphic controls, I had a lot of. I had a number of plants and distribution centers and joint ventures that we were visiting. So it was a lot. A lot of demand there. And I started experimenting with leader standard work. And for the most part, what it did is it helped me manage the cadence of time and how I worked with other leaders, both my peers in the company and the leaders that were in my organization. And so over time, I've used that. And then when I became independent, you know, time management becomes pretty difficult. There's not a lot of assistance around or anything like that helping you out. And so I've found that the leader standard work tool framed around what I'm doing, helped me in my time management and helped me engage with companies that I work with and their leaders. And currently, interestingly enough, when we form the San Diego Business Consortium here, one of the key topics that we're working over the last almost nine months has been leader standard work. We go in and we have each of the companies working to build a model in a certain organization hierarchy and test it and learn from it and share across the companies and such. It's been a really a wonderful experience, and I think it's a pretty powerful tool.

Love it. All right, so is there one thing that's surprised you during your last year of practicing or implementing Lean?

Well, yeah. Yes, as a matter of fact, you know, all of us talk a lot about respect, respect for people. I mean, in the AME folks in the lean world, we talk a lot about respect for people. And as I started getting into some of the research here and also working with a couple of client companies, is how difficult the concept of respect for people seems to be for some managers. And it's not a small problem. Gallup does, you know, surveys and polls and that sort of thing is, as we all know. Well, you know, they did one called the State of the American Business Survey, and they found that only 30% of the workers understand the business strategic objectives and how their jobs even relate to those objectives.

And that's staggering.

That's staggering. I mean, how. How insulting that is to people. Yeah. Okay. I mean, it's. Clearly, we haven't really learned from Peter Drucker's knowledge worker term. But clearly we're missing so much in our businesses when we, when the people aren't engaged in them.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, last question I have for you. Is there, I mean you've been around for a long time. You've been practicing lean and can you continuous improvement for some time, but is there an area or skill area or knowledge area that you feel that you need to improve in order to become better at practicing lean?

Well, actually, yes. It's one that's bothered me for a long time and that is how to encourage leaders at all levels to self develop. I had a manager that worked for me, for example, that was, he got, you know, introduced him to lean, he got into it and such and he really got fired up about it. We have tours. He'd stand up and talk about how all the wonderful things he did. But to go to out to see and I told him I'd pay for it. To go out to see another company, to go out to an AME conference and you know, learn. Just didn't seem to be interested in it. You know. And it's. I've seen that in too many companies that I've gone in as people are interested in telling you about what they know, but don't really want, don't seem to want to have that lifelong learning for continual developing. So I think continuous improvement is applies to. Yeah. To me as well. Yeah. So I'm. Any suggestions you got on that one, I would be greatly appreciated.

Well, we'll go over to gemba academy.com and not just kidding.

Wow.

No, I think you're on the right track and I think just all the, all the work that you're doing with AME and just AME in general, we're big, big, big fans of AME and great friends and collaborate together continuously. I just think that type of work, you know, I think you, you'd probably be the first to admit you learn as much as you teach. Right. Anytime that you're out there talking to people and helping people, you're learning yourself. So I think that's, that's a wonderful situation to be in.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. I learn from every, every company. I go into every organization, every AME conference. Are you going to be in Cincinnati?

Oh goodness. Well, goodness. Yeah. No, we're, we're, we're actually, we had a double booth and big party going on that we're working closely with AME and making some videos for you guys even so, so It's. Yeah, it's going to be a great time. Can't wait. So we'll see you there.

All right, look forward to it.

All right, Ken, well, let's go ahead and wrap the show up with you. Why don't you share some final words of wisdom and then why don't you tell people how they can connect with you? Maybe on social media, LinkedIn, something like that.

Well, very, very quickly, I'd say the best way is you can find me on LinkedIn. That's the best way to communicate. If you can't find me there, you can look on the AME website on the West Region Board of Directors and you can connect me through email there. In terms of, I guess, kind of a last advice, I would say is to anyone that's really listening here and what they hear about this is what I think you can do to really got to get started is simply go out and see what's going on. Go to Gemba, Gemba Academy there. Go to Gemba, go out to the factory floor, to the engineering spaces, to the customer service points and such, and talk to the people doing the work. All right. And look at our use, our lean management system things. Ask people, do they know why they're doing it? Do they have clear clarity of purpose of what they're doing? Do they have standard work? Is it pretty transparent what they need to do and the results of what they do? Is there a clear sense of accountability? Are people really looking to get results? Are they just simply getting their job done? And then finally, what are they doing to improve the work that they're doing? So if you look at those five things and such, and look at it from the standpoint of if you're a leader, how you can support their efforts in that regard. If you're a lean practitioner, how can you help them? If you're an engineer, look at it and clarify it for yourself, but go out and see what's actually going on.

Yeah, got it. All right, Ken, well, thanks again for taking the time out of your day to visit with us. It was great. And can't wait to meet up with you in Cincinnati and meet you in person.

Likewise. Likewise, Ron. And thank you. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to talk with you today and I appreciate the opportunity.

All right, take care, Ken.

All right, you too. Bye. Bye.

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