GA 065 | Lean Metrics with Robert St. Louis

You're listening to episode 65 with Robert St. Louis. 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 in your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over@gembaacademy.com now, as a reminder, if you're not currently a customer of Gemba Academy and you'd like to take us for a test drive, head on over to gembaacademy.com and set up your free seven day trial. There's no strings attached, no credit card involved. You just get set up. You can set yourself up now and be watching our videos minutes from now. Of course, I want you to listen to this podcast first, but then if you're interested, go and check out what we have to offer over@gembaacademy.com now today I'm excited to welcome Robert St. Louis to the show. Now, Robert has a really interesting background that he's going to tell us about, but today the theme of the episode is metrics. And this is something that Robert's very passionate about as you're going to hear. And we're going to talk a lot about, you know, the type of metrics that organizations might want to look at and how many metrics should you have? A bunch of metrics, just a few metrics and so forth. So these are things that Robert and I are going to explore. We're also going to talk about something that Robert calls his rule of three. And this actually goes back to his time at the Air Force where he was an air traffic controller. So super interesting information that I know you're gonna love. So show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything that we're talking about, can be found over@gembapodcast.com 65 and that's 65 for 65. So gembapodcast.com 65. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Robert, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to visit with us. Where are you calling in from?

No problem. Well, thanks for having me on the, on the show today. Ron calling in from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Nice. All right, Home. The gophers.

Home of the Gophers.

All right, Very good. All right, well, Robert, let's go ahead and just get started with you telling us a little bit about your background, maybe how you first came to learn about continuous improvement and then what you're.

Up to these days, certainly. Well, my background, I've been in manufacturing for a little more than 20 years, but before that, I was in the Air Force. I spent a little over eight years on active duty with the U.S. air Force. And I think at that time, we were doing continuous improvement, although we didn't really call it lean or continuous improvement as I reflect back on it. That's what we were doing with, like, TPM programs and different things that we did. But as I transitioned out of the military into the civilian world, I got into manufacturing. And at that time, it was probably about the mid-90s with a large company in Wisconsin. They were just embarking on their lean journey. So they had some consultants that had come from Japan and were teaching us all these different tools and techniques. And at first, you know, I was not dismissive of it, but I thought it would be pretty incredible when a gentleman told us he was going to take one of our setups down from what was at that time, about 15 hours to less than an hour. And lo and behold, within two weeks, we had that setup down to about 15 minutes.

Wow. For what, seven hours, you said.

Yeah, from a little more than it was taking us well over 12 hours to configure this machine. And, you know, it was just some very simple things that we hadn't thought of that could do it. And, you know, it kind of took on that pit crew mentality about free staging things ahead of time that we knew. And then some of the things, we were taking panels off the machines to look at the oil gauges, and he said, why don't you just cut a hole in there and put some plexiglass? And I was like, yeah, because it's taking us 20 minutes to do this. Yeah, and just all the little simple things. And it made a real believer out of me after seeing that about what you thought could be impossible was definitely possible. When you got people together and all started thinking and collaborating and sharing ideas and then trying it, that was really the trial and error piece was a lot of fun. And not every iteration on every project we did over the years that I was at that company was great, right out of the park, but that was the whole spirit of it. Okay, what did you learn from that? How did you improve on It. And so from there I transitioned that was more industrial type of products, and I switched to electrical enclosures. I got recruited from there to another company that was doing data comm servers and things. And they were well along their lean path. And that took it to a different level in terms of learning and what we could do. They were more focused on how rapidly and how many they could do, which was good. And it was providing significant results because for the time I was there, we had delivered over 25 consecutive quarters of improved ROI and improved operating income. So that was pretty significant for a publicly traded company at the time. And then from there I went to a completely different industry, which was medical device, where people told me you couldn't do lean in the medical device community because the regulations wouldn't allow you to. And, you know, lo and behold, we were able to do it because the regulations may have defined the playing field. They didn't necessarily define how we played the game. And so that was a great opportunity to leverage some of that training and experience I had. And then from there went to the food industry and now the chemical industry. And so it's just been an exciting journey and a lot of fun.

Nice. Very good. Sounds like you've had an awesome career and still more fun to have.

Absolutely.

All right. Well, as you know, Robert, we'd like to start all of our shows with our guest sharing a quotation that possibly inspires him. So do you have one?

Yeah. You know, one of the things, a quote that has resonated with me that I heard a long time ago was by former President Ronald Reagan, and this was before he was president. It was a speech he was giving in 1975, and he said, we may not have sought this role of leadership that has been thrust upon us, but whether we like it or not, the events of the moment demand our participation. And I thought about that in terms of kind of the lean context. And oftentimes organizations, unless they've got a lot of foresight and have had somebody with that experience come in and share with them, it's not until they're pressed up against a wall that they start really thinking about this. And then all of a sudden, we got to do something. And not everybody is enamored with it because they think it's going to be this herculean effort, it's going to require a lot of things. But the reality is, you know, it does take our participation. If we, you know, we may not have thought about it willingly, we may not have wanted it, you know, in this context, but you know, if we participate, there's a great opportunity for us to be extremely successful with this.

Love it. All right, well, Robert, today we're going to talk about metrics and so called lean metrics. So let's kind of just, I don't know, get started with you kind of describing to us what, what you mean when you, when you say the term or the phrase lean metrics.

Sure. One of the things I've noticed over my span of career is, you know, KPIs and metrics and you'll get organizations that say we're a metric driven organization. But what does that really mean? And then what does that mean with respect to. And so as I've toured other companies and been part of some big companies, sometimes there's metrics and they want to measure everything under the sun, which is great, but to what end is that helping you? And what does that really take to measure all of that? How much of your resources, time, are there wastes within that? And what I have found is there are wastes if the metric is cumbersome to create and people don't understand it. Because at the end of the day you really want to focus on the significant few that can really move your company forward or give you a clear insight into how your area or a particular process is performing and performing with respect to your business strategy, your long term objectives. Because my experience with lean is it's not a short term type of thing, that's more of a sprint. Lena is looking at it much longer. And so how are these things helping you with that? And are they easy to create, easy to maintain and easy for people to understand? So that's the criteria for a lean metric for me.

So can you give me an example?

Certainly. Let's say you want to look at an on time delivery metric. A lot of times I've seen companies get into the discussion of, well, is it on time from the time it leaves our dock to the time it reaches our customer, to what? And while you want to measure it to the time it reaches your customer, unless you control your own freight lines, it's really not within your control once it leaves your dock. And then you get into the international. And so they're perplexed by why this metric isn't okay, let's just put 95% or 97% on everybody's goal sheet, we'll get there. Not necessarily. And so you're pulling it out of disparate systems at that time you're waiting for your third party logistics provider to provide you Detail. And the poor individual that's putting it together is spending an enormous time creating this kind of cumbersome chart. Whereas what we do now at my current company is we say what we have absolute control of is the time it leaves our dock. From the time we receive that customer order to the time it leaves our dock or it's ready for shipment. We control that. So let's measure that. And we started putting it out into, like, a bar chart. But what we noticed was when we'd ask people on the production area or in different areas, did they really understand that as we were trying to show periods like here's the month, even though it was simple enough, they said, we really like the pie charts better. So we switched to a pie chart. So now you'll see the pie chart is just simple, two colors. It's green and red. The green portion of the pie is good. And that may say we're 97% on time. And then there's a little sliver that is separated from it that shows here's the 3% we weren't. And a call out either. Not a rationalization of here's why, but here's an opportunity for us to get better.

Now, sticking with that on time delivery example was something that I remember back in my days of working in manufacturing, different manufacturing environments. There was always the question of, is it on time delivery to when we commit to the customer what we commit to the customer, or on time delivery to what the customer requests? What are your thoughts on that?

I'd say my experience has been, is that on time to what we committed, what we first committed to the customer? Because we may change our commitment to the customer based on different factors. But was our original date that we had presented to the customer accurate? And if not, why not? Because that was probably based off of a lead time somewhere or an assumed lead time. And if that wasn't matching up with reality, then what is it? And is that really driving the market? Because at one company I was at, we found, you know, we were trying to get to this really high level of service to our customers and do it within five days, when in reality, the market really didn't care about that. When we went out and did a survey, what they carried about was the. Or what they cared about was the fill rate. Was it 100% filled? Not was it on time within five days?

Interesting. All right, so why do you think kind of these critical few lean metrics matter to a business?

I think they matter to a business because it's really about cost. At the end of the day, if you've got a lot of your people engaged, spending a lot of time creating metrics that are interesting but not of particular value to you, how much is that costing you and how much more human capacity could that open up for you to solve other problems if they didn't have to focus on those ones? So if you could really narrow them down to the critical few. Because when you get right down to it, metrics are a form of communication. And effective communication is achieved when our mental process has both the ability to accommodate and interpret the information contained in the message. So what you're putting out there in terms of metrics, if people don't understand it or they can't gravitate to how they affect it, that's ineffective. So then you get into this re loop of redoing things or reformatting or re graphing, which is all forms of waste at the end of the day. So that's why it should matter to an organization.

Now, what are your opinions on the famous balanced scorecard approach? Have you ever done practice that?

Yeah, we do have a scorecard or a dashboard, an executive dashboard that we look at in my particular industry, and we have one in other industries. And what we did was go to a very simple information on that. Again, kind of a three color, like a stoplight. Red, Yellow.

Yes.

If it's green, we don't discuss it or talk about it because there's really not a need to. Unless we say how do we want to maybe sustain that? Or we feel there might be some drip. But the reds. Okay. We want to spend some time and understand what's happening. And then what we actually do is on some of them, where we have history, we don't get concerned about one redd because that could be easily an anomaly. It could be an environmental impact. I think about the time when Hurricane Katrina came through and affected our business in the north here, because a good portion of our customer base was in the south. But what we do is we say when we get to two reds, before we get to that third one, when we notice the second red, that's the time we want to come in as management and try to help out to the extent we can. Where do we need to block and tackle and do some of the heavy lifting so the team can be successful.

Yeah, yeah. Something else that I found to be particularly powerful when it comes to these balance scorecards or just metrics in general, is really understanding the difference between a leading indicator and a lagging indicator, you know. So on Time delivery is a perfect example. It's a lagging indicator. Right. It's either on time or it's not. Whereas cycle time or different other more leading indicators. When those things are getting out of control, you may be able to catch the problem before that lagging indicator fails at the end of the month. Would you agree?

Yeah, absolutely. And to the extent that you can create good leading indicators, which are simple, one of them we did at one business I was because delivery for us, we were delivering to the retail environment, to the big box retailers that are out there. So it was all about on time delivery and fill rate with those guys. So the way we did that was having stocking programs where we maintained a certain level of stock based on ordering history. And then we kind of buffered that to include what was in transit. So we knew our transit times from different points where we were shipping. So I need, you know, above and beyond that, probably three or four days worth of stock to ensure that things would arrive and there'd be enough in the pipeline to sustain it. And what we created was a very simple report that gave the product sku, the stocking target and where we were in relation to that. And then we conditionally formatted that so it was an export out of our ERP system. But when we put it into the Excel format and later just automated the report, it lit up with either red, yellow or blue. And if it was white, there was no issue with it. Yellow was you were starting to get in trouble. Red was you might be in trouble and you need to start to replenish. Blue was if you don't get this corrected within 24 hours or 48 hours, whatever the criteria was we set at that time meant somebody was going to be singing the blues or somebody was going to be having the blues because somebody was going to be sad they didn't get their product or we were going to have to explain to somebody why they couldn't have their product. Product.

Or the customer's going to pop you in the eye and your eye was going to turn blue or something.

Exactly. But it was a good leading indicator because you could actually watch it move from yellow to red to blue if you were wanting to do that. But it did give you the time to react before it would get there.

All right, very good. So before we started the show, we were kind of talking a little bit about what you're calling the rule of three. And so I wonder if you just go ahead and describe, what is this rule of three?

Yeah, the rule of three is something That I can't say I've come up with because it really stems out of the aviation industry a little bit, although they don't formally call it that. But my time in the Air Force, I was an air traffic controller. And one of the things that NASA and the FAA and some psychologists have done is a lot of studies on how much the brain can actually take on what it's got capacity to take on at one time, especially when it comes to numbers. And what they found is that when you start getting beyond three, some people have the capacity for four, the brain starts to drop out information exponentially and it just falls off quite rapidly. And really beyond seven, it's like there's almost no retention of what numbers, 10, 11, 12. And certainly there's a few outliers. But as I apply that to metrics, I say the rule of three is in a category. So if you think of traditional categories as safety, quality, cost, delivery, no more than three to four significant metrics in that area in each category. You mean in each category. So can you put the three most significant ones? Because you might have seven metrics under cost. You want to look at really which three are the most significant? Because if you kind of follow the 8020 rule, that's really where you should be spending your time. But if all the other ones are consuming your time either creating them or studying them, but they're not moving your business forward, you've probably got your energies maybe misapplied. So really focus on the significant few. And then within that, as you create a metric that you're going to be putting as a visual out somewhere or even on a dashboard or something like that, limit it to three colors, limit it to three numbers or three sets of numbers. 2 if it's like ratios or two sets of numbers that are comparing things, because then it's going to be much easier for people to interpret. When you see some of these that are very complex and three dimensional, or there's eight colors on it, people just walk right by because it's automatically, it's almost like a wall that they get put off by it because they don't want to spend the time with it. And that was reaffirmed with some of the feedback we would get with people on the floor if you'd ask them what does that metric mean? It's beautiful, but they couldn't interpret it. So that's why we try to follow on the rule of three because we don't want that information to fall out. We want people to use that information and Engage with it.

Okay, so I got to ask, this is a little bit off topic, but the air traffic control, like, fascinates me. And I've never. I've never really been in an air traffic control room or anything like that. Just everything's movies and whatnot. But what's your most exciting or craziest air traffic control story?

Well, there's a lot of them. I mean, there's moments of where it's really tense, but everybody's on game, and so there's lots of people watching. So it's not just all on one person. You've got coordinators, you've got other people looking and multiple eyes looking at a scene. But I can clearly think of one where we had a. I was in the Air Force, and we were stationed in the Pacific, and weather was moving in, and it was going to be bad weather. It was a typhoon that was approaching, but it hadn't gotten really bad yet. And we were kind of going down to our minimum staffing. Once we battened down the hatches and things like that with radar, you know, we'd go to kind of a minimum staffing level. Unbeknownst to us, there was a battle carrier group that was offshore that we didn't get the message traffic on, and the planes had to evacuate off of the ships for whatever reason. And all of a sudden, it was just like the sky opened up with airplanes that came out of nowhere. And that was a pretty tense situation because when the fighters recover and the weather's bad, they don't have a lot of fuel left on that. They can just hold out or do multiple approaches. They have to start putting it on the deck. And that can get a little bit tense at times. But it can also be a very rewarding experience because you are a part of that success for them that you helped get them there safely. The nice thing about it was it was never a job that you took home with you that you said, oh, I bet I left that guy downwind.

Yes.

Halfway to Tokyo by now.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, I just, like. I don't know. It's so fascinating just how someone can just stare at their screen with all these dots going around and keep it under control. But it's fascinating work.

Yeah, it's a. You know, to me, it is a good analogy for manufacturing, and that's a little bit how I got into manufacturing. In one of my first interviews where the gentleman said, you don't have a lot of manufacturing experience, he said, you're military. And I thought about that and I said, well I said air traffic control is a lot like manufacturing. And he said, how so I said, because in air traffic control, what you're trying to do is take an aircraft from one airport to another airport in a safe, orderly and expeditious manner. There's going to be things that happen en route, you're going to encounter turbulence, you might get delays, etc. But at the end of the day, the person waiting at that other gate for that airplane really doesn't care what happened in route. They care is that it arrived on time and safely. You're just doing the same thing with a customer order. How you choose to respond to those things as they come up, that's entirely up to you. So you can either have a process and have some training and rules around it and work within those, or and allow yourself some flexibility or you can choose to just get all panicked and concerned about it and not be very effective. So he looked at me, said, well, you don't know much about manufacturing. He said, but I like the attitude. And you appear trainable.

Yeah, exactly. All right, well, let's just say that organization kind of gets into this, this mode of, kind of critical, few lean metrics, got rule three working and so forth. How do you sustain this kind of environment?

I think the biggest key in my experience for sustaining it is engagement by management and by whether that's floor level management and senior management. And it absolutely has to be senior management engaging with it on a periodic basis. They may not be able to be on your production floor every day, but to the extent that they can, if they are out there for any reason and they can ask a question, ask a cell operator or an owner about that. And really from a management level, using it to educate people rather than intimidate them. You know, if you set it up well, we want to have targets and objectives with certain metrics. We use ours and we focus ours on educating and developing people to ask good questions around the data. Well, why do you think, you know, we didn't, you know, reach this or why do you think we overachieved that? What would you do differently so they're not afraid of the metric? Because sometimes if people think you're keeping score, it's human nature to want to have a good score to be great. And when it's not, it can lead to unintended consequences where people either stop reporting information or start doing different things. So if utilization, for example, is a metric a company chooses to look at, I can utilize my. They might pull in orders or Overproduce to a certain degree to get a higher utilization which burdens your inventory, which restricts your cash flow. So the unintended consequences restricted cash flow, but the intent was great. To get better absorption and better utilization of your equipment.

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. And that's always the challenge of a traditional kind of cost accounting approach versus a lien accounting approach. Right, right. So. All right, well, very good. The last question I have on this Lean metrics section is if someone wanted to learn more about this topic, do you have any recommendations as far as books or resources or anything like that?

One of the best tools for myself has been in Minnesota. We've got Manufacturers alliance up here. And so they have a website. It's about 400 member companies where it's just peer to peer learning and sharing of things like that. They can contact me via LinkedIn, look me up on LinkedIn. But really, a lot of the information on just putting together metrics and simplifying has come through. Whether it's through Gemba Academy or other sources, which is a great source, and some of the online tutorials which emphasize the simplification of things. I think those are all great tools and pathways. I haven't seen a particular book on lean metrics or simplifying metrics, but I think people learn over the time that this is cumbersome. Why do it? I've just become more of an evangelist around it because I see the waste from the executive position and I felt it from when I was an analyst earlier in my career of why am I doing this? Nobody's routinely looking at it or using the information.

Yeah, yeah, very good. All right. Well, thank you for that. It was a great session. So let's go ahead and kind of transition now, Robert, into. Into the reflection section. And the first question that I have is, you know, we lead thinkers spend a lot of time talking about kind of the two pillars of tps, the respect for people and continuous improvement. And continuous improvement is kind of easy to put your fingers on. It's the tools, you know, one piece, flow, jidoka, these sorts of things. But what about respect for people? What does that mean to you?

To me, the respect for people really means not solving problems for them, but rather teaching them how to become problem solvers. The traditional definition of a lean will state that it's the relentless pursuit of the elimination of waste. And as I've thought about that over the years and how my career has moved and the people I've worked with, it's really been more about the relentless Pursuit to develop people to become better problem solvers so they can recognize waste and then know how to eliminate it.

Yes. That's so hard to do though, isn't it? Especially when you think, oh, I can do it, I can just solve it for them really fast here.

Well, exactly. And you think initially you think that's being very lean. Right, I got it done. I got, you know, we got solution in place. But really what you're doing by doing that is robbing them of the opportunity to learn for themselves. So your sustainability, you're neither sustainable in taking that approach nor are you scalable.

Yeah, we always talk about don't steal someone's monkey, you know, the monkey on their back.

Oh, yeah.

So one of our team members, Britta, came to me the other day and asked me a question about some video or something and, and I knew she could find the answer. I said, I'm not, you know, I kind of gave her some hints and I said, but I don't want to steal your monkey. And she started laughing and she figured it out, you know, but yeah, right.

You know, initially it's like, yeah, I just want the answer, you know, the, like electricity. We want the path of least resistance, but that's also how you strengthen things, is through that resistance. And that's why, you know, otherwise you just get, you know, this kind of malaise where, you know, the business just kind of is in a quagmire for a while.

Yeah, exactly. Robert, what's the best advice you've ever received?

You know, it was early in my career and I had one of my bosses come in and he was looking around my cube and I had a lot of charts and graphs and things. And he kind of looked at me and he said, Robert, he said, tools and data and plans. He said, those are really good and I can see you're a data driven guy. He said, they don't accomplish anything. He said, people do. And he just walked off after that. And I thought about it and first thought, what's he getting at with that? It's like, is he saying, I'm not doing my job? Because you can clearly see I've got all these things here posted in a very indirect way. He was telling me to go to Gemba, to really engage people with the tools and understand what it was. Because all that was, as he, as he mentioned, was it's just an indicator. It's a point in space at time, but it's not going to solve your problem for you.

Yes, yes, we even talked. We actually just refreshed our practical problem solving course, as you may have seen in the module on breaking the problem down, when the last steps of kind of identifying that point of cause or where the problem's really occurring. But the only way to do that is to get up and go to Gemba and see it with your own eyes. You cannot do it looking at a minitab graph or spreadsheet or, you know, anything like that. You have to go and see. And that's so, so simple, yet so, so hard and just doesn't happen often enough.

Oh, absolutely. I can think of one example in my past where we were moving a facility, transferring equipment from one facility to another, and started up some of the new equipment. We noticed the results on a particular product was strange discoloration, and it was from an annealing process. And we had engineers and technicians and everybody in a conference room for two or three days hypothesizing about why this would occur and why did we look at the gas lines and we're interrogating the contractors and some of the project managers. And at the time, I let it go for about two days and then said, why don't we walk out, go to the Gemba and see? Let's talk to the operator who's working with it. He pointed out that while we had two pieces of equipment that were identical, he said, maybe it's because this one got a little bit bent here where there was a seal in transit, and lo and behold, it was enough to create an atmospheric condition that produced this outgassing that caused the discoloration. But you would never see that unless you went out there or you engaged that operator. Love it.

Love it. Great story. All right, Robert, do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

Probably the best productivity habit that I have is really leader standard work for myself. So I really leverage the tools that I have available to become as efficient and as effective as I can. So one of the biggest tools that I have available to me is Microsoft Outlook, if you run a Microsoft suite of solutions in your business. But it's really leveraging that calendar to block and make time. So I have specific times that I want to be on my production floor, and those are mandatory. And I will put other meetings aside for those people, try to schedule into that time. I will just know that's my time on the floor to go to Gemba to engage the people that I'm entrusted to, to be leading and to be working with. So I have a better understanding when I come to other subsequent meetings of what's it taking for us? And then also through email communications, really kind of following that rule of three, or limiting that email to not a big, long, laborious email of paragraphs or paragraphs, but be succinct, be to the point. And then if it's something that requires action, put that in the subject line so that when people see it, they know action required. And there's a date on there so they understand it's not to try and impress people, but there are deliverables and there are subsequent things attached to that. So at least they know right away that you're being candid and you're being open with them as to what the deliverable is and they know how it's impacting them.

Yeah, very good, Very good. So, Robert, is there anything over the past year or so when you've been practicing lean that something surprised you?

You know, I think, you know, it's not so much surprising me, but it's really. I'm just always amazed by how much people can accomplish when you free up the constraints or the. You know, the. What they feel is the barriers for success. When you can strip away those barriers and really empower people to just please try and do something with that, how quickly they can make improvements, and then really get excited and get passionate about wanting to continue to do that. That's been, to me, very rewarding to see it. Because what I have found is early in my career where you think you've got a solution in your mind's eye as to how this should look. The result might be the exact results you're looking for, but the pathway there, or how they went about that can be completely different, yet still achieve the same result. And oftentimes it's better and more robust than what I might have had in my mind's eye.

Got it. Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow when things aren't going well and you need to recharge and refocus?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's times, like most people, where you run into those occasions and you just need to take a step back and recompose. And so when I feel that approaching, I like to go to the mountains. I like to go out west, whether it's glacier or Yellowstone or some of the national parks. Last year I went to Iceland. It was a different spot, but I really like to climb and get up in the mountains because a teacher early on, when I was young taught me that really the answer to anything in life can be found in nature. And nature has a way of revealing itself. And it's almost like Gemba. When you walk out to a production floor for the first time, it's, wow, there's just so much going on. It's almost like sensory overload. And when you first walk out to a field or a mountain, you just take in this vista and you go, wow, that's really grand. But then as you walk, watch it for a little bit of time. It's like standing in a circle. Certain things start to reveal themselves. Patterns of how insects are moving or wind is blowing or whatever the case may be. And sometimes that gives me inspiration to come back and look at things. Whether it was a really tough problem, I might actually find the answer in that. Because nature is also very simple in the way it kind of designs solutions around things and a little bit elegant.

Yeah, great. All right, so the last question I have for you, Robert, is I'm curious if there's a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become a better lean thinker.

You know, I think in terms of a knowledge and skill, it's really more encompassing. I can't limit it to just one because there's so many areas within lean. There's so many different tools. But it's really, I think, learning to take the tools and adapting them to different situations and saying, okay, how can I take the concept and apply the concept versus a particular tool and say, okay, what am I trying to accomplish with this versus here's the exact tool I need. A screwdriver. No, not necessarily. Or I should hide. You know, this should be hijunka. I should level load this. Now, what am I trying to accomplish? And maybe there's a different way to do it, but the concept is still there. I'm trying to balance this or I'm trying to do that. Because sometimes, like anybody else, after you've done this for a while, some of these tools become second nature and reflexive. So if you're used to using a screwdriver, you start seeing the world as a screw, right?

Yes.

And that's not what lean is about. It's about taking those concepts and applying them to an ever changing and dynamic of environment and adapting for that, with simplicity, with ease, to become more efficient and to solve the problem better.

Very good, Very good. Couldn't agree more. All right, well, Robert, I really enjoyed talking with you. So let's go ahead and wrap the show up with you sharing some final words of wisdom. And then why don't you tell people how they can connect with you via Social media.

Okay, well, great. Well, I appreciate you having me on and the opportunity, you know, to share some of my thoughts and some of my insights around this topic today. And I appreciate the people that are listening for being there. Probably the final words of wisdom I might have or might share with people is something that I was taught early on, which I might not have appreciated early on, but I certainly appreciate it now and try to share it with my team, which is practice. There's two reasons for that. One is practice to get the feedback quickly, because with feedback you can start to continuously improve. If you try to get it to perfection and never get it out there, you're just going to spend a lot of time, eat up your time continuum and never get the benefit of it. But the other reason for practice is practice allows and teaches us patience. And when we practice and we develop patience, then we can relax. And so when we have practice and patience and we're relaxed, once you're relaxed, you can focus. And so if you're relaxed and focused, then you can be deliberate, then you can execute strategies effectively.

You know, my wife is going to. I'm not going to let her listen to that last part. We're actually selling a house I was talking about earlier and. And I don't have any patience for selling a house. I'm like, just somebody just buy it now. And it's so hard, right? Patience is so hard. Especially I always. I'm a man of action, you know, but sometimes you just have to kind of sit back and let the process work and be patient and be diligent. I guess. So. Very, very good words of wisdom there.

Yeah, things will happen. They just may not happen on the continuum that you want them to. They'll happen.

Exactly. All right, well, how can people connect with you, Robert?

Certainly they can contact me directly via LinkedIn. My profile should be out there on LinkedIn and feel free to connect with me. That's probably the best way. Otherwise, if they have specific questions, they can email me at Robert st. Louis, all one word, s t l o u I s@mgk.com all right, well, very good.

Well, thanks again for coming onto the show, Robert. It's been fun and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Great. Thanks, Ron. Really appreciate it. And thanks to everyone for listening.

All right, take care.

You as well. Bye.

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