GA 073 | The Zingerman’s Approach to Lean with Tom Root

You're listening to episode 73 with Tom Root.

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 at Gembacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now then, today I'm excited to welcome Tom Root to the show. Now, Tom is the founder and owner of Zingerman's mail order business. Now we are getting ready to go back to Zingerman's. They are in Ann Arbor, Michigan to do a full blown Gemba Academy live episode. And Tom and his team have been gracious enough to welcome us in. And I've actually been out there one time already to check things out and kind of walk through and learn more about their business and kind of planning for this, for this episode. And I gotta tell you, they are doing some pretty special things over there and Tom's gonna explain their business and kind of the Zingerman's model. But one thing in particular that I was really taken back of is just how sophisticated they are as it comes to things like production leveling. I'm not sure I've ever seen business. You know, obviously there's Toyota and companies like that, but I'm not sure I've ever seen another non Toyota type company level the way that Tom and his team do. They have tons of volume and tons of mix and they handle it in an incredibly efficient manner. So we're actually going to explore that a little bit in the episode and Tom's also going to kind of talk about how they got started. They actually started because they had a problem that they needed to solve. And like so many things, Lean is a great way to go about solving problems and you're going to hear exactly how that unfolded. Now, the show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com 73 and that's 7, 3 for 73. So gembapodcast.com 73 okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Tom, well, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from today?

I'm calling in from Ann Arbor, Michigan.

All right. Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the Wolverines. All right. Yeah. All right, Very good. Well, I was just, as you know, I was just up there a few weeks ago and can't wait to come back and do our full Gemba Academy Live episode with you guys. It's going to be a blast.

So we're looking forward to it.

Yeah, looking forward to it. So let's just go ahead and tell everybody that's listening maybe just a little bit about yourself, Tom, and maybe we'll get into the Zingerman story, But I'm most interested in Tom right now. So how did Tom first come to learn about continuous improvement?

So I joined Zingerman's about 16 years ago, got involved in building the first website to sell product, and then we ended up merging the website company with the mail order company, and I ended up getting involved in sort of operational issues at the mail order company. Our problem was that we were growing so well that we had to move the company three times in six years. And we just got real tired of that exercise, and so we started looking around for ways that we could solve some of our space problems. And I happened to have a partner getting his mba. He was studying under a gentleman named Jeffrey Leiker, who wrote the Toyota Way, and he told me, you might want to read this book, there might be something to it. And I read the Toyota Way, and to me, it was sort of one of those light bulb moments. It all became very clear that I didn't know how we were going to do it, but the answer to our problem was found somewhere in that volume and just realized very quickly thereafter that was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. So our introduction to Lean came basically, we had a problem we were trying to solve, and it came along at the right time. We were lucky enough that Dr. Leicher is actually in town, a local guy for us, and we gave him a call, and he introduced us to some folks who were trying to get their PhDs, and we learned a lot from them, and we learned a lot from Dr. Leicher and have benefited incalculably from our experience with Lean.

Now, when was that, when you first read that book?

I think we guessed that that was probably about 10 years ago, maybe 11 years ago at that point.

Yeah, Very good, very good. All right, well, we're going to dive much deeper into the Zingerman story and in particular, your mail order business. And one thing you didn't mention is you are an owner, right, in the mail order Business. Is that correct?

That is correct, yes.

All right, all right. Very good. All right. Well, Tom, as you know, we like to start all of our shows with our guests sharing a quotation that possibly inspires them. So do you have one?

So this was hard for me to narrow down because there's so many good ones. My first answer was going to be, I went through a rather Paul Akers talks about going through a rough spot in his lean adoption. Well, I had exactly that circumstance and was really sort of frustrated with the fact that the frontline staff didn't seem to be getting it and they weren't really picking up the banner of continuous improvement. And I was sort of lamenting this to a friend of mine who wasn't involved in the lean stuff at all. And he goes, tom, you know, working with people isn't lean. And I thought that was actually a pretty good insight. But my favorite quote actually came at the same period of time from probably one of my biggest mentors and one of the co founders of Zingerman's, which is Paul Saginaw, who told me that, you know, Tom, it always seems like you have believed that your responsibility as the owner of Zingerman's mail order was to ensure that the organization was financially healthy. But the truth is your job is to develop the people that work for you. And I think that that was one of those what we call belated glimpses of the obvious. And the moment he put it into words, it was very obvious that he had nailed the proverbial nail on the head.

Love it. Love it. All about people.

Yes, absolutely.

All right, so tell us a little bit about Zingerman's. What's the story there?

Yeah, well, Zingerman's as an organization is actually a community of businesses. There are now nine different businesses that make up the Zingerman solar system. Many of them are producers. So we have a bakehouse and a creamery, a coffee company and a candy company. They're all making product. We have two restaurants. One is a delicatessen and one is a sit down, sort of American food style restaurant. Restaurant. And then we have a mail order company. Addition to the mail order company, we have a training company. So there's a sort of this solar system of businesses. We have the two co founders have common ownership, are partners in all of them. But the whole model is that each entity would be owned and operated by different people. And so my involvement in the organization actually started off as I was the chief information officer, originally started the original zingermans.com and as I mentioned, after a little while, we decided it made sense to merge that with the existing catalog business. And that's when I sort of stopped being a technology guy and started becoming a Lean guy.

Love it. I love it. And just a quick commercial. You guys didn't ask for this, but if you want to have the best Reuben in your entire life, you'll go to the Zingerman's Deli there in Ann Arbor. It is incredible.

Thank you. Thank you.

All right, well, let's talk a little bit about. So you talked about how you first got introduced to Lean through a book and Dr. Leiker and some other students coming in and helping you guys. But what did you really do? Like, how did you really get it started there at mail order?

Well, so the thing to keep in mind about mail order, which maybe is a little different than some business context, is that we are a gift business. We'll say 70, 75% of all of our shipments are actually one person sending something to somebody else. And as a result of being a gift business, we're a very seasonal business. 50% of our annual revenue will occur in the four weeks leading up to Christmas, basically one week prior to Thanksgiving. And the three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we're going to do half of all our business.

Wow. So in a month, basically, or two.

Months in a month. And the fun part is that 50% of the 50% happens in the two weeks just before Christmas.

Wow.

So last year, we were about a $15 million business. I mean, that meant that we did seven and a half million dollars in four weeks. And that focuses the mind, I'll say, having that much seasonality and that much of a change of business. It's really like having two different businesses. We have a business that sort of happens 10 months of the year, and we have an entirely different business the other two months of the year. Our problem was that every time the holiday came around, our process of batch producing gift boxes at night and then picking them during the day required more and more and more space to produce and store. And that's why we had to move all the time. Every time we grew the business, we needed more space because of the way we were working. So our first salvo in Lean was the desire to make gift boxes just in time. And so the first effort was stop batch making them at night and start making them during the day. So kit it up or assemble it up and then ship it out the door. Kit it, ship it, kit it, ship it. And the first holiday that we attempted to do this we had to set up a pick market, which we had never done before. And we had to have replenishment kanbans, which we had never done before. And we had to have a bunch of specialized workstations that were designed to make gift boxes one at a time, which we had never had before. And you know, unfortunately or fortunately, I guess it's a classic story where going into it, there were maybe two people who thought this was a good idea.

You were one of them, maybe I.

Was one of them. Yeah. I was certainly behind a lot of it. But there were very few people who thought this made sense. And it wasn't really until after the holiday had passed and we had survived and it had actually gone pretty well that people began to say, well, okay, maybe this isn't a terrible idea. That didn't sell them, by the way. I mean, there was still a long road ahead of us in terms of figuring out how to make it make sense for everybody. But a little bit of resistance was eliminated. That first holiday.

Now was that first holiday like the first holiday after you read the book or was there like a year in between or anything like that?

Yeah, there was probably about 12 months. I think we probably found out about the book in the fall. And we didn't do anything that holiday season. But the following year for that holiday season was when we took on our first lean implementation.

Just in case anybody kind of missed it, I want to just repeat it because I think it might be one of the most staggering statistics I've ever heard in business. You do 50% of your revenue in a. In a basically four week period of the year.

Yes, sir. Yes.

I mean, that's, that's staggering. So the natural question that I have is, how do you train? I mean, you need. How many more people do you need for that? And then how do you train those people?

Sure. Well, so the number of people we need, we go from a standing crew of about 100 people. And that covers our service center, the pick pack and fulfillment part of the operation, all the leadership, administration, management, software development, all that's about 100 people strong. But during the holiday we'll go to between 6 and 750 people. So we have to onboard, bring in onboard and train about 500, 550 people to run the holiday. And they're with us for about six weeks. And then we ramp back down into that normal static 100 people. That story or that need to convulse from the slow season to the high season and then back again was actually the necessity that was the mother of our Lean invention, as it were. What you realize pretty quickly is the only way that you can bring 550 people, quote unquote, off the street and make them productive in a short period of time is to have really, really strong system, really good, obvious visual management systems, really good documentation. So really our first big foray into Lean was writing standard operating procedures for everything. And in the early days, because training was such a big component of what we were having to do with the holiday crew, I set the objective that we should be able to bring somebody unfamiliar with our work into the facility and get them 80% effective in 30 minutes or less. And the only way that you can do that, the only way we found to do that anyway, is to have a really, really good standard operating procedure. And we actually use the training within industry approach of job instruction. So that's break the job down, then show them, then have them try it out and then do the follow up stuff. So that's our SOP for instruction. Is that how to instruct? So between the combination of really good SOPs, really good visual management systems and that adoption of the TWI approach to instruction, we started to see some success. We were able to bring those people in and make them productive. Now I said 80%. The other 20%, we still rely pretty heavily on good captains and supervisors and management and things like that. There's going to be all kinds of things that fall outside the norm, but 80% gets you quite a ways.

Yeah. Now what about the hiring process? So you've got 500 people standing outside your facility and what do you do? I mean, that's got to be a lean process itself, I would imagine.

Well, you hit the nail on the head. It did not start that way. Like everything, the, I don't know, fortunate, unfortunate part is that we have about a 25% success rate in our skills test. So we do an intake process that involves some skills test where we're going to check out your ability to follow an sop. To understand our location naming and numbering system, we use computers pretty extensively on the production floor. So do you understand how to interact with the computer effectively? We get about 25% success rate. So in order to keep 500, we have to process almost 2,000 people through that intake process. Now in the early days that meant that rain or shine, you know, sort of mid November in Michigan. Yeah, we would say we're going to do our open house and we would have 4,000 people literally line up outside the building and they came not knowing what the Experience was, and our process at that time was basically just to do a classic interview. We would sit down one on one with each individual, spend about five to 10 minutes talking to them about their work experience and so on. And then we would thank them for their time and we would send them on their way. So they came in, they'd wait in line upwards of eight hours. Some of them, they would go through this little bitty interview and they would go away not knowing any better about what the job was or whether they got the job or anything like that. And then on our part, we had all these in these interview results. So we had them all there, we talked to them, then we had to batch process all the interview results and try to make decisions on hiring. Well, the truth is that hiring based on an interview like that ends up being a very subjective process and unfortunately for our taste, far too susceptible to bias, if that makes sense.

Sure.

So we were doing some Value Stream work. We were actually taking some classes on value streaming and the instructor encouraged us to pick some things that we were struggling with as a potential case for the Value Stream. And so we chose this hiring process at the holiday.

Love it.

And we Value Stream mapped the current state, which was an absolute disaster as just described. And then we came up with a potential future state. The way the process works now is you basically call us and you make a reservation for a 30 minute period of time. You are only one of about 20 or 25 people that are scheduled during that 30 minute period. When you come in the front door, there's a name tag waiting for you. We greet you, we recognize that you're checked in, and we walk you through our assessment process. You go basically workstation to workstation, like a little work cell. If you succeed at each workstation, you pass all the way through the process and then the last thing we ask you to do is to fill out the employment application. So this is to me a classic example of that sequence question of the sop, the standard operating Procedure. What's the right order to do the work? Well, before we used to have you fill out the application at the beginning, well, that meant 1500 people filled out applications that we never ended up looking at because they didn't make it through the assessment, they didn't make it through the inventory. So now we have you fill out the application and the hiring paperwork at the end, after we already know you have the job. So now it's a 30 minute experience. You go through the assessments and at the end you walk away with a scheduled shift you know where you're going to work, you know when you're supposed to come back, you know you've been hired. And the fun part of it is that when you get to that stage, they bring you into a room and the people working in that room know the only reason you're there is because you've been hired.

Yeah.

And so they greet every individual with a round of applause. Yay.

That's awesome.

Congratulations and welcome to mail order.

Well, not to be a buzzkill, but there's obviously a lot of people that don't get a job.

It's true.

So how do you handle that?

Well, we have what we call the no door. So there's a door in the facility that if any time someone struggles with or isn't able to perform well on our assessment, then we kind of take them through the no door. And on the other side of that door is someone, usually it's a higher up in the organization. Oftentimes it'll be me or my other partners and we're there to receive them and basically look at their assessment and say, wow, it looks like this was a challenge for you. We explain why that particular ability is so critical to our process and we thank them for taking the time to come in and give us a shot. But unfortunately, at this point it doesn't look like it's a good fit. We do have their information on file and we do tell them, look, if something changes, we might have you come back in and retest. But that at this moment it looked like unfortunately it wasn't going to work out for us.

Yeah, yeah. Well, at least it's very fact based. There really should be little to no emotion. Right?

That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

Yeah. All right, well, and it's, I think it's also respectful because you just, you give that immediate feedback. No one's left wondering and worrying and, you know, so.

Yeah, yeah, very good. And I mean, it's. We do honest, it's good news when you can say, I really appreciate you coming in because in truth, we really appreciate them coming in. Yeah, it's an easy thing to say.

Yeah, got it. Talk a little bit about your production leveling system. What is it, who developed it and how has that changed your business?

Yeah, I guess I understand now that a lot of people, when they look at Lean, sort of imagine that they can pick and choose, but because we sort of came to our experience with Lean from the Toyota way point of view, we sort of thought that it was an all or nothing kind of deal. And so when it came to the question of production leveling, we just assumed that we had to have some way to production level. So it so happens that I mentioned my background's in it. We decided to build our own order management software in house. And we had done that a couple of years prior, actually, to adopting Lean as our methodology. And we got to the point where we were seeing it was very difficult to keep our replenishment routes running efficiently. We were out of stocking products a lot because we really had not figured out how to get the streakiness out of our orders. We were basically taking the orders as they came in and putting them on the production floor. And that was creating some problems, mostly exacerbated by the fact that we created a new department, a new sales department we call professional presence. So these are corporate clients. In our normal ordering situation, it's one sender, one recipient, but in the professional presence realm, it's one sender, many recipients. So it's not uncommon for us to put an order in. One of our most popular items is a sour cream coffee cake. So it's not unlikely for our professional presence team to put 50 sour cream coffee cake orders right in a sequence. That's the way they get put into the order management software. Well, if we just let that go out to the production floor the way it is, then we're going to have that whole problem of the pig and the python. We're going to have the one person responsible for sour cream coffee cakes going to be working their full head off, and everybody else around them is standing around, and we're going to deplete the marketplace fast, and we're going to overwork the individual. So inside of our order management system, which we call eve, we decided that we needed to figure out how to schedule those orders. And our first step into that was we tried to calculate what we call a desirability score, or how desirable is this order to be Next. And originally, we did it down at the very product level. So every product that we had would be given a number. And then if that product were included in the order I just scheduled, then the number for that product would become very undesirable. Right. So that would prohibit EVE from scheduling the same product. Right. One after another. Okay, well, that was very computationally intensive. If we have 1500 different products that we're managing at any given time, calculating a desirability score for 5000 orders and 1500 items in those 5000 orders became very problematic. It would take hours, and it's not an exaggeration to say sometimes as many as 10 hours to process 5,000 orders. And that was sort of untenable. Plus, because we're, you know, because we take seriously the concepts of Lean, we knew that we were batch sequencing. We were having to take a large batch of 5,000 orders and calculate these scores. And the nature of the calculation was that it had to recalculate 5,000 orders, then 4,999 orders, then 4,998 orders, and then 4,997 orders, etc. Etc. So we wanted to get someplace where we could still basically sequence the orders, schedule them effectively, but make it a little computationally easier and do so in less of a batch. So the two big changes we made is we started sequencing the desirability based on location that it gets picked. So the rack or its location in the shelf is now what gets sequenced. So the desirability of that pick location. And we do it by the shelving unit. So that actually helps manage both the replenishment and the individual workload. We sort of pick in zones, so I'm always going to be scheduled in a particular zone. So by sequencing based on pick location, we sort of got a twofer. We don't deplete the marketplace too quickly. We don't overwork the individual. And then the second thing we did is we calculated at the time that the order was made a pre score, and that took some of the computational load off the sequencer later on. So we were trying to do a little more, just in time sequencing as the order was created, so that later on when we needed to do a little bit of batch work, that half the calculation was done. Those two improvements ended up making it. So we can now process those 5,000 or sequence those 5,000 orders in a little over 20 minutes.

Wow, wow, wow. Used to take you 10 hours.

Yeah, yeah. And God forbid that Eve hiccuped in the middle of that. Right? So you get eight hours into that calculation, and then something goes wrong. You have a power blip or something goes wrong. And now we have to start from the beginning again.

So I assume you have some programmer overseas working all night with you, and then you're Skyping with them. Is that how you handle it?

Absolutely not. No, that's it. A great point. We required that all of the developers take up a desk and work from our facility.

Yes.

The whole point being, I mean, Genshi Genbutsu, right? You got to be able to go and see the work. I got to tell you, it's no more true than for the software developer. It is impossible to conceive of all the craziness that actually happens when you try to do work like this. And the only way that the developer can have any real insight into the work is the same way the rest of us have to do it. And that's. You got to go look at the work. And the good news was, is that we found some guys who were kind of into that. They didn't find that an imposition. They weren't turned off by the fact that we wanted to be there. They kind of got excited by the fact that they could stand up, get away from the bits and walk out there and actually look at the atoms and begin to see things like they really were. And that has been a critical success factor for us.

Yeah, I cannot wait to come back because I really want to dig into your leveling system and, and just kind of go into it because I know there's a lot of people listening right now who struggle with hey Junka. And just leveling in general. So I think seeing your success is going to be very, very inspirational to a lot of folks.

Excellent, excellent.

All right, next question I have for you. We've talked a lot about all of the success stories and a lot of the work that you guys are doing, but what do you struggle with?

Well, you know, if you had asked me that question a year ago, I would have. It would have been easy to answer and that would have been. We were really struggling with that culture of continuous improvement for the longest time. All the improvement that we were doing was largely pushed through by management. And we were really not seeing an employee, a staff level uptake of the concepts of continuous improvement. And we had tried a lot of things, we tried a lot of things to try and incentivize it and pay people and all that sort of thing. And it just wasn't taking. And the good news is that, I don't know, something happened, a light switch happened, or they learned about guys like Paul Akers or whoever. And all of a sudden I had some folks at the staff level who started doing some things on their own and they got really excited about it and they read the book and they would start quizzing me about it and they'd start poking at me about it. And all of a sudden, like a virus, the most positive kind of virus you can imagine, the staff really got lit up. And now two weeks ago, we have a weekly huddle, weekly meeting where we all meet. They were doing a Kanban demonstration, trying to Demonstrate what happens when the route runs early versus when it runs late and the impact that that has on replenishment. Last week they did one on rapid continuous improvement, the two second lean kind of stuff. So now I can't say that that's the problem that we're struggling with anymore, which is such a great message. Now I think I'm going to say that we haven't taken lean to every place in our business yet within Zingerman's, you mean within mail order even but most definitely within Zingerman's. So as you know, because we talked a little bit about this, that we've been slinging the lean lingo for almost 10 years now in an organization of businesses that would benefit from lean. I mean who doesn't benefit from lean? And for a long time there was no, there didn't seem to be a lot of interest on the part of the other business as to what we were doing. And that was quite honestly, I mean, you know how it is, it feels bad, it feels sad, like you know, you have something that would help them but there doesn't and you can't force it on them, right? It's got to come from them. And now again that's that light switch. Something's happened in the last year and all of a sudden every annual plan from every business is talk, talking about the development of standard work, the development of good visual management systems, the development of waste elimination having we call them training passports now they've got training passports that have all kinds of lean classes in them and so on and so on. But still I think people have the idea that the lean and I like prefer waste elimination. Continuous improvement is just meant for the production part of the business. And so when I think the thing that we're still struggling with is getting people to recognize that lean is a lifestyle, that it applies to everything, everywhere. Every time when I teach classes now, I don't use business examples anymore. I don't use business examples for two reasons. One is I think it can turn people off. If they can't see their business in the business example I use then they'll hold it at bay. They'll say well that doesn't have anything to do with me, that's different than what I'm doing. Second reason I like to use non business examples is to demonstrate that it can be applied everywhere. Right? Waste elimination, continuous improvement can relate to doing the dishes, it can relate to doing the laundry. It's great for kids. I got a 10 year old and a 5 year old. I give them SOPs. They do a good job with an SOP.

Yes.

So I think where our big opportunities lie or what we're still working on is getting the mindset that Lean isn't just just have to do with the production, but it can apply to the accounting, it can apply to payroll, it can apply to managing your inbox, it can apply to how we clean the break room, it can apply to all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can't wait to see the journey and excited to stay in touch with you and as I know you guys are going to continue the journey and make your company even stronger than it is already.

Absolutely.

All right, last question I have as it relates to Zingerman's is how can people learn more about. About the Zingerman's model and just your companies?

Sure. So if you go to zingermans.com of course you're going to find the mail order company there, but on the top of the bar you're going to see all the other businesses listed. So you can sort of get a tour of the various businesses that make up the Zcob by looking through the website there. One I would draw your attention to is one of the businesses called Zing Train and that's the training arm of the organization. And that's where we're going to talk about our approach to business. You know, Ron, we haven't talked about the fact that we are an open book management company and how tightly and nicely that fits in with Lean, but there's some classes that we teach about our approach to open book management, how we approach service, how we approach food, merchandising, all that kind of stuff. So I would say take a look at all the businesses there on the website. You see that bar right across the top. And then specifically I would look at the Zing Train website and I would draw your attention all the way at the bottom of the front page of the Zing Train website it'll say free samples and there are a bunch of really great essays and content that talks about our approach on visioning and all that kind of stuff right there available for you to download and take a look at.

Yeah, we'll definitely link to that in the show notes for this episode. And just so everybody knows, many of our listeners are familiar with our friend Richard Sheridan over at Menlo Innovations. And Richard would be the first guy to tell you that it was Zingerman's and you in particular, Tom. I think that really helped transform Menlo into a strong, lean thinking company with particular Focus on that open book management. So very well done there.

We feel very fortunate to count Rich among our friends.

Yes, absolutely. All right, very good. Well, let's go ahead, Tom, and transition into the next part of the show. And this is what we call the reflection section. And so the first question I have for you is, you know, we spend a lot of time within the Lean world talking about kind of the two pillars, continuous improvement and respect for people, with continuous improvement being pretty easy to kind of define. It's the tools, the methodologies. But respect for people, sometimes it's more difficult to kind of define. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you?

Well, when I do tours at Zingerman's mail order, I start at the front of our building where we have our company mission and our guiding principles listed. And I do this on purpose because we feel very strongly. Zingerman's happens to manage according to a style of management called servant leadership, which says that a leader's job in the organization or an employee's job in the organization is to first serve the organization and then second to serve the people that report to you. And I start off by showing people the corporate mission and the guiding principles to make the point that if you do not have the right mindset, the right relationship with the staff, the tools are not going to work for you. So respect for people, to me is central, absolutely central. The most important thing to our experience with, with continuous improvement and waste elimination. The story that I would tell about, we actually started with openbook management before we started with Lean and Open Book management. I always describe as sort of the radical democratization of financial information. So we put our financial information in front of our staff. We expect them to be able to read the income statement and make observations about how their work is reflected in that income statement and how they might have a positive impact on the income statement. So the radical democratization of financial knowledge. Well, when we first read about Lean, I said to the group, this is going to be easy for us. I was totally naive, mind you, but this is going to be easy for us because we already get that. We already get the fact that the critical component here is the people. Now what we got to do is radically democratize operational thinking, operational knowledge. And that's where we. All we have to do is, I would say naively, all we have to do is learn the tools. We already have the philosophy. Now, it wasn't easy and it wasn't that simple. But I will tell you that I think our adoption was made Much, much simpler because we already bought into this central concept that respect for people is essential.

Yes, yes. And when you say open book management and that you're sharing your financials, you're not just talking about top line, are you?

No, I'm saying that it is in every person's job description in our organization to know and teach financial acumen as specifically applied to being able to read our income statement, our balance sheet and our cash flow statement. And we have a recipe that we use when we meet weekly to look at our scorecard. We call report, forecast and deliver. Reporting is the 20% backwards, right? What happened last week, what happened last month, that's 20% of the time, of the presentation, 80% of the time then is forecast. And delivery forecasting for us is not a prediction, but rather an act of leadership. We say it is a preferred future. So we ask the line owner, right, the line owner, which is a staff member, not an owner, but a staff member, to own a line in the income statement. And we ask them to forecast a preferred future of what that number should look like. And once they've come up with their forecast that preferred future, we ask them what do we need to do in order to deliver that. And that's where the deliver comes from. From. So ownership of numbers or being open book management to us isn't just being able to read the information, it's not just making it available. We mean they have to own it to the degree that they're responsible for reporting on it, forecasting it, and then coming up with the action items necessary to deliver on that preferred future.

Wonderful. What's the best advice you've ever received?

Well, it comes back to probably my favorite quote, and that is stop worrying about the financial health of the well being and start worrying about the people. And if you do that, well, financial stuff will come on its own. And that's got to be the best advice. And at the time, to be honest with you, I didn't even realize that it had anything to do with Lean that was offered just because that's sort of the prevailing philosophy of the Zingerman's organization to begin with. Now I recognize in hindsight that that was the best advice I could ever been given because not only does it fit well with our organizational culture, but it fits perfectly in continuous improvement and waste elimination.

Yeah, you've mentioned Paul Akers a few times and he told me one time he said, I don't even care or worry about the bottom line or the cash or the money. I just worry about attacking Waste and fixing what bugs us and the money will come.

I think that's absolutely right on.

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

Yeah. The two things that came to mind on this one, one is there's a technique called the Pomodoro technique.

Yes, yes.

And I like it because it's a very lean approach to work. Right. Don't try to batch the work work. Just take little 20, 25 minute segments. You know, I'm a geek, so I love the fact that it was sort of based in neuropathology and sort of brain science. So that certainly was appealing to me. But I love that whenever I'm feeling really overwhelmed by a project, I just think to myself, just make a 20 minute deposit and that'll get you going. What I find is 9 times out of 10, the 20 minutes is all I really needed. It doesn't take any more than that.

And so for people that don't know what that technique is, it basically just means that you turn all the distractions off and you focus on one task for, say, 25 minutes uninterrupted, right?

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Now, how do you keep track of the time?

So I always like to start off the process by writing down what I call the tomatoes. Right. What are the tomatoes I have to do. So if I have two hours to spend, I'm going to break that down into basically four 25 minute segments. And I'm going to say, okay, I have four tomatoes to spend. I'm going to spend the first one on this, second one on that, third one on this, and fourth one on that. And then I get to work. I just. And I just work right through them. When the time's up, I stop. Now, one of the things about the Pomodoro technique is you want to take a three to five minute break between segments. Just get up, walk away, don't think about it anymore. So that's the way I sort of. That's my process. Start off. Define the to do list, as it were, for this session. How many Pomodoro cycles do I have? How many cycles do I have to spend? Document what I'm going to spend those cycles on and then just have at it.

Love it. Love it. All right. Is there one thing that's possibly surprised you this past year as you've been practicing lean?

Well, I think I've told you a couple of times maybe already, that you helped me by introducing me to Paul Akers. And the thing that surprised me was I thought I was pretty sharp with respect to this lean stuff, and I thought I was pretty excitable with respect to this lean stuff. And I realized what was surprising is that there are people who are far more sharp and far more excitable than I am about it. And I look forward to getting to that level.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you guys are doing fantastic work. I'm going to definitely introduce you to Paul because I think. I think you guys would really enjoy each other.

Yeah, I look forward to that.

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

So I think that Pomodoro technique is sort of lame as that sounds, is really when I'm really feeling overwhelmed by a job or a process or where I'm at. It's just that realize I don't have to solve it all right now. So the ritual is, forget about trying to fix it all right now. Just commit the 20 minutes, just commit the 25 minutes, just get at it and so on. I will say the other thing that I have been successful with in the past is I've had a couple of times, just big career wise, where I was feeling adrift and say, a crisis of confidence. And I took some time off and I just did labor, just yard work, and just put the music on and started down on my hands and knees in the dirt and found that insight came from that process. So when it's really bad, then that's kind of what I would go for.

Yeah, there's nothing like a good sweat once in a while.

Right? Exactly right.

All right, now the last question I have for you. Is there a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become successful and at. Or more successful at practicing lean?

Well, I think it's sort of what I was talking about earlier with respect to the organization in general, and that's the ability to practice lean in more aspects of my life. Don't relegate it, let it flow in. And it's not so much that I feel like the rest of my life is sort of out of control and it quote, unquote, needs lean. But I see that I'm missing opportunities to practice. I'm missing opportunities to practice. The sight of waste. I'm missing opportunities to practice the idea of continuous improvement. I'm missing opportunities. And again, as Paul talks about, you can make your life so much simpler by applying these things to everything and that ultimately the objective is to fix what bugs you and make the life more enjoyable and joy filled. And allow me to focus on spending time with my boys and my wife rather than worrying about dumb things like how to get the trash.

Yeah, got it.

So I think that's the thing I feel like I'm still working on, I'm still trying to figure out and still excited by the prospects of learning more about now.

There is one other question that I forgot to ask earlier and I guess I can't believe I forgot. It is most definitely the most significant, important question that I could ask you today. I understand from meeting with you before that you're from Ohio.

Yes.

And now you live in Michigan.

Yes, sir.

And I just got to know, what is it? Go Blue or go Bucks?

I stay out of the middle of it is what I gotta do.

Okay.

I'm like Switzerland on this issue. I gotta stay out of the middle of it.

Okay. You gotta live there, so be careful.

Yeah, exactly. Right. I gotta. But you know, my entire family is from the Northeast Ohio area. I've been living in Ann Arbor now for over 20 years. So I have to go. Very carefully, I will tell the story. I had a friend of mine, I grew up with this guy. He was a dyed in the wool Ohio State fan. I moved to Ann Arbor. We hooked up over Christmas time one year and we were talking about, hey, next year they're playing in Ann Arbor. OSU is coming to Ann Arbor for the big game. You should come up and visit. We'll go to the game. And he goes, I'm not going to that place. I was like, well, what place is that? You don't want to go to the restaurant, you don't want to go to Zinger. He goes, I'm not going to that place. He wouldn't even say the name of Ann Arbor. Yeah, he was that serious about it.

I love it. I love it. That's awesome. All right, well, very good, Tom. Well, I can't wait to see you again and visit with your team. It was a real joy just walking through. We actually, just so everybody knows, we kind of did a little walkthrough and met Tom and his team as we were kind of planning for this Gemba Academy live event. And so I'm super pumped to come back with our video cameras and tell the full story.

So. So we're looking forward to it. And Ron, if you'll indulge me, you know, we have a habit at Zingerman's, which is we end all of our meetings with what we call appreciations and it's Just a way for us to make sure that we keep an appreciative mindset and a thankful mindset in front of us at all times. So I'd like to end this little session with doing that. And I would just want to say for you, I really appreciate you finding us, seeking us out, and basically opening our eyes to all the other fantastic people that are out there. And thank you for what you're doing and how you're bringing lean to people who might not have the opportunity that I did to talk with the Dr. Leiker and so on. You and your partners in the Gamma Academy are providing an amazing resource and I want to thank you for that.

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. So it's a joy to meet people like you. And I got to. I guess we return the favor back to Rich, because Rich Sheridan is the one who told me about Zingerman. So there you go. It comes full circle.

Fantastic.

All right, well, listen, my friend, I'll be in touch and I can't wait to see you again. And one thing I didn't ask you was how can people connect with you personally? Are you a social media guy or what's the best way?

You know, the best way is probably just through the email. My name T. Root. Tom Root. So, T.

Got it. Got it. All right, my man. Well, take care and enjoy the rest of your summer up there in Michigan and we'll see you soon.

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