GA 095 | How to Practice Lean from the Heart with Karl Wadensten

You're listening to episode 95 with Carl Waddenston.

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. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembaacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today I'm excited to share a presentation that we were able to record in the latter part of 2015 at the Iowa Lean Consortium Conference. Carl Waddenston was one of the presenters, and Carl gave a really good talk called Lean from the. As you'll hear, Carl shares some hard lessons about thinking, feeling, and running a highly efficient organization. And as you'll see, Carl has tons of passion and true love for Lean, and I think that really comes through in his message. So show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 95. So again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 95. All right, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

I just want to talk a little bit about, you know, everybody talks about leadership from the top. We hear this all the time. We hear about the people, not the tools. We hear about the culture. We hear about these things. And one word that kind of bugs me about the culture is, you know, that we want to create a culture. I like personally changing that word is that we already have cultures in our organizations, right? We want to cultivate the culture and drive that culture to some kind of business outcome or some kind of thing that's going to help our people grow and help our companies grow. And the reason that I ask for the number of presidents here is that so many times I go and speak or listen to speakers and I hear everybody kind of stuck in the middle that down below doesn't really engage themselves. The middle wants to move ahead. And up top doesn't really have the passion and the connection to move. So after you get really jazzed up at one of these conferences and you have to go back to your organization, and I call that re entry, because now you're really jazzed up, you're excited, you come back and you're like, Babbling to everybody really, really fast about all the cool things you learn and all the things you want to try. And then you hit a stone wall because you don't have the support to get this initiative from the top. So the one thing that I like to share with everybody here, if your top leader isn't here when you do go back, is try and encourage your top leader to go for a Gemba walk, to go somewhere and speak with another leader. You have a lot of leaders here in your community and get your leader to go there and listen to another leader because you want to get that peer to peer focus, right? So the people who were with me earlier know that I like doing exercises. So here it is. There are two mathematical equations here. And one of these mathematical equations is TPS thinking. All right, so who thinks the top equation is TPS thinking? Anybody? Nobody? Did somebody give you guys the answer? So let's see here. There we go. So everybody thinks the bottom equation is TPS thinking. Any show of hands? Okay, so why, I'm going to ask you why is the bottom equation TPS thinking? I don't have an answer for you. Please stand up so everybody can hear you, please. I put people on the spot all the time.

It could be 4 plus 5, it could be 2 plus 7, it could be any variation. The end result is 9. But I guess how you get there could always be changed.

It's almost an infinite number of possibilities, right? It's almost an infinite number. And Paul talked about it before was try, try, try and experiment and do these kind of things. So a little bit. Does anybody know what Viveco vibrators makes? Except for my few friends up here? Well, we don't make the sexy brand of vibrators for those that raise their hands. It's a pretty bad brown bag industry and we're 100% USA made. We're really, really, really really proud of that. And during the times when people are leaving to go offshore and get short return on investment or big dollars return on investment with short sightedness about what we're doing to our own economy. Our supply chain is domestic. We have 1600 products, 6800 component pieces. We have a very, very high mix, low volume. We, we have standards, we have customs. We have over 150 suppliers in our supply chain. 340,000 global customers out of our domestic office here in the US and another 40,000 out of our Toronto office facilities in Canada. Licensees in Australia, sales office in Atlanta, Pennsylvania and a licensee in the UK and something we all have in common. We have a ton of competitors who want to chew our lunch. They just want to beat us up and spit us out. And you know what? We're on the hamster wheel going as fast as we can to outpace them as fast as we can. So Gwendolyn Galsworth, if you guys know Gwendolyn, and I have my standard work here from Gwendolyn because Gwendolyn's heard me speak and I've been with her many, many times and she said, Carl, you tell great stories, you do all this stuff. You've done some really impactful things, but you need to tell people what the heck you're going to talk about, why it's going to change their day, why it's going to change their thought process. So being a good servant to Gwendolyn and taking her instructions, I'm going to read a little bit and normally I don't read, but I will forget a key point and Gwendolyn will say, why didn't you read that? So here it is. I'm going to share some hard won lessons with you about thinking and feeling and running an efficient or effective organization, about translating the principle of respect for employees into actual respect, demonstrating it in and by my own behavior and in and by the expectations of others. Because that is what I hear everyone talk about and how to learn about operational excellence and how to carry the respect for people. And people are what our organizations are about. Okay? And this poll here, we are unfulfilled at work. I mean, we're in the most glorious time history happening right now with globalization and with all the things going on. But we're in the most turbulent time of history as well. So this was from Gallup Poll. So most Americans are unhappy at work. And what they say is 30% of the people that work in your organizations and The Was it 500 organizations or 100 organizations represented here? Anybody? There was a large number of organizations represented here, but only 30% of whatever your workforce is out there is engaged in the work. 30%. And I looked at that and this is from 2015. This is the real deal. 52% not into their jobs. These are the people on the fence. We hear it again from Lean thought leader. Lean thought leader. Lean thought leader. You know, you have a certain percentage that are on the bus, the early adopters. You have the people that are never getting on the bus. And then you have this big chunk of people that are just waiting to see where's the tide going and can they make an emotional connection that they Care about me. They care about my opinion. They care about me as a person and want me on this team and can I contribute to the team? Will they allow me to do that? Or is it lip service? And 18% disengaged. And Gallup went even further with that. 18% disengaged. That blows me away because I'm a positivity guy. I drive really, really hard. But I always look at the good things. And sometimes it's an Achilles heel for me because I always see the good in people that these 18% are taking, doing sabotage, working against you. And I sat and listened to the speakers at Gallup talk about this. And I said, how can this be, America, that people are doing this? Why don't they just leave their job, you know? But they're actively working against you. So this is our challenge as leaders in our organizations, as owners in our organizations. And this is also our opportunity, a huge opportunity to get people on board and to try and change this kind of results. Here it is. Your company, 30% on the front. They all have oars, 52%. The mass of your organization is sitting there wondering if they're going to go to the back of the boat and start helping to saw or if they're going to grab an oar and put it in the water and participate. Right? And the beauty with lean, why I'm so attracted to lean is that, you know what? All this stuff goes out the window when you really practice lean, deeply, when you really, really practice lean and you care about your people, you get them purpose, you get a connection. You do all these great things. And it's impossible for any organization to thrive when there are so few people are working to move it forward. Have you guys ever been in an organization that felt like this? Any show of hands? A large number of us. Do you believe the Gallup poll stuff? And I'm bringing up the Gallup poll stuff because as I talked about before, I'm going to tell you about the personal journey that I've had a leader and the things that I've learned so many things today, the things that I learn from my people every day, the self reflection. I have to make our organization super produce with the mix that we have here in our organization and the number of customers that we have. We are moving so fast, it is not even funny. It is not even funny. Anybody have guys like this in their organization? Our whole organization runs on how well our machine shop runs. We have 27 machines out there that feed the whole rest of the organization. If these this doggone feedback. If these guys aren't feeling good about themselves, feeling good about the work, if they don't feel engaged, and if they don't have the opportunity to improve, our whole organization comes to a screeching halt. Comes to a screeching halt. And they all have expectations, they all have assumptions that they're making on what that looks like for them, Right? And they're all very, very different. So how do we get that mold that everybody's expectations, everybody's assumptions and their needs and wants all together to make our organization to move when the people's needs have changed, but our leaders have failed to evolve. So the people that raised their hands, that were in organizations, that you did not feel connected, that you did not feel that you were a part of this and that people cared for you, were they kind of like this caveman guy? Did you feel that anybody? We talked about this before because it takes the whole organization from the people that answer the phone, the people in accounting, the people in engineering, the people in production control, the people in shipping. It takes end to end in our organization. The minute you open that door, you need to have the people feeling the same things you do and following some kind of direction or you get into these power struggles. And we had a lot, a lot of poor communication before we started our lean journey. We started our lean journey in 2000. We did not touch one tool until 2005. I didn't even know what the tools were. And we'll talk about this a little bit later here. We worked on culture for five years. We lived culture. We live culture today. I'll bring my people and they'll ask me to go to places where they have highly evolved cultures of problem solvers. We breathe and we live continuous improvement. There are millions and millions and millions and millions of small improvements that have happened in the 15 years, even prior to the, you know, the five year stint of just doing culture, that have transformed our organization to be globally competitive. So figure on a marketplace. We didn't touch tools until 2005. So you had 2006 to 2007 to 8, 9, 10. We held pricing for our customers for almost 48 months. And we were buying domestically aluminum, brass, motor manufacturers, foundries. They were shooting prices through the roof. We used Rigo Beloit as one of our prime vendors that does specialty things for us over in Wisconsin. They gave us three price increases in one year. I was like, are you guys all right? You know, the economy is not doing that great and you're giving us three price increases. But the way that we beat that and the strategic decision we made in our organization was we were not going to increase our prices to our customers and pass that along. We were going to cut out the waste like Paul talked about this morning, and reduce the waste so we could hold our pricing. Not only did we hold our pricing, we were still able to increase profits. Not exponentially, but we still had profits. And the profits, you know, outperformed each year prior through the innovation of the people and through the leadership that we had and the team leaders and everybody. And the way that we thought and we had the production control was fighting that they wanted to drive the bus. Sales and marketing was driving the bus. So I'm not going to belabor with the people that were here. And all I'm doing is looking at everybody saying, there is no one here that is more important than anybody else. We all have the same importance. We all have our jobs that we have to do here. Get rid of your ego a little bit and listen, because I'll tell you one thing that we all have in common is that we're all struggling. So if we can figure out how to help each other in that struggle, we're going to move ahead. If we don't figure it out, we're staying right here and the bus is going off the cliff. So I didn't know the tools back in 2000, but I knew effective communication models. Ways to communicate, ways to get people to sit down and listen and talk and understand what a good communication model looks like. Authentic versus pseudo communication, emotional connections, clearing models. And a clearing model is talking about when you have a sticking point with someone, and I won't say disagreement, but when you have a sticking point and neither one of you are seeing what the other is talking about, you have to have some point that you can call time out and say how you're feeling and what's going on. And the person can sit back and just listen without speaking. And villain, victim and hero. We had a lot of villains, victims and heroes running around in our organization. And the heroes weren't true heroes. They were enablers. And an enabler as a hero is a bad place to be. So when we saw this kind of thing going on, we'd step back and say, time out. We're getting stuck in a circle. And it's just that it's a circle. It's no beginning, no end. It's just going to go around in a circle and the velocity is going to get faster and faster and faster and we're going to get really hung up on it. And these were some of the things that we lived during that five year period of time where I needed to get the organization wrapped around this notion that we're all in it together. We were all struggling and we had to go to a different place. You know, now discover your strengths. It's actually Gallup now. Strengths 2o, the age of Speed, Quantum Leap Thinking. But the best ones, the books that we had, and how would you like this? Your boss gives you a book for Christmas. But, you know, I said, if you don't want to read it, don't read it. If you want to read it, we're going to live this stuff. Who moved the cheese? Fishtails. How many people even know what fishtails is? A good number of you, right? And then we had Toast Kaizen, Bruce Hamilton, gbmp, and my favorite article, My favorite article, I Just Want My Pants. It's the best. It was in the newspaper. It was in the Sunday Globe in Boston. And I never buy the Globe. I live in Rhode Island. I bought the Globe. I read this piece and I said, this is exactly what we're trying to do. In short, it's a guy that. His wife bought him some pants, khaki pants, kind of like my khaki pants. She got the wrong size. The husband tried them on at home, got the wrong size. She had just got him earlier in the afternoon. So she had. The tags were still on him and everything. The husband said, don't worry, honey, I'll go back to the store the next day and I'll return them. So the guy walks into the store, he brings the pants, they're still creased, neatly folded tags, you know, the waist and the length and everything still on him. And he says, I want to return the pants. Well, where's your receipt? He goes, well, my wife got them. She didn't give me the receipt. But you can see your store tag on here. You can see all the stuff. And she goes, we can't do that. We need the receipt. And he said, well, the new pants are right here. They're on this table and. And I just need to change the size. He said, well, I'm going to have to get my manager. So the guy's standing there and getting frustrated. He just wanted the pants. He said. He kept going with this lady saying, arguing with her, let me just get the pants. Finally, he gave up. He pushed the pants onto the counter with the girl. And he said, when your people all get together, talking and figuring out what they're going to do, Call my people. I'll come back down to the store and I'll get the pants that I want, right? So this whole thing is that customers know what they want. Are we ready to serve the customer? Are we ready to give the customer what they need? And the punchline to this story is 90% of your competition is doing exactly what this store does. So you know, the ability to stand out and change what you do in your organization is right there in front of you. And so we took this article as part of the culture building and as culture cultivating. I'm going to say, right, we took this article, every single person in the shop, in the office, we all had this article. What's that? Oh, it's a speaker up there. I got to stay here. I'll stay right here. This works better. I'll stand straight like this. So you guys have somebody here. It looks like I'm respectable. And I'm telling you something really smart. People were looking earlier for something profound. But I'm going to tell you, the pieces that worked for us and worked so well that it's just memorable as heck. So this I just want my pants was plastered everywhere. We just put them on copy machines. Everybody read this. And what this gave us as an organization, they understood the essence of the being of what it was for the customer just to want their pants. Right? And what it also did for us, that was a really profound thing, is that if I was talking to you on the floor and it was five minutes to five on a Friday afternoon, it's a beautiful sunny spring day, and your son is either going to play soccer or football or some sport or there's something going on. And I walk up to you as the leader and say, aaron, we got a customer order. They're really looking for something. Do you mind staying for a few extra minutes? How do you think that goes over on that kind of premise that I outlayed? Friday afternoon baseball game, five minutes to five, you've already worked a full week. What's going to be your response, you think, Aaron? My response? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'll give you the flip side, Aaron. Thank you, Aaron. I'll give you the flip side, Aaron. And you know, it's just human reaction. We put in our 40 hours. We want to have family time, we want to have me time. And you know, the hair on their back of their neck is going to look at me. I'm going to see it in their eyes right away. They're going to look at me and they're going to say, well, you know, I got a baseball game and my mother in law is coming to town and we haven't seen a game all, you know, all spring and I got to go. And then I'm going to say, well, you know, this is a really important customer, Don, and we got to stay there. Can't we get it out? I just talked to him on the phone. I want to get this dialogue and it's going to take more than five or seven minutes to do this dialogue. But this article, all I had to do, customer just wants his pants. I cut out all that other crap. And they looked at me and my team knew that they could say, Carl, you know, I really can't do it for you. But someone else, you know, here's somebody else who will step up. But nine times out of 10, they knew it wouldn't take that long to do something. They knew that it wasn't me coming out there to give them a hard time, to push them for one more ounce of sweat, one more ounce of blood. It was the customer that pays our bills. And we live this every day. We just don't do it. We live this and it cycles in and out of our vernacular as we talk to people in the sales office for the gals that do order entry processing and we get crazy things happening and somebody gets frustrated, someone will shout out, customer just wants his pants. Right? But as a leader of the organization too, remember now I'm starting to tee everybody up for essence, DNA values and characteristics of our organization. It's a double edged sword. It's a huge one. So the people that were with me earlier in the strengths thing, another piece that we live by. My strengths are number one achiever, Number two is deliberative, number three is self assured, number four is command and number five is strategic. And don't think about the strengths. Have no soft side. They have a huge soft side. Just as many hard driving things as soft things. So my guys and gals know when I'm on a mission, walking through the plant and they see my brow go down, it's probably growing down now that that's the time they're going to challenge me. We have this one young gal there that does that. We call her simplicity Sue. She's unbelievable at the innovations and how she kaizens herself in her area every day, millions of them. And I'm walking through the factory. She could see by just the way I was walking that I had something big on my mind. She says, hey boss. Hey boss. So I stop. Yep, Susie, what's up. And she asked me some random thing, like the most random thing, and I can't even remember what it is now. And she asked me something. So I looked at her, I turned around, and I'm going, oh, man, I can't believe she's asking me something random like this. But we're talking about cultivating a culture. I could have crushed it, right at that point. I could have crushed whatever. Whatever work we'd put into this and whatever equity I had into this. I could have crushed it. So I said, all right, Susie. She goes, yeah, boss, Customer just wants his pants, right? I said, you bet. So what do you want me to do? Tell me where you want me to go. Tell me what I need to do, and I'm on it, right? So these are the things that we have to understand. I don't care if you're the president, and I speak from the president spot here, but you're leading people, and your responsibility is to your people. And if you start these initiatives of cultivating a culture, you got to remember all these actions. And these actions carry outside the workplace, too. When you meet your teams there. It's not something that you just do infrequently at work. This is lifelong stuff. This. This lean journey is the hardest doggone thing that I've ever, ever had to do in my life. It is relentless. And I'm not perfect by any means. You know, even Paul Akers, we're best of friends, and, you know, Paul Akers and I had something where I didn't get back to him and do some things that I said I was going to do, and it was tough. And I'll talk about that later here on this, and you'll see that I got to eat crow a lot of the time, and it's my own fault. And if you're not reflective on it, you can just go along your merry way and wonder why people aren't following you. Well, they're not following you because you're not being realistic with yourself. This is one of my favorite, favorite, favorite thoughts here. And we saw this from Tanya. Tanya had some great people on her slideshow next door. Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values, and your values become your destiny. For us in our organization, there can't be anything more profound than that. And if we think about that, the way that we're building people and what we're doing in our organization, and we just start thinking about this every time you want to give a quick answer, that you're too wrapped up in your own stuff, right? Your stuff is the people. So whatever you have going on in your head, get it out of your head. Listen to the people, stop for a minute and just give them two minutes. It takes two minutes. And, you know, pieces of this are the circle of misunderstandings. Because if you don't do that, people make assumptions, there become misunderstandings, confusion, anger, blame, alienation, hostility. And we need to move out of this circle. And this is a Toyota piece. This is directly from Toyota. We were fortunate enough at our organization to get the number three lady from Toyota that worked under President Cho for 20 plus years. She lived at my guest house for two years. So not only did I have my wife, four kids, two dogs, I had a Toyota sensei, a lady from Kentucky that rode with me to work every day and rode home every day telling me what was wrong with me. And she ate dinner with us every night. And I'd sit there at the dinner table as the worst meal of the day. And my kids would go like this. And my wife would say, I've been telling you for years, where's the respect for people? When you go home, what happens? When you go home, something crazy happens. And thank God I had Lisa. Lisa trained us on more things and she learned more things from us as well because she got to see an organization that was really, really passionate about this. And she got to have feedback from me as a president. Honest, authentic feedback of what I was thinking, what I was feeling, and, you know, just curiosity. It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me as a person, the best thing that could have ever happened to our organization. And, you know, she was there as a servant to help us to open up our doors for people. As I told the other group, 6,000 people have toured our organization in about four and a half years. You know, universities, all kinds of crazy things, but you don't get through our door if your president doesn't come. If the president or the top leader doesn't come, we will not let you through the door. And I will work for people when they email us and say, you know, we really want to come and see Carl, but our president won't come. I'll say, give me your president's email. I'll find out who he golfs with, who he sails with, who he drinks beer with, and I'll shame him into coming. He will be here. I will get you in here somehow. And these are the pieces of the strengths. You'll see these These are monuments or these are who we are as you walk through the facility. And this is just the packaging crew that does our packaging. And you see here that Clark is the leader up there. His number one strength is discipline. Man, I couldn't have a better group leader than a guy with discipline in a shipping department. How many things come at you 2 million miles an hour in the shipping department to get everybody there? Harmony. Connectedness achiever includer. Responsibility. Empathy. What a good compatible group they are. I don't have all like minded things. That's the beauty with strengths. And the thing that I didn't tell everybody earlier was that you can do Myers Briggs, you can do Bell Institute, you can do all these great things. But when you do the Strengths Finder, you're 1 in 35 million that will have the same five strengths in the same order. So it speaks to the individual. It's not like something that's a four quadrant matrix that you're up on this. You're a red, blue, green. Yeah, I'm a red, blue, green too. And then everybody huddles around. Red, blue, green. Now what the hell do you do with it? What do you do with red, blue, green? But this thing here, if I'm working underneath Clark and I know his number one reason why he wakes up in the morning is discipline. Am I going to go talk to him about stuff that I've been loafing around and kind of goofing off and Clark knows it? No way. If I'm smart, I'm not, you know, and I'm going to expect that. Clark expects that. He expects discipline from himself and he's going to expect it from his crew. And he's going to help train his crew in that. And this strengths finder gives you a playbook how to talk to these people and how to recorrect and how to understand what they're talking about. And the courageous conversation, and this is what I had to have with Paul. The kind that puts a pit in your stomach. The kind of conversation you try to avoid. The kind that gives you a coaching moment. The kind of conversation that adds clarity and removes assumptions. The kind of conversation you need for success. And the conversation that if it's done right, makes everyone feel better. I hate these. I'd rather go get my teeth pulled out. Somebody pulled my teeth out. But you know, if you do a lot of the other right things in the beginning that we're talking about cultivating culture, you don't have to have these that often. You can avoid them. You don't have to have them because you have clarity, you know, And Paul and I are like best friends. He was on the west coast doing radio Lean five days a week. I was on the east coast doing Lean radio five days a week. He was, like, crazy passionate about his people. I'm crazy passionate about my people. Paul was running for Congress, U.S. congress in Seattle. I was a potential runner for governor of Rhode Island. He's working with his state government. It was like east meets West. And, you know, Paul and I were going to do something, and I kind of lost the. The stream of communication and clarity with them. And then one of my people, you know, got the phone. Paul couldn't get ahold of me because I was tied up in my own crap. Just so tied up. And they said, hey, was Carl going to be in Germany? What's going on with Germany? And she says, oh, you didn't hear? Germany got canceled. You can imagine. And this person comes into my office saying, I just got off the phone with Paul. Tell him Germany, he's canceled. I'm like, oh, oh, man. Now he's trying to pull a rabbit out of my hat to make this event happen and do all this stuff. And then tried to call him. He wouldn't pick up the phone. My own fault. Wouldn't pick up the phone. He was busy. And it went on for a few months. And before we came out here, I hadn't seen Paul before. We came out to Iowa for what's Jerry, three, four months. She kind of has the backstory. I said, I gotta talk to Paul before I get out here. Because, I mean, we are like brothers. And I just let. I just let my brother down because I got caught up in my own stuff. Finally got him on the phone, talked to Paul. I had no excuses. Well, Paul said to me, he goes, you know what, Carl? With clarity and with true honesty here, the respect you had for me was not the respect the leader gives. And he goes, I'm disappointed in the respect that I got from you. Didn't seem to say anything more. I understood what it was, and now it's a building point for me. And I hope you guys don't have to have these building points in your organizations, because it takes a long time to get back. And if you really, really care about somebody, it's gonna. It's gonna be on my head for a long time. Right? You know, we had the newspaper here. There were some ads. I was hiring a lot of people. Did you guys know that? No. You guys are coming back. You guys are The Comeback team and I picked up the paper this morning and it was for jobs. They're looking for people that like complaining, controlling, concealing, facade, entitlement, conflict, defensiveness, knowledge, being right, control, and they love the rules. And I looked at it, I read through the paper and they said, salary, a million dollars. I said, holy crap, Iowa has high wages. Who wants to go to work at that company for a million dollars? None of us. You can't pay us enough money. So why are we taking the organizations that we work in and letting all these things go on in those organizations? And then in little, little tiny print on the next page was this ad. It says, we're a startup. We're not doing big things now, but we're planning on it. We need healthy responsibility, revealing authentic feelings, appreciation, creativity, curiosity, wisdom, show up, gratitude, compassion. But we can only give you $32,000 a year. Potential for growth is huge. Whatever we put in, we're going to get out. We're going to redistribute. Who wants to work there? I think none of you. The rest of you guys don't even want to work. No wonder we have a problem with unemployment. You have state officials here today. And we had. I was the only one that wanted to work for a million bucks. I'd get fired in a week. But this second job sounds great. It's a job. But they want all this good stuff. Don't we all want this good stuff in our organizations? This is awesome stuff. This is how you grow companies. This is how you have a long standing track record, withstand the test of time, and, you know, there's gateways to relationships. And this is the piece as I go on talking about, you know, with Paul, truth and openness, commitment, accountability, vulnerability, discomfort, fear, risk of betrayal, risk of embarrassment. And I'm standing here telling you this story because I feel embarrassed by it. Not the first time I've been embarrassed. I get embarrassed a lot. I get my stuff. I think my wife. That's why I thought I was married to somebody from the Far East. She always stayed like three, four arm lengths away from me when we go somewhere. She waits until I walk into the room to see what I'm going to step in before she even acknowledges that she's my wife. If it's a really bad vibe there, I wonder why she's in the car waiting and when are we going to go home. But the point is, you need this kind of support system. None of us are. Is anybody immune to this kind of stuff? Is anybody here? Are you associating with my story? Or am I the only one that steps in it? Who else steps in it? And you have to pick up the pieces. We're humans. We're humans. And this is what I was trying to remember for the group that was with me before. And these are the things that we talk about. We live this in our organization. When I'm out on the floor having a coaching moment with a supervisor or a team leader or somebody on the floor, life's hard for all of us. There's all different levels. Life's hard. We're all gonna die. So what are we gonna do with the time that we're here? You're not dead yet. What are you gonna do? You're gonna have some kind of profound impact on the people around you. Some kind of personal profound impact, Some kind of thing that your family can say, you know what? Dad was this. Mom was that. Holy mackerel. My dad invented the corn cob pipe from Iowa. It's a big thing, corn cob pipe. You get it? And none of us are that important. We really aren't. Cumulatively, altogether, we're important. But there's no one individual person that's really that important. Sometimes I am, John. You know that? But I get knocked down really fast, and you're not in control. That little plane that I flew over from Minneapolis, I looked in the cockpit, and I asked the guy, said, can I help you fly it? I think I know better how to fly this plane. It's really bumpy outside. Can I sit up front and watch what's going on? I can't do that. So I got to get rid of that. And if you get rid of those things, you start seeing things in a different fashion. And this is what I forgot. Your life is not about you. You are about life. Right? We're about life. And these are some of the values that we have at our organization. And when we interview and bring people on, respect, dedication, innovation, quality, responsibility, follow through, continuous improvement, passion and honesty. This is our personal cry at our organization. And if you want to be part of a team that has all those values and characteristics, then you want to join our team. If you want to add and enhance those values and characteristics, then you want to be on our team. We state it. We hang it right out there. You know, the group before I talked to them. Did I say that in the earlier session? Interview is a conversation between two liars. Just think about that for a minute. So if we can get down to brass tacks, and they know who you are and what you're about and what you want and you know, what you need from somebody in the organization and what your organization's about. Because everybody's job has certain values, certain values and characteristics that will make you a superstar. And then my personal challenges I've been talking about here. What do I have to do? You know, I have to question every assumption. I have about five CO's manufacturing and business operation. I designed it. I'm second generation. If it's messed up, it's my fault. It really is. I didn't give the people the tools. I didn't give the people the power. I didn't give them whatever support they needed to change it. I didn't listen. Maybe at the time that I needed to listen. It's my fault. It's nobody else's fault. Learn to see what is really happening in our organization and listen and use all my senses. If my heart wasn't feeling good about something, I'll bet you two or three or four or five, a dozen people on the factory floor or even in the office might be feeling the same thing I'm feeling. You gotta let it out there, hang it out there. And do we have a clear and predictable operating system? We've been working the last 10 years on our operating system, our OS, and man, we're starting to shoot it out of the park. But it's been 10 years of hard, hard, hard, hard work. It's unbelievable. And then holding prices and doing all the things that we do. And this is where I'm going to talk about the heart. Have I talked about the heart yet? Have you guys gotten the heart piece yet out of this? No. Bleeding heart, brave heart, anything. So the heart is the primary driver of human performance. It truly is. You can read study after study after study. And we wouldn't say brave heart, bleeding heart, got a heart, real heart. Think about all the things that have been written about the heart and the heart they've actually found. I was in California at a big event and I think John here, my friend, was there and Sherry was there and they talked about the heart. Right? Now their thinking has some thinking capabilities or some kind of thing that goes on there that really controls, helps control the brain and doing like this crazy, crazy, crazy reality. And we're listening to some really smart guy talk about this. But the heart has a big influence on us. Aching heart, right? You're in the dumps. And it's about feelings. Our organizations are about feelings where people. We can't walk into sterile environments. We can't walk into environments that don't cultivate us. We can't walk into environments that we don't feel a part of. So these are the things that I talk about is love your people. Gotta love your people. They're an extended family. You gotta love your people that love. People can sense it. Whether it oozes out of you or not, they can sense it. Care about your people. Sometimes, to my own. My own dismay is that I know too much about things that are going on and care too much about the people. Because if they're not whole coming to work, work, they're not working, they can't contribute. Forget about the work piece. I want their brains, their bodies will do everything. We'll figure out how to super speed everything in our place to get all these products out. But if their brain isn't connected, I'm dead. Develop your people. And we've lost a lot of people in the last 15 years in key roles. In key roles. And I get really, really down on myself. But we lost them for the right reasons that they went out, they became rock stars. And I couldn't produce enough challenges for them going forward. And they got to be such big thinkers that the positions that they left for, they're in positions that they would have never gotten in a million trillion years. And the people that are authentic about this and that have left me all thank me for this. It hurts my heart when they leave and. And it creates a big void. But if you're doing this to your people, you gotta feel proud of them and you gotta have the bench to go up. Jamie, one of the guys. You'll see a picture here if I don't run out of time. Jamie was a guy that was on the butcher block in early 2001, 2002, he was in our machining center. Young millennial, right? He had those big things in his ears and all this tattoos and stuff. And Jamie had one of these European, not even European cars, but like a Honda or something really loud, crazy, just a fast and furious car. So he worked in our assembly area, and the assembly supervisor said, you know what? Jamie's attendants suck. We watched it. It was creative as hell. We did the strengths thing. Thank God. About that time, we started living strengths figured out. This kid's like a D developer. He's an innovator. He's doing stuff. And we have him doing mundane, repetitive stuff. We put him in our machine shop. Holy mackerel. Holy mackerel. What he did in our machine shop had no machine shop experience whatsoever before you know where he's working now. He's working down at the. At the Formula one track. Is it Austin, Texas, I think the Formula one track. Any Formula one people? Austin, Austin, Texas, working for Team Porsche. This kid already had like, three, four electronic stores that he tried to do. He tried to do dyno tuning. He was an entrepreneur. He was curious. He wanted to learn. He wanted to say, you know what? Ah, they say it can't be done. Watch, I'll make it done. He wrote things for us. He figured out things. It was just unbelievable. So, you know, develop your people, share with your people, support your people. You guys ready to do this stuff? Because this is what it requires. It really, really is. I'm not just talking here. And the profound things that I'm telling you are that, you know, you got to use your heart. You got to think about this. You got to get out of the left side of the brain. You got to get into the right side of the brain. The left side. We can do all these tools. We're doing tools. Awesome now. And thank God we have the right side of the brain, that we know how to have fun with them. We know how to play with them. We know how to correct each other when we're getting out of line, when we're not seeing or hearing or listening to what's going on. We need to call time out. I want to share this video with you. Hopefully it plays.

It projects such pride within your organization. This feels like a community. You actually take time out of your day to improve the process. Struck by how much you get done. I guess I'm just impressed that people.

Can come up with all these different.

Ideas without being overwhelmed. I was impressed by the pride that everyone had in their positions and their work. Doug was sharing and stuff was just phenomenal. All of these people are very intelligent and articulate. I think you mentioned the tenure. Average tenure of an employee was 18 or 19 years, and that just. I was stunned by that.

This was like no factory that I've ever seen.

Positive attitudes pervades everything from you down. Obviously, I have an idea. It's in my immediate workspace. And the encouragement. Well, try it out. Put it to use.

I love how the thought leadership permeates the entire work. The team that I got in here and out on the floor is really about people setting aside their egos in all sorts of really remarkable ways.

So think about it. Earlier, Paul talked about Harvard doing this $5 million study. Did you see what the badge was on the front of this video? Did anybody see what it Was it was Harvard. Two busloads from the business school coming to our little factory with faculty, with administrative people coming to learn from our organization how to be the next Harvard. Because they know they can't sit on their laurels and just want, and people want to just come there because they're Harvard. There are so many opportunities now, so many universities, so many colleges, so many experiences that are giving them a run for their money. And they were coming to learn how do we adapt, how do we change, how do we look at this? And the last lady that you saw there with the blonde hair speaking, I remember this. We'll do a debrief when you come to tour with us. So we have probably 1500, 2000 debriefs from the 6000 people. She was in tears, in tears. And she was a long time employment employee of Harvard saying I wish our organization had this thinking, this feeling, this caring, this innovation. And she was in tears. You know, and everybody thinks about Harvard, everybody thinks about themselves always as doing the best stuff. And Harvard does some great things. The biggest great thing they did was getting in a bus and coming to sea. No think about it. And I was honored, you know, as a leader of our organization that they wanted to come and see my people. And when they come in, I'll walk around with them, I'm in the background, talk to whoever you want in the factory. It's just like Toyota. When the president of Toyota walks through a factory, no entourage with him, he walks around, just talks to people, right? And when people come into our facility, you want to talk to somebody, you want to peel off the tour and sit there for half an hour. God bless you, have fun, learn and make sure you bring it back and share it with your people. And then my crazy idea was, remember I showed you all those 340,000 people, 1600 products, 6800 SKUs. From RAW. From RAW. The challenge that I laid out there is that we have to deliver to our customer in 24 to 48 hours. 24 to 48 hours. We have UPS comes twice for a pickup. I begged UPS to come at 6:30 our office hours. We answer every revenue generating phone call live. And we have two operators that sit up front that take between 2 and 300 phone calls each from 7:30 in the morning and before they get in at 8, you know who answers the phone? The production department. Because our customers are global. Our customers need us when they need us. And we're in an MRO business and then after 5 o' clock when people go home we all rotate and I'm not immune to it. I have Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights are my late nights. I tried two, but I've drifted into three because I'm spending so much time, you know, on the floor with new initiatives that we have that have to stay that extra night. You can see I haven't been going to the gym. And Paul Akers has a new book. So if you guys have me back in a year, you'll see a new me give you a side profile like that. So I had to draw a picture. And these pictures hang up all over our facility. So everybody internally knows what they need to do to support that. Our vendors, vendors come in, we show them these two pieces. This is what we're about. If your company can't support this and you can't figure out some way to get us products at the pull that we need them for, our customers, don't even bother talking to us. Because the first time you fall down on this, we're going to talk to you. But the second time you fall down on it, shame on you. Right? Drew the picture today at our shop, tomorrow in the truck, next day at the customer. We take frowns and people that are looking for help and we turn them upside down. So that means the operators, when you watch them, the operators are cross trained in the so many different things. So if our lines are tied up from sending calls to Canada, sending calls to our guys in the field, sending the calls to our CSRs and our techs in the office, they can keep the conversation going. And what we do is we use the NATO call letters when we transfer calls or numbers. We don't have time during a hot transfer of a call to say who it is and screw up. A, B, C, you know, what do you say? 0213, customer. Got it. Send them. And then we have a saying in our company, F9 every time our factory is hooked up to our contact management software. So you know, the factory for the warranty office especially is hooked up. So we know what customers need, what they want, what their preferences are. Our production department has their own contact management that they reach out using in reverse. The way that we help our customers, the vendors, they can tell you in two seconds we don't have to go run and look for prints. We don't have to do this. We don't have to look for contracts. They hit F9 every single note since the beginning of time. You talk on the phone for two minutes to somebody, it goes into the computer because we don't want to hunt and seek information. The velocity doing this is so fast that if we don't have systems in place and everybody understands those systems and wants to partake in those systems, it all falls apart. And believe me, our system's fallen apart more than once and twice in the last 15 years. I can name the times of it. You come and you'll see archives on our walls. We'll graffiti our walls for finally, when we had a breakthrough. We'll graffiti our walls for when we were the Bad News Bears. And everybody there was saying, man, we ain't never coming back. I said, we gotta come back. There's no way. So when you watch this, try and figure out, like the gorilla thing, try and figure out how many people are actually adding value all day. And there's a bunch of guys in this shop. There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 machines there, and then a whole bunch more behind this. And it's one man, one machine. So think about if we're behind or ahead or what we're doing. And you see me there, that's during lunchtime. Because they probably were out there and they were experimenting with something and had a go see to see what their experiment was. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of videotape watching what we're doing, why we're leaving. What do we need to know? Who do we need to share with? How are we maximizing our efficiency? What bugs us? What bugs us? And does it work? Setup times reduced from 2.5 hours to 8 minutes. I was off before I told everybody. An hour and a half, but 2.5 hours over those 20 some odd machines in a month. We were lucky if we could change over machines 40 or 50 times. What does that do for your competitiveness? What does that do for the picture that I have here? They're changing over now four and 500 times a month. They're saying, smaller, smaller batches, Carl, smaller batches. They're telling engineering groups, smaller batches. They're working it down. Their goal in the machine shop is zero. At first, when we started, it was like, carl, there's no way. We're the best machinists around. You have the best. We listen and we innovate. You see how hard we work. No one ever leaves. We're the best. I said, all right, if you're the best, let's try it. And if this is the best we can do, it's the best we can do. And we better think about another business plan. But let's try it. Two years of hard Work eight minutes. And now my guys are telling me zero. And I'm looking at them going, man, zero. But that's the bar that they're raising for themselves. Zero. They will not be finished until zero. And we have a new flow cell in there. The Kevin Dugan mixed model manufacturing. We're doing zero. I welcome you to come and see this because you'll see how a mid sized organization has been able to assemble people to go out there and problem solve and get the facts and work with engineering. And all I do is come and check in and. And they have white boards up there. How you doing? And they'll show me all the things. And I'm like blown away. And I'm their biggest cheerleader. I am so happy to watch that and show me the innovation. And no one, you know, they barely ever ask for all kinds of money on these things. Yeah, we bought some new machines because we had squeezed the juice out of what we could do before. But boy, they can bootstrap stuff together and make it happen. I'm not showing you anything new here, you know, and my comments to the guys, when I go out there, I'm kind of clown with everybody and say what's on my mind. Ask somebody for a Valium out there. When I look at stuff and say I don't even understand what's going on. I said, if I can't understand, I can't expect you guys to understand it if I can't really understand it. So, you know, we work on it and you know the visual boards. But our visual boards are very unique and we've done this before that we've shut the lights out without the machine running for the safety people here without the machines running. And we'll tell the guys that stand at these vertical machining centers, grab a 916 socket, no lights. It's pitch black in a factory when there's no lights. They go up, grab it, turn the lights on, they have it. And that's the surgical precision that we, we want in our organization. That's what we want to do. And if you see this small triangle here, I know that hopefully and I'll be very proud if Tanya steals this from us here, this triangle. Because Tanya had a sign on the back of her machines. It was red or green, good or bad, you know, on the injection molding machines. Well, we want to be able to walk by a machine up and running down. And this one's set up so they're answering the question before it's asked so anybody can walk through the Machines. And if somebody's standing there, well, they're setting up or it's down. You know, if it's down, then we huddle around and we'll do some things. And it's the most profound little thing that we have. And our tools for our lathes. Akuma came up to visit our company, and if anybody has Akuma lathes, we figured out we had all these tools and there were even more on this board before we had all these tools. The guys were so proud of themselves. And then they told me as they started getting the knack of this car, we're only going to do it with one tool changeover. They came up with vibeco Innovation. One tool. Do you know how fast we can change a chuck and a turret around with just one tool? And these guys figured out how to standardize machines that came from Akuma and how to put thumb screws on stuff and still have the quality, the reliability. And the changeover. That was huge. That one helped us with three minutes, getting us down to the eight, you know, taking it off the two something. It was huge. And the guys, you know, I talked about Jamie and Darrell out there. This is the lead for out there. I think he's up to three monitors now. And this live schedule here is something. They'd get their schedule and they'd get their lists. And they said, you know, Carl, can we have. Can we have access to the IT guys and talk to them? And can you let us go in and play around with some code? Because we're really not getting the information that we need. And we have such velocity through the factory, and we think we can write some code. I said, sure, how about it? They researched this at nighttime, and they made a live schedule. You know, we're just. We're like, you guys, we're in New England like you guys from Iowa. We figure out how to bootstrap this stuff. If we can make it work with no money involved and just some good old ingenuity, we make it happen. And when they show me these kind of things, I'm like, oh, yeah. We talked. We went on a forum last night. We were talking to some guys. They told us some code, and they click these things so we know where everything is in the process. Why do I need a big ERP system? Why do we need to spend money on that? They have exactly what they want in the form that they want it, and they know who to communicate downstream to, and they know how to communicate upstream. So why do you need all that stuff? Stuff, you know, the Push carts. You've seen all this stuff. And here's Jamie. He's working with Team Porsche and every single workstation. When we started on the tools in 2005, they all had stopwatches. They wanted to beat their personal best. They were like Olympians. They wanted to meet their. And it wasn't me asking to do it. We had stopwatches in a few areas and all of a sudden everybody's got a stopwatch and they're just measuring this. And Jamie here figured out on the Okuma, you see it says done there. Well, when you're a machine operator, you just watch numbers and codes go through there. And we flex a lot of people in and out. And at certain points when you really have to concentrate on the machine and you know, for people coming into the job, they don't know when the job's done. So we say, well, if no one knows when the job's done, can you tell us when it's done? And then we can open up the door. Akuma hadn't even thought of that because they're used to guys just reading code. And if we have to do a two part operation, we have to flip the piece over. It says flip. And this was all in his own time. So you know that you're living, breathing, lean. When you're willing to give up some of your personal time to help your team members, help your organization and help yourself to reduce some of the stress. You got to feel the pulse. You got to be thinking, trusting, learning, working on our destiny, our systems. We'll live up to our values. How will we define ourselves? Developing leaders. Laser focus on our customers. Laser Laser. Laser. Laser focus on our customers. There is no one that can beat our deliveries if it's inside our four walls. And we've in housed a ton, a ton of operations, operations probably way more than we should have. But the competitive nature of our business, that if we can control it, it's happening, everybody is ready to make it happen. And that's why we're winning. Vibration nation. Vibration nation. And that's what we have there. I really feel like I'm a leader of a country and that everybody believes that we have a higher purpose than self there and they're part of something bigger than themselves. And we call ourselves a vibration nation. And we believe we are the vibration nation. So you can come to the Gambitar manufacturing facility in Rhode island, see the operation. The ILC knows how to get ahold of me. Come anytime Tuesdays and Thursdays. And now it's your turn to go back, hopefully take some of the lessons that I've given you today. Take one person along with you, have that person find another person, and before you know it you have a total movement with inside your organization. Thank you for letting me to speak to you today.

Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now it's time to take a free nose strings attached, fully functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma. Over at GembaAcademy.com gain immediate access to more than 500 Lean and Six Sigma training videos free of charge at GembaCademy.com.