GA 103 | Our Favorite Episodes

You're listening to episode 103 with some of our favorite guests from the first 100 Gemba Academy podcasts. 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 Gamba 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 Gembaacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now then, today, what we've decided to do is release a different type of episode. As you know, we recently eclipsed the 100 podcast mark. Episode 100 was released a few weeks ago. It was Matt May's story of of how he died two different times. So definitely ch episode out if you haven't. But what I decided to do was ask all of my Gemba Academy colleagues to share their top five or six favorite podcasts from the first 100 episodes. And so everybody emailed their choices into me, and what I did was kind of a random selection process. I literally put all of the their choices into a hat, and I pulled out a handful. So obviously I wasn't able to use everyone's favorite. So I do apologize to my Gemba Academy colleagues if your favorite wasn't selected. But it was a random process. If you want to check out the full list of every episode that we've done, you can do that on itunes, or you can Simply go to GembaPodcast.com and you can access the whole list there of all 100 episodes. So the plan for this episode is I'll go ahead and I'll introduce the clip, and then we'll play a short segment from each of these episodes. And take note, if it sounds like something that you want to hear the full episode of, just go over to GembaPodcast.com and you can download and listen to the whole thing. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Okay, well, the first episode that I want to share with you was episode 76. And this is Simon Sinek. And I'm not sure if there was a 100% agreement between all Gemba Academy colleagues, but this one was pretty close to 100% that everyone had this particular episode on their list. So Simon Sinek, as you may know, has the third most watched TED Talk of all time, his famous why video. And Simon came onto the show and it was a fantastic episode. Probably the most nervous I've ever been to interview someone, that's for sure. But during the episode we talked about all kinds of things, but we spent quite a bit of time talking about what Simon refers to as the golden circle, namely how people can kind of identify their why, like why are they doing what they do, how do they find purpose in their work, in their life and so forth. And I ask one particular question that I find figured was going to fire Simon up. And it sure did. I kind of asked him. We had spent a lot of time talking about so called knowledge workers and I wanted to know, well, what if you're a factory worker or what if you work in retail? Does this why principle still apply to you? And here's what Simon had to say.

Oh, my goodness. Of course it has nothing to do with the work that we do. It has to do with the people with whom we work. We are social animals and we respond to the environments we're in. You take a good person, you put them in a bad environment, they're capable of doing bad things.

Yeah.

You take a person that maybe others have given up on, they may have even performed bad acts, you put them in a good environment, they're capable of becoming remarkable human beings.

Yeah.

You know, we, I think people in the knowledge world, in the knowledge business world are terribly, they suffer from hubris and terrible ethnocentrism that, that how. I can't imagine someone who works in a factory would actually be happy, you know?

Yeah.

And that's because they think happiness is equated with the work that you do, which is nonsense. Happiness and joy are equated with the people with whom we work. And if we feel trusted and trusting, then we love going to work regardless of the work that we do. You know, we've all helped our friends move and it's been a joyous experience. Well, lifting boxes and carrying them and putting them on a truck is not a joyous experience, but serving and taking care of our friends is. We've all been on our hands and knees trying to help someone build IKEA furniture.

Yes.

You know, it's a pretty awful job. It's a pretty awful task, but we enjoy it and we say yes because of the joy of helping our friends or having the joy of our friends helping us. So it's terribly, terribly pompous to think that because the Work is unglamorous, that you can't have joy. I can tell you I've met factory workers and people who are in the stone crushing business who are way happier, way more inspired and way more fulfilled than somebody who works for a tech company or a bank.

Yes, well, I don't know how much you've studied the Lean movement that we kind of work in, but one of the principles that we teach is respect for people. And what you saying is so true. It doesn't matter if you sweep floors or you're the CEO. We all have inherent respect and we should all take care of one another and help each other.

And we're all cogs in a machine.

Yeah, that's true.

Some of them have a more visible role, like the hands on the front of the clock, and some of them are more hidden. But every piece in that machine needs to work and feel valued and valuable. Otherwise things break. That's just the way it works. And that's why we refer to companies as quote unquote, well oiled machines. As you know from the Toyota experience, Lean has nothing to do with efficiency. Lean is everything to do with people. And the biggest mistake the Americans made bringing the Toyota process to America was calling it lean.

I didn't know how much you really knew about the Lean movement, Simon. So I have a whole new army questions for you, but I'm fascinated to hear you say that.

And Americans turned it into a tool for efficiency, and that's never what it was supposed to be. And so there are zero. Zero examples of an American company successfully implementing Lean when they do it as a tool for efficiency? Zero.

Yes.

Right. So how good can a process be if there's zero examples of success? You know, and when it's used as a people tool, is it used for a tool for helping people respect each other and help each other and Kaizen moments where you help someone else solve the problem that they're suffering. You can take an accountant and ask them to look at this machine and say, do you see something that I'm not seeing? It's about cooperation, not efficiency. Now, efficiency may come out of the cooperation, as will profit and innovation, but the motivation is human. It's not a metric.

Again, that was Simon Sinek in episode 76. So if you'd like to listen to the full show, just go to gemba podcast.com and look for episode 76. Okay, so the next episode that I want to share a bit of is episode 89, which was with Paul Akers. Now, this wasn't a traditional interview. Instead, what we did was we shared Paul Akers most recent book called Lean Health in an audio format. Paul was gracious enough to allow us to do that. And so it's a much longer episode. In fact it's, gosh, it's over three hours long, so it's a full audiobook. But basically what Paul does is he walks you through how he's literally transformed his life from average health to exceptional health. And so what we're gonna do here is we're just gonna play the opening, which just kind of gives you an overview of what the book's all about. And if it sounds interesting to you, I'd encourage you to download the full thing and give it a listen. To do that, go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 89.

A word from the Author if I was to summarize my entire book in one word, it would be Ferrari the Secret to excellent Health the answer is to treat your body like you would treat a Ferrari. A Ferrari is the archetype of a sports car, one of the most precise and high performance machines ever made. It is exotic, fast, agile and beautiful. If you take the same care of your body as you would a Ferrari, using only the best fuels and regularly taking it to to the best mechanics for maintenance, your body will give you back 10 times what you put into it for the duration of your life. So ask yourself, do you treat your body like a Ferrari or a Pinto? Another way of thinking of your body is as a magic carpet transporting you through life. It is the vehicle you use to experience everything. If your vehicle is in excellent condition, your life experiences will be more full and complete. If you choose to take average care of your magic carpet, you should only expect an average life experience. The more you respect it and care for it, the more magic you will experience. Lean Health tells the story of how I went from average health to having exceptional health. I achieved this exceptional health in just one year. These are the four things that define exceptional health for me. 1. Most of my life I was over 210 pounds. Now I find it easy to maintain my 165, which is the correct weight for my height of 510. Number two, when I go to the doctor for a checkup, he says, you look amazing and your health is excellent. What are you doing? 3. I have a strong muscular body with a chiseled abdomen. Something that was just a dream before. 4. Finally, and most important, it is easy to sustain exceptional health. After a full year of living healthy, I have no Temptations to backslide into unhealthy habits. I just have a total love affair with serving and taking care of my greatest customer, my body.

And once again, that was Paul Akers in Lean Health. And that's episode 89. So just go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 89. Okay, next up, we have Dr. Sami Bari. Now, Dr. Bari is the world's first lean dentist, and we welcomed Dr. Bari onto the show back in episode 67. And during this episode, we spent quite a bit of time Talking about how Dr. Barry has applied lean to his dental practice. And in one particular segment, Dr. Barry was talking about how they transitioned from kind of a traditional batch and cue approach to dealing with their patients to one piece flow or one mouth at a time. And here's what Dr. Bari had to say about that.

The waiting time of our patients was something like two hours, around one o'. Clock. So we were two hours behind. And I would apologize every day and say, I'm trying my best. There's nothing I can do about it. Two weeks after we started one piece flow, then the wait went down to 10 minutes.

Wow.

And then after one meeting, it went down to zero seconds. So now I could say probably 90% of our patients, if they're not early for their appointment, if they come on time, we ask him not to sign in, not to waste the time signing in, just go to chair number five. So that's how dramatic the change was. So after so many years, and I'm talking many, many years of practice, you're taking your wait time from two hours to zero seconds right away. So that was dramatic.

Now, Dr. Bari went on to explain how they applied many other Lean tools and concepts, such as quick changeover, to their practice in order to get to where are today. So if you want to listen to that full episode, just go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 6767. Okay, next up, I want to introduce Ori Fiume. Now, I met with Mr. Fiume in the latter part of 2015 at the a Lean Leadership Summit in Jacksonville, Florida. So we were sitting outside. So the audio on this particular episode isn't stellar, but the interview was. Mr. Fiume, as you may know, was vice President of Finance and Admin at the Wire Mold Company. Now, the Wire Mold Company was featured in the book Lean Thinking, and it was one of the, Gosh, one of the first western companies to adopt lean thinking principles. And Mr. Fiume has been instrumental in the whole lean accounting movement. But he's done far more than just accounting. And during our interview, I actually asked Orey if he had a favorite wire mold story. And here's what he said.

You know, as I said a minute ago, you know, unless the leaders really get it and live it and walk it and not just talk it, it's not going to happen. And I can remember in the early days, Art was in walking through our factory in West Hartford, and he walked past an assembly bench where we put together what we call telepower poles, which is a product that's about. These are those two inch poles that you see in an open office space that bring wires from a drop ceiling down to the desk. And so they were. It's a two person assembly operation.

Okay.

And as he's walking by, one of the ladies says to him, hey, Art, come here. So he comes over, he says, you know what? We could make more of these every day, except it's a lousy design. So now what does that tell you? First of all, she started understanding the concept of productivity.

Yes.

I can make more of these every day.

Yes.

And she understood what the barrier was.

Yes.

There was a bad design that caused them to spend too much time assembling it.

Yes.

And then she says, I bet you can't do any better than we can. Well, if you know anything about art. Yeah. Okay. Art never turns down a challenge.

Okay.

So Art goes, and he gets the VP of operations, Frank Giantasio. And they on the second shift start learning, getting trained on how to assemble this product.

Okay.

And once they were adequately trained, they showed up the next day and they worked a full eight hour shift in a union factory assembling this product for eight hours.

Wow.

And at the end, they do. And at the end of the day, he went over to the lake that challenged him and he said, you're right, we're going to change it.

Wow.

That stood to the day we retired. That story became part of legend. It was told as if it happened yesterday.

Wow.

But you talk about changing our culture of a company. Yeah.

Okay.

Think of what that did in that workforce in terms of their understanding as to how this, this was really the way we were going to live when the CEO can come down. And you know, because one thing people learned about Art pretty quickly is art fell and feels today all work is honorable. Now, it may contain waste, but it's honorable. It doesn't matter what job you have in the company, from the highest to the lowest, it's honorable work. And people sense that in seconds when he talks to them and so he gained such credibility and trust with the workforce just with that little story about spending eight hours doing the work they were doing.

Yes, again, that was orifiume and that was episode 81. So if you'd like to listen to that full episode, just go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 81. Okay, next up, I want to welcome Richard Sheridan back to the show. Now, we've had Richard on the podcast two different times. He was on an episode three, a third episode, and then again in episode 70, we brought a segment of a Gemba Academy live video shoot that we did. We just kind of converted that into audio. And during that particular segment, Richard and I were exploring the topic of babies, as in infants, at Menlo Innovations. Here's what Richard had to say.

Yeah, it's been a long standing tradition of ours. And let me tell you how it started, Ron Tracy was off on maternity leave for three months. She had her second child, Maggie, and she was on paid maternity leave. And after those three months, she came back and she came up to me and said, rich, I'm ready to come back to work. And I said, awesome, we miss you. Can't wait to have you back. And she said, there's only one problem. Maggie's too young for daycare. And then she reflected on the fact that grandparents lived far away, so there was no sort of family support network that could take care of Maggie in the meantime. And she didn't know what to do. And I have to say, in that moment, there were two little voices on my shoulders that started screaming in each ear. The bright voice and the dark voice. And the dark voice was like, don't you dare say what you're about to. To say HR will kill you. You know, this is against the rules. There's probably laws against what you're about to say. And the bright voice said, it's your company. You can do whatever you want. You don't even have an HR department. And I look. And Tracy never heard that argument in my head. I resolved it quickly. And I looked at her, said, bring her in. And she said, what do you mean? I said, bring her into work. Now. In that moment, this look of bewilderment came across her face, because I don't think she was expecting that. She's a programmer. She was a QA person on the team. She is a QA person on the team. And she said, you know, all day. And I said, sure. And she looked out in the big open room, she said, rich, where will I put her? I Said, tracy, she's three months old. She's not going anywhere. Just put her in a bassinet on the floor wherever you're working. And she said, every day? I said, sure, why not? I think she was testing me, right, to see how far I thought this through. And quite honestly, not very much. Yeah. And then she said, well, Rich, what if she makes a fuss? I said, tracy here, it's like a noisy restaurant. You'll never hear her. She goes, yeah, but what if she really makes a fuss? And I think this is a sort of a managerial growth moment for me personally. I looked at her and said, tracy, you're the mom. I trust you. You'll do the right thing. We'll work it out together. Yeah. Well, that was eight menlo babies ago. Maggie stayed for about six months. We've had some babies stay here up to a year. And it's become this great tradition when the baby's awake, usually out in the middle of the room in a pack and play. When the baby fusses, some unexpected things happen. We figured the mom would rescue the baby. It's seldom the mom. The team raises the baby.

How about you?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. They got pictures of me sitting at my computer holding Maggie or the babies, checking email. Often when I do tours, if the baby's here and it's nap time, they love putting the baby in Rich's arms because they as he's walking around the factory talking with his deep, booming voice, babies. So, you know, I just found when they got older, holding a baby for two hours on a tour, your arm would get very sore after a while. But, you know, I think it's another wonderful expression and looking at the whole lives of our team members and also perhaps, I think, you know, there's going to be a lot of workplaces that couldn't bring babies in. Just wouldn't be safe.

Right.

And I understand that. So. So this isn't a story necessarily about if you want to be a cool place to work, you should allow moms to bring in babies. Although I think it probably works at a lot more places than most people would expect. But it is more of an experiment or more of a philosophy of trust your team members and run the experiment. Because Tracy and I could have stood there and kind of did, right? Me and the silent voices in my head and her out loud saying, I can think of five reasons this won't work, but ultimately, what happens? Did we say, let's run the experiment and if it works, great. If it doesn't, we'll try and Adjust. And if it really doesn't work, it was worth a try. Yeah. Well, found out it worked. It was awesome. Found out the team really enjoyed having the babies in the room. And then we found out something amazing. Customers behave better when you bring a baby to the meeting.

Well, they won't swear at you, right?

Yeah. They won't get upset. Oh, my gosh, you guys are awesome. And then we had customers start to bring their children into business.

Now tell the story in the book. I want you to tell a story of the lady who.

You were trapped holding a baby. The phone rang. I was holding Solomon. I was at my desk. I was holding the baby, and Christina mom was many feet away from me, and she had her back turned to me. And my phone rang, and I knew it was a call I was expecting. And, like, an important kind of sales phone call.

Right.

It was a potential client. It's the first time I'd ever talked with him on the phone. And I knew this wasn't necessarily gonna work. And I'm trying to call Christina, but the phone's gonna ring over to voicemail. And so I just grabbed the phone and pick it up. I start talking to her, and Solomon starts making baby noises like kids do, because they're wired.

They know when you're trapped.

They know when you're trapped. Right? And so he starts making baby noises. I can't get Christina's attention, so I figured, well, okay, fess up. Tell her what's going on. So I said, oh, by the way, you're gonna hear a baby on the phone. She goes, oh, that's cool. Are you working at home today? I said, no, I'm at work. Oh, you get to bring your baby to work. I said, well, it's not mine. She's like, excuse me. And I started to explain to her our whole pattern and philosophy about bringing babies. And at that moment, she goes, oh, my gosh. I totally, totally want to work with a company that thinks like you do. And I realized, oh, Solomon's part of the marketing team now. So, you know, it's just interesting. When you run experiments, you get unexpected results. And obviously, sometimes there'll be unexpected results that you have to deal with. Sometimes they're unexpected results that just produce, you know, results that you just couldn't have anticipated. They're very, very positive. Yeah. Seeing that with the babies, very cool. Very cool.

Again, that was Richard Sheridan. If you want to hear that full episode, just go to gamelitpodcast.com and look for episode 70. And we also did a full episode with Richard back in episode three. Finally, to wrap this episode up, I'd like to share a segment from episode 50, which we recorded last year in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during a Gemba Academy strategy session. And since we had all of our team members in one place, we. We decided to record an episode allowing all of our team members to reflect back on the first six years of Gemba Academy's existence. Now, during this clip, we're going to hear from Greg Nicol, our lead videographer, and Elaine Crescione, our customer service manager, talk about the culture we're trying to build here at Gemba Academy. Now, if you'd like to hear this full episode, just go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 50. Okay, we'll let Greg and Elaine wrap things up. Like most companies, we're far from perfect. But if I can boast a little, the thing I'm most proud of is the culture we're building here at Gemba Academy. Yes, we're still a small team, relatively speaking, and time will tell how well we maintain our core values as we continue to grow. But nothing, and I do mean nothing, it's more important than our customers and team members. We truly believe in a concept of respect for all of humanity. Here's Greg again to expand on this.

I'm a big culture guy. I mean, I don't. I don't talk about it, and we don't. We don't go through this kind of stuff, and we don't, you know, culture is one of those things. You either. That's what a company has.

Yeah.

You can kind of change it. You can try to make it and all that kind of stuff. But this is something you guys originally had. I just was able to climb on board and it's comfortable. That's. That's the number one thing I can say about our culture, is that it is so comfortable. If you've got a suggestion, and I don't care what role you play, if you have a suggestion, everybody listens to it. We talk every day, and we're not even in the same place. We're all over the. We're all over the U.S. probably soon we'll have people all over the world, but. But we talk every day, and if not every day, at least a couple times a week. But generally we try to talk every day so we all know what each other's doing. And I just always feel like I have a voice. And it doesn't even have to be in the content development piece. It can be in anything and I know that people are going to listen to me now whether I've got a good suggestion or not. That's neither here nor there, but at least I know that if I've got a comment about something, I want to be heard.

And last but certainly not least, we'll let Elaine close things out with how she feels about her colleagues. And I just love the team we've built here.

We have some amazing people on our team. It's a fun group.

It's a group that really works well together. I really feel so blessed to have.

This job and work at Gemba Academy.

It's a great team.

Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast.

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