GA 118 | How to Use Lean and Zen to Become a Better Leader with Kevin Meyer

You're listening to episode 118 with Kevin Meyer.

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 and your week, for listening to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos. We definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now today, I'm excited to welcome my friend and my business partner Kevin Meyer to the show. Now, Kevin has recently published a book. The book is called the Simple Leader. And what we're going to do today is kind of walk through that book kind of section by section and Kevin offers some insight into why he wrote the book and really just kind of gives us a high level overview of the book and also adds a lot of value, I think, in just sharing some wisdom. Kevin's extremely knowledgeable. I'm a little biased because he's my business partner and friend, but he's run companies and been in charge of several Lean transformations and he's also had just a lot of incredible personal experience in his life that's helped him to become a pretty, pretty special person, in my opinion. So that's what we're going to talk about in this book. Now if you want to learn more about it and you want to get some, some free chapters and learn a little bit more about what it's all about, all you have to do is go to the simple leader.com again, that's the simple leader.com and we'll link to it in our show notes which are going to be found on GembaPodcast.com just look for episode 1181 18. I also want to mention that we are really going to start announcing the AME Conference that's coming up in Oct. It's a pretty special conference, so we want to make sure that everyone that listens to the show is aware that it's coming. If you want to learn more about the show, possibly get a discount and you can also sign up for our free cocktail reception that we're doing on the Tuesday night of the show. Just go to gembaacademy.com Ame Ame so gembacademy.com Ame okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Kevin. Well, welcome back to the show. It's been a while since you've been on. Episode 25 was the last time you were on.

Good. It's a little bit different since we talk every day. I think we talked only what, about 15 minutes ago?

Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. So for those who don't talk to you every day, what's been going on with Kevin Meyer over the last year or so?

Well, trying to work on Giva Academy. Obviously we've got some exciting new functionality. Obviously you work more on the content side, so people have seen the videos and that kind of thing. But I think behind the scenes we've got some very interesting functionality that will be coming online over the next several months, especially toward the end of the year.

You've also been a little bit busy writing a book. Right.

Finally getting it off my plate, I think is probably a bit more accurate. I've been toying with this for four or five years and just never getting it close enough. And I think is at the Lean Accounting Summit last year, maybe someone came up to me and said, well, when are you going to finish that Blumen book? Just made a call then that I was going to either finish it or kill it by the end of the year. So it wasn't weighing on me. So I went away for a couple of weeks and just wrote and cranked it out.

Great. So it's called A Simple Leader. So that's obviously what we're going to talk about today, but you know the drill. So we like to start all of our shows with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one? Maybe it's related to.

Actually, I've got a couple. It hit me when I was thinking about this, a quote that I've had ever since a kid, I was a kid, is wherever you go, there you are. And it didn't hit me until a couple of years ago. That's actually rather Zen related in looking at who said that, I always thought Winnie the Pooh said it, and I was convinced of that. In fact, I think I even got a picture in my house of that. My wife gave me of that. Turns out it originally came from Buddha himself and then was also featured on Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension, if you're into movies. So it's a little way out there. But the one that is really intriguing me lately, I know you've read his book too, is Greg McGowan, who wrote Essentialism, said clarity about the essential fuels us with the strength to say no. To the non essential. And I think about that quite a bit as I'm even as we're designing Gimbick at what is non essential? What is the essential? And how do we simplify and make things more intuitive and so forth. Trying to apply that to our own lives.

Yeah, yeah. So obviously this book is kind of based on, I guess, your personal leadership journey. Talk about that.

Well, I guess for. I've been at it. What have I been out of school now? A little over 30 years.

Oh, man, you're dating yourself.

I know, man. Well, it hit me, actually. Yes. Yesterday when my sister, my younger sister turned 50 and. Yeah, and I know you're a decade younger than I am.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least. Oh, goodness.

But I look younger, so. Hey.

Yeah.

But no, I had the sort of traditional career path of an engineer. I got a degree in chemical engineering and made light bulbs for a while, made medical devices for a while and sort of worked up through the ranks. Ended up running a plant in Salt Lake and then eventually coming out to California to run a plant. And the last, I guess, real job I had before Gimp Academy was I was president of a medical device company. So along the way I learned a lot about Lean. And it was back in Salt Lake. I was moved out there from the Bay Area. And like most people do when they take a job transfer, they just say yes. They don't really ask too many questions. And found myself in Salt Lake, and it's a very large plant with a lot of molding presses and a lot of strange things going on on night shifts. But that's a little outside the point that I wasn't aware of. But what I also wasn't aware of was when I got there was that this plant with about 60 heavy presses supplied parts just to other company plants. And they were six months behind schedule, running at 100% capacity, 24, 7, 365. So you get in there and they're like, well, fix that. What do you do when you're supposedly running 24, 7, 365 every press and you're six months behind schedule? So the knee jerk reaction obviously is you buy a lot more presses. And we did that was back in the late 90s, early 2000s, I guess, 97ish or so, when Apple was starting to tool up its Chinese manufacturing capacity and it had pretty much bought out the global capacity of presses and heavy production tools like that while they were doing that. And so the lead time was long. But what I did is I reached out and I came across the association for Manufacturing Excellence. And a couple of guys there steered me toward Quick Changeover, which I'd never heard of before. And we took that back to the group and about three months later we had done a good job of implementing that and we were ahead of schedule. We caught up and we were actually ahead and we started to retire presses, some of our old presses. At the same time those new presses started arriving, which was a waste of several million dollars at that point. So when something like that happens, you're pretty much sold on Lean. So it just went from there. Learning about Kaizen and value stream mapping and so forth. When I moved to California it was a similar situation as a telecom photonics equipment manufacturing operation. And again a year behind schedule and just some using some simple visual tools, Value stream mapping and a lot of training, we turned that around pretty fast. The story there is we turned it around just in time for the bottom to drop out of the telecom market. And we announced the closure of the facility on the day before 9 11, which made for a fun week.

Okay, well, what I thought we would do, Kevin, is just kind of. There's eight parts, as you call them, of the book the Simple Leader. So let's kind of just walk through each one and maybe just give the highlights of what that part of the book is about. And the first one is Fundamentals. It looks like it's a lot about customer and that sort of thing. So talk about that.

That part one on the fundamentals is sort of my journey. How I came to Alberty described how I came to discover and implement Lean. The Zen side was a little bit different as I was president of this medical device company out here. Is that a pretty chaotic and stressful job? And at the same time I started going through some family medical emergency type issues that really just added to the stress and got to the point. And I'm very honest about this in the book that I was thinking maybe I should just go to Samoa and sit on a beach for a couple of years. And I'm saying that in all seriousness because I'd even researched visa requirements and one way ticket prices and that kind of thing. But I knew there was a better way and I just flew myself to Hawaii on a moment's notice and sat on a beach and I was like, this works. Just being alone and at one with nature and just sitting and contemplating. And I came back just two days later refreshed. And as you know and some others know, I ended up doing that several times. And from that that sort of helped Me discover the Zen side of things. I came across Matthew May's book the Shibumi Strategy at the same time, which many know is one of my favorite books, and talks about a sort of nexus of Zen and design and personal leadership as well.

Part two is Reconnect. What's that all about?

So after the fundamentals, I thought we should think about ourselves. And this is from a very individual perspective. You know, what do we need to do to get back to what we're about as individuals? We have to do this before we really approach leadership. So I talk about becoming more healthy, which I know you and I have both done a lot of over the last year. I think there was even a podcast on that, Paul Aker's book that really inspired both of us. But then also how powerful concepts like gratitude are. When you wake up in the morning and you really think about what you're thankful for, it sets a tone for the day and the week where instead of just thinking about your problems, finding comfort in just being alone and seeking stillness, breaking the routine so you're getting out of the rut. And then, probably most importantly, just being in the present moment. Too many people spend too much time dwelling on the past instead of just learning from it and moving on, or planning in the future instead of just being in the moment and making the moment the best it can be.

So there's another part in there about forgiving yourself. What's that all about?

Well, we've all done things that we probably regret. Luckily, nothing too severe that has landed me in jail or anything like that, but still they weigh on you, and you need to, instead of just being disappointed in yourself, just forgive yourself, be okay with it, and move on. Similar concept to just not thinking about the past. You learn from it and you move on. But when you get too wrapped up in the negative side of things you've done or the negative side of your past, it can consume you.

Yeah, exactly. Part three is create.

So this has some productivity tips that I guess I've come across and work for me, and I guess that's an important part of the book, too, is this is what works for me. It's not intended to work for everyone, but removing distractions. I'm highly distractible. I was tapping on the table, so I had to learn and really work at turning off the Internet when I went to work. The Pomodoro method of setting aside 45 minutes, where I'm just going to focus on one thing. But probably the most powerful thing for me was every morning figuring out what are the three things I really want to accomplish today? And writing those down in a journal and then figuring out what part of the day is my most productive. For me it's very early morning. I'm most productive from 5 to 7 in the morning. So I really work on those big three items during that time. And then toward the afternoon is when I do more the phone calls and that kind of work. And then at the end of the day reflecting on that, how did I do and what can I learn? And this, you can start to see where this ties in with Hansei, with Lean for example, or reflecting on how you've done creates the learning that happens.

What's the hour of power?

That is my most productive hour. So that's for me that's depending on the day of the week or so, it's usually five to six or six to seven and I set that aside and I guard that. And so you know, the most important thing, the most important task I want to get done that day, that's what I do that time. I turn off everything else by then. I've read the paper if I wanted to. I caught up on email. But that hour I just focus on that thing. And that's why I know you come into the office or especially some of the other people and they have a barrage of emails from me because I've gotten some. Something done already.

Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. All right, Part four is lead starts with O. The humanity. I love that.

This is where we start going into more the professional side of leadership. So we've talked about ourselves but now on the professional side and it's really geared around people centric leadership and instead of maybe the typical MBA style leadership where we focus on the numbers. So you know, the humanity is people and it all revolves around people. And so I talk a lot about respect for people, humility. Again, a common concept between Lean and Zen of how to be a very humble leader. The servant leadership, something I mention in there is on sharing. And the best leaders I know, the ones I try to emulate and now the ones I try to hire are the ones that learn how to share. And for example, when I'm hiring executive leaders and I noticed that at my last company, that the key aspect or characteristic of the best leaders were the ones that really had a quest for knowledge. They would learn anything about anything, but then could also distill that and figure out how it applies and most importantly share that and teach that. And that characteristic I think is when you're, when you're Looking for people is probably the most important.

Talk about trusting and how important that is to leadership.

That's a hard one for a lot of leaders, especially when. And I'm one of them, where I know how I like things to be done and I have to take a step back and realize I've hired great people. Even at Gimba county, we've got fantastic people, and we need to just let them do their job and trust them to do their job. It may not be exactly how we want it to be done, but we trust them. And that ties in with how our culture code, which is loosely based off of the Netflix culture code, and it's not based on policies, it's based on finding high performers and then turning them loose.

Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, I know obviously you recently went on vacation for a couple of weeks and I mean, you had to unplug, right? Talk about that.

Yeah. Usually when I go on vacation, it's not been like this last week where there was no Internet. I was in Cuba for a week, and that was a struggle. I was. I know. Tony, our IT guy, mentioned it's the first time in seven years that we've had Gemba Academy that I've been disconnected. I've gone to Africa for a month and been able to check in at least once a day to see how things are going and fix things. But this time it was a solid week without checking email or anything. And I noticed when I got back, I got on the plane and there's wi fi and was going through the thousand emails that built up, and there are no disasters. In fact, there's nothing anywhere close. It all just been humming along. And that's because we've hired great people that handle everything.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, part five is clarify what's going on there.

The sequence of some of these parts might seem a little strange, but I felt we needed to get the leadership out first. But now clarify is to define what we and the organization are about. In my lean journey, in fact, even in the last company I ran, and I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but I focused too much on the tools. In fact, early on, there was. We even had a goal that we will put in two lean tools a year. Luckily, I had a great staff by then that felt comfortable enough with me asking, why? Why are we doing this? And it really brought us to a halt and we went back and decided we need to define what we're about. So defining the principles, our values, and then our why. What are we up to? Why are we doing this, and this applies to both personal and professional leadership. What are we about? What is very important to us? A key part of this clarifying is what in the Zen world is called the beginner's mind. And it's very similar to a concept in the lean world of asking questions. Ask questions before assuming the answers. And that's a tough thing for senior leaders to do. When you have 30 years of experience and you think you've seen it all, taking yourself right back to the beginning and asking the questions and thinking that you don't know everything. But it's very powerful. Then from there, you document the current state, you observe, you determine what you think the future state will be. This will ring a bell with most people in the lean world. You then create the Hoshin plan. You tie it all together, and if you want to, you create an A3 with all of that on it, all on one page.

Part six is simplify. I know you're pretty passionate about this.

And again, this section is after clarify, because I was toying with that and the more I thought about that, you have to simplify within the context of your why? What are you about? Otherwise, you may simplify things out of your life that may actually have value. So after you know what you're about, you simplify your life, you simplify your organization. And you're right. It's something I've really focused on the last few years is decluttering and getting rid of what I don't need. And for my wife and I, it actually means that, you know, we're trying to find smaller and smaller houses. I know you actually did the same thing as you realize you need less. You know, one thing that has always bugged me is when you look for houses, a key value component in a house seems to be how much storage space there is. And I guess I would put the opposite. Storage space is a waste. But I also talk about choice and the waste of choices. How can we remove choices? And I've seen that with elderly family members that just get so wrapped up and how many things they got going on that they can't move forward.

You know, something that. Something that. And I think it ties to this closely that you've helped me a lot over the years is just the F word, focus. Right.

And it has sort of become that. Because you'll send that back to me. Yes.

Well, yeah, I use it back on you now, but. Yeah, but it's so true. Right? Because it's so easy to, you know, I don't know, just get off on tangents and you kind of forget about your why or your purpose. Right. Like, what are you trying to do?

Well, it applies to Gemba Academy as well. There's so many opportunities that we come across. I think we've become so good at being able to pivot and go after things that we find valuable that we really have to take the time to say, is this within our plan? Is this within our vision and why we exist? I think we've become pretty good at that.

Yeah. Or I agree. Or like, what you learned in essentialism. Is it a hell yes? Right. If it's not hell yes, then why are you doing it? Right.

Right.

So, yeah, everybody needs to read that book, by the way, Essentialism by Greg McCowan.

Fantastic book. Yeah. Yeah.

After the Simple Leader, of course. All right, Part seven's improve.

So this is the classic lean PDCA type improvement. You know, just start, and then I take people through some of the history between the pdsa. I prefer the plan do, study, adjust, because it makes more intuitive sense to me. Creating the plan, doing it, study what happened, and then adjust it and then start over again. So I talked about that. Some of the human aspects of change, you got to explain why you're doing a change. It goes back to having a clear understanding of your why within your organization and then tying that to why you want to change. So people buy into and accept the change. Go and see and the gimbal walk side of things going and seeing what is really happening. Standardize it, map it, Get a little bit into kata with what is our current state, what's the future state? And then running experiments to make continual small changes up to try to achieve that future state. Then some daily management, then reflection. I think the reflection side is what is often missed, both on a personal leadership side and a professional leadership side. And in my last organization, that was what was very important. We're in the middle of wine country here, and once a quarter, we take the executive staff off to a winery. And we'd spend the morning reviewing what has happened over the last quarter. How are our projects done, how are we performing against metrics, how are we performing against our why and our principles? Are those still valid or do they need to be tweaked? And then, of course, we have a little bit fun in the afternoon, and it's a good thing we wrote things down during the morning. If you're having fun at a winery, there's a danger of forgetting everything. But it was fantastic. And so I can't emphasize that enough of how powerful reflection is and something.

That we try to do here at Gambit Academy, it probably could do better but celebrate success right when things have gone well. Talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. We thought even at Gimbacon we got everyone together. We had a successful year, we had a very successful few years. And just getting people together among each other and outside of a work context and being able to celebrate, I think it's very powerful.

Yeah. So the last part is grow. What's going on there?

This is sort of again, something that's important. Important to me. Over the last probably 15 years now I've had. Boy, it's been longer than that. I guess I've had an annual goal to do something different. I don't know how I actually started to do this, to be honest. It wasn't consciously. I think just each year I wanted to try something different. So, you know, and those things have been trying to get outside of my comfort zone. So some of them, especially when I was younger, were more sports related. I skied five countries in six days in Europe one year and learned how to windsurf and that kind of thing. But then one year I taught myself HTML programming just because I thought I'd better learn what that's about. And it's interesting how those things then come back to play later on. Teaching myself that is what led to a couple of website projects in the lean world that then eventually led me to be part of Gemba Academy and my role there. This year, for example, my outside the box kind of thing is I'm trying to read a novel from an author from a different part of the world each month. This month got it right over here, it's Life and Death are Wearing Me out by Mo Yan, a Chinese novelist, won the 2012 Novel Prize, I guess. But it's not something I typically read. I'm more the business book or, you know, Tom Clancy kind of a thing. And so this is taking me out of my comfort zone. It's been, it's been interesting. I love that kind of stuff. I found that some of these books are really fascinating. So same thing on exploring the world. It's something my wife and I share is that we, you know, we both have grown up overseas and studied overseas and so we, we like traveling and just like we were in Cuba last week, that was our 66th country, I think, and we do it a little bit differently of just instead of doing the museum tour with groups, we get there and then we ask the cab drivers or whatever that drive us to where people, real people live and trying to learn more about the culture. So I think that's important to take yourself out of the box. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg does that as well. He taught himself Chinese to the extent that he can now give speeches in China in Chinese. Each year he has something that tries to take himself out of the box.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. So those are the eight parts of the book. I guess my kind of like maybe final question is why did you write the book and who's it written for?

Like I mentioned, I've been sort of toying with the idea for a few years because I saw this, you know, lean concepts and Zen concepts, these commonality of things, you know, simplicity and flow, respect for people, reflection, that type of thing. The commonality really fascinated me. So I had all that floating around and I think, you know, sort of to one of the sections, to the simplify. At some point I said, I got to get this out of my head. And so I was putting it on paper and like I mentioned last year, toward the end I was like, I'm either going to write this thing or I'm going to be done with it. I just got to stop getting it out of my head. When you get to my age, there's not enough space left to fill it up with anymore. You got to make some space. So that's what it was. I self published it because I wanted it to be done a certain way and didn't want to deal with publishers. I have a few friends that are authors, told me some horror stories about that. But I did try to do it the right way, you know, putting some professional copy editing into it and so forth.

Yeah, no, it's a beautiful book. So the simple leader dot com. The simple leader dot com. That's the best place for folks to go to, I guess. Right to.

Right. And there are some sample sections there, some of the reviews, there's some downloads that are on there as well and obviously there's links to Amazon and it's on Kindle as well.

So. Well, so I guess we talked a little bit about Gemba Academy at the beginning, but what's coming up on your end of the company for the future? I'd say the next, I don't know, six to 12 months.

Well, you know, right now we're in the middle of launching Gemba Academy Espanol. So that's an exciting thing. Up until now, for the first seven years we've just had English speaking videos with captions in various other languages, including Spanish. But we've always wanted to go the next step of videos and content that are in a native language. We found a fantastic person that is a presenter to run that part of the business. Next month, we'll be launching our first set of videos actually in Spanish, with the backgrounds translated and support materials translated and then Spanish support as well. And the entire website over time will also. You'll have a Spanish version of the website. There's going to be a Spanish podcast, Spanish blog. The Spanish blog actually should be launching fairly shortly as well. So that's what I think is really exciting and obviously we can take that concept further. Moving on, we're thinking about what are ways that we can help people connect. There's a community of lean and Six Sigma practitioners out there. I think we've mentioned this before. When we first started the company, we thought we'd be focusing on manufacturing, but it rapidly grew out of that. Right now we've got customers from all kinds of industries. Manufacturing is actually less than 50%, but healthcare, education, government, you name it. And it's really intriguing how people in different industries can learn from each other. So we want to put some functionality in place to enable that people on one side of the world and one industry can be discussing improvement with people in completely different industries on the other side of the world in a very intuitive and seamless manner. We've got some very interesting projects along those lines that are more being worked on right now.

Yeah, no, it's pretty exciting. It's pretty exciting. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. It's like what's come. It's just like a real company now, you know.

Well, that was the other thing of when I went away for a week was, you know, when you're. When you're one of the first two or three people in the company and you grew something, having to step away from it and seeing everything run just fine. It's really something. It's really powerful. And I think we've seen that too with some of the remarkable people we've hired. They're fixing problems that we don't even know about. Exactly. And coming up with these improvements that are really amazing. It's. It's really great to watch.

Yeah. One question I did forget to ask you as it relates to your book, and we'll wrap it up with this one. But when the mail came the day and you held that book in your hand for the first time, what did it feel like? Because I've never written a book. I'm just curious.

I was very happy at the same time. I was also very relieved. It's like, okay, this is done. I can put it out of my head. I can, you know, it's exciting. But what is that? The next project to fill that void? I can tell you, it's not going to be a book. Yeah, I think that might be it. I enjoy writing, but for those of you that haven't gone through it, the book writing process and especially copy editing is very humbling. And you may think you're a good writer, but boy, that was something else. So, yeah, I think it was almost more relief. But then also, you know, this is. I wanted to share what worked for me. It's sort of a give back thing. It's in a lot of ways what Gimba Academy is to me too. It's, you know, Lean has been a very important part of my career. It's been, it's enabled me to do a lot of things. And so, you know, the book and Gimba Academy to me are give back type of situations. You know, how can I help others?

Yeah, very good, very good. All right, Kevin, how can people connect with you? You.

Well, through Gimba Academy. The contact page on Gimba Academy is probably the easiest on LinkedIn as well. And then the simple leader.com has a contact page. Yeah.

And it's Kevin Meyer M E Y E R on LinkedIn and all the rest of it. So. Kevinimbaacademy.com easy email. All right, well, thanks, Kevin. I, I look forward to hearing how the book. I know it's doing very well and I'm sure it's going to continue to do well and touch a lot of people. So thanks for coming on and spending a few minutes.

All right, talk to you tomorrow.

Okay, thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now it's time to take a free, no strings attached, fully functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma over at Gemba Academy. Gain immediate access to more than 500 Lean and Six Sigma training videos free of charge at Gembaacademy.com.