GA 120 | How to Invest in People with Jamie Parker
26 Nov 2025 · 5 min
Podcast episode (GA 120) featuring Jamie Parker from FedEx Office describing their Lean/continuous-improvement journey. Parker explains an early wrong turn (top-down, checklist 5S rollout), then how the organization shifted to people-centered practices: investing in every team member via weekly instructor-led lessons, experiential learning, application projects, daily shift huddles with a problem‑solving queue (ABLE), and leadership development. Key themes: respect for people, creating more customer value (easier→better→faster→cheaper), building problem-solving capability, and learning from bumps in the road.
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You're listening to episode 120 with Jamie Parker.
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 Perera with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy Podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your day in your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembacademy.com, we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today, I'm excited to welcome Jamie Parker back to the show. Now, Jamie works for FedEx office, and she is definitely one of my favorite Lean thinkers in all of the world. She's extremely passionate about what she does and she's always willing to give back. And that's exactly what she's going to do on this particular episode because she gave a webinar for Gemba Academy a few weeks ago and we've released the webinar. But what we're going to do here is share the audio portion of the webinar. Now, what Jamie kind of talks about here is their journey at FedEx office and how they've gone about kind of implementing continuous improvement through their QDM program and also the various Lean initiatives that they've been doing and working. And Jamie, the thing that I really love about her is that she's willing to share where they've done well, but also where they maybe haven't done so well and where they've taken a few steps in the wrong direction and how they've corrected the course and came back on track. And so that's really what Jamie kind of just shares in this whole webinar. And if you want to see the slides for this webinar, those are available on the Show Notes page. So to access those, all you need to do is go to GembaPodcast.com and then look for episode 1212 0. So again, GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 120. Also, Jamie is going to be offering a workshop at the upcoming AME Conference that we've mentioned in previous podcasts. So if you are planning to go to the AME Conference or just want to look into it, be sure to go to gembaacademy.comame where you can learn how to save 10%. You can RCVP for our free cocktail reception that we're going to do the Tuesday night of the conference. So again, that's gembaacademy.com for. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.
Thank you, Ron. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you and with your audience today. And I want to tell the group here that I absolutely love the idea of a road trip. The wind in my hair, the music blasting, long conversations with the travel companion. It's really like the symbol of freedom. But there's one small problem. I am a planner. I like to have every single detail of the trip mapped out. So when those inevitable obstacles rise, maybe it's an unexpected road construction, detours, traffic, or just going off course to see different sites. I get really frustrated and it's really not a fun time for me or anyone else on that trip. So much so that back in my 20s, my friends just stopped inviting me on these adventures. But I find that our lean journeys can often be like road trips. They can be really great, exhilarating experiences. But we also sometimes experience bumps in the road or take wrong turns. So I want to talk a little bit about a wrong turn on a lean road trip. And specifically about 5s. On the 5s productivity course that was recently updated on Gemba Academy, Ron tells a story about an early organization he worked with early on in his career that implemented 5s. And it was done very top down. It was push only two personal items on your desk and there were 5s. Audit police going around to make sure you complied. It didn't go very well. This is also a video that Mark Graben created that shows Office 5s gone wrong.
You can put tape around your computer, your monitor, your phone, your stapler, your coffee cup, your purse, your mouse, the tape, the staple remover, that book, and those paper clips. Why would I have to put tape around my monitor so it does not get lost? We will always know where the monitor is. You will not waste time looking for it. Our office will be more efficient. Has anyone in our office ever have a monitor go missing? I don't know. You must do this. It is on my goals and objectives to implement 5s. So I will open my desk drawer and put tape around each of my pens and pencils.
Ah.
The consultant says there will be a strict limit of two pens per desk. Any more than two pens is waste. We must not waste money. We must be lean.
So I think 5S is an area where many organizations take wrong turns often because it's usually one of the first things organizations tackle. So this is how we started our lean journey. And I think you could beg a question, say, has anyone in our plant ever lost a phone or had a phone go missing? There's a lot of labeling going on. And this was the first time we ever used the terminology lean or continuous improvement with our team members, with our employees. So it wasn't just that we went a little overboard with the labels, but the reality of the situation is that we didn't actually do 5s steps at all. This was a cleaning and labeling initiative. It was top down. We shipped out labels to all of the plants. We gave them a PowerPoint deck that had lots of pictures that showed them how they needed to organize what was and wasn't allowed to be on the different work tables. And then we traveled around the country inspecting to make sure that they were in compliance. We said to our teams, isn't this lean stuff awesome? Don't you love it? As you can imagine, the answer was not yes. That was not the response that we got. And it really started us off on the wrong foot. And I would say very early on, the very first step, we took a big wrong turn on this journey. Despite that, we've had some good results. And so what we're going to talk about is how did we handle those wrong turns? How did we adjust? How did we course correct? What did we learn from those wrong turns and the bumps and in the road so that we could deliver positive results? So that's what we'll talk about today. To give you a little bit of context, I work with FedEx office. You're all familiar with FedEx and some of its operating companies like FedEx Express and Ground, but there are many different operating companies in the FedEx enterprise. FedEx Office is one operating company and we provide printing and shipping and business services solutions to commercial customers around the country. So at FedEx office, we have more than 1,800 stores across North America. And then we have our manufacturing network. So these 19 manufacturing plants, 14 of which have signs and graphics plants within them, this is what makes up the manufacturing network. And we support commercial printing from the 1800 stores as well as from our largest commercial customers. So as we produce large and narrow format digital print, the products that we produce are similar and the machines and the equipment are the same across our plants. But of course, every job is custom. I can't print extra Gemba Academy material and then sell it to another customer. So it's absolutely print on demand. And we do have Variation across the network when it comes to demand and staffing levels and space constraints and things like that. So same products and services from a core perspective and then some unique pieces, plant to plant. Our history as a manufacturing network in particular has been fragmented and independent. If we go back eight years ago, all of these locations really operated independently. They weren't a cohesive network. So each local plant manager could make his or her own decisions about products to some extent, equipment, what they would and wouldn't print. All of those decisions were local. And then as we started to come together as a network and really work to have a cohesive strategy and a cohesive plan, we found that we were making some changes, but that we still have this autonomous culture that we kind of go up against. We also have a history of results. Only leadership and specifically stack rankings and scorecards are really the drivers of how you create value or how you created value. So it was hit the number, hit the number, hit the number. We didn't spend a lot of time understanding how you hit the number. We had a traditional batch and queue operations. We have one manager that likes to call it print and stack. So we would print, print, print, stack, stack, stack, and then at some point get around to finishing, whether it's binding or drilling or folding or booklet making or putting grommets, whatever it is that needs to happen to that product. And then we didn't have any lean expertise. So when our journey started without having lean expertise, it really was kind of a middle management. Our director had heard about it, was interested in it. We had a district manager and some plant managers who were reading about it and watching videos said, hey, we think this could provide value for us, let's go for it. But it was a part time. It wasn't something that was really who we are. It was something that we were kind of dabbling in. And because of that we took quite a few wrong turns. And I'm sure we still do today. But I think some of the biggest ones were having a tools only approach. We didn't always understand or appropriately apply tools. We were very top down, push, had poor communication. This really caused a lot of frustration, a lot of frustration for our team members and employees in the field, a lot of frustration for us trying to lead through this change. It became very clear that if we continued on the path we were on, it was going to be an uphill battle. And so we had to change our approach. And really in a position where we had this leadership commitment, my peers and my director, we all were committed to Continuous improvement in this methodology. But we knew we had to redefine some things we worked in alignment with Quality driven management and people service profitability. Both of Those are core FedEx philosophies that are really critical and crucial to the FedEx organization, our culture and how we work, do business and serve our customers and communities. But as we looked at quality driven management and people service profit, we realized that what we were looking at from a lean and continuous improvement standpoint was very much aligned with that. And so here are some of the kind of principles or values that were different from what we were doing before or how we were leading before. I just want to call out a couple of those. First being creating more value for customers, we really needed to change our language away from lean, doing more with less a lot of the language that can often be associated with Lean and change that to no, it's really about more. It's more value for customers more often. That was a shift for us in understanding that we're here about value. It's not cost slashing. As we learned more about respect for people, that was something that we all really connected with and wanted to make sure it was incorporated as a fundamental belief and basis for our behavior. And then developing a team of problem solvers and focusing on process plus results for sustainability. So kind of changing from an all top down to a team member engaged approach. And really not just going on scorecards. In fact, we eliminated stack rankings as a normal method. We have all of the data. We can use that as comparison to go in and ask the right questions and engage people in understanding what's different. But it's not used as a comparison or a carrot or a stick. So that was a big shift for us. At the end of the day though, we understood that being versus doing really requires daily management integration. So it's great to say, okay, yeah, we've got leaders, we're committed, we want to make this change. We want to approach our business differently. But how are we going to do that? We decided that the approach we were going to take was investing in every single team member in our network. So it wasn't something we were going to invest in our leaders. We were not going to create a lean lead or person in each plant or a quality owner in each plant and invest in those. This was something that we said, if this is going to be who we are and how we work and how we operate day in and day out, then it is something that every single team member is going to be a part of and not just A select few. So we created a series of lessons that goes through different content concepts that really every one of our team members go through. Having these lessons helped us do a couple of things, but one of the things was it put all 19 of our plants on the same material with the same messaging, with the same activities, so that we were really moving as one. And it helped to overcome some of the challenges of having that fragmented past that we had before. We also decided that each of these lessons was going to be instructor led by the local plant leadership. We had actually experimented with sending someone out from our corporate office out to try and train or district managers out. And besides the fact that it's costly and the logistics are very difficult, we also found that team members are not as receptive when some guy comes from corporate to tell them how to or to talk to them about process. And that it's really much more effective when the people, the leaders that they work with day in and day out are there with them going through the material together. We also decided to go with an ongoing approach. So instead of having an 8 hour full day of training or a full week immersion, a lean 101 full week long immersion, we actually do classroom segments on a weekly basis. And these classroom segments are limited, where they're only 40 to 60 minutes each. And I would say that probably 50 to 60% of the weeks in the year have a classroom segment. Any weeks that we don't have a classroom segment, those are application weeks where team members are applying what they've recently learned. This really allows for ongoing and incremental learning. So becoming a learning organization where we learn constantly and then incremental learning where, hey, it's just a really small snippet and then you get some chance to apply and practice, and then you get another small snippet. Apply and practice, another small snippet, kind of an ongoing basis. And you'll see that each of our lessons include conceptual content, experiential learning and targeted application practice. So I want to show you what that looks like for us. So we have our content, this is our conceptual content. So think about when you go to school and you sit in class and we chose to use Gemba Academy for that one is from a speed to market standpoint, the material is there and ready to go. And then from an expertise standpoint, we were really learning, learning as we go. We are kind of self taught. And so we are not in a position to be the experts without also having some sort of content. We also all have day jobs because we are not using a centralized lean office. Everybody that is involved in this process are operators or operations managers with full time jobs and P and L responsibilities. So we use Gemba Academy and the content that they provide. We use both School of Lean material as well as Gemba Live material. So in each lesson we're going to have some School of Lean videos that we specifically pick. And then we're also going to go find Gemba Live videos that supplement the messaging and include those as well. We also include experiential learning. So here they're drawing pigs. They are folding T shirts to a new T shirt folding standard to learn about standardization and standard work, the benefits and how it works. I think I have found that experiential learning is very important, particularly with adult learners and particularly with team members or employees who work with their hands. So operators and nurses and people who are doing all day every day, they tend to be more tactile learners. And this is really a safe place for them to learn. And then we have our targeted application activities and practice. In this case, after learning about standardization, having the experiential activities, our team members actually produced and created a standard process for something in the plant. In many cases, we asked them to start with something that was not production related. So things like cleaning the bathroom or changing the toilet paper roll or cleaning the break room or whatever, it was something that was not necessarily production related, really to create a safe space so that they could practice without judgment about their production methodology. So you could consider this, we call these good practices. You could kind of think about them as standard work light, kind of what I refer to them as. And then finally, because we have each of these lessons is being facilitated by the local leadership, we actually have facilitator guides that accompany every lesson. And we go through those with our leadership teams before they facilitate the lessons. And this really gives them all of the tools that they need. It gives them the questions that they can walk through. So after they show a video in a class, it gives some sample questions that they can ask to really get the conversation going. And then this is what kind of the lesson plan looks like. From what we've developed so far, I expect we'll move into a 200 series that's a little bit more advanced. Once we get through this, you can kind of see starting with foundation to finding waste through to continuous flow. I want to show you lesson 102, find waste. As I said, we have content and here we have the waste of motion and waste of transportation content from Gimba Academy. We also Those two FXO titles, those are videos that we created ourselves where we asked team members in the field to take short videos. They could use cell phone cameras if they wanted to, but short videos showing that waste in action in their plants. Because we have 20 licenses, we have an enterprise site that we can load those to. I know that they're very nice and entertaining, all of my requests there. So we have, hey, here's some content. Here's an example of what this looks like in our plant. And then we did some experiential learning. In this case, we have these are managers and we're showing them either pictures or video of waste and they're identifying the waste. And then in this lesson about finding waste, we also had application activities. Chris is doing a stand in the circle activity and we had forms available for him to do that. We have Corey and Brandon from Minneapolis are going through an activity where they ask team members to go and find waste the plant and then put it on a sticky note, apply it to which waste they saw, and then they could discuss it in their huddles and team meetings. So really kind of an application of. Okay, so we've learned what they are. Conceptually. We have done some activities. Once you've done activities related to experiential learning, related to things outside of work, you can definitely bring examples inside of work. When I showed that first picture of everyone having the E, I don't know if you noticed, but there was a lot of laughing going on. They were actually watching videos taken in their plants. So it was videos of inventory and motion waste and all kinds of process waste happening. And it was kind of a little bit of self actualization realization happening with a lot of humor. We did find that as we taught people waste and they were learning the eight wastes, they still needed help and permission to act on that knowledge. So they were becoming more knowledgeable but needed a little help. And so we really focused one of our lessons on continuous improvement. And you can see as normal we went through our lesson content. Here we've got GEMA Academy, School of Lean as well as the Alexei Vetkov interview is from one of FastCat's GEMA Live series that we incorporate. We had experiential learning. They are building spaghetti towers to learn about how to improve their spaghetti tower building processes. And then we had application. Our application in continuous improvement was implementation of this improvement wall of fame and specifically the use of daily improvements that team members were encouraged to make themselves. You can see these are very small improvements, but it's based off the idea Paul Akers likes to call this two second improvements. Mike Wrobleski in a session called this either his MYCI program or simple Kaizen. Here's an example of a wall of fame in the Chicago plant at the time. They've gone to two additional walls since then. But one of the things that was really important when we went through this process and really started using this wall of fame that gave recognition and communication and sharing and collaboration with our teams is we had to really focus on, hey, we want small improvements that make your jobs easier and better. That's what we are asking for. So if you remember how we started off in our journey with that 5s push top down, go do this. We had a lot of fear still in the organization about team members fearing the connotations of the word lean or it is all about cost cutting or are they going to lean themselves out of a job. You've probably heard those types of things before. This was a big shift and we said, look, this is not about cutting costs. We want you to make your jobs better. Shigeo Shingo is quoted as saying, there are four purposes to improvement. Easier, better, faster and cheaper. These four appear in the order of priority. This really became our basis and our teaching point and jumping off point is that easier, better, faster, cheaper, in that order. So you find you make improvements that make your jobs easier and better. That's what we're looking for. And then we did. Because we are geographically dispersed, we do have a virtual wall of fame where these good practice forms and daily improvement forms can be uploaded and shared across locations. So we're feeling pretty good. We've made a lot of course corrections. We changed this focus on finding waste. We had to make some changes on how we talked about it and what our priorities were for improvements. It's not about cost, it's really about easier and better. But we found that our tactical applications were too rigid and they were still top down. What was happening at this time is we were preparing to kind of launch a formal shift huddle or daily meeting, program initiative, implementation, whatever you want to call it, where some of the plants had been doing them. But it certainly wasn't an expectation that everyone do them every shift. And we said, you know what, we need to correct this. We know that communication is critical. We've got to start doing these and we want to make sure we do these right. So there were some managers that got together and they put together this program and the shift huddle program that we were preparing to launch. It dictated every single Part of this huddle or this team meeting it had, what time of day it was going to be on each shift, who led it, who attended the agenda minute by minute, the specific visual control board and exactly which reports went on it. Every single detail was dictated. At the same time we went to an AME conference, my colleague and I were talking and said, you know what, we probably need to take a step back because if we really think about it, we're not respecting our people if we are going to dictate every single detail about how they do their team meetings or their huddles. So we need to rethink that. And so we gave them high level parameters. We said, hey, you have to have huddles, team members have to attend them, you have to talk about our five pillars, which are safety, quality, delivery, cost, morale, and you have to have a visual control board of some sort. And I'm using the visual control boards just because they're visual and you can see the difference. If we were to look at their agendas or the times or who was leading that, you would see variation across all the plants there. We said, okay, let's leave it up to you. Here are some high parameters. You go run with it. I would say some of the plants really did a great job. Some of them did better than if we just gave them a checklist to follow. And some were really struggling to figure out how to make these effective. What we found is that giving them every detail really wasn't respecting them because it was just teaching them how to follow a checklist. So we're not developing problem solvers. If you remember, one of our core values at the beginning is to develop a team of problem solvers. We're not doing that because we're just teaching them how to follow a checklist. At the same time, when we just gave some high level parameters and then said, figure it out on your own, that wasn't really developing problem solvers either, because it was just too much to do on their own. We really needed to make sure that we developed their capabilities to facilitate or participate in effective shift huddles. We needed to provide a vision or a true north that allowed them to align and execute as a single network. And then we had to figure out how to handle all of the problems that were being raised in the huddles because what was happening is managers were taking all those on, then they had bandwidth issues, didn't get timely resolution, and you guys know that's not a recipe for success. So we really provided training. We said, okay, let's develop this lesson that really teaches not just the managers, but every single team member in our organization the purpose and the benefits and the logistics of effective shift huddles. And we provided a little bit more structure, but also still gave some autonomy. And then one of the things we did is we incorporated problem solving for daily work. So at FedEx, we use a problem solving methodology called ABLE. It's very similar to PDCA or PDSA. As an example, you have a team here who is participating in a huddle. They have their visual control board that has some structure to it, that's aligned with a network vision. They have some opportunities for local needs and to really focus on what those local needs are. And then they have this problem solving board in the back. So where it says able, assess, build, launch, evaluate, you could think of that as plan, do, check, act or plan, do, study, adjust. If you use those methodologies instead here, when we had problems being raised in huddles, they could go onto a queue on that board and then the team would prioritize them and said, hey, as a team, this team had the bandwidth to handle three problems at a time. They could attack three big problems at a time. Beyond that, it was outside their bandwidth and things wouldn't get done. So then they could then prioritize kind of a problem solving kanban system, if you will. It allowed some visual controls of the problem going through the system. The team members owning that problem and the countermeasures could report back or solicit feedback in the huddles. But the real work was being done outside. So this was really an adjustment. You can see we kind of adjusted our shift huddles and approach a few different times. And I'm sure that we're not done making adjustments. I'm sure that some of these are still going to be bumps in the road. So when we think back, if I look back onto what this process of Investing in all 550 team members has been. So what is it that we've done? This is what I came up with of. Here's what was important, right? This was our path first is that we invested in all team members, not just a small subset. We include experiential learning activities so that we can connect with many different types of adult learners. We create opportunities to apply and practice. The classroom stuff doesn't matter if it stays in the classroom. So it's very important that there are specific activities that they can go and apply and practice so that they can truly learn and get better. Creating a safe environment for failure is Important it's giving permission to have ideas that fail, giving permission for 50% of your improvements to fail. Those types of things are important when we do our shift huddles and having different team members lead and facilitate those huddles and giving them permission to not be the best facilitator because that's a learned skill, but that applying in practice and it's a safe environment, you get feedback, but it's never going to show up on your PA that you were a bad facilitator of your huddle your first time. That's not going to show up there, giving away autonomy and decision making. We've done more and more of this as we've progressed through our journey and developing leader capabilities aligned with lean principles. So I didn't put this in here initially because I wasn't sure if we were going to have time to go through this material. But I wanted to make sure that we had an opportunity, that you had an opportunity to see it if you want. So it is in the appendix if you would like to see that. There is a specific series of lean leadership development that we use that's really more of the soft side of lean leadership. So people like Simon Sinek and Bob Chapman, some really inspirational speakers and leaders that we worked with or that we use material from in that and then finally expecting and being on the lookout for bumps in the road. And that's an important piece because you want to look for them so that you can act or adjust more quickly. So I want to take us back to the beginning. So this is where I started the presentation. I started it as a wrong turn that we took with 5s. And as you can imagine, this approach wasn't going to work with or be aligned with our new values and the way that we empower and engage and respect our people. So we definitely needed to revisit this. So this is what 5s looks like for us today. The initial piece was a lesson. Because that framework has demonstrated success for us, we want to repeat that where we've had success. Our team members learned every single step within 5s and they did some activities, whether it was the number game or a pen building game. So they had those experiential activities. But their application is throughout that lesson. They worked in groups and each group took a specific area in the plant that they felt was problematic and they thought 5s would help solve those problems. Here we're having a problem on this shelf. We're having a problem on this work area. We think 5s will help solve those problems or help improve the work in those areas. And then they went through each step one at a time. So they would learn about a step, apply a step, learn about a step, apply a step. Here on the left there's a group of team members and they're looking at the red tag area and they're actually deciding how they're going to disposition each item. So this wasn't a management decision. It was absolutely a team member decision on how are we going to disposition these. And I think this is important because it's not just teaching 5s, it's really teaching collaboration skills and conflict management skills and teamwork and how do we interact with each other and how do we make decisions when we have disagreement. And those are really important skills that apply across many areas in work and personal lives. On the right, you have Chris in our Denver plant and he is doing part of the present out of his groups 5s activity. So not only did they do each step and practice each step one by one, but at the end of it, they stood up and shared with their peers what decisions they made in each step, how they applied each step, what the outcomes were, and how it's going to make their work easier and better. And this was really great to see so many team members kind of having pride in how they helped their peers and how they helped their colleagues. I think for many of us, we love the people that we work with. We work with them every day. They're almost like family. And when I as a team member get to come in and help make our work better by doing something like this, I have pride. I feel good for helping people out and I get to go home feeling good about it. And so really there's an opportunity to develop people beyond. Do you know the steps of 5s? I want to tell you another story. And this is a story of a team member named Jen. Jen. As we were going through this journey, she was making several improvements at work. She worked on some visual controls related to recycling that helped save us money. She worked on process mapping one of the sections of work and finding some steps that she could eliminate altogether that saved a couple of minutes per transaction over the course of a week or month, hours of team members time. And so she was doing these things at work. And in doing these things at work, she's really learning a bias for action and learning, hey, you know what? I can make a difference and I can do something to make things better. So at home, Jen was caring for her father who was ill. And what she found is that the room where they cared for him. Between the caregivers and Jen and her family members, people were putting things in all different places. And so it would make it difficult sometimes to find what they needed or to see if they needed more of something. And it was just really an extra burden on something that's already difficult to do. Caring for an aging and ill father, she took these steps of 5s that she had learned at work. She took the bias for action that she had developed by being engaged at work. She went in and applied those steps to the room that they cared for her father and made a really big difference and lifted some of that burden that everyone was carrying. And so I think that really when we think about our lean journeys, our lean road trips, that's really what it's about is it's about value and it's about impact and it's about purpose. The same way that if I go back and think about the road trips I was taking in my 20s, right back then I thought that the value was crossing things off the list. I saw this, I saw that. I've been here, I've been there, being able to say I've done all this and I've seen all this. What I had to learn is I had to learn that the value in that road trip was not from crossing things off the list at all. The value really was in the journey itself. It was in having crazy long personal conversations with travel companions that I probably never would have opened up and talked that openly and been that transparent and vulnerable with in any other environment. But when you spend that many hours on the road with somebody, you get there, right? That's where the value came from. The value came from going to anywhere USA and finding this 90 year old couple who's grown up there and knows all the stories of old and sits and tells you them over coffee. Even if that means that your schedule is thrown off. It's on finding the random, I guess, purple dinosaur, whatever it is, the random thing in whatever town that you had no idea existed. Those experiences that happen in the journey, that's where the value of a road trip comes from. It's not off the to do list. And I think when we think about our lean journeys, it's very similar is that the value doesn't come from checking off. We've done 5s, we've done continuous flow, we've done Kanban polls, we've done hey Junka cards, we've done whatever. That's not it. The value is in the experience. The value is learning to be better problem solvers. It's in developing our people to be better problem solvers. It's in developing collaboration and capabilities beyond what we had before for and really giving purpose to our teams. And I think that as we go through this lean road trip, we're still going to make mistakes. We're still going to have bumps in the road, we're still going to take wrong turns. But what we learn from those and how we check in with our teams and adjust from those is really going to help us succeed and overcome any mistakes that we make. So I hope that as you take your lean road trip and your lean journey, that you check in with your people and make adjustments to overcome some of the missteps and wrong turns that you've taken so that you can find value in this journey as well.
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