GA 124 | How to Utilize People-Centric Leadership with Ron Harper

You're listening to episode 124 with Ron Harper. 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 Perera. Hey, 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 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 Ron Harper to the show. Now, Ron is the president of Cogent Power, which is out of Canada, and he's also on the Canadian board for the AME organization. And today, Ron and I are going to spend some time talking about people centric leadership, which, as you may know, is a key theme of AME and what AME is all about. Ron also shares what he believes some of the major challenges are when you try to transition from more of a traditional style management system to more of a people centric leadership and kind of some of the pitfalls and then what you can do to overcome them. Now, show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 124. Again that's gembapodcast.com and look for episode 124 and we'll have the link to save 10% for the upcoming AME conference on the show notes page there. So be sure to check that out if you're interested. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Ron, well, thanks for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

I'm calling in from Burlington, Ontario in Canada.

Nice. Home of the. Okay, I don't mess it up. What's the CFL team?

Well, there's a couple close to us. Toronto Argonauts. Yeah, the Argonauts, but we're actually closer to the Hamilton Tiger Cats.

Okay, okay. Well, my father lived in Winnipeg, so I used to travel there every summer to visit with them and been to many, many Blue Bomber games. So. So that was some good memories right there. I love cfl.

So I was in Winnipeg recently. My daughter is, is a first year resident at Winnipeg Children Hospital.

Nice. Oh, congratulations. That's great. All right, so. All right, well, Ron, we. Why don't you Just kind of kick things off by telling everybody a little bit about your background and then what you're up to these days.

Okay. From a formal education point of view, I'm a mechanical engineer, graduated many years ago. I've worked most of my, at least working life in manufacturing for a number of different manufacturers, all based here in southern Ontario and Canada. Most of them have been multinational organizations. So I've had the opportunity to travel around and work in many different places and countries. Most of the actual facilities I've worked with are in Canada. I'm currently president of Cogent Power. I'm also an active member of the ame, and at the moment, I'm on the Canadian board and on the executive board of the ame. I do a lot of speaking, talking on Lean, the people side of Lean culture, in addition to the tools and how to make Lean into a business process and to impact your business results through both people and the process improvement side of that. Got it. That's pretty much what I'm doing at the moment.

Nice. All right, so what are your thoughts on the upcoming international conference here for ame?

Well, we're looking forward to a really exciting conference in Dallas. The registrations so far are pretty strong, and we're expecting a lot more folks to register between now and the conference date in October. And we've got a pretty good lineup, as we always do, of practitioner presentations, workshops, keynote speakers, and I think it's going to be another great conference.

Yeah, we're super excited. It's in our backyard, so I don't have to get on an airplane for this one, so I can't wait. That's really nice. So you can have it in Dallas every year.

As far as I'm concerned, that might be your vote. I'm not sure everybody else would agree with that.

Yeah, well, you know the one I went to, the one up in Canada, so, you know, that was good. That was. What was that? Two or three years ago? I can't remember that one, but that was a good one. So. All right. Well, Ron, as you know, we like to start all of our shows with our guest sharing a quote or two that possibly inspires him. So do you have one?

I've got one that I think is really important. It's important for the subject of lean and specifically as it relates to leadership, because I think one of the key things of leaders responsibilities is to develop people and help them be the best they can be and realize their potential, which is a real asset when you're working with lean tools. To provide that opportunity for people to fulfill more growth and challenges. So the quote I've got is, it's from John Quincy Adams. If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you're a leader. And I think that really speaks to me in terms of my responsibilities as a leader and those of other people. We need to really be working hard to help people fulfill their potential and become the best they can be.

Well, and it kind of ties in perfectly to the first question that I want to talk to you about. So the theme of today's show is people centric leadership. So let's just start at the start, as they say. What do you mean when you say people centric leadership?

That's an important question because I think if you asked 20 people what that meant to them, you might get slightly different answers. So I think it's something that's important for people to reflect on. But for me, and for the definition that we're applying in the AME and the work that we're doing through workshops and summits and that kind of thing, People centric leadership is really all about the caring for our people, entrusting their lives and the fulfillment of their work to us as leaders, and really to be remembering that the people that we're leading and dealing with are all individuals with goals, aspirations, challenges, and that we, in the work that we need to do in our businesses, need to be caring and mindful of that and not just focusing entirely on the numbers. And specifically, as we're not treating the people in our teams and in our organizations or in our suppliers or in our customers, etcetera, we're not treating them as numbers, we're treating them as people. And that's a really important part of trying to match the vision of the company with individual vision and goals of people individually. And to make sure that we're giving people an opportunity to fulfill their potential with challenging work in the work organizations that we've got and to help them have the best life they can. So that's really kind of the direction that we're looking with that because. And lean really fits well in with that because it's applying continuous improvement or process improvement thinking to that really provides a lot of challenges to people. And as long as they get good direction and good leadership, good support and good care from their leaders, it can create a very fulfilling work environment and be a positive impact on people's lives.

Yeah. You know, the person that always comes to my mind immediately when we start talking about this is Bob Chapman at Barry Wehmiller. I mean he just exemplifies leadership at its best, in my opinion. So if people aren't familiar with Bob Chapman, just go to YouTube and Google his name and Barry Wehmiller and you'll see tons of videos that he's given different talks. But he really walks the talk, if you will.

Yeah, Bob. Actually I saw Bob a few days ago. We had the AME annual Leadership summit. It was in his facility in Wisconsin. So it really is, as you said, an excellent example of people centric leadership. Bob summarized all that work and his perspectives in his book and they've really, really done a great job of showing when you engage deeply with people, provide them challenging and fulfilling work focused on and in alignment with your business objectives, provide them the tools and resource to do it, how powerful that is for a business's success. And yeah, I'd agree with you. I've had the opportunity to know Bob for a few years and he certainly has done a great job of pioneering this subject and really lives everything he talks about.

Yeah, I'd love to get Bob on the show so maybe he can help make it happen, man. Bob, if you're listening man, we'd love to have you on the show. Even better, we would love to go in there Gamba Academy and tell the whole story. That would be fantastic. So great, great big fan of Barry. Barry. Barry Wehmiller. Hard to say that company's name though. Very hard, especially when you do it too fast. But let's go into the why. You know, we talk a lot about why Simon Sinek and so forth about understanding your why. So as it relates to people centric leadership, why is it so important in particular maybe to manufacturing businesses. But I don't think it's just manufacturing. I think it's really any sort of organization, whether it be nonprof IT, service based or manufacturing.

I 100% agree. It doesn't matter what business it is. It can be applied to any business, government, non government service, manufacturing, etc. And I think it's really important because it's such an important. People are such an important part of our organizations and our ability to fulfill what our missions as a company. And really without people, you don't have a company. So to me it's really simplistic in that if you don't have a people centric culture, you're really minimizing the impact that your organization can have and really undervaluing the people inside your organization. And I think the only way to really get good Solid sustainable results is through engaging with your people and leading them well and not focusing entirely on short term goals. I think it's particularly important in manufacturing. I've worked in manufacturing for approximately 30 years now and I think back to how manufacturing was 25, 30 years ago and maybe even not that long ago. Especially the operating team members of manufacturing have often been looked at more so by the numbers and using negative terms like headcount and those kinds of terms have really devalued what the people in our manufacturing businesses do, particularly the operating team. They're almost, and I've talked about this before in some of the workshops I've done. It's almost like we were treating people as human machines. They could be turned off and turned off and sent home. And we didn't really need to engage them too much. We just set them at the pace we want them to go and set the expectations and expected them to deliver. And if they didn't, we didn't have any use for them anymore. And I think we have a legacy of manufacturing in terms of how we've dealt with people, generally speaking, as an industry that we need to get out of. You know, periods of downturn when we have mass layoffs don't really help people and their families create a positive future for themselves. And I think that, I think that because we've done those kinds of things for the benefit of the business and its finances alone, it's hurt the stigma of manufacturing and its attractiveness as an employer today. I think you don't have to look too far at most surveys to see that manufacturing businesses are finding a hard time getting the kind of people and workforce it needs to be successful, whether it's skilled trades, engineers, non skilled, you know, highly qualified operating teams, etc. Very challenging. Because there's a negative stigma around manufacturing that it isn't necessarily the best area to work. And I think it, you know, I think some of that's been deserved. And because we haven't always managed or led our organization in a people centric way and the realities of businesses go up and businesses go down, whether you're in manufacturing or otherwise. I think the true test is how you actually do deal with those circumstances when they happen. Do you do them in a cold, calculated way where you're treating people as numbers, or do you look at the impact and look for the options that make may take into consideration the lives and the ambitions of your team and their families and the community that you're impacting. So I think people centric leadership is really important. But I think it's particularly important to manufacturing. There's lots of statistics, if you follow the Gallup reports on things like engagement were, you know, 70%. Yeah.

They say 70.

Yeah. 70% of people are disengaged.

Yeah.

And if you actually look specifically at the manufacturing stats, there's more people, what Gallup calls actively disengaged. And there are people that are engaged helping your business. So it, the people who are actually trying to make your business work poorly are larger in their statistical statistics on manufacturing than those people trying to make it better.

Yeah, that's a very scary stat.

Very scary statistic. And I think a lot of it has to do with the way we engage people and the way we lead them. So for those of us who believe that manufacturing is critically important to our North American economy, that's the only way we can be successful is to, to find ways to tap into the hearts and minds and capacity of our people.

Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit, Ron. So say, someone's listening, say yeah, I get it, I want to do it. Let's talk about some of the challenges of transitioning from maybe a so called traditional management style to more of a autonomous leader, people centric leadership style.

That's a great question and you could probably spend an entire day talking about that. We've been working quite diligently in my organization on this for the last five, six years and it is really challenging because there is a lot of traditional thinking that needs to be unlearned. I think a couple of the key things are, or big challenges with that are we've built an economic model that says we need to be focused on the short term financial results and almost at the expense of everything else. And I think that does provide, you know, gets people focusing on the bottom line as its primary mission of an organization. When I think if we look at a more sustainable model for organizations, we look at the purpose of our organization, what we're trying to do, and look a little bit more longer term in terms of the decisions we're making and what we're doing. And if you look at it from a people centric perspective as opposed to a short term perspective, I think it leads you to develop your people in a different way, invest in them in a better way as it relates to training and personal development, and helps you make a little bit more accommodating decisions when you have the ups and downs of business volume and business conditions. So there's a lot of pressure on short term financials that are a big shift in thinking.

Let me turn it around this way. Let's say that you decided to consult for a company who, let's say it's, I don't know, medium sized company and they're completely traditional management style. Morale is bad. The 70% number is very valid for this particular organization. Let's say you walk in. What are you going to do on, let's say, the first 45 days? Where would you focus?

You have to, in my view, you have to focus at the most senior parts of the organization when you need to consider a change like this. Because unless you make the change at that level, it's not going to filter its way through the organization and become a real changing impact. If you consider a shift like this, one of the big challenges to people trying to shift from a traditional management style to something that's more people centered as I've defined it, is that probably the people that need to change the most are the most senior leaders in the organization in terms of their perspective, in terms of their outlook, how they deal with problems, how they react to failures.

So let's, so I'm going to keep pushing you. And this is because it's a tough one. I know, I know we didn't prepare for this or talk about this ahead of time, but you know, let's say that the CEO is bought in, senior vice presidents, they're all bought in and they know they're far from perfect. Let's say you have their willingness to at least entertain a change. Like what would you say? Is it more problem solving or are you looking at the way they're planning or their goals, their strategy? What are you going to look at?

I think the first we talked about the work that Gallup's done on engagement and I think that's really at the heart of it is the way that the leaders in an organization engage with their people and the way they lead them. Well, if you look at, so you look at the story of Nummi, when Toyota first put their production facility, their first shared production facility with GM in California, they took the worst GM facility. And all Toyota said was we want to run it according to the Toyota production system, which in my view is an extremely people centric way, looking at respect for people as an important part of that. And within 12 months, the way the leaders engaged with the people, shared, pulled together in terms of problem solving, turned that organization, without changing any of the workforce to one of the better operating facilities within the GM group in North America. You know, that's a powerful story of how quickly this can happen. If you are able to tap into, earn the trust and engage at a, at a personal, deeper level with your people, that they feel that you're on the same side, you're trying to accomplish the same things, the same vision, and that you work together in that. And I think unless you're able to or willing to engage really deeply with the full range of people in your organization, from the newest operating team member to the most experienced engineer or leader in your company, to share problems, help solve problems, and to work collectively towards the challenging goals you've got in a highly engaged way, you're not going to be successful. And that's as leaders, we have to be prepared to roll our sleeves up, get our hands dirty and work right alongside everyone in our organization and listen particularly well to their needs and challenges and what problems we need to help them solve.

Yeah, you mentioned numi and I want to go back to that. If people aren't familiar with the NUMI story, there's a fantastic podcast that the, I think it's this American Life the guys at NPR did.

That's right, yeah.

And it's, it's several years old, but they just brought it back out. I think it was last year or something like that. They interviewed John Shook and some other folks. We'll, we'll, I'll try to, we'll get Jessica to link that up in the show notes for this episode so people can go and really encourage people to go check that out because it just kind of walks you through this horrible management style, people drinking on the assembly line and so forth to like you said, a totally people centered culture. So it's pretty powerful.

Yeah. And one of the statistics that Bob Chapman quotes quite regularly is that 88% of our workforce in North America basically hates their work. And the single biggest reason why they cite in those studies that they hate their work is their relationship with their immediate, immediate leader. And to me that really speaks so many volumes to how important those relationships are, how important the engagement with the leader and the team are. If you haven't got that, you're really back to the kind of the business case for this. If you haven't got that, you're really leaving a lot of value and a lot of potential on the table that can help your organization in terms of its performance or its finances. And like we talked about before with the engaged and disengaged, if you have more people working against what you're trying to do as a company than is trying to help make it better then you're going in the wrong direction. And I really believe that focusing on a people centered culture and the level of engagement you've got and the level of care and the level of challenge you give people and in a positive way really can make a huge difference between success or failure.

Yeah, you know, another, I guess I don't know if it's criticism that I've, that I've heard when it relates to this sort of discussion is when we focus on, you know, maybe the so called soft side of people that it could potentially hurt results. What do you say to that?

I think, yeah, I've heard people say that as a concern. If I'm too soft on my people or if I'm too people centric, then.

Well, they'll say this is a business, we've got it.

They're going to get away with murder and get away with murder, their productivity is going to drop, etc. And I think that to me that often comes from a naive understanding of what we mean by people centric leadership. And if you take it back to kind of the roots of the Toyota production system and what I think we have a lot to learn by the Toyota way, if you actually dig into the second element of what they talk about in respect for people, people really misunderstand what people centric leadership or respect for people means because they do see it too often, often as this soft, touchy feely thing that doesn't have a place in business or a place in manufacturing and they're afraid that it's going to, if I'm too nice to people, they're going to take advantage of me. But I think if you look at the definition of the way Toyota's defined respect for people and you look at the people centered side of this, it isn't just being nice to people, it isn't just being caring for people. It's a perspective to. If I care about you so much and I respect you so much, I'm going to help you be a highly effective team. I'm going to help you by giving you, give you challenges that make you be the best you can be. And it's not like a people centered culture is disconnected with the results or improvements you're trying to make. It's actually part of the reason why you're doing it is that you do have to look at the results you're getting equally with the way you're treating your people, the way you're caring about them. And if you really believe the statistics on people work like Gallup said, if you take an organization that's 30% engaged and 35% actively disengaged and change that to 70% engaged in what you're trying to do and value, there's a huge business case for that. Oh yeah, the results you're going to get are so much better than what you would. But so many people think people centered just is about being soft on people and letting them get away with things. But it's about challenge to me, it's about challenging them. And it's about challenging them in a safe way that they feel that it's okay to try things, to experiment, to learn without the fear of failing. If you can create an environment where you look at the results you've got and you look at the way you're engaging and the way you're connecting and the way you're leading your people, you need to look at both those things. And it's not a compromise. It's not a compromise looking at and saying, okay, I'm a people centered culture, so that means I'm going to have poor results. I believe the exact opposite.

No, I mean it's common sense, right? If 70% of your organization isn't engaged and you flip it to they are, I mean, how can that not benefit your organization? Right? It just, it's just people are just fooling themselves.

Back to the question on, on transition too, because when people, you know, if you've had an organization that's, you know, hard metrics, you know, drive the metrics and, and a more traditional management kind of top down sort of style, all of a sudden being people centric and asking people what they think and what do they value and how would you solve this problem? That's not an easy transition to make. And. That's one of the reasons why I think people hesitate to do this is because that change can be very hard, not just in an individual leader, but in a whole company that they're really fearful that they're not going to get the results they need and therefore they just keep doing what they're doing. But I think that for me and my experience and our business here, and certainly if you kind of follow Bob Chapman's story and Barry Wehmiller, the longer term effects and the sustainability created in the business is the completely the opposite. Bob's taken most of his acquisitions are struggling businesses that are about ready to close. And kind of a little bit like the Newmi story, he puts a different perspective in there, a different leadership style, a caring approach and turns those into Successful, positive businesses. And he does that not just because he's got a good people centric approach, but he's got a good business model and he's got a good expectation on what he wants his team to create. And he puts both those things together. And I think that's really consistent and similar to what Toyota is doing in terms of the kind of challenges and people development side of what they do.

Exactly.

People isn't just, I'll treat you really nice and never make it hard for you or make it comfortable for you all the time. It's about, it's about creating a challenging work environment and giving people the right tools so they leave at the end of the day feeling a sense of fulfillment. In our case here, when we, when we do some, we've taken on some pretty challenging assignments the last few years with different clients and different, different improvement projects. And the people, people working on those, once they achieve something that they didn't think was possible, they are super motivated and really deeply engaged and that just creates that much more success going forward.

Got it. Well, you've way overachieved here and you've already answered the first question of our reflection section on respect for people. I don't want to belabor that anymore. But the next question that we have in this reflection section is I'm really curious to ask folks that have a lot of experience, such as yourself, is the best advice that you've ever received. So what is it? Can you think of anything?

Well, my experience may, the advice I've drawn from my experience may be very different than other people. So I grew up on a dairy farm and so had a strong work ethic and an important perspective. And there's a couple of things that my, maybe not exactly advice, but a couple things that I drew from my parents that have really, really stuck with me. One of them is persistence. Keep going and don't. Even though you run into challenges and ups and downs, stick with it and do the best that you can. And it's interesting the last couple of years and I've really reflected a lot on kind of some of the things that I learned as I was growing up. And if you look at the way lean is applied and the way businesses look, you got to go through in farming. You plant the seed, you nurture it, you fertilize it, you till it. And if you get the right amount of sunshine and rain, you get something at the end of the season to harvest. And I think that's a lot, what I'm trying to do with our organization and our people here is to invest in them to develop and grow and help our business in the same way. So I think from those may not be exactly advice I was given, but certainly lessons that I learned early on. You can scream at corn all day long, but it doesn't grow any faster.

Yes. Love it. All right.

And it's the same with people.

Yes, yes. Do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

I think the one thing that I would maybe mention at this point in time, and I started this about a year ago, there has been in our industry, and I don't think we've talked about this yet, I'm. Our business makes electrical steel components for motors, generators and transformers. So our basic raw material is steel. And if anybody's followed kind of the steel industry and what's going on around the world, there's been just an enormous amount of upheaval with overcapacity in China, protection, etc. So. And we sell a lot of our materials into the North American electrical transformer market and there's all kinds of challenges in terms of over capacity, imports, et cetera. So we've gone through a huge challenge, number of business challenges over the last year that have really created a volatile and uncertain environment. So as a leader of that, it's really important that I keep my head and stay calm through this. And so what I did about a year ago is I one evening after I was kind of in the middle of a significant challenge, I created what I called a manifesto. And I stepped aside from what I was doing and saying and really reflected what I was trying to accomplish, what my vision was, how I was going to deal with the challenges. And really that meant I'm going to choose to deal with the challenges instead of being a victim of things that may or may not be in my control. But recognize I have the control. I have the choice on how I deal with and react to them. And I look at that thing, that two or three page document that I created almost every morning to help me remind myself when I'm in the. When I'm in the middle of the crap, so to speak, why I'm doing this, what direction is. And it really centers me in terms of, okay, this is, you've gone through challenges before, you're going to go through challenges, you're going to face challenges again. You just got to stick with it, you got to do the best you can and work forward. And the other routine I do in the morning is I. And I've talked about That a lot with my leaders here at Cogent, because you don't go through this. And there's lots of challenges that we face as leaders. Look yourself in the morning, look yourself in the mirror in the morning, and if you can say you did the best you can, you really can't do any better than that. And it's when you lose your way and you kind of lose yourself in the ups and downs when challenges come that. That I want to avoid. So I look at that every day, I remind myself kind of the path I'm on, and so I don't get lost in the challenge and. Or the difficult circumstances I may be in any particular day.

Yeah. Is there anything over this last year or so as you've been practicing and applying lean to your business, that support surprised you?

I'll tell you a story. It may not be a surprise per se, but it just constantly reminds me how much you can't stop, how easy it is to slide back. Our business has had a lot of growth in the last few years. We brought in a lot of new people, and we've got, you know, our business has been practicing in a pretty serious way, lean for over 10 years now. And there's. You can't take your eye off the ball. You need to stick with the disciplines. One of the things that we realized that as we went through this pretty rapid growth in one of our product areas, we were so focused on the growth and what we needed to do, we lost sight of some of the lean thinking and mindset that we needed to apply to what we're doing. And it's just. It's how quickly things can slide backwards in terms of the mindset of the organization. If you, if you don't. If I, as a leader, don't stay purposely focused on. Hold on, guys. We're not looking at this at the right way. We need to look at it this from a client perspective or we need to look at it, you know, are we laying this out in the most efficient way or what just came to the top of our mind? And that's, for me, one of the real serious lessons is how through organizational change and growth, I do workshops and talk about lean as a capacity and growth model, but you have to be remembered to apply it to yourself and stay true and disciplined to that and constantly be studying and reflecting on, okay, am I doing the right thing? Am I on the right track? That's also one of the reasons I did this manifesto. Is it because I think we got focused on growth and the impact of Growth as opposed to using. And the best successes we had through that is when we used our lean thinking and our lean tools to. To achieve things that we hadn't before. So I guess it constantly surprises me how quickly things slide back if you don't stay attentive to it.

Yeah. I always say that continuous improvement is a little bit like the stock market. It's either going up or it's going down. It really never goes perfectly sideways, right?

Absolutely. We coined a number of years ago the analogy of pushing a large rock or boulder up a hill. Yeah. You don't keep pushing. It slides over top of you. You can't just stop and hold it very easily. You got to be moving forward or it will roll backwards over you. So you're absolutely right. Sometimes we learn those lessons the hard way.

Yeah. All right, well, last question I got for you. So is there a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to. To improve. Improve in order to become a better lean thinker?

The one thing that I work on, study, read, etc. Is all about leadership. And for me, if you understand the tools and practices of lean, that's great. But as a leader and in my responsibility, we have over 300 people here. My responsibility is to make sure that everyone's pointed in the same direction, is led well, is cared for, is safe, and is challenged. And we're giving them fulfilling work. And I think I'll probably never stop trying to be a better leader. I learn from everybody around me every day. Some days I learn what I shouldn't do, and some days I learn I should do. But it's about constantly practicing and getting better at providing the right direction, the right focus, the right support for our people. I don't think that you can ever really be skilled enough as a leader in an organization or wherever you're in that kind of role. It's kind of like what we talked about with Lean. If you stop trying to develop and grow, you will slide backwards. Bob, you know, Bob, again, we keep talking about Bob, but Bob talks a lot about his passion and why he works so hard at making. He's not just keeping his story inside of Barry Wehmiller. He's doing this because he. He sees a leadership crisis. And good for him because he's trying to make an impact on other organizations and other leaders by drawing that to everyone's attention, that we're not engaged with our people, that they're heavily stressed because of the way we deal with them, and there is a better way, and that we can create A better society and a better work environment and a better community. And that's through constantly improving your leadership skills and the balance, so to speak, in terms of our business responsibilities and care for our people.

Fantastic. Well, Ron, I can't wait to shake your hand in Dallas. Well, it's going to be in a couple months. Going to be here before we know it. So why don't we wrap this show up with you telling people how they can connect with you on social media or your webinar website or whatever it might be.

Sure. I have a personal Twitter account. It's rjHarper4. I can give you my email address and you can put it on your link on the GEMBA Academy if you want. And I'd be happy to talk to anybody about this or get stuck. I do a fair number of workshops at the ame, so I'm partly my leadership responsibilities in the AME and the work that I do on LEAN and People Centric Leadership. I'm at each of the conferences so happy to speak to anybody there. Actually, I've got the opportunity this year to be a keynote speaker and be on the special interest group for People Centric Leadership. And so that's how people can connect and follow the thinking and what we're doing. And the me.org website's a good source as well. We are continuing to populate it with more people centric leadership information and videos. And that's something that and we've got some new workshops coming that people can tap into, whether it's with me or somebody else. So, you know, I'd be happy to talk about this. Lots of great excitement when we do talk about this. And it's, I think it's an important subject that hopefully we can, we can have an impact on the way businesses are led and people are cared for in all of our organizations.

Yeah. And we'll link to everything on the show notes for this episode. So that'll be@gembapodcast.com and just look for episode this will be 124. So gembapodcast.com, look for episode 124. We'll also link to our AME page where folks haven't signed up for the conference yet and they want to go. They can save 10% using a special coupon code that AME has been kind enough to give the Gemba Academy. So you can find that over@gembapodcast.com, look for episode 124. So Ron, thanks again. I know you're very busy and I apologize. Yesterday I had Internet problems. We were supposed to do this interview yesterday. So thanks for your flexibility and can't wait, can't wait to have you here in Texas. Don't, don't worry about your winter jacket or anything like that. You're not gonna, you're not gonna need it.

I'll remember to take it off. We don't, where I live in Canada, we don't have. Need winter jackets in October anyway.

Okay, that's good.

It won't be a big challenge.

All right.

All right, Jacket. So thanks. I appreciate the opportunity to come on, come, come with your podcast to get my academy and appreciate the. The opportunity to share some of my perspectives on our story.

All right, well, take care, Ron.

Okay, thank you.

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