GA 154 | The Real Meaning of Lean with Art Byrne

You're listening to episode 154 with Art Byrne. 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 week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembaacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today, I'm very excited to welcome Art Byrne to the show. Now, if you've read the book Lean Thinking, which is one of the kind of the, I don't know, probably the first or second Lean book that I think I ever read, you will hear the story of a company called Wiremold. I think it's actually maybe chapter seven, if I remember right, where they introduce Art Byrne and the story of wire mold. And it's a. It's a really fascinating story of how Lean really transforms this organization. And it's one of the original Lean case studies, if you will. Well, Art has, as you'll hear, has actually got quite a bit more to his Lean story than just Wire mold. He. He did a lot at. At GE and then Danaher and then Wiremold, and now he's. He's kind of working with different companies and helping them trans all the while. He's written a few books. In particular, he's written the Lean Turnaround, and then that was in 2012. And then in 2016, just last, I believe, was last October, he released the Lean Turnaround Action guide. And so we definitely touch on what those books are, and really they're his story of how he's personally turned many, many companies around. I think more than 30 companies. He's really applied this. This formula, if you will, and always successful. And so he decided to really just share exactly what he does with these companies and these two books. But since I had him on, I definitely wanted to hear more about kind of the early days at Wiremold and what went well, what didn't go well, and really just kind of dig into to a man, that's pretty fascinating to me. And it was really a great honor to have him on the show. So show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com. just look for episode 154. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 154. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Art, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

Well, I'm in California right now, Ron. It's nice and sunny and warm out here.

Beautiful, beautiful. We were just out in San Diego a few weeks ago, and, yeah, it's a lovely part of the country, I'll tell you that.

We live in Boston, but we spend the winters in California.

Okay, good stuff. Good stuff. Well, as I mentioned before we started the recording, it's a great honor to talk to you. I've read about you like everyone has, I'm sure, in the Lean world back in. I think it was chapter seven of Lean Thinking. Right. That's the first time that I met Art Byrne of West Hartford, Connecticut. Right. And heard your Wired mold story. And it's been fascinating to kind of follow your journey and what you're doing these days and your books and so forth. So, first of all, yeah. Thank you for coming on. Sometimes I have to pinch myself that the work that we get to do and all these folks that we get to talk to, it's really humbling and pretty exciting.

Oh, you're welcome. Glad to be here.

Yeah. So, all right. Well, we like to kind of begin all of our shows with our guests sharing a quote of something that possibly inspires them. So do you have one?

Yeah, in fact, I do. One of my early sensei, Chihiro Nakao from Shinjujitsu, used to always say to me, burn san, if you don't try something, no knowledge can visit you. I always thought that that was an excellent observation and something that really fit with Lean very well, because Lean is always something. You're always jumping into the unknown and you're always trying something to try and get better, remove the waste, et cetera. And he's always. His quote is correct. If you don't try something, no knowledge can visit you. You won't learn anything.

Wow. No knowledge can visit you. There's a lot of. There's some richness to that. No knowledge can visit you. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So, all right, well, let's jump right in, Art. And why don't you just kind of, just in case some folks haven't read the books and so forth, tell us a little bit about your background and maybe how you first came to learn about continuous improvement in general.

Sure. Well, I've been working on this since the. The January of 1982. That was my first general manager job at the General Electric Company. I was in the lighting business group and I was running. I had just been promoted to run the high intensity and quartz lamp department. So I've always done Lean or Toyota production system or whatever you want to call it from the point of view of being a CEO, a president, general manager, whatever the title was, but always from the role of running a business. Back in GE in 1982, we just started a simple Kanban system between myself and one of my component suppliers who was also one of the divisions of the GE Lighting Business Group. I was making all the high intensity lamps that you would see outdoors or in high bay factories, that kind of thing. And my supplier was one of our divisions that made quartz arc tubes and those kind of things. So we were buying arc tubes for my high pressure sodium lamps from them and we just started a small Kanban system. We bought a truck and we created the Kanban quantities. And every morning the truck would come to my factory about 45 minutes to an hour ride away and we would give them the Kanban cards from the arc tubes that we used the day before and just said, you know, this is what you should bring back tomorrow. And that was basically all we did. Now what happened though was pretty unbelievable. My inventory went from 40 days down to three days and their inventory disappeared altogether. But, you know, that was interesting. But really in GE at that time, this was 1982, the whole thrust was make the month or die. So no one really cared much about inventory reduction. But what we observed was, gee, we did this camping system. But the side effects were pretty impressive. I had better customer service, I had better quality. I freed up a lot of space in the factory which made it safer and cleaner. My employees were much happier and on and on and on, and our costs went down, et cetera. So I said, gee, this is really interesting. From now on, any business that I'm going to run, I want to try and use this Toyota production system approach. Because of course, back in 1982 it wasn't called lean at all. Back in those days it was just called Just in Time. It hadn't even been called the Toyota production system in the west yet. So I wanted to do that. And when I left ge, eventually I joined Danaher Corporation. And at Danaher I went in as a group executive. So I had 8 of the Danaher 13 companies at the time reporting to me. And we had one other group executive and he had the other five companies and I had a guy working for me, and one of my companies was called Jacob's Engine Brake, or Jake Brake, and a guy working for me named George Koenigsegur. He and I were the only ones that had any exposure to the Toyota production system at that point in time. And Jake Brake was really struggling. Jake Brake made engine retarders for diesel trucks, but it was really a business that was struggling badly. And so Koenigsegur and I decided, you know, we should really try and implement just in time here to see if we can't fix this business. And so we started out using, at the time, it was Arthur Anderson Consulting. They had a little branch that was doing some just in time consulting. And so we started with them. We created our first cell or two, and we struggled with that, but we were making a little bit of progress. And then we came across a seminar that was being held in Hartford, Connecticut, which was only one town away from us. We were in Bloomfield, Connecticut, and it was being sponsored by a guy named Masachi Amai, who wrote a book called Kaizen. Yeah, of course, Amai is not a. He's not a consultant or he wasn't a Toyota guy. He was more like a headhunter, I think, and a writer. So he needed someone to help him run this seminar. So he brought in this small consulting company that had recently been formed called Shinju Jitsu. And Shinju Jitsu consisted of three individuals, all of whom had spent their whole careers at Toyota. And all three of them had spent the previous 10 years working directly for Taiichi Ono, implementing lean in the Toyota Group companies and in the first tier suppliers. And so they were really there at the, you know, the foundation and the development of this whole thing. And so we thought, boy, this is great. You know, we went to this. I could only go the first couple of days, but Koenigsegur and his team stayed the rest of the week. And, you know, after the first day, Koenigsegar said to me, you know, we really need to get these guys to come and work for us. And I said, well, that'd be great, but how are we going to do that? He says, well, I'll work on it. So he badgered them pretty much the whole week. He got them out to the factory at, I don't know, midnight one night he took them out to dinner and then had them at the factory. And that caused a lot of disruption. And then they came later in the week when Konaseko and I were both there. And then they came again on Saturday Morning. And so we were begging them to come and consult for us. And their first response was, well, look, you know, we're too old. It's too far away. We don't speak English, blah, blah, blah. And we said, well, but we have great stakes and great oh, and we have golf. We have great golf. And they said, oh, golf, yeah, we like golf.

Okay.

In any event, we convinced them to come and work for us. One of my other businesses was Jacob's Chuck, and it was just in the same kind of shape as Jacob's Break. So I wanted them to start in both Chuck and Brake. And they started really in Chuck to begin with down in Clemson, South Carolina. The first day, interesting day, you know, that we had introductions. We said, we'll take a factory tour. We got out in the factory about. We couldn't have gone more than about 50 or 60ft. And they put up the hand and said, okay, we've seen enough. Let's go back in. And we go back in the office, and they get up on the board and they write up in great big letters, no good.

Okay?

And then Mr. Iwata turns around and says, look, everything here is no good. What do you want to do about it? And that's the way we started. We just said, okay, well, we want to work on our big industrial trucks. And he said, fine, you know, Nakau and Takanaka will work on that. And he says, but I like assembly. I'm going to go help you with assembly. So myself and the president of Jacob's Chuck at the time, we said, well, we'll stay with the water and see what he has in mind for assembly. Of course, we go out to our assembly area, and we have, I think we had five conveyor belt type assembly lines. And the first thing he says is, I hate conveyor belts. Get rid of all the conveyor belts. And we were like, oh, okay. That's how we started and went from there. And that, you know, we really focused on Jacob's Chuck and Brake at the first year or two. And then the Rales brothers came to visit us at break one day, and we showed them the progress we were making. And they said, well, how fast can you do this in the rest of Danaher? And we said, well, we're not sure. We asked Shinji Jitsu to help us. And they said, no, we won't help you until we get Chuck and Brake to look better, because they're so bad that until you improve them, then we're not going to help you. And the rest of the company. So we decided to create something called the President's Kaizen. We took all 13 presidents from Danaher and their VPs of operations. We took them to Japan for a week and we showed them Lean at various different companies that Shinjujutsu had been consulting for, in addition to Toyota. We took them to Toyota and when we came back we started doing a Kaizen in one of our factories. Every six weeks we had a three day Kaizen where all the presidents had to attend. We basically ordered them to come and at first they complained, why am I doing this? I'm a president of a company. Why am I on somebody's shop floor in my blue jeans, blah blah blah. After about the third time, however, third week, the third visit like that, then they didn't want to miss any of these things. Right. They wanted to come to these. And we started from there and Danaher made some great progress doing that. And then when I left Danaher, I went to a company called the Wiremo Company, which is a privately held company in West Hartford, Connecticut. And we implemented a pretty strong and aggressive Lean program there using Shinju Jitsu as well. And I had learned enough from them at Danaher that I understood what was possible and what we could do. And so we just started right away and. And over the course of about nine and a half years, we took a company that was only worth about $30 million when I first got there and sold it for 770 million. Wow. And so, you know, and it was really all through the thrust that we had with Lean and QFD for new product development. We were able to free up enough cash and space that we bought something like 21 small companies along the way. So it was a really good result that we had and everybody turned out to be pretty happy about that. Then we sold Weirmold and after that I left and I joined a private equity firm in Boston, JW Chows Associates. So last 14 years or so I've been working on the various portfolio companies in J.W. charles, trying to implement Lean and all those. And you know, we've had some really great success stories there as well. So that's kind of background.

Yeah. Well, I want to circle back one question I have for you. Back at ge, when you were implementing that first Kanban system, how did you know how to do it? Like, did you bring a consultant in? You read a book or someone know?

Well, no, we didn't use any consultants. And what had happened was GE had sort of a corporate manufacturing group at that time and they had sponsored A trip to Japan in the fall right before I became the general manager and my manufacturing guy went. And the guy who was the manufacturing guy in the supplier division also went. And they had to come up with a project and report to corporate manufacturing six months later what they had done based upon what they saw in Japan. And so one of the things that they saw was the Kanban system. You know, it was pretty simple. So it didn't require a lot of things for us to do. We didn't need a consultant to do it. There weren't really any U.S. consultants doing that stuff back in 1982 anyway. Right. And so they had seen this in Japan and came back and said, well, our project will be we'll implement a Kanban system between the two of us. And that way each of us can report on the same project and get, you know, sort of two birds with one stone. And so that's what we did. And we just, you know, we felt our way along as we went, but we made it simple enough that it was pretty hard not to work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love it. All right, well, let's jump back in back to Wiremold now. So I'm really. And I've some of these questions, I've read some of your answers, but I like to share it with the whole audience here. But talk about really that first year at Wiremold on that journey, I'm curious, like, how did you approach it? You had seen it work, right. At previous company, so you believed in your heart that it worked. But how did you approach it? What did you get right as an organization? And what could you have guys done better again that first year?

Yeah, well, the first year I just approached it from the point of view of I started out with a strategy that said, here's what we're going to do. I brought all of my. I brought about. I think we started out with. I wrote a little training manual that I wrote. And then I brought like 150 people together to begin with with her. A day and a half of sort of introduction to Lean and what are we going to do? And of course, the strategy that I put together had sort of five key things that would define our operational excellence goals. And you know, I introduced those to people. And of course the ultras, they couldn't believe it because I was, you know, I said, we want to have 100% on time customer service. We want to have a 50% reduction in defects each year. We want to have a 20% productivity gain each year. We had done like 29% each year for the first five years at Jake Break. So I knew that that wasn't a crazy number. And we wanted to take our inventory. We wanted 20 times inventory turns had to be the new target. We were at three.

Okay.

Everybody said, what are you crazy? And we wanted 5s and visual control every place. So we did the training. And then I brought in Shinju Jitsu and we started doing very aggressive Kaizen activities. We created a just in Time promotion office. We started doing aggressive Kaizen activities. I selected most of the Kaizens to begin with because I wanted to make sure we were focusing in the right areas and that we were going to get enough bang for the buck. But you know, the first year was really interesting because we, you know, if you had come to visit Weirmal at that point on any given day, there were equipment moving all over the place. And you know, we were moving a lot of things around. We really rearranged the whole factory. We freed up about 50% of the floor space in the first year. And I think we more than doubled inventory turns. I think we freed up something like 10 million in cash the very first year. And that gave us a cushion that we could. A year or so later, we bought the first five companies using that money. So I don't know what we could have done differently or better. I think the only thing that I would have, in retrospect, that I would have liked to have done early on was to introduce policy deployment. We weren't even aware of that at the time. And so we didn't introduce that until maybe four years, three or four years into our lean journey at Wiremold. And it was a big help once we did it. And if I had to do it over again, I would have started. I wouldn't have started with that. I still would have started with the Kaizen activity, but I would have had policy deployment right there early on. So that was the only thing that I can think of that would have been a little different.

Now this is about a year or so ago. I actually interviewed your old business colleague and friend Ori Fumier, and he was telling a fun story about you. I asked him to share his favorite wire mold story and he told the story of you walking through an assembly area of the factory. And it was a two person assembly operation, if I remember the story right, and said one of the ladies that worked in the area kind of pulled you aside and said that they could make more, they could be more productive. But this design wasn't optimal. I think Orie said They'll use the word lousy. And they. Apparently Orey says that they challenged you, that I bet you can't even do it better. So Orey said that you went and learned how to do that job during the second shift. And then you came back and the next day you actually worked on the shop floor and you built these parts or assembled these parts. And then you came and you looked at the young lady and said in the end that she was right. And the story really touched me. Like, that's not normal, right? That's not normal behavior for an executive. So I'm curious, do you remember that story and did I get it kind of right or. Or is Ori crazy?

No, no, no, no, that's true. You got it mostly right. Myself and my VP of operations, Frank Giannitazio, and we did exactly that. We went on the second shift to practice and learn a little bit. And then we went on the first shift for the whole shift, and the two of us made the product. And we had the ladies who normally did the job, we gave them the stopwatches and sheets and stuff and told them to observe the waste and what could we do better? And so we sort of reversed the Kaizen process, if you will. But it was fun and it was a. You know, there were lots of things like that early on at Wiremold that are interesting stories. For example, you know, when I first got there, I was on the shuffle one day and Wiremold had a number of rolling mills because we made these long channels for wiring buildings. And I had never really seen a rolling mill before. They're very long machines. The product coming off of them was most of the time 10 foot long, but sometimes we made them in 20 foot lengths. So you had to have space for it to come off. You had to have a big coil of steel. And so These were probably 100, 150ft long machines. I can't remember exactly. But anyway, I was looking at this machine and I said, well, how long does it take to change that over? And they looked at me and they said, well, you know, normally about 14 hours, but sometimes we have problems and it can take 16 hours or maybe even longer. So I looked at them, I said, well, no, no, no, no, we can't do that. We got to change this machine over in less than 10 minutes. And so of course they looked at me and they said, you know, this is crazy. I mean, how do we get this guy as our CEO? He doesn't understand anything. And, you know, of course now if I had Just said, go ahead and get this, I want you to work on this and get it under 10 minutes. Nothing would have happened. You know, they would have just said, they would have just been convinced that I was nuts and nothing would have occurred. But instead we started a bunch of Kaizens on this rolling mill and we had to alter the machine. So it took us a while, you know, maybe it was a year, year and a half even, but then we could do the setup in six minutes. And so this was a huge change. And now all of a sudden it went from being, who is this crazy man that's our CEO to gee, what's his next stupid idea going to be like? And so you gain some converts and you teach people some things and you have to be kind of hands on doing that stuff because that's what's going to make the change in people. And I always tell CEOs or people running businesses that, hey, lean is something that you learn by doing. And if you didn't go and learn it and you didn't understand it well enough, you would never walk into a new place, look at a 14 hour setup and say, oh, you got to get this under 10 minutes. You wouldn't believe it was possible yourself. And therefore, you would never challenge anybody to do that. But I had had enough experience at Danaher with the Shinju Jitsu Group that I understood it was possible. I didn't know how, of course, but I was convinced that it could be done. And therefore, even though I know they were all going to think I was nuts to say it, that was the right challenge. And we did a lot of those things. We took a 150 ton punch press that was changing over in 3 hours and 10 minutes and we got it down to 1 minute. We took our injection molding machines that were changing over in two to two and a half hours, and they could consistently be changed over in someplace between one minute and two minutes. So, you know, the list goes on and on and on, but those are the kind of things that are really important to any kind of a Lean implementation. You got to fix those fundamentals.

So with all of your experience, you. I guess I want to put words in your mouth, but I think you wanted to kind of share your story a little bit. 2000, was it? 12, I believe the Lean Turnaround was published. What problem were you trying to solve with that book?

Well, the reason I wrote that book was that I had been doing this for longer than most people. I guess since 1982, I've been sort of watching The Lean movement evolve over time. I mean, the word lean didn't even come in until 1996 when Womack and Jones published Lean Thinking. And, you know, I just thought the whole thing was drifting in the wrong direction. It was drifting in a direction where people thought of Lean as either a. A cost reduction program or just a bunch of tools. You know, the number of books that have been published on various tools and things like that, you know, it makes people. Gives people the impression that, oh, this is just a set of tools and I can select whatever tool I want and use that to help me cut my costs. And, you know, I've always, from the very beginning, I always saw Lena as the most incredible strategic weapon I've ever come across. And so I felt, gee, you know, I've done this the same way all the time, and it's always worked. We learned the principles and stuff from Shinji Jitsu, Toyota, but then, you know, we apply them in ways that we thought made sense. And so I thought I could maybe make a contract. I thought the Lean movement was going the wrong direction. I think of Lean as a strategy, not as a bunch of tools or a cost reduction thing. And so I just wanted to write a book that sort of explained that and got people thinking about this in a different way instead of thinking it as a bunch of tools. So that was the rationale for the Lean. The Lean turnaround.

And just so people know it's not just a bunch of theory, it's kind of you. Right, like kind of telling your story in a roundabout way.

Right, right, right. It's all the things in there. It's really trying to make the point that Lean is a strategy, not a bunch of tools, but it does so by all the experiences that I've had, all the things that I've seen work and things that I saw other that don't work, I think even today, people ask me, what percentage of companies do you think are really lean? I still think it's only someplace around 5% or something like that. It's a small number relative to the number of companies that have tried it or are working on it is much larger. Now, I would have told you 10 years ago there was maybe only 20 to 30% of the companies. Now I think maybe half or maybe even more than half have tried Lean or are thinking about trying Lean, but most aren't successful because they go about it the wrong way. They think about it as a bunch of. As a cost reduction program and of course, or they call it Lean Manufacturing. That's the way they talk about it, if you call something Lean Manufacturing, first of all, all the companies that aren't in manufacturing figure, well, this doesn't apply to me, even though it helps them more than it will even help manufacturing companies in most cases. In my experience, even in manufacturing companies, if you call it lean manufacturing, then the CEOs think, well, lean manufacturing, I'll just delegate it down to my manufacturing guy and he can do this stuff. The rest of the company, we'll just keep doing what we're doing. Of course, right away, if you do that, you have a tremendous conflict because you're sending your sales force out to sell big batches. You've got everything running on mrp. You've got people going in opposite directions of what's going on with Lean, and yet somehow you figure you can drop it in on top of a batch structure and be successful. And that's almost never going to happen.

So then, October 2016, you released the Lean Turnaround action guides. I guess, same question. What problem were you trying to solve with that book?

Well, I had figured I had retired from book writing after the first book. I wasn't going to write any more books. It was just. But McGraw Hill, the first book, turned out to be quite successful. So McGraw Hill came back to me and said, hey, we'd like you to do another one. We'd like you to do the Lean Turnaround field book. And the question trying to be answered there was. And it was a question that I got as I gave a lot of speeches, different Lean conferences around the world on the Lean Turnaround. And I had a lot of nice response. And people said, gee, we really liked your book, but how do you really do this stuff? Right? It's like, we got the concept, but how do you really do it? And that's kind of what McGraw was asking me to do, too. So trying to figure out, how do we tell someone that? How do you go into more detail and show, you know, how do you do this stuff? And so we came up with the action guide and the concept there. My editor, Tom Ehrenfeld, we're trying to wrestle with this, how to do this. He said, well, why don't you just do it? Why don't you just do a Kaizen or something like that? And I said, well, all right, well, that's a good idea. Why don't I just create a company and give it a forecast as a batch company, and then we'll buy it, then we'll go step by step through how we would turn it around? And then we'll show you the P and L as the batch company five year forecast. And then we'll show you what really happened after implementing Lean for five years and show the contrast. That was the whole concept. How would you really do this? I didn't make anything up. This would be exactly the way I would go about it and the way we went about it in Wiremold every time with 21 acquisitions. So, you know, and it pretty much has always worked. So I figured this would be a good guideline for people to understand what are the steps you have to take, what's the management role, how do they have to be involved, what does the leadership require and how do you convert the people? Because Lean is really all about people. It's all about converting people.

Yeah. No. Fantastic. So we're going to link to both books. I think now people should definitely start with the Lean Turnaround. Right. If they haven't read either. Would you suggest starting with a Lean Turnaround and then go to the Action Guide, or is it okay to jump straight to the Action Guide?

You could go in either direction. The Lean Turnaround is a little more general. It has some things in it that the Action Guide doesn't have. For example, it talks about Lean and non manufacturing companies and it talks about how do you translate Lean into the marketplace and things like that. Whereas the Action Guide is really more focused on how do you implement this stuff and what kind of results can you expect? Because I think putting the results in is important. Because the big question in the whole Lean movement so far is really how do you get CEOs interested in this stuff? Because that's been the big hurdle for almost everybody is how do you get the CEO to embrace this and lead it? Because if the CEO doesn't lead it, you can pretty much forget about being very successful. You can't delegate it down and not change anything else. That's been the big issue part of the Action Guide. If you think about what's the role of the CEO, one of their main roles is to increase the enterprise value of the company that they're running. Otherwise, why do we have them there? By showing what a good batch company might look like over five years. And the forecast that I put together is very similar to forecast that I saw in all the acquisitions we did at Wiremold and all the companies we looked to buy in the private equity business. It was a pretty standard forecast that you would normally see. In fact, it was a little on the plus side. In other words, the company was moving along and doing quite well and improving its margins, improving pretty much everything. Sales were growing, earnings were growing. So a company that people would look at and say, hey, this is a pretty good company. And then when you go through and implement Lean, we showed the P and L and the steps that it took and the problems they had in the first couple years and, and then the things started happening. And so you can see what the P and L looked like after five years and the contrast, even though I downplayed what was possible in the Lean case, because we certainly did better than any of those measurements at Wiremold, and I have a bunch of other company examples that did better than those measurements. But this was a reasonable Lean implementation and it sort of blew away the enterprise value of the batch case. Part of the rationale there is, gee, if you're running a company and you read the action guide and you see, basically you're going to see your own P and L forecast for the five years to start with, then you're going to see what happened to it five years later. Maybe we can get some CEOs to get the message that, hey, this stuff could really help me.

Last question I have for you, Art. In this section, if someone asks you to give a, oh, I don't know what to call it, like kind of a State of the Union address as it relates to the Lean movement here in 2017, what would you say?

Well, I would say that there's certainly more interest in it and more companies trying it, et cetera. But I think we need to shift from this cost reduction tools type of focus to strategic focus so that companies understand the strategic application and reason for Lean. I look at it in a very simplistic way. Any company, whether it's manufacturing, non manufacturing, is only really three things, right? It's a bunch of people and a bunch of processes trying to deliver value to a set of customers. And the only way you increase enterprise value is by delivering more value to your customers over long periods of time than your competitors can. And so Lean is going to drastically help you do that, because all you're trying to do with Lean is to teach the people how to see the waste and remove it from the processes so you can deliver more value. So it's a pretty simplistic approach, but unfortunately, most companies don't behave that way. They could agree with me if I said, okay, companies are nothing but a bunch of people and processes trying to deliver value. I could get all the heads in the audience nodding to that. But when I went and visited their company Then they'd tell me, oh, we agree with your basic principle, but our company is way more complicated, and you don't understand all the problems we have, blah, blah, blah. That's just human nature, right?

Yeah. Very good. Oh, well, I could talk all day about this stuff, but let's go ahead and jump into the reflection section, Art. So this first question we've asked since really day one of the podcast is, you know, we spend a lot of time in Lean talking about kind of those two pillars, continuous improvement and respect for people. And continuous improvement is kind of easier to wrap our arms around and kind of define, but respect for people can be a little bit more challenging. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you?

Well, it's kind of like what I just said. Lean is all about people. I mean, it's really all you're trying to do the thing that you're trying to transform. And lean isn't the machine or the building, it's the people. Because the processes that you have that are causing you problems with your customers were created by the people. And, you know, you need to change the people in order to change the processes. So respect for people means that you need to understand that part of your role is to get all the people participating in finding and removing the waste. And that really means you have to respect the people. You have to listen to them. I mean, think about it simplistically. All the great ideas of improving the value adding are mostly going to come from the people that are doing the value adding. Unfortunately, most companies, when they start to do this stuff, they try and have a bunch of salary people coming up with stuff and implementing it on the floor. We approached it the opposite way. When we did Kaizen, we always had at least half the team was hourly people, and always the people that were doing the work in whatever we were trying to fix or improve were on the team. And then we had maybe half the team was salary people. So everybody worked together to look at it, understand it, and make changes that remove the waste. So I think respect for people means just that. You got to respect your people. You got to understand that they can all contribute. They all have something to offer. And I think in a lot of companies, in batch companies particularly, you get this approach of, hey, check your brains at the door and just do what we tell you. That's a huge waste of all the talent that you have.

What's the best advice you've ever received?

That's a tough question. I'm not so sure I can come up with a quick answer for that one. I think it goes back a little bit to the quote I gave you to begin with, which is, if you don't try something, no knowledge can visit you. That was tremendous advice, and not only is it a good quote, but I think it's very, very true. Because with Lean, everything that you do is always some form of leap of faith. When you try and change something or move something, the question in the back of your mind is always, well, gee, what if this doesn't work? That question, what if this doesn't work? That stops. Most people, they come up with all this stuff and then they say, oh, yeah, well, that could happen. We better not do it. And they talk themselves back out of it. So I think if you don't try something, no knowledge can visit you is really good advice.

Do you have any regrets as it relates to your journey with Lean?

Well, not really. You always regret that you couldn't have done even better, because I'm sure in every case we could have done better. But other than that, no, it's been fun. I've learned a lot, and. It's been very, very rewarding. From a learning point of view, I think you have to think of things as you should always be in a learning mode. What you're trying to really do with Lean is you're trying to create a learning culture, but the CEOs should be learning as well. Lean is learned by doing, and therefore you always have something to learn. I felt that I've been learning a lot, and every time I go to see a different company or a different industry and trying to think about, how do you apply Lean there? I did a lot of work in the hospital. Lean fits hospitals fantastically well because they're so bad, and insurance companies, anything. I always find that as you try and apply it in different places, you're always going to learn new things, and that's always exciting.

What are you most proud of as it relates to your journey over all these years?

The people I'm most proud of the fact that I think I've brought along a lot of people and. And taught a lot of people a lot of things that they might not have done otherwise. And a lot of times, in order to do that, you have to push people. You have to push people to do things that they think are crazy. It's like I told you, 14 hours to six minutes on a set of production of a rolling mill, or when I first said, hey, we got to go from 3 inventory turns to 20 inventory turns at Wyermool you have to push people to do that. But to me, it's the most rewarding thing in the world as a leader is if you push people to do something that they all feel is absolutely impossible when you start and then you help them through Kaizen and other things, help them to get there. When they get there and they get to that goal, it's just great to see how excited they are and how happy they are that they did it. And that to me is the most rewarding thing is to see a bunch of people achieve something that they thought was impossible. But the leader then has an obligation to those people. For example, if I said to you, you've got to go from three inventory turns to 20, and then let's say eight years, nine years later you get to 20, and if I don't say, okay, now you got to go to 30, then I would expect they would be mad at me. They should feel like, well, what happened to him? He helped us get here and now he's going to quit on us. Come on, what's the next challenge?

Right, so aside, of course, the Lean Turnaround Action Guide and Lean Turnaround. I'm curious of any books that you suggest folks check out or maybe that you've read over this last year or so and they don't have to necessarily be Lean related or anything like that.

Yeah, no, my. They were kind of a short list of different books, but Shingo's books and Ono's book was very important to me. And of course, Lean Thinking, I think is a classic. And there's another book called Better Thinking, Better Results by Bob, by Bob Emiliani. That's the story of Wymo, really. And it's told through the people who did it. They started out doing a lot of interviews that were going to create some cases for their business school based on what Weirmold had done. But they gathered so much information that Ori Fumi and I said, well, look Bob, why don't you write a book first and then you can spin the cases off of that. And so that's what they did. And so that's a, you know, I think it's a kind of unique book because it really tell us the story of where was Wyermole and what did they do to get to where they wound up. And so I think that's another one.

Good stuff, good stuff. Well, you've been at this a long time, Art, and you've learned a lot. I'm curious. Last question. Is there a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become a better lean thinker.

Well, I don't know about the. To become a better lean thinker. I think that way anyhow. I guess if I had to improve something, I guess it would, you know, it's probably like anybody else. It's your ability to follow up better on all these things. Sometimes you get too busy doing too many things, and the follow up isn't where you'd really like it to be. But I have gotten better at that over time. And it's really important in lean, of course, because I always see lean as sort of three steps forward, two steps backward most of the time. And if you can do three steps forward and only one step backward, you're going to go ahead of most companies. Because the tendency is once you make an improvement, let's say from a Kaizen, and then you go away, and the next week, the normal tendency is for it to go back to just the way it was before. And so that's the thing that people have to fight for, is to maintain the gains that they get. You can always get tremendous gains during one week of kaizen, but maintaining those gains is the key thing. So maintenance of the gains, I think, is the thing that I would have to improve on. And I think probably everybody does.

Yeah. Good stuff. Well, thanks again, Art, for taking time. I know you're really busy to visit with us. Let's go ahead and wrap the show up with you, sharing some final words of wisdom. And then why don't you tell people how they can best connect with you?

Yeah, you can connect with me by. First of all, I've been writing a monthly article for Lei called Ask Art. And so any questions that you had, you know, and we're always looking for new questions to put into that, things that people want to know. So that's one way. Another way is just through email. My email address is A B Y R N E wchilds. So it's pretty simple. I always like to hear good stories and some good success stories that people have had. So, you know, I always try and answer anything, anything that comes in. So, you know, feel, feel free.

Yeah, good stuff. All right, well, thanks again and it's been a pleasure and hopefully we get to meet face to face one day and I'd love to shake your hand.

Okay, Ron, thank you very much. Great to be. Be with you.

All right, take care.

All right, bye. Bye.

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