GA 155 | Toyota Kata and the Power of Networking with Christopher Ferrier

You're listening to episode 155 with Christopher Ferrier.

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 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 Christopher Ferrier to the show. Now, a few weeks ago, we were over in San Diego at the TWI Katacon Conference and we actually met up with Christopher on two different days. In fact, I had lunch with him on one day and come to find out, Christopher ate lunch with Greg and our camera guys and our film crew on the first day. So he, he really got to network with Gemba Academy. And come to find out he's had a lot of interaction with Kevin Meyer, my business partner, and Steve Cain, one of my colleagues here at Gemba Academy. So really interesting guy. He runs these ultra marathon races and so forth. So we spent some time talking about that at the beginning. It's pretty incredible physical feat for I didn't know the human body was even capable of doing such things. But so we spent some time talking about that before really diving into the topic of the day, which was Christopher's use of Toyota Kata at his company there in California. So we spend some time talking about their journey and then really, probably my favorite part of the show was the reflection section, where he really kind of shares some pretty interesting ideas and concepts. And one in particular was the power of networking. And it's pretty interesting to hear Christopher was actually in between jobs and a friend of his gave him a suggestion for how he might go about networking and how that could potentially lead to. To employment. And it sure worked out. And in fact, as Christopher reminded me at the end, he was speaking to me on the podcast as a result of networking. So definitely listen through to the reflection section. I think you're going to enjoy that show. Notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 155. That's 155 again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 155. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Christopher, thanks so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

Calling in from Fontana, California. It's at the northeast edge of the greater Los Angeles area. Ron.

Nice, nice. Beautiful part of the country. We were hanging out together in San Diego. What was it? Gosh, about what, three, four weeks ago now? Something like that. I don't know. At the Katakan conference. So it was great to have a lunch with you and really enjoyed meeting you. And I was going to ask you about your favorite sports, football team or anything like that, but I don't think you pay any attention to any type of, what you call it, sports ball, right?

That's right, Ron. I really don't pay much attention to sports ball. I spend most of my time training for ultra marathon trail races and doing social media with other ultra marathoners.

Yeah, you sent me something right before we cave on here about a race he recently partook in. Why don't you share that with the audience here? What did you do?

Yeah, as a matter of fact, it was just this weekend. It was on Saturday, and I've got some pretty sore feet. I ran 68 miles across the top of the Santa Monica mountains. It took me 15 hours and 22 minutes, and I ended up getting seventh place in the race.

Wow, that's so cool. We were talking about San Diego. I do a little crossfit or whatever, and I'm like pretty sore from a pretty gnarly 17.3 workout that I just did. And it was. It tore me up. But I'm thinking, wait a minute, 60 some miles of running? Goodness gracious.

That's.

That's insane, man. So how do you fuel for that?

Like, oh, well, I had a plan and I had a crew out there to hand me stuff at aid stations along the way. In fact, I applied some lean principles to the aid station process because I'm only adding value if I'm moving towards the finish line. And a lot of runners will stop and sit and talk and reload their water bottles and Pac, I just said, I'm going to hand you a bag of trash. You hand me a bag of goodies and a plastic handled grocery sack and I'm going to load my pack while we're moving. And anyway, water ice. And then I started the race with candy, skittles and sour patch kids and snickers bars. But by the time we got to the heat of the day, I couldn't even stomach another skittle and so we had to change the plan a little bit. And I went to more liquid calories, like a little bit of coke and water and some sports drink.

So it's just clearly glycogen or whatever. Just trying to get some carbs into your muscles, I guess.

Right? Yeah. It's pure rocket fuel at that point. Yeah, yeah.

Goodness gracious. Do you walk at all?

Absolutely. I walk up the hills and run when I can on the flats and downhills.

Yeah. I could just talk to you all day about this and. Oh, I guess we got to talk about lean, too.

Yeah, we owe it to your listeners.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Oh, well, it's quite an accomplishment, so maybe we'll do a follow up show. And we had Steve Kane on talking about his Tough Mudder experience. I don't know if you'd listen to that one.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah, yeah. So, good stuff, good stuff. All right, well, you know the drill. I know you listen to the show and let's go ahead and get your quote. Do you have anything that possibly inspires you?

I do. It's the motto of the school that I graduated from, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. And the quote is, learn by doing.

You just made Jessica so happy. Jessica actually listens to every one of our podcasts and she types up some of our show notes and whatnot. And she's a proud graduate of that same school, so she's going to be very tickled to hear you say that.

Awesome.

Good stuff, Good stuff. Well, Christopher, let's kind of get started with you telling us a little bit about your background and how you first came to learn about continuous improvement.

So at Cal Poly, I actually got to receive instruction from one of your former Gedima Academy podcast guests, Dr. Eric Olson. And I was learning industrial technology from him. And he had worked at HP previously before becoming a professor and had some pictures of some Kaizen events that he led there and talked about some of the challenges that he went through. And one thing that he mentioned in particular was that they would make T shirts for their Kaizen events, and the people really enjoyed that. They'd kind of collect them as badges of honor. And you'd see the shirts go on through the years and they'd be color coded and created like a fun environment because they could wear their shirts to work. And it was also at Cal Poly where part of my curriculum was to read Learning to See by Mike Rother and the Goal by Goldrat. And that was my introduction. And out of college, I Got a job as a manufacturing engineer at a company that manufactured CNC machinery. And I led four Kaizen events while I was there and received some state funded training as well as seeking some Lean certification from a group called apix and did some projects where I got to flex those Lean tools. In particular, I put together as a young engineer enterprise wide Kanban system to help distribute sub assemblies across the plant using a plastic bin system that I design labels for. And one thing I learned in that role is that if someone asks you to improve an area, it's a good idea to get them to define what success looks like. And I take that learning now to mean that I want to have a charter started for every event I do. And I get the stakeholders to initial a charter at the beginning of the event and then we show actual scans of the initial charter at the outbreief. And that way everyone's literally on the same page. And it also helps us prevent scope creep. Now from there, I got a job as a manufacturing engineer at a place that used machine tools to make aerospace parts and had the honor of starting a CI program from scratch and made a group called Fit for Factory Improvement Team. Kind of a synonym on Lean. Plus we were making aerospace fittings. So it was just kind of a good fit.

Plus you like to do ultramarathons and stay fit, right?

You know, it was absolutely true. Yes, yes. And we. I led seven groups through Kaizen events there and we. That was the point where I got to use some Gemba Academy videos to front load the learning. That was very helpful. I think I turned on my subscription at that time just to try it out. And that was great because it got us really accelerated into the projects. We did one. I mean some of the cycle times in these parts were a minute, two minutes. And so it was high volume. And we did a project called One More Part Per Hour. And so we saw can we just get one more part per hour out of this area? And it turned out to be a big financial gain to be able to do that. And so that was really fun. One thing I learned in that role is that for CI to be successful, you need to make problems visible and be willing to look right at them and talk about them. We'll leave it at that. Then I had a neat opportunity between then and my current role as a manufacturing manager for a company that made electrical and mechanical parts. And now that I had a management role for the first time, I said, this is my playground. I'm going to try out these lean tools that I've always wanted to do. And so I took kind of a hybrid blend of what I'd learned about specialty silicone and FastCap and how they ran morning meetings and would run mine with kind of the same standard work. And also I found a projector and a Bluetooth speaker and I'd show about five or ten minute videos every morning, something from Gemba Academy or something from YouTube, whether it was Mike Rother or Paul Akers or the state of Washington, and really try to boost that learning. In my team there, I had 25 employees. One thing I learned from this company was that they did an amazing job at their shadow boards in particular. Had all the tools up on the walls, very professional looking, signage everywhere. But while it looked good on the outside, some of the processes behind the scenes didn't match how it looked on the outside. And so how it looks isn't always how it is. And it really reinforced that it is about the people and the processes that they have to behave within. So that was my learning there. And that brings me to my current role. I've been in this role for about a year. I'm so excited. I'm in continuous improvement work full time. It's not a subset of my other duties. It's my whole duty. And I just feel like a. I don't know what you call like a duck in water or something. It's so great. And so I met a company called Clark Pacific. We make precast concrete panels and building systems in Fontana, and there's also a NorCal plant.

So I came to understand when we were having lunch and just kind of getting to know each other a little bit better, that you guys are quite into the Toyota Kata approach to problem solving. So let's talk a little bit about that. How did you first come to just hear about Toyota Kata and get interested in it?

Sure, I learned about Toyota Kata from you. As a matter of fact, it was a podcast, episode four. I went back and looked it up and the minute I heard about it, I ordered the book on Amazon and read it from COVID to color.

Who was episode four? I don't remember.

Oh, gosh, we have to look it up now. Yeah, I have it down somewhere. Yeah, but let's see here.

I got it. Oh, it's Michael Lombard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Michael Lombard. There you go. Yeah, yeah, sorry, Michael didn't remember you. You couldn't possibly remember. How many of you have done like 160 or something?

This is 155. This one that we're going to put up yeah, 155.

Not to hold in memory. Anyway, I read Toyota Kata and I said, this just makes so much sense. And I instantly wanted to try it. And that particular company wasn't ready at that time. But I'd always held it in my pocket like, this is something I want to do. And even in my new role, I've got colleagues at the Northern California plant that's kind of the bigger part of our company. So there's more of them up there. And every time we get together to have a summit meeting, whenever we're talking about what we want to accomplish or what we should try, just like Kata, Kata, Kata, any of them will attest to it. I was a little repetitious. But anyway, I found the right opportunity at my plant here to get Kata started in October of 2016. And now we're up to 24 Kata participants in our company and I'm doing coaching cycles for 16 learners.

How did you get started? What did you do? You read a book and then what?

Yeah, well, I watched a lot of YouTube videos. There's a lot out there for free on Kata. Mike Rother has been so generous with spreading this knowledge and his forms and templates. I just went out and started printing up some of the blanks. I got blank learner storyboards, blank obstacle parking lots, and blank PDCA cycles. The. The holy trinity of kata, I guess they are, and just went out and engaged my learners and said, what's keeping you from doing what you're meant to do? You know, what would it look like if everything was going right in your area? And we hit some really early wins that were just incredible. Our loading. Foreman said, you know, I got really held up. We needed to move these big, heavy concrete panels and we had no way to lift them. And he says, normally we're supposed to have custom lifting brackets made for something like this, but we had to figure it out on the fly and scrape something together. It might not have been as safe as it could have been. We didn't have time to load test them. And I said, well, let's see what we can do about that. We went and got a checkbox put into a weekly meeting that we have further upstream in the company to check whether or not lifting brackets had been addressed for our products. And lo and behold, we haven't had that problem again since. So that's something COD has done for us, is help eliminate modes of failure.

But let's talk about that one just in the mechanics of it a little bit, you know, within the improvement Kata. Coaching kata. Kind of like, how did you. Did you actually kind of work them through it by, you know, setting a challenge and, you know, you know, using the lingo, so to speak? I mean, did you work. Work them through the process or how early on or how did that. How did that go?

Yeah, absolutely. We. We used the challenge, but we did. So what I've learned now to be in kind of a haphazard way. So as a new coach who hadn't practiced as a learner, I didn't know what challenge really was supposed to mean. I hadn't grasped that yet. And so the challenge was just whatever they wanted it to be. And again, we had some early wins with that. So in this case, it was okay. So you want to be able to just pick up a panel, move it, and set it down. He goes, yeah, that's all I want to do. But I've got all these things, like, I got to get the bracket. You know, maybe someone wasn't ready for their part or the thing where. The place where I need to put. It's not ready. I said, okay, all these are great. Which one do you want to work on first? He said, all the lifting brackets. Okay, great. So. So what experiment could you do to do that? Oh, well, I guess I could talk to so and so. Okay, well, could. When do you think you could get that done by? I guess I could go today. All right, well, go ask and. Okay. And get back next week. How did that go? Oh, well, he said that we could talk to this person, and so we just kept working it, and eventually we got it to where standard work at a high level in the company, way upstream from his process, so that by the time jobs get to him, it's solved.

Yeah. You know, the thing that I love about kind of just the five questions is it's. I. You know, it's a very. It's practical problem solving. Right. It's just a. It's a various. It's a. Oh. I always described kata as a streamlined way to practical problem solving. Right. It's, you know, what's the target condition? Once you actual. What. Actual condition. What kind of obstacles you have? What's your next step? You know, it's just moving people to action, right?

Yes.

With clarity and focus and in a plan and. Yeah. So I love it. So what other wins did you guys have?

You know, I had another foreman, and he said, you know, okay, so with making concrete panels, it's a lot like baking a cake. That's something most people could picture in their own kitchen, you've got maybe a cookie sheet and you're pouring batter in it. And then the concrete cures just like a cake bakes. And so what we get are metal forms that we put on top of flat decks, and those help shape the void of where the concrete needs to go. And. And this foreman says, you know, we get these metal forms in and sometimes they require so much rework they're either bent, warped, the holes are in the wrong place, they don't line up. And he says, and I don't learn about it until it's the day we need it. And I've had some days where I've had three or four guys working eight hour shifts just cutting up these metal forms and reworking them. I wish that we could have looked at them earlier and copied stuff so he could have responded in time. I said, perfect. What experiment could you do to make that? Oh, I could go talk to my foreman or my superintendent about that. Okay. Yeah, great. So we went through several cycles and all along the way made a little progress, learned something. Made a little progress, learned something. And where we got to was the point where we wrote a standard procedure so that when metal forms come in, they're inspected by our QC department. And then the foreman gets to learn that they passed inspection. And this happens a couple weeks in advance of when he actually needs them. And he hasn't had to rework metal forms since. And it's just another time where we reduced that failure mode, something that was causing him 300 man hours on a job. Sometimes I've got a bunch. I don't know how much time we have.

Yeah, well, let's do one more. Do one more.

Okay. So I really like this one, our tool room guy. He wears a lot of hats around here. And so we use a radio system, walkie talkies around the plant. And he's got to go from one corner to the other. He's got to load stuff, unload trucks, do stuff in the front office, a little light janitorial here and there. And so people are calling him all the time, hey, we need this, I need that. Can you get me a drill bit? Can you get me a safety glasses? And so he's doing all this time shuttling back and forth to meet everyone's needs. He says, it wastes so much time, and I can't really concentrate on one task because I keep getting interrupted. I forget where I left off. I said, okay, well, what could you do about that? He says, well, I wish I could just focus. I said, well, okay, well, what could you do about that? Well, what if I had standard tool room hours? That sounds like a good idea. What if you tried? I'm going to try. So he did an experiment with looking at what people's needs were and some patterns when times they were busiest. And he standardized his tool room hours and trained everybody to come during those times, but also to kind of aggregate their needs for their whole crew so they could send one person to get a day's worth of supplies. And in that way, he freed up about two to four hours a week of travel time that he was doing that he no longer has to do that for there's a predictable schedule. And so I said, congratulations, you know, you saved two to four hours a week. What are you going to do with that time? He goes, oh, I hadn't thought about that. He says, well, I've always wanted to reorganize the bolt room. It's a total mess in there. I said, awesome. So, you know, he's getting into 5s work. He's a real high scorer on 5s and he's less harried and there's less chatter on the radio. And it's just another example of just taking a small action and how much of an effect it had.

I love it. I love it. I'm sure we could talk all day about successes that you have, but so let's talk a little bit more about the training that you've gone through. So obviously you originally self taught, right? I think is maybe the safest way. You read a book and watch some videos. But how have you taken to the next step?

Yeah, I was absolutely self taught. I thought I'd just go try. What I did is at the advice of Kevin Meyer. As a matter of fact, I got in touch with Ame and I saw in their newsletter that there was a Kata training going on in Washington. I said, I need to be there. And I got permission to go. And this was held at the Genie Terex facility in Washington. And I learned kata from people who have taught people kata for years and years. And we did some exercises putting together scopes from Leupold and Stevens and the classic kata puzzle exercise. And what I really the biggest takeaway I got from that training, though, was that I was treating the challenge all wrong. This needed to be challenged with a capital T, capital C. The challenge. And what we needed was something that would take us about a year to three years to achieve and have every learner working towards the same challenge, doing target conditions along the way that were maybe A week, two weeks, a month per target towards that challenge. And so when I got back from that training, I shared this with the team and we put a challenge in place right away. And our challenge focuses on budget quality and safety, and we've got numbers that go with each of those so that it's measurable. And, you know, in the first four weeks that we put that challenge in place, our man hours per panel reduced 37%. And that's probably just because we were looking at it, you know, but from a dollars and cents perspective, those four weeks justified my salary for the year in the savings that the company achieved, to give a point of reference. And it's just like, wow, how, how amazing was that? In addition to the other small wins we were getting, that was a pretty major one. And so we've been going forward with the challenge ever since. And it's, it's going well and it's also not perfect. And so we're right in the middle of it, right where CI happens.

So why do you think it was that challenge was something that you needed to kind of awaken to? Because I think it's common. Right? I think it's. And we talk about it sometimes in Ho Chi Conri or whatnot. You kind of set out a long, tame, long term goal, but so often we don't do that. Why do you think that is? And maybe why was it a problem in your situation?

You know what, it really slapped me upside the head because we had recently done something like Hoeshun Kanri, although we didn't call it that name. It was more like a strategic initiative process. And we had already had these strategic initiatives in place. And so it was all just right there. It was like Captain Obvious right in front of my face. We should have all been trying to reach this objective. I don't know if I just was ignorant to see it or if I wasn't brave enough to ask for something so lofty from the, from the team or what. But once, once the coaches at AME helped me understand what the challenge needed to be like, it was just like, like again, a slap upside the head. Wow. Obviously it needs to do that. We got to have alignment all the way up to reaching the corporate objectives, all the way down to our front lines. And that's the only way we're going to get to where we want to go.

Talk about how you guys assess your current state, because I think that's another area of KATA that's really very useful and something that many of us don't do. Even here at GEMPA Academy, sometimes it was like, you know, we get excited about countermeasures and so forth, but we don't always deeply understand that current state. So how do you guys do that?

You know, Ron, that's interesting you ask, because that was probably one of my biggest takeaways from Katacon 3 was that Kata learners everywhere are struggling with their current state. And what we got from that conference was an actionable way to address that, which is to have your learner's target condition, to be able to clearly state their current condition well and then do experiments towards reaching that. And I'll admit that many of my learners right now have that as their target condition ever since I got back from Kataka. You got to be able to describe your current condition really well before we even try to move any of these numbers. And so what we're looking for are a budget metric, a safety metric, and a quality metric, and being able to describe their crew's performance to those metrics and how those numbers are trending and how the numbers work together with each other. And we've got some people that have really grasp that and some others that are still practicing, and that's how we're going about it right now.

So what's been the hardest part of the journey for you so far?

I'll admit that it's meeting my learners at the place where they're ready, not at the place where I expected them to be, especially early on in my kata coaching.

Give me an example.

Oh, man. I'll admit there was a day where I said, how can you be managing a crew of people on jobs and not know how you're doing on budget? This is fundamental, guys. You really should know this. If we're going to run jobs according to budget, you got to be able to know how you're doing on budget. And just because I could understand how the budget numbers work didn't mean that my learners were ready to understand that. Before we introduced kata here and also in it, there was a change in leadership that kind of happened about simultaneously with my arriving. And the old leader didn't expect that of them, of my learners to understand where they stood on the budget. It. And it was that walking into a situation, me walking in and expecting a certain level of performance, a certain common ground, and not being sympathetic to anybody's learning gap. And I'll admit that I've ruffled some feathers because especially in a group situation, people don't like to have their weaknesses exposed, especially in front of their peers. And there were a couple days where I made people feel a little raw. I have a kata on my kata. I'm looking at my board now and I'm actually still on the same obstacle, which is some of my learners dread their kata appointments. And I've worked several cycles on improving this. I'm using a delightful score metric to overcome it. I'm currently at a 7.8 and my target's at an 8. And let's just say we started at zero.

Wow.

Wow.

So what's next for you guys with your journey?

Oh, man. I got a cool thing that I'm trying with my manager who's in NorCal. We're doing Kata coaching appointments with FaceTime. We've tried it twice. The second one was just today. We'll start the call facing each other and then I'll turn my camera around and he'll ask the questions and I'll show him where I'm at on the board. And it's actually working out pretty cool.

Wow, that's so cool. Steve Kane from Gimba Academy, he and I were doing kind of a call this morning and it was the same thing. We were talking to each other. We actually use Google Drive now for a lot of our forms and our templates, whatever it is that we're working on. And we do have some kata templates and. And yeah, it can work. Right. Virtually. I mean, you have to make it work if you're not together. Right. So I think that's an awesome way.

You know, another thing that we're doing is my. The NorCal plant now has four learners going and two coaches. And they've got in the plan another four learners coming on in April and another four in May. And so they're going all at it and trying to catch up with our plan. And they. They've got the resources. I'm sure that they're going to do great up there.

Yeah, very good, Very good. Well, let's stay in touch. I can't wait to hear really, how the next six months go for you guys. I'm sure you're going to do really good things. Well, I do want to have one last question before we get to the reflection section. Have you applied kata to your racing and your trading?

Yes, absolutely. I treated everything like an experiment. So, for instance, I have a GPS watch and this helps me track my speed and my altitude gain and loss. And I post stuff to Strava with it. And when you run as long As I do 15 hours, 24 hours, the battery runs out on these things and So I tried as an experiment first decreasing the GPS accuracy to make the battery last longer, but the data was garbage. I posted that on one of my forums, and someone came back and said, oh, yeah, I used to have that problem. What I tried was an external battery. I charged it on the fly. I said, I didn't know you could do that. I got a little external battery. It's about the size of maybe a highlighter pen, and I charge my watch on the fly. But I didn't do it on race day. Nothing new on race day. I tried it in training first and learned about the things that would make it come unclipped and get loose and where to put it and where to route the wire and all these things. And so kind of, I guess one mantra is nothing new on race day. So everything I try out there, I've tried in practice.

Very good. Very good. All right, let's get into the reflection section. So I think you already know the questions. I got one I'm going to drop on you.

That's new. Nice.

I don't want you to be all prepared for everything, but this first one's the oldie but goodie. What does respect for people mean to you?

Well, my general desire is to help people reach their personal and career potential. It was actually Steve Cain who helped me solidify that desire at a raw time in between jobs. But anyway, what does that look like in my current role? It's to draw people out of their comfort zone into their learning zone. So if you think about a bullseye target, the comfort zone is right in the middle of that bullseye, and it might be a green color. And the learning zone is the next ring, and it's usually a yellow color when you see this diagram. So I respect people by challenging them to get better. And what happens, though, is sometimes I need to really show respect when I accidentally take them into the next ring, which is the red danger zone. And when that happens, I respect people by being quick to apologize for exactly my role in doing that. Hey, I went too far, too fast with you. I'm sorry I made you feel angry, frustrated, upset. I really am sorry. I hope you can forgive me. What can I do to make it right? And in that way, try to mend that relationship as quickly as possible so that we can keep moving and get back into comfort and learning again.

I mean, I assume that's happened. Like, what are you. What are people's reactions when you say that?

Generally pretty good. We've got a lot of straight shooters here. It's really a family like atmosphere. And any family is going to have their ups and downs. And so, you know, just saying to them, straightforward, you know, I've got a kata on this kata program. And right now my obstacle is that some of my learners dread their kata. And I'm doing this to try to address that. I remember my first experiment was to sit shoulder to shoulder with the learner rather than across the table from them to see if it would feel less confrontational. Kind of like sitting in a pickup truck together, looking down the road at where we're headed.

So let me stop you on that one. So if that was your next experiment, what did you expect to happen?

That it would feel better and it would feel less confrontational. And so I would ask people at the end of the appointment, how did this feel today? At first I told them why I was doing what I was doing, and they said, okay, yeah, I understand. Yeah, you know what, you're right. It was just a little nicer. And then, of course, in kata fashion, what did I learn? I also learned that it made it easier to read and write in the middle of appointments if we were doing that kind of stuff because one of us wasn't upside down.

Have you experimented with which side do you sit on?

I have. Since I write with my left hand, I sit on their left. And that way they don't have to try to look over my hand as I'm putting text down on the page.

Nice. Nice. Very good. All right. Hey, what's the best advice you've ever received?

Best advice I ever received was from a good family friend named Scott Frost. He's a consultant for a living, works in the medical industry. And he said, chris, you gotta network. You gotta go out and talk to people. And this was during a pretty low time. This is a period of unemployment after my first major career at the CNC company. And he said, this is how you do it. You go out and you find people who are doing things that you would like to do someday, and you ask them, how did you get to where you are today? He said, people love to tell their story. And he says, don't go in don't expecting them to offer you a job. Don't go in expecting anything other than just to learn and ask some clarifying questions and really listen. There's a lot of wisdom. People are happy to share their wisdom at the end. Ask them, is there anybody else you think I might want to talk to and see if you can get another node in your network? And then when you're done sent him a quick thank you card. Thanks for your time. That's it. That's all it has to be. He said, here's the thing. Once a month, write up a networking newsletter that talks about all of the people that you talked to that month and all the amazing wisdom you learned from them. Maybe put some of their pictures in there from LinkedIn and send that out to your network. Then he said, just happened to also include as a second attachment a fresh copy of her resume. And so I went out and tried this and I admit I was in kind of a fragile state at that point. And even having my first appointment was kind of a fearful thing at this time in my life. Was just kind of going between my front door and the factory and then back to my front door, not really getting out and networking. I didn't have a social media presence at all. And so I was really starting from a pretty small network. But I reached out to my old college roommate, he's a manager at SpaceX now. And I said, dude, would you let me practice with you? He says, sure. I took him out to lunch and we held the form and did the networking interview. And I said, is there anyone you think I ought to talk to next? He says, you ought to talk to Danny. So I talked to Danny. Danny said, you ought to talk to this other manager in our company. I talked to the other manager and the other manager said, you know who you might like? It's Kevin Meyer. You should talk to Kevin Meyer. And so I reached out to Kevin Meyer at this time and Kevin was so gracious. He did like an hour long networking phone call with me and led me to Matthew May's book, the Shibumi Strategy, and gave me some other tips. I think the other one that I got from out of that call was write three things you want to accomplish that day at the beginning of the day and then try to knock them out. He says it's deceptively hard. It's true.

Yeah.

Anyway, this networking thing was definitely the best advice I've ever received. My last two roles I've literally gained through networking. Two roles ago it was because I sent out that networking newsletter and a position had just opened up at my former coworker's company and I got hired on there as that manufacturing manager position. Then the role I'm in now. I was not a full time CI guy yet, but I wanted to be. So I was finding people with job titles that I aspired to have on LinkedIn. CI Manager, for instance. I had grown a first degree connection with the CI manager at this company. And when our HR guy went to look to fill the role, he started on LinkedIn and he found me as a first degree connection to his already existing CI manager and emailed me directly and said, hey, I'd like you to come interview for this. I think you'd be a good fit. And here I am networking once again. In fact, Ron, I think networking is the reason that I'm doing this podcast with you right now, because I knew who Gemba Academy was and I got to actually have lunch with with Gemba Academy folks both days at Katakan. And I was just so happy to interact and share my appreciation of everything that Kevin and Steve and Gemba Academy has done for me over the years. And I didn't expect to be invited on the show, but it's like networking magic. It just happens when you go out and interact with people.

Oh, that's so cool. So cool. Yeah, I mean, I know Kevin's talked about you and so it's a small world. I think if you just help enough people, good things are going to come around and. Yeah. So glad everything's worked out for you.

I figure if I do it enough, I'm going to meet Kevin Bacon someday.

There you go. Then it'll be kind of complete. Right. What else is there after that?

That's when you know.

Yeah, you've arrived. Yeah. Hey, is there any advice you would give? Jump in that time machine and go back and speak to yourself, I don't know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Would you give yourself any advice?

I would. I would say to my younger self, Chris, go find out about stoicism and Buddhist style breath meditation and learn about them and practice them until the pathways in your brain are changed by them. I wish I had known that earlier than I found out about it.

Well, yeah, as you've probably heard on past episodes that I've done, I'm also a huge fan of stoicism. And I don't know if you've read Ryan Holiday's book the Obstacles Away, but talk more about your interest in stoicism. Like Marco Aurelius Seneca. What is it that you like exactly?

I haven't read that book yet, but the principles of just kind of thinking about what the worst case scenario could be and then seeing could I be okay with that and understanding what is the minimum I need to get by? For instance, could I sleep on my kitchen floor one night just to feel uncomfortable? Or what would it be like if I just subsisted on Oatmeal today? Or what if I only drank water I found from free public sources. Things like this, like little practical mind experiments to, you know, what it does more than anything is recalibrate and take me out of either being a victim or a hedonist or whatever. It's a real leveling to just be able to be happy with the present moment. Love it.

Do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

This might sound funny, but my productivity tip is to stare off into space. But I've got to explain this a little first. A lot like Kevin, I keep a notebook with me. I happen to use a Moleskine notebook, the one that's close to the size of a sheet of eight and a half by 11 paper. And I write in it by hand every day. And so if I'm having particularly like heavy day at work, what I'll do is I just download into the notebook, write down everything I could think of that I might want to do and I just keep going until I feel satisfied. And then it's at that point just stop and stare. I can actually see a mountain from my office window here. I look up at that peak and just space for a little while. But I know that my subconscious mind, the back of my mind, is working through that action list. And it's a lot of ways like closing all the apps and restarting the computer. What I do is I free up all of this RAM in my mind by no longer having to try to hold on to the tasks themselves. I'm now able to let my mind figure out the most efficient path through them all. It's a wonderful priming exercise. My mind, I trust it to find the most efficient way through. And I also find that it alerts me to opportunities, resources around that I might not have noticed before, but that could be useful. The one I could think of is not work related. It's more trail running related. But what I wanted to do was carry ice with me in between aid stations. I saw that our babysitter had a chick fil a cup and it's a styrofoam cup and it's a nice sturdy one with a lid and I said that would be perfect. That would keep ice cold in a backpack for a while. During a race I started looking around for other styrofoam cups and it just would have looked like trash before. But since I knew that I had a need, the resource made itself visible to me.

All right, so I'm actually going to drop a new one on you. Now, I just interviewed Art Byrd from Wire Mold fame and this and that. I don't know why, but the question just kind of popped in my mind, and I'm curious. We talk sometimes about, you know, success stories and so forth and best advice and all the rest of it, but curious. Do you have any regrets as it relates to your journey with Lean?

Well, now, this sounds like similar to a question that you asked before, which is, talk about a failure you've had.

Yeah, it's similar. Maybe.

Yeah.

Quit trying to get out of it. Man.

Oh, man. You know, I have to dodge it because you have to acknowledge that everything that's happened up to this point helped shape what's going on with me and Lean today.

That's pretty much what Art said.

So don't feel bad. I'm not really in the regret business. It kind of goes along with the stoicism and meditation is what's happening now. If there's something back there to be learned from, great. Maybe we'll go back on purpose and reflect on it. But I'm not really holding on to any regrets that come to mind at the moment.

No, I love it. That's a great answer. It's a great answer. What are you most proud of as it relates to your journey?

This one was cool. This happened at my current company. We had a mission statement up when I started here. It was to be the best in America. I asked a couple of questions at one of our management meetings. I said, what place are we in? I said, what would be the best? What rank are we in now? Well, we don't know. Well, how would you know? We don't know. Anyway, not more than a week or two later, the plant manager said, chris, you know, we've got this strategic initiative thing that came from corporate. I'd like you to facilitate it for us. And so my proudest achievement was to facilitate the strategic initiative process for our plant. And it worked for several weeks. And we rewrote the vision statement, mission statement and values. And we set out five strategic initiatives to help us help the company reach its objectives. We are one of 28 business units in our company and then able to pull down that alignment down to the crew level. And just being able to see that happen and be a part of just coaxing out these ideas and helping people get stuff on the board, and then what can we eliminate? And then what really means the most to us was just the most rewarding process. I'm so proud to have been able to lead a group through that, especially since I'D never done it before, and I'm really proud of that result. Very cool. Very cool.

So you've got a lot of good experience over the years, but is there a knowledge area or skill area that you feel you need to improve?

Yes. And I think we discussed this a little bit. I want to get Six Sigma certified this year. And, Ron, I'll probably be getting a hold of you a little later because I put it down as one of my performance appraisal objectives for the year. I'm going to be graded on this next year and my salary is going to be affected on whether or not I get it done.

Come on, man, let's go.

I am committed. Then also, I realized that there's a lot about TWI that's that I don't know yet, but I've got enough taste of it that I say I want to know about that. So that's going to be another growth area for my learning.

Well, we got you covered on both, so come on over to Gamba Academy. We'll take care of you.

Excellent, Excellent.

What about any books that you're reading or recommend to others?

You know, I am going to recommend the Simple Leader by Kevin Meyer.

Okay.

And it's not just kissing you. It's. It's really an amazing book and it's not a large book and it really is simple, but not simple minded. He was so concise. Kevin was in capturing just a philosophy for life and some aspects of religion and mind state and how to run a company and how to run yourself and the entire history of Lean and enough information about critical Lean tools that you could really just set the book down and go start. And he fit all that into just a normal sized book that's light in the hand and that was quite an accomplishment. So I would really recommend the Simple Leader.

Yeah, good stuff, Good stuff. All right. Well, gosh, I could talk to you all day. It's been fun, Christopher. Let's wrap things up, though, with maybe sharing some final words of wisdom and then tell people how they can connect with you. I know you're on LinkedIn and some other places go there.

Well, remember that the best way to look out for yourself is to look out for others. And I could be reached on LinkedIn. I'm Christopher Ferrier on LinkedIn. In fact, part of my standard work for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast is to reach out to every guest that's on LinkedIn and ask them for a connection.

Really? Wow.

Yeah. So your past guests might have noticed that I'm also on Facebook and Strava for my running stuff primarily. And so if there are any runners in your audience that want to look me up there, that's primarily what I use those two pieces of social media for. And if you let me, going back to LinkedIn, I'm interested in starting a kata community of practice in the greater Los Angeles area. I'm not sure what shape that would hold yet, whether it's having second coaches come in kind of from one company to the other, or doing an off site where people get together and learn from each other. But if any of your listeners are in the greater Los Angeles area and would be interested in starting something with me, please reach out on LinkedIn. I'd be glad to develop that and grow that seed with you.

Very cool. Yeah. And we're going to link to all of Christopher's social media outlets here in the show notes. So the show notes here can be found@gembapodcast.com and look for episode 155. So, Christopher, well, I don't know if we'll see each other again at another conference later this year, but I'm sure our paths will cross again. I can't. I would say I'd go run up, you know, 100 miles with you on a mountain, but you'd probably end up carrying me through about 75% of it. I don't think you want that. But keep up the good work and it's been a pleasure chatting with you.

Thank you, Ron.

Take care.

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