GA 159 | Lean and Profitability with Jim Lancaster

You're listening to episode 159 with Jim Lancaster.

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 watching, 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 Jim Lancaster to the show. Now, longtime Lean thinkers have likely read the book called Lean Thinking, and if you have, you'll have read the story of LandTac. LandTac is one of the really original landmarks Lean Thinking companies, at least here in the US and they're really just showcased in that book as one of the original Lean exemplars, which they were. But what many people don't realize is that they actually went through a phase, kind of after the time the book was written, where things weren't always perfect for them. And they realized that while they were doing some really good stuff, they had lots of areas for improvement, in particular with profitability. So it was kind of like, wow, we're running all these Kaizen events and we're doing all this great work. Why aren't we more profitable? And so today's guest, Jim Lancaster, who is now the CEO, he took over for his father, kind of tells the story of why that was and what they did about it. In fact, Jim wrote a book called the Work of Management, where they really walk through this story of early Lean success and maybe some struggles, and then again coming out of it with. With more success. So it was definitely a great honor to speak with Mr. Lancaster, and I'm excited for you to hear the the this episode now show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 159159. Again, that's gembapodcast.com and look for episode 159. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Jim. Well, thanks so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

I'm calling from my office in beautiful sunny Louisville, Kentucky, Ron.

Nice. How sunny is it up there in Louisville today?

It is. It is. A beautiful spring day. We have spring early, and there's. There's buds coming out on the trees. And yeah, it's a wonderful day now.

So I got to ask, Kentucky, were you Wildcat fan?

No. No.

Okay.

No, I'm a UofL Cardinal fan.

Okay. Okay. Well, you never know. You know, it's kind of like, oh, gosh, do I even ask? Because if you get it wrong, then no.

We have a. There's obviously the big rivalry here in our state. In fact, in our factory, we have a big flag. And depending on who won the last UK UofL basketball game, they get their big flag in the middle of the factory.

Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

There is a big U of L flag out there at the moment.

Okay, okay.

All right.

Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Well, hey, it's a great honor having you on the show. Obviously, like many, many people read the Landtech story many, many years ago in Lean Thinking and Harvard Business Review and all good stuff. So it's really a great honor to talk to you. So, first of all, thanks for coming on.

Absolutely. It is my pleasure. I love talking about Lean and all this stuff, so it'd be fun.

Yeah. Good stuff. All right, well, we're going to kind of dig into the concept of really, Maybe we even call it a dirty little secret about Lean and profitability. Right. Kind of talk about how those two things don't always jive if things aren't going quite like we want them. So that's kind of going to be the theme. But before we get to that, we like to start our shows with our guests maybe sharing a quote or two of something that possibly inspires them. So is there a quote that you particularly enjoy?

Well, you know, it's. I don't have specific quotes, you know, quoting somebody else so much. But, you know, what I will tell you is that Bob Morgan, my mentor, told me this some number of years ago, and I love it, which is that the whole purpose of Lean is to accumulate competitive advantage. And that word accumulate is a really, really important word that really drives me every day. So I don't know if that rises to your question, but, boy, it sure drives me every day.

Oh, I love it. I love it. All right, well, let's jump right in. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about your background, kind of how you first came to learn about continuous improvement, and then tell us a little bit about Landtech.

Okay, well, let me start just a little bit with Landtech. So my father started the company back in the early 70s, it's a classic American startup. My mom was teaching school and I think I was in kindergarten or preschool. And after doing a few things prior, he and his brother decided to start this company and kicked me out of my bedroom. So I took up residence with my brother and the company started in what was my bedroom.

Nice.

And it wasn't long after that, during the oil crisis of the early 70s, that he came up with this idea of rotary stretch wrap, which is the idea that when you're shipping in the back of a semi truck, if we can put things on a pallet and we can load the back of a semi in about 20 minutes, as opposed to loading a back of a semi with individual cases, kind of like they still do UPS trucks, which can take six or seven hours. And so the trick of that though is when you get to the other end, it's really nice to be able to take the product off the truck with a fork truck on that pallet. And if it's all come off the pallet, that's kind of hard to do. So back in the 60s and 70s, we did that with big shrink bags or with strapping, which was very expensive and difficult to do and caused you to have to heat the product. So he came up with this idea of rotary stretch film or stretch wrapping and got some friends he had at Mobile to make him some what was dry cleaning film at the time on a big 80 inch roll and invented this rotary stretch wrap idea. And the company took off like crazy.

So one question I have on that, how did he come up with the idea? I mean that's a, I mean it's a pretty revolutionary idea. Before it was in. Now we're like, oh yeah, it's kind of normal, but not normal. But back then.

Well, I know, I mean, I know this sounds corny as all get out, but I remember him sitting at the kitchen table with some of my building blocks and he was playing with these building blocks and I remember him grabbing some Saran Wrap and starting to, starting to wrap it. And then I remember him playing with rubber bands and he tells the story that basically it's kind of a. My dad is a physics major, it's kind of a duh. But you don't have to put all the force at one time on the product. As you revolve, you put, let's call it 10 or 15 pounds of force every revolution and you can put as many on as you want. And that basic concept, using the tension of the film against the load as you rotate it as Opposed to trying to use heat or something else was just different, was just dramatically different. And obviously strapping and those kind of things put all the force in a really small spot which ends up crushing a lot of product. So it ended up being great. So I think like all invention, if my dad was sitting here, he would say that the invention or the idea is typically the easy part. The hard part is understanding the problem. And I think he really understood that he had bunches of different shapes that needed to be held together with even force. And this was a way to do it. And it's really the same when you're doing any kind of problem solving. Typically if you can see the problem differently or see the problem specifically, it's not that hard to solve. The trick is trying to find and see it.

Okay, well, maybe I've got some other questions about you from your book, the Work of Management, which obviously we're going to spend some time talking about as well. But talk a little bit about Landtech's. No, I want to ask this one now because it's before Lean. So I've got children and they have dreams of, you know, maybe one day being part of dad's company, genba Academy and that sort of thing. And in your book you talked about growing up at Lamtech. I mean, you mentioned you cleaned bugs out of every light fixture in the building. You know, as a young, as a young man, what was it like growing up, you know, in this company? Just as a kid, did you think that you were gonna work there forever and be the CEO one day? Or was it just that what you were supposed to be doing at the time?

You know, it was. My dad is this really dynamic guy who's just very aggressive and full of energy. Always has a plan. And you know, we were at the office a lot because on the weekends, especially in the early days, my dad was at the office and so, but the family was together, so we were here. So I mean, I was coloring on whiteboards and roller skating through the plant when I was really young. Now the plant wasn't near as big as it is now, so I was sort of here a lot also when the business was really small, as my dad tells the story, it wasn't the easiest thing to recruit people. So he really built personal relationships between the families of the managers in the early years as a way to build loyalty. Plus he just liked everybody that worked here. And so I knew their kids and it was a very family oriented place. So I grew up here and my father talked about the business all the time at home. So I knew about what was going on with the latest patent or this management problem or whatever. I knew a lot about what was going on even as a grade school kid. Then I started working here actually I think my first time I really worked more than just like a one or two day thing was helping them move into the building we're currently in in 79. And then when I turned 14 I worked here every summer and every day after school until I left for college. And I did everything from answer the phones like I said I did. I can fold blueprints about faster than about anybody around I think all kinds of stuff. So what that did for me is I got to see the work at a detailed level all over the place. I wasn't allowed to work in manufacturing until I was 18 but prior to that, how things worked and got to know people. It was fun and exciting. When you run a medium sized was a small business then or a medium sized business now, it's really cool because it's a train set that's got all the components in it. We have sales and marketing and manufacturing and product development and engineering. All the different functions are all here in one spot. So you know, it's fascinating. And so I've always been fascinated with it and as I was growing up believed I would come back and work here. I for a few years, when I got out of college was in New York doing the finance thing and didn't think I was going to come back at that point because I was having a lot of success in that. But my father changed my mind as he tends to do.

Okay, got it, got it. All right, well let's jump right into Landtech's journey. So, so many of us have read the, I guess the first wave of our phase one or I don't know what phase it was but the early years of Lentex or Lean success. And I don't want to maybe I try to choose my words carefully but I would call it more event driven Lean. I don't know if that's fair. That's what it sounded like in your book, that lots of successful events and one piece flow was implemented and things were going very well. Is that accurate? Am I getting that right for those early years of Lean at Landtech?

Yes, I would say so. I mean I think you can look at it one of two ways. We made massive improvements. I mean when we went from just incredibly large batches and huge amounts of inventory. And it's not just the money that was absorbed in the Inventory. It was just the waste of all that stuff everywhere to make, to order and one piece flow. The impact on the business was just so overwhelming, so huge. That impacted us for years. We had 60 people freed up within the first two years of implementing Lean back in the 90s, and we had made a commitment not to do any layoffs. Those folks were all then moving it to sales and product development and these investment areas that then caused the business to just explode in growth. So, you know, it's one of the reasons we were able then to get Lean to hit the bottom line is we took the freed up resources and put them on something that would create revenue growth. Because if you don't take, if you don't let people go, your expenses go down. So the only way you make more money is you grow the business. I mean, kind of simple math, but some people don't understand that. Right, right. So, but very event oriented. We would do one week long Kaizens, and we would bring in a facilitator generally, especially at the beginning, and we'd have a big group, 10, 15 people, and we would just blitz the living daylights out of an area process, map it, relay it out, put together, you know, wood, duct tape, whatever it took to get a new process in place and then try to document it. And Monday morning, it was the team leader in the area's job to keep it rolling.

So. Okay, well, let's go into the next phase. And this is kind of in the book you mentioned. You're asking some tough questions like we're so good at these events and awesome. You're standing in the back clapping for the event, but you're wondering, why aren't our profits better? Talk about that phase of the journey.

Well, you know, I'm a young CEO and I just come back. You got to. I came back from New York and this was late 90s, early 2000s. Remember the dot com boom? I had buddies working for some of these companies that were just growing like crazy. And I was like, gosh, I got to be better. I got to be able to get this rolling better than this. We were profitable and we paid off all the debt and highly successful compared to where we were. What I was seeing is that the work we had put into Lean to get us where we had come to by the late 90s was not going to get us any further. It was not. We were living off the improvements of the prior years, really, the product developments we had put together and the new sort of level of quality that was well above our competitors. But it wasn't continuing to give us a return. And I knew we had to do something different. And I believed that Lean had sort of run its course, that we had gotten the main improvements and this switch from batch to one piece flow was awesome. And it wasn't just in manufacturing. It was, you know, we called it re engineering at the time, but we went through the entire office areas and dropped dramatically the amount of time it took to do everything from order entry to close the books. And so our idea was, let's do that somewhere else. So among other things, we went and acquired some companies and with the idea that we would take these principles and apply them in those places and continue the growth. Because my objective was to be growing at 20% a year and to be making top quartile profitability in our industry. We were about 50% of the profitability and we were growing single digits, percentage growth. When I started looking at these acquisitions, I'd go into these acquisition targets and they couldn't run their company anywhere near as well as we were running ours, except for that little problem where we weren't making as much money as they were. And so I'm like, dad gummit. I used different words. But I was just very frustrated that I knew I was doing something wrong and I just couldn't figure out what it was. And as you read in the book, some of my friends were telling me, well, the problem is, Jim, you're doing all these great things, you tell these stories. It's amazing. These people are coming to visit. Da da da da da da. Your problem is you're just not holding on to the, the gains you're putting in place. You've got these people working for you that just don't care and you're not holding them accountable because you've got this really nice culture and you got to do something about that or all this work you're putting in is going to waste. Like I said in the book, I hired some really nice guys, actually really smart guys out of a very large corporation to come in and put an accountability structure in place. And long story short, that didn't work very well. Yeah, I mean, it just didn't work out. And I'm not saying accountability is not important. What I'm saying is that accountability without understanding the work is actually counterproductive, at least in our kind of business. So anyway, that didn't work. And that sort of led me on the journey where I found sort of this next chapter, which is how do you continue after you've done that? First big jolt of sort of process mapping, getting rid of the big waste stuff, kind of straightening the line out, getting one piece flow in. What do you do after that? And it turns out there is enormous amounts of waste left, enormous amounts of upside left. I just couldn't get my finger on it at the time now.

So this is now about the time where the consultant came in and I say maybe more of a daily management approach to working was, I don't know, beginning to get implemented. Is that right?

No, not really. The first thing that we did was he went back to teaching me and the rest of the top management about work. I mean, Bob Morgan's a gentleman's name and his approach was you have to understand work and the sort of enemies of being able to do work the same every day or the management system won't work. And he was really correct with that. So we spent a bunch of time going back and understanding what we call standardized work. And that's not the same thing as what we Learned in the 90s, which was standard work, which is a sequence of work. Standardized work is really about making the way work gets done the easiest way to do the work, therefore gets done the same every time. And sort of incorporating that flow of work into the environment in a way that can actually happen sequence after sequence. And then getting involved in designing those work cells means you get vested in their success. And when you get vested in their success and they deteriorate, you get pissed off and then you want to do something about it. And that's when the management system got introduced.

Ye. Without standards, there can be no kaizen, right?

Well, without standards there can be no kaizen. But what I'll add to that is without, let's just put it this way, without standards you can't maintain. And without maintaining, there's no use to improving because it's all going to go away anyway.

Yeah, yeah. All right, so keep going with the story.

So I think what happened was I committed to Bob in order to get him to come help me, that I would basically go back to the shop floor and relearn again. And you have to understand, Bob didn't need this gig. He wasn't a professional consultant. He was retired, had just bought a yacht, he was going to start sailing around the world, and I couldn't pay him enough to come be my ops manager or vp, which is what I really wanted. So he agreed to help me a couple days a week if I agreed to basically do what he said. And that's what I did. And I can't tell you the fun I had and the embarrassment that I experienced when I went and did that. When I went and did that, meaning went and relearned how to design work. And I keep talking about going to the shop floor to do that because manufacturing is by far the easiest place to learn this. When you go into an office environment, work is work. It's all the same. It's just more difficult to see. And so in manufacturing, it's far easier to see. So when I say embarrassed, I was embarrassed. Because when you get on the shop floor and you don't just walk around, but you're in an area long enough to really understand what goes on. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, all the sort of shows that go on for a day or two when you're standing there go away and you see the real issues. And you also get to know the operators and you realize they're no different than you. They're not dumb, they're not lazy, they want to do a good job. They have a ton of issues that hit them every day, and they get frustrated every day with how hard we make it for them to actually accomplish their job. And that sort of, in my gut, is what allowed. Has allowed me, I think, to implement the management system in a way that actually supports them.

Now, how long did it take to get this management system into an operational mode?

Two weeks.

Oh, wow.

Okay. So the management system went in place very rapidly. The process to get me in a position where I have any shot pulling it off was about six, seven months. So we laugh around here because we try to teach people this system and assume we can teach them without them going through the same thing we went through. I don't think it takes six or seven months once your culture is sort of moved, but it takes time for our managers to really get it. We got to get them into some work, and they have to design it, and they have to see how hard it is to hold. And otherwise the problem is we all think we can just change something real quick from a distance, and we're really smart, and it's all going to work.

So when was this? When you. What was the year when this management system.

Let's see, this was 06. The summer of 06 was when I was on the floor all summer and into the fall.

Okay.

Because Bob has a sense of humor, and so he thought me out there sweating all summer was a good plan. So. And then we put the management system in the fall of 07, and it was, we literally had a planning session. We drew up the structure of the management system. We pulled all the managers in the whole place together, asked them to go find one or two quality metrics that they were already tracking that they could get up and they could get a 90 day run rate on and told them how to post it and all that and what to do with it, that they'd have a week to get started to get it posted and start looking at the results on a daily basis and seeing what was causing variation in those measures. And then the following Monday we would start the sort of top management walk. So we have, you know, this management structure is a tiered structure where every piece of work is touched every morning and then it cascades cross functionally and up so that everything is touched and is interconnected every morning. And that provides an infrastructure for support. And you know, the impact was just unbelievable, the impact we had on quality. In that first year we had, you know, most metrics dropped by between 70 and 90% meaning the quality defect rates dropped. So for example, we were dropping 7% of our customer service calls. When we started the end of the first year we were dropping less than 1%. Now we drop, we'll go a week without a single dropped call. And that's not by just, that's not adding resources. That's just why were we able to drop two yesterday and we dropped seven today? What's different? Change back to what solved that problem. And in many cases the problems were very simple. Had to watch the work, watch what was going on, see what was different between the two occurrences and lock down the correct way.

So it's interesting timing when this management system was put in place 0607, certain event occurred to our great nation in 2008. So curious, how did the management system hold up during the recession?

It was incredibly impactful. So in the fall of 08, September is when basically the phone stopped ringing. August, September is when the phone stopped ringing. Of 08. We had a decent backlog because the bubble had really exploded just prior to that. I don't know if you remember, but commodity prices were going up. We're all raising our prices and just trying to keep up because as you're raising prices, people are throwing orders at you to try to get their equipment on the old price before you increase the pricing. So everybody was sort of experiencing that. So anyway, by the fall there when the phone stopped ringing, I had about 90 days of lead time because I had about 90 days of backlog. The simple thing we did is we added cost to the quality metrics and we said, find the cost metrics in your area, in every area, get them on the board, and let's see, let's get a run rate on those. And then we want ideas. And what we used the management system for was every day making those decisions. Because we were touching cross functionally every day, we could literally determine the impacts across the organization of making various decisions. Instead of having to look for the five or 10 or 15 big cost savings, we were hitting 30, 40 a day, every single day. And we took expenses down. But more importantly, we took variable margin up by almost 7 points, percentage points. And we did that by driving material cost out of our solution, out of our equipment, and doing a fair amount of insourcing. And we ended up with dramatically lower revenue and almost the same profitability. The reason that worked in 2009, 2010, the analogy I want to use is the steering wheel of the car was hooked up to the wheels. So when we needed to make a steering change, a focus on cost, we were able to make that instantly, and we were able to connect up and make really good decisions really fast in high numbers. And most organizations can't do that. We couldn't do that in the recession in 2001. I understood philosophically what we needed to do in 2001, which is to switch our energy to continuous improvement and take cost out and all these things when our revenue dropped. But I couldn't get. I steered left and the car didn't go left. In this particular case, we steered and instantly the car moved or the organization moved. So then what happened after that is obviously the business started to grow again and we added the rest of, I'll call it the categories of measurement. So now it's quality, cost, delivery, safety, and skills that we track. We also track sort of as part of that, what we call environment. But really environment is safety and skills and. And preparedness for the day. So we've got those tracking mechanisms going. And basically what happens is, for example, on an individual quality metric, after a while you get to such a low number that it's not producing enough problems. And if you're not producing problems, you're not getting the improvement from fixing them. So we would continually move the line down on quality. And then when that sort of runs out, you come up with something. You either come up with a different quality measure or you move to cost. In our case, we move to safety and delivery and skills that gives that flexibility. For example, in the last two years, two and a half years, the Biggest business issue has not been cost because material costs haven't been moving that much. It hasn't been quality. Our biggest issue has been the labor shortage in our marketplace here in Louisville. We got a lot of automotive here that has just exploded, and so it's just drained the area of labor. And so we had a. We ended up, for the first time in our history, having a significant turnover problem as these fairly skilled folks that we had trained up over the years were being hired away to go into maintenance jobs, et cetera, in these other factories.

So what was your countermeasure to that?

We had a couple countermeasures. So the first countermeasure from a management perspective is we had to understand how deep we were, what our skills were and what our cross training looked like. So we put in skills matrices that we could see and we put in metrics that were based on. This may be too technical, but it was the number of cells that people were trained up to. So in a particular factory, if you had 20 work cells in 20 operators, how many, what we call green squares did you have? And if you had less than 40, which means you had 40, would mean in a perfect world, all 20 people knew two cells. We know if you're under 40, you're going to become unstable because on any given day, somebody's not going to be here. You get the normal turnover rate and you fall instantly to not having somebody that can fill a cell. By setting those standards and starting to drive on those standards, it caused us to plan ahead in terms of how we did cross training, and it gave us better visibility on where turnover was coming from and let us combat it. The best countermeasure we found, though, for the labor issue was very clearly articulating the career ladder for people in manufacturing. And we as an industry have not done that exceptionally well. So by laying out here's what you can do and here's what your role in getting yourself positioned for the next level promotion in manufacturing has actually made a pretty significant difference in our turnover rate.

Yeah. So you're obviously very successful at LanTech and things are going well. And I can imagine that writing a book isn't something that you need to do. So why did you write this new book, the Work of Management?

That's a good question. First of all, Jim Womack sort of guilt tripped me into it after multiple times asking me to do it, and he got me on a weak moment. And I say that half jokingly because I take so seriously my job that I have here of working with the folks that are here and, you know, it can be a distraction. But I also think that this whole idea of deterioration and the fact that lien doesn't hit the income statement is such a big problem that causes people to fall off the wagon. That I wanted to share our success and our experience because I think it's so important to the ability. And I don't mean to be to sound funny about it, but I think for our country to be competitive, we've got to be good at making things. And in order to be good at making things, we have to love doing the work of designing work and learning how to manage and run manufacturing. And I think we lost some of the zest for that. And I've really gotten it back by this fun process of working on how work gets done. And I wanted to share it.

What's the title mean? The Work of Management.

That management is a job, just like putting a wheel on a car. And you put a wheel on a car with a very certain set of steps and that causes that wheel to go on there in a way that it's not going to fall off. And management is the same thing. We tend to think of management as this soft thing we do based on feeling. And it's this sort of professional skill you get. And I'm not saying there's not a professional skill. There is. But to do it well, it is just like any other work. It's to be put in sequence. It's to be done in a way that can be expected so that operators or working folks can expect what kind of response they're going to get. And that response is supportive to allowing them to do their job well. So management is an incredibly important job that in my opinion, doesn't get done in a lot of places.

So now give some advice to someone that has bought the book. Should it just start at the front and work their way to the back, or is there a different way to use the book?

Well, yeah, I mean, I wrote it to read from the beginning, to go to the end. I think the way I wrote the book is to try to tell my story so that people could relate to their situation. It's not a textbook.

I guess that's what I meant.

Yeah, it's not a textbook. That is meant to walk you through. Do step A, do step B, do step C. And the reason for that is this is an experience. What I wanted to convey is this is an experience that I had that caused me to believe differently about work and believe differently about my responsibility as a manager. And until I got there, this system of do this, do this, do this, do this I don't think would have worked. And I really hope that the reader gets that, gets that, and then engages in the work and their business in a different way. Because if you engage down at the value add level and you stick with it long enough, you will get the understandings I think that I got.

You know, it's funny, I've never talked to you before and as I was reading the book, I, you know, you kind of get a feel for a person when you read their work. And now that I'm talking to you, I feel your energy. Right, talking to you. But you can feel your energy when you read the book. It's really interesting now, kind of marrying the two, now that I've actually got to talk to you. So, yeah, so I've really enjoyed the book. And I'm not just saying that to help you sell more books, but it's very story based and those are my favorite types of books. But not fake stories or real stories. Right. And that's what I've really enjoyed about it. So the work of management, we're gonna link to it in the show notes. What we'd like to do here towards the ends of all of our shows, Jim, is ask a few what we call reflection questions. And so this first one is kind of a. We, we've done it for 150 some episodes, we've asked the same question. You know, we spend a lot of time in Lean talking about these two pillars, right? This continuous improvement and respect for people. With continuous improvements, the tools, the things that we can touch and do and see. But respect for people can be a little bit harder to wrap our arms around and grasp. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you?

You know, it's funny, it's a difficult thing to explain, but let me try. First of all, humans are doing the work and we are all humans. And the way I try to wrap my head around this is I've got to respect them, the operators, if you will. It could be a salesperson, an accountant, a manager, by respecting their work. When I respect somebody's work, I respect them. Or when I disrespect their work, I disrespect them. When I respect their space, I respect them. When I respect their situation, I respect them. And what I mean by that is I don't walk into somebody's area without asking for permission. I don't get in the way of what they're doing. I Send a very loud message. If I'm in an aisle and a fork truck is waiting for me because I'm standing there about what's most important. And when I talk about what's most important, the person on that fork truck has a feeling about how important his job is, which then has to do with his self esteem. Does that make sense?

Yeah. No, it does. It does.

It's a straight respecting work and respecting space respects the people. It's like I tell people all the time, my job as a manager is to provide valuable, productive work. Because if I provide valuable, productive work, that person who does that productive work knows he did productive work or she did productive work and goes home feeling good about their day, nobody goes home going, oh, man, I feel great. I got to sit on my butt all day and do nothing because the engineer sent me a bad set of drawings. No, they're frustrated. They want to go home feeling like they actually accomplished something during the day. Everybody does. I think so. And that really comes from understanding that people want to do the right thing. And I've really come to learn. I'm 50 years old now, and I've come to understand that if I can understand that if something's going wrong, it's not always. But 98% of the time it's because somebody was not set up for success either. From a training perspective, a tool perspective, a process perspective, something. If I go in thinking it's because somebody doesn't care, A, I'm generally wrong, and B, I'm disrespecting him.

Yeah.

So I don't know if that.

No, that was great. Very good, Very good. What's the best advice you've ever received?

I mean, this is boring, but go see. Go experience the customer, the product, the work process, the culture. You know, I took a trip to Europe a couple years ago with my kids and we went to Normandy beach. And the discussion about World War II is completely different. After having my kids stand there and look down on that beach, then when you. And think about it in your own mind, if you read a book about something and then you go see it, how it's just the whole experience and how you think about it and remember it and deal with it is completely different. It's no different in standing there in a factory and watching an operator utilize a piece of our equipment and what's working for them and what's frustrating for them. It's no different walking down and seeing what it's really like to load my paint line with a paint cart. So I Mean, that advice is just. And my dad has always been. He didn't do it from quota lean perspective early on, but he's always been that way. All of our, you know, I don't know, three or four hundred patents come from a unique understanding of what's going on in that customer location. And then coming up with solutions that other people hadn't thought of. Not because we're so brilliant about the solution, but because we were standing there and they weren't.

What's your favorite story about your dad that people may not have heard in the books and articles and so forth?

Oh, gosh, there's hundreds of stories about. Well, first one, this one's funny. My dad's a physics major and so people would think he'd be kind of a scientist type guy, but when he was trying to figure out the dynamics going on in the back of a semi truck to determine what we needed to do to optimize the way we package these loads so they get there without getting damaged, he didn't instrument the back of a truck. He. He rented a truck with a semi trailer. This was back in the 70s. You do this now, you get in big trouble. And he bolted a bunch of park benches to the inside of, on the floor on the inside of the trailer. He put he and his engineers on the park benches and then had it driven up and down the expressway and around the road in the back of the back. So, you know, they're riding along in the semi and it's that same experience thing gives you a visceral understanding of what's going on. My other favorite story is early in our lean process. And I know this because I was here at the time, I was a young guy. But you know how what you're doing, you're re figuring out how you're going to lay an area out. And everybody's coming up with their own cart designs and fixture designs and part presentation designs. And my dad prides himself as being a garage mechanic kind of guy. So he put this whole wood fixture together as a cart to carry one of these frames of our machines. And there was another team doing the same thing, and they got together to decide whose was better. And this other team's cart was just far more ergonomic, worked better, all kinds of stuff. So they had a big ceremony and threw my dad's cart into the dumpster. And it was great. It was great.

Oh, God. Wow. Fantastic. What are you most proud of as it relates to your journey with lean?

You know, I'm proud of a Couple things I'm proud a that we figured out how to get it to the bottom line and we figured out how to grow the business utilizing lean. And I think what a lot of people misinterpret is putting one piece flow in doesn't grow the business. Putting one piece flow in, putting 5s in, putting this management system in, is a facilitator to do the things we need to do in business, which is make products that solve problems. Right. So we've been able to do that successfully now on multiple continents with multiple different products. And I'm really proud of that. The other thing I'm proud of is just what we make. I mean, what we make is really cool and it saves billions and billions of pounds of product going into the dump because it's no longer damaged when 15, 20 years ago it would have been damaged and gone into the, into the solid waste stream. And a lot of the improvements we've made on our equipment in the last 10 years are really from a lean understanding of the improvements we've made in our processes have rolled into the equipment. So the way you operate a piece of equipment today is far more intuitive. We've gotten rid of a lot of the steps and instead of telling the machine what to do like we used to, now you tell it what you want it what you want the result to be and it figures out what to do. So things like that that just make big leaps in the performance of what it does. I'm really, really proud of that. And I'm also proud that we're an American company shipping products all over the world competitively. So that's kind of cool.

Yeah.

Any good?

I know we've spent quite a bit of time talking about your book, but are there any of the books that you've read recently or maybe this past year or so that you recommend other folks check out?

Yeah, my favorite book of all time, it's called Leadership and Self Deception. I don't know if you've heard of it.

I have not read that one.

Leadership and Self Deception. Yeah, Leadership and Self Deception. It is just an absolute great book. It's the R. Binger Institute, I think, put it out and I've handed this book out for years. But yeah, it's a phenomenal truth in how to interact with people and manage and lead. It doesn't directly talk about leadership, it talks about this. It's really about respect, really. And when you're a highly energetic, high energy, wanting to achieve a lot of person, and I've met a few of those people. This is just a really important understanding of the dynamics of communication and how to motivate folks. That's real versus I think a lot of the motivational stuff is sort of transitory.

Well, I'm going to order as soon as we get off this interview. Last question. So you've been around for quite a long time, you've seen a lot of success and you've learned a lot. But I'm curious, is there an, a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become a better lean thinker?

Well, I can always get better at problem solving. I think problem solving is the most difficult of the components. Laying out a one piece flow now I can do really effectively. I know how to set up pull loops, I can set up supply chains, I can do a lot of these management structures. I've done it in multiple locations. But learning how to find the root cause of a problem is still many times very difficult. And how to coach people through that is very difficult. We do it, we try, we do it better than a lot of people do, but whoo, it's hard. The second one that's also difficult is the next level up in product development process. There's some good books that have been written about it, but doing it is, it's tough. So we're working on that one and we're learning and you know, having the words and all that are good, but figuring out how to actually make it work in the real world, we're still working on that one.

Well, something tells me that you guys are going to figure it out. You seem pretty innovative and you don't seem to take no for an answer and you always find a way, it seems like. So I'm sure you're going to be successful.

We're trying.

Alright, good stuff. Hey, how can people connect with you, Jim?

Well, they can connect to me through our website, lantech.com there's a contact us and there's a contact the CEO there which works. I am also on LinkedIn and now you're going to ask me my LinkedIn address.

We'll find you. We'll put it in the show notes.

Yeah, just put it in the end of the podcast I think. But they can get me through LinkedIn.

Yeah, got it. All right, well, hey, I really appreciate taking time to talk with us today. It's been great. Again, a great honor and great job with the book. You got any more books in the process or what?

Not right now. Not right now. Maybe when I get product development figured out, I'll tell you the story. You never know.

There you go. There you go. All right. Good stuff. All right, well, thanks again, Jim. You take care.

You too. It was my pleasure. Thank you, Ron.

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