GA 177 | How to Think Like Toyota with Tracey and Ernie Richardson

You're listening to episode 177 with Tracy and Ernie Richardson. 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 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 Tracy and Ernie Richardson to the show. Now, we actually had Ernie and Tracy on, oh, gosh, back in 2014. I believe it was episode 30. But they came back on to talk about their new book. Now, this book is called the Toyota Engagement Equation, and they go into great detail on what that title really means, in particular the equation part. Some pretty interesting stuff. So throughout the episode, we really kind of just dive into their journey. And as you'll hear, Tracy and Ernie both really grew up, so to speak, at Toyota. They were there at the very beginning of the Georgetown, Kentucky facility and kind of started as hourly workers and worked all the way up to leadership positions. And now they teach others all about Lean and the Toyota production system through their consulting. They're really, really sharp folks and they have a really just great personality. And I really enjoy chatting with them, as I do every time I get to chat with them. One quick plug for our AME event that we have going on at the AME conference this year. Again, I don't want to go into great detail, but all of the information is going to be over@gembaacademy.com ame so you'll find a coupon code there to save 10% on the price to the conference. And then you'll be able to RSVP for our cocktail party, which is going to happen on the Tuesday night of that session. And this music that you're hearing in the background is of the little jazz trio that we've already hired to kind of play a little background music. So we're going all out this year, and I'm super, super excited for that cocktail party. So again, genbaacademy.com ame and all the information will be there. Now, show notes for this particular episode can be found over on our GembaPodcast.com page and you'll look for episode 177. Again, GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 177. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Well, all right. Tracy and Ernie, thanks for coming back onto the show. How you guys been?

We are doing good, Ron. Thanks for having us back. We were honored to be back on talking about the book, and it's really a great opportunity to share.

Yeah, awesome, awesome. Yeah, we talked before we got rolling here. You guys came onto the show back in October of 2014 in episode 30. I was like, I can't even believe it's been that long.

I know. It seems like. It seems like it was a lot more recent than that.

I know, I know. But time flies when you're having fun, I guess.

On planes, right?

Yeah, that, too. That, too. All right, well, good stuff. Well, hey, I'm super excited to have you guys back on. We're going to talk about your new book, the Toyota Engagement Equation. And before we get started, I want to make y' all blush a little bit. My. My colleague, business partner, and our mutual friend John Miller recently, you know, read the book, and I know he's, you know, kind of, I guess, been chatting with you a little bit, Tracy, about it, but he wrote a blog article where he reviewed your book, and I don't think you paid him too much money for this. So. But this is. This is a little bit of what he said. This is towards the end, and for those that know John, this is. John doesn't talk like this very often, but he said this is the best written and most enjoyable book on Lean and the Toyota experience in the past 20 years. It is full of lessons we can borrow to make our own organization stronger. It's accessible to beginners and will also challenge advanced learners to deepen their grasp of lean thinking. Encourage anyone concerned with leadership, continuous improvement, people engagement, practical problem solving, Lean and the Toyota production system to pick up and study this book. So when I read that, I was like, whoa, you know, you know, that's pretty.

That's pretty. That's pretty awesome.

Yeah. Yeah.

There's a lot of great books out there, you know, that we've read and been a part of and learned from as well. And, you know, John's a great guy and respect him a lot in our Lean world. And to hear him say that, we were just honored to be part of, you know, that level in the community to share and to bring the Toyota story. And it hit home for folks like John and others, we really tried to, you know, take people on our journey. So it seems like that the feedback so far, early stages, it's, it's coming across as we intended.

Yeah, beautiful, Beautiful. All right, well, let's go ahead and just kind of catch folks up and, and go ahead and just tell us a little. We're going to get into the book, obviously, so don't, don't spoil the whole book with this part, but just give us a little bit about your background and, and kind of how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff.

Well, I'll kind of start with that. You know, before I went to work at Toyota, I worked at IBM and that was probably my first exposure to efficiency improvements is what we called it there. But I wasn't prepared when I left IBM to go into Toyota where that became part of the expectation every single day. And so the move into Toyota at the early stages, when we open the plan up and then to go through the, what we'll term is culture change and see that through all the way from a team member perspective into a leadership perspective and see how important that is, is very, it was very impactful to me in my career, Toyota and you know, I spent 25 years at Toyota and I tell people the day I started, I was learning. The day I left I was learning. So very, very great company to work with and very taught me an awful lot about Lean, but also taught me a lot about me personally. So I think it was a win, win for me.

Tracy, what about you?

Yeah, so like Ernie, you know, we both started there in the very early phases of, you know, them creating the, and building the plant. You know, there was a lot of construction going on around us and you know, we were both, we started out hourly and Ernie was team leader, I was team member. But from that kind of basic perspective of seeing the culture grow and it's like we were all growing together. You know, Toyota as a company was growing with us. The trainers were growing with us because they had a barrier of translating to English what they knew so well in Japanese. So it was a really neat time. You know, what we wanted to create in the book was something I think that in the historical perspective of us being, being there in that early stage and being so lucky to go through the hiring process. And we allude to it in the book of, you know, there was 100 and some odd thousand people putting in for 1500 jobs. And so to come out of this, you know, I call it the Sifters, we all were rocks and we came out, the grains of sand were hired in, in those first days and to experience that culture and, and as Ernie said, from hourly employees up through salary and leadership positions was, you know, a priceless opportunity. And to recreate that path, you know, the first part of the book, I think, is to take you on a Gemba with us, with our learning, because none of us started there with a lot of preconceived notions or knowledge. You know, a lot of us, I think more, more than 70% of us had no automotive experience. So it was really neat to learn and grow together. We were all sponges kind of soaking it in. So it was a really special time for, I think, Kentucky for us, for Toyota to start that as a seed as they've grown now in North America and globally.

Yeah, yeah, good stuff. All right, so the Toyota Engagement Equation is the name of the book. So my first question for you guys, and you guys can just tag team these answers however you'd like, but is why did you write it and what problem were you trying to solve?

Good question. So, you know, we, we talked about this a long time ago. I actually had the idea back in, it's about 10 years this year in 07. And you know, there's, as we talked about before, there's so many great books out there around the thinking, you know, we call it Lean. There's the Six Sigma side of it, there's the people development side of it. There's so many facets to the DNA or the cultural, the climate behind what happens in Toyota. And for us, living that kind of, that experience, that real time sense of being there and being a part of something that was, you know, as we considered to be very special, we felt the need to, as we were progressing on in our careers and I had gone into consulting, you know, we wanted to try to share this story. And so many people would ask me, as, you know, Ernie was still, you know, working at the plant when I started teaching Lean Inc. But I would get asked the question, what was it like? You know, what was it like to work there? How did it feel to be part of that culture? You know, how does one replicate that culture? And so the more we thought, you know, how do you answer that question? Easily, you know, it's a very loaded question. And how do you pull out many years of, you know, having a trainer next to you asking, why are you thinking this way? Tracy Sond, please explain. Let me know the deeper thinking behind, you know, think about it a little longer, those types of things, you know, I got asked why many times, as we know they're famous for asking. And so the book was our way to share the what we would consider not the answer, but a process of thinking that takes folks down a journey, a path that we went down to try to not replicate, but be able to see that this is doable. You know, if you have what we have in part of the formula of the book, which is the DNA, the discipline and accountability to recreate what we did, so to speak, the doing in quotations, you know, the problem that it is solving is to help folks create the people side, the culture side, which is so often missed in industries, all industries today, is that people side. Ernie, I don't know if you have a hard time.

I think to me it's, you know, we work with a lot of great companies who start using tools and tools are important, but, but what we believe and I think the answer to the question for us is, you know, you have to start with culture. Are you a culture that wants lean for the right reasons? And the book tries, tries to help people understand how, how we were engaged into the culture. And it didn't, it wasn't a one day thing, you know, it really was, you know, 25 years for me and several years for Tracy. But it was the daily engagement of people of how that culture was developed and continued to change.

So I'm curious, talk a little bit about how the book is structured in parts and chapters and so forth. Take us through that a little bit.

Sure. So we tried to look at it as a lot of people are kind of kinesthetic learners or they like a process. And, and so we tried to take them down the process of how we learn. So if you look at a 50,000 foot level or a high cut macro level. So there's part one, which is the first four chapters which really kind of talks about the hiring process, our learning journey through that, the competencies they were looking for in the employees they were bringing in in those first round of hires, our discoveries with our trainers, you know, that, that learning journey, which was often, you know, trials and tribulations, you know, it wasn't all fun. You know, there was failures involved, there were successes, there was frustration, sometimes language barriers, sometimes it was just a cultural way of how we discuss problems. You know, we were all conditioned from youth to hurry up and solve it, you know, and we often would jump to a countermeasure before we would know what the problem actually was. And they always grounded us to, as you ask us, what problem are you solving? So there was a lot of early Gemba time as we were constructing the equipment, our standardized work, our visual boards, a lot of things that would help us to start. So it kind of goes through the chapters of what I call the phone call when I got the call to be hired. And chapter two talks about the early days. Chapter three is becoming a leader. And then chapter four, which is part of the. Part one, gets into the DNA, the discipline, accountability at a micro level and then at a macro level, Toyota's DNA. So, you know, you have individual discipline and accountability we all are responsible for. And that feeds up into the higher level macro DNA, which is what creates, you know, the company's characteristics, kind of like human DNA. What's our fundamentals that we are made up of. And so that kind of goes through part one of just our learning journey.

Now, before you get to part two, I want to circle back one question I have. Tell us a little bit. You mentioned the hiring practices. Give us a little insight into how that worked back at least when you were there at Toyota.

So that was very interesting. You know, I was, I was 18 when I was going through the process. I was a sophomore, actually a freshman and a sophomore. It took me a year and a half. And part of that was the timing. You know, they had just broke ground in 1986 and there wasn't anywhere to go for several months, you know, as they were building. So some of their really early on hires were working from trailers until, you know, the structure and the plant was being built. So a lot of us were going through the process of. And I looked at it as gates. You know, you get through one gate and you get to move on to the next. Kind of like video games. You go through one level, you get to the next. And so what I talk about in the book a little bit is what that was like. And some of the things that we were assessed on. You know, for example, there was a few things around dexterity. I can remember vividly turning white pegs over to the red peg side and how fast can I do this? And putting it into a hole. So you were kind of timed. So you were looking at your ability to handle maybe small parts or, you know, your ability to the dexterity process that you had. And then it evolved to a situational question type test. And those were maybe 40 questions around, hey, if you saw a co worker do X, what would you do? And it was kind of a little psychological. You know, they wanted to kind of look at you as an individual. How would you view things and so, so there's a lot of situational. If you saw a defect on the line and it wasn't part of your process, how would you handle it? You know, there was some multiple choice answers. There were some, you know, fill in the blank answers. And so I think they were looking for, you know, different aspects of how you would handle, you know, the situation, which was, you know, kind of dubbed the test name.

Now, was there, was there any, like, behavioral interviewing types, like, tell me a time when, you know, that sort of thing or.

Yes, yes, that came a little bit later. That was probably six or seven gates down.

Okay.

But there was times where we were in groups. You know, I remember a time we were. There was 15 people at a table and they put a problem down and said, you know, here's 15 things on a car. How would you list them from importance to least important? And so they watched a group of strangers talk about, how would we look at these? And so you had seven assessors around you kind of documenting, well, what is this person saying? And I think they were looking for the ability for a person to surface as a leader. They were looking for natural extroverts. They may have been looking for people that were overly extroverted, trying to take over the conversation. And then the opposite was somebody just sitting there, not saying anything. And so they. It was kind of the teamwork side of it, I believe. And so, you know, those things were interesting that they put us together in groups and watched us interact. And lastly, we actually built things. You know, they put us in a cell and we got to build things for two days. And they would stop us and ask us, hey, how's it going? What would you change? And we did that for iterations of about eight hours at a time, stopping every hour and asking us, what would we do differently? So it's very interesting on how in depth they went in looking into our ideas and getting our input.

Years later, I actually reflected back on the hiring process and I looked at it a lot different after I'd been there for several years in the aspect what Toyota was trying to do early on, I believe, was, you know, they were finding leaders. And so every person they interviewed in the back of their mind, they were going, where will this person be, you know, five or ten years from now? And I think they were trying to understand that first, you know, first several thousand people that hired were going to be future leaders of the company. And I thought that, you know, at the time I didn't realize that, but as I saw that, you know, 10 or 12 years down the road. I thought that was pretty unbelievable that they would have that kind of vision when they were starting up the plant.

Now, Ernie John's article, he. He touched on a situation that involved Mr. Cho. And you tell that story.

Yeah, it's kind of one of the stories that we use even in the book, it's in chapter 11, but we use it in our training too, to talk about how a leader develops culture and develops people. And in this story, you know, I'd been a production manager very, very short time and fortunately it was. I was promoted to that level at a time when Mr. Cho was still there. And I'd shut the. I'd shut the plant down at that point. And Mr. Cho came over and I was. When I heard he was coming, I was really dreading it, you know, because, you know, my self pressure I was putting on myself was saying, you know, this is a terrible thing. And then when Mr. Cho came over and asked me if I needed anything first, and of course, you know, I told him we had our best folks there working on it. Then he turned to me and said, thanks for stopping the line. We'll fix this problem now. And so that was very incredible of how he was developing me at that point. And I reflected on that. In the book I talk about it, but also in training, we talk about it developed me professionally to be a better leader because I looked at people different after that day. But even equally important, it changed me personally.

What do you mean?

It changed the way I looked at people personally about, you know, about looking at the structure of the situation. Not it's. It's the process is the problem. It's not the person I'm always looking at. You know, the person is trying to do the best job they can and we give them broken processes. Now it's my responsibility as a leader to fix the process so they can be successful.

Was that the first time you ever interacted with Mr. Cho?

It's the first time I'd ever had face to face interaction. I've been in several meetings where he'd been there and then, you know, I'd heard him speak several times, but it's the very first time I've had a direct face to face conversation with him.

So talk about the emotion that you felt. I don't know, five seconds after he walked away.

Well, I tell her, I tell everybody. I went from zero to hero, everybody, you know, because I was by myself when he walked up and talked to me and everybody. That was my little entourage of folks. That were watching me. You know, there's all coming up, wanting to know what was going on, what'd he say? And I always joke with him. I said, well, if you'd been up here, you'd have heard, right? But. But it really. It really was. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but it's like you knew. I knew at that moment, something special happened. I didn't know how to describe it. I didn't know exactly how I felt about it at that point. I knew something very special had just happened. And as I build on that, the rest of my career, it became a milestone that I always. If I needed grounding to, I could go back to that event and use that as a grounding. So before he got there, I was emotional because I was telling you I was putting a lot of pressure on myself because, you know, I was thinking things like, well, this is probably it for me, you know, shortest production manager ever at Toyota. Not that Toyota ever gave you any reason to believe that. Yeah, it was the self pressure I was putting on myself. And to go from that to, well, thanks. Thanks for doing this is the way we do business is basically what he was telling me. Yeah, this is the way we. We practice every day, you know, and I challenge people. I challenge people everywhere. Find your Mr. Cho moment, because that moment is so valuable as leaders, and they're not easy to find. I mean, that would have been the easiest thing in the world for Mr. Cho just stayed at the plant and called over and said, tell me what's going on. But that wasn't the purpose for his visit at all.

And he had to come a pretty good distance for that, didn't he?

Yeah, I think it was close to a mile from where he walked from, from where his office was to where I was at in Power Train, but it's a pretty good hike. And it seemed like it took him forever to get there.

Tracy, do you have a Mr. Cho moment? Maybe not with Mr. Cho, but something similar.

Well, actually, I was part of one of the first Jashukins, an event that actually we did with Nummi in plastics. And I got to meet Mr. Cho during that time. That's when I was exposed to, you know, looking at Kaizen a little differently, where we actually built yamazoomis, which are cycle bar charts of every process and creating, you know, kind of magnets of time, wait time, walk time, and really slicing up, you know, what's involved in a process improvement. And there was probably 20, 25 people in this event, and I Was just promoted team leader. This was my first big jashukin as a line supervisor and team leader. And I can remember Mr. Cho coming back to this several times during our pilot or what we would kind of simulate what we were going to do with some of the team members during break times and during shift change when we had the equipment. And he was very kind of similar to Ernie, but different situation. Do you have everything you need? Was an important question he would ask in the fact of. He was being that servant leader. A servant leader is there to help provide resources and remove barriers and constraints so people can be developed.

And.

And Ernie said this many times. And the interactions that I had, you know, you never heard him tell people to do anything. He always directed through questions and was always present at the Gemba and with a smile. You know, he had a patent smile to me. And, you know, he was always there as a leadership presence of, you know, what can I do to make this easier, you know, to provide a resource? And so through that Joshukin, he was. He was present a lot and always asking what we needed and how he could help in a way to make the transition of the line rebalance that we were doing go easier. And, you know, a traditional mindset, you would think, oh, we're gonna go in and rebalance people. Well, sometimes they don't use the word rebalance. We lose people. And so just to have the president down, just being that servant leader was a neat lesson at a very early age for me. I think I was 21. To see that as an example. As Ernie said, those moments really, really stick with you. And when you're growing as a leader, it does ground you back to kind of like, what would Mr. Cho do? Because he was such a phenomenal leader at a time in Toyota's growth at TMMK and as we expanded in North America to set those early examples in our culture.

I want to ask you guys about the name of the book, Toyota Engagement Equation. Toyota, you get engagement. Even you get. Tell us about the word equation. What's that all about?

Yeah, so the equation. We talked a lot with, you know, McGraw Hill, obviously, and ourselves, and, you know, how to best describe. We went around with several different things. And the equation was something that I had started several years ago, maybe, I'm gonna say around 2010, I started out with these GTSs. And in our world at Toyota, when you would see gts, just that. That acronym, it was from a trainer, you know, we kind of acronymed a lot of things, as most companies do. But when you saw gts, it was immediate, kind of grasp the situation. And so I had it on a slide that I would train from. And, you know, I started thinking about these GTSs, and I'm like, you know, I think I could create something from this. And so it started out GTS squared, if I can go to see and get people to grasp the situation, which is GTS1 and GTS2. That's the essence of what we did initially. And so I kept building with that thinking. And so the GTSS created a process for me that replicated PDCA and tbp, which some call the Toyota business practices eight step. And so Ernie and I wanted to put kind of our spin or our thought process and give somebody a neat little equation to say, if you follow this, do this kind of like a flowchart, if yes, go here type thing. It gives you the thinking path that we, we used every day. And so the GTSS are chapters 5 through 10 broken down into very explicit detail of you go to sea, you grasp the situation, you get to solution, you get to standardization, you get to sustainability, and you get to stretch. It creates the cyclical PDCA continuous improvement loop. And so this equipment equation, you know, we add the E cubed in there, which is kind of part three, chapters 11 through 13. The E cubed is if we can get everybody every day engaged in this thinking, this, this cycle of the, of the gtss, then that creates the DNA, the discipline and accountability for creating the culture. And so, you know, I had a lot of feedback, and when I was doing my sessions, when Ernie joined me in 13, we got a lot of really good feedback. Like, this is great. This gives me a process to follow step by step. You know, a lot of people are kind of visual learners, so they like to see the example based kind of step by step. And so this became the equation that allowed us to share, as Mr. Cho would say, share our wisdom with others in a way that, you know, they can. It's catchy. You know, you can write this down, you can put it on a poster and you can learn this. And it is pdca. It is continuous improvement and the Toyota business practices sense of what we did every day.

So what is the actual equation again? Because GTS many times, right?

Yeah. So it's, it's the actual equation, and it's kind of mathy. So the, the math folks out there, so GTS to the sixth power, because there's six GTSs that follow the process. So GTS to the six plus E cubed, which is everybody, every day engaged equals DNA, which is, you know, we always say, there's no perfect company out there. Even Toyota, they're not perfect. Nobody is. But they did do things very well in regard to creating a discipline and accountability, but behind standards. And so the standardization piece which comes into the GTS was if you set a standard, you need to have accountability to a standard. Without it, it actually hurts the culture to just say, well, we're gonna set it, but you don't have to follow it. That creates more of an issue with people. So the whole equation is the GTS to the six plus E cubed equals the DNA. And the middle part two of the book is chapters five through ten, which go through each of the GTSs very, very explicitly.

I love it. I love it. That's beautiful. So what was the. Was there a second place title that was almost the title?

Oh, boy. Yes, there was, but I'm not sure I can share.

Okay, okay.

There was a lot of discussion, and it's not that I don't want to. It's probably just McGraw Hill.

Oh, I got you. I got you. All these book people. Come on, man. Yes, yes, I know, I know.

I'm love to blurt that out. I had an idea, but, you know, after lots of discussion, we did come to consensus.

Well, I think it's a cool title, so I think it works. So I'm sure your other one was good too, but this one works. So I like it. I like it. So. All right.

And it is. The engagement part is kind of bringing the E cubed in there of, you know, the people side of Lean will always trump the tool side. And so if you engage people in this thinking, and that's where you get into part three, which is, you know, really the. A lot of cultural experiences. Ernie goes into a lot of things with being in Japan and really the development, the thinking behind all the aspects of gimbal walks and problem solving and even we have a lot of everyday life examples just from Ernie and I of how we don't just turn this on for a class or a session or a conference or a keynote. You know, we live this every day. And so it is kind of an engagement piece for us. It's kind of who we are. It's our human characteristics, is our DNA from living this way for almost 30 years now.

So now that the books out in the wild, for lack of a better word, and you've had time to reflect on maybe the entire process and the final result, you know, your book. So as you reflect on it, if you could go back and change anything about that process or the final result. Would you change anything.

That'S being so fresh off of, you know, this, this started, you know, 10 years ago, right. So. And it kind of, because of travel and many other things got kind of put to the side and I went to blogging for, for quite a bit and, and so the last two years though, it's really been a journey within our, our, our learning journey of being on the road sometimes three weeks a.

Month.

If I had to do over. I probably now that I know how much is involved in putting together a book that's so dynamic of kind of extrapolating 30 years of thinking into a small, not a small book, but just a book in itself to say I can put all that in a book. I probably would have allowed myself a little more time to really think through because sometimes I felt like there was pressure, you know, after a session. I had to sit up several hours after a draining day and have to, you know, really discipline myself to think clearly to read through a chapter several more times. I didn't realize maybe what all was involved with this level of a book that we wanted to share, but I don't know that I would change a whole lot because we, we were really excited that it came together as it did. And some of the pre. Things that we were hearing before it got out from some of the folks we sent the manuscript to, we felt like we were hitting the mark and we invested a lot of time to do that. So probably the time factor of realizing what project I was thinking taking on in amongst our workload, I probably would have changed that a little bit. But I don't know.

I think, you know, to learn. What I think we probably didn't realize early on was what was the process for publishing a book. And we had some really good folks that help us understand as we're going through and even McGraw Hill, they were teaching us as we was going, going through too, which I thought was very, very positive. But I think, you know, the reflection for me was as we started putting it together and I would, we would see a chapter at a time and, or a segment at a time and we'd work through it and we really, it didn't really hit home to me until I got to see the whole thing together. When I saw that manuscript, in seeing how it flows float at that point, it was, it kind of took me back a little bit to go, wow, this is, this is, this is even better than I thought it was going to be. As was Putting the chapters together. So it's pretty, pretty awesome, I mean, from that aspect of it. So I guess I didn't know. We didn't know what we didn't know at the time.

Yeah, yeah. Unconsciously incompetent, as they say.

It was a great learning experience and. But we had some people who were very good to help us.

We had some folks and I think I had posted on LinkedIn. Jacob Stoller was instrumental book collaborator with us on this. He had the Lean CEO and lots of knowledge of lean, taught us a lot. Yes, he's an excellent writer. And so it was fun going through the, the process of learning Jacob learning us and us learning Jacob. And by the end it was like he could finish our sentences as we were. You know, we really went through sentences of are we saying exactly what. And that's how detailed we got with making sure that the learning was captured and the moments were captured and that the deep, the Japanese are such deep thinkers that the deep thinking came through in the sentence, you know, and I wanted it to be Tracy and Ernie's voice. I wanted to read as if they were listening to us talking in a session or at a Gemba, you know, to really get that voice out there was phenomenal that all that came together. And so it was, it was a really neat learning experience, I think for us both.

Yeah, Jacob's pretty cool, dude. We've had him on the show twice. He's. He was on episode 11 and episode 116, so we'll link to those in the show notes. But he did one on how to use storytelling, you know, just in general. It was pretty powerful. So yeah, he's a great guy and.

Very knowledgeable and, and just again, his ability to learn us and us learn him. And towards the end, I mean it was just clicking and we've told him, you know, all of us together created, you know, this, this replication of our, you know, our past and our journey and to be able to share. Yeah, we were told, and I don't know the whole truth to this. I need to do a lot of knowledge. But we've been told, you know, this is the first story from a, you know, two people from the direct inside that's been told for many, many years from a living IT perspective from, you know, I worked at Toyota, I lived this and going through from pretty much for me, a 19 year old up to 30 years later today to walk through that journey. We're not sure that's been told.

Well, I don't think it has. I mean, A lot of the other ones that have been out there about Toyota, and they're all great books, and we've all read them, but many of them are written by folks in academia or whatnot. And also, you know, they've been well researched, for sure, but they didn't live in the trenches like y' all did.

So, yeah, some days you did feel like you were in one. You know, when you reflect back, you know, back then, I did not know what I was learning at the level that I'm teaching it today. You know, you have such a different perspective, and you didn't realize what you were soaking in. And, you know, there was a little bit of maturity level to too. As a young individual, I didn't recognize how blessed I was to have these trainers. And sometimes I just wish that they went away. It's like, leave me alone. Stop asking me, why would you pick on somebody else? It was like, don't bother me. And today, if I had that to do over again, I would be like, come home for dinner. I want to ask you a thousand questions. Yeah, it's funny how we don't realize what we're in until, you know, like today, 20, 30 years later, how special. The first plant that Toyota brought, you know, solely in North America, like tmmk and to be. It's like that. That history moment that I don't think that can happen again. You know, it's that, you know, we were part of something that can't be replicated from that standpoint, and that's where we told the story from. We wrote the book from the essence, we were taught it, and we wanted to capture that moment in time to share that with others, because that was a startup, and a lot of companies can replicate that if they choose to create that DNA.

Beautiful. All right, well, so the book, again, is called the Toyota Engagement Equation, and bought anywhere books are sold, I suppose. And. And we'll definitely link to it in the show notes. So that'll be episode 177, so folks can go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 177. Tracy, Ernie, thank you. I love talking to you guys. You're some of my favorite lean thinkers. By the way, one of Gemba Academy's customers was just bragging on you guys, Chris from Collision, he just came down to one of your workshops, and he would not shut up about it, about how great it was.

Chris and his team, they were great to be around, so engaged in that session, and they do get it. We look forward to that.

Yeah. Awesome stuff. All right, well, hey, I know we'll see you around at some conferences and whatnot. It's always a pleasure. Tell people how they can best connect with you.

Oh, well, we're very social, so. Tracyson, Tracy Son on Twitter, Ernie and I are both on LinkedIn. We also created a new site for the book. It's the Toyota EE. So that's short for engagement equation. So thetoyotaee.com and so we're gonna start sharing a lot of insights to the book. We have downloads on there. We've got a listserv that you can sign up for. We don't try to spam a lot. It's probably once a month or every six weeks as we're home, we try to send out a newsletter of what we're doing, what things we can share from the book downloads in that as well. So if you want to sign up for that and be part of the toyota ee.com, please do that and you can connect. I think our emails are on that site as well. So we're pretty, pretty social. So I think you can find us pretty easy out there.

All right, well, very good. Thanks again, guys, and I look forward to catching up with you later in the year.

Thank you, Ron, for having us.

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