GA 179 | How to Leverage Continuous Improvement in the Office with Jim Pecoraro

You're listening to episode 179 with Jim Pecoraro.

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 Jim Pecoraro to the show. Now, Jim and I are going to explore a topic that I don't think gets talked about enough, and that is really applying Lean in Six Sigma and any continuous improvement principle to the office or administrative areas of a business. Now, this is an area that we've really focused on at Gemba Academy over the years. You know, when we first started the company, gosh, back in 2009, granted, our first few courses definitely had a manufacturing slant to them. And so what we've done is we actually have gone back and redone some courses and added more office examples, in fact, like our 5s course, where the case study is doing some 5s and different things at a FedEx office, in a storage closet and a gentleman's desk. So we really tried to try to close that gap ourselves. But still, across the industry, most of the books and things that you see about most of the conferences are always slanted more towards the manufacturing side. So was really glad to have Jim come on and talk a little bit about the office side of the world, because as we all know, anybody and everybody can benefit from Lean, from Six Sigma, from any type of continuous improvement process, really. I say as long as you have people involved, Lean can help. Yeah, I think you're gonna like the show. Jim's a super well spoken and I really enjoyed chatting with him. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 179. Again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 179. And as always, go over to gembaacademy.com ame to learn more about the upcoming AME conference and to RSVP for our cocktail party that's going down the Tuesday night of the conference. It's gonna be pretty epic. Gembacademy.com, okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Jim, well, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

Hey, no problem, Ron. Thanks for having me on. I'm calling in from Naperville, Illinois, just outside of Chicago.

Awesome, awesome. I know the area well. My wife's born and raised in the Chicagoland area. I actually worked at the Big M, Motorola for early part of my career up in Libertyville, Illinois.

Oh yeah, that's right. We did a lot of work with Motorola University back in the 90s.

Good stuff. All right, well, hey, so as you know, I know you've listened to the show. We like to kind of get things going with our guest sharing a quotation of something that possibly inspires him. So do you have one?

Yeah, sure, absolutely. And you know, for me, I like to keep things relatively simple. And this one, the one I'm going to share, always has spoken to me for a while. And that is when the best leaders work is done. The people say we did it ourselves. That was Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism. He's got a lot of other quotes, if you look up quotes by him, a number of others. But for me, that really speaks to what I do, not only in my current role and the things we're all about, but it speaks to me about continuous improvement in general and leadership, that sort of thing. So doing it ourselves is kind of the mark of a good leader.

Awesome, awesome. So let's go right into it, Jim, tell us a little bit about your background, how you first came to learn about all this continuous improvement stuff and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, so my story actually starts before I really hit the professional world. I grew up, my father started doing continuous improvement for waste management in the early 90s and ended up joining an organization called Leap Technologies to bring the tools and methods that they were using kind of out to the market. And their whole methodology was based in the Toyota production system, based in kind of traditional lean, but under this idea that there might be an easier way to get kind of the uninitiated involved folks that will never have necessarily the bandwidth or the time to go through lean training, but still want to be involved in continuous improvement. And so his career took him in that direction. And as a result of that, I was kind of growing up in and around the realm of continuous improvement from a relatively young age, 12 or 13. So I started my career actually outside of that Realm just in sales, marketing. I worked for a regional bank in Chicago, did a number of other things from then until what I'm doing currently. But I had an opportunity to join Leap Technologies as a partner a few years ago and decided to take it. So it was really one of those things where a number of things came together. This was the summer of 2015, and I had an opportunity to come on board as a relatively small organization. You know, as you know, I'm sure, Ron, we never really had a dedicated sales and marketing engine, someone to go out and kind of pound the pavement, spread the word about some of the things that we're doing. So that's what I came on board to do, and I've been spending the last couple of years doing that and hopefully having a lot of success.

Nice, nice, nice. All right, well, so today, Jim, kind of the topic that we're going to explore is kind of, whatever you want to call it, administrative office based kind of continuous improvement. You know, a lot of times folks are very familiar with lean within, say, the manufacturing world, but, you know, and it's obviously very popular now in all settings, you know, office, healthcare and so forth. But. But it can be maybe a little bit more daunting for those folks in the office or administrative side of things. So kind of, to begin with, how do you go about engaging this group who just, I don't know, maybe they think that doesn't apply to me because we don't make widgets.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. Right. And I think that's kind of the eternal struggle, depending on the market that you're working in. And I think for us, we usually get started by helping people understand what continuous improvement really means. Right. And without necessarily using terminology like lean or Six Sigma or waste and inefficiency, without diving into those things right off the bat. We often start any training or any kind of work that we're doing emphasizing the respect for people. Right. This whole idea that each employee's honest effort to do a good job is where you have to start when you're bringing folks together to work and try to solve some problems. And really for us, it's about identifying places where inefficiencies and waste might get in the way of that. But I think if we, you know, we tend to have more success when we stay away from starting with terminology and starting with traditional education and more kind of seeking relevance, giving folks that we're talking with a way to say, hey, in my particular role, you know, I may not be making widgets I may not be working for a manufacturing organization, but if I think about the people I work with and the collaboration we're trying to achieve and the results we're trying to achieve, if there's a way for me to do that better, I'm all ears. And that's the response we usually hear from folks. Whether they want to call it Lean or continuous improvement or Six Sigma. Those types of things tend to be less important to those organizations. And what's more important is how to get people working together.

Give me an example of something like maybe, I don't know, a tactic that you would do. You've been hired by this organization and you got a few weeks to kind of get your bearings, like, what are you going to do?

Yeah, it's a great question. So for us, we often start. So we bring folks together who are interested. An organization might say, hey Jim or Mike or some of our partners. We want to bring you guys in and help us solve some problems. So one of the first things that we do, depending on their appetite, is we bring 12 or 14 people together in a training session for a day and we kind of give them the basics, we walk them through. What does continuous improvement mean? What are some things that you're going to be doing to tackle some of your challenges as far as, you know, not necessarily teaching specific Lean right off the bat, but talking about things like, you know, the hidden factory or you know, ways to identify waste in the workplace and just how to work together to understand what is a process, you know, what goes into a particular process that ends up spitting out an output and who, who's working together throughout that situation. So for us, you asked, how do you kind of get started? Give me an example. I think really the first thing we do when we bring people together, and I know it sounds a little bit cheesy, but we almost start with, or we almost always start with an activity that breaks down what we call the barrier to adult learning. Right. Everyone has this need to be right and kind of look good in front of other people. And in our opinion or in our experience, that's the single biggest challenge you have to overcome when you're bringing people together to train them to get better at their jobs. And you know, we always give the example that hey, you know, most of our clients and most of the folks we're working with have kids out there. If you asked a six year old kindergarten student to sing a song in front of their class, they wouldn't hesitate, that you'd have hands raised throughout the Room. Right. But adults run and hide. We don't want to do that. We don't want to stand up in front of our peers and co workers and put ourselves out there and say, maybe we don't know everything there is to know. And I think if we can break that down a little bit, especially at the outset, we tend to have a really, really successful session and then obviously a relationship with that organization.

So do you have like icebreakers and stuff like that? You guys do or.

I mean, yeah, yeah, so we do. We have some icebreakers. You know, we have one of them. I picked on singing a song. One of the things we do. I'm laughing now just thinking back to it. We ran a session like this last week at a local higher education organization. And one of the things we do is we have everyone write their favorite song on a post it note and maybe a few words to it. We say, hey, write a few of the lyrics to that particular song and everyone's writing down heads down kind of thing. And then in the pause between asking them to write and then the next part of it, there's often this moment where the group kind of looks around and looks at each other and realizes we're going to ask a follow up question. So we then often ask. We'll ask folks to volunteer to get up in front of the class and sing that song to the group. Yeah, and it's funny, I mean, we're chuckling and these are very low pressure situations. But it's, you know, it's amazing. There's usually one person who might raise their hand in a group of 14 just because, you know, he or she is the person who always does that sort of thing. But more often than not, everyone kind of puts their heads down, doesn't want to be called on and that sort of thing. So. But we usually call on someone and they get up there, they sing and then we sing a song. And I know it's just one of those things that's kind of cheesy, it's kind of corny, but we have a lot of success with it. Gets people to kind of breathe a little bit easier for the rest of the day.

Well, yeah, I mean, it kind of just kind of takes the tension out of the air. I mean, if you can get up and do that and laugh at someone else and have a good time and without being mean about it, gosh, I should definitely, I don't know, just take the anxiety out of the room. Really?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And really, for us, it just speaks to this Idea that everyone is in there trying to pull in the same direction. We're all trying to get better. And, you know, anyone trying to improve in any walk of life has to first recognize they're not perfect. And, you know, that's one small way to get a little closer to that.

I like it. I like it. So let's talk a little bit about. Are there any misconceptions that you guys see out there as it relates to the, let's say, the administrative organization?

Yeah, well, you already touched on one, Ron, I think, and that is that most folks, when they think of lean and continuous improvement, if they know anything about it at all, really think it only applies to manufacturing companies where you can see the work being done and everything is right there in front of you. If you're on a shop floor, you know, a second one for us that we run into all the time, and this is actually one of the first modules that we walk through is the difference between firefighting, you know, this quote unquote, getting the job done, whatever it takes, with real continuous improvement, with a real cultural effort to continuously drive for excellence. And, you know, one of the things we use in our sessions is the Duran spike chart, if you may be familiar with that. The whole idea that, hey, you're operating at a certain level of comfort. You know, you get a big spike. You know, something goes wrong, whether it's in it or services or a customer complaint, and everyone scrambles. They all work together, they get the job done. Every. Everyone feels good kind of hammering that spike back down, and then they go back to their jobs and wait until the next spike. And a lot of organizations confuse that sort of thing, firefighting for continuous improvement, you know, so breaking that down a little bit, helping them understand that, you know, it's not about fighting the next fire, it's about preventing that fire from happening in the first place. Yeah, you know, that. That's a big one, you know, And I think the last one, you know, that. That really comes to mind right off the bat for me is especially in the administrative setting where, you know, as, you know, processes are less visible. A lot of things are happening in the white space, from handoffs, people to people, that sort of thing. Managers and leaders within most of our client organizations, or many of them, kind of default to believing failures in performance fall to failures in people, if that makes sense. They kind of say if something is not working, if someone is not performing well, that must be a people problem, and they must not be working hard enough or they don't know enough or they need better training. And again, I'm sure that's the case sometimes, but in our experience, we help them understand that most, most of the time the processes themselves are incapable of performing to whatever standard, you know, that that is required. They weren't designed that way, but they've become that way over time and we kind of help them see the light in that regard. And again, I don't know if those are the sorts of things that, that you have seen in your walks as well, but those are definitely ones that jump to mind for us.

Yeah, I mean, that's an age old, you know, it's not the people, it's the process. Right? Yeah.

Yep.

So, you know, back on your firefighting, I've reminded, I gave a talk as early this year and on, on the, on the dangers of firefighting. This particular company that brought us in was, you know, famous for being fantastic firefighters. And what we came to realize was that they actually rewarded firefighters, you know, by promoting them like this. These people are, you're a fantastic firefighter. They didn't say that, but you're a fantastic firefighter. Why don't you become vice president of firefighting, essentially? Right. And so kind of our message right out of the gate was you got to stop rewarding firefighting and start realizing that it's not value added to constantly be chasing fires. Even though they're all out for that dopamine hit or whatever. It might be to feel like they've accomplished something, but in the end it's not. It's accomplishing very little, really.

Well, sure. And even to that point when you talk about rewarding the wrong activities, I don't know if you're familiar with the Peter principle, this whole idea that we get promoted based on our skills and based on the things we have done. But too often we're promoted to a point where maybe we're not prepared for what we need to do moving forward. One of the things we talk about is that every organization, every employee at every organization should be devoting some time in their day to thinking about continuous improvement and innovation. Most organizations are not set up that way though, right? Below a certain level, you're coming in, you're clocking in, you're doing your day to day operating tasks and you're clocking out. And you know, you get promoted, those folks at the lower rungs of the ladder start to climb the organization and when they get to a certain point where they're required to think about continuous improvement or innovation, they have no experience doing that. You know, so it's, it's this whole differentiation between high performing organizations are usually ones that are devoting some of that time and training their folks and embracing a culture where people even at the lowest levels are encouraged to give feedback, you know, turn a critical eye to the things that they're doing every day. And that's the sort of environment that we try to promote as well.

Yeah, yeah. You know, so an area that we've really worked hard here at Gemba Academy is trying to break that idea that this is only for manufacturing. So, you know, many of our examples are in offices and we've redone courses where we've gone to office based organizations and shown how these things apply. But unfortunately it seems as if, and correct me if you, I don't know if you think I'm wrong here, but it seems like the, I don't know, a lot of the lean and continuous improvement, you know, training, even the books and so forth that you can buy these days are heavily slanted towards manufacturing. Why do you think that? Is it just because it's easier to talk about widgets or what is it?

Yeah, I think, you know, I think that's probably part of it. Right. It's really easy to see an assembly line or a production line and identify just visually where the problems are. Right. You talk about the whole idea of, you know, the Gemba walk, that sort of thing, just kind of going where the work is, you know. And I think part of it though too, for me, and again, I was uninitiated to most of this on a technical level. I'm growing up in and around this. This business is a little bit different than, you know, kind of going through the traditional classroom training. And for me, being outside the manufacturing realm and outside the kind of Lean and Six Sigma realm, the biggest challenge for me is it almost feels like most training in Lean and Six Sigma kind of gives what I would call a token. They kind of give a token emphasis to the administrative and the office setting. In other words, the entire program and the entire training is based on manufacturing. And when they give it to an office or they deploy it in an office, they kind of say, oh yeah, it'll all apply, apply here, kind of seek relevance. You know, maybe it's up to the employees themselves to kind of think about ways that this could apply to their jobs and this could apply to their roles. And using some examples is good. But for me, it's almost a marketing issue that I've seen with Lean and that again, I think it's not A problem I don't understand. I mean, I think if I was someone driving lean and I had all this material and all this work had been put into driving these results and teaching Lean and teaching Six Sigma in the manufacturing setting, of course, it's a different challenge. You kind of have to rethink and maybe turn some of those principles on yourself. Right. Continuous improvement. Let's think about ways we can do this a little bit better and innovate. And again, some people are doing it better than others. Gemba being one of them. Not to blow smoke necessarily. You know, I think you guys do a great job of kind of allowing attendees to your programs or even just viewers, folks who are watching your videos online, a way to kind of seek relevance and give them examples that speak to challenges they may be facing, you know, but again, I think it's part of. So it's part of that. I think it's part that it's just easier to visualize a marketing setting, you know. But I also think again, I think if I'm a lean practitioner and I'm deploying it in an office, it's as much about teaching the tools as it is about teaching the cultural piece and the emphasis on people and, and collaboration because those things are not difficult to apply in an office setting. Those things resonate with everyone. So, you know, to me, maybe it's part that, you know, it's part the visibility part and part kind of emphasizing more the culture piece than most folks.

Yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with the guys at Menlo Innovations, Richard Sheridan and the guys there in Ann Arbor is a software development company. He wrote a book called Joy Inc. And it's fantastic. Just, I mean, they're software developers, right? I mean they, they build websites and whatnot. But just an incredible, you know, continuous improvement culture. And it's just, it just, it's a perfect example of what you've said about the people based side, the people side of things. And in their case, Joy, you know, trying to create an atmosphere of joy and happiness and doesn't mean that they all stand around and singing Kumbaya all day. But, but that's what it's all about. It's about people. So yeah, really, if it's what. I guess in that sense it's no different. If you're lean manufacturing, it's still about people. If you're a lean office or lean service or lean whatever, or Six Sigma, whatever you want to call it, it's about people.

And think about like something like Lean it, yeah, right. They've all the whole, you know, and again, it is so broad anyway. But you know, if I'm a web developer, to your point, talking about Joy Inc. They've almost rebranded Lean to fit their own industry application. You know, Lean it, right. If you look up Lean it, you're going to get a lot of things about Agile and the Scrum methodology and kind of all the pdc, the same PDCA stuff, but it's been rebranded completely for folks in that area to, you know, resonate with them a little bit faster. And I think that's something that maybe hasn't been done or owned in the office setting quite as much as it has been on the IT side or the healthcare side or some of these other areas.

Sure, sure, sure. What are you seeing in the next, I don't know, three to five years as it relates to the continuous improvement world? What do you think we're going to be talking about in the future?

Yeah, well, gosh, it's a good question, right? You take out the proverbial crystal ball. I think if we knew exactly what was going to happen, we'd all be in a much better place. I think in my experience, you know, the folks we talk to often share similar struggles with Lean or Continuous Improvement, and that is kind of how to turn their managers and employees into better versions of themselves. You know, most folks are worried about, you know, their employees, the people that they're responsible for, you know, doing their jobs better. And in our experience, right, we talk about that meaning either A, putting someone in a classroom to learn tools and methods, or, or B, giving someone maybe a project and testing their abilities. And historically Lean's kind of been used as a tool to solve both of those issues. But I think for us, the future of the industry is probably going to be de emphasizing. And again, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think more and more organizations, it seems to me, have a smaller appetite for what I would call traditional Lean and Six Sigma training, at least the way it exists currently, you know, in terms of rolling out armies of green belts and black belts and that sort of thing. So I think for our experience, it's going to be more on the job training, finding a way to incorporate the same tools and methods, but doing it in a way that allows folks, you know, very little time off the clock. They can do these things as they're working on projects and as they're doing their quote unquote day jobs, you know, so that it's kind of molding from a classroom Based kind of tools based system into more of a practical on the job type of system. And again, that sort of thing is happening all over the place already. But I mean, widespread. Yeah, I just think it's going to be the sort of thing where. And again, as the, you know, not to get generational necessarily, but as the millennial workforce grows and the workforce gets younger and attention spans get shorter, seemingly over time. Yeah. There's. To me, there seems to be less appetite to say, hey, you know, go sit in this classroom for a week, you're going to get some great training. And then you may or may not be able to apply this directly, but it's going to be great for you. Intrinsically, I think more people are asking for real stuff they can use right away, you know, and I think this speaks to our previous conversation about applying Lean in the office. This whole setting or this whole topic, applying Lean in an office or in an environment that's not manufacturing, I think there's only going to be more demand for that moving forward. So for us, I think it's, it's kind of, I mean, I think Lean and Six Sigma and continuous improvement has gone through a lot of this evolution over the last 20, 25 years anyway, and especially as budgets got tight after the recession. But for me, I think that's really where it is, more on the job, more practical process work. Giving someone maybe a step by step guide to kind of taking a project from beginning to end and learning as they go how to use some of these tools, but not getting so tied up in the terminology or in the certification necessarily. Not that those things are not still going to be very valuable, but I think it's just going to be a smaller group that's required to have those things and more people are going to be doing it practically.

Yeah, well, I think that would be a beautiful situation. Like we always say, it's not a program. Right. It should be a way of thinking and working. It's a philosophy. Right. Way of life. So I think if we get there, I think the, the world will be a better place if everyone's just naturally doing these things as part of their day to day jobs. And it's not a project, you know, that forces them to start thinking this way.

Right, right. Absolutely.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, hey, good stuff, Jim. Let's go ahead and transition into the reflection section. And so I know you've heard this first question before a few times. You know, we spent a lot of time and you've touched on this a little bit already. But talking about those two pillars, one being continuous improvement, the things that we can touch and do. But the other pillar is that respect for people side and it could be a little bit harder to wrap your arms around. So what does respect for people mean to you, Jim?

You know, I think for me, Ron, and I know I said this earlier, as far as keeping things simple, I think really on a very basic level, I think it's starting out with the assumption that employees come to work to do a good job. They come to work and want to contribute positively to the direction that their organization is heading. I just think in general, too many folks I've come across don't start there. They might look at a problem or look at an issue and again, kind of what we were talking about earlier, go straight to a people problem, you know, to an issue with personality or an issue with culture fit. And I just think if you start from a place of understanding that, that most if not all people want to wake up every day and want to be excited about where they work and want to be excited about the job that they're doing, then, you know, you might be better off. You might have an easier path to kind of collaborating with folks in a more effective way. And I know again, maybe that's seeing the world through rose colored glasses, as they say. Maybe that's not realistic. But you know, in my experience, I think when you get folks to start thinking that way, they end up working together a lot more effectively.

Well, and I think it's fair to just go in with that assumption that all people are inherently good, you know, and some people are wicked and evil, you know, but they're very few and far between, I think so. And you'll quickly identify if they are wicked and evil and then you can adjust accordingly, right?

Sure, yeah, of course, Absolutely.

Good stuff. So what's the best advice you've ever received?

Oh man. Best advice I've ever received. You know, I'm going to go with something that I that's totally unrelated to the professional space, but it's keep pushing play. You know, I started a. This is again, totally sidebar personal story. But you know, as we all get through our careers and we, you know, manage our time in different ways, you know, I was a college athlete and after school I let my personal fitness fall by the wayside a little bit. And one of the things that, you know, I started doing a little bit more was some at home fitness types of routines. And one of the things they say on those types of routines programs is keep pushing Play, keep showing up, keep doing the work. And for me, I try to think about that every day, if nothing else. And it's really about building positive habits. Right. Human beings, in my opinion, are creatures of habit. We're creatures of incentive. We want to be doing things because they feel comfortable, not because they feel uncomfortable, even though a lot of continuous improvement is involved with discomfort. So for me, it's about showing up every day to tackle whatever challenge it is that you're trying to solve. And that doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna get there in one day or one hour or one year or whatever it is, but if you keep kind of committing to saying, hey, every day I'm gonna wake up and do the things I need to do today to make today better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today, I've had again, that that's the best advice I've ever received. I think it's certainly made an impact on my day to day. And I think for most people, they'll find that if they keep showing up, you know, it's a great way to get started on the right foot.

I love it. Keep pressing, play good.

Yeah.

What are you most proud of as it relates to your journey with continuous improvement?

Wow. What am I most proud of? You know, I'd have to say, you know, it's kind of a two part answer. For me personally, I'm proud that I've been able to take what was a relatively, you know, again, having not been experienced in this field at all and kind of jumping into it headfirst over the last couple of years of years. I've been very proud of the fact that I've been able to have an impact working with some of the clients that we've worked with. And we get feedback in a session that says, I see Jim as an expert or I see Leap Technologies as the way forward for our organization. Those types of things make me feel really good. They make me proud of the work that we've put in to change people's work habits in a positive way. I think the second part really is on an organizational level level, we're a relatively small organization. Not to talk about LEAP too much, but, you know, we've been around for a while and we work to complement the work that folks like you guys are doing as far as certification and green belt, black belt training, that sort of thing. But I'm proud of the fact that, you know, we've been around since 1993, almost 25 years, and we have stronger client relationships today than ever. You know, and as a small organization in 2017, it can be hard to be heard out there. You know, there's so much noise in the realm of, you know, I don't know how many emails you get a day, Ron, but I get a lot more today than I got a few years ago or 10 years ago, you know, so I'm proud of the fact that we've been able to carve out a nice little, you know, a nice little niche for our business and making a positive impact for folks, you know, has continued on in the last, you know, 25 years or so.

Awesome. Have you been reading any good books lately?

You know, you asked me this question ahead of time and this was probably one of the easiest ones that I had. And for me, it's this book called the War of Art. I don't know if you're familiar with it, it's by a guy named Steven Pressfield. And this is, it's kind of, for me, it kind of straddles the line between kind of personal and professional reading. It's all about kind of breaking through the personal barriers that everyone has and kind of tackling that next great project or that next great idea you may have. It's about kind of identifying what are some of the common things you use as excuses to maybe avoid tackling that next issue or avoid that challenge and figuring out what's preventing you from doing that next great thing and helping you get started overcoming that. So the War of Art by Steven Pressfield is a really good one. That was recommended to me and I've really enjoyed it.

Awesome. I'm going to check it out. All right. Well, Jim, hey, I really enjoyed talking with you today. Let's wrap things up with maybe sharing some final words of wisdom. And then why don't you tell people how they can connect with you?

So some final words of wisdom for me. Not, you know, fully understanding that I'm not necessarily an expert in a lot of these areas, but I think for us in our experience, just having an open mindedness to change and being open to and hopeful for what comes next. I think in our experience, you know, we, we talked a lot about change management and breaking down barriers and icebreakers and things like that. But when we work with folks, the feedback we get is often. I was scared of change before and I'm excited for change now. And a lot of that has to do with learning about continuous improvement, learning about what it takes to kind of work together with your peers and colleagues and kind of solve an issue. And when you have that feeling, that feeling of success, I think that only breeds more success and people get excited for change. So embrace it, look forward to it, tackle it head on. I think that's really what we try to practice every day, and I think it really serves us well, and I think it will for others as well.

Good stuff.

So, social media, all the usual places. LinkedIn, Jim, Pecoraro, Twitter, Pecoraro 10. And then for Leap Technologies, we're on LinkedIn and Twitter as well. Leap Two results, the number two EAP2 results is our Twitter handle. And then our website is www.improvefaster.com. all about faster change. So, yeah, all the usual places.

Good. And your last name is P E C O R A R O, is that right?

Yep, yep, that's correct.

All right, good stuff, Jim. Well, hey, again, thanks for coming on and hopefully we can meet up face to face one day at a conference or whatever it might be. And shaking cans.

Yeah, absolutely. Ron would love to.

All right, you take care, Jim.

Thanks a lot, Ron. You too.

All right, bye.

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