GA 183 | How to Approach Lean with Michael Ballé

You're listening to episode 183 with Michael Ballet. 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 Gemba Academy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you now, as we've done the last few episodes. Just a quick shout out for the upcoming AME conference, October 9th through the 13th. If you're going, please register to come to our cocktail party. We are probably approaching capacity, so it's important that y' all RSVP if you do want to come. All that information, including how to save 10% on the conference, can be found over at gembacademy.com ame so, yeah, go check that out today. I'm excited to welcome Michael Ballet back to the show. Now, had Michael on back in September of 2014, episode 22. So about 160 some episodes ago, in that episode, we talked about the trilogy that he and his father wrote, the Gold Mine, the Lean Manager Lead. With respect, It's a fantastic episode. So if you've not listened to that, listen to this episode first and then go back into the archives. Just go to gemba podcast.com and then scroll down and look for episode 22 and check that one out. Those are some fantastic, I would say, must read Lean books. For anyone that's practicing Lean, you must read those three books. Now, today we actually talk about another book that Michael took part in, and that's a more recent book called the Lean Strategy. Michael co authored that with three other gentlemen. And it's a fantastic book. And we get into some really interesting stuff. There's been a little bit of a. Oh, I don't know how you say it, social media kind of some conversation, let's just put it that way, on this book. And that tells me that there's something special about a book when so many people kind of have hot sports opinions. But so we kind of get into that a little bit and we talk about, you know, is Lean a business strategy and a personal strategy? Michael kind of kind of sets the stage for what the book's about addressing those two questions. We also get into some interesting conversation on the innovation part of Lean. In particular, we spent some time talking about what we used to call back in the day, vave, value analysis, value engineering. And so that was some good conversation. And Michael's a really direct guy. That's what I kind of appreciate about him. He doesn't kind of hold back, and he just kind of says was on his mind, which is I always appreciate. So show notes for this episode, which will link to several things, including this book and all of Michael's other work. And Michael's actually working on some cool stuff with book clubs and different things like that, with some videos that he's creating. So we'll link to all that, and we may even have Michael back onto the show here down the road to kind of address that topic of building a community and how to use books to help build that community. So look for that maybe down the road. But yeah, show notes, GembaPodcast.com just look for episode 183183. Again, GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 183. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Michael, thanks for coming back onto the show. How's it going?

Very good, thank you. And yourself?

I'm doing great. Doing great. So where are you calling in from?

From Paris.

Paris, Texas?

Yeah.

Paris, Texas. Yeah. You sound like you have a Texas accent. You know that? Anybody?

No, please, actually, because I'm not. Because I'm not Anglo Saxon, my accent tends to reflect the person who's talking to me. So they think I'm making fun of them.

Yeah. All right, well, I don't know if I'm in Texas now. I don't know if I have a Texas accent. I'm from Ohio, so I maybe hopefully have more of an Ohio accent. I don't know. All right, well, hey, we were talking before we came on that. You actually came on the show before, back in episode 22, September 2014. Wow. It's been a while, Michael.

No. Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, yeah, I went back and actually listened to part of that episode. It was a great one. We summarized your kind of your famous trilogy, the Gold Mine, the Lean Manager Lead, with respect. So folks haven't listened to that episode, definitely. Well, listen to this one first and then jump back into the archives and go to episode 22 and give that one a listen, because it was really fun and we covered a lot of really good information. Those are three of the best, I think, Lean books that would ever been written.

So I'm doing an experiment right now that they can, they can find on lean.org, which is. I started doing video masterclasses on these books to support book clubs.

Nice.

I just wanted to give a shout out to folks to know that I've done the gold mine, I've done lean with the Lean Manager and I'm working on Lead. With respect, I think it's a, it's a very interesting way to complement the books to have actually, because it actually occurs in companies and to see how it looks so.

Well, I don't know if you remember, but we're big, big fans of your work. We bought a hundred copies of the Lean Manager and gave them out to folks a few Christmases ago, I think it was. So. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyhow, well, hey Michael, let's get started and well, just before we, before we do the quote and all that, just catch everybody up on who you are, Michael, and what you're up to these days.

Who am I? I fell into lean by accident. When was it? 1994 now it sounds. It's so previous century now when I was doing my. I was doing research for my PhD which was on social sciences and knowledge sciences, whatever that is. And so I discovered what I studied what Toyota was doing with one of their suppliers when they were setting up their operations in Europe. I thought it was pretty cool and very interesting, but didn't quite know what to make of it. So I continued to practice. I then did some support to consultancies in the crazy times where we would move the machines in the night of the Wednesday and then hopefully start the factory again on the Thursday to create cell. And then I moved on to. When my father retired, we started doing. He was an automotive CEO, a supplier to Toyota. So when he retired we started doing these very large programs for automotive companies. And then at some point, thankfully I moved out of automotive and I started working with CEOs of smaller companies. In terms of what does it mean to. The question we had is what does it mean to actually create a complete lean culture? And all of this led us to one of my. I've had many mentors. One of the most important mentor I've had were Dan Jones and Ork Humey. They taught me a lot and I'm so proud and lucky and fortunate that basically what happened is that 15 years ago Dan and Jim Womack asked me and my friend Godfroy Bouvallet if we could start a Lean institute here in France and sort of started Lean Movement in France. And we thought France, absolutely no way. I mean this is the most reactionary country. We know nothing new grows here. And it turned out we were completely wrong. And it turned out this has been quite a success. And it turned out we surrounded ourselves with both CEOs and practitioners who were really very keen to do Lean the right way. And the result of all that is that Dan and I thought, looking back thought, why don't we tell the story? Why don't we show in a way sons of lean thinking, if you see what I mean, or daughters or the idea of companies that have taken the ideas from Lean Thinking from Jeff like a stowed away from the speeches or if you may gave the talks or if you may gave in those days who really impress the CEOs then. And let's tell that story. What has Lean become in real life situations with real life case. And this became the Lean Strategy, which is a book that I'm very, very proud to have co authored with Dan Jones, co founder of the movement with Ori Fumig, who founded, who was a CFO at Wiremold, which is in Lean Thinking and who founded co founded the Lean Accounting Movement, and Jacques Chaise, who is a CEO I've worked with here for years, but who is also the co founder of the French chapter of the Society for Organizational Learning. So quite a very impressive trio of gentlemen and I've been very fortunate to work with him. And we have this new book about the Lean Strategy which tries to give a complete different picture of what Lean is.

Got it. Well, we're going to dive deep into the book here in a bit and just give a quick shout out to Mr. Ori. We actually had him on that on the podcast back in episode 81, so we'll link to that as well. He kind of talks, he talked about Wire Mold's journey.

Isn't it great?

Yeah. Oh my gosh, he was incredible.

I mean I'm so the really amazing thing about writing this book with four authors, you think it's difficult, but it turns out the product, you know, I have a very direct style. Dan is incredibly nuanced and very insightful and Ori is very pragmatic and always completely spot on. And Jack, the fourth writer is a very elegant person and he writes very elegantly. And what is absolutely fabulous with writing the book is that at the end of the book we can't tell who is who, you know, so it's amazing. But Ori is incredible the way he has of course, when It's a complex issue when there's a lot of yin and yang and black and white and pros and cons. He has a way to cut right in and say it right the way it should be. I'm always very impressed.

Yeah, he's a jealous. Pretty special guy. Pretty special guy. All right, Michael. Well, you know how we like to kind of get things rolling at the beginning of our podcast. We like our guests to share a quote or two of something that possibly inspires them. So do you have one?

I think my favorite quote is a quote from Taishi Ohno. I don't know if it's genuine, but it's from my father, sensei, a gentleman called Nampashi Hayashi, who says, you look with your feet and you think with your hands. And I think this is one of the great points of the book, is that rather than start from abstract sort of value stream level thinking, we go back to all thinking starts with a concrete action. Because you don't think the same way when you do something concretely and with your hands dead when you start thinking in abstract. So I think this was a breakthrough moment for us that happened in China. Reading the quote later on, as I was reading an interview with Mr. Hayashi, I thought this completely captures the spirit of the book.

Got it. All right, the lean strategy. My first question is pretty straightforward. Why did you write it and what problem were you guys trying to solve?

Well, conference after conference, we keep hearing, how do I get my CEO involved, how I get the execs involved. We're doing this great stuff on the. You must hear the same, Ron. Sure, sure, we do this great stuff, but the top management is not interested and so forth. What can I do to convince top management? And I always have kind of a glib answer, which is really covers my embarrassment of this. Nothing, I mean, they're top management. Nothing is going to convince them. What can you do? And it's always a strange question because I actually work with top management and I don't have that problem. So I was thinking, you know, we were thinking, what's wrong with this picture? And I don't think you can actually move from the bottom up and convince execs. I think you get very lucky sometimes when they see something spectacular and they click. But really, execs that convince at sea level, they get convinced when they see the strategic part of what you do. And all this goes back to all the way. I mean, I think at the end, after, after the disaster of 2000, do you remember how hard it was in 2009 when everything went to hell and even Toyota lost money. And I remember at the time talking to one of these old guys from Toyota occasionally talk to you and said. I said what happened? And he said, well that's pretty straightforward. Toyota's strategy is actually very simple. We assume that the car market renews itself about 10% every year as people change their cars. So the entire volume is about 10%. And we were obsessed with just one thought. We want that our 10% remain our 10%. So the strategy is actually very simple, which is first time Toyota customer, lifetime Toyota customer, we don't lose customers. And he said that what happened that year is that the market actually didn't renew itself by 10%. It actually there were more, there were less cars built than cars destroyed, which had never happened before. Many conclusions came from this. One of the conclusion was that their thinking is that they know their competitors need to load their factories up to, you know, up in the 80s and 90% to be, to be profitable. They know that their factories can be, are flexible so they can be profitable up to down to 80% loaded. 80%, 70%. And they say well this one did furlough down. So we need to work harder and improve our flexibility even more so we can take these kind of hits. Which I found such a typical Toyota reaction. But it got me thinking in terms of this when you read the press and historically people say to it it doesn't really have a strategy and so forth. And I thought this whole thing about keeping our 10%, keeping our customers sounds pretty much strategic. I started looking into it and then I realized that if you want to do this, you have two very, very concrete problems. One is you need to create really robust cars so people keep being happy with them. But you also need to offer new cars all the time so that as people move up, they find the car they want or they get a family, they want a different car, they succeed, they want a different car, which explains Lexus or they get green and they want a different car which explains price. And suddenly I realized and I started looking to this and Toyota has the broadest range of any automaker. That is also the least cannibalized. I thought this is very strange. And actually then it hit me. It's exactly like Orey says and Artboard said, it's all about smed. I know it's silly, but it's all about smed all the way back in the 50s that if you have flexible lines as we see in Japan, that can handle like six to Eight different. I remember line had eight different, complete different models on the line. It means that if you design a new car and you're uncertain of the success of the market, then you can put it on an existing line without having the new car to carry the weight of a full line. If you see what I mean, financially, put it that way. When you build a Mirai, it's basically a Prius with a hydrogen engine. So at first you can build it if you sell very few, because there's no hydrogen stations, you just build them by hand, then you can put them on the price line. Then if it's really successful, you can have its own line. In this way you can scale up and down cars without taking so much of a risk. Then it hit me that the flexibility part is a lot and the quality and flexibility is part of the really, it's a strategy. It goes way beyond doing cost savings improvement in the workshop. It's a complete total vision. Now the fascinating thing about this is that this hypothesis had been recently confirmed to me in a complete different angle from the retired head of global operations at Amazon, because the same thing happens there. Amazon is not a retailer with a website. It's a website that does supply chain. So basically on the website you can put any new product you want and you will lose money on the transport to get it as fast as possible as you can to customers from wherever you are. In Paris, Texas, if you have some space, special belts, you do that. Do you see what I mean?

Yep.

And somebody buys it. So you take a hit and take the cost and ship it. But if many people buy it, then the product, you can integrate it in your supply chain and then start massifying and making a lot of money. So it creates this. Again, this flexibility is what enabled Amazon to move on from books to everything else and take over the world. So I think we're seeing the message here is that we were seeing something very, very big. This was an untold story and it was big, it was lean. It's not just some operation. Things is how big it is as a strategy. And of course, if you look into this, and this is the part of the book that rarely gets picked up, but it's most of the book, suddenly it makes sense that this flexibility was in the favor of building new products. Innovation. Not only the story was that this was all about a strategy, but it was also a growth strategy based on innovation. Because when you take out the waste, you do two things. First, you find ideas for an innovation and secondly, you find capacity for new Products. So it was suddenly, as we discussed all this with Jack and Dan and Orey, it came to us that this was a really big story. And this is a story we're telling in the book.

Mm. So the next question, you've already kind of answered some of this, but I want to kind of take a slightly different angle to it. I was going to ask you, well, how did you come to see Lean as a business strategy? You've already started kind of explored that a little bit. But I want to have a follow up question to that is I don't spend a lot of time on social media because it makes my head hurt. And honestly, I have a company to run. I just don't have time to waste, you know, reading through. But I have seen some threads, some pretty passionate threads from folks, you know, kind of moaning and groaning about all this strategy, Lean, this and that. Why do you think it's such a hot button for people? And the people in the Lean world are especially sensitive and there's a handful of people who we know who they are, who you say one thing and they just gonna argue no matter what. But why do you think this is such a volatile topic?

To be honest, your guess is as good as mine. It was completely taken by surprise by this. I was completely taken by surprise by this for two reasons. First, the CEOs we described in the book. We just had an incredibly mean comment on Amazon that is simply untrue, saying this was all about Wormholt. The book is full of cases. First, the cases of the CEOs in the book, they say Lean is their main strategy. This is not something we invent, this is something they say. And they tell you in the book how they pursue Lean as a main strategy as opposed to classic strategy. So I say, well, I mean, that's what these guys think. So I mean, some people think it's a strategy. And the other thing is I naively thought that for Lean guys it would be good news. You get to all these conferences and people say, how do I convince my executives? And you finally, after all these years, we have an answer. Say, well, Lean is a strategy. Show them how Lean is a strategy. And then you have people saying, no, we don't like your answer and say, well, okay, fine, yeah, yeah, well.

And I think a lot of it is they didn't come up. They answered themselves or they've tried to say the same things different ways and no one listened. You know, I don't know.

To be honest. Again, I've been very fortunate because I Worked at the level. And to be honest, one of the key thing we say in the book is not just a business strategy, it's also a personal strategy.

What do you mean by that? What do you mean?

Very proud of is that we've actually pinned down what lean thinking is. We look at traditional business thinking, which is like when I have a problem, I define the problem, I make a decision, I drive it so people get it done. And then it never works out like this. It's like kind of elections and something else happened. And I spent all my time dealing with the consequences. And to everybody that I talked to, this seems a perfectly normal way to work. But I was in a Toyota plant in China and I was having a deep discussion with the lean TPS sensei there. A Chinese guy called Jolie was fabulous person, a wonderful guy. And he was saying this lean thing. I don't get it. We went into the. Rather than just ignore the conversation, we had the conversation. Do you know what I mean?

Yep.

So often you have the opportunity, but you just such a degree. And so we had the conversation. We went into this and he said, look, we start with solving all problems. We solve concrete problems. And out of doing this we find the problems. Some things just go away, they're easy. But some things are signs of deeper problems. So then we face those problems, we're going to tackle them. And then once we face them, we learn to express them in a way that everybody in the company understands what we're trying to do. And then it brings that everybody participates at their level in shaping the new answer, informing a new solution. So we have this completely different cycle which starts with find, then we face which is very difficult for management. Then we frame, we express it in a way that everybody participates. And then we form with people. And then suddenly. And I was very excited by this. I was very excited by this. I phoned Dan and he immediately caught on and said, this is what we meant by people. People first, people centric. This is it. This is lean thinking. So that's the other part of the book that I don't know that creates a lot of reaction is actually.

As.

Dan says, it was called lean thinking for a reason. And what they came up with in lean thinking is an organizational solution. As Dan says, we looked at it from the outside and what he really liked about this is looking at it from the inside. How is the thinking different? So this completely different way of reasoning, the thinking cycle was also a pretty exciting part of the book. And again, that is not. You're talking about social media that is not being picked up at all because people keep bringing us back to operational issues that quite frankly we're not very interested in.

So at a more general level, we're just talking about Lean. What do you think people miss?

People miss a lot of things. Getting lucky Lean. I think it really is a strategic part. Actually not all people miss. This is what Art Byrne writes about. Now the fascinating thing is that if you go back to that very first experiment I studied, my dad was at the time the industrial VP of this huge automotive supplier. Toyota is working on one line. They do lighting cases. Not very exciting. They work at it for two years and in two years they change everything. Operators get autonomous, they do short batches, all these things, all these link things. Yeah, lots of smell. And the result is 30% productivity improvement. What do you think of it? Is it good or bad? What do you think?

Better than zero for sure.

Well, better than zero, but think about it. Labor content is about 10% of the total cost. 30% productivity improvement. In two years we have what, a 3% productivity improvement. I mean this is not particularly competitive. This is what we could get with old fashioned automation or Taylorism. It's not that good, it's not that impressive. And it was really interesting because Toyota never asked for any money for doing all this work. And we really wanted they put a sense in there. They brought my father in and it's like what was the point? And then four years later you get a model change, model renewal, the supplier gets the part and working with the Toyota guys, they come up with a new part that is 30% total cost cheaper. And now we go, hang on a minute. And this total cost cheaper. They found all these ideas from the work of improved online. So from the value analysis which is improving value in current production, products in production. Now they devise all the ideas for value engineering which is improving product value in products in design. Now then you think, hang on a minute, when you go to the Toyota museum, you see again that two things. First they do explain that if we had every car customer wanted in stock, we'd have a huge stock. So we really need to be flexible. Second thing you see that a car is like 35,000 parts. So the just in time supply chain drains all the, you know, draws all this value in supply chain, but it reveals problems. And what it really creates is all these value engineering opportunities from solving just in time problems. And then suddenly it hit me. I'm there in the museum and I'm seeing the battery evolution and the starter Evolution and they have this wall covered of actually learning curves. They are actually drawn there, the learning curves on critical components. And then I had this aha moment and this is it, this is what we miss. It's all about. It's not just about the improving of. It's not about optimizing right now. That is not it. That is what people try to do. It's about this constantly dynamic pushing the products to improve the total value of each of the components. So it's a much, much, much bigger thing.

Yeah, you know I've got a little experience with, with, with value analysis, value engineering back in my, my last kind of corporate job and, and it was very powerful. Just kind of taking part, taking things apart and looking at the function of that part and asking what is a function of that part. And then, you know, going from eight pieces in the bill of material down to three, it's a hell of a lot easier to assemble something with three parts than it is eight. Right.

So blended with the idea of the 4F here, what we're saying is that is by solving all the problems where you're doing the 30% labor productivity improvement, does you mean that you surface all these problems that lead you to redesign?

Yeah.

And I was in Brazil in a Toyota supplier factory. It was so funny because they didn't understand why the Japanese were pushing them so hard on flexibility. And they had reach a plateau and they had done great stuff on quality but they had reach a plateau and they don't know how to progress. And say, well listen guys, if you change your tools more often, if you make smaller batches, your first part has to be a good part. You can't have set of parts so it will force you to solve much deeper quality issues. So just. You mean it's this link between solving problems in production. Right now some of these problems are really interesting and get you to solve innovatively problems in engineering. It's this flow of thinking from the physical finding problems to actually solving it. So it's incredibly powerful when you start seeing it like this. And then I went back and I started looking at the evolution of Toyota cars. Every four year new car, okay. New design to adapt it, some new stuff. But so much of it is standard stuff is all stuff that is being moved forward in this way. Which explains the inbuilt. Here we have again real built in quality because it's built on all these things. Improvement of value and sales, value engineering. I started going on about this talk to Dan, talked to Ori and said, Dori said Hey, that's what we did at Wiremold. And this is a part of the Wiremold story that doesn't get much traction on the light. But a lot of the success of Warmoll at the time was using all the capacity they freed through the improvement to do at the time QFD and new products and radically accelerating the flow of new products and taking over the market with them. So if there was something people miss in the Lean story is the link from Kaizen to innovation. These things people miss. Ron is very, very puzzling because I mean it's black and white in the book. It's mentioned in the very first chapter of the book. We have entire chapter optimism on this about how you have a technical learning curve. We describe this and it's like nobody reads it. So it's probably very badly written, but it's very mysterious.

Last two questions are just related to the book in general. If you could go back and perhaps you guys will, I don't know, and have a no cost revision. But you only had, oh, I don't know, 10 days to work on it and then you had to resubmit the manuscript. Is there anything in the book that you would change now that you've read it and reflected on it and had some time? Is there anything that you would change?

I feel a bit guilty making this admission, but can I say that we're actually. It sounds terrible, but the four of us are really pleased with it. We're very happy with what we've done. We think this book will have legs and. And it will take the time it takes, but I think we really push the barrier here. Yes, I would probably be far more direct. Again, it's back to the dynamics of the four authors writing. I tend to be more direct. Dan tend to be more cautious. I'll be far more direct about the strategy part. My whole story about the flexibility and the brand and what Tod has done is in the book, but it's not hammered directly in the very first chapters. One of the reasons is we thought that the cognitive strategy part was more important than the rest and we still think that. So I think we misconceptions because we've been working on this for a while and discussing it and we got a bit overexcited with the ideas and we. I think the book is a bit forward from where the Lean movement is at the moment, if you see what I mean. And so we're currently with articles and things doing a lot of backpedaling to explain things. Here's a joke. Rowan, this is the book we would have loved to write in 1997. This is that kind of book. You know, it's a business book like we used to write. It has theory, it has new ideas, it pushes frontiers, it has in depth cases. Do you remember those books?

Yep, yep.

And, and we might be a bit out of. Out of sync with the times of more of glibber. More surface y. Things that are easier to read. I can see that. I'm not quite sure how, how to address that. It's probably another book and actually with Dan we're thinking about writing something, you know, as an introduction that is. That is more like that. Does that answer your question?

No. It does, it does. Last question.

It's hard to say because I'm actually.

Very pleased with it. Yeah. Well, this is a follow up to allow you even talk about what you're. You're especially pleased with. What's your favorite chapter in the book? I want to guess, but I don't, I don't want to guess. What's your favorite chapter? I think chapter five is pretty good. Organized for learning. What do you think?

That's very interesting. That's a chapter I struggle with.

Really.

Okay, no, go figure. People take different things. I'm really pleased with later chapters, the ones on innovation and the learning curve. To me this is completely the. An edge and I'm very pleased. We took on the prototype of traditional strategy in the ninth chapter. We just take it on and then we give a broader. Putting Lean in the broader concept of industrial history of the last century. And we. So we're out on the lean there, out on Lim. But we figure, you know, Dan was one of the co founders on Lean, so you can say whatever he wants. And so yeah, I'm actually pleased with those. But.

Well, if someone picks this book up, do you have any tips for them on the best way to read it? Is it start on page one and just go or do you have any, any tips?

Yeah, it's like, sorry, guys, read it. You know and please, please, some of the, some of the guys who are making these, these strange comments about the book, please read it. You know, please do not start your comment as I have not read this book yet. Yeah, I don't believe link can be a strategy. You know, this is so what can we say?

Right, right, right. Good stuff. All right, well, hey listen, Michael, back in 2014 we went through many of these reflection questions, but I want to ask one because I don't think I asked you back then. So we've Spent a lot of time talking about the Lean strategy book and Goldmine, Lean Manager, Library of Respect on episode 22. Are there any other books that you suggest folks pick up? They don't even have to be directly related to Lean.

Oh, any book.

Yeah. I mean, for a Lean type thinker, you know, so not basket weaving is probably not going to be interesting to them. But, you know.

I had my mind completely blown away by Robert Sapolsky's latest book. The name is Keishmila. You know, one of the key things in our book is helicopter thinking. Something that this is how you have creative ideas. You go into the detail and the big picture. Go into the detail and go and see the big picture. And Robert Zabolsky wrote a book that is so completely all encompassing about how to explain, you know, somebody does something like pulling a trigger or something terrible. And he goes from the neuroscience of it, you know, the electricity in the brain to the hormones and the chemistry, and he goes all the way back to cultural anthropology. And this is a. This is. It blows my mind, you know, these books when you know enough to vaguely understand, but you don't know enough to, you know, when he goes into different kind of corticoids and things like that. I have no idea what he's talking about, but you get the gist of the mechanism here. Yeah. And to me, this is so fantastic because back to when I was doing my research, we had this 20 years ago, we had this inkling that it was time to study the brain and to understand how we work as human beings. And this is Robert Zapolsky's book is a tour de force that shows how far this program has been and how much more we understand. And back to Lean. It's fascinating to see how the, let me call it, the naive psychology that we find in owner's books and the early days of Toyota. It's just so completely spot on. So. No, I would definitely recommend that.

Okay, well, we'll find the title of it and we'll put it in the show notes. People can find that@gembapodcast.com and this will be episode 183183. So we'll link to that. Michael, I guess I know you're on LinkedIn and all the other social media outlets. Is that the best way for folks to connect with you?

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

And it's.

Everything is great. I see it on Twitter or just send me an email. Michaelball.

And it's B A L L E.

Yeah, michaelbal.org Got it, got it.

All Right. Well, hey, are you going to be at AME this year?

I'm not sure. One thing I'd like to say, Ron, is it's very strange that there seems to be some pessimism about lean in the States at the moment. Because here, after all the resistance we've had, finally it's coming out, it's working.

Yeah, well, you know what's interesting about that? I wouldn't say there's, I think there's a few very loud people that like to get on social media and be very negative. But I gotta tell you, we've got hundreds and hundreds of customers here in the States that are doing great work. So I think overall, I think the movement is strong here. But like anything, there's a few, few loud, loud people who.

What I was saying, it's working. Guys, this is not the moment to, you know, this is the moment to push. This is the moment, you know, when we have our, we've had our shoulders to the wheel for so long getting the car out of the mud. Yeah, it is out of the mud. It is running. So this is the moment to be enthusiastic and to, and to move forward and to push frontiers and to push the thinking.

Yeah, well, I think that is working.

And there is no other alternative to the financial management that gets us such, into such deep holes there. And every other fashion is gone. Lean is still there because it's a solid, structured, time tested alternative. So this is a moment to really be enthusiastic and really go back to the game by do these experiments and see the big picture.

No, I totally agree and I think the reason that the people who are actually doing good work, they don't have time to get on LinkedIn and waste two hours.

You know, I can well believe that.

So they're being silent. So. But they're out there, trust me, I know they are. So good stuff. Michael. Hey, I really appreciate you coming on. It's always a pleasure. Keep, keep writing. You do such great work for the, for the movement that is lean.

Quick thing just comes to my mind. Ron, just one very quick last thing.

Yeah.

We've been talking a lot about the, about. I've been talking about the pleasure it's been to work with my co authors. But I want to say hi to Tom Ehrenfeld, the editor of this book, who's the greatest editor I've had the privilege to work with and who managed to bring these four cantankerous all guys together to write this seamless book. So again, we wouldn't have this book without Tom. So thank you, Tom.

Yeah, my business partner, John Miller, speaks very highly of Tom as well. So. Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. All right, well, thanks, Michael. I'm sure we'll catch up soon. But keep up the good work, my man.

Thank you. Bye.

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