GA 196 | How to Name Lean with Tracey and Ernie Richardson

People were struggling trying to figure out what to call their culture. And so I think coming out with Lean really was able to give people a way to define their culture, what they're trying to get to. And I think what we see with our customers today is it's having a really positive impact.

What if you could rename the word we continuous improvement practitioners call Lean? What would it be and why? Well, my guest today recently posed this very question on LinkedIn and the thread exploded with more than 60,000 views. Their names are Tracy and Ernie Richardson. And besides being successful Lean consultants, they also published the Toyota Engagement Equation, which in our opinion was one of the best lean thinking books released in 2017. On today's show we explore Tracy and Ernie's motivations for asking this question and why, what they learn from the responses. Show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 196. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning System over@gembaacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now let's get to the show. Tracy and Ernie, welcome back to the show.

Hey Ron, it's awesome to be back.

Yeah, thanks Ron. It's good to be back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so Yeah, I guess three time guests now. You guys have been on episode 177 and episode 30, way, way, way back. Episode 30. So yeah, thanks for coming on. Really excited to talk about this, this topic. Now we're going to link to those previous episodes. So definitely encourage folks to go and listen to those if they haven't. But in case people haven't heard those episodes, Tracy and Ernie, one of you have Kenny, tell us a little bit about your background and maybe how you first came to learn about all this continuous improvement stuff and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, so actually I spent 25 years at Toyota, part of the time in the Kentucky plant and then part of the time at the headquarters outside of Cincinnati. In my time there I actually spent about half of my career in manufacturing and the second half of my career into human resources. And so I got to work, I got to take the, the culture that and the activities that I learned in manufacturing and then put it in non manufacturing environment. And the last few years of my career at Toyota I actually worked in the medical field. Operations, medical. So pretty excited career path. And prior to that I worked at IBM. So I got the opportunity to see two very good and big companies and how they work.

Awesome.

Yeah, so very similar to Ernie I started at TMMK in 1988 and I started in plastics. I was a team member and went through a lot of schooling, so to speak. We had Toyota Institute, University of Toyota. So both of us had a lot of coursework we had to take to become leaders. So I was a team member for about two and a half years, promoted to team leader, spent five years of being a team leader, two of that on the pilot team, which is our model change team. And then in 1995 I was promoted to our first level salary position, group leader. And I spent three years as a group leader and in 1998 I decided to leave that position and actually Toyota brought me back in as a contractor in hr. So I was actually a trainer for Toyota, not only at TMMK for a lot of the plants in North America with a lot of the thinking around problem solving, 83 standardized work. So I became a trainer. And then outwardly past that, there was a pool of demand of can you teach this to us at our place? And so we started doing teaching lean incorporated around 2004 and started with Lei a couple of years later. So we're both on the faculty at LEI and a lot of colleges. We work with them, OSU being one of those and they're impacted BOE program. So we stay pretty busy. We're sharing our knowledge from a collective almost 60 years now when the year turns of knowledge, working at Toyota with very different hats on and different areas, different functional areas, different levels. And so we love to share our knowledge and kind of give back what we were given from our trainers and at the time, time we spent there. So lots of, lots of things we enjoy sharing.

Nice, Good, good, good. So, all right, well, let's jump right into the topic of the day. And that is a. Some kind of big fuss you guys made over on LinkedIn. So for folks who haven't seen the. And we're going to obviously link to it in the show notes will be episode 196 over on GembaPodcast.com, we'll link to the, to the actual posting there. But what was the question, let's start there that you asked?

You know, I believe it was around, you know, the word lean, obviously. And I'm like, if we didn't have the word lean to describe some of the things that a lot of organizations try to do, implement, evolve, if we didn't have that word, what word would we use instead? You know, like an exchange word. And it created a huge dialogue. There was a lot of comments A lot of interaction and it really wasn't expected for me to have that much discussion today. I think the viewpoints are at almost 50,000, 57,000 views. And so it turned out to be a very popular and engaging question that got a really good response and some really great answers and discussions going on from it.

So why did you ask it?

Well, you know, I love LinkedIn and the interactions on there. I got a lot of good colleagues, friends and there's so much good discussion. Ernie and I are like sponges. So, you know, we love to learn and soak in from other people and their ideas. But you know, we get questions externally too, not just from social media side, but from clients. We do a lot of private clients and also public sessions. And the question sometimes comes up, even in the most recent, maybe one or two years is do we have to call it something? Do we need to call it lean? And so I just thought it was a good question to throw out there to everybody to discuss and say, hey, if we didn't have this work word, how would you describe it? And so bringing from what we were learning from what we were doing in the field, kind of bringing it out to social media and asking them the same question we were kind of asked in private settings with clients.

Yeah, a few days ago you guys were trapped in an airport and one of you was playing around with a Word cloud and basically I think you took the, the answers or the responses from the LinkedIn posting and created this word cloud. So what did you learn from the responses? Let's start there. What did you learn?

Yeah, it was very interesting because I tried to take all the comments and kind of do a copy and paste and put them over into a Word document and weed some things out. And I looked down and it was like 20 pages of comments. I'm like, oh boy, this is a lot to do, some 5s of information. But I started looking in, obviously we were on a delay, so I had some time and so I started looking into it and pulling out some of the key worded. There were some repetitive words, things like flow. And I like one of the words upskilling a lot of things around people development. But I decided these word clouds are kind of neat and informative and it brings information together in a fun way to kind of capture summarize what came out of all the comments, what were some of the commonalities and what were some of the neat little new things that people come up with. So I put that together a couple of days ago and put it out There as a kind of follow up to the thread, I think, and it's being looked at as, well, pretty good. So I think it was a good summary of that.

Ernie, when you were reading through all the responses, did anything surprise you?

You know, you know, it really. I think there was a lot of good words in there in terms of how people describe it, but it really, it wasn't a lot different than what we see actually when we go to clients or when we talk to other people. And what does lean mean to you? You know, we get. We get all kinds of different answers. And I think, I think the post showed that same kind of trend of it means different things to different people. And honestly, from my opinion, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing. You know, when I was at Toyota, we really never used the word lean. And so it was kind of our culture of how we did business. It wasn't really. It didn't have to have a tag, so to speak. So I thought there's a lot of good creativity in the way people are talking about it and a lot of the words they use, you know, especially when we talk about development of people and continuous development of people, that's kind of in our world at Toyota, that's kind of how we define continuous improvement, is continuous development of people. So I thought, I thought it was really good. I think it's really good discussion.

So what were the. I don't have the word cloud up in front of me right now, but got all the podcast stuff read in here, but what were. I guessing what were, say maybe the top five or six kind of phrases or words that folks used.

I think flow came up quite a bit. Engagement was up there. Harmony was a good one. Integration, trying to kind of look through my notes as well. Kind of operational performance, cultural transformation, respect for people. And then there was a kind of a learning with the R inside of lean.

Yeah, I saw that for leaning and.

Learning at the same time. Kind of mindset and operational grace was a neat one in there. So there was a lot of things around and obviously the default ones around waste and value add. But there was a lot of good things, especially around flow, you know, just simple flow. How do we flow with people, how do we flow with information product, you know, our outputs, the things that we're trying to do from a vertical and horizontal alignment in the organization, you know that. I think that was pretty cool. And then like I said, the one upskilling was around people, I think was pretty good. Summary of what we saw.

So imagine that some other clever Lean thinker wrote that same posting and both of you stumbled across it at different times and you decided to play the game. What would y' all have typed in there?

You know, for me, and I think Ernie kind of mentioned it, it's always been, if we go back to our cultural begin with TMMK before we ever realized that there was this term for what we were doing. We joke sometimes and said, our trainers said it's your job. That's an acronym for you, it's your job. But for us in our toyed away culture, I think Lean and there's this equal sign of people development or respect for people. And that's kind of for me when I hear the word, because lean is such a large umbrella word for many things under it. But I think it resides with culture and people and putting them first. If you go back to some of the words that Sakichi Toyota comes up with, there's a lot of things around people first and you know, the people are determinant of the rise and fall of an organization. And so I think it really resides with people.

Yeah. Ernie, do you agree?

Yeah, I think, I think, you know, and I reflect back at our years at Toyota and really we obviously we looked at process, we look at results, but our biggest challenge as leaders is how do we continue to take people and develop them into doing things they didn't think they could do their self. And it was very powerful to see that development of people over time, time and time again, which is what continues to bring our continuous improvement culture. You know, it continues to reinforce that continuous improvement culture.

Yeah, I know it's interesting. We did a. I was just thinking about this the other day after I read your the Post and we did a video interview series. It was, I don't know, couple Ames ago, maybe been the one in Toronto, I can't remember which one it was, but we had Jim Womack, Mr. Shook, Mr. Jones, they were all in a room and Chet kind of was sort of emceeing the whole thing and, and they reflected on that 25 years of lean, right? Like that was the 25 year anniversary of it. And one of the questions that they did ask, I think it was they asked Jim Womack if he could go back and do it again, would you call it lean? And I don't want to. I can't remember exactly what he said, but I remember him specifically saying, you know, we did the best we could, you know, and so I think it's real easy for People to be critical of it and. Oh, why'd they call it that? But I'm like, well, where were you, big boy? You know, you were nowhere, you know, doing nothing. These guys were out trying to change the world. So I have a lot of respect for the work that those guys did. And machinery changed the world, obviously changed many of our lives. Right. So, you know, it's our career now, you know, this Lean thing. So. So, yeah, so it's super easy to be critical of it, but. But I for one, super, super happy that there is a thing, anything that, that, that, you know, represents what it is that we're trying to do. So.

So I think I listened to that. I think the majority of that and it was something I think needed at the time to try to. How do we come up with something that isn't a Toyota word, so to speak? And let's try to replicate this external. And I really think it's a really good word. And I've talked to Jim and John and others around it, and I think if you asked them and some of the things they talk about in the interview, I think it's really just about adding value. Value, whether it's people, whether it's what we are creating in our product, services or output, it's just how do we add value the best? And, you know, the thinking around that, I think it's okay, you know, it's okay to call it something.

And I think it was a really, actually pretty, pretty important at the time because people were struggling trying to figure out what to call their culture. And so I think coming out with Lean really was able to give people a way to define their culture, what they're trying to get to. And I think what we see with our customers today is it's having a really positive impact.

Yeah, no, for sure. So, I mean, none of us have, you know, magical powers. We can see into the future. But do you think the term lean is here to stay?

I think so. You know, obviously this is our thoughts and opinions from experiences over the last so many years, decades, working with customers and all over different industries and just listening to people have the discussion. I think it's going to be around, I think, how it evolves as we all continue to grow and learn together again. It's an umbrella work that means so many things, but I think it's starting to, you know, kind of merge towards the culture and people side versus maybe the tool side of it. You know, I think in the very beginning, and even with myself, when I began to train external it was about trying to replicate the tools. You know, let's put the tools in place. And we were missing an important facet of it. I believe in, in that, hey, the tools are great and they're really effective, but if the folks, the people behind the thinking behind them, the people don't understand that it might not stick. And so I think the word's going to be there. I think how we all evolve it together and what the folks need from it, I think that part may change to the culture and people side.

And I think when we go to clients and we ask them, what does lean mean to you? Fortunately, this is a real positive. We don't hear as much now, less employees are needed, which was at one time you would hear that pretty frequent. People associate lean with getting rid of people. And the culture is changing. And so I think when we talk to them, every client we talk to, they define lean differently. And that's okay, but it kind of gives them that common thing of saying, here's we got to improve our culture. And this is kind of the star we're following to improve that culture. And I think that's awesome, actually.

Do you think there should be or do you think there is a universally kind of agreed definition of lean?

I think if you wanted to say there was an agreement, it would be very, very high level, maybe a thousand foot level agreement. And what you usually get is when you ask, hey, what is, you know, we often do icebreakers to say, what does the word lean mean to you and what does the word culture mean to you? And what we hear a lot from that 50,000 foot level is, you know, waste reduction, do more with less, be streamlined and you know, kind of starting and thinking from that perspective, you know, about waste and it really is about waste. Now how we go about finding it and engaging people, I think is where the cultural and the people side come in. Because again, if you don't have that buy in and understanding of why this tool under the lean umbrella is helping us, you know, it can be non value add or it can create rework if we aren't explaining it deep enough. But I think when you hear that word at a high level, it's associated with, you know, trying to be better, less cost and that waste reduction, in my opinion.

Yeah, I think, I think, I agree that at a high level and I think everybody kind of associates it with continuous improvement, which is fine. I think once you get into how. Okay, how do you define continuous improvement in your organization, that's where it starts getting different and A lot of different organizations will define that differently, which is okay. As we was talking about earlier, you know, everybody's not ready to make all the changes now. And so as they define Lean, it's one step at a time to be able to see how the tools and how the culture, creating the culture, continuous development is important to the company.

Very good. So I want to now kind of transition a little bit to, you know, this is. I mentioned to you before we started recording, this is actually this episode's the first episode to air in 2018. So happy new Year. Even though it's the middle of December when we're recording this.

Yes. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. To everyone listening. How's that? Talk about 2017. I mean, you guys are always blowing and going. You're always on the run, always helping people, teaching people, learning yourselves. What were some big takeaways from 2017 for Tracy and Ernie?

Yeah. So just this past eight week block, we've been gone six weeks of it, you know, training, and we actually got to go to Israel. We were across 400 people in five days over there with the LLE group. And so, you know, the things that we learned this year, there's so many of them. But we saw this common theme around the importance of Gemba. And, you know, the Gemba is the actual place where the work happens, whether it's widget or whether it's material and information flow or if you're on a computer screen. There's so many things that define the Gemba, but we've seen so many discoveries and light bulbs come on from, you know, really tenured people that, you know, have said, hey, I've been here 25 years, and I didn't realize this was going on until I stopped and took a second to. And that differentiation from initial assumption of what we think it is, and that keyword is think, not what I know. Just being able to see it, engage with the process owner and ask the questions and realize just this past week, just a few weeks ago, it's a common theme that we're seeing. And to watch the light bulb go off for the person and then the person doing the work and the leader and seeing that dial and engagement happen, where the work is has been just, you know, awesome to be a part of. And I think for me, that's one of the pieces that have just been great for us to watch the learning in that aspect of the go see and how important that is.

I think absolutely the Gemba. And we probably have spent more time at the Gemba this year than all the previous years combined, maybe. And so it's becoming very important for companies to be able to understand. But I think as we go to the gemba, one of the things I think we saw this year, probably again, more than we've ever seen before, is for companies who are really getting into lean as we. As we coin it, we're seeing better standardization. We're seeing companies that are able to define problems really well now and to be able to understand where do they need to put the focus. And that's really encouraging to me in the aspect of now they can see that just getting, just moving people or not hiring people is not necessarily the answer. It's the ability to be able to see that one second of waste and how do we use that one second of waste. And so that's been super good. I mean, we sat with last week with a senior leadership group and we did a couple gimbal walks. And I mean, it was very, very powerful. And the impact that they're going to have to that company, I believe that because they came out of there with a strategy that's going to make a huge difference. That makes us feel good when we see that and the company is progressing, that's what encourages and inspires us. Yeah.

Well, you guys also had something pretty big happen in 2017. I'll go ahead and plug it for you. You wrote a pretty. Well, I don't know when you actually wrote it. You probably been writing it, but you released the book in 2017, and we kind of liked it. We bought 100 copies and sent it out as a holiday gift. So talk a little bit about Toyota EE.

Yes. Hashtag TheToyota EE. The Toyota engagement Equation. Yeah, it. It went online July of this year, so almost six months. And I guess being the first in 2018, we'll say seven months. You know, it's been. We've had a really good response from the book, not only from a lot of the Amazon reviews that we've seen, but just people emailing us saying, you know, the inside perspective that you guys are giving of actually living it and kind of growing up with Toyota, so to speak, when they started their very first plan and the interactions with the trainers, Ernie's experiences. He spent probably a couple of years in Japan. All the trips that he made, learning and just hearing the feedback from, you know, this is real. It's like listening to you two as we're reading. And, you know, our voice kind of came through with the help of Jacob Stoller. He was our kind of book collaborator. And, you know, he really helped us bring out some of those stories and bring it to life with the case study that's in the book. And, you know, it's. We've just been really happy to share it and it's been a great thing for us to use as kind of the information our equation, the GTS to the sixth power plus the E cubed equals the DNA, the discipline and accountability. And it's been great. We've been humbled by a lot of the comments from it and it's been a great thing to share with others.

Now, I think also we've got a lot of feedback from our friends that are still at Toyota that have read the book and, and, you know, that was probably the people we want to hear the most from because we're trying to. In the book we try to tell the story of our journey, you know, and the learnings of it, the successes, but also the failures and how we learn from both of those. And the feedback we've got from our friends at Toyota has just been phenomenal and we've been very pleased with that and very, very fortunate and very lucky with that, I think.

Yeah, no good stuff. Awesome. So, again, this is coming out in 2018, so let's look forward 2018. What's new for Tracy and Ernie and what do you guys got going on?

Yeah, so we recently found out around the book that we've won the Shingo Publication award for it. So we were just completely, you know, just wowed by that. It took me a second to read that email that we had won that and to be put in with a lot of folks and books that have also won and that we will be honored at the Shingo Institute conference in April, I believe, in Orlando. I think it's the second week of April. So very, very excited to have that happen to us for our very first book and so very excited to share that and, you know, other things going on for us in 2018 that, you know, we're wanting to evolve to. You know, there's a lot of conferences and things that go on with a lot of different, you know, groups. And Ernie and I are thinking about, about, you know, hey, guys, it's very warm in Florida in the wintertime and so we're not looking at a conference type setting, but more learning sessions. We've been talking a little bit, having some discussions with a local hotel here and also trying to team up to try to have a physical gemba to go to. And so it won't be A speaking conference, but it'll be a two to four day learning session that we're going to offer what we offer to our private clients in the form of two, two day sessions at a hotel here. And it hopefully tie up with a host gemba that we're going to be able to physically see, you know, some processes. So that's, we're working on that for 18, maybe summer or the fall. That's our hope. And to start to maybe offer that maybe twice a year to bring folks to us and to offer what we're doing externally to a public forum. That's just about learning and we really hope that it's successful and we want to make that small. It'll be probably no more 20 to 30 people. So very intimate with coaching and good instruction. One on one from Ernie and I.

Awesome, awesome. Very good. Well, super excited to see what 2018 brings for you and really the whole lean community and the movement. I don't know about you guys, but I feel really good about the movement and what people are doing. I know it's far from perfect and many of us still, you know, struggle from time to time, but it's, it's folks like you, Tracy and Ernie who kind of help pull it all back together and writing good books and, you know, we try to do our small part with this podcast and I just, I don't know, I have a lot of hope. I don't know what you guys feel.

I think so too. I think, as I said earlier, I think the improvements with the clients we saw in the last year and a half or so has been phenomenal. Yeah. And I think, you know, I, I think it's really starting to. Companies are starting to understand how it, how it's a benefit to them and their people and, and I think that's just priceless. I mean, we always talk about, you know, at Toyota, we are a company that developed people just happen to build cars. And I think people are starting to be able to understand that when we say that now.

Yeah, exactly. Good stuff. All right, well, I'm sure we'll talk again later in the year on this podcast. Definitely. If not on the podcast, some other way. But keep up the great work, you two, and thanks for coming on again and I'll keep watching out for those LinkedIn viral posts again.

We hope that we can continue to do that, get the community talking out there. It's great stuff.

Yeah, well, let's get that thing rocking again. So again we'll link to it in the show notes. Againba podcast.com episode look for 196. We'll link to that LinkedIn, we'll bring it back to life again, and we'll get another 20,000 views on it. How's that?

There you go. Absolutely.

All right, you guys take care.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ron.

All right, bye.

Bye. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now we invite you to take a no strings attached, fully functional Test drive of Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than a thousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge at gembacademy. Com.