GA 209 | How to Address Poverty with Lean-Like Thinking with Jacob Stoller and Mauricio Miller

Improvement for me now is watching families take control over their life.

Have you ever wondered how life changing Lean thinking principles could be? Perhaps you've seen the power of Lean after an exhausting Kaizen event. Perhaps you've even experienced the transformation of people when they're finally allowed to share their thoughts and ideas. Now, don't get me wrong, these things are awesome. But what if you could use many of these same principles to eradicate poverty? How powerful would that be? Well, this is exactly what my guest today has done for the majority of his adult life. His name is Mauricio Lynn Miller, and he's the founder of the Family Independence Initiative. Now, I was introduced to Mauricio by my friend and fellow Lean thinker, Jacob Staller, who was kind enough to join us on today's show. Now, it's important to point out that Mauricio wouldn't refer to himself as a Lean thinker, but as you'll hear, he's been practicing aspects of Lean for many, many years. In fact, if you look up the Lean definition of respect for people, you just may see Mauricio's picture. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we talk about, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 209. 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. All right, Jacob and Mauricio, welcome to the show. How's it going, guys?

Terrific.

Very good.

Great to be here, Ron.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Jacob, we were talking before we hit record. This is your third time onto the show, so thanks for coming back so many times. Yeah.

Oh, my pleasure.

Yeah. Yeah. So we were on. People could go back. They always like to go back and listen to the archives. You are first on Believe it or not, episode 33. 33, where we talked about your famous book, Lean CEO. And then in episode 116, we talked about storytelling. I remember that one. That was a fun one, talking about storytelling. So folks can go back and check those ones out. But today I'm really excited to dig into a topic that, gosh, I'm not sure we've really addressed here on the podcast, and I just don't think it's probably being talked a lot about within the Lean movement, which is, well, we're going to change that today, aren't we? Let's begin with Jacob telling us, how did you meet Mauricio?

Well, this is really interesting. I Got a call from my father who said, I've just read this book you've got to read. It's called the Alternative, and it's about ending poverty. And he said, the reason you got to read it is because there are a whole bunch of ideas in this that are exactly like your book, Valiant CEO. And I thought, that's interesting. Well, a little backstory here is that my father knows Mauricio for many years. He was one of Mauricio's professors at University of California in Berkeley. So they kept in touch. And my father tell you what, you read the book and I'll introduce you to Mauricio. So anyway, I got the book. I thought, okay, well, we'll see what the parallels are here. And to be honest, I was completely dumbfounded at how many parallels there were with lean thinking. I mean, Mauricio has a roadmap for ending poverty, that it's really based on empowering people in communities to get themselves out of poverty. I mean, and it's about saying that it's not experts that are going to have the answers, it's the people in the communities. So his approach is all about collecting data, and I mean real data, not running focus groups, but collecting real information about how people can get themselves out of poverty. It's about continuous improvement. He doesn't believe in great sweeping interventions. He believes that families are going to get out of poverty one family at a time. So the parallels just go on and on. And I'm sure you're getting pretty curious at this point, Ron.

Yeah, no, no, really good stuff. And I've actually done a little bit of snooping around myself, Mauricio, and watched some YouTube videos featuring you and all that. So I definitely interested to hear your story. So let's just jump right into that, Mauricio, just before we're going to get into the Family Independence Initiative, or FII, I guess as we'll refer to it. But before that, way before that, let's talk about Mauricio. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and then how do you became interested in this whole idea of ending poverty?

Well, first of all, thanks a lot, Ron. You and Jacob, and the introduction, especially the introduction to the whole concept of lean, lean corporations and how that whole system works. For me, it was the same thing in that I was kind of dumbfounded as to how you would run a corporation and that there was really a parallel in terms of what I was thinking in terms of where it came from for me is that my mother was in Mexico with my Sister and I and like so many others that before her, she obviously wanted to come to the United States to build a better life for her two kids. And as a female in her period, she probably was. She only got go through third grade and she was a single mom. And she came up to the United States feeling like, well, here there was really a chance that if you worked hard enough that things would work out for your kids. And so we moved up to San Jose, California, which was fastest growing city at that point in time, which is back in the 50s. And what I think we learned is that it wasn't just working hard and getting talents that actually could get you ahead in the United States, that actually things did not go that well for our family. My mother, because she was Mexican immigrant, single mom, third grade education, that there was no trust in her decision making, there was no trust in her talents or even trying to find out what her talents were like. And that she found coming into the States that basically any help that was available was pretty paternalistic. It was very top down, top down solutions and that in order for her to then get any assistance that she had to give in to conform that way. And my mother was not very good at conforming. My sister, even though my mother had made, I think the best decisions she could, she put us in good schools, that my sister ended up meeting the wrong guy. He got her pregnant at 16, took her out of the house and turned out that he was really abusive. For my mother having to come here then to lose one child of the two, that she wanted to come here for a better life, to lose her daughter into that situation was pretty devastating. And so she then turned to me as like, this is not going to happen again and you're going to go to college. And she basically sacrificed everything. And my sister did too. My sister, you know, ended up with three kids and realized that, you know, her husband wouldn't let her get ahead and wouldn't let her get a job that paid more than him or finish high school or anything. So I had these two women that I knew were very talented, were very smart, were very hard workers, and yet nobody recognized that. And we didn't have a system that actually would recognize that everything was very top down. As my mother was able to get me into UC Berkeley, I have no idea how she told me how to be a doctor, an engineer. I picked engineering.

No pressure, right?

Yeah, well, there was like no choice. This is not about what you're talented as you have to make some money and you have to be able to take care of your sister, her three kids. And so I was much younger than my sister. So you know, I went to Berkeley, ended up in the 60s where everything was a movement. But in the meantime, my sister's life was getting harder and ultimately I did graduate as an engineer. I went to take care of my mother. She was, no, you're not going to take care of me. We didn't sacrifice everything so you could spend all your time and money and energy on me. And so she said, you know, what you have to do is take care of your sister. As it went, my mother ended up checking out. She would just not let me take care of her. And so what I had done then is watched as the two people I love the most, my sister, her life was being ruined by this man. And then my mother basically taking her own life in order to not have it drain our family. That I decided to join the war on poverty. And it's a long story, but I quit engineering and then started to work at a nonprofit providing social services. And in that process came to realize that everything was a top down solution and that ultimately I wouldn't bring my own family through my own services. And we, you know, after I was running these for 20 years, so after 20 years of running services, we were considered to have one of the best community development corporations in the country. President Clinton invited me to a State of the Union address in 99 to honor our services. At the same time, I wouldn't bring my own family through my services. I knew something was wrong and I had to leave that scenario. It was really that whole experience that made me question the kind of pretty much paternalistic system that we set up for people like my family and the families that I grew up with. So I'll stop there for a second.

Yeah, so just to help level set within the lean movement, we spend a lot of time talking about what's your current state and then what's the future state. And we try to problem solve or close that gap, if you will, between current state and future state. So talk a little bit about when you were in that original role. What was the, say the current state? I mean, you can't go into great detail, but just in a minute or two tell us like what was the general process like that you didn't like. Like what was it?

Well, you know, and I think what you mean by the current state is like when I was running social services, I think my first job was to was in job training and I was to train 25 kids that were trying to get out of gangs, how to do construction, because I did construction to earn my way through. About two months into my recruitment of my first crew, I had one position that was still open of the 25, and I had two kids coming in that both had dropped out of high school and were trying to get out of the gangs. And what I ended up doing is, as I looked through applications, One of them, I learned, had just come out of jail because he'd gone on a robbery. And he had, however, not been able to get his friend who was with him, to go on the robbery with him. So as I looked at these two kids, because our service system is set up to help the most in need, I came out and I said, well, you know, I have to give the training slot to Richard. And Richard was the one that didn't want to be there. He's the one that was in the robbery. And they both looked at me as like, so you're going to give it to Richard? And they said, well, how come? And they said, well, because the way my funding is set up is I have to serve the most in need. And Richard just came out of jail, and so he's more needy. And so then Richard turns to his friend next to him and he smiles. See, you should have gone on that robbery with me.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Okay, so I'm over there. What in the world did I just do to these two teenagers? I sent this message that in order to get help, you have to get in trouble. And basically, that's what I did for 20 years, is I made families compete to be more needy than the next person in order to get in any type of access to services or help.

Yeah. And Jacob, by the way, feel free to jump in at any time if you have thoughts or comments or anything like that or questions as well. I mean, we can tag team this one. All right, so you recognized that the system that you had devoted 20 years of your life to wasn't working. What did you do next?

Well, to be honest with you, I was pretty lost. And then there was a lot of serendipity that's happened in my life. And because we are very well known, I was at dinner one night, and I. The phone rang, and it turned out to be Jerry brown, who at that point was mayor of Oakland. And I sat on the board of the private industry council in Oakland, and he was calling up to complain that those in the private industry council and in the nonprofits that were serving that basically we hadn't, after 30 some years of The War on Poverty. We hadn't fundamentally changed anything. We had made poverty more tolerable for folks. But we hadn't had any fundamental change. And. And so he was complaining. But by this time, I was already disappointed with my services. Because I had just come back from the State of the Union address. And I wondered if we were the best, then something's wrong. So he challenged me. And he basically said, look, if you could do anything you wanted to do. And money and regulations weren't a problem, what would you do? And it was the first time, I think, I ever felt like, well, what if there was no box? And so after two weeks of trying to figure this out. Cause I had to go present to the mayor. I realized I didn't know what to do. So when I went to talk to Jerry, because he set up an appointment. He said, well, what would you do? And I told him, well, I don't know what I would do. But my mother figured out how to get me out. And for that fact, I think most mothers, fathers, guardians. Would have a better idea how to get their own families out of poverty. And so what I would do is I would turn to them. I have a journaling system that I had developed in the 90s. I have a journaling system that if you help me put it online, we'll give everybody a computer and we'll ask them what they would do. Basically, they can design their own process out. And then what we'll do is we'll learn from it and maybe try to help if we can. Basically, that's what we set up. We called it the Family Independence Initiative, or fii, as you mentioned, it was really a research project to see if people. What the capacity was of people to help themselves or to help each other. That was the start of the solution. It was really this call from Jerry Brown.

Now, you mentioned, Mauricio, that yesterday we were chatting, you said that the typical social services solution of collecting data is to do focus groups. And so you're doing something very different.

Yeah, so one of the things for me is that in that 20 years of doing services, knowing I wouldn't bring my own family through it. And that. That that system wasn't going to work for the friends. Because, you know, I grew up in these poor neighborhoods. And it's like. Well, nobody I knew really felt like that was the right way of doing things. So I developed this journaling system to try to see if other families and what they did and where they were were like my family and the families I grew up with. And so the system really was to understand people's lives, like, set up a system that collects over 200 data points everywhere, from anything from income and assets to their vocation, their skills. Like, my mother had a skill, but she didn't have education, to health and human services, to their resources, to whether they help each other or not. I did this by actually asking families what was important, what they did. Having an engineering background, then I broke it up into indicators. Then when Jerry backed this, then we set it up online, gave everybody a computer, and essentially what they would go on is every month they would journal on the computer into this online system. What had changed in their life? Did their income change? Did they help people? Did other people help them? What were the things that were important, the actions, their goals? And it was pretty elaborate. And because it was, then what we did is we paid them for their time. We paid them, on average, about $25 to $30 an hour, which for them was a really good pay rate. So really, this was very deep data about the family by individual on a monthly basis. So you can imagine the kind of information that we were getting. And it was pretty dynamic and still is very dynamic.

Now you started collecting all of this data. First of all, how did you choose who gets a computer? How do you determine who is a candidate?

So, you know, what I told Jerry is that for me, I'd been working with probably providing services for about 2,000 families a year out of the same neighborhoods in Oakland and San Francisco. So I kind of knew a lot of the families and a lot of the circumstances, especially after 20 years. And that what I wanted to learn is of the same families that came through services. I wanted a diversity of those families to understand if the services worked for them and didn't. I didn't felt it was good for my family, but I wanted to get their perspective. What we did is I went back into the same neighborhoods that I'd been serving for 20 years. But what was different, that I also knew is that I promised Jerry that in order to get clean data, we would not have any social workers or counselors or advisors, that we wanted to find out the capacity of families. But we knew, and I knew growing up, that my mother couldn't do it alone. She needed family and friends. And in Mexico, there was a sense of village. And so I said, what we're going to do is go back into these neighborhoods. We're going to find some of the same families that come through programs that are now starting to show up, their kids are showing up in my program. So we'll get a diversity, but I will only enroll them if they recruit four to six or eight other families that are friends of theirs. So we'll enroll them as a group and tell them, look, you're not going to get any help from the program. We're going to learn from you. But we know you're going to need somebody. And so you're going to have to turn to your friends the way it used to happen historically, whether you were Irish or Polish or African Americans. After slavery built black townships, there were 50 black townships built in Oklahoma alone by former slaves that were totally excluded from our economy. And yet they worked together and were able to bring up black colleges and stuff. So I said, we're only going to enroll you in groups, but it was really still the same diversity that would show up in my programs over that 20 years.

Okay, so you're collecting all this data on these folks. What do you do with the data and how do you take action or how do you help them take action?

These are all great questions because I think that the first thing is we wanted, and I certainly wanted the data to serve the family. It was first designed by asking the families, okay, so how do you want these questions really structured? How will it be structured in a way that we can find out what really is happening? Because questioning, they'd been through focus groups, they've been to programs that ask questions in a certain way in order to try to figure out what the program can do for them. And I'm with her. No, that's not, you know, we're not here to help you. We're here to learn what really is important. And so the way the whole online system was actually refined is by going back and get continuous feedback from the families and restructuring all the questions along this, you know what ended up about six categories of different indicators. The that was the first thing is like, okay, let's make this information useful to you. And today, because it's real time and cloud based, it's sort of like having mint.com or fitbit or something like that. The second piece we told them is like, I got the mayor and I got the congresswoman and whatever in a commission, and we want to learn from you. And so we want information in a certain way. So essentially with the families, it's like we're forming a partnership. We're in this together. You know, you want to help your family, you want to have an impact on your friends and the community. Community, we want the same thing. And so it's going to be a partnership. You're basically a consultant and a peer to us. We're paying you for your time. So we need clean data. And what was interesting is that we get very clean data. If you make the information useful to the family so that they can use it as they try to improve their life, then they put in clean data. You don't get Fitbit and try to fool it because then that information to you isn't really useful. That was the two audiences is, okay, this has to serve. Serve you and it has to serve us. But we're in partnership towards the same goal.

Okay, well, tell us about maybe some of the questions and then because I understand, I don't want to spoil the end, but this has helped people. Right. But I'm trying to do is walk through that process of they're learning and lean thinkers. We're all about learning. It's not for us. It's not about solving problems. It's about learning and learning faster. And the more we learn, the more that we. The more problems end up being solved. But we really, the best lean thinkers approach it as it's learning opportunities. So how are these folks learning through these, this questioning process? And then how are you helping them, perhaps, or coaching them perhaps through the process?

So it's interesting because I wasn't sure exactly what was going to happen. All I knew is that my mother wanted to tell people that she was a really good dress designer, that she was a great seamstress, that she was a really hard worker, and that's the information she wanted to share. And so we would ask questions about what your talent is, what your kids, what they aspire to, what have you done towards that aim? Are you just interested in increasing your income? But if so, in what area? Or you're trying to buy a house, or you're just trying to make sure your kid doesn't get into a gang and what are the steps you're doing? So we would also ask, well, in this whole peer group that you have, what have you guys done together? Or have you helped each other? Who has helped you? Because we knew social networks were really huge. But what we saw within two years, and we start seeing it, like I said, we collect monthly data that within two years things happened that I didn't expect. That we had two groups of African Americans from West and East Oakland and their incomes jumped 37% within that two years. We had a group of Asians from Laos, from the war in Vietnam. They were refugees. Their income jumped 18%, not the 37%, the Latinos that we had from the war in El Salvador. So we didn't take populations that were here as immigrants with a lot of hope and a lot of energy. We took refugees that were really pretty difficult situations and trying to transition and that what ended up happening is we saw these big jumps in income and everything. But we also saw. Which we had to investigate. Kids grades start going up. And there was no program associated with this that the refugees from the war in El Salvador had never expected to buy a home or anything. But because one person this is. I'll get to. What we finally learned was the change agent. But we had one refugee family from the war in El Salvador that was pretty nondescript family, but somehow figured out how to buy a house. And because that family bought a house, then the other five families in that group all ended up owning homes. And then what they told me is that then, because we bought homes, then it spread, that word spread to other people in the Salvadoran refugee community, and now other refugee families are buying homes. And it is something that none of us expected could happen. But because Maria and Javier, that they had bought a house, then everybody believed, well, they're not that special, and they were able to do it, so we can do it. So it's a behavioral piece called positive deviance. And positive deviance is that if that basically, in humanity, if you bring any group of families together, what you'll see is people that deviate. And that what happens is that when there is a positive deviance, that somebody from that same circumstance moves up, then everybody else becomes very interested. Obviously, it can happen the negative way, because in another community, the kids have been joining gangs. So there'd been a negative deviance, and other kids start following that. But now we had a positive deviant. And then the other families in the group then said, well, if Javier Maria can do that, we can do that. They bought homes. And then it was like, well, then there must be this other ripple effect. And what I can tell you is in that story of about the homeownership that 16 years later, it was about a year ago, I presented at Stanford. And afterwards, when I told the story of Javier Maria buying a house and how it had an impact on other people, and we thought it had an impact on the refugee community in a broader way. A young man walked up to me after the talk, and he said, so, you know, my family's from El Salvador. My mother heard about your families buying homes. And so our family really targeted getting a house. We bought a house, and it's the equity from that house that got me through Stanford. Wow.

Wow. That's incredible.

So all of a sudden it was that. That self made solution then is what changed expectations. And it is people following each other's positive examples that actually can spread and go very deep into a community, because those are the ones they work because they're the only experts of their own lives.

Yeah. You know what's interesting with kind of always trying to parallel. Most of the folks listening to this are so called lean thinkers. And we all know that you can literally walk into a factory or an office or anywhere where they're trying to get something done. And the minute you start what we would say, keeping score. Right. Like literally, it's like, how many widgets do you need to produce this hour? 100. Okay, write 100 up there at the end of the hour. How many did you produce? 80. Okay, right, 80. So we missed it by 20. Why? And then we start talking, right? Or. And just the fact of keeping score. Productivity almost always skyrockets. So I'm wondering if all of this, I don't know, data collection systems and just holding people kind of really accountable for lack of a better word to tracking their life, if that had had an impact, a positive impact. What do you think?

No, I think so. What was interesting, I was just having this conversation with someone else and there is a lot in American thinking about kind of logic. So it has to be this cause and effect. And that's sort of true. But the information I think about somebody is what drives, I'd say, like let's put in percentages, which is not necessarily true, but let's say for 30% of the families, seeing what other peers are doing actually is one of the biggest driving forces. And it actually is in the evaluations that we try to do with other families. What we found is that, and it's a smaller percentage is the way we were looking at it, or at least what we seem to be learning. For other families, it really is more like Fitbit. It's just sort of watching yourself and having a way to track your goals and what you do. Because you can see it every month the charts come up as to, well, here's what I'm doing and am I meeting my goals, et cetera. For some of them, it overlaps also that the fact that it's being measured then actually brings validity. And so being validated plays a role. You know, humans are driven by a multiplicity of different factors and we weigh them all in different ways. And so for us it was always that there probably is not one thing and that what we would not want to do is say this. You know, that the main thing you have to do is put together a fitbit for families, that that's going to be the biggest driving force. Because another family was saying, you know, the reason we stay in this whole thing and what's made a difference to our kids is that when we journal our whole family with our kids sits around the kitchen table and we talk about here's what we wanted to do last month and whatever, and this discussion with our kids, actually, it is kind of a cohesion of family. And we've seen that with groups too. It's like we're doing group activities. And so, you know, what we need is a system that allows for the diversity of drivers for families.

Yeah. You know, a couple podcasts ago, I'm losing track. We do so many. I had Jacob's friend John Miller on and Michael Ballet, and they're two prolific so, you know, lean thinkers within our lean movement. And they spent, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes talking about how difficult it is for, in this case, organizations to define what success is like, you know, or. Or as Simon Sinek would say, like your why. Right. Like why are we doing this? So I'm guessing that the success is very, very. There's a lot of deviation, if you will, to use that word, from family to family. Like you said, for some, success might be to make sure Johnny doesn't go into the gang. And for another one might be that Cindy wants to become, you know, a heart surgeon and we need to help her get there. Right. So is that part of the process, helping them define what success is for them?

Well, you know, I think we approach this really as learning. So we're learning from the families. And if you think about Amazon or, you know, Walmart or whatever they and us, you know, for we have our own purpose and that what I think business does right now is they're trying to understand their customer and their customer base. And that customer base is dynamic. It is. Its needs change continuously. So there may be a huge demand for baby carriages this month, but then it may shift to something else the next month. And certainly within a family, it's the same thing. As soon as your kid goes to kindergarten from the house, then all of a sudden everything changes around that. And what I feel like what we're trying to do is get the nonprofit sector and philanthropists to think about people in low income communities is again, this very dynamic group of people that are willing and, you know, this whole thing with Facebook and everything like that, obviously are willing to give information as long as you don't misuse it.

Yeah, yeah, careful.

And so this issue of trust with the families for us is like, we need to serve you in order to get good information, and we need to keep your trust. But what technology allows you to do. So the good side of technology, it allows you to track real time what is happening. And if you're able to do that, if you're able to. And this is this continuous improvement that I think Jacob mentioned, that you're able to then get continuous feedback that makes. In a business, probably it'll make the worker feel better. Certainly for our families, they feel so, so much better. And that essentially we all get what we want is that improvement for me now is watching families take control over their life and watching them help each other. Because since we don't help them, they go back to that model of how the Irish started helping each other to become policemen in one place and construction in another, and the Polish into meat factories and African Americans to build black townships and the Chinatowns. And it goes back to that model of we're in this together and let's help each other and then. And let's bring our talents to society as a whole. So I'm not sure if I answered it, but it is this diversity that really can make us great and especially if we invest in it.

Yeah. Hey, Jacob, I want to pull you back in now. So you've written a good article I believe is on the LAI website, and we'll link to that in the show notes. What can we lean thinkers or what can our lean movement if you will learn from someone like Mauricio in the work that he's doing in fii?

Oh, gosh, I think we can learn a lot. I mean, you know, when I think about some of the uncertainty that Mauricio is willing to accept, I mean, he says we're going to empower people. We don't know exactly what they're going to say, but we're going to follow their lead. I think that's, you know, you see the strongest lean leaders, they're willing to do that. They're willing to say, I'm going to hand the ball over to the people in the Gemba, and I'm going to see where this takes us, and I'm going to trust them. And I think Mauricio is doing the same thing. He's trusting that people really do want to get out of poverty and that they have some pretty strong ideas about how to do it. We just have to help them get the resources they want, and then we have to get out of the way.

Yeah.

Is that fair, Mauricio?

Yeah, I think that there is a really strong parallel is that, you know, living every day, whether it's in the workplace or, you know, living, you know, with your friends in poverty or whatever, that you have so much at stake and to actually be a contributing factor where basically you can understand what's going on better information is shared with you that if you have solutions, they're honored and you can try them, people are willing to take a risk and trust you. I'd say one of the biggest things on our end is that at least, and maybe you'd have to tell me in the business world, but families like the one I came from are seen as takers from society and they feel put down all the time. And it's hard to be a parent of a teenager when. And you as a parent are kind of being put down either because of gender or race or, you know, people think you only have third grade education.

And in the workplace. I think there's a parallel there. I mean, a lot of people that think that workers are lazy bums and they don't want to, you know, they'd like to do as little as possible. So it's kind of breaking out of that kind of mold of thinking.

Yeah. So, you know, when all of a sudden you get validated and the mayor's watching and learning from you, and when people in these higher social status or, you know, supervisors are learning and you see that they're responding to your information and the families see that, we respond. What's been fascinating and this keeps happening, it just happened two days ago is this one woman who was part of the family. She comes up and thanks me and I'm with her, but, you know, I never met you and I haven't helped you. And she said, but you trusted us, you know, and that's what she's thinking. And so in situations where you have been put down or you feel put down or you feel like you're not a contributor, but you can be that if you actually just move in that direction to start treating people as contributors, that we can all learn, and we should be learning that that's a huge driving force. You were asking about what drives this whole thing. It's just fascinating because now these families self organize to help each other even more.

And we have lots and lots of stories like that in the lean world. Workers whose who have been trusted and listened to for the first time in their lives and now saying, lean changed my life.

Yeah, they're very similar. I mean, they're identical in a way. It's a beautiful story, Mauricio. So thank you for your work, first of all. I mean, wow. And just thinking about the number of families that you've impacted has got to be mind boggling. You sound like a very humble man, so I'm sure you don't let that get to your head. But goodness, it's, you know, you truly are changing people's lives for the better. So I guess my last question, Mauricio, is, you know, we have a lot of people listening right now, a lot of people in this Lean movement. And many of us believe with all of our heart that, you know, that the people are very, very important parts of, of humanity. I mean, we have to have people working together. We have to have people helping each other. So how can we in the Lean Movement help you?

I think, you know, in talking with Jacob and reading his book, which was great, that we probably are running up against the same situation, which is that the, the overarching stereotype, whether you're poor or whether you're a worker on an assembly line is kind of this negative stereotype or negative view that society has of you, which is very disempowering. And that even though I think I don't know how long the Lean movement has been going, but I know I had heard about it actually quite a long time ago, I didn't quite give it a name and that poverty obviously has been going on for a long time and people helping each other that I feel like we're in the situation of how do we take these ideas, which sort of are common sense. I mean, people will obviously do better if they feel good about themselves and their contributions. How do we take those ideas and have society in a more broad way accept them, have more CEOs accept them, have basically philanthropists accept it. They have policy and so stop looking at people as takers from society or lazy. And the point that we're at right now is that it not only is common sense, and I think you have the same thing. There is data and information that says people will do better in this other environment if you trust them and move them. And. And yet we have not come up with a way to start changing that stereotype. So I feel like what I need on my side is I need business people that think this way and can trust people that are low income. And this is kind of all over the world and not think of them as charity cases, but think of them as the experts. And so Jacob actually has now joined a small advisory group that we're going to design a campaign to start beginning to change these stereotypes. So, you know, is the campaign maybe probably communications, etc. So really what we need is support, and we are willing to support the lean movement that basically we actually start now taking and developing a strategy to bring about that change of mind, that change in behavior of those that really are in influential positions. The families are no problem. They want to take the lead. So. So I'm sure the same with the workers.

Yeah, Well, I mean, I would love to talk to you offline. You know, Gemba Academy's mission, we have, we train, teach people about all this lean stuff, and we have videos and so forth. So I definitely want to talk to you about, you know, perhaps where you can find ways to get these videos in front of folks who, you know, knowledge is power. Right. And so the more they can learn about different principles, we can help these folks learn about lean and. And stuff called Six Sigma and some other continuous improvement principles. And then an employer really can't ignore them. Right. Because they have some skills. So let's definitely talk offline because I'm interested in helping from Gemba Academy's perspective.

That's great. So thank you.

Yeah, beautiful. All right, Jacob, do you have any kind of final words? We've been going for about 40 minutes or so here, but this has been fantastic. Any thoughts that you want to kind of put in here at the end?

The only thing I would do is I would say we talk. This phrase never came up, but we talk a lot in the lean world about respect for people and how this is in many respects the most important thing. So I would say, gosh, what a wonderful story about the triumph of respect for people that Mauricio has told us.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right, Mauricio, how can folks find out more about family independence initiative yourself? How can they connect with you? Are you like a Snapchatter Twitterer? What are you? Tell us how people can connect with you.

Well, all that's being developed, I think, one, in terms of more background. The book that I just finished towards the end of last year called the Alternative. Most of what you believe about poverty is wrong, that people can find it on Amazon under the Alternative in my name. It's. It'll take you to a site that has some more background, which is www.thealternativebook.org. the other thing is they can look for FII www.fii.org and that I am now going to start blogging on medium.com and that'll be hopefully where we have the most interaction. But I want to talk to you about Gemba and what other things could do.

Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. All right, well, Jacob, you always deliver, my man. Thank you so much for setting us up. And it's been fantastic. And we're gonna link to everything in the show notes. Let me find out. This is going to be episode 209, so people can go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 209. Yeah, we've come a long way since episode 33, Jacob.

Sure have.

Yeah, we've been chugging along. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, good stuff. Again, Mauricio, thank you for coming on. Thank you for the work that you're doing. I'm very, very touched by your work and I'm excited to find out how we can. How we can help you.

I look forward to working together somehow. So thank you all very much.

All right, you take care, guys.

Bye. Bye.

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