GA 215 | How to Reflect on Lessons Learned with Brian Buck

Just knowing that, how stressed people were, knowing that they never felt they were going to get to the end of the stack, you could really see in their faces when we moved to that, how much happier people were.

How often do you take time to look back and really reflect on how your life has gone? And if you've been practicing lean or any form of continuous improvement, how often do you look back on how that part of your life has gone? Well, if you're anything like me, you probably don't take the time to. To reflect on the past as much as you should. Well, the good news is today's guest has actually taken the time to look back on the last 10 years of his Lean journey and has graciously offered to come onto the show to share what he's learned. His name is Brian Buck, and if you spend any time following the Lean Movement on social media or the blogosphere, you've likely come across Brian's work, which, in my opinion, has added a tremendous amount of value to the Lean Movement. Now, on today's show, Brian shares the lessons that he's learned over the last 10 years, and I really enjoyed hearing some of his takes on some of the things that we take for granted, such as some of the sayings and the thinking behind Lean gurus like Taiichi in oh. So I think you're going to really enjoy the show. Brian has a great demeanor about him and I really enjoyed chatting with him. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 2, 1, 5. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning system over@gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now, let's get to the show. All right, Brian, well, welcome to the show. How's it going so far?

It's been great. Sunny afternoon here in Seattle, so we don't get to those too often. So I enjoy it when I'm done here.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right. Well, you know, I was trying to. We were talking a little bit before we hit record and trying to think when our paths first crossed because it's been a long, long time. I think we used to kind of follow along with each other over back when I had my own personal Lean Six Sigma Academy blog way back in the day. Was that right?

Yeah, it's been 10 years since I got involved with Lean and I quickly started my blog to just kind of reflect on my learning and, and use it as opportunity to talk to others. Who are in the field so I can learn from. So I remember quickly coming across you and Mark Rabin and John Miller and Mike and so many of these folks that were farther along than I were that I got a chance to learn much from you guys. So you really helped my career early on, even not specifically, not directly, but indirectly been a big influence on me.

Yeah, well, awesome. Yeah, it's always been fun to know you and collaborate with you, Brian. So. Well, let's kind of begin at the beginning and tell everybody a little bit about Brian, who you are, about your background and how you first came to get involved with all this continuous improvement stuff.

Sure. Yeah. I fell into the whole world of continuous improvement. It started off one of my first jobs outside of college. I used to be a customer service person for like a UPS or a FedEx. It was a competitor at the time. And I have just been someone who always wanted to make things better. And I just naturally started changing things and people were like, hey, this makes life easier. So I just continued to do that. I did that for a couple of years and then I got promoted be a business analyst at that company. And my manager and I, we kind of did these internal takeovers, for the lack of a better word. And they would send the two of us into these departments for three months and we would completely redesign the work. Not using any formal methodology, just things that seem to make sense to me. One of the first projects I remember doing for that is we went to this billing reconciliation group where we would bill people for shipments, but they wouldn't put their account number on there. And this process group, they had one person who did screenshots of everything, these stacks of paper, they would hand it to another person who would research on the piece of paper and write down the account number and then hand the paper to a third person for them to be able to enter and properly bill it. And I just remember going, this doesn't make any sense. And they were stacks, stacks and stacks of paper. And I work with them so that way they could know how to go online, do the research, make that change and get it done all in one piece. Flow, which really engaged a lot of people. And we were able to get a seven month backlog fixed within two months. And then we were able to keep on it in real time. So that was my first flow event without even knowing what the heck I was formally doing.

So you hadn't had any kind of training at that point? You were just kind of using your instincts or what?

Yeah, I just used my Instincts. So to me, lean is something that just makes sense to me. It clicks with me in just the way that I operate and see things. So to go through, to a certain degree, I see lean as almost kind of like a universal principle that putting language to things that naturally work just makes so much sense to me. It's probably why I'm so passionate about it.

Yeah, it's really interesting though, because I mean, even for, you know, so called lean thinkers, sometimes, you know, having more of a batch mentality is more instinctual in some cases, you know, like go do your, you know, stuff the envelopes, you know, for the wedding coming up or whatever. And most people just naturally gravitate to doing it in batches. Right. Versus one piece flow. So it's interesting.

Yeah. And one thing that my manager showed me, and she didn't have any lean background as well, but I learned a lot from her. And she said stacks of paper on people's desk is ruins engagement. And just knowing that how stressed people were, knowing that they never felt they were going to get to the end of the spec. You could really see in their faces when we moved to that how much happier people were.

So, okay, so that's kind of your background. How did you get introduced to, I guess what we call lean today?

Yeah. Okay, so, yeah, so I did that and then I almost moved to Texas. I was almost your neighbor for a while because they moved down there, but I chose not to move with that. So then I got into project management for a few years and then I'm currently at a hospital here in Seattle and they offered a position, an internal consulting position using Lean. And so I was able to use the actual experience that I used improving and in my project management kind of found a real nice way of blending those two things together and join our Lean internal consultants. And that has been an interesting role because as we've matured here at the hospital, I don't think they would have hired someone like me because they were really. They are now looking for people who have formal lean experience and have black belt experience. I came in going, I know how to improve stuff and I know how to project manage. And I can learn a lot. I was able to learn with the rest of the group many of these principles and kind of learn and then consult on it the next day.

Yeah. So now how long have you been practicing then would you say kind of formal, continuous improvement? 10 years. Like that?

Yep, 10 years last January.

Nice, Nice. All right.

Yeah. And so I spent five years as an internal consultant working with Nurses and doctors and surgeons and MAs and admin assistants. I got a real chance to and different leaders and helping them lead change. And that was something I find a lot of satisfaction in, is not doing the improvement myself, but helping others do it. Yeah. And then five years ago I had an opportunity to move into operational management and I took it specifically as the challenge to try to take my own consulting advice, which isn't as easy as you think trying to go from. I found a lot of, given my experience, I felt a lot of the things I was talking about were theoretical and I've seen some evidence of it, but some of it seemed a little, wow, does this really work and is this workable? And so moving into operational management, I'm able to really see this even more than I had as an internal consultant, especially on the cultural change piece. Instead of week to week going, oh, are they going to remember the follow ups that I had from our last meeting and what are they going to, you know, this way every day I can be checking in and seeing how people are progressing towards improvement.

Yeah, got it. All right. Well, kind of the, I guess the theme of the day, Brian, is really kind of looking back on your last 10 years or so of practicing lean and continuous improvement and maybe just reflecting on some of the, some of the lessons that you've learned. So I'm really, really excited to hear, hear and learn from you. So where do you want to start?

Yeah, the fun thing about 10 years is it's always a good milestone to go back and go, man, what have I learned? And thinking about maybe what's next. Something that has been so clear to me in the last five years specifically came from Mazaki Yamai. I got a chance to meet him and Mark grab it. And Mike Hrableski, John Miller a few years ago when they came out to Seattle and he said something and then I read his Kaizen book and that was there's three root causes to all problems. And that is you have a standard or the standard is inadequate or people aren't following the standard. And that has been really powerful. I know there's a lot of root causes behind why people don't follow the standards, a lot of system stuff. But I found through teaching and perspective and working with folks, starting there has opened up a lot of people's eyes on helping identify the problem.

So when you say starting there, what do you mean? Do you mean starting by defining standards if they don't exist or what?

Yeah, it's working with folks and if we have a problem to be able to say, okay, what are the three root causes to that problem? Did we have a standard? Do we not have a. Is the standard inadequate? Or we didn't follow the standard? And that lets people start to go, oh, you know what? We really haven't documented this. So we have a standard, but it doesn't really call this out. And it helps people start to think, how do we change our standard? How do we better communicate it? Or when we talk about not following the standard, just go, how well did we train to that standard? People even know the standard exists? Or did we actually talk to the people, the upstream process and get their agreement on this standard? And I just find it. It's a simple enough structure that it helps people kind of think through how to. How to make things better. And it's engaged people with Kaizen a lot.

Do you have. I don't want you to share anything confidential or anything like that, but do you have maybe a real life example of. Of where you've. Where you. Where this helped you? Yeah.

I started it primarily, I created a system for how we deal with safety or quality claims. We have this internal system, and that was a good opportunity to just really reinforce the culture that problems are gems, problems are opportunities, and we can only improve if we know and openly talk about our problems. Because before, and I don't. I'm not even sure when I was a consultant how long ago this online system existed, but there was often a lot of fear of, oh, we don't want to be blamed and we don't want this to be on the official record. We don't want this to be used against us versus going, okay, well, if we look at this in this perspective of, well, why did this happen? And started to give people that structure to start to look through, you know, like, I think in nutrition, you know, sometimes people didn't get the food they ordered. You know, what happened in our standard that might have led to that not being captured. Do we need to improve our accuracy checking on the tray line? Because our current checking standard isn't. It doesn't meet that. So that has been where we started. And then from there, we've done a lot of work in the last couple years. We went through a 3P event to design a new kitchen, and through that, we standardized all of our processes. And now that we have something to base off of, we can now really go, hey, is the standard even adequate to be able to meet these needs? So, like, we had a situation the other day. I supervise our sanitation team and we have someone bringing in some dirty bins from another group while it's like our busy peak time and all the lunch stuff is coming back. So we said, does that have to be the standard, or is there a place that it could be staged until we can make it flow more? So that's an opportunity where we said, okay, well, our standard says we bring it back right away, but it's causing this bottleneck, so how about we update our standard? And the team said, well, if we put it over here, that way we can focus on the critical things that need to be turned around for the next meal, and then we can get to that, and it's going to help us be busy all day.

No, I love that. And I think it's one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to standards, standardized work, whatever you want to call it, that there are these handcuffs. Right. Like, we are forced to do it this way when in fact, standards are meant to be improved. Right. This is the true spirit behind it all. And so I love it that you guys are open to improving those standards.

Yeah, yeah. Another big influence for me is T. G Ono, and he had a quote once about, if your standard hasn't improved within a month, that's a problem. And so I just been constantly working with my teams to say, hey, these standards haven't changed. Were you guys just so perfect the right way, or are there opportunities to do it better? And just continuing to say, you know, where are the opportunities that we can tighten this up, make it easier? You know, I really want people to use their creativity on improvement, not their creativity for how to get through the day and figure out what to do next. If we solve the same problems every day, let's use our brains to something more exciting.

So, okay, so for this first lesson, I guess if we were to summarize it was to ensure you have standards. If you don't have standards, create some standards, and then when you do have standards, don't be afraid to challenge and improve them. Right?

Yep, Yep.

Okay.

And then also understand why people aren't following the standards. There's a lot, a lot behind that.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right, well, let's jump to the. Do you have another lesson that you. Aside from the standards that you want to share?

No, I think that's the main one. The second kind of lesson that I've been really reflecting on is just recognizing how much a kitchen is just like a lot of regular manufacturing. The only difference is the stuff can go bad quicker because it's a live action you know, live food, you know, it's not like a nut or bolt that could sit for a while before it starts to deteriorate. And it's kind of part of the 3P work that we did. We had a great external consultant kind of help us go through that process. And you know, one of the lessons he had for me that really resonates is keep food or keep your item in this whole state as long as possible. And so, and what he means with that is, you know, we don't have to dice all of our onions and sit on them and then slice all of our onions or grate all of our onions. It's keeping in the raw. So that way we have an onion, but we have the most flexibility if it's in its whole state. And then we could change it around based off of the needs of our customers at that time, to me, it was just really powerful for it's a bit of flow and it's a bit of a pull piece on recognizing having it in that full state gives us a lot of flexibility. It turned out to be even a safer thing. We recently had a recall that happened with romaine lettuce due to E. Coli. And the only ones that were affected by that were the ones that were pre cut and sliced by different manufacturers. And it was through that process that actually made it potential for E. Coli. But all of the stuff that's in the raw state was okay and clean. And so from a safety perspective, and that's been the case since we've opened up our new kitchen using whole foods, that there's been recalls that haven't affected us because we have it in the whole state. Just little things. You don't think about a safety thing, but it has really helped us to be able to continue to provide consistent, reliable quality to our patients.

Cool. So let's just dig in a little bit deeper into your journey. I mean, I know you guys are doing more than just the standard work and all that, but talk about some of the other stuff that you guys got going on.

We are doing quite a bit on working on our quality systems and helping tie in our more governance and that kind of stuff that making it really clear across the organization what the accountabilities and the reportabilities are. You know, while it's often clear from a director's and VP's perspective, but just seeing how it fits into an overall quality system for an organization. And so been working with some of our key people across the hospital to really get that set up and pioneering what that could look like for other groups and finding it being a real engaging thing for our team. So we have some clinical folks and we've got all sorts of different quality committees focused on different things, but they weren't always connected and using this as an opportunity for better visibility and better reportability. 1 so the rest of the organization can see the good work that's being done on the clinical side, but they are also able to maybe provide some guidance or resources that way as well.

So how do you see the more quality kind of QMS type activities that you have going on there, collaborating with the lean work that you guys are doing? Is there any crossover?

Oh, absolutely. And that's something that is very exciting I think, because we have a few different initiatives at our organization and they're all saying the same thing, but they're now starting to come together. So we recently moved to an accreditor that asked the organization to follow ISO 9001 principles. And our organization is actually ISO certified now because of that. And I'm an internal auditor and we call ourselves ambassadors. One of the main messages we have with the ISO certification is this is really taking the continuous performance improvement methodology or concept and actually applying the rigor to it because they are the things that we actually want to have done. You know, everyone who I've worked with that engages improvement really does this because they want long term sustained gains. And the notion of how we look at ISO9001 is, you know, you say what you're going to do, you show evidence that you're doing it and you show that you're getting the outcomes from that. And if you're not, then you, you're figuring out what you need to do to get that back on track and you're providing visibility to that. And so that right there is really just hardwiring PDCA and making that expectation. And that's kind of where the governance piece comes in, is allowing more people the visibility of how that's working and thinking about how we can help out with that.

Yeah, you know, I've seen ISO and even in past lives, you know, obviously been working companies that were, that were following the, you know, ISO approach, Malcolm Bollough or whatever it might be. And I've seen it done very well, you know, and I've seen it really benefit organizations. But I've also seen ISO done to where it's like, oh, hey Greg, tomorrow at 3:00'. Clock. Yeah, why don't you not be at your desk because you know the auditor's gonna be Coming around. And it might be better if you're on break around 3 o' clock tomorrow. I mean, I mean, I mean, really, I've seen this and.

Oh, wow.

And it's really sad. Right. Where some, some organizations sadly seem to be chasing the, you know, the banner on the ceiling. But it's fake. Right. It's like they're just. So how do you make sure that it sounds like you guys are obviously doing it the right way and for the right reasons, but how do you make sure that you don't fall into that trap of just making sure that we, you know, get out with our one or two minor findings and we keep our banners up on the wall, you know?

Right. Yeah. And I think that's really a leadership responsibility. You know, definitely, as internal auditors, we could continue to be ambassadors to that message and stating this is what, this is how it should work. And it works because it's beneficial for our staff and team and ultimately beneficial for our customers.

Yeah.

And helping people just see that this is just, it isn't another thing, but it is a reflection of the continuous improvement that we're dedicated to at our organization and tying into that and using that governance. That's one of the biggest things that has been really clear to me in my transition to operational leadership is my role in shaping the culture. You know, a consultant, I can just say, hey, you know, here's a culture you might want to consider and I'll help coach and guide you towards that. But unless the leader continues to champion, model and help drive that, then it's not going to stick. And so that's the same culture that we are working with our leaders on for this ISO stuff, because it's got to be tied into improvement and innovation, not just another thing.

Right, right, right, right. Good stuff. So, last question I have for you before we jump into the reflection. Section Brightness.

Sure.

Someone's listening to this right now. You know, they're just starting their journey with, with a continuous improvement. And maybe they've. They read a book, watched a video, attended a conference, whatever it might be, kind of got a little bit of excitement, but they're more nervous than anything and perhaps are even unsure of what to do. What advice do you have for that person?

I think the advice that I would say is look to save a second. Because if you find a second every day, after two months, you are going to have a whole minute saved and you're going to learn so much for that. It's not stressful to try to find a second. But once you do it, you're going to get better and better and you're going to start seeing opportunities for bigger things. And then with that, I would also say standardize it, you know, document it and try to it. One of the things that I love about standards, that I try to help my team see is standards exist just to make problems visible. You know, that's not the end all, be all. They're not the straight jackets that some people fear they can be. So I think if, you know, as you save seconds, you just use those as opportunities to, you know, capture those gains. And then anytime that you things slip, you can then figure out why that's not happening. And then slowly but surely you can start to build up on it. But you know, ideally is start getting ideas, experiment, see how well it works. Do a pdca and you'll find it gets pretty addictive.

Now my buddy Paul Akers wrote a book called Two Second Lean. Are you angling for one Second Lean book now? Coming on, Brian. Is that what's going on here?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, because you could start anywhere, but yeah, if you just go with that. And I remember, I can't remember who actually said this quote, but it was someone at Toyota and they were saying, sensei said if everyone at this plant saved a second a day, we'd be able to do 7,000 more cars per month or something like that. And just recognizing how all these little things add up to the big things and it doesn't have to be giant, and probably, if it is giant, it's probably gonna be harder out of your scope of or within your realm of influence. But everyone can find a second.

Yeah, well, it's kind of like when people are always coming to me and be like, oh, I'm struggling with sustainment or the control phase of Six Sigma or whatever it might be. And my response is always the same. You know, the stock market, does it ever go perfectly sideways? No, it's either going up or it's going down. And it's the same way with improvement. Right. Entropy is always pulling. Right. And so if we aren't constantly making just bit a little, little bit of an improvement, then it's gonna go down. Right. I mean, entropy is a law of nature, second law of thermodynamics. It's never gonna quit. Right? Yep. So we have to keep improving. So yeah, whether it's a second, two seconds, whatever, make it something, otherwise you're gonna deteriorate.

Right. And to me, that's what makes work fun.

Yep.

You know, because I see all of these improvement ideas as puzzles to solve and kind of fun and, oh, look, we figured it out. Oh, we didn't figure it out. What did we learn now? What can we do to figure it out? So I think from an engagement perspective, that should make work fun instead of, okay, I'm just gonna do this for eight hours and be done like, oh, I could come up with something. I'm using my creative energy.

Yeah, exactly. All right, so, hey, the first question I have for you in this reflection section is I'm gonna kind of tweak it up a little bit, especially based on something you said earlier in the show. So you were kind of talking about maybe what's next for Brian, you know, coming down the road the next 10 years. So what? But if you look at lean and just the continuous improvement movement that we work within, what do you think is going to happen 10 years from now? We're talking what's going to have happened with this movement of ours.

Yeah. I've been reflecting a lot. It's a bit of a shift in my organization and my understanding of lean, but I really think lean embracing and really helping people recognize the innovation aspect, because from our hearts, the same lean heart of pdca, of improving processes, also is the heart for innovation. We aren't improving for improvement's sake. We're improving because we're focused on solving the customer's needs and because we know our customers so well and know the problems they want to solve, knowing that is either going to spring improvement to do it better, or it's going to spring innovation for another way of meeting their needs. So I think it's within the framework of Toyota and people who think Lean, but just being really clear about it's both. It's not one or the other, it's not two separate things, but all together.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I think. I think related to that too is I'm starting a new. I'm getting coached on doing some human centered design, which came from IDO and a bit of design school stuff. And my first dips into all of that is it is so Toyota, like from everything I've read and, you know, when I went to Japan and read through the Toyota design principles, very similar to what this is. So I think just recognizing how we can get that deep, intimate knowledge and that empathy for our customers is going to help, really, which is true. Gemba. Yeah. You know, is so recognizing how human centered design gives us the gamba we need, that's then going to spark either improvement or innovation.

Yeah, well, it Sounds very similar to a lot of the work our friends over at Menlo Innovations are doing. Richard Sheridan and those guys with their so called high tech anthropologists, you know, going out and seeing how people are interacting with the world, you know, and designing products accordingly. Right.

Yeah. My coach, my coach for that is an anthropologist, so.

Nice. There you go. Nice.

Hey, anthropologist.

There you go. Exactly. That's going to be a thing, right? Yeah, yeah. Hey, do you have an opportunity to practice the things that we do within lean, like in your personal life, at home, anything like that?

I do. My wife would probably want me to do a little more because it's kind of like, oh, I've done. But I think I do just because it's part of my nature. One thing that I very excited about is I am refusing to go shopping and that is I figured out how to get all my groceries online and I have found it has saved so much time for myself.

Amazon Fresh kind of stuff, that kind of thing.

Yeah. But there's another one in the city that I live in that works really well. And then Target also offers free shipping if you buy so much. So we found that it's cheaper to get some of the household stuff from Target and it just shows up. And then our other grocery, it just shows up. But the app I'm able to go through, have you ever been to a store and you go, oh, do I need this? I don't know, I'll buy it. I just go through my kitchen and I could see right there it only takes me about 20 minutes to go shopping. And then it just shows up at my door. And it is just so convenient. And it's given me so much joy. It's given me more time with my family. Everyone says, well, you need your exercise. Well, I'd rather exercise, not break a sweat at Safeway.

Yeah.

You know, so that's just been an opportunity for improvement that has really jazzed me up because it saved me a lot of time, it makes it easy and it's saving me money.

Yeah, awesome, awesome. I love it. Yeah. Never go to the grocery hungry. Right? That's the.

Yeah, exactly.

So, all right. Hey, so you know, within the, within the lean world, you know, we all know about the seven waste, right? And we learn about those early in our journey. And you know, as we, as we all know, some people even add the kind of the eighth waste, whether they call it, you know, under utilization of people or skill, lack of using people's brains or whatever, it might be something people related. And there's some People who are super passionate about it.

Right.

And we're like, no, we're the eight ways tier, not the seven. And that's cool. My question is, if you had the power to add one thing that everyone would focus on as hard as they do, the seven waste or the eighth waste, what would that one thing be?

Yeah, I'm gonna say respect for humanity, respect for people. Because I think from that all things start to spring forth. Because if there's waste, it is felt by people. And if you understand humanity, you recognize that people are falling. And so what's your processes and systems for error proofing? If you focus on people, your customers are people. So you're knowing more what those people want, need and desire and the problems they're trying to solve. So I think that is something that. I think if you focus on the respect for people and really connect with that empathy for humanity, it's going to make the rest of the stuff start to make sense. I know once, I don't know, it's a play on a joke, but I always say management would be easy if it wasn't for people. And that's because people aren't machines. And even with these lean systems and lean knowledge, we can't think we're standardizing because we're making robots. And we also know that we can train someone and they aren't gonna maybe recall that the next time it comes up. So it's recognizing that the humanity that people means we need to set up systems to allow humans to succeed.

Yeah, I love it. Have you ever interacted with Jeff Koss out there?

Yeah, yeah, we used to bring our department there many a times and he's definitely a hero of mine. And I loved his podcast last year.

Yeah, well, I was just thinking about when we had him on, he was talking about something to the effect of working. Allowing waste to exist within your organization is to cease to respect, you know, humanity. Right. It's like if you allow that to continue, then we're really not respecting one another. Right, so.

Exactly. And I think one other thing to say about waste, that is another aha for me is, you know, the eight waste are the eight waste. But we don't talk a lot about variation and overburdening. And I want to say I think it was Matthew May in one of his books said, the great overburdening and variation is what causes the waste.

Yeah, for sure.

And you know, so, so often we're trying to find the waste, but instead of going, you know, these other two wastes aren't part of Tim woods or Downtime. But they are just as important for us to think about because that's what's causing all of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we always talk about Muda, but not the Miri and Mira. Right. So we forget two M's.

Yeah, Yep, exactly. So that's kind of related. That would be the second thing I focus effect on humanity and focus on those other two because then the other waste will start to go away.

Exactly. Love it. Love it. All right, well, hey Brian, thanks for coming on. It's great to finally have you on the show. Let's go ahead and wrap things up, maybe share some final words of wisdom with the folks and then be sure to tell people how they can best connect with you on the interwebs.

Okay? Sure, it's hard to pick one piece of wisdom, but I actually was just reviewing my notes from Japan last night for an unrelated thing and it just struck me on the sensei there said waste is invisible to those who do not seek it. And that to me is so powerful because unless people acknowledge waste is a problem, they aren't going to work on eliminating it. And so I just been really just reflecting just on that is as a leader, how to help people acknowledge that it's a problem because we get so used to living with it and thinking that's just a part of it. And also helping people seek the waste so that way they want to see it's a problem and eliminate it.

Love it.

I'd say that's the latest wisdom I'm reflecting on. And then to reach me right now, probably more active on LinkedIn. So if you go to Brian Buck on LinkedIn, you'll see me. I have a blog improvewithme.com I haven't blogged in a while since my son was small, but I wanted to maybe get back and doing like a blog a month. So maybe this would be the perfect opportunity to say, all right, I'm going to follow up with that and get my blog post. I also do Twitter, ryan Buck, but LinkedIn is where I'm having the most fun. I used to send a quote of the week, but now I'm just finding LinkedIn is the easier place to find cool articles, make a couple of comments and share with people that I hope they find interesting. So that's where I'm currently passionate about kind of sharing and interacting.

Good stuff. All right. And we'll link to everything in the show notes so folks can go to gembapodcast.com this is episode 215, 215. So look for that. We'll link to everything on Brian there. So yeah, Brian, thanks. Thanks again for coming on. Hopefully we can meet up at a conference or something sometime soon and keep on reflecting and keep on improving, my man.

All right, thanks again. I appreciated the time.

All right, take care, Brian.

Yep. 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 Gemberg. Gain immediate access to more than a ousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge@gembacademy.com.