GA 235 | How to Embody the Spirit of Toyota with Jess Orr

Performance and achievement is kind of a byproduct, if you will, of having the right attitude and the right mindset that can foster that type of environment where we can achieve and perform.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Jess Orr back to the show. Now, longtime listeners may remember Jess name from previous episodes. So Jess has been on episode 142 and186 and we'll definitely link to those episodes in the show notes. She's got a great, great story. As you'll hear. Jess used to work at Toyota and has now gone on to another company. But she's always reflecting on the things that she's learned at Toyota. And she just has a really, really great way of just kind of sharing her story in a super humble yet passionate way, which is what I really enjoy about Jess. Now today we're going to talk about the 10 Toyota attitudes. Now, Jess wrote a great LinkedIn article, or actually it wasn't. I found it on LinkedIn, but it was on her blog. Yokoten Learning blog describes these 10 attitudes. Now I'll be the first to admit that I had never actually heard of these ten Attitudes before Jess's article. And so I reached out to her, I said, hey, you got to come onto the show and kind of make sure everyone knows about these things. Now as you'll hear, many of these attitudes are things that we lean thinkers have long preached and practiced, but putting them all together into a list is really powerful. So I'm excited to have Jess tell you all about those 10 attitudes today. Show notes for this episode will be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 235. And as I've been reminding you in the last few episodes, Definitely go to gembacademy.com ame to register for our cocktail party that's going to be happening at the AME Conference this year in San Diego. And if you want to save 10% and haven't bought your ticket yet to the show, we can do that as well again. Gembacademy.com Ame okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Jess, well, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

Thanks, Ron. It's going very well. It's good to be on here with you again. I think this is our third time now.

Yeah, you know what? I think we've done kind of a traditional one over Skype. We did one. What was it? Ame, I think.

Yes. Which I hope I'll see you there again this year.

Oh, you know we'll be there. Have you signed up for the cocktail party yet?

I have not, but that's on my to do list. I had a great time last year.

Yeah. All right, everybody go to. What is it? Geba academy.com ame and there's. Yeah, if you haven't bought your ticket yet, you can save 10% too, Jess. So, you know.

Excellent. Yes.

All right. Well, hey, it's great to have you back on. We'll link to the past episodes in the show notes. The show notes for this episode will be. What is it? Gembapodcast.com and this will be episode 235. So we'll link to your previous two episodes there and encourage folks to go back and listen to those. But tell us a little about who Jess is in case folks haven't heard those ones.

Well, thanks. So I'm Jess Orr. I started off as a mechanical engineer. So I worked in materials engineering for a few years, got introduced to Six Sigma while I was working there, got my Six Sigma black belt and I started getting my first taste of continuous improvement in that role.

And.

And I had the opportunity to work for Toyota in Georgetown, Kentucky for a few years. I took that opportunity and that's where I really became passionate about lean and continuous improvement, respect for people and engaging everyone in Kaizen. And I took those lessons that I learned into my current role. I'm a continuous improvement practitioner at Westrock. So that's what I currently do is really helping plants and manufacturing locations learn how to engage their employees in driving this employee led change at these sites. So kind of taking the lessons I learned from Six Sigma and from Toyota and kind of combining them and really applying them in my current work.

What's the product or service at Westrock?

We are a paper and packaging company. So the particular one that I work for the division is merchandising displays. So we make like the big displays that you might see in the aisles at Walmart, those kinds of things. Pretty neat stuff.

Awesome. Awesome. Lots of ways to apply lean to that, I'm sure.

Oh, absolutely.

Very cool. Very cool. All right, well, hey, Jesse, I know you, you know the drill here. We like to kind of begin our episodes with a quote. Do you have one?

I do. And this one is related to the topic that we're going to talk about today, these 10 attitudes from Toyota. But the quote is from John C. Maxwell and it is great. Leaders understand that the right attitude will set the right atmosphere which enables the right response from others.

What's that mean to you?

Well, to me, it means that as an organization, as leadership, we've got to decide what are the attitudes that we all are going to commit to as a company, as the people who work for this company and as leaders. You know, displaying and modeling that behavior of those attitudes helps to foster the type of atmosphere that we want to have in our company for our associates, and that that also reflects to our customers as well. So really just understanding that it's, you know, it's almost performance and achievement is kind of a byproduct, if you will, of having the right attitude and the right mindset that can foster in a type of environment where we can achieve and perform.

Got it. I love it. I love it. All right, well, so I guess this episode here came to be a few weeks ago. I was kind of scouring through LinkedIn, I think it was, and I saw, saw you link or someone linked to one of your articles from your, from your blog, which is yokatanlearning.com really cool name, by the way. I like it.

Thank you.

And this, this topic really, I don't know, caught my attention because being just true, true, truthful here, I had not not seen this list of. I mean, I know many of the words on the list, but I hadn't seen it put together this way. And it was the 10 Toyota attitudes. And one thing led to another. And here you are gonna, gonna talk to us about it. So I want to just begin with, how did you first come to experience or get exposed to this list?

Yeah, it surprised me as well, Ron. I don't think a lot of people are nearly as familiar with these attitudes as they are with things like the House of Toyota or continuous improvement, respect for people, which are all important principles in continuous improvement. But I haven't seen a whole lot of discussion around these attitudes and awareness. I became exposed to them, of course, at Toyota. I was given this sheet by my manager and he explained to me, he said, you know, it's important. I want you to read this list. He goes, I want you to understand each of these attitudes and I'm going to ask you some questions later about what they mean to you. And he kind of explained the why behind it. He said, you know, these 10 attitudes are really what, what drives how we act at Toyota. And he explained how our attitudes influence our actions. And so that's how I became introduced to it. And it was just this card that I kept with me. And I would look at it from time to time and just think about what those attitudes meant to me. And then Also reflect on were my actions actually matching up to the attitudes that we had all committed to having at Toyota. So that's how I was introduced to it and it's something that's had a lasting impact on me. I've been out of Toyota for three years or so now. One of the other things that Toyota left with me was the compulsion to carry a notebook with me everywhere I go. That's something all the managers did at Toyota and I've done the same. But every time I start a new notebook, I actually take a copy of these attitudes and I paste it on the back of it so that I can look at them and just reflect and remember them. But it really, it had a lasting impact on me, but that's how I was first introduced to it at Toyota.

Okay. All right. Again, we're going to link to the art, your article on your blog where people can see an actual picture and, you know, I guess they could kind of print their own out. But let's just go through each one. What's the first attitude?

So the first attitude is customer first. So we always provide satisfactory products and services. And at Toyota, this is how it was demonstrated. I think most companies have some form of customer first and either in their values or their mission statement or something like that, and that's good. And I do believe many of them are committed to that. But there was, I remember there was one incident that happened at Toyota that really sealed the deal for me where I understood just how much importance we put on the customer. And that was, it was shortly after a model change and the stamped component that was used for the curtain side airbag that they installed the curtain side airbag into the hole. Locations had changed on that during the model change. And so the model change time period is, you know, you're actually transitioning from the old model, running that in production to the new model. It's a high risk time period. And unfortunately, you know, the worst happened. So about 70 vehicles were welded together with the old stamp bracket on them, not the new one. And we didn't catch it until we actually tried to install these curtain side airbags and assembly. And that's bad because that means that the vehicle's basically almost been completely assembled by the time we found this defect. And so we all fly in these 70 cars and we all started having a discussion about what we were going to do. And one of the options was we could cut a hole into the sheet metal so that there would be a clearance for the clip that needed to be installed in there. The problem with doing that is when we had crash tested the vehicles, it was with the stamped hole, not with a drilled hole. And there's. The material integrity around the hole is going to be different if you stamp it versus if you actually drill the hole. It was relatively low risk. Most likely the clip would have held, the airbag would have deployed just fine. But we have proof, and we'd have to do another crash test in order to see whether or not that was true. So there was a lot of debate that went back and forth. What should we do? I mean, these cars are worth $30,000 each. There's 70 of them. And my leadership, I gave my recommendation, I shared my concerns, and the senior leadership at the plant decided to scrap all the 70 of those vehicles.

Wow.

And that day, in that moment, I was never more proud of my leadership. I said, I mean, I understood. Customer first was always something that we talked about. I knew it was important as a quality engineer especially. But in that moment, I saw them put their money where their mouth was, and that had an impact on me.

Wow. That's pretty powerful. I'm not sure, I don't know how many people would do that. That's a lot of money.

It was millions of dollars worth of vehicles. Yeah, they did. They did.

Okay, so customer first, that's number one. What's number two?

All right, number two is challenge. So it's aimed at a high target with a brave and creative spirit. So I think an example of this that I saw at Toyota was that true north type of thinking. And even these attitudes really represent that true north thinking themselves because they're something that we aspire to, we work towards, but we didn't always, didn't always reach the intent of these attitudes. But it's something we tried to, tried to aim towards our challenge. But I think our true north thinking was, you know, if, if we were had a perfect operation, right, we'd have zero waste, we'd have zero quality issues, right? Everything would be running perfectly. That that's our ultimate goal. And the reason that's important is because we all know that we're not going to actually hit that true north, that perfect target. But having set our target so high kind of gave us the motivation to keep trying, even when we did make gains, to keep trying to keep, to inch further towards that. And I think a great example of this is the A3 problem solving template that, you know, many people are familiar with that we used at Toyota. But when you're defining the problem that you're trying to solve in the A3. And one of the first things that you do is you identify what's the current condition. So where are we at right now? The next thing you do is you identify what's our target condition. Right. So if I have, you know, 4% defect rate, I want to cut those defects in half. So maybe my target is 2%. But there's a third step and I think that some people may miss that third one. Sometimes it says the third step is set what your ultimate goal is. So my ultimate goal would be a 0% defect rate and that would be on my A3. So even though I would say my short term target, you know, I want to cut it in half, I'm still keeping my eye on what that actual true north target is. And that's something I think that really helped to kind of drive us to keep trying to achieve more in that spirit of challenge.

Yeah. Well, even in, you know, today with, with the kind of popularity of Mike Rother's work and Toyota Kata, which I know Toyota didn't actually call it Toyota Kata. Right. But it's, it's many of the same things, right. And you know, setting the challenge and what's your target condition? And so it's interesting to see this list and see how it's all kind of coming together. The pieces come together, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it segues well into the next step. Right, which is which? The next attitude, which is Kaizen, that continuous pursu of evolution and innovation. So if we've got that challenge, we know that challenge is so aggressive that in its perfect state we're not going to hit it. But Kaizen is the engine that helps us to keep moving towards that challenge. I think when we think of things like evolution and innovation, a lot of us tend to default to thinking of things like Apple or Tesla. These big game changers completely disrupted the industry. And those certainly, those are examples of Kaizen and improvements at Toyota. It kind of helped expand my mental model of what Kaizen was. So really seeing that as incremental small changes that done daily and built up over the course of a period of time can really have a powerful impact. We used to say at Toyota, you have two jobs at work, you have to do your daily work and you've got to figure out ways to improve your daily work. So we set that expectation right up front. So that might be finding ways to do things faster, easier, less cost, better quality.

Or my friend Paul Akers would say, fix what bugs you. Right?

Yes. I was actually going to Mention Paul Akers. Yeah, exactly. So his concept of the 2 second lean. Right. Work, is there a 2 second improvement that you can make every day to make your work a little bit better? And I think that helps to lower the level of intimidation for people because they feel like they can get their heads wrapped around. I can make a small improvement. Right. I can do that. Maybe I can't invent the Apple computer, but I can figure out a way how to bring these bolts closer to my process so I don't have to walk two extra steps to go get them.

But I think what's interesting about the list, and I'm sure they were intentional about the order in which these go. But Kaizen, I think only thing we have to be a little bit careful of is people can just go start making random improvements every day. And that's okay, that's good. And it's better than not making any improvements. But without that second step or the second attitude, the challenge, which is that direction. Right. Like, where are we going? You know, so all these improvements hopefully are getting us a little bit closer to that challenge. Right. And I think that's what we always have to keep in mind is that, yeah, making two seconds improvements is great, but make sure you kind of have a direction of where you're trying to go. What's better, Right. For your organization. I remember back in my corporate days, you know, some of the financial controllers would get frustrated with us, with us continuous improvement people, because he would, they would say, oh, you guys are just dealing in monopoly money, you know. And, you know, in some ways he was right, you know, in that we were making some improvements that were okay, but they really weren't helping move the company towards the direction they wanted to go. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that brings up a good point in that not just these attitudes, but a lot of things we hear around the Toyota production system, they can't exist in silos. So Kaizen really needs to be paired with kind of like a Hoshin Connery strategy deployment, right? Yeah. So we all know what are the targets that we're trying to hit in our department. As an example, during one of my projects, we had determined that we needed to have cost savings in a certain area. So we set that challenge in front of the team of we need to figure out a way to save $200,000 a year in this department. So we kind of looked at the data, but then we kind of led it up to the team. Okay, here's what the target is what are your ideas for changes you can make to help us hit that target? Because I think you're right. I think people, we tend to. If we don't have that clear strategic alignment to our goals, there tends to be a little bit of kind of going rogue and going in a bunch of different directions and not a clear, focused effort.

Yeah. Well, this is where, again, Mike's work with kata has really helped, I think our movement, because Hoshin Connery is very intimidating. Right. To a lot of people. Whereas you can set a challenge. Where do you want to be in a year? Okay. Where can we be in two weeks? All right. What's in our way? Right. And you start chipping away at those things in your way towards that target condition. Right. And now we're. Now there's an. We're being intentional with our Kaizen. Right. And I think that's. I think. I think that's what. I think that's what Toyota has always done.

It's important distinction. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, Good, good, good. All right. So I'm going to keep repeating these from time to time in case folks are only listening. Number one was customer first. Number two was challenge. Number three was kaizen. And what's number four?

So number four is Genshi genbutsu, and that's go and see reality and attempt to know the truth. When I was educated as a quality Engineer, I spent 10 weeks in training, and one of the first things my trainer taught me was Genshi genbutsu, and he taught it to me as get your boots on. So for me, that's always been a little bit easier for me to remember than Genshi genbutsu. But I remember anytime we had, like, we were reporting out on a quality issue at a huddle, so we'd have our senior advisors there, our leadership there. You did not want to go into one of those huddles without having had your eyes on the issue yourself, because it was very. It would undermine your credibility. You know, there's. You know, there's what you hear about an issue, but there's no. There's no substitute for going and seeing and trying to understand what's actually happening with your own eyes. And a per example of this actually happened when we had a defect, a recurring defect. So we had a stamped and welded component that came in from a supplier and got welded onto the vehicle. And this component had a small bracket on it, and that bracket was used for the G sensor. So G sensors for car crashes, to measure the impact of the force, was installed onto this bracket. Pretty important. Bracket, but it came in a couple of times with the bracket was not there. It had not been welded on at the supplier, and we caught it in body weld, and obviously this was a problem. So I thought, you know, I'm just kind of curious. I just want to go see where this bracket's used in assembly. Just want to go see that installation process, get my eyes on it. So I'm walking the line. I get all the way to final assembly, and I still see the bracket, and it's got nothing installed on it. And they finally, they put the bumper over it. I said, okay, if it didn't have anything installed on it at that point, it's not going to have anything installed on it, period. And it turns out. So by finding out that that bracket wasn't actually being used in final assembly, we dug into it a little bit deeper. We found out that during the model change, the engineers had moved the G sensor location, but had not removed that bracket. They hadn't updated the drawing to remove that bracket. So it turns out that the fix for that quality issue is a little simpler than having to install a check at the supplier or something to make sure that the bracket was always there. We got engineering approval. We removed the bracket from the component. But had I not actually gone out to go see that in the process, I wouldn't have learned that we weren't continuing to use that.

Wow, that's pretty awesome. My other. One of my other favorite stories from Toyota on Genji Ginbutsu is. I can't remember his name, but is a Japanese kind of design engineer who was in working on the Toyota Sienna project. And he went and drove a Toyota Sienna, like all over America and all over. Just north and South America, I think, Canada, Mexico even.

And.

And he wanted to just feel how the car operated in different parts of. Of the world. And they came to realize that, oh, you know, this is where this legend has it, where some of these cup holders came from. Like all these cup holders, right? Like these. Unfortunately, as Americans love our cup holders, right? Yes, we do. And. But it was just Genji Ganbutsu. This guy literally drove a Toyota Sienna all over the the country. And just to see what it was like, I was like, wow, talk about going to Gemba, right? Or the place the work is going to be done.

Very powerful and customer first. Right. I mean, those are. Those are kind of seamlessly working together. Both of those attitudes.

Exactly.

Beautiful.

Yeah. Awesome. All right, what's number five?

All right, so number five is Shih Tzu Jitsu Goken which I always struggle to say and anyone who speaks Japanese is probably cringing right now. I sincerely apologize. Let me just, just explain what it means instead. But to be time and cost efficient and to work with sincerity. So I think in an organization, you know, aside from people, time and money are critical resources. And you know, I think we're stewards of them in the organization. So we've got to be very careful about how we're, how we're allocating them and using them judiciously. And I think an example of how Toyota kind of encouraged this behavior of being careful with time and cost was our process change request process. So anytime we had an engineering change to a drawing or we had to a supplier was changing a part, we had to go through this very lengthy process change request. We had to run trials on the new parts coming in. We had to discuss with all the stakeholders ahead of time. We had to evaluate the risk to production, et cetera, et cetera. But what that did was what we were trying to do and it worked very, very well. I'm actually pretty, pretty impressed, especially compared to what I've seen some other companies using. But we're trying to pre disruption to production or quality, right? So by preparing all of this work ahead of time, we're making sure that when we actually do implement that change, we're reasonably confident that it's going to go smoothly. We're not going to have any downtime and we're not going to have any cost related to quality issues. With this change and with this kind of very robust process that was developed, I think I did probably about 60 process change requests during my time at Toyota. Virtually none of them resulted in any negative impact, impact to production or quality based on the robust process that they had designed in place. So I think that's just one example of how really looking at our processes and making them robust so that we are maximizing our time and cost resources, I think was really ingrained in everything we do.

Great, great, great. All right. Awesome, awesome. So, all right. I wonder if that's where this whole idea of using your wits over your wallet came from. You know, be time and cost efficient sort of thing. You know, I don't know.

You know, I think it does. And that's conversations that I've had with teams recently too, where, you know, yes, we could make this, you know, fantastic, you know, half a million dollar investment and automate this process so we don't have to worry about it anymore. But we've got to look at the cost and the benefit of that. Right. So kind of do weigh the way and evaluate that. And is there a simpler fix that, you know, maybe. Maybe it's not even as impactful, but it's going to be much more time and cost efficient that we could possibly use. And there really was an emphasis on that at Toyota that it didn't have to necessarily be a pretty fix either. Yeah, as long as it was efficient.

Yeah. You know, one thing that has popped in my mind is, you know, we've had, you know, there's a few. This list is. Got some English phrases, then there's some Japanese phrases. I'm curious, like, why do you think they chose to use genshi genbutsu instead of get your boots on? Yeah, like really, like, because it's. It's, as you probably know, it's a source of touchiness within the lean community. Some people won't use Japanese words. Some people will, you know, I'm. And why do you think they say customer first? Surely there's a Japanese phrase for that. Right. Any ideas?

I've got a couple of thoughts on that because I've thought about that as well. I think that first off, you have. Some things just don't translate into English quite as well. So genshi genbutsu, get your boots on is kind of a quick kind of slang way of saying it, but really, really, it doesn't quite communicate the true concept of it. So it's get your boots on, but it means go to the place where the work is done and attempt to see and take a deep understanding of the reality that's all encapsulated in genshi genbutsu. And it's hard. And I found working outside of Toyota, I really try not to use the Japanese terminology because I don't want to create a barrier between and communication. So I think people forget, like, Toyota is a Japanese company. It makes sense. Japanese words make sense to use in a Japanese company. Right. You work for another company that's not Japanese. You've got to adapt and use the words that are going to resonate with the audience there.

So, okay, so for Kaizen, we can say continuous improvement, you know, genshi kibutu, we could say go and see.

Right. I don't know. That's what I usually do. Yeah. And even kaizen, it comes from the root words in Japanese just being good change.

Yeah.

You just keep it as simple as that.

Use what's over your wallet. For this next one, I can't even say shit. Goken.

I'm going to say, what's your Wallet, too. I'm stealing that from you.

Yeah. What's your wallet? All right. What's number six?

All right, number six is teamwork. So priority is on your team's performance, not only yours, by helping each other strive to achieve the team's target. And to me, this really was a lesson that I needed to learn. Before I came to Toyota, I had gotten my Six Sigma black belt certification. And I remember giving the final report out for that project. And I can visualize it right now. So it's me standing in the front of the room. There's a bunch of leaders there. I'm going through some slides. You know, I acknowledge the team members, but mostly I was talking about what I did, to be honest with you, on the project. Yeah. And going to Toyota and learning, you know, the A3, problem solving methodology and how you bring together a team. And you're all kind of focused on what you're trying to achieve with the A3, and also realizing that I am not the process expert in areas outside of my own. So I was a quality engineer. But I can't solve a problem related to, you know, Body Weld components without, you know, someone from my supplier who supplies those components, representing someone from Body Weld, someone from assembly who's installing to those components. So just that kind of forced me to see that I needed to really. To really rely on my team for these things. And that. That started to really get into my mindset, and it's something that I'm continuing to develop. But I like to think about one of the last projects that I worked on, on the report out that we had at the end of it. So we brought leadership in. This was a very. It was a complex project. Basically, we were trying to improve the performance at one of our sites that wasn't doing very well. And so we brought leadership in. And I kicked off the meeting. I think I talked for maybe five minutes. You know, here's the vision, here's what we did. And from that point on, it was the team members themselves that spoke to leadership. They took them out to the full floor. And I remember just kind of watching, just with this feeling of pride inside, you know, as I saw these. These team associates, and they're speaking to our upper leadership, and they're showing them the improvements that they made. And I realized that there was no way that we could have achieved this at this site without this team. And that's when it really started to click for me, that it really was about something a lot bigger than myself and a lot of that was from what I learned during my time at Toyota.

Yeah, that's beautiful. Beautiful. All right, number seven.

All right, so number seven is ownership and responsibility, but consider it for all what you do and speak. So I like this word ownership better than the word that we often hear, which is accountability. Ownership implies that you are the one responsible for it, you know, whatever the task or the activity is, and by default, that you're accountable for it because you own it. And I see that a lot of times in companies, we like to say we need to hold people accountable. We hear that a lot, or things to that nature. What I learned at Toyota was before you can hold someone else accountable for something, you have to show that you hold yourself accountable. You've got to demonstrate, build that credibility by saying, I take ownership of the things that belong to me, and I expect that from you as well, but I'm going to show you that I'm going to do that myself. And really where this evidenced itself was we were working on a really difficult quality issue at Toyota. It was something we had been fighting for actually years, I think. It kind of came and went over time. And part of the problem was that it wasn't clear what the root cause was. So you had groups of people. We'd have Body Weld saying that it was the. The supplied parts that came in. Right. And the supplier of the parts would say it was body weld. It was going back and forth. And I was responsible for the supplied parts as the quality engineer. But so what we did was we formed an A3 on this and we looked at all the data and it turned out that went to the supplier to investigate. And this was a complicated issue. There were a lot of factors involved, but one of the ones that we found was that someone had tuned hole on one of these components a long time ago. They had moved it a couple of millimeters one direction and had never moved it back. And that was contributing to the issue. And I remember meeting with Body Weld and I took them this information and I owned it. I said, there is a problem with supplied parts. This is what we found. We're going to tune it back, we're going to run some trials, make sure it doesn't cause any other problems. And the act of doing that and taking ownership over the issue that my supplied parts had caused really started to open up this conversation where Bodyweld was willing to look at some things that they were doing that could possibly improve the condition as well. I think that it shows that really, when we take ownership of what we say and what we do, that really has a ripple effect on other people being encouraged to do the same.

Yeah. And I remember, you know, a few years back when Toyota was having some, you know, pretty incredible quality issues. And I think it was the president of Toyota came on and he basically opened up with two words, I'm sorry. You know, he like just said I'm sorry, you know, and just owned it. Where I was like, golly, that's all he had to say, I'm sorry. And he had me. Right. And then everything else came from again. Just, just. Well, I don't want to steal your number eight, but humility, right? I mean, it was just, it was just incredible. So.

No, it's true. And you know, there, there are times that, you know, when you take ownership of something that you've run the risk that someone will take advantage of you for doing that. Right. They might, might throw you under the bus and say, well, this person said it was their fault. So.

Yeah.

But I will say nine times out of 10 people, I know that when I hear someone like someone say I'm sorry in response to a huge quality issue like that, my first instinct is almost a relief. Wow, you took ownership of that. It actually creates this immediate trust which I think really makes organizations more effective.

Yeah, no, exactly. All right, so let's see, that was number seven. What's number eight?

Number eight is humility and gratitude. So do not forget that you are always supported by others, always listen to others and appreciate their comments. Now this one particularly resonates with me. I don't believe in the concept of a self made man or woman. I think that all of us are where we are because of the investments that we've made in ourselves, but also the investments that other people have made in us and at Toyota. Something. I just kind of realized this recently, something that Toyota did very well and that was the concept of mentoring. So at every stage in my journey through at Toyota, from being a contractor to being a quality engineer, to being an assistant manager, I always had a mentor. And it was interesting, Ron, because it wasn't a formal process, so I was never formally assigned a mentor. It would always just be someone who was more experienced and who I just kind of had a connection with. You know, we got along really well. Who would just take me under their wing. And I saw that happen for almost all of the other engineers as well. So someone who was more experienced would see the newer engineer and they would just take them under their wing. And it made me, I mean, I can Say that I, I became, you know, developed the skill set that I did. And I learned because of these people who took the time to invest in me. And, you know, I'll forever be grateful to them for what they did. And showing gratitude. So the humility and understanding that others have contributed to your success, but also showing people gratitude for those contributions, it could be as simple as a thank you. I remember one time recently, I saw that this material handler, she was running back and forth, she was working really hard one day trying to get orders out. And I just pulled her aside when she had a moment to breathe. And I said, you know, hey, I just, I noticed that you were running around today helping us get orders out, and I just want to say thank you for what you're doing. And she looked at me and I could see the tears starting to form in her eyes. And I was like, whoa, what? What did I say? Is everything okay? And she said, no. She goes, I thought no one saw me me. And to her that meant a lot. Just the fact that I stopped and said thank you. And that's something that. It happened to me as well. When I was at Toyota, I was working, it was like 1am we had this bad quality issue. And the senior advisor in our department who's pretty far up in the organization, he's still there at 1am too. And I know why he's still there. He can't work directly on the issue, but he's there to support me. And he walks by my desk and he puts a bag of chips on my desk and he just says, thank you just on for your hard work. And he walks off. And I just, I still remember how that made me feel. And I think that, you know, just incorporating that gratitude into everything that we do for and to show, to acknowledge the people who are supporting us is so important.

So here's an idea for everyone listening. It's something that we, we're, we're trying to do a little bit better job here at Gamba Academy is, you know, in this world of text messaging and emails and all the rest of it, it's pretty sterile. You know, it's easy to type thank you in an email and hit send, but it takes more. It takes a little bit more effort and heart, I would say. And get a piece of paper and this thing called a pencil or a pen so you can actually mark on a paper with it. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. And you could just write a thing, thank you note to someone, like physically write it, put it in the mail and Send it, you know, and even encourage them to do it to one person. And if everyone listening to this, there'll be many thousands of people listen to this in the course of a week or two. If everyone did that and then asked all those people to do it, you know, you could start this movement of gratitude. Right. Just a short note. Thank you. Thank you, Grandma Arlene, or whatever, or thank you, Jess, for coming on the podcast. It was awesome, right? And just. And really mean it. I think this kind of. This attitude can heal this broken world of ours.

I agree with you, actually. I mean, I'm not in my cubicle right now at work, but on my cubicle wall, I've actually got about three different thank you notes that people have given me just posted up on the wall. Because, yeah, it was something that probably took them 10 minutes to write and send to me, but I kept it. And I'm a minimalist. I don't keep a lot of stuff. But those notes meant a lot to me. So I agree. That'd be awesome.

Beautiful. All right, what's number nine?

All right. Number nine is integrity. Always communicate the facts in a sincere manner. So I think that when we have integrity, that means our words match our actions. And when that happens, that builds trust in an organization. And I think an example of this. There was this particular individual I worked with in Body Weld, and whenever it wasn't clear if an issue was being caused by one of my supplier parts or if it was being caused by Body Weld, this was the person that I would go to. And the reason for that is I knew he would be 100% honest with me. So he would help with, you know, doing some scans of the. Of the vehicle to try to understand where the variations away from nominal were. And he'd come up to my desk, he'd have all of his body weld gear on. He'd be all greased up, and he'd sit down and he'd pull out this folded piece of paper out of his pocket and he'd lay it out and he would show me the scans and he'd say, look, Jess, I saw this here and I saw this here, and I think we might be contributing here. I'm going to try to tune this part up a little bit. And I'd look at it and I'd look at my supplier scans and I'd be like, let me talk with my supp. Supplier. I'm going to try to tune it down here while you're doing that and see if we can make it better. But I knew that I could always trust him. That even if it didn't reflect well on him or his department, this person would tell me the truth. And, you know, it's. You know, Toyota is an organization, right. It's built up out of people. And it certainly wasn't perfect by any means. But the thing that I noticed that was different about Toyota was that the way that leadership responded to transparency. So whenever someone had the courage to say, I don't know, this was my responsibility, I would say 99 times out of 100, leadership would respect and honor that. And their response to that was what helped to foster that kind of culture that valued integrity like that.

Yeah, that's beautiful. All right, so last but not least, what's number 10?

This is the fun one. All right, so we love Toyota. Create more Toyota fans around you by supporting production of high quality cars at affordable prices. Now, I am a Toyota fan, but I have a confession. A lot of people like to give me a hard time about this. I do drive a Civic.

Okay.

Now, to be fair, I had the Civic before I started working at Toyota. And if anyone who's owned a Civic knows those things do not die. Right?

Right.

But when it does, I will be buying a Toyota for sure. The reason that I'm such a Toyota fan is because I believe in the product that we made, but I also believed in the people who made it. I saw their commitment to making these high quality vehicles. But it's more than the product. I believe in the organization. I believed in what they did. They made an incredible investment in me. They helped develop me as a person and a leader. And I will always speak highly of them. Were they without their challenges? No, they had plenty of challenges within Toyota, and I think sometimes we put them up on a pedestal. They. By no means were they perfect, but that company made a difference in my life and I'll always remember them for that.

Yeah, well, I can't. I've lost count of how many former kind of Toyota folks that have gone on to great things that none of them speak poorly of Toyota. Right. In fact, are proud to say they worked there. And I think what a great witness to a great company.

Yeah, it is. And I would encourage other leaders in other companies. What kind of legacy do you want to leave with your company? Do you want to have given value to shareholders on Wall Street? That's important. High quality products to your customers, that's also important. But Toyota, we said we don't just build cars, we also build people. And. And they meant that, and I think that it can't be underestimated the value that that company has had in thousands, hundreds of thousands of people's lives. Yeah.

All right, let me run back through the list. I'm going to give the when applicable Japanese phrase followed by our made up English phrases for folks. Okay? So number one was customer first. Number two, challenge. Number three, kaizen, or continuous improvement, change for the better. A couple different ways to say that. Number four, genji genbutsu, which is to go and see, get your boots on, that sort of thing. Number five. Oh, boy. Shih tzu jitsu goken. Okay, we're going to say this is use your wits over your wallet with sincerity. How's that?

I like it.

All right, number six is teamwork. Number seven is ownership and responsibility. Number eight is humility and gratitude. Number nine, integrity. Number 10, we love Toyota. Yeah. So very, very strong list of attitudes there, Jess. So thank you for running through those. Gosh. Any final words on these, on these 10 attitudes?

Yeah, a couple of thoughts. I mean, these attitudes, they're abstract, right? So we can, we can't see them, we can't touch them, but they're real and they're powerful because they determine our actions. Right. And our actions really create the environment and the atmosphere that builds our organization. So understanding what your attitudes are, basing those on your beliefs and getting that right is critically important. And I would encourage anyone. I mean, these attitudes may or may not resonate with you, but go ahead and make a list of what you think, feel like your attitudes, what you want them to be, or do it with your team. As a leadership team, what do we want our attitudes to be? And then I'd encourage you on some sort of frequency, evaluate are our actions lining up with these attitudes? What do we need to change part of that continuous improvement cycle? Right. Are we meeting what those attitudes imply or do we need to adjust our process as well?

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Hey, so before we go, Jess, I want to give a little plug to your blog, Yokoten Learning. What's Yokoten Learning all about?

So Yokoten Learning is a platform for sharing best practices among people in the continuous improvement community. So I have a blog on there as well, but I'm starting to build content so that we can kind of share some of the ideas and things that are working well from industry to industry. Kind of an iron sharpens iron type of concept. But, but so there's, there's some content on the blog. I do do some blogging on there as well. I'm available for coaching and that sort of thing, but appreciate that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well, we'll. We'll link to it. So yokoten folks that don't know how to spell it. Y O K O t e n learning.com and again, we'll link to everything in the show notes. So this will be gembellpodcast.com and then this will be episode 235. So, Jess, wow, thank you for coming on again. Number three. I guess we'll do number four here and, you know, another six months to a year or something like that. We'll figure out a new topic.

I'd love that. Count me in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well, I'll let you go so you can run over to Gemba. Gembacademy.com ame. Get your ame ticket and your RSVP for our cocktail party. All right. You better be there.

Yes. And you do that right now so I don't forget.

One piece Flow. Right. Just do it.

Exactly.

All right, well, thanks again. And I, I guess, Jess, are you on LinkedIn and everything?

Yes, I'm on LinkedIn. And you can also email me@JessoCatenLearning.com as well.

Right. And Jess Orr is Jess. And then. Or. Or.

Right, that's right.

All right, beautiful. All right, well, thanks again, Jess, and have a great day.

You're welcome. Have a great day as well.

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