GA 256 | Reflecting on a Career in Continuous Improvement with Jon Miller

And that process of learning and filling gaps and sort of turning darkness into light was always something positive for me.

Today I'm excited to share part two of the conversation I had with my business partner, John Miller. Now if you missed last week's show, I'd really encourage you to check it out as John and I explored a pretty important topic. Namely, what are the minimum set of elements needed for a strong lean system. But today show is a continuation of the same conversation since I had actually made an impromptu call to totally pivot and take that first conversation in a totally different direction. Well, specifically I wanted to explore John's 26 year career in order to see what we could all learn from his experiences starting As a young 22 year old translator for Japanese Sensei all the way through to the present day. Now I know I sure enjoyed a conversation and believe you will as well. A show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we talk about can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 256. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning system over@gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. I'm interested in picking your brain on a few other things, John, and we haven't talked about this at all. And you know you have the right to refuse as always, you know, but you know, you've been at, you know, in the opening you talked about your, your career. I believe you said 26 years if memory.

Yeah, 26 years since I first.

Yeah.

Stepped onto a plant floor.

Yeah.

With a kaizen event going on.

I guess so there's a lot of experience there, you know, and I know you hate hearing it, but you know, you've taught me a lot, you know, and a lot of people, not just me, but I can only speak for me because I'm me. But over those years I would really be curious if we could maybe even break it up into phases and looking at, I don't know what the phases are, you know, these first five years, second five years, and not necessarily like that, but maybe the early part of your journey versus you know, the consultant getting after it and sleeping two hours a week and you know, all the rest of it working really hard, just, just sharing maybe your experience with the listeners, a little bit of what you've seen over these years and what maybe you've learned and even maybe some of the mistakes that you made and not, and I don't mean for you to talk like about personal things or anything like that, but just, just lean, right. And I know you hate talking about yourself, so this really isn't about you. It is about you, but it's about the journey.

It's about a consultant and a lean learner and how that person grew. So yeah, I mean that I could see, I could see reflecting on that being of value to people.

Talk about those early days, right. How old were you? I don't date you, but you were in your 20s, weren't you? Right. When you were just getting going out of school.

Right. When I first got into interpreting I was 93, so I would have been 22. So imagine that. I mean this is 22, this is before, before the Internet, before. So I knew nothing basically. And I had no idea I could speak a couple languages and I had graduated from university with a liberal arts degree.

And like how did you even come to the idea of being an interpreter or how did it, did you trip across it or.

Well, I was looking for work. I decided further education or further further graduate school wasn't interesting to me. So I was back in Indiana living with my folks at the time and I was happy to do manual labor. I'd always enjoyed doing physical work. So I applied to some local places that were hiring over the summer. And to my surprise, because I didn't really have work experience, I worked in Japan, I'd done, you know, I taught English there. I, I'd done surveying, I worked in my built houses with an Amish work crew over the summer in Illinois. I worked on farms and things like that. But I didn't have a, I didn't have a, I didn't have a high school career of having worked 6, 5, 6, 7, you know, jobs at McDonald's. So when I was filling out applications to work someplace, I wasn't finding a lot of work in the early 90s.

And to set the context for everyone just so they. I think it's an important point that we haven't necessarily mentioned on this episode. You were born and raised in Japan, right?

Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah. So grew up in Japan and then went to school in Canada and then back to the US where my parents were living at the time. So when it comes time to find work or deciding what to do next, my sister I think was involved with a Japanese electronics company in Indianapolis doing, doing the kind of work with the in house team, being a president's assistant or something. She's bilingual as well. And was it through her or through my parents? I forget. But Somehow I was introduced to a, a professor at the university there who was Japanese. Japanese professor, I suppose who knew of some people who needed. And I guess she probably done some work for the Shingijutsu and the consultants in the past. So sort of through word of mouth it's like you want to, you want to try this? If so, here's a ticket. Get on a plane, go to Connecticut and be here at a certain time. And not a lot of prep. I mean I had a couple of technical dictionaries. I might have had some had a binder full of terms on what was Kaizen. But I knew nothing about business, nothing about manufacturing or this stuff called that to be called lean at the moment. But back then there was no lean.

What'd they call it? Just in time or what was it being packaged as?

Yeah, I think it was. I think UTC called it continuous improvement and Japanese guys just called it Kaizen or the Toyota style of doing things.

Yeah, okay.

So anyway, yeah, so that, So I guess the first five or six years was just week after week of.

Do you remember the first one?

Vaguely, yeah, vaguely. I mean was it, was it a.

Kaizen event or was it a.

Well, they're almost all Kaizen events or follow up visits or Japanese consultants popping in on a 3P project or something else that a team was doing and if not so much leading it, but coming in, embarking orders or answering questions and then going to the next team and just sort of doing that round meeting. A Kaizen event facilitated by a Japanese consultant was usually multiple, multiple teams working in parallel for that week. And there was probably a prep week that the local or the, let's say the on site lean leader took care of and then there was a follow up week and so forth. So it wasn't, it wasn't as drive by as it might sound. They were brought in for sort of specific high profile. Let's get through, let's cover a lot of territory and let's make sure our team is being given good direction during this five day period.

So talk about their. Those, the consultants that were there and you didn't know them, obviously you just met them for the first time. What was your first impression of their aura, of their behavior, of their presence? What was it like as a 22 year old seeing these folks?

Yeah, I didn't have anything to compare it to. They were in some ways unusual for, for Japanese people because they are much more. I don't know, they were, they were sort of rock stars in their own mind and also in the Eyes of the. You know, you call them sensei. You call somebody a sensei, it's gonna.

Go to their head. Yeah.

And part of it was they needed immediate surrender. They needed you to respect them. They didn't have time to debate with you because they were. They're doing it through an interpreter. And I think they learned very early on, and I think through the experience of working with maybe, what is it, danaher and Wiremold and some of those companies in Connecticut, that if you just listen to what we say and you jump when we say jump, then this is gonna go a lot easier than if you try to engage us in debate, because your heads are so screwed on wrong. And frankly, we can't articulate what you need to do in a way that we could if we were speaking in each other's native language. And they were taught that way from Ono, too. They weren't. They didn't engage in philosophical discussion or debate with Ono. Ono just said, okay, what have you done? No, that's not good enough. Can you, can you try. Try thinking a little more on this and if you looked at that, or go stand over there and come back to me when you figured it out, you know, so it was the culture that wasn't really a teaching culture, the Toyota Autonomous Study Group that they're coming out of. So that was unusual in hindsight. And that isn't how Toyota did it in their automotive plants. That isn't how a lot of Japanese transplant auto parts suppliers or whatever in the 80s would have taught their people how to. How to think. So, but I didn't know any different. It didn't appear to be abnormal from the American customer side. They had been taught, this is what to expect, here's how you communicate with them, and everything will be okay. So I just accepted it as okay. This is how this, this type of business is done.

How did they treat you, John?

I mean, it was. How do they treat me? Well, the very first thing I think that Mr. Nakao said is something like, is this greenhorn going to be okay? Like something basically that said, this guy's still up behind the ears. What are we doing? Why are you. He kind of turns away from me, points at me and looks at the other people like, are you crazy? Why do you have a 15 year old in the room? I was 22, but I look like I was.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I probably had sneakers and a baseball cap on for all I know. So I didn't look the part, but, yeah, I was able to do the job. I was able to do the job because I was probably one of the better bilinguals. A lot of people were not natively bilingual. They were either Japanese spouses of Americans or Americans who had spent some time in Japan and who were competent with the language but weren't sort of instantly able to go back and forth between the languages like I was. So once I figured out the terminology, I think they appreciated having somebody who, who was able to help them communicate with and understand the nuance of what was being said and all those kind of things. So yeah, so I was treated fine. I mean, there were times when, you know, they would, they would be jet lagged or drunk or whatever and they'd yell at you, but just kind of accepted that as part of the territory.

Yeah, yeah. So. All right, well, so those early days you're, you're traveling about translating for these, for these Japanese sensei, as you called them. How did that, what was the next phase? How long did you do that?

Well, I got to be pretty repetitive and pretty exhausting. Long days, long nights, long weeks. I didn't have much of a social life or anything going on. So that, that didn't suffer. It just never got started. So it wasn't as if I was, you know, not not seeing my girlfriend at the time or anything because I didn't have one, because I didn't have time to. Yeah, it's kind of a bush circle, Right.

Kept you out of trouble?

Me out of trouble. Get me out of trouble. Yeah. So one of my early memories is Mr. Nikal saying, if you do this for 10 years, if you keep this up for 10 years, I will. What is it? I'll give you. Not a certificate, but I will, I will graduate you as a consultant, something like that. I'll give you, I'll recognize you as a consultant or something like that. And then I was thinking to him, like 10 years, you kidding me? That's, that's part of it was like I couldn't think 10 years ahead.

Yeah.

At that age. And part of it was I didn't see what I would still be learning from them in 10 years. And that isn't to say any disrespect to the depth of knowledge and experience they had. But, you know, and that might have been at year two or year three. But what I've been exposed to has been largely the same. First of all, there was a lot of, I was doing 30, 40 weeks a year, you know, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. So I was getting a PhD in this stuff. And you know, you hear it over and over and you begin to know when, when the American asks the question, I already know the answer that they're going to say because I've heard it before. Yeah, I've already, I've already heard the speech before. So. And if there's new scenarios, and there always were new scenarios, those are great opportunities for learning. But I got into the, in my mind that you know what this is, this isn't so much. This isn't so much. This is, there's not so much new that they're new ground that they're covering and it could have been that I just was never exposed to the cutting edge stuff or what have you. So I want to be cautious not to make it sound like, you know, they, they didn't have more to teach me. But in my 20 some year old mind I was, I was not, I was not completely convinced that it would take me 10 more years of this to be graduated, to be honest. You know, by stepping out and broadening myself, I was able to, I was able to be ready more quickly. But long story short, was it five years into it? Yeah, it was really not very long. Five, five years into it or so. And people were saying, you know, hey, when are you going to be a consultant? Sort of to sort of half jokingly but half seriously, I guess, you know, people that were clients that in, in the moments where Japanese guy's off to the bathroom or we're waiting for him at the hotel or something, you know, they want to know about me, what my plans were. And I really hadn't thought about it, but I thought, well, maybe one of these days. So I think somewhere in year number four or five I turned it around and I said, well, anytime you want to invite me over, I'll happy to do a project for you, do a Kaizen for you. So what happened was, was that still.

Connecticut, still east coast or.

No, no, I don't remember who that. I think, I think it was a company on the west coast. Oh, okay. And that was kind of our first opportunity to do that.

Well, I mean Paul was one of. Right. I mean Paul and fastcap, weren't you. Was one of that one of your early.

I think it was 2000 or 2001. So back in late 798 it was like a name names. But so there was a company, there's an aircraft component company in Yakima. They're probably part of a different group now. They were called Dowdy Aircraft, Dowdy Aerospace, Dowdy Props or something at the Time D O W T Y and one of the VPs there was somebody who kind of said, hey, come on and help us sometime. So he said okay, pay for a hotel and then give us a good reference and we're going to do this. I think we maybe it was like 500 bucks for three days or something. Just did a smed event, did a flow event, whatever and helped them get started or get through a tough time or something like that. And then just a series of those sort of small get your foot in the door kind of projects led to meeting people like Jeff Koss at Koss Taylor and further down the road fastcap and working with the local manufacturing extension program. Well, they were looking for lean resources and so we helped out some companies that they were, they were supporting through their manufacturing extension efforts. So yeah, so that was kind of getting started with consulting, kind of always knowing that there was. So we targeted small companies, very small companies or small divisions of larger companies. People, basically any door that would open, you know, and Boeing wasn't going to open, but these other tiny companies that have resources or needed to get started. So the idea with Gemba Research was what the TBMS and the Shinkijutsus and the simplers and so forth, maybe simpler wasn't around then, but these larger, more grown up consulting companies were offering were probably out of reach for the small business. And yet there was a lot that even I could teach them was kind of the thought process. And I think one thing that was clear was this sort of don't ask questions, do what I say and in five days you'll have Kaizen. Things wasn't going to work for everybody. That sometimes the people who were raising objections to the Japanese consultant had good questions and good objections. And if you're, if your go to move is to shout them down and just say shut up, just do what I say. It's not going to, it's not, that's not going to build sustainability that might get you through the week, but that wasn't going to really help companies long term. And you know, that wasn't again, have to be careful. That wasn't necessarily what the Japanese consultants believed was always the right thing to do is to shut people down and not listen. There are people that did listen. But if your mission is to go in there in these five days, get these results and then move on to the next thing, you had to leave it up to the lean office or the corporate lien office of your client to have those conversations. So it wasn't your role As a high paid, you know, $5,000 a day plus interpreter, plus first class airfare, big cost sensei to have debates with the materials manager about, you know, their philosophy on MrP2 or whatever. It's just like shut up and do what I said. Tear that rack down, put in some kanban. I'll be back in three hours. Because you could have that debate forever. And frankly that needed to be debate between that manager and their, their, their boss.

Yeah.

So I want to put that in context. But at the same time I realized that no, sometimes there are cases where in the moment you need to have the conversation and I, you know, I didn't have the credibility of a 60 year old Japanese guy to be able to say just do what I said. And it just wouldn't style wise, it wouldn't be how I would have done things. So all that said, working with small companies did that for about six years and it worked pretty well and taught the basics. Kind of broke it, broke it down as far as you could break it down. It wasn't Kaizen events, it was, you know, let's think about waste and let's think about value. Let's map your process. Let's, let's label things and make standards and let's get people involved. It was really sort of, I guess I think what was frustrating for me at the time I guess was that I was having to break it down and simplify it just to get people to be able to digest it. When I knew that there were so many other fancier, better, faster, stronger tools just right there in the box. But the customer wasn't ready for them or it would have just blown the walls off the place to do even a two day Kaizen event. And that was where that was big, big learning for me because that's where the customer really teaches you. Here's what I need, here's what I can, what I can spare for my 12 person company, 50 person company. So I was working in a field sort of completely different than what I've been interpreting. Multi, multi hundred multi thousand person plants versus now single owner, single site, less than 100 person facilities. So that was frustrating but. So that was for sure. But it kind of got us in the door with that next tier up of companies that might have been divisions of aerospace companies or multi location furniture plants or things like that. That started right about in the early 2000, 2003, 2004. I don't know what triggered it. If it was just having a website and putting information and case studies and Customer lists up there. And eventually we're just one of the options and we just by luck or just by law of numbers, eventually, eventually one of them is going to find you.

When did you start your blog?

2000. And I'm gonna have to look at it, see what the earliest post was. Mid 2000s, I think. Yeah, yeah, that, that was, that wasn't necessarily a, that doesn't, that didn't really correlate with moving into a different, different customer sphere. That was just more. Yeah, that's something that I think the website company that we've done, our website suggested that the blogging was a good way to increase your visibility on the Internet. So we did that. I'm sure that helped. And then in 2000, what was it, 2000, four or five might have been earlier we started offering Japan tours or Japan lean experiences. Pretty common thing now. There weren't that many people doing it back then and that became a pretty popular thing. And at one point I think we did about 80 of them. By the end we would do one or two a year open to the public. And then some companies would want to, want to take 10 to 15 of their leadership team or employees or whatever. So we would organize custom tours and that was interesting and that kind of helped us to showcase systems, I guess you'd call it. Where before if you talked about, well, you've got to have these lights on your machines and call for help and have supervisors who can come and respond and solve problems. You know, you talk about these elements of a escalation system or an end on system and they might try it but they wouldn't completely get it. Where once they see lights blinking in a Toyota plant and everybody's moving to the problem. Oh, now I get it. You know, it just, it wasn't until you see it in action, it doesn't really sink in the benefit of what you're describing that they, that they need. And I think that was, that helped a lot of companies get over the hump and start to really build systems and so forth.

You know, my, I don't know what year it was, John, when you guys came to Nokia there, when I was working there and this is where you and I first crossed paths. And I know you, I don't know, I assume you remember, maybe you don't, that we were doing a value stream mapping exercise that week in. One of your young consultants had come in there. I don't even remember the gentleman's name, but he was really good and he ran us through and taught us how to do it. And, and we had a, you know, a really successful few days. You know, we'd move some equipment and flow had improved. And I was really excited because I was actually the one of the people kind of, you know, fighting to, to bring you in, you know, and bring your company in. And there was a gentleman, I won't say his name, but I do remember it, it starts with a D in case he's listening. And he was a. He was one of the senior, I don't know, I guess maybe an industrial engineer or something like that. Really, really smart guy, good guy. And. But he definitely was not on board with this whole lean thing. And fact was, just not. Just wasn't. Wasn't pleased that we were there, nor that we were doing these things. And this was his baby, you know, that we were basically tearing apart and putting it back together in three days. And there was operators running around and coming up with ideas and it was just kind of blowing people's minds, right? Some, some in a good way and some in a bad way. And, and he was involved, say involved with air quotes, you know, throughout the week he was around, you know, and he was present but wasn't really participating per se. And during the report out, you know, the, the operator stood up and had big value stream maps on the wall and you know, they were talking about some of the improvements that they made and they were really excited and you know, it was all good. And then I remember the general manager at the time, I remember his name, but I won't say it. He's a good guy. He didn't, he had no part in this. But he, he asked this gentleman, we'll call him D. What do you think? What do you think? And he stood up and I'll never forget the words that came out of his mouth. He said, this is all fuzzy math. Fuzzy math was the word that he used. And it was like indelibly burned in my soul. I don't know why, but it was just my first experience, right, with lead kind of thing. And I'm like, oh my gosh, what are you talking about, fuzzy math? It's very obvious what we did. And I was dumbfounded. And I was just sitting there with my jaw was. Just had dropped. And I'm like, I don't know what to say. And then you stood up. You hadn't said a word at all throughout this whole thing. You just came in to see the report out and then you calmly. I don't even remember what you said, John, but you calmly. I don't know how to say it. Put D in his place in a very kind and polite way. But really, really, I don't know, just. Just took this really volatile situation and. And brought it back down to earth. And I remember thinking to myself, who in the heck is this guy that looks like he's 15 years old? You know, we were about to save age. Right. But I don't know if you remember that, John, but that was.

I do remember there was a tough moment. Yeah. Where I think it was the plant manager asked the senior guy and then he. Yeah, he kind of threw cold water on the room and fuzzy math. Yeah. I think it was. I don't remember the exact comment, but I do remember it was. It was kind of like. Well, just look at the. Look at the. Since you sent. You mentioned the math. Let's look at the numbers. Let's look at the reality. I'm happy to. Happy to go over with you. Kind of happy to, you know. Sorry. Sorry, we weren't. We didn't reading. Go over the numbers before. It was just. I think I probably apologized to him and said, yeah, if the number. If the numbers don't add up, we'll do this again. But it's. It's a logical process and so forth. So it was. Yeah, but he was. He was actually very calm.

Yeah, no, he was.

And cool. But it was clear he wasn't happy at all about what was going on. So it was one of those moments where you just had to end the meeting and then, okay, not a good time for you to have brought it up, but since you did, let's get back together on this. Yeah. So those are kind of interesting. That's a single example. But that same theme of who in the room stands to lose the most from these lean consultants coming in, that was kind of a recurring theme. And it usually wasn't the company owner bringing you in because they're bringing you in. Usually wasn't anybody on the floor or supervisors or managers. It was usually the VP Ops or director of this or the sales guy who liked to jerk the factory around and wasn't happy at all about not having to. Having to have value streams that things flowed down and he couldn't just move his favorite order to the front or the back of the line. So that became sort of a learning point where. Up front in the consulting engagement where we were. To be honest, we were. In the beginning, we were looking at this as manufacturing consulting. That was what we knew and that's what we offered. And certainly some of the Background I had was in office kaizen and supply chain and design and so forth. So it wasn't that it only applied to the shop, but we were approaching manufacturing companies to help them out. So we didn't consciously go into it looking at as a way to sell our services to the whole enterprise. And we talked about how the other parts of the value stream, and we didn't even call it value stream back then because the book hadn't been written. But all the parts of business that support the shop floor, the support the gemba, have to synchronize and not, you know, not put in orders that are, that aren't leveled and not be slate with materials from a purchasing standpoint. But it became clear that when we were either positioned as a manufacturing consultant or they're bringing in, bringing us in for sort of a ops project, we had to immediately sort of push back, if you will, or sort of say, well now hold on, you do understand that the scope of this is going to go beyond manufacturing. It's going to go beyond this part of it that it has to for it to work. And that would, first of all, it would surprise them that it would say something like that because aren't you guys manufacturing consultants? Second of all surprising because how is this guy that looks like he's 15 talking about. How does he understand my, my issues? How does he understand that my sales. Sales guy who he hasn't even met. Yeah. Joking around my shop floor and my materials guy buys on bulk and doesn't care about on time except price, you know, so. But it was common issues. Right. So to the factory owner who only knows their company, somebody else coming in and sort of pointing out sort of general things that happen in a business, it's sort of shocking to them. So that was another way that was learning for me how much this was a universal problem, but also how you have to respect the stakeholders like who. Who has what to. Who has how much to lose and how are they going to sabotage you knowingly or unknowingly by not bringing them in early enough or communicating with them or just going knocking on the door and saying here's what we're working on, here's how I think it's going to affect you. What do you think? Am I, Are we, are we completely off of our, of our compass, completely wrong or. So that was part of it too, is just doing sort of a lot of that active, active listening and involving people who had some part in it. Now that was, yeah, that was an interesting, I call it interviews you know, they need to interview you, but really all it was is giving them. I wasn't looking to learn so much from them. I was looking for them to have a chance to vent. In hindsight, this is what it was like. I have a. I'd have an interview sheet and I have questions, but it wasn't that I really needed anything from them to solve my problem. I just really needed them to have a chance to look me in the eye and tell me that they've been there for 35 years and they built this plant and that thing and, you know, just get. Just get the rage off the top of their head that here was a kid coming in and messing with their plant, with their system. And there were a number of those. But I was, you know, it's like, so what, the process.

What if, you know, I, you know, we both deal with a lot of young, lean practitioners who, who don't have a lot of authority necessarily, but they're. They're really, they're really, you know, they're really excited and they're really passionate and they really want to make this work. What advice? I mean, you know, you were. You were that younger person, you know, trying to lead change. Now, mind you, you did have some authority as you had an incredible amount of knowledge in your head. But what did. Like how do. How. How did you overcome the age thing? Because it had to have been a real obstacle early on, at least.

Yeah, I just waited 15 years, honestly, as it was always a thing. It was always a thing and, you know, it was. It was never really something that you could overcome by effort. Yeah, because there was always the impression. And the fact was that. And there's an interesting turning point, actually, now that you mentioned, there was an interesting turning point in the. Oh, what was it? I guess again, it's the mid-2000s, when I would have been just barely my early 30s, and I'm still looking like I was 20. That I noticed. And I think it might have been when I was working with more global companies going to Europe, going to Asia, that the United States. In the United States, the manufacturing median age was, let's say it was older than in China, in Finland, in France, in Brazil, wherever I was going, these countries, just in general, I shouldn't say in general, but the workforce that was represented in these plants, there were people in their 20s who were chief engine or like engineering managers, which never happened in America, for example, or people who were leading projects. So I had people that are either my peers or slightly older or slightly younger than Me, who looked at me and you know, okay, you look kind of youngish. But they weren't shocked that I was 20 years younger than they were, so. And that that made it a little bit more. And of course, if you're from a foreign country and if you're from the United States, you immediately gain some credibility whenever you're flown in and brought up on to the front of the room as a consultant. So I think that that probably helped. It didn't help anything other than in the eyes of the customer, I was easier to accept. It didn't change anything about me fundamentally. Yeah, yeah. In North America, I think it really was. I mean, it stopped bothering me long before it stopped bothering customers, but I think it. Yeah. So to bring it back around to the 20 something, 30 something year old, enthusiastic, lean leader, CI leader who might be listening. Yeah, it's a tough one. I would say that I was confident that I knew what I was talking about. I also didn't have an ego. I didn't have a strong need to be right because on the one hand I knew that I was when it came to, you know, when it came to lean or when I was trying to teach them, if they, if they had something to teach me, I was willing to learn. And if it was about tps, then I was, I knew more than they did in almost every case. So it wasn't like I needed to prove anything. So part of it is know your stuff well enough so that you're not feeling insecure and you're not having to fake it or not feeling like, oh, they got me there, you're right, I don't know enough. You know, just really do your homework, really do your homework, be professional, be respectful, all those kind of things so that you don't make that any kind of an excuse for people to look down on you. Just don't give them an excuse for age or for lack of experience to be a thing. Because it's, it's really not about years, it's about repetitions. You know, it's not about what age you are, it's how many times have you gone through it, how many cycles of learning, how many cycles of experimenting and trying. And you know, if you've got a, if you've got a certification, certificate, degree, mba, it doesn't matter how many reps do you have. If you don't have enough reps, then it doesn't matter your age, it matters how. Well, how many times have you swung the golf club? It's not how many years have you been a pro, you've been a pro for 20 years and you really haven't gotten out and swung the club and doesn't matter. So I think that's the thing is that people confuse age and years of being in a job with repetitions. And a consultant trainer who stays busy gets a lot of repetitions and here's the, here's a lot of common scenarios. So go get your repetitions and then age doesn't really matter because if you listen well and you're professional, people find that you can help them. I think, and I guess part of it too is don't, don't let the passion get in the way of what the customer needs. If you're passionate and you love lean and you really want to do it and oh, I know I can fix this area, that's going to get in the way of the person in front of you sending off signals that they're not comfortable, you're not welcome, you haven't really listened to them or heard them. So sort of temper your passion in that moment. Don't get into a fight over things that don't matter. Things that don't matter, meaning the details of it. Just try to get high level alignment with the person in front of you and then you can work out the details later.

So let's talk a little bit maybe just about kind of almost maybe last five, 10 years, something like that, you know, up to present day and some of the things that you've learned and that I'm more. I work with you, John, and get to know you like, you know, you're a thinker, right? You're constantly thinking and wondering and exploring and that's what I really appreciate about you. So have you found yourself to be more, I don't know, reflective the longer you've gone in this, in these 26 years, or have you always been like that?

You know, I think I've always been a thinker or a worrier or somebody, whatever you want to call it, you know, just thinking ahead and wanting to be prepared, I think is what it also partly is. And being curious, you know, wanting to fill gaps in my knowledge and not wanting to feel like I don't know what something is or what. So being starting out and interpreting years ago, everything was new, right? What's a lathe? What's a mill? What's a, you know, what's a, what does it mean to calibrate something? I don't know what any of these words meant. I know what they mean now and I knew as soon as I looked them up, you know, and night at the hotel and that process of learning and filling gaps and sort of turning darkness into light was always something positive for me. Now, if I, if I'd gotten a degree in engineering, which I didn't, but if I'd gotten a business degree, a degree in engineering, had an internship at a factory, I knew all those things, my experience might have been very different. Starting off in a positive and a negative way, I might have had much more security and confidence and feeling like I know what I'm talking about. I got a degree in engineering, might not have been willing to listen, but on the other hand, I might have leapt off to a much higher and faster start than I did. I'm not, not saying that I wish I would have done that because I think the way I went about and learned, it's, it was good and it help me keep, keep questioning. But. So, yeah, the past 10 years you. So let's say so in 2008, 2009, beyond working with a large medical products company, health and wellness lifestyle company, I'm going to call it that, a couple hundred plants around the world. And that was interesting work because they, I think in one of the consumer electronics division of that, they wanted to roll out a lean operating system. And they didn't really know what that meant, but they had seen things like it and that. So that request and that desire on their part fit well with some of the thinking I've been doing in terms of. It's sort of similar to another conversation we recently had, Ron, about what are the sort of the minimum elements or the. What makes up a. What you minimally need for lean to be sustainable. And so we developed something together, both a model of how to roll out lean across different sites in multiple phases. And what does that model of a lean operating system look like? And so that was a good experience. It was good to have a chance to structure a lot of that material, put things together. In hindsight, probably that was still more complex and more full of, full of tools than it needed to be. But at the same time, I think they needed something that was practical and going to deliver them $100 million in savings in a couple of years. So it really had to be focused around specific problems and specific lean methods and tools known to address those. If I was to do it again, I might start a little bit more abstract and then kind of help them see a couple years down the road. And then of course, there was economic crisis around that time. So that was another part of it. 2008 financial crisis hit and so a number of customers pulled back their budgets. A number of them did the opposite because they needed more help. We got through that period pretty, pretty well on the whole, partly because we were pretty diversified. We had, we didn't have any single huge clients. And this new client I'm talking about became one of our bigger clients. So that was an interesting learning experience, I think as an input to that lean operating system building exercise. Some of what I'd been learning over the, let's say the previous 10 years working with small and medium sized companies, or really just anybody, was that the level of frontline management in most companies that I'd seen that weren't Toyota, that weren't far along the lean journey, was really poor. Most of them didn't have enough supervisors and team leaders. Maybe they didn't have any team leaders at all, just supervisors managing 50 people. The ways of, and their job descriptions were kind of, I don't know, they just weren't there. You looked at what they were being asked to do and it was firefight, expedite, paperwork, you know, where is the training, where is the improvement? Where is the. There was none of that, there's none of that. So that became very clear very early on. And at first I thought it was just a small company issue that they didn't have the resources and didn't see the value of elevating somebody to being indirect cost. But then it was also very clear that whenever this was brought up as a, as a must do, you'd have people that were in the financial side of things saying, well, I can't afford to add an indirect cost here. Add a layer of supervisors or take one out of every ten shop floor workers and make them a team leader. Who's team leader? Water spider, facilitator, whatever is going to help out and keep the other 10 people 30% more productive. I just can't do that. You scratch your head and go, huh? So you can't take 10% of your direct labor to make all 10% of them 30% more productive. How does that pencil out? Show me the numbers. And they go, I have a top down edict from the chairman saying no more direct indirect costs. Oh, but you also have a cost reduction edict. So how does that square? It doesn't square, so it's dumb. Top down, command and control type goal setting versus saying here's what I need you to achieve. You figure out how to achieve it. So that was interesting because working with this particular company in Europe, I Was able to say, look, these are things I've seen. They're very open minded and willing to say, okay, yeah, we'll consider it and we'll do it wherever it makes sense. We'll do it as an experiment and then roll it out more widely. So validating that, really being able to work from the top down, but also in terms of top down, in terms of planning it and doing it, but bottom up in terms of working with frontline teams, setting up all the kind of daily management things and visual controls and value stream thinking, working away. Rather than trying to impose value stream management on middle managers, it was more letting them stand and watch while their frontline workers became teams. And then they needed supervisors who then needed area managers and managers and production line managers and coaches and began to grow those people out of that organization. So that was a fun experience. And then of course in 2009 we got together and formed Kaizen Gemba Academy as a way to put Kaizen thought online. And that's a whole separate discussion how that came about. It's not really, not really related to consulting, but certainly doing the consulting. I saw a big need for better way for people to access the knowledge and the online. The that that was just becoming a thing with the Internet.

I remember that early conversation. I said, hey John, you ever thought about making videos? And you said something like, yeah, I'd love to know. That sounds great. I have no idea how to make videos. I was like, man, I'd love to do it too. And I don't have any idea how to make videos.

But.

But at least there was an idea born, right? And you know, here we are 10 years later, so making a lot of videos. Yeah, that's great. That's great.

Yeah. Just to kind of wrap things up I guess the last. Last what? 10 years? I guess it is. I guess the first half of that I was with. So 2011-15, I was with Kaizen Institute. And that was less of a consulting role and more business development, organizational development.

Well, you're like CEO, weren't you John?

Yeah, I was. I was the guy in charge globally to try to get all the parts and pieces working together and cooperating. It was a very small corporate team and then the divisions, but I think they have about 50 different Kaiser Institutes around the world now which are all semi autonomous and have their own CEOs or bosses. So I wasn't a big boss so much as the global salesman and somebody who tried to set policy and mediate between disputing factions or whatever. You wanted to call it, but it was a good experience. It was a good learning experience. I think what I learned out of that more than anything is just the value of really, really listening to what the customers needed and how tough that was. If you have a product that you believe in. And you know, we had 50 different. Well, at the time we had about 30 different units worldwide that all believed in their product. And so it was kind of tough to bring one, one customer voice to that team and say, well, can you all get together on one sort of common way of doing things? That was tough because you have a lot of autonomy and independence over the years. And we got closer to that and I think they're doing much better with that now. But bringing together consultants anytime in any environment to do things the same way, it's tough because everybody's consultants are largely lone wolves. They have their own experience and often they come from many years in a. They're in their middle of their career or later in their career where they're pretty much set how they do things and how they think. So. But yeah, Kaizen Institute did some fabulous things in terms of figuring out ways to hire people out of university master's program or engineering master's program and rapidly turn them into really world class consultants, especially in Portugal and Spain. Those guys have done a fantastic job of the process of building and managing and growing a consultancy. The consulting work that they do is great. This is world class. But the process of how they've managed to grow and build their business is what I respect, I think more than, more than the lean work they do. So, and I had a small, small part in that, just helping them to kind of focus more on, on seeing that they could, they could be a worldwide power and they could do more in terms of marketing and so forth. But yeah, so that. And I think what I learned out of that experience as well is that I had to stop traveling as much as I had been over the last 20 years if I was going to get to know my family. And so that was a decision that was facilitated by the fact that Gemba Academy enables me to work from home and support clients and support content development and things like that. So that's been the last four and a half, five years, I guess, and there's a lot that I've learned in that time. But I think that was kind of. That'll probably, that'll probably be a separate conversation. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna stand by Academy.

Yeah. Pinning you and Kevin down and we're gonna tell a story man. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Well, thanks, John, for coming on. This is been. This has been good, you know, I, I've learned a lot and hopefully it's added some value for the listeners and. Well, hey, tell folks how they can best connect with you.

Well, there's LinkedIn if you want to connect on a business social media environment. And if you need to reach me personally, you can.

Yeah, it's J O, N. Yeah, right. For folks. John J. Yeah.

First name is spelled Joanne. Or if you look up, if you look up, or if you search for John Miller and Gemba, I think you'll be able to find me.

Yeah, Good stuff. Yeah. Gemba Academy website, obviously. All right, well, thanks again, John, and I'm sure we'll, we'll have you back on again in, in the future, but yeah, good chatting with you.

Sounds good. Nice talking to you, Ron. All right, thank you.

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