GA 353 | Creating the Jeep with Paul Bruno

And I think creating that kind of environment for innovation today, get a small team, free them up from bureaucracy, give them a really difficult time frame, and give them an impossible goal and let them have at it. I think you can see some really amazing things that really led each of the teams to be able to create an innovative vehicle. Hey, everyone.

So this is the first episode of 2021. So happy new Year. Wishing you all the very best for 20. Thank you for listening to the podcast. And, you know, we typically, as you know, always have folks on that are kind of in the lean movement and kind of traditional lean practitioners or gurus of some sort. And we're actually going to kick 2021 off with a little bit of a twist because the gentleman that I'm having on today named Paul Bruno wouldn't call himself a lean expert or lean guru. He does have a quality management background and, you know, quality engineer background. So he's completely foreign to what we're doing. But his expertise or really the topic that we're going to talk about is the Jeep vehicle. Now you're probably scrunching your eyes like, Jeep vehicle. Like, what the heck, man? What are we doing here this 2021 or what? What's going on? And well, come to find out, Paul has done an incredible job researching the history of the Jeep vehicle back in the early 1940s, when a couple companies were battling it out to build the first jee for the military during the war. And come to find out there are incredible parallels to what we're trying to do with Lean and, you know, let's say scientific thinking and learning and PDCA Rapid, PDCA Cycles. So they had like weeks to be able to build what we now call the Jeep. And so Paul just walks us through the story of how these three companies battled it out to see who was going to basically win the win the big contract for the government to build what are now called Jeeps. And I wasn't sure what to expect when we first signed up to do this podcast with Paul, but I gotta tell you, it was really fun. And I really got into the story because I didn't know really any of it. So I was just asking questions like a person trying to understand what's going on. So really, really interesting stuff. Now we're going to link to quite a few different things that Paul talks about. And so those are going to be over in the show notes page. So go to gembapodcast.com this is episode 353 again, gembapodcast.com look for episode 353 for all the links. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Paul, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Oh, thanks for having me. And I'm doing well today and looking forward to our discussion.

All right, so we're actually recording this just so everybody knows, in late November, but believe this is going to be released in the new year. So happy New Year, Paul. So we're a little bit ahead on the podcast, but yeah, last what I did was I interviewed a young lady and it was going to be the Christmas Eve episode and I didn't realize it was the Christmas Eve episode. So her and I don't even talk about, you know, Chris, because obviously it's November, so why are we talking about Christmas, you know, but. But yeah, so. So thanks for, for coming on to the show. Appreciate you carving out some time.

No problem. Well, I decided. Hang on a second, Ron. I'm going to jump into the DeLorean and fast forward a month and see how the podcast went.

Right.

I got Marty. Marty in the doc are right there. So we're good. But I look forward to kicking off the new year 2021. And you know, 2020, you know, it's been a wonderful year hearing our wonderful interview to start off 2021, you know, it's got to be a positive.

That's it. That's it.

All right.

All right. Well, hey, Paul, I know you've listened to the show. We do like to get all of our episodes rolling with a quote. So do you have one that you want to share?

Yeah. They asked for a quote on leadership. And what I've tried to, especially in the second half of my life, lead by what? It's in the Bible. Jesus said when the disciples were arguing about who was the greatest and he kind of flipped it all on its head and said, you know how the Gentiles lorded over everyone. Not so with you. For us, the first shall be last and servant of all. As the son of man came to serve and not be served. And I realized for me that being a servant was a much better way to go. I wasn't really good at the whole lord it over people and the more egocentric leadership style. And as I've tried to develop that, far from perfect, I can tell you. But keep that in mind. Each day. I really realized, shockingly, Ron, there's not a lot of people jockeying for position in the servants line. So I found a lot of, a lot more space over there and a lot less of having to fight for things and all that kind of stuff that can go on. So that has really made a difference in my life in terms of just finding joy and serving others and putting others first and realizing that that is the true way of leadership. And there's a whole, as I'm sure you're aware, paradigm out there, for lack of better term, of servant leadership. There's a servant leadership cab in me. A guy named Robert Greenleaf, who I'm sure you heard of, started that in the 70s with a more modern twist on servant leadership. So that's kind of where I'm at as my life went on. And that's my favorite quote to try to keep that in mind.

Very good, Very good. Thanks for that. All right. Well, Paul, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background, just kind of how you got involved in all the, you know, just business and quality. I know you're, you were in the quality movement and are in the quality movement, certified quality manager, all that kind of good stuff. Tell us a little bit about that and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Well, my background, I went to school for Bachelors of management back in the 80s. And for your listeners, if you want to know when you're getting older, when you start referring to things in decades, then you're getting older. So back in the 80s, Ronald Reagan was present. And then I received an MBA after I had my bachelor's done in marketing. And with all that, I decided to go into the computer technology field. And while working in that in the 90s, I was working in an organization that was trying to adopt quality management for, you know, for their organization. And so I got involved with that and I did go through the American Society of Quality, Certified Quality Manager and Certified Software Quality Engineer. So I can speak to the subject to my business background and my quality background. Then, you know, I worked in the technology field for about 25 years. I ended up in my last 15 years as a project manager. And then after I basically left full time work about eight, nine years ago through a series of events, I really kind of have been more working on my history side of things. I'm a big history buff, always have been. I wonder if I had taken a different career path and become a PhD in history. And that's what's led me to your podcast is I really became interested in early jeep history about 20 years ago through a whole series of events which we won't detail here. And I've been studying that for 20 years and I've written two books. And we're going to talk a little bit about how the first three jeeps, how that was. There was a lot of quality management going on there, even though they probably didn't know it at the time. So that's kind of the brief summary of my journey on the. On my career side.

So. So how did you get interested in jeeps? Just as a starter Question, General question.

Yeah, really I became interested in early jeep history. And how that happened was I was in one of my other incarnations. I was beginning to write screenplays back in the late 90s and I was watching a TV show on a history channel because the excitement never stops in my life. It's unbelievable. Lucky I could find time for you today, Ron. And it was the big rigs of combat jeep. And before the commercial, they said the first jeep was created by a bankrupt car company in Butler, Pennsylvania in the impossible time frame of 49 days. And I said, that sounds like a really good screenplay. And sure enough, as I dug into the story, wrote screenplay, tried to get it produced, was never able to have that happen. But the story is so remarkable of what they accomplished to build the first one. And then in the current book, I extended it to what the individuals who built the second and third ones did. And it's really amazing. So it started with that screenplay. And we always kind of pitched a screenplay as Rocky versus Tucker, the ultimate underdog trying to create the ultimate vehicle. And I did receive last comment on that. Some. Some solace that our concept was good because the Ford vs Ferrari movie which came out in 2019 with Matt Damon, was very similar to what we were trying to get made. So I. It kind of gave me a piece that while we weren't able to get our movie made about the jeep and how the first jeep was built, it wasn't necessarily a bad concept. So. And we'll talk more about how that all came about and quality management here in a moment, I'm sure.

All right, well, let's jump in. So we were kind of talking before the interview about some different topics. And so one of them is I want you to talk a little bit about this process, this iterate process that the army used to create the specific requirements for the jeep procurement.

Yeah, that's a great question. So the bad news for the army is in May of 1940, they needed to replace the mule and the horse as the key way of transporting troops and small payloads. And they had nothing on the drawing board while Hitler was overrunning the low countries in France. So through A series of events. The procurement got started and they come up into about June, June of 1940, and they need to create the specific requirements from the general outline they had. And what they did is at Camp Holabird, Maryland, which was the main Army's depot for procuring vehicles, they brought together a cross functional team, to use a modern terms of quartermaster people. But they also included people from a car manufacturer, American Bantam, and representatives that knew vehicles from the infantry and the cavalry. And they went through, and first they created some drawings, then they created a wood mock up, getting feedback every single time from the drawings and the wood mock up. Then finally they built a working model and put a very underpowered engine in it and tried to drive it up a hill and it didn't make it up the hill. And they thought the whole procurement was going to be gone then and we wouldn't have what we call a jeep today. But someone was there and said, oh, don't worry, that engine's underpowered and we're going to have a more powerful engine. So the iterative process was really three phases and getting feedback from the infantry and the cavalry to make sure that they were meeting the requirements of those using arms as they developed the specifications that the manufacturers would build to. So it's really. We detail that really well. In the book, I found some people who actually described the process and it fascinated me how meticulous that was for 1940.

Yeah. And I know you're not a traditional lean world or anything like that, but I know you're somewhat familiar with what we're talking about, but what you're just describing is very, you know, very lean oriented. Obviously. You know, we talk a lot about something called scientific thinking, where we take small steps and learn. And there's also a lean tool out there called 3P, where we're, where we're building mock ups. Typically, we'll do it out of like, like you were describing, using some wooden mockups. We would, we. Sometimes we're building a factory or whatever, we'll use cardboard boxes to, you know, simulate machines. And that way you can move them around real easy. But it's a beautiful example of, of, of what we would call PDCA plan, do check, act and, and kind of, you know, making small changes in learning. Small, more small changes in learning. I'm curious, how long did that process take, that iterative process? Was it like, was it weeks, months, Years? What kind of time frame were we talking about there?

Oh, about three weeks. Wow. You know, operation warp speed, which became a term for 2020, they were working at warp speed, which I didn't know that because Star Trek in 1940 they were on a mission to get this vehicle built because with the pressure that they saw with the Germans and over in Europe, they knew they were way behind. So yeah, they did it in weeks. It's amazing.

Yeah, there was so much going on in those, around that time frame. Another really powerful thing that came out of the, out of the war was in lean. We talk a lot about TWI training within industries and that's where Rosie Riveter, you know, came from. And there's just so much that happened in that timeframe that's influenced the manufacturing world and production and all the rest of it even to present day. It's really mind boggling how influential that time period was.

Well, you really went from the Industrial revolution at a certain scale, say in 1930 and then the war came and they had to have things on such a large scale. And the Liberty ships come to mind that they were just, you know, making up new ways to manufacture and build things at huge quantities in a rapid time frame. And so yeah, the war really accelerated that process. And coming out, you look at 1945 and all the manufacturing changes and to be able to build, you know, large amounts of material in short time frames, it was, you know, maybe an overused word but really was revolutionary.

Yeah, yeah. So you mentioned American Bantam. There talk a little bit about that first jeep and what kind of quality were we talking about? Was it good, bad?

It was amazing. All right, so they give American Bantam, they go, the army decides, you know, we, you need to build this first vehicle which is revolutionary. And by the way, American Bantam was bankrupt and didn't have any staff. And you need to build this in 49 days, which at the time by every single expert was considered impossible. Okay, this is the other reason for the screenplay. It's like this shouldn't have happened. So American Bantam assembled a very high, a small team of exceptionally talented individuals who hand built the first jeep and the incredible time frame of 49 days, actually 49 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes. They delivered it with a half an hour to spare on the 49th day. And these individuals had grown up, they were highly experienced people in the automotive world, were in the 20s and the 30s and even earlier with the automotive world starting in 1900. It was a very hands on type of work that you did. Okay, so these people could build anything. And what they did, they reversed engineer it. They were so good, they Built the parts and then did the drawing for the parts. Because they had to have this thing done in 49 days. And they built it so well. And now you're building this vehicle which is going to be tested by the army, whose singular goal is to break the vehicle and ruin it. Okay. It's not like, well, you're going to put it out there maybe to run it through a couple little things and see how it goes. Okay. No, they're going to try to destroy it. And they built it so well that the bantam vehicle passed all the army testing. It didn't. They finally broke it four weeks in if they just put it through everything. So this thing was such high quality to meet those testing. And we detail that testing in the book built one shot, 49 days, hand built. And you had to have. You had only one shot to do it to get it right. And they got it right and built something that was extraordinary. And in terms of the quality to be able to survive and pass the army testing with. With just incredible. The people in the army were just amazed at how well it was built and how well it met, which going back to quality, what it was supposed to do, just. Just incredible. Even talking about today, I still go like, this shouldn't have happened. It's really amazing.

Ron, what's the Go devil engine?

The gold devil engine? Now that was Willis. Okay. And what Willis had to do, they were the second group to build what they called a pilot model for the jeep. And it's. The photograph is on the book cover. Now what happened with Willis was the weight requirement was a huge issue with building the first jeeps, which we won't detail here. So what Willys decided to do because they also were having a few little problems in this slight economic dislocation called the great Depression. It's this thing that's happened. And so they didn't have a lot of money, so they went and they had to build their vehicle at their own expense, which is a whole nother side story. So they had to go devil engine. It was more powerful than the engines that the army was looking for. It was 60 horsepower, but it weighed a lot. So what happened was Willis decided to go with the gold devil engine. It gave them more power because Banham and ford were using 40 horsepower engines. But they struggled meeting the weight requirement. And Willis great quality achievement was they were able to use the Go devil engine and have all that extra power in their jeeps, which eventually were the ones built for the war while meeting the weight requirement. So it's another journey in the book that we detail looking at from a manufacturing and quality standpoint that they were able to use that exceptional engine and put it in their jeeps. And we actually have detail in the book of how they actually improved the Go Devil engine. Directly quoted from the person that did the work and showing how they went and took the engine and made it better so it would work for the jeeps, which, you know, I geek out on that kind of stuff.

So Willis and American Bantam work, I guess competitors. Is that a fair statement?

That is more than a fair statement. They were extreme competitors. And then they added Ford to the mix, the quartermaster. So you had three competing through 1940 to build pilot models into 1941 to eventually get the sole source contract for 16,000 in the summer of 41, which eventually went to Willis. So yes, Banham and Willis were competing, you know, right from the beginning to try to get the contract for what the army initially called the quarter ton truck, 4x4 light. It wasn't known as a jeep till later on.

So. But obviously American Bantam had a head start. I guess they were the first one for the first prototypes. And Willis was shortly there behind, was trying to understand the timeline.

Yeah, what happened was the army didn't have a clue on how to build the small vehicle, but they knew about Bantam. So in June, before they did the specific requirements which we talked about, they went and visited Bantam and talked to them. So Banham did get a head start. Willis had known that the army might be looking for a small vehicle. But what happened is the army went out to try and get the. The let the contract to build the first 70 in July of 1940. Bantam had a head start. That initial contract for 70 was awarded to Banham. And what happened was Willis and the quartermaster and really was initiated by the quartermaster Corps, which is the branch in the military. In the army, excuse me, that procures things that Willis would build their own vehicle on their own own money. And if they did it, the army would do them a really big favor and take a look at it. So Bantam got the contract for the first one, had a head start, built it in 49 days. But Willis said, we're not getting out of this. We're going to compete. And they spent $35,000 of their own money to build the Willis quad, which in today's money that's like $650,000. And they stayed in the running. And the rest, as they say, is history. So that's kind of the timeline There. And again, that's detailed in the book. What was going on with Bantam, what was going on Willis and how they overlapped some and, you know, and built their pilot models. The Willis pilot model. Let me step back. The Bantam pilot model was delivered on September 23, 1940, and Willis delivered their pilot model on November 13, 1940. So some weeks later.

Not that far away, though.

Yeah. No, no, they were. They were. They were working almost simultaneously to build their pilot models.

What about Ford? What was Ford up to then? I'm surpr. They.

Yeah, right. Another. Another part of the story. Well, Ford, In July of 1940, when they bid the first 70, that banner one they didn't even bid, they said, it's impossible to build this in 49 days, so we're not even gonna try. So the quartermaster corps kind of. And I worked in government, so I kind of understand this. You kind of like to have a big player in the mix.

Yeah.

Because these other players, Willis and. For Willis and Bantam, excuse me, were small, struggling somewhat. So In October of 1940, the quartermaster called up Ford, said, why don't you come down there to Camp Holabird? We'll have a little chat. And basically, they asked Ford to build a pilot model starting October 1940. And because they were able to use a lot of. Use my project management method, terminology lessons learned from Willis and Banham. Ford built their pilot model and delivered it on November 23, 1940. So they built it in October. So it took them about seven weeks, maybe the same time it took Bantam. But they had a lot. The army shared a lot of what they had already learned about these vehicles with Ford. That kind of gave them a chance to not have to deal with a lot of the issues that Bantam and Willis had to.

But then Willis ultimately won the big prize in the end.

Yes. And what's really amazing about that, you know, going to quality management and seeing the perspective in 1940, the army says, you know, we'll go out and get 70 of these, see how that works out. And as I read through the documentation a year later, In July of 1941, they go, you know what? We're gonna need at least 16,000 of these things. Because they saw how much the war had expanded. Hitler had invaded Russia, the Soviet Union by then, and Japan was on the march. And you just see in the documentation over the course of the year, the army getting a sense of how big this was going to be. And it was something of the magnitude, even with World War I and our participation there was really France. They really didn't have a sense of the magnitude and it had grown on them. So they went out, they had three really good vehicles which are detailed in the book. Bannon, Willis and Ford had them compete, did a lot of testing in the spring of 41, let out a contract for bid for 16,000 and Willis was eventually awarded that contract and they became, you know, the Willis mb which was eventually the final version that was created for the war. That's how Willis was able to do that.

When did they start calling it a Jeep?

They started calling it a Jeep in the late fall, early winter of 1940 into 41. We have a little bit about how that Jeep name came about at the end of the book, the original Jeeps book. And basically no one really knows exactly how the name got put on to the quarter tons because originally they were calling them the Bantam, the Willis, the Ford. But from we able to find out between the wars, the people at these depots would call a lot of vehicles Jeeps for some reason, just generic name. And somehow that name got attached to the quarter ton vehicles, the Bantam, Willis and Fords and it just stuck. And eventually it was just those small quarter ton vehicles were the only things they called Jeeps.

Got it.

So that's kind of our best guess on how that came about.

Yeah. So if you fast forward to present day, there's Jeeps rolling around on the Leslie, who works for Gamba Academy, drives around in his little red Jeep. So. So talk about where it's at now. How does that, what we call Jeep today, go back to the 40s?

That's a really good question. And what I tell people is, and you read this book which details the manufacturing of these early Jeeps, the quality that went into them, the DNA that came from the specifications and that basically especially with the Jeep Wrangler. But every Jeep ever built, in my opinion, the DNA of that vehicle was laid down in these first three and it really hasn't changed. The original three were built really, really well and they did what they were supposed to do really, really well. And I think you can still say that about jeeps today. So 80 years later, that's the key to me, I see a Jeep on a road and I go, you know, I know the three jeeps that this thing really evolved from, that's still living in what you're driving today. And those individuals who built these things, who, you know, a lot of them were in their 30s and 40s at the time, their legacy lives on in those, you know, from the Bantam, Willis and Ford pilot models and the. All the Jeeps ever built and the Jeeps of today.

So if you were like, I feel bad for American Bantam in a way. I don't know, just hearing their story, you know, it's like, golly, you know, there they were, the first ones, the trailblazers, if you will. And then. So was it, you know, would you. If you're in American Bantam shoes, is it a sad story, this. This whole Jeep saga or. Or a happy story? What do you think?

It's kind of in between, to be honest with you, because we detailed chapter 11 up through the spring of 1941. Some of the melodrama that was going around, the procurement between Banham, Willis and Ford and the quartermaster and Bantam basically got frozen out for, you know, in my opinion, there was political stuff going on that happens. Okay. And other reasons, not necessarily because their vehicles were not really, really good. So it's a happy story in the sense they have a legacy to tell. And Butler, Pennsylvania, has done a much better job the last 10 years trying to tell their legacy. But it's a sad story that, yes, out of the three that competed, Willis ended up building 330,000 jeeps and is really known as the home of the Jeep in Toledo. And Ford is known for building the Jeeps during the war. But after the war, they didn't really want anything to do with it. So Willis kept the Jeep legacy alive, and Bantam kind of faded into history. And so my first book, Project Management History, the first Jeep, really tried to bring that story back to life. And those, in my opinion, heroes that built the first one, to kind of, you know, honor their legacy. And the second book really honors the legacy of all the individuals who built the first three, Bantam, Willis, and Ford. But so it's sad in the sense that Banham's been forgotten by the vast majority of people, and everybody just thinks Willis built the first Jeep, or Willis is Jeep, and they really are. The way I delineate it is, in my opinion, Bantam and Butler were the birthplace of the Jeep, but Toledo and Willis is the home of the Jeep, because that's. You can be born somewhere but be raised somewhere else.

Yeah, really.

They were born in Butler, but it was raised in Toledo. And I think both cities have a lot to be, for lack of a better term, proud of in their contribution and legacy in Jeep history. Yeah.

What is there? So we got a bunch of lean people, operational excellence, people listening to this. What do you think? We take away from this story, 2021, what can we learn from the whole history of the Jeep?

Another good question. I wrote an article that was published in the Las Vegas Business Press and also@project management.com Lessons and innovation from the creation of the first Jeeps. And what I think is really applicable today is this was a revolutionary vehicle. So they had to be innovative. And how they set it up by creating a small, exceptionally talented team with a difficult time frame, with an impossible visionary goal, really freed from bureaucracy, that really led each of the teams to be able to create an innovative vehicle and I think creating that kind of environment for an event. Innovation today, get a small team, free them up from bureaucracy, give them a really difficult time frame and give them an impossible goal and let them have at it. Yeah, I think you can see some really amazing things. And one place where that's really documented well was an Apollo 13. They had to create those air filters.

Yep.

It really is the same exact type of situation for the people building the first Jeep. You have, the war's raging, you have, this has to be done. If we don't get this done, we're gonna be doing horses and mules against machine guns and tanks. And that probably wouldn't have ended well. So that's really the lesson to me for today, at least one of the lessons is put that paradigm together in an organization, small or large, and see what happens. Real quick, Ron, where I also think that happened is when IBM created the first personal computer. They were all mainframe back in the late 70s and early 80s. And they took this small team in Boca Raton and said, you know, here, see what you could do with this. Because, you know, we really don't want to do this because we're all mainframes. And that's how they created the IBM PC. And you know, in a very short time frame by giving these people just said, here you go, here's the problem, and so on and so forth.

Yeah, well, from, again, from a lean perspective, you know, Toyota, right, was really born, if you will, for real born or reborn, you know, after the war, right? Because, you know, here they were competing against the giant like Ford and all the rest of it, and they were having to make, you know, little trucks and some cars and some whatever, you know, a bunch of different products in the same area. And they had no resources, no money. And so this is where the so called Toyota production system was born. Because they had to be agile, they had to be flexible, they had to be, you know, what we would call lean today. They didn't call it that back then, but yeah. So, golly. And then this TWI thing which I talked about earlier, that's how the Allies, if you will, won the war. Right. Because we were able to build the war machine faster than the enemy. So these folks that created this TWI program in America, when the boys came back home, the American soldiers came back home, they were like, ah, we don't need all that stuff. And the ladies went back to the house and the guys went back into the factories and TWI sort of died. Died or died out. But then it. Guess where it went? Japan. You know, it went back. And so that's where it's. So it's just crazy. Like that time period again, how influential it's been. You know, here you told about the Jeep story, which, honestly, I didn't know all that which was coming, you know, really the early side. And then this whole lean movement Toyota production system came after. So, boy, sure was an influential time period. You know, those, those 10, 15 years. And then in the 40s.

Yeah, well said. Can't really add anything to that other than. Yeah. When people's backs are against the wall and they can't rely on what they've always done, that's when they'll change and usually surprise themselves on the amazing things that they will accomplish.

Well, I know. Hate to look back, but look back at 2020, you know, and, and, you know, there was a lot of people with their backs up against the wall a lot of, but there was a lot of things that, that came out of it.

Right.

There was a lot of, I mean, there was incredibly heartbreaking stories. We can't, you know, dismiss those. But, but there were also some, some, some really, really amazing things that happened. So I think to your point, when we're up against it, you know, that's when, that's when the, when humanity can really rise at its, at its best, you know, is when, when, when things are really tough.

That's. That's true. And what people listen to your podcast and heading into 2021, depending where the pandemic goes, from my perspective, hist. This is a transformational event we've been through this year, and it's just starting because we're just trying to get through the pandemic right now, but there's been a lot of, you know, to go to change management, which would be part of what you guys do. Unfreezing, change, refreezing. We've been going through the unfreezing process in 2020 on a lot of, lot of things. And we haven't gone through the change process yet. So we've got an interesting journey coming up in the 2000s of what's going to be, for lack of a better term, the fallout. But the changes are just started. It's not what existed before the pandemic. And really, you know, starting around 215, that's kind of gone. And I'm not sure people have realized that yet. It's like, well, we're just going to get back to normal. No, And I hate the term new normal, but we're transitioning into the future and what the 21st century is going to be just like. If you go back to the 20th century, World War I, the 20s, the 30s, they were transitioning from what the 19th century had been. It took a long time. And by the time you got to 1945, the world looked a lot different than it did in 1914.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Hey, so tell us about the what's the name of the books on the Jeeps? Because I think it might be interesting for folks in our industry to check them out. Right.

I'll give my shameless blatant plugs, Ron. So here we go. The books are the original Jeep is the one that's out right now. It's a history book and it details the creation of the first three pilot models. The first book, which I came out 2014, which some of your listeners might be interested in, is Project Management and History, the First Jeep. And that looks at the creation of the first Jeep from a project management perspective. So there's a lot of if someone has an interest in that niche, it's a good book for that. You can find both books@Amazon.com and that's the best place to find them. Now for your listeners, for the original Jeeps, we're only putting this on podcasts we go to they can order an autographed copy for the same price as you can get it on Amazon + shipping@dispatcher magazine.com dispatchermagazine1word.com books so if anybody's interested in an autograph copy of the original Jeeps, go to that website. We have a website on early Jeep history, originaljeeps.com which talks about the books, lots of documentation about the early Jeeps. And lastly, we do have a Facebook page and we've been sharing stories of my aunt and uncle's service out in World War II out on that page. And so we're asking people if they have any stories from family or friends from World War II that they'd like to share on our Facebook page the original Jeeps is the name of the page. They can go there and do that. So hopefully people will pick up a copy at Amazon or an autographed copy@dispatchermagazine.com books and find them worthy of their time.

Yeah. And we'll link to everything in the show notes in case folks can't remember all that. So just go to, go to GembaPodcast.com this is episode 353. So we'll link everything that Paul just described in case you didn't get it all written down or you can't remember what he said. So GembaPodcast.com just remember 353 and we'll get everything linked up on the Show Notes page there. So. Hey Paul, thanks for coming on, man. You know, when we first started exchanging some emails, I wasn't sure what to expect. You know, we typically have a traditional, traditional kind of lean, you know, guru or whatever a practitioner on and, but this was really fun. This was really value added and I think there's, there's tons of lessons for, for those in our Lean movement to learn from, from the stories that you shared. So I appreciate you coming on.

Oh, it's glad to be here. And that's, that's really the great thing about the early Jeep history. It is really a lot of fun.

Yeah.

And it's just amazing to talk about. So I really appreciate that opportunity to come on your show and do that.

Awesome. All right, well, thanks again, Paul. We will, let's stay in touch and you know, need to get any more cool Jeep stories, holler at me.

Okay, we will do that.

All right, take care.

You too.

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