GA 368 | The Balance of Tools and Culture with Jonathan Jones

You know, it's great as an engineer to be able to come up with the ideas, but they're carrying it out. And if they have the right culture, it goes so much farther without the culture, you know, they don't embrace the change. You don't have the stakeholder buy in that you would. And it's much more difficult to change a culture than it is to create a culture.

Today. I'm excited to welcome Jonathan Jones to the show. Now, Jonathan has a really interesting background. He first entered into the kind of the culinary space and so he worked in hospitality for many years as a chef and then as a general manager and whatnot. And then he transitioned into the manufacturing world where he works today as a manufacturing engineer at a company called Moog. They kind of make aerospace parts and different things like that, really high tech parts. And so on the show today, we sort of talk about that some of the journey from the culinary side of things and what he learned there. And then for sure we dive into his Lean and Six Sigma journey there at Moog and all the things that he's been learning. He walks us through some, some actual examples of some ways that he's applied some, some tools, including like really fun 5Y situation that he, he came across there in the manufacturing plant when they were having a problem. So really a pretty fun episode, pretty diverse, and I think you're going to enjoy it. Show notes for this episode can be found over@gemba podcast.com just look for episode 368. Again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 368. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Jonathan, welcome to the show. How are you?

Thanks. It's great to be here. I'm doing fine. How are you today?

I'm doing good. Where are you calling in from today?

Today I'm calling in from East Aurora, New York. It's just outside of Buffalo near the Canadian border and near the Niagara Falls.

Nice, nice. Beautiful part of the country.

Yes. We're just starting to warm up and come into spring. So today it's about 43 degrees. Just the other day last weekend it was 80 degrees. So it varies from day to day. It's a very volatile spring.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, good stuff, Good stuff. Well, Jonathan, I know you listen to the show and as you know, we do like to kind of get things started with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one?

I actually have two. The first one is from Dr. Deming and one of his seven deadly diseases and it goes like this. The most important numbers are the unknown and the unknowable. And often you'll hear a lot of people misinterpret this and say that you can't manage what you can't measure. And in fact, I think he meant quite the opposite. I think he meant that managers still need to make decisions and manage situations where we don't know all of the data. And one of the examples from my career is that in a restaurant business and you go into dinner service and you can't possibly know what every guest is going to come in and order that evening. So you need to go off of numbers that you do know to kind of learn about the unknowable at the time. And another quote that I cherish is this is probably the most all time favorite of mine, but it is by a gentleman by the name of Christian von Koenigsegg. He makes Koenigsegg vehicles, which are very high end supercars. And his quote is that perfection is a moving target. And for me, this is continuous improvement. In a nutshell. Always chasing after perfection.

Yep, exactly. Beautiful. Well, Jonathan, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background and how you first got exposed to all this lean stuff that we dabble in, and then tell us what you're up to these days.

So I have so far two different careers under my belt. One in the restaurant business and food and beverage and hospitality, and now I'm in manufacturing. So when I was a young boy at home, I had a fascination with food. It seems like my family was always having great food and entertaining. My father loved to cook growing up. And I remember one time my parents were at work and I had been home with my sister and I thought I would surprise them with a dinner ready to eat when they got home. So I set up sort of a manufacturing cell of spaghetti din.

Okay.

And so it began there, this love affair with food and how is it made and what makes good food. And it transitions into busting suds at a high school job to make a little bit of extra money to have fun with. Busting suds is dishwashing. And from there I started to learn a little bit more from the cooks and the chefs. And it turned into me going to culinary school. I went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and I learned culinary arts management and came out of there with a degree. And I enjoyed many different roles, from an assistant chef's job to general manager of a very large restaurant and nightclub. And it was about the Time that I was a general manager where I thought to myself, gee, it's very difficult to start a family working 16 hour days, seven days a week. The atmosphere isn't really conducive to having a family. There's a very high divorce rate in the restaurant business. So I thought, I really like working with my hands. I like to see things that I'm working on, you know, come to life. I like the tangible evidence of your work. So a friend who knew of a machine shop just outside of Philadelphia who needed, they needed some help. And I had taken some metal shop classes in high school and I thought, yeah, you know, I'd like to give that a try. So that's how I started in the machining business and manufacturing. And from there it transitioned. You know, I thought I would learn as much as I could. I already gone to a college and gotten a degree. So the way that I thought I would learn the most, the fastest in this situation is just ask questions, buy books, learn as much as I can. The first job that I had was in a tool and dye shop. We made basically machines that would make your soda cans, your aluminum beer bottles. I did a lot of the R and D work for aluminum beer bottles, paint cans. So very high efficiency, high output metal stamping presses. And it demands a lot of high precision tungsten carbide and high strength tool steel grinding. So I found my way into the grind shop at this little shop outside of Philadelphia called EKL Machine and worked there and transitioned to another shop that did more industrial and aerospace and a little bit of medical work by the name of M and M centerless grinding just outside of Philadelphia. Again, ekl, my first job, said, hey, can you come back and work part time? So it turned into I'm working two jobs now while I'm starting a family. And I did that for three years. I learned a tremendous amount within the first year of my first job. I was traveling with a foreman, going to different factories and plants and doing troubleshooting. So it was very obvious that I could learn fast. I was given a lot of opportunity to learn as well. And one thing led to another and eventually Tecomet in Florida reached out and asked me to start a grinding department down there within all of Ticomet. They didn't have any cylindrical grinding machines at the time and they needed someone that had a lot of knowledge. And I knew this. So I went down there for an interview and went down to tech o met and we were down there for about three years and built their cylindrical and surface Grinding departments from the ground up. There was nothing, nothing there. When I got there, I was like a kid in a candy shop. Got to go in and buy a lot of equipment. But I was introduced to a lot of the Lean and Six Sigma methodologies in Tikkumat in Florida. That's where it all began. And now I'm here at moog, which is a very highly. It's a high mix, low volume manufacturer of very highly complex assemblies for actuation of aircraft controls. So we've installed actuation controls and everything from the roof on top of the Wimberley Stadium. We have actuation controls and some flight control simulators for training space shuttle. We've done a lot of work over the years. Very high precision. It demands a lot out of grinding. And I'm continuing on the Six Sigma and Lean even more so. The methodologies are in place even more so here. We've got a long way to go, but we're very much on our way.

So when did you first start getting exposed to Lean though? Was it at previous jobs before Moog or.

Well, yes, when I was at Tecomet, I had my first Kaizen Blitz event and I thought, man, this is great. I get to go and have catered breakfast and lunch for a whole entire week. This is awesome. I want to be on more of these events. And that's where I started to learn about what the whole Kaizen word means. I'm a big sushi fan, so I thought we were getting sushi for lunch or every day. So as it turns out, we started learning and I started to learn what a charter is, what the scope would be, what the project sponsors are and the champions. And I learned what 8020 Pareto principle stood for. So our project was to quickly improve our revenue and profit for the last quarter of one of our fiscal years. And in doing so, we needed focus on one of our product lines. And this generated the bulk of our profit for that location. And so we did a virtual manufacturing cell. In other words, we weren't moving equipment at the time. But this was a predis. This was, you know, first step in getting to that position where we would be creating the manufacturing cell in physical reality. So we, we employed a lot of playbooking smed. There was a lot of these little efforts that came out and spidered out. I saw my first spaghetti diagram and again, I'm a food guy. So immediately I thought, not food, I'm getting hungry. So we transitioned from that Kaizen event and it just a lot of other events kind of Sprung out of that as well.

Yeah, got it. So you've mentioned a bunch of tools so far and I know you're, you're constantly learning as you go. Are there any, I don't know, do you have any favorites or any that you maybe that you value the most that have, that have helped you the most?

Certainly. So in my roles as a manufacturing engineer, we use quite a bit of them, honestly. And dmaic, when I first was introduced to DMAIC and define measure, analyze, improve, control, these words just started to become like this revolving door in my head. And I started to approach every problem and opportunity that was presented with this in my mind. So it doesn't have to be a very involved big elaborate to make project, but even the smallest of problems and opportunities could be approached with the DMAIC kind of method. Another one is the, is root cause analysis. And this is where I spend a lot of time our day here in any manufacturing engineering position. You know, Ishikawa and the fishbone diagrams and five whys. And I think five whys to me was one that stood out as wow, the power behind a five why. Because I had always thought, hey, I'm getting to the root cause when there's more levels that you could get to really have sustainability in a corrective action.

So hey, talk a little bit about, about culture though, because obviously it's not always about, about tools, right? And we've got to have a, a strong culture and, and values and things like that, you know, as it relates to the work that we're doing with Lean and in Six Sigma. So how do you approach that?

So my, my approach with culture. So Lean, Lean and Six Sigma and, and Lean in Six Sigma are great at continuous improvement, problem solving, variation reduction. But these are not tools that are intended to fix cultural issues within an organization. However, culture can support Lean Six Sigma and in fact it's very important that it does so. And when you have the culture support Lean Six Sigma, then and only then can it be a, let's say a win win for both. They kind of grow together. And in my experience, core values and having those in place creates the purpose and a drive and an inspiration behind the purpose. And then Lean Six Sigma is one of those supporting tools to achieve our goals and in that purpose. And then the core values help to drive that overall behavior change and get people to start thinking in systems, start making decisions that are molded by data and keeping the core values closely together with all of that kind of welds, if you will, the goal and the purpose of that organization, I think it creates an identity for everyone to really associate with. It creates the passion and the inspiration. So it's very important. From my experience, I've been in companies that really have a strong desire to utilize a lot of the lean Six Sigma methodologies, but maybe lacking some of the cultural side of it. And it's a shame because from the Gamba area where culture is the most important and where your lean Six Sigma methodology are really carried out, you know, that's where the action is taking place and you know, can see this and feel it and you know, it's great as an engineer to be able to come up with the ideas, but they're carrying it out and if they have the right culture, it goes so much farther. Without the culture, they don't embrace the change. You don't have the stakeholder buy in that you would. And it's really hard to change a culture. It's much more difficult to change a culture than it is to create a culture. Yeah. You know, and just because a company's been around since the 50s like Moog, doesn't mean that, you know, you're, you're. The only way is to change culture. No, you can create culture. You can create a culture that turns into the culture that is yours as a company. And I think that's what we're doing very well here at Moog now actually. And this was kind of set on fire down in Tikkumat in Florida too, right before I had transitioned to this role. Core values kind of came after Six Sigma and lean methodologies down there, so. But yeah, got it. I firmly believe in core values. I'm a Christian, I grew up in a Christian household and we had core values growing up. And when I found mns centerless grinding and they are really heavily involved in core values and really turns some great people come out of that organization.

Fantastic. Awesome. Well, hey Jonathan, I know in kind of as we were preparing for this, you hinted at you might had a couple questions for me. So I'm curious, really curious what those are. I'm a little worried you going to stump me here or what?

So sometimes, well, more often than not every day we are doing continuous improvement, not even realizing it. And I guess my question for you is, can you give us some examples of how you continuously improve everyday tasks?

Yeah, yeah. It's funny. That's a great question. It's funny you ask it today because we, we actually just got done doing what we call a table read, you know, so making videos here. That's it's our core business. Right. And so over the years we've gone through a lot of different iterations of how we go about that. And we, we now have this process to where the person who kind of writes the, the story, if you will, of the video, they're on and I'm there typically, and the person who's going to be editing the video and shooting the video and maybe some, some kind of copywriting people. So we've got a few, several people who have different say. Well, they're stakeholders of the, of the final product, but in different ways. Right. And so we're all on there and, and believe it or not, you know, we keep, we talk about like having standard work for how we write scripts, you know, because we have certain rules and certain things that we're looking for when we're writing a script for a video and sounds crazy, but, you know, little things like no, no, no, don't say, don't write it is, write it's. Because when you talk, you know, typically you're going to say it's good, you know, you're not going to say it is good, you know. Right. So like just little things like that. So we're constantly fine tuning like all aspects of our business, including standard work for, you know, how long a script should be, how many bullet points you should have, maximum number of bullet points you should ever make at any one time, you know, because a learner can't remember all that. So those are examples where over the years, you know, used to be, back in the day, it would be me kind of writing the script for myself and, and I would just wing it and do the best I could. But now it's like, you know, it's a, it's a, I would argue a slower process now, but it's very methodical and you know, at the end we feel really comfortable with the, with the end product. So like, you know, that's just one example that came up today where we're constantly fine and tuning. We added some things to our, our script standard work today. And so, yeah, it was really, really fun to do that. So, yeah, I mean, I could give you probably a million examples like that. I mean, we're big individual management and you know, we use fancy, you know, software to track all of our customers and their information and all that kind of stuff. But we still have big, huge boards in our, in our office here where we have different things on there, where all the same information is inside of a computer somewhere. But it's just not Visible, you know, so we like it visible to where we can just see it and touch it. So, you know, things like visual management are real, real important to us here at Gemba Academy. So I don't know. Those are a couple.

Okay. Yeah. The, I guess the reason for the question is I'm often reminded in college, one of our French speaking chef professors would say, he would say two things all the time. And one was the shortest distance between A and B is the fastest distance. And he will come around. And if you're cutting vegetables up on a, on a cutting board, he would bring the container that you're putting your cut vegetables in that you're done with much closer to your cutting board. And he would just walk around and just nudge you like he's giving you the elbow, but he's just nudging your container closer to where you are. And he would repeat this and he would get us trained into thinking that. And the other saying he would say is mise en place.

Yeah.

Exactly. So 5s in the restaurant business and Smed. You know, I think one of the greatest demonstrations in the restaurant business is the changeover daily from like, let's say lunch to dinner.

Yeah.

So, you know, oftentimes in the restaurant you may not, you may not stop serving lunch and go straight into dinner. And then in hotels that's very common.

Yeah.

So you would, you know, your changeover would literally be bring everything you need in one trip to the line and all of your ingredients, all of your mise en place. When you go into a walk in refrigerator and you're getting your mise en place, it's one trip with one cart and you grab what you need at that time for your task.

Yeah.

So it, after. Yeah. I was in the restaurant business for 15 years prior to the manufacturing career change. And I had started learning all of these, you know, the lean six Sigma methodologies. And I thought, hey, we were doing that and we didn't even know it.

Restaurant for sure.

If you look at, look at Julia Childs and shadow boards, if you ever Google, Julia Childs is a very famous chef in history and if you Google images on her, you can see she's got pegboards and shadow boards with all of her cooking tools in her kitchen, it's great. And you know, so that's, that's often the case in restaurants. We don't have a lot of space to work with, so we have to be efficient.

Yeah.

You know, and it's, I thought it was a great example of sipoc where, you know, all of manufacturing is really baking a cake. We. When you think about it, your suppliers supply you ingredients. You apply a process, an input or a recipe to these ingredients. You output a product to a customer. And in the restaurant business, that customer is waiting for their product in 15 minutes, and they're sitting in the dining room right next to you. So your instant feedback is great, but the challenge is there. Whereas in the manufacturing side, we've got, you know, I've got lead time, and I can come up with a strategy to create the product for the customer. Yep.

So, exactly.

Yeah, There's. There's a lot of. There's a lot of times I love food and I love manufacturing, and a lot of times I will blend examples, and a lot of people, you know, they get a good laugh out of it here. Makes some people hungry. But one common thing about people is that most people like to talk about food. Yeah. And when I relate, you know, these principles to food, it's like, aha, I get it.

Yeah.

So.

So do you miss the hospitality world?

You know, I always say that things happen for a reason, and God is certainly, certainly played his hand, has played a role in my life for sure. So I had thought about getting back into the restaurant industry. I actually was interviewing for an executive chef's position in the Keys down in Florida. And thankfully, the opportunity just wasn't right at the time. And so I stuck with the position that I had. This was years ago, but thankfully, you know, I did because they got hit by the hurricane quite bad recently down there in Irma. And, you know, there was a lot of people that just lost their jobs, and they've never been able to, you know, recuperate from that.

Yeah.

So sometimes I miss it. And honestly, I don't enjoy cooking at home as much anymore. I like to. I'd much rather eat out. I like to be the critic.

Yeah. No pressure there. Right, Right.

No pressure. And it's just. It's fun. I like to see new concepts. I like to. I got writer's block over the years. I believe in my creativity, so to speak, in the restaurant industry. And so that's when I switched from being a chef to a general manager and, you know, and apply my management skills. But sometimes there are days where I do miss, you know, the food is. Obviously, it's much better. There's more of it.

Yeah.

And, you know, the nice thing about. One of the nice things about being in the restaurant business is as a chef, if I were to say, oh, man, I'm hungry for, you know, Clam chowder. Today I just go and make clam chowder, eat clam chowder or I want a steak or I want a tuna. It's, it's not, you know, what you have at home in the refrigerator. I've got a whole restaurant at my disposal.

Exactly. All right. Well, hey, Jonathan, man, it's been fun chatting with you, man. Any final words that you want to leave with the folks listening?

Maybe another Deming quote. You know, I, this one I hold pretty dear to my heart. I've, I've been on both sides of this quote and I know how it feels. So the greatest waste is failure to use the abilities of people to learn about their frustrations and about the contributions that they are eager to make. You know, in both the restaurant business and in manufacturing, you know, the gemba, going out to the folks that are responsible for making the action happen and communicating with them and being, developing that relationship so that, that communication is free flowing. I've seen great things. I've been a part of great things, but I've also been in situations where there's borders and there's a lot of tension and it takes a lot of effort to kind of build, to break that tension down. And you know, the ultimate goal is to build those relationships, build that open flow of communication. Don't overlook the many, many links in the chain that make your system because sometimes that great idea will exist in this little link that is often overlooked. Yeah. You know, I hope that I add value and I hope that I can help others add value. And that's period. That's, that's it. You know, that's, that's what I thrive for. That's what I live for.

Awesome.

You know, I hope I got to add value today.

Yeah.

You know, and speaking with you, I hope, you know, something helps, something I've said maybe helps somebody else. And that's, that's my wish.

Nice. I love it. Hey, if folks want to connect with you, Jonathan, what's the best way on LinkedIn?

I don't very much do any other social media other than LinkedIn. So long as it doesn't turn into a Facebook. I will stay on LinkedIn. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of Facebook stuff that is on LinkedIn nowadays that belongs on Facebook.

Well, it's an easy fix to it though. You just block it or unfollow, you know.

Sure, yeah, absolutely. I tend to just go over it and ignore it. And I enjoy LinkedIn. It's a great avenue for seeing what else is out there. For benchmarking for getting good ideas. Yeah.

So Jonathan Jones on LinkedIn then.

Yes, Jonathan Jones. If you probably. If you search LinkedIn, Jonathan Jones. Moog.

Okay. M O O G. Yeah.

Yes. M O O G. Not Moog.

Yeah, Moog. Yeah.

Often mispronounced.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Jonathan. It's been fun. And we'll put everything in the show. Notes for folks. So this is episode 368, so just go to gemba podcast.com look for episode 368 and we'll get you linked over there to Jonathan on LinkedIn. All right, well, thanks again, Jonathan. Take care, my man.

Thank you so much, Ron, for having me. It was a real pleasure. And maybe one day we can do this again.

Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, take care. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years, or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 Lean and Six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy. Com.