GA 398 | Lean Storytelling Part Two with Adam Lawrence

We don't always have to bring a Kaizen team together in a room to struggle through things, something that we've been dealing with for years. You know, just be willing to ask those questions and realize that you have the power to make the change if you're doing it for the right reasons.

Today I'm excited to welcome Adam Lawrence back to the show. Now, Adam was most recently on the podcast in episode 393. And in that episode we covered three different sort of lean slanted stories, true stories from Adam's professional experience. So if you haven't listened to that, that'd be a fun one to go listen to after this one. Those stories don't build onto these stories, so it's okay to listen to this episode first. So today Adam tells three more. He had six that he was going to cover in 393 and we only had time for three of them. So he did the other three here today. And yeah, they're really. Adam is just, as I've mentioned before, is really just a master storyteller as it relates to Lean and, and the thing I really appreciate about Adam is he genuinely believes in this stuff, you know, and he really believes in helping people and you can hear that authenticity come through. So that's why I love having him on so, so often. So this episode is 398, so just go to gemba podcast.com look for episode 398 and we'll have all the links and, and you can connect with Adam, check out his book and as he mentioned at the end, if you have read Adam's book, the Wheel of Sustainability, go to Amazon and leave a five star review. It really helps these folks that put a lot of effort into writing a book. Apparently the algorithms there on Amazon really, really lean heavily on review. So yeah, if you have read that book, go out and give him a review. I know he appreciate it. Same thing with this podcast. Whatever app you're listening on, you can probably scroll down. There'll be a little deal there to hit a hit a review. So if this podcast has helped you, we'd sure appreciate a five star review. All right, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Adam, welcome to the show. How's it going, Ron?

It's going great. Thanks for having me on again, yet again.

I love it, I love it, I love it. So last time you were on, let's see what was at episode 393.

We.

Were rolling with some stories and I think I told you on that episode, you're one of my favorite lean storytellers. And so that's really what I wanted you to do. And I know you had six back then, and I think we had time to get through three of them. So maybe this is lean storytelling, part two, something like that. I don't know.

Yes, yes, yes.

But you know the drill, Adam. You've been on a number of times here, and before we get rolling, we do like to have our guests here. A quote. So do you have one?

Well, I do. And because this is part two of storytelling time, I thought I would try to find something that might get us thinking in a little different way. So this comes right out of David and Tom Gardner's Motley Fools, Rule breakers and Rule Makers, which is a really cool investing book. Once successful, companies that ultimately became unsuccessful believed in and focused on constantly improving rather than adapting. Companies like this are doing all the right things, but it may be the beginning of the end. So for us continuous improvement people, that might seem a little counter to our approach, but they make some amazingly interesting examples about typewriters and floppy disks. And, boy, it kind of lends itself to the iPhone, the 13th version, but it's still. Is the exact same phone just a little better, A little better, A little better. Somebody one day will eat their lunch.

Yeah, man, that's. I mean, as a business owner here at Gamba Academy, we're constantly thinking, like, I wonder, like, in, I don't know, 10 years, 20 years, however many years, will people still be watching 2D videos on screens? You know, like, I genuinely wonder about that, right? Because I remember growing up, going to Blockbuster Friday night. That was the thing, man. We'd go in, you get your couple, two or three, you know, movies, and you'd. Maybe if your mom was feeling happy, she'd let you buy some candy there, you know, and that was it, man. That was how we rolled. And now, you know, what, is there, like, one Blockbuster left in the world as a thing?

So I think it's a museum. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's a fantastic, fantastic quote, and one that all business owners, just of any company, really, or any service, like, will there be Lean Consultants? Right. You know, I mean, who knows? So that's really good. Really good.

Yeah.

All right.

And I hadn't read that. I hadn't read that book in a long time. So I do recommend it. It's amazing. In 1998, some of the things they predicted were spot on, and some other things are like, yeah, those companies don't even exist anymore.

Hey, are you a big, like, investing kind of guy or whatever. Do you like to study it and stuff?

Probably late 90s to early 2000s, I spent a lot of reading time and I followed these guys for a while and they, they led me into really interesting spaces and then sometimes there were some big oopsies. So. Yeah, there's. I've read. Read some of. Yeah, some of them. Not too much lately.

Yeah, I'm a big index fund guy. I followed this, you know, they call them bogleheads, you know, the. What's a guy? Bogle from Vanguard, right?

Yeah, you know, perhaps, maybe.

Yeah, I think. Yeah, he's his name. And they call themselves bogleheads. But they're all these like three fund portfolio guys. So they buy index fund for the total stock market and then index fund for like some bonds and maybe some international. And that's it. That's all they got, man. You know, and so that's how I roll, man, over these last five. Five. So. And you can still be diversified and. Oh, I like more stocks and bonds. Anyhow, this is not an investing episode, but I was just curious since you mentioned that book. I really, it fascinates me, really, you know, because there's so much, there's so much psychology to investing, you know, Like.

Absolutely.

As far as panicking, when it's bad and it's all. When market crashes, it's like, great, stocks are on sale, let's go. But so do people panic and get out and then they never in. Right. So.

Well, these guys are definitely buy and hold folks, but they were involved early in things like aol, Starbucks, Google, yeah, Amazon, things like that, Apple. So they, they pick some good ones.

Get one or two of those right, and you're in pretty good shape, you know.

Pretty good shape.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Awesome. All right, well, hey, so people, if you haven't listened to episode 393, maybe go listen to that after this one. But I don't think. Those aren't prerequisite stories, I don't believe. But, but there were some really fun ones that you, that you talked about there. I think one of them you almost got fired or something like that, you know.

Yeah, I think most of them I almost get fired, but this one was really close. Right on the. Right on the edge. Right on the edge.

No, good stuff. Good stuff. All right, well, let's. What, what do you got for today, Adam?

Okay, so I have three stories today if we get to all of them. And I'm going to save the one about beer for second. So that'll entice you for. But I think the first one I'd like to talk about is about a team that had a lot more power and empowerment and control of their destiny than they thought they did. And it has to do with improving a process that drew things to Amazon. So if you'll allow me to get to that one, I'll be happy to do so.

Yeah, let's go. Let's do it.

All right. So setting things up, when I get together with a client or a potential client, the first thing I do is I walk in. But with them, I want to see the problem that they have, you know, prior to setting up any type of event or project. So I walked with the distribution manager for this global consumer brands company. And their problem was that normally they ship things in huge quantities to companies like Walmart or other big box stores. And so if I have a pallet of, let's say 150 boxes of laundry detergent, I put one label on that whole pallet, ship it out and everything's good, I'll fill a truck. Because Walmart orders a lot of things. But early, maybe five, 10 years before Amazon started to want them to ship things to them, you know, one item at a time. So as I walked Gemba, I noticed that they had to label every single box. So if there were 150 boxes on a pallet, every single box would have to have a label for Amazon because any box could go anywhere in the country or the world. So of course they had set up their system for this very low volume but high diversity request. But of course, as we know, Amazon has grown and exploded and you can buy anything from them, including any box of laundry detergent or kitty litter or any consumer type brand that you can think of. Well, unfortunately for this company, they had not kept up with that demand. So all the systems that they had built early on had not been changed for the exploding demand. So they were getting behind. And the issue was that if you get, if you're late delivering to Amazon, you get fined. And they were getting fined on the order of over a million dollars annually. So the goal for the Kaizen event was to cut the time to Amazon from eight days to four. So we put a team together and we did what any good Kaizen team would do. We mapped the current state. So we took a walk through Gemba and we saw all these interesting things that had great opportunity for reducing time. So when we went back into the meeting room and we mapped everything out, we found things that took 8 hours and 4 hours and 16 hours and then we found a couple of things that were a day or more. The first thing we found was that orders for Amazon could come in any time of the day or night, seven days a week. But there was one single person at their corporate center that took orders between 9am and 6pm so after she went home, if an order came in, the system would just wait. But they were shipping 24 hours a day, so that seemed to be a pretty substantial opportunity, especially if an order came in after 6pm on Friday, wait the whole weekend. So after a series of questions were asked, and eventually the question was, well, what do you do for Walmart? Oh, well, that's automated. They say, well, is there anything we could do? Says the facilitator, says, I. And one of the team members said, oh, done. I just fixed it in the system. It was just a toggle from automated to manual. Oh, well, that's pretty good. All right, fantastic. So that was one done. That was an easy. Just do it five minutes or less. And probably saved, I don't know, anywhere from 16 to 72 hours in the process. So that's kind of fun. So another issue came up, and I can't recall the exact problem that was occurring, but it was worth anywhere between eight and 12 hours. And it just seemed to the team to not make a lot of sense, like, why are we doing it this way? So one thing I'm really good at during these sessions is getting them the question, do we have to do it this way? It doesn't really make sense. Is there a way to simplify? So as it turns out, one of our team members, she says, I know who I need to call for approval. We need approval for this. So she leaves the meeting room and she makes the call.

You mean approval to, like, change something? Like make an improvement?

Change. Okay. To make the change, yes. Okay. Yeah, because it was a corporate. It was like a corporate policy. Got it. So she goes, she calls back to corporate, she comes back in the room with kind of a scowl on her face, and she says, well, the gentleman I needed to talk to, he's out sick today, so we need to wait until at least tomorrow. And of course, as a Kaizen facilitator, we know waiting till tomorrow is not a good option. Right. But this was most of their first opportunity. So of course I asked questions and I said, well, can you go to his house? Can you call him at home? Well, no, I can't call him at home. Can you go to his house? Oh, that's over two hours away. Well, I Say, we can't wait for an answer. What do you think my next question might be? So there was a little stunned silence until somebody said, maybe his manager. So the team member says, I'm on it. So she goes out of the room, makes the call, comes back, oh, the manager wasn't there. But I did reach his manager, the VP of. I think it was, I don't know, VP of something, I can't remember, but supply chain, maybe it was that. And he said that Ava can approve this. Turns out Ava was in our team. And of course Ava says approved. So that was the end of that. So by the end of the session, the team got so energized, they solved so many different things and actually included improving their LTL shipments. They found out they had a much better vendor option that nobody had ever realized they actually implemented that solved that problem that wasn't even in our scope. By the end of the session, they had put in systems to drop everything below the four day Amazon requirement. As of this moment that I know of, they haven't been fined since. So they save just over a million dollars annually.

Wow. So what's your key takeaway though, from that one?

Well, the key takeaway is, first of all, talk to each other, people. Yeah. You know, when something doesn't see or feel right, it's okay to ask the question, why do we do it that way? We don't always have to bring a Kaizen team together in a room to struggle through things, something that we've been dealing with for years. You know, just be willing to ask those questions and realize that you have the power to make the change if you're doing it for the right reasons. Yeah.

Well, I feel to me, the other key point in that story was, you know, as simple as it sounds, you got to map out how is this thing working? You know, because how many times have we done that? And people stand back and they're like, holy smokes. Is that really how it works? You know, because typically you're very familiar with one aspect of what's being mapped.

Right.

But you're not so familiar with what's happening right before or perhaps even right after. But you put it up all, get some post it notes up on a wall or whatever it is, and like is magic sometimes. And it's such a simple concept that I just wish more people would do.

Me too. Yeah. See the waste. You're right, Ron. Absolutely. It's amazing how powerful those post its are and how simple the technique can be just by engaging people together to look at it as a whole system rather than just the small portion that they work in.

Yep. I mean, even here at Gemba Academy, small company and all the rest of it, you know, and have our sales organization, you know, they really are trying to practice. Practice, you know, process improvement and in the way that they're even working. And, you know, two different salespeople were sort of comparing how they go about their work. And there's some. A lot of similarities, but there was a lot of differences, and that's okay. In some cases, it's okay to have a slightly different style, you know, of going about your job, but they're really working hard to standardize their process. So then at, you know, at any moment in time, you sort of know, hey, I'm here in the process. Can you help me out? And they can. Someone else could jump in and go from there because they're familiar. Right. With that process instead of. I don't. Doing it your own way, so to speak.

Right. So. Yeah. Right. People have their head down trying to see in their own thing, and they don't see what. Whether the customers think. What are the suppliers think? Is there a better way?

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

All right. So that's our fourth story that we've done now so far in the series of episodes. What do we got for number five?

Well, I promised beer.

Okay, let's see.

Just visualize. So this is from very early in my career. My first physical company move was from Thomasville, North Carolina, to Franklin Park, Illinois. And I was going from supporting a support engineer for a furniture company, Thomasville Furniture, to a team manager, line supervisor for a metal ceiling grid manufacturer. Okay.

So definitely a big change.

Change of venue, a change of perspective, all these wonderful things.

And you were going from where to where?

Thomasville, North Carolina. So Greensboro, High Point. That area, what they used to call the Piedmont Triad. I'm not sure if it's still called that. And moving to Franklin Park, Illinois, So very near. The. Very near o', Hare, actually. So we have. We had a very small ceiling grid plant. So ceiling grid is the stuff that holds up ceiling tiles in most offices. Very pretty. Yeah, I'm sure you do, because we made a lot of it, even though we were the smaller of the two plants in our network. Okay. And so my first assignment as a supervisor, so the first thing I noticed was, boy, there was. It was dirty. And we were sure making a lot of scrap. We made tons of metal scrap, and we could not reuse it. So we were sending out car. So scrap, in our view, was these bars. They looked like grid, but they really weren't because it didn't turn out very well. And we would have these scrap carts and at the end of the day or the week, we would dump them into these 20 or 30 yard containers and ship them out for pennies on the dollar. And that really bothered me. So, you know, I was young and I. I was trying to change the world in my small little, how young? Way, like twenties, mid twenties. Okay, early twenties, mid twenties.

You're only like 30 right now, right? Aren't she something like.

Aren'T you kind? Aren't you kind? Yeah, that's been a while in the rear view mirror. But anyway, just scrap going out the door. So I started off trying to understand the problem in the process. And I was out on the floor a lot and certainly nobody knew me. And I had a mentor. He was the prior supervisor, but they had moved him into a technical support role and he had been supervisor for 28 years. So he kind of, you know, I had taken his place. And I would complain every once in a while to him. I said, bob, you know, I'm trying to do the right thing and we're not getting anywhere. I'd have these crew meetings, and they said they wanted to be better, but we never got any better. He says, well, listen, Adam, don't worry about that. The next guy will do better. And of course, that was not very motivating, but that was his way of poking fun at me in a. In a nice, mean way, Passive aggressive, perhaps. We don't know. So, you know, I was describing the problem to my crew in these meetings about our scrap percentage and how we needed to try to cut down. And did have anybody. Did anybody have any ideas? And the best I could come up with is, we'll try and make less scrap or we'll do better. And I just knew that I was doomed at that point. Okay, so one weekend I am grocery shopping with my wife in Elgin, Illinois. That's where we live, about an hour from the plant. And I noticed something that I never noticed where I grew up. In this grocery store, not only was there food, but there was alcohol, there was beer, there was liquor. This was a thing you could do in Illinois. I did not know this was a thing you could do. Now, most places do that. But the other thing I noticed was this beer was priced very similarly to the value of the grid. And I had this. I had this light bulb go off and I said, wait a minute, I am speaking in the wrong language to my crew. So I tell my wife my grand plan and she looked at me like I tend to get looked at most of the time, like what you smoke in there, right? But I said, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try something different because what I've been trying is not working. So I come in and start my crew meeting off, talking about my trip to the grocery store. And what I learned was that grid comes in 3 lengths, 2 foot cross tees, 4 foot cross tees, and 12 foot main runners. So I won't get into all the details of why that is, but what I can tell you is that and what I told the crew was a two foot cross tee is worth a bottle of beer and a four foot cross tee, I found out is worth two bottles. And if you lose a main runner, a 12 footer, that's a six pack. Well, all of a sudden I'm getting laughter, I'm getting engagement. They're talking about it, but they're talking about it in beer. And I'm like, this is something. So after we left the meeting room, as we're running, I'm out on the floor and I'm looking at how much beer we are scrapping and all this after a while, it took a little while, maybe days, weeks, I'm not sure what. People started to talk to me in terms of beer. And then one day we had these skilled setup men. At the time, we finally got a woman that was a setup person, but for a while it was just men. And one of my setup men came up to me one day and said, hey, I just saved us a keg of beer. Because my setup was right on the first try. And we high fived and all of a sudden everybody was talking in beer and scrap levels started to drop precipitously. And by the end of, I'm going to say about six months now, this was about 30 years ago, so the memory fades a little bit. But you can find the story in the book. And I left a few details out, but I believe we cut our scrap rate down by about 75% just because we were relating to people in a way that made sense and actually mattered to them. So in Chicago, what's critical is to understand your beer.

Why do you think it. I mean, it's a great story and nice to chuckle about, but I think there's something pretty significant going on here. Like, like dig deeper a little bit. Like, why do you think it's more than, oh, they like to drink beer, you know what I mean? It's like there Was some. There was, like, some meaning that was associated. And you just happened to use that example of beer. But it could have been pizza. Chicago loves their pizza, too. You know what I mean? Like, why do you think it mattered? And what can we all learn from that, you know? And what. What lesson can we take from that?

So here's what I learned from it. One thing is most people don't think in percentages, right? So If I have 7% scrap and I want to turn it down to 4%, people don't really relate to that. Well, what does that really mean? But people like to think, like business owners, people like to think in terms that feel realistic and meaningful. So until I could come up with something that felt meaningful and real to them, yeah, I'm just throwing away bars of metal. Who really cares? What's the big deal, right? So percentages love them. They're a way to compare. But most people don't really relate to that. So how do I. How do I do it in terms that are meaningful to them? And I've used that approach in many times, you know, following in my career.

I love it. I just sparked a memory from my own kind of early career. I worked at Motorola, and then I worked at Nokia cell phone companies, you know, And I remember there was a supply chain executive, and I was working in a supply chain organization at one point there, and they had this big meeting, and he was talking about his sister had just started her own business, and it was a furniture store business. He was so proud of his sister for starting this business and this and that and how he was. You could tell he probably had entrepreneurial spirit and his blood a little bit. And he was just talking about how she was, you know, everything that she does is for her business, right? Like, for the survival and, you know, success of her business. And so his challenge to us, like, to sort of the motto for that year or that quarter or whatever it was, you know, for this meeting was, you know, it's your furniture store. You know, like, he wanted us to run our part of the business as if it was our business, right? And I remember it really did resonate, like, wow, that's a different perspective because you think about, oh, this big giant company, they got all this money. Who cares? You know? But when you start thinking, well, it's a furniture store and it's my furniture store, puts a completely different spin on it. So I think there's a lot of psychology going on there.

Absolutely. And when people personalize, you get a lot more, you know, a much Better reaction and typically better performance. Yep.

Love it. All right, well, what do you got? Number six.

All right, so this one is recent, so I can't. I can't say that I don't remember it. This is this year, okay? So I can't make that excuse anymore. So this has to do with my first true TWI Kaizen event. Okay. Okay, so what? I'm proud of the fact that when a client or a potential client asked me to help them solve a critical problem, I don't just apply any tool to anything, the same tool to anything. Basically, their interest was getting all teams to operate in the same way. And they, as a company had agreed that they were going to try to implement training within industry in the appropriate way. Could I help them? I said, well, absolutely. Have experience with it, but not facilitating a Kaizen event for it. Let me do some research and make sure that I can support you in a proper way. So I found a book they were using and I read it probably, I don't know, half a dozen to a dozen times. So those of us that have read Lean books over and over again, you know that after a while it can just make your head blur. But my prior experience with TWI was extremely limited, and I don't truly believe I ever saw it in its true appropriate approach and value. But I knew that if I was going to support these folks, I'm going to make sure we do it the right way. No shortcuts, use the approach, train them well so they could do it. Okay, so that's the setup for all of this. So I said, of course, eventually the answer was yes. What was the question? Can I help? So we got a team together of 12 folks on one very critical line in this factory in New Jersey. And some of them were right off the floor, hourly folks. And then we had a supervisor or two, and we had some staff, and we had the operations manager. And my goal for the team was to teach them training within industry in such a way that not only would they learn the approach, but they could actually start building job instructions and standard work to the proper way, and they could start training their crews so that eventually they would get the entire organization for that line at least built up in capability and skill. Okay. So I was hopeful. I didn't really know. But I will tell you that what happened was we had our first Kaizen event. It was a full week, and we did the training and. And during the Kaizen event, we actually practiced.

So are you talking, like when you say twi, were you doing More job instruction, job methods, job relations, or were you. Were you more focused on the skill of instructing people how to do a job or what? What was your focus?

Okay, so the ultimate goal was to create 12 TWI trainers that had the skills to not only build job instructions, but also to train others in those job instructions. So they weren't going to create new TWI trainers, but they were going to be confident enough that they could train anybody in any level of the organization, any shift, and also follow the method as stated so that they could be consistent across any trainer and any person. Okay, but to get good at that, there's a good technical term to get good at that, you have to be able to write TWI job instructions. Right? You have to understand, you know, all of it. Now, time is always a limiting factor. So we can't do everything right, so we do enough to practice and get comfortable. And then we had agreed that we would do some work following the kaizen so that they could get some practice. So the first kaizen, you know, happens, we built some. Some nice job instructions. We. Everybody got practice. You could tell that certain folks were more comfortable than others. And a couple weeks go by and I'm home doing something on the weekend, and I get a text from one of the hourly employees that was part of the kaizen, and she is bragging on her training experiences with some of her coworkers. So out of the blue, she's communicating with me and telling me how excited and extremely feeling really confident because this is helping. Everybody that she's trained has said it was helpful. And what I saw was somebody that was, you know, we've talked about people getting emotionally moved by these activities like this is. Can be, you know, work changing or life changing. So of course, knowing this, I wanted to keep encouraging it. So I, I wrote her back, I said, that was great. You know, tell me more about it. You know, we had a couple of nice conversations. I wrote to the overall manager to say, hey, you need to know, you have a budding superstar here. And she really was. You could tell she really had some training skills, even though she never got that opportunity before that I'm aware of. So a month or two went by and they really weren't rolling out the training on the same schedule that they had agreed to. We had created some nice visualization and we had across every shift in every location, building the work and who was going to be the trainer and who are the key people to train first. So other things were happening. They weren't. They were still Weren't quite at budget, so they were getting a lot of pressure. So I got reengaged to come up a few times and do you know, it had been a while. So we wanted to refresh the training and get them more experience out there in the work in the workspace training. So I did that a few times. And the same person always made sure that she was with the group that was getting the refresher. She wanted to keep practicing and keep practicing and keep practicing, which was wonderful. So one week I came up on the evening shift and that was her natural shift. She didn't even know I was there. And the line was not doing very well. And as we were fighting some issue, I was helping them fight some reliability issue also while supporting this training as well. The plant manager comes out and she wants to know what we're up to. And I'm explaining it. And while I'm talking to the plant manager, this trainer, she comes up to the plant manager and says, hey, would you like to learn how to set up this complicated piece of equipment? And because I'd worked on the leadership team for their commitment to all this, the only answer she could give was yes. The only answer which. And you could tell that she had other more important things on her mind, but she knew the right thing to do is to say yes. So my trainer and the plant manager and I stepped away because, you know, I wanted them to feel that safe and comfortable one to one opportunity. So she took plant manager through the entire TWI process to set up this complicated piece of equipment. And then she did something really special with the plant manager. She said, before we did this, what level of confidence on a scale of 1 to 10 did you have that you could set up this piece of equipment? The plant manager looked her straight in the eye and says, oh, minus 11. I've never touched this equipment. Our mechanics are only the ones to do this. So the trainer says to her, now how do you feel? She says, easily a nine. I could set this up. That was fantastic. I've never been trained so well in my entire life. And you could just see the trainer just glowing. You could just see, you know, just the joy in her face. And of course I was feeling it. I was like 15ft away. Yeah. And you knew that the plan manager was telling only the true, her true feedback because she was under a lot of stress, I can tell you. Yeah. So that was really neat. And what that did was that just the momentum for all that just started rolling once they got that level of confidence and they're just knowing how vital and critical the work was. She ended up being promoted, by the way.

Wow.

Not long ago.

Wow, that's great. It's almost like you get to this point sometimes where you know you've won and you want to see how much you're going to win by now, you know, so it's almost like you're just playing with. It's like your favorite sports teams kill another team and you can just kick back and relax or, you know, you recorded the game and you heard that they won and now we're just going to go watch the game and see how much, you know, see how it played out sometimes that's how it feels when you're, you know, you're in that. That groove. Right. You're in that state of flow or whatever you want to call it and you just let things happen. Yeah.

That's.

That's wonderful. Ah, that's great. That's great. Well, Adam, it's been fun talking three more stories. I'm sure you got a million more. We'll have you back on down the road. Get a. Still chasing Karen, you know, as far as number of episodes. But so, but now it's. What final words of wisdom or advice or encouragement do you want to leave with, folks?

Well, I think that for me what matters most are these memories and these stories. Right. Tools are, you know, I don't want to minimize it, but anybody can do tools. Yeah, but the stories I can relate to the people, how they were able to get the benefit. You know, I can picture them. I can picture the joy in their faces. I can picture the frustration during the challenges. And what I'm hopeful is for them that they remember it in a way that tells them that nothing's impossible. Right. You just put your mind to it and you get some help and you can solve almost anything. I mean, can. We landed on the moon, didn't we? Yeah. If we can do that, we can figure out how to get the line running safer and simpler and better and reduce scrap and convert it to beer. And you know, there's just so many things that people can do. You just gotta want to and just ask for help. It's okay. And support your teams.

Yeah. What's. There's one famous quote. I can't remember how it goes, but that something about people really remember the way you make them feel.

Right.

And in. That's, you know, this is a human based system that we're dealing with.

Right.

And we're dealing with people. And in the end that's that's what they're going to remember is how. How you. How you made them feel and the emotions that are involved and good and bad.

Right?

Y' all all hear the story of the emotional Kaizen event report out where the grizzled veteran of 30 some years, you know, it's like, man, no one's ever listened to me like this team did, you know, and those are powerful and they are life changing. I feel like, you know, company changing for sure when you see that happen. So. Great. Awesome.

I would say just add. Add the point of look for those moments, because if you miss it, you don't get them back that easy. So be on the lookout so that you can grab onto it, remember it, and share it with anybody who will listen to you.

Yep, yep. Very good. Very good. Awesome. Well, Adam, thanks again for coming on. It's always fun. I want to give another plug for your book. Tell everybody a little bit about why they should be reading your book.

Why should they be reading my book? Because there's more stories in it. But, you know, I'm focusing on sustainability. I realize the topic doesn't really get as much coverage as it should, so my attempt through the wheel of sustainability is to give you an image of what that looks like and how to do it. And for the few that have read it. Thank you. And if you have read it and you like it, please leave a review for it on Amazon so others will be aware that it exists. Because I realize people don't love to leave reviews, myself included. But I've learned to do it now. It's really not that hard.

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, it does help. I mean, even like with this podcast, apparently these. These algorithms, Amazon and Apple podcasts and all the rest of it, it's all about what other people are thinking, this social proof thing. So, yeah, if you have read Adam's book, go in and give it. Give it five stars, and that'll sure help him out. And yeah, same thing with this podcast. Scroll down whatever you're using and hit five stars. We appreciate it.

Absolutely. That's right. Four is not bad either, by the way. That's.

Just go five. I mean, you're gonna do it, so why not just put five, right?

I mean, okay, go for five.

It's almost like the people, the two people who leave reviews, they either love you or they hate you. So it's gonna be like one or five, you know, one or the other.

That's probably true.

Yeah. All right, well, thanks again. And we're gonna link to your social media and your book and everything in the in the show notes. So this is GembaPodcast.com go to episode 398 and yeah, we'll have all the good stuff there. All right, Adam, thanks again.

Thank you, Ron. I really appreciate it.

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