GA 475 | Helping Humans Be Heroes with Christopher Hodges

Before I go into what I need to cover today about what's going on in finance and the company, I want to tell you that automation is, he says this all in Danish, by the way. Automation is very exciting and it's going to change the way we all work. In fact, 50% of you will not work here in two years.

Today I'm excited to welcome Chris Hodges to the show. Now Chris has a really diverse background. He's an old school, lean Six Sigma guy back at GE and lots of, of lots of experience in some consulting roles. And now his passion is helping leaders succeed with what he calls intelligent automation. And so that's what we talk about really for the, for the majority of the, of the podcast is, is the role that the so called intelligent automation. And then it definitely morphs into some conversation on AI, you know, which is all the rage these days. And I just had a really good chat about how things like automation and, and Intellig and even artificial intelligence, how it can benefit the world, but then how it will in fact change the world for those who maybe say resist it or don't try to be the best that they can be. And so some really good stuff. I think you're going to enjoy this one. Now, show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com, look for episode 475. Also go to gemba events.com which is, we're doing in person training now here in our Keller, Texas facility. And, and it's always changing these, these podcasts are evergreen, so I don't want to throw out any dates or anything like that. But if you go to gemba events.com, you'll see what we've got in store here for in person training. We'd love to see you, you come in, do some training here yet you get to see where we make our videos and, and heck, we may even throw you in front of a camera and let you make a little test video. And you also get to see where we do the podcasts and all kinds of fun stuff.

So yeah.

Gemba events.com okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Chris, welcome to the show.

How are you, Ron? I am doing really well, thank you very much.

All right, where are you calling in from?

Denver, Colorado.

All right, got, so we're recording this in late March. So how's, how's the weather out? You can never tell out there.

Yeah, exactly. Depending on what time of day it is. I always say once you move to Denver, you tell everybody that the weather here is terrible, so that not everybody shows up and crowds the freeways. Yeah, it's 300 days of sun a year, but it could be 30 in the morning and 70 in the afternoon.

Right.

It's cold.

Yeah, yeah. No, I've got some good friends that, that move there as well and. Yeah, similar in Texas in a way. Sometimes we get like, you know, AC in the, in the. During the day and heat at night, you know, so.

Right.

But yeah. Awesome. All right, well, hey, man, I'm excited to have you on the, the podcast and I know you know the drill, so we, we like going out of the gate with our Gas Cerner quote. So what do you have?

So my quote, if, if the Internet breaks and nothing else is said, I would say that history has shown to lead with noblesse oblige, and in this case, with automation. To lead with noblesse oblige is the secret to long lasting, successful enterprises, countries and dynasties. And as my book is called, Noble Automation now, that's what it's inspired on. So I think we can all build long lasting dynasties, organizations and countries.

Great. Love it. All right, well, hey, Chris, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background, how you got into your line of work, and then what is that line of work and what are you up to these days?

Oh, thanks for asking, Ron. First, I meant to say when this call started, the first thing I should say because we are talking on the Gemba Academy, is to say arigato gozaimasu desu and coedes means I am honored to be here. And I mean that because the Gemba Academy and everything you stand for is, as I said to you right before the call, I'm a member of the tribe and the tribe of continuous process improvement, of excellence in producing products. So back to the history. So that's what you asked. Do this in a compressed way. I was in active duty in the U.S. navy. I went to the Naval Academy for undergraduate training. And then my first real assignment outside a short time in Hawaii was in Japan. So I got to Japan, southern Japan, a very young man got exposed to all these concepts. And ironically, within two years, I was teaching total Quality management. If you remember those days.

Oh, yeah.

Total Quality management, which was the Department of Defense, tried to adopt the concepts of Deming and all of the other quality concepts at the time that were the total quality world. And I had no idea what those were prior to studying them. And I was just fascinated. And because I was living in the country where Deming, you know, had Learned a lot of those ideas and where Toyota was from. I felt like I was immersed in this. And it was ironic that I'm teaching, you know, employees in Japan about total. What a joke. But the truth is, not everyone in Japan follows all of those ideas. But because, as you know, if you're. If you want to learn something, be forced to teach it on Monday morning. So that's exactly what happened. And I just became absolutely enamored. And then I would see these examples within Japan, whether it was the quality of the products or the way the service was delivered in restaurants or the gas stations, or all the different things that happen in Japan. And then you realize the ethos behind that is all about okyak sama, kamisama desu, which means the customer is God. Right? Okyak san is customer and kamisama is God. So you learn, well, what is that? That's what quality is all about. It's all about delivering a super high quality product and service, minimizing the waste, doing it as quickly as you can, and going home and feeling great about the job that you did.

Yeah.

And I mean that, that is to some people, not others. Some people don't get excited about that. I was incredibly excited by that. And that took my career for the next 30 years, was to jump into the same tribe run. It's funny, you and I have crossed the same paths. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. So I spent about 10 years in the US Navy, went to business school when I was leaving the Navy and joined GE at exactly the right time, right back in the days of Jack Welch and Six Sigma. And. And he was completely behind the Junior Military Officer program, which was to hire young guys like me into ge. And I became a black belt and then a master black belt. And then we added Lean to Six Sigma, which is such an obvious thing, right. To put those two concepts together. It wasn't obvious at the time. And some of my most glorious happy moments were leading or working on Six Sigma projects and then Lean Six Sigma projects. I eventually became a quality leader at a division of ge and then I left GE because I wanted to be doing what I love, which is process improvement, the stuff that you and I and most of your listeners are excited by, but doing it in a place that was still really, really well thought of. And when Jack retired, GE lost its push and its emphasis on that, which was really sad to watch a whole bunch of people who loved it. So I went into consulting, did process improvement consulting at Accenture for 10 years and then Deloitte for a short period of time and I spent before moving to Denver. This is the genesis of this book. I showed up in Copenhagen, Denmark and by the way, spent a bunch of time in Nokia where you. Congratulations for what you achieved at Nokia. That's pretty impressive. Maybe everyone knows your bio on that, but that's no small feat to be awarded something of that stature at Nokia. So I spent four years doing automation, intelligent automation. The technology has finally arrived where all those processes administratively and mechanically, but specifically administratively, because the mechanical stuff has been steadily moving forward since the Toyota days. How to make better cars, but administratively we just didn't have the automation tools. And so remember those days when you're trying to do office projects and figure out how to minimize risk and waste and all that. But finally, with the invention of intelligent automation tools and technology, you can do unbelievable things in an office. Robotic process automation alone is a tool that is incredible. Visual image recognition, voice recognition, all that stuff together, which I would call intelligent automation, that package of technologies is so powerful that you just want to say, you know, like the sky parted and the sun was there and down from the heavens came this stuff. But then you realized, guess what, we're still screwing this up with people. We're still implementing this stuff and we're, we're doing it badly or insensitively or we're walking into. In my book. And yes, this is an opportunity to bring up my book. So in my book, Noble Automation Now, I cite an example where Chief Financial officer walks into an office and he's got his entire finance team assembled. This is in Copenhagen, Denmark. So he's got his whole team assembled. There's more than 100 people in the room, and he's got a stack of print out of the slides in case something goes wrong. And he says, before I go into what I need to cover today about what's going on in finance in the company, I want to tell you that automation is. He says this all in Danish, by the way. Automation is very exciting and it's going to change the way we all work. In fact, 50% of you will not work here in two years. Okay, now onto my presentation. I'm not kidding. He actually did that and it made it into the press, you know, into the Danish newspapers. And my point of that is that's just one, one example of how these incredible tools were, are and were being badly implemented. And so the point of Noble Automation now, the whole point of what I'm doing now is to show the successful and I didn't create all these. Right. But I was in a lot of them and saw them. But what are the successful things you can do to implement these fantastic automation techniques both in the factory and in the office, in a way that engages and empowers employees as opposed to scare the hell out of them?

Yeah.

Which is what happens. Right. And by the way, you didn't ask, but people go, oh, is this some kind of socialist thing? Is this like Kumbay? No. There will be people who do not remain in companies after all these things get implemented and there are other people who will have better jobs than they had before. And there are ways to handle that where you send people off on their next hero's journey may not be in your company, but there's a way to do that in a way that is good for all people involved and that is what great leaders have done for thousands of years.

So give me an example of what you would call noble automation. Like, like a very practical example.

Okay. So specific example. It's funny, I'm going to use a company, you know. Well, right. Which, like I was going to say Ericsson, but I'll use Nokia. Although I, I, I'm, I'm a little hesitant to say, because this is a Nokia example. Okay. So we, we were doing a, and for those of your listeners who Don Nokia 20 years ago made hands, handsets. They were famous for making phones. They made more phones than anybody else in the world. When the invention of the iPhone came, they missed the wave. And Nokia no longer makes handsets except in very small, zero circumstances. They make the infrastructure for cell phone towers. So one of my clients was Nokia and we had won a very impressive contract to go implement automation down at Nokia's service centers. And through some political stuff that went on in the consulting company I was in, I was, I had to step back from it. The delivery was done by a different team. And the delivery team walked into the building to these places and said to the managers, we're here to implement automation. It's going to cut your workforce by X. And paid no attention to the fact that those managers were actually rewarded for the size of their teams. Now think what that means. And they didn't say, and this is what, these are all the new things we need your team members to do. These are all the innovations and growth areas in the company. So they just went in with the negative, you know, because they just had a number in their mind. Right. They're gonna, they're gonna cut costs. And it was an abject failure the entire project was an abject failure. Again, I sound like I'm trying to distance myself from it. I'm not trying anything. I wasn't there when it happened, but that's what happened. The entire project was written off and it was written off because of a lack of Noble Automation. So what does Noble Automation mean? It means taking into consideration the needs and interests of all the people involved. And so if you go in and tell an employee we're going to implement some new technology and you don't explain what that technology is and make them feel comfortable that they can succeed using that technology and they'll understand it, they're going to get nervous. They're going to. And you know, we all know what happens, right? When people get really nervous and scared. The best swimmers jump off the ship first. So you lose your best employees. You end up only with people who are terrified but don't feel like they have enough skills to leave. All because you didn't enable them, help them understand how this can do better things and give them a hope of a better future. Like, look at all these new services we could implement to make a lot more money. And the truth is in most companies, they have nowhere near enough people to do the innovation that they have good ideas for. So then they go pay consulting companies to do it, which is not necessary a lot of the times. So Noble Automation would be to say, you can use these tools, we understand who you are, we're going to give you the training you need to understand some of you will have a path that is outside of this, but a lot of you are just going to have better, more exciting jobs and you're going to learn more.

So the million dollar question, you know, given the state of the world right now with Chat GBT and you know, all the various AI tools just raging the world right now, I got to imagine this is going to play a role in what you're also speaking about here because, you know, the writing's on the wall that some professions are going to be, I wouldn't say completely replaced, but greatly the productivity should go through the roof, right, for some certain applications. But then, you know, some, some like I saw a, a deal yesterday again, we're recording this in late March. By the time this one comes out, everything's going to be different. They're gonna be like, duh, Ron, like I saw yesterday, like Expedia, the plugin plugging into Chat gbt and you're just sitting there saying, hey, I want to go to Madrid, Spain with my family of Four, you know, what are some options on this date? And it's just spitting it all out and then, oh, well, once, you know, it's just like, basically, I don't know if it's going to replace a travel agent or something like that, but goodness gracious, it's going to, it's going to radically change that, that type of environment. So how do you see the whole world of AI playing into this need for, for noble automation?

You know, Ron, that's a, it's a great question and it's a very timely point. Even if tomorrow morning something changes, it won't change it. Well, yeah, it'll change. So I have two points. That there is a gigantic industry in hype to generate hype and fear. Now, you know, you think of fear politically, you know, one party is evil, the other party is evil, whatever, but there's also the hype. It's all about getting clicks, right? So if you write an article that says AI is going to eliminate, you know, 50% of all jobs in the world and oh my God, we should all terrify, they get clicks. They don't care about the damage they've left behind them them. The fear and the terror that's been then been generated in the workforce. So what I find is the hype wave moves at one speed and the reality wave moves at about one third that speed. So let me give you an example. When I showed up in Copenhagen, I became the intelligent automation leader for Accenture in northern Europe. And they said to me, well, it's all about RPA and robotics. And I looked at him like, what are you talking about? I had never even heard of rpa. So of course I had to go deep dive in all this stuff. Then I thought, RPA is going to take over. This is 2015, RPA is going to take over the entire world. And this is so obvious how much of this will be done and you're going to change every. Well, guess what? It's not. It hasn't happened yet. The wave of RPA is slowly moving forward way after the hype. Wait, so what that means is when the hype wave comes, if you're a travel agent, to use your example, you have time to decide two things. One of two things. You're going to be the best damn travel agent there is in an innovative way. And you're, you're irreplaceable because there will always be a part of that that is irreplaceable. Or you're going to start looking around for ways to morph your existing skills into a field that is in fact growing. And you have plenty of time to do it, right? Because the hype wave moves so fast in the reality. The ChatGPT thing, that's just the latest way of scaring the crap out of everybody, right? And it's. Yeah, it's real, but it'll take years for that stuff to come in. Let me give you an example, personal example for my, my family. My father was, believe it or not, way back in the day, my father was the lead trumpet player for Benny Goodman. And Benny Goodman was a huge big band guy during the big band era. And then my father got off the road from Benny Goodman and a few other, went to Las Vegas, have a family, right? Because if you play in Las Vegas, in an orchestra in Las Vegas, you can come home at night and see your kids. You're not on the road. Noble thing for my dad to do. So he comes off the road, he's in Las Vegas and he's playing, you know, the flanked Frank Sinatras and the Tony Bennett's and, you know, all those people, right? A kind of glamorous thing for him, I'm sure. And then the advent of the synthesizer, the ad, advent of canned recorded music, the advent of, you know, all that stuff, right? That was the intelligent automation in the music industry. And my father had a choice. He could have said, well, they'll always be, you know, the shrinking orchestras will always go down. But guess what? He was a trumpet player. You, you. I think I already said that. But you, you have to be. You have to have certain trumpet players in certain orchestras. But they probably went from 1000 employed trumpet players in Las Vegas to 50 employed trumpet players in Las Vegas when it was in. Or, you know, some version of that, right? So you have a choice. Be the best trumpet player in Las Vegas and keep your job or decide you're going to do some other version of other things within the industry, the music industry. Maybe music's going to be part of your income. He made mouthpieces, custom mouthpieces for musicians all over the world. That was another. So I use that example because sometimes people think that the technology thing we're talking about is somehow different than everything else in the world. And it's not depending on the industry and the invention and the change. So what happened to my father? He was at the end of his career, right? And toward the end of his career, and unfortunately, this doesn't end on a positive note. He was kind of bitter about that. But my, my uncle, who's about 15 years younger than my father, my uncle became a studio musician in la, which is the version of be the best musician you can possibly be or be the best travel agent you can possibly be. And he recorded, I don't know, 40 or 50 movie tracks, living in LA, got home at night, saw his kids, but he happens to be one of the world's best French horn players. So if you're a mediocre French horn player.

Yeah.

Or if you're a mediocre travel agent or a medium. Right.

Yeah.

You're going to probably be displaced and now's the time to think about what can you be great at.

Yeah.

Instead of being a mediocre travel agent that gets replaced by chat GPT.

Yeah. Well, and I'm also of the opinion of that I think that the travel agent or the trumpet player or whatever profession is you can use, whether it's AI or some other so thing that hasn't even been invented yet, which will come five years from now. You just learn to not fight it, but, you know, work with it, you know, use it to help you be better. Right. And so I think that's what that the folks that are, that have won in the past will probably continue to win in the future because they're going to know how to, you know, not fight, you know, resistance as futile as they say in Star Trek. Right. It's like, well, yeah, let's see. Well, could this help us? Could it make us a better travel agent? Could you offer more services now that you don't have to sit there and, and look for flights to Madrid? Anym that's done, but maybe there's other value added things that you could do. Right. So that's the next, that's the next wave or opportunity that we have.

I completely agree with you and I think that that opportunity has existed for hundreds and hundreds of years, but the timeline was stretched out. Yeah. So you could work an entire career being a pipe fitter.

Right.

And by the time the technology changed beyond pipe fitting and whatever, that was your kid's responsibility to learn that new skill. Now those changes are happening within a career.

Right.

I tell another story in my book, Noble Automation now about a colleague. I invited this colleague over, she was our, our EA when I was working in a, in back in Accenture and this is in the D.C. area. So I really liked her and I said, I invited her over with her husband and said, you know, we'd like to have you over for dinner. And she kept kind of saying no and making excuses and you know, I'm starting to think, God, I must be a jerk. And then I finally confronted her and I, I said, what? You know what? I feel kind of bad. Is it that you don't? And she said, no, my husband's in a bad state. And I went, well, what does that mean? You know, I mean, now you don't know what to say, right? And she said, no, no, no, it's not a health thing. He was, he worked at a grocery store. Big. And I don't know if everyone realizes this, but in the days of unionized grocery stores, you could make a pretty decent living checking out food at a grocery store. He worked at this grocery store. And he got laid off. And he got laid off about 10 years younger than he wanted to retire. And what had happened, of course, is the self checkouts had come into the store. This is when, you know, years ago. So when the first self checkouts came in, he came into the store and there was first one self checkout and then there was two self checkouts, and then there was six self checkouts. Well, guess what? He saw this coming, right? And he's looking right down the aisle, he can see the self checkouts. And so you say to your, one kind of person says, oh, my God, they're going to get rid of me, right? That's a fear coming from a fear base. And another kind of person says, what does this mean for me? How could I add more value to this grocery store? And let me get really specific, because sometimes that sounds so pie in the sky. This is what he could have done. He could have been, I'm going to become the expert on all things cheese in this store. This store sells 75 types of cheese. You know, the gourmet type, the American cheese type, whatever. And every time somebody comes through the checkout line and they're buying cheese, I'm going to say, you know, I recently charged. And I'll just pick a name like Guerrero. I can't remember. That thing's a French cheese. Anyway, have you tried this, right? Have you tried that? And then after he masters the cheese world, he masters the whatever world, right? Maybe it's poultry or it's beef. And he's making those comments to the customers. Well, the boss is going to figure this out, right? Is going to say, hey, this guy knows our store. He knows what's going on. He's. He's getting people to buy other stuff. He's, you know, it's like a miracle on 34th Street. A movie that's like 80 years old. Saying, hey, did you know the Brie is on sale right now? And the person goes back and gets the Brie that they weren't going to buy. Right. So that is the kind of thing people can do and they can do it in every industry.

Yeah.

Or they can stick their hands, head in the sand, drink three more beers, eat a whole pizza, go back at home and complain to their spouse about how the world isn't fair.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it comes down to, you know, you have a scarcity mindset or a growth mindset. Right. And you know, the winners typically have growth mindsets.

It's just the way it is, you know, scarcity mindset. Had you ever heard that before? 7 habits of highly Effective People. I had never heard that expression before. The scarcity mentality.

I don't even remember where I first learned it from, but I don't know.

We can thank Stephen Covey. I think that was one of Stephen Covey's.

Yeah, yeah, good. Hey, I know that. And we were talking before and sort of preparing for this, that you've got this concept about wanting to help humans be heroes and I know you're passionate about that, so maybe let's talk a little bit about that and the role of intelligent automation and how that all plays together.

Thank you for asking me that question. I have to say, when I sat down to write the book and you write a business book, you better put a lot of stories in a business book or everyone's going to get bored. Right. If you just do the. Here's your 10 point checklist of how to do single single minute exchange of die and you don't put a story in there, you're done. So as I'm coming across this point trying to talk about heroes and I had given a talk about helping humans be heroes and, and I use the Star wars analogy where R2D2 saves the human heroes from being crushed in the garbage bin. Right, Right. So the only reason they get out of that garbage bin, almost everybody knows that scene. Even if you're young, you know that scene the garbage compressor walls are closing in and you know, they're shooting bullets, trying to blow the thing up. Nothing works. The princess is screaming, one guy goes swimming accidentally for the dragon. You know, it's all horrible. And the only way they get out is that R2D2 the robot finds all the trash compressors and he says, stop all the trash compactors in the entire station. And he does and they get out. Right. That analogy, I thought, well, this is, you know, this is a Great analogy about technology and humans being heroes and the robots doing the robot stuff. And then I got on to Joseph Campbell. And Joseph Campbell, when he died, was one of the leading mythology experts in the world and had written a book in the 50s called Hero of a Thousand Faces, which, by the way, is a tough read. It's written by an academic, but it is a great book. Just a very tough read. And he came up with what he called the monomyth. And the Monomyth is the story that generate. That cultures all over the world use to describe heroic behavior. And in one culture it's a dragon, in another culture it's a goblin, and in another culture, it's a mystical whatever, but the same monomyth pattern. And. And you may say, well, what are we talking about? We're talking about movies here. No, the monomyth is actually human beings looking at what it takes to be heroic in real life and turning that into stories and that circle. And for the sake of this call, I'll cut it really short. So the first stage is where the hero is unaware of anything of what's going on. They're just living their normal life, right? And then something happens to shake them out of their normal life, and they suddenly realize there's something beyond that. Joseph Campbell called that the call to adventure. Right? What is the call to adventure? It says you could do great things in some way, shape or form. They could be very small things, or they could be very great things. And then once they cross the line from the known to the unknown, they're now at a point where they have to learn this new world. That's the Obi Wan Kenobi character. So Obi Wan Kenobi teaches the person, this is what the Force is. Or in the case of intelligent automation, this is what this new intelligent automation stuff is. So get away from fear and embrace the potential of what this is. So now the character. And again, these myths are Navajo myths and Eskimos, and they're all the same story. They all go the same path, right? So now the hero has these empowered tools, and he says, oh, I know what this new world is. Now I have to go face the big challenge. Well, the big challenge, as Joseph Campbell would call it, was the dragon. The dragon again, in different mythologies, different things. In the case of Star wars, we all know what the dragon is. It's Darth Vader, right? So Luke has to face Darth Vader. Well, what Joseph Campbell told us was the dragon or Darth Vader really is just a way to Picture what the real dragon is, which is fear. The human fear that they will not succeed or be able to thrive in this new world with these new skills. Think of intelligent automation. Oh my God, am I going to be able to understand this? I never studied computer science. You know, I'm just a guy on the line or whatever. Well, that's what the dragon is, right? So how do you face that dragon? And if you don't face that dragon and overcome that dragon, you can't finish the circle. And finishing the circle, and I'm greatly simplifying this, by the way, but finishing the circle means facing your greatest fears. And then after you overcome that and say, I've transcended, I'm a better person, I've seen bigger things, I've accomplished greater things, then you bring that lesson back to the tribe.

Yeah.

And that lesson back to the tribe. You think of an Eline example is, did you guys know we can change this over in 5 minutes instead of 45 minutes? Did you know we can produce products that have 0.005 D VEX instead of 20? Right. In anything. Right. We can embrace this technology. And then the circle starts again. So when I say helping humans be heroes, I think every human being has the potential to go on their hero's journeys over. And it's not just one, it's over and over again. And that's that idea and that model. And to realize that it has survived 5,000 years of history, of written history, that, that is inspiring to me. It's so much better than walking in the door and going, yeah, we're implementing some new technology. Yeah, your life's going to suck, let's move on. Well, that's not too inspiring, is it? Right? You're about to face this, you're afraid of this. It's okay to be afraid of this. We're going to get you through it. And the leader's job in Noble Automation. Now the way I describe this in helping humans be heroes is to recognize that pattern and then in themselves as well. By the way, when the new leader take. You don't think a new leader who takes over a line for the first time, or a department or a company or a ship when I was in the Navy, they're terrified. They don't want to tell you that, you know, it's a superficial look, oh, I'm tough and I'm strong. But deep down inside that got a, they got a big dragon. And that dragon is called failure. Right. So if we recognize that and help people on that journey and realize where they are in that journey. Everybody benefits. The company gets better. Will there be people who refuse to accept the call to adventure? Yes. The grocery store clerk who refused to embrace reality. My father, when he refused to say, what am I going to do with this change in the music industry? The person in the bank who refuses to accept the adoption of new technology. They're going to be people who do that, but it's their choice to do that. Right? And we as leaders, Ron, Chris, Jane, you know, Joaquin, whoever, the leaders we got out there, if we help people see that journey, they go home at night challenged, but inspired.

Yeah.

And that's what I think it's all about.

Love it. I love it. Fantastic. What a way to end. Very good. Well, hey, Chris, if folks want to connect with you and learn more about your work, what's the best way?

Well, obviously they. An email. You can send me an email@chris nobleautomationnow.com or you can go to nobleautomationnow.com or you can find me on LinkedIn and maybe we can post that somewhere.

Yeah, we're gonna. People are scrolling down right now on their podcast app and they've already hit it. So, yeah, so we're gonna link it all up in the show notes. So, yeah, man, thanks for coming on. This has been a lot of fun and. And super inspiring. I'm ready to go find some dragons.

You have a dragon? That's fantastic, Ron. Well, we all do in my best hacked Japanese koedeshita, which means I was honored to be on your call and on your podcast.

Awesome. All right, well, thanks again. Take care and keep up the great work.

Okay, thank you very much, Ron.

All right, bye. 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 6 Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Sigma Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.