GA 481 | Motivation and Respect for People with George Saiz

It's interesting that when somebody gets promoted into a leadership role that, you know, sometimes their personality changes and the power goes to their head. And you think, is that the kind of person that you would want to work for? I mean, if you're working for somebody like that, you're not coming home every day and saying, I sure love working for this guy. He beats the you know what out of me every day. But I love it.

Today I'm excited to welcome George says back to the show. Now, George and I have known each other for a number of years, and George is. Well, he's retired now, but his mother, most recent, I guess, engagement was with Ame. So many of you who have been involved with Ame in different conferences and whatnot have probably known George. So he's a great guy. And it's got a really vast experience, just industry experience with just all different types of leadership roles. And. And so today, George introduces the. A new book that he's. That he's written. And it's actually going to be released here, I think, in another few weeks, depending on. Based on when this episode's coming out. So book's called We Started With Respect. And so obviously, you know, like we do when we have different authors on, we try to talk a little bit about, you know, you know, all the same old why'd you write the book? And all that, but really kind of digging into some of the specific topics in particular, respect. You know, it's a word that we lean thinkers spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to understand. And so I asked him the old question I used to ask it on the podcast many years ago, just like, what does respect for people mean to you? And so George gave us a nice answer, but I wasn't satisfied. And so I kept digging and kept pushing a little bit more. And so it was a really interesting, fun conversation to talk a little bit more about just this whole idea of respect for people and what does that really look like? And then we just kind of get into many different types of things, including, like, motivation and different types of people and how do you motivate different people, you know, to all get the results that we're trying to achieve. So just lots of good wisdom in there. George is a great guy. I think you're going to enjoy this show. Okay, so show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 481. Also, if you don't mind. Thank you so much to those that have given us a review. I went back And I read some of them recently and we're climbing up there, man on getting reviews. So that's pretty cool. So I'm going to keep asking once in a while, but if you don't mind, scroll down if you're on Apple, just keep scrolling. It's sort of hard to find, but you got to just keep going and you'll see at the bottom, Spotify, same thing. And hit the five star. If you think it's a good podcast and you like it and leave a little note on what you like about it or if you have ideas for how we can make it better. Man, my, my skin is thick. So I'd appreciate that as well. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Hey, George, how's it going, man?

Going great. Looking great, Ron. Good. Good to talk to you again.

Yeah, it's always fun. It's always fun. So I'm, I'm excited to have you on the show and this, I think this topic is going to be pretty cool. I'm excited to, to check out your new book.

So.

But before we get into that and what you've been up to and all that, let's talk with about that quote. You know, we always like to begin all of our episodes with a quote. So what do you got?

Well, sure. You know, my favorite Lean quote is and it's not one that was meant for lean and I've shared it before. It comes from the famous or legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. And he had a great saying and the saying was be quick, but don't hurry. And I've always thought that that really in my mind is a picture of what Lean looks like. In fact, I think that's what our speed of business goal should be, is to be quick but don't hurry. And if you, if you look up hurry, it talks about haste and, and you know, you can just picture people in the, in, in process environments trying to do things too fast, trying to hurry. And you know, the whole goal is to, to, to be as quick as you can but under control. So that, that be quick but don't hurry quote is something that I've always kind of hung on to and it pictures linked me to a T. Yeah.

When you, when you say that like I think of like the PDCA wheel and I just think it, you know, quickly kind of try to quickly experiment in P and you know, M and just quickly iterate, you know, and learn quickly learn. Whereas hurrying would be. You don't even have a plan. There's no PDCA it's just like, let's go and try to do something right.

Yeah. Of a mess behind you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely.

Chaos is what I think of when I hear hurry, you know?

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very good. All right, well, hey, George, tell us a little bit about, I mean, many people know who you are, have been around for a while in the Lean movement, but tell us a little bit about yourself and, and what you're up to these days.

Well, I, gosh, I spent about 40 plus years of my life in the medical device environment. Started out in operations and worked my way up through into executive leadership and was president and led a few companies. And then at the end of my career, I spent three years as the president and CEO of the association for Manufacturing Excellence. So ame and through that I got to see a lot of companies and see a lot of best practices. So, you know, that's really helped me certainly in writing this book. But I got involved in Lean as a, as a first time as a general manager of a company. We were in a complete mess and in a desperate situation. And I was introduced to Lean through the book, the goal and wow, it just changed my world. And I don't know for many people. You know, when I read the book, I thought, this doesn't make sense. You know, a lot size of one, one piece flow. That, no, that didn't make sense. And then we did the LEGO block simulation and all the lights turned on for me and so I became a real believer. And you know, that company, we just as a sidelight, we started with a process that from releasing a work order, picking it, building it, inspecting it, packaging, putting the finished goods is about three weeks. And when we finished through all of our Lean implementation, that process was down to two hours.

Wow.

So, you know, to talk about the be quick but don't hurry. I mean, we really were able to accelerate that process and all the things that we hear about, you know, of the, you know, the inventory reduction, the quality improvement, all the things that happen and have to happen in order to get to that point. It was amazing impact for our company. And you know, we end up, you know, our profitability went through the roof. But of course the real focus to begin with was on the whole process improvement and all the benefits that came out of that. So anyways, big believer that and throughout my career, and then in the last three years, I retired from AME and of course Covid hit right away. Thank you. That was not welcome. But did happen. And then, and then so it gave me the opportunity to work on this book project. And that's been a lot of fun.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. You mentioned the goal. I'm like, I'm wondering how many people have been impacted by old Alex Rogo. Right?

Yes, yes. And Herbie. Following Herbie.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Good stuff, man. All right, well, so tell us a little bit about the book and. And what's it called and why'd you write it and all that kind of stuff.

Okay, well, the book is called We Started With Respect and it's about a medical device company who, you know, with my background, who has a startup, pioneered a new technology in cardiovascular surgery. And they were very successful and they got sold off, but the focus was really on developing and commercializing that technology. So there was really no focus on building a sustainable culture. They did everything pretty much by brute force. And so we fast forward 12 years and now the original team is gone with their large payouts and the company, the products are outdated, it's become stagnant and the parent company wants to see some changes. And so they bring a new leader in that has turnaround experience, but who really believes that culture is that foundational tool that's key to executing your strategies. And so in the book, he reforms his leadership team, gets the new product development process reignited, which comes upon a breakthrough technology very early and very much earlier than they expected. And so the team realizes that they're not in a position to really successfully commercialize this product unless they tackle that whole culture and leadership model. And so we follow this team and it's kind of a race. It's a two year development project and it's a race to develop that culture and that leadership team. And so we'll follow them from forming to storming, then norming and performing. You're going to go through all the trials and tribulations of building a culture from the ground up. And so culture was always an important thing to me. Coming up in my career, I just for some reason latched onto a little short story. I remember that when I was really young, there was a guy that I worked with that called in sick. One day he decided to go snow skiing. And I thought, man, if I was in charge, I'd want to create an environment where you woke up and you thought, I think I'll just play hooky today, that you came in anyways, because you just didn't want to miss what's going on. And so culture was. Culture is just a big thing. So that's. This book is about culture and the importance of culture. I also, when I was president of a medical device company, I was invited to an AME leadership summit. And it was a group of, a small group of committed leaders that came together with the purpose of hopefully reigniting a manufacturing renaissance based on people centric leadership principles. And Bob Chapman was the host of Barry Weimar, the CEO of Barry Wehmiller company. And Bob said two words at this meeting that really impacted me. And the first one was the word intentional. And he talked about having an intentional culture, an intentional plan for your culture. And I thought about that. I thought, you know, as, as president of the company, did we really have an intentional plan for our culture? And our team believed in, in respect. We advocated for teamwork, and we always tried to do the right thing. But did we have a comprehensive intentional plan? A plan with specific tactics and measurements and goals around our culture? And that was what Bob was talking about, and we didn't. And so that really made me think about that. And then the second word he used was the word entrusted in that as leaders, we're entrusted with the working lives of those people that report to us. And I kind of took that as president of the company, that meant everybody. And so I went to that meeting as a practitioner of people centric leadership principles. But I left is wanting to become a promoter. And so I began really talking and writing more about it. And certainly we went back and made intentional plans at our company and really made it an important part of how we did business and part of our strategic planning effort. So going back to the book, it was just a natural lead in when I retired that I wanted to continue writing. And this topic of culture and leadership is important to me because I think that is the linchpin in terms of execution.

Yeah. And so I mean, the title of the book, you have the word. You know, we started with respect, a question I used to ask people on the podcast years ago. You know, we've been doing this for a while. I don't ask it all very often anymore. But like, the whole respect for people is obviously a key tenant of what we're. We're doing in our movement here. But what, like, we just ask someone to define what is respectful. That can be very different. So I'm curious from your perspective, like, when you say respect for people, like, what do you mean respect for people?

Well, you know, in the book we do talk about that and they, they talk about defining that. As a matter of fact, one of the, the characters. Well, just step back for just a second when I say that the book is written as a novel. So, like the goal, it's written as a business novel. So one of the characters in the book does bring this up. They. They.

Which one. Which character are you?

You know what? Oh, gosh. This really digresses. But my intention was to write the book through three perspectives. One was as the. The eyes of the CEO. The second one is the supply chain manager, and the third as a distribution associate. And that was three roles that I held. And I wanted to write, incorporate some of the things that I saw when I was in each one of those positions.

Okay.

And so it's. It's really through my eyes and three people. But it became too difficult to get too much in depth with most of the characters. So I. It's primarily through the. The. The president of the company, but the other two are. Are me when I was in those roles. So one of the characters defines respect. They look up the word and. And there's a Greek word, the original Greek word for respectless. Th. And that meant to honor and to value. And I think that's a great way of honoring and valuing each other. Every person, no matter what they bring to the table, They're. They're the good, the bad. You know, everything about them is to honor and value them. And. And so that's. That's where we start that. And it. It manifests itself in many different ways throughout the book. And I think one key thing is that we see when we talk about respect in business, we tend to say, you know, we need to show respect. And it typically means leadership showing respect to employees. And I think, yeah, that's a very important part. But what I try and bring out in the book is that I think it goes throughout the organization. We should also develop respect from employees for leadership, and we should develop respect for employees to employees. And so the book centers around developing that and. And respect being the. The center of that and. And really the. The hub of the wheel. And. And I. As I say in the book, the glue that. That holds it all together and this company that. That reforms their culture builds on respect throughout the organization.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because it's. It's a really. It's a big word, right? Like, and it means it could. So I want to. I want to push you a little bit because, like, yeah, the book said that that's great. But, like, when you think someone asked George, like, respect for people, for you, like, does it mean, like, being nice always or being tough sometimes or all things in between? Because I really do think and lean. We don't give it enough thought. We continuous improvement that pillar. It's super easy, right? I mean, it's the things that we're doing, right? I mean, go implement XYZ and you're going to make it better. But respect for people is just mysterious movement. And so many times we just, we talk about, oh wow, you just got to respect each other. Well, what do you mean by that? Like in a day to day basis, like, what does that look like? What do you think?

Well, you know, I think it's a very simple old cliche, but you know, I'll use it. That is to treat people as you would like to be treated. And you know, it's interesting, especially when we talk about the, the part of leadership, showing respect for employees. I challenge leaders in this book to become the leader that you always wanted to work for, which is really kind of saying the very same thing. You know, it's interesting that when somebody gets promoted into a leadership role that, you know, sometimes their personality changes and the power goes to their head. And you think, is that the kind of person that you would want to work for? I mean, if you're working for somebody like that, you're not coming home every day and say, I sure love working for this guy. He beats the, you know what out of me every day. But, but I love it. But you know, somebody that, that can actually motivate you, encourage you and, and you know, help you achieve better things, you know, and help you achieve fulfillment in your, in your job is, is somebody you want to work for. And so respect is that same way.

Yeah.

Why wouldn't we treat people the way that we would want to be treated? And yeah, you know, when you do that, it's amazing. It sounds very small and very old and cliche. Ish. But it, it's so true. And when you see it in, in, in action, it's amazing. You know, the output and the outcome of that and the fun that people have at work.

Yeah. I'm curious if you could look back to your, throughout your career like before Amy, like just like industry career, maybe that general manager position, that first one that you mentioned, you know, where you first implemented lean. You just mentioned motivation. This is another one that's really interesting to me and it's a word that we throw out there a lot. Like how did you over your career seek to motivate? Because you know, what moves me is probably going to be a little bit different than moves. My business partner, Kevin Meyer were very different people, you know, very, very different people. And if you try to motivate him and me the same way, it's probably not going to work. So, like, how did you. How did you do that, manage that as a leader back in the day, to seek and to motivate people with different personalities, different styles, that sort of thing?

Well, I agree with you that everyone has a different personality and somewhat different motivators, but I still think that at the heart of that is respect and showing respect for people. I was never one to. To. It comes out too, in the book, in this character, but I was never one to dictate and tell folks what to do. I encourage them to, you know, to take responsibility and take that authority. And I would give them enough support to help them and be there, but not tell them what to do. And, you know, interesting, actually, this, this very first company when I was. We were trying to turn this company around, our materials management area was a big mess. And I had just come from a role. In fact, I got promoted into this general manager role because of. Of some of the things our team had done in materials management that I was leading back at a. At another division. And so we walked into this situation, we had this huge backorder problem as well as we had inventories going through the roof. A lot of the same problems that we had at the previous company I was at. And this, I hired this guy to come in and to tackle it, and he gets a completely different approach than I did. And I thought that was interesting because I thought, well, I kind of just got promoted because of the things I did in this area or our team did. But now you're coming with different ideas. But I thought, I'm going to support you. And I have to say that if he had done it my way, it would have worked. But we did it his way and it worked better. And so I learned and that helped me very early on to understand that, you know, help and support and be there for people and when he needed help. In fact, this guy and I kept meeting after he, after he left our company. We kept meeting about every three months for what we called walking golf in the morning and kept mentoring him. But so it was, you know, we had a good relationship, but I really learned a lot about, you know, helping people to, to think and, and to do the best they can and then be there to, to help and support.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. Well, I know you're sort of a lifelong learner, George. I've known you for a while and, and you mentioned just learning there, so throughout this book process, I'm curious, as you looked into developing these characters, who were you at some phase of your life and career? You know, did you learn anything? Maybe just about yourself or about lean or about leadership or probably clearly about book writing, I'm guessing. What did you learn?

Well, first off, on the book writing, I did learn that you better grow thick skin. Well, my first reader was every chapter I finished. The first reader was my wife.

Oh, boy.

And she reads novels, loves to read novels. And for her, a book has to play like a movie in her head.

Okay.

And so I would give her the chapter, and. And she'd read it. And if it ever slowed down or got boring or if a concept didn't make sense, you know, she let me know. And. And. And then the second reader was a buddy of mine that retired at the same time. And. And. And they were both pretty brutally honest with me. And so I realized, okay, if I'm going to get through this, I'm. I'm gonna have to, you know, grow some thick skin and be willing to open up. And so that was a real learning environment. Certainly. I also sent it out to three beta groups, three different groups of beta readers, and they had some great feedback that really made the book much better. But I really realized that I had to be open to that. But in terms of the book, there was a couple of things that I learned that were very interesting. So the first one I'd like to share is the whole topic of change management. And when I was at ame, we were involved with some folks in that area and learning more and more about it. And actually, one of the beta readers had suggested that the book needed more content about change management. And so I really dug in and began researching it more. And the result was I ended up dedicating an entire chapter to change management. It became that important. And, you know, one of the statistics that I found there was that 70% of our change initiatives fail, which is really poor when you think about that. And when you look at, you know, some of the things that happens there, you know, part of it, there's. There's some three major reasons that they think contribute. One is that changes is systemic in nature, and we tend to think of it being isolated, but yet when we're doing a cultural transformation or a lean transformation or going to a whole new operating platform, it's systemic, and that means it involves every employee in the company. Second thing is that it takes time, and typically companies don't have time. And the third thing is that we tend to see change as this logical plan. We build this plan, this is what we're going from this state to this state, and here's the plan, and it's perfect. We've outlined all the things and all the steps and it's really logical. But what we fail to realize is that change is an emotional event and that it really challenges some of our deep seated fears and emotions. And so this was a big thing to me. I found in my research too that McKinsey & Co. Did a study on change management. They studied 40 companies that had implemented change management processes and 58%. Okay, so bear in mind these companies recognize the importance of change management. And yet 58% of these companies didn't achieve the goal of their change initiative. In fact, 20% of them achieved 30% or less of their goal and then 42% did achieve their goals. And some of them as much as 2 to 300% of their goal. And what McKinsey found, the big difference was in the robustness of their change management process. And so even though you recognize the need for, without change management process, you're really, you know, throwing the dice on that. But, but even if you do recognize it, you really got to become good at it. Yeah. And so that was a, a lot of new information for me that, that was some great learning. I think that I'd like to pass on to your, your listeners to, to really research this. The second one, this was really funny, was that as I shared, I sent out my book to this three groups of beta readers. And so there was a guy that I worked with in the 1980s at a company and, and his reaction when he read the book was, wow, Georgie, you wrote all about us. I said, well, yeah, there was a few things in there. Yeah. And then, and then another person I worked with in the 90s at a different company said, wow, you wrote all about us. And then some folks that I worked with in the 2000s that I, yet another company said, you wrote all about us. You know, common theme. And then another guy that I did work with responded and said, wow, I read, I read it, I loved your book. But he said, I thought this was the, the transformation story of that we went through at Wiremold. And, and so the real what, what it really helped me to see was that this issue of culture has been around for quite a while.

Yeah.

And if you think about the evolution of culture, you know, Post World War II, you know, we were, the approach was command and control and it was very business centric. And by the 1980s, we adopted the whole idea of teams and self directed work teams, quality circles, things like that. And then by the turn of the century, servant leadership model came in and this people centric leadership where everybody feels valued. And so that's. The evolution has been great and I think it's. We've gotten better and better. But I think what I saw in this responses from these folks was that the real culprit was, back to Bob Chapman's word, intentional, of whether folks had an intentional plan or they were cultured by default. And so I would surmise that there are companies that are pursuing an intentional culture and they're talking about whether or not you should be, you know, business centric or people centric. But the real issue is that most companies out there are culture by default. And that's the real issue with what's happening in, in our business. And I think it presents the real opportunity.

Yeah.

All of these environments that I was talking about, they all had a culture by default. Nobody had. Not that they, you know, they might have some values up on the wall, but did they really have an intentional plan and a consistent approach to their leadership model and their culture? And the answer was no. Yeah, so it was very interesting. And you know, when you think about leadership, since you're asking me questions, I'll ask you, how do you, how do you think when, you know, how does somebody get into leadership typically, let's just say in production we need to, you know, promote somebody into a lead role or to supervisor role, who usually is the person that gets that great firefighter.

You know, get things done, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The person has produced the most or, you know, the, the, the guy that sells the most becomes the sales manager.

Fantastic. Individual contributor sometimes, right?

Yeah, yeah. But are they a leader?

Maybe, maybe not.

Exactly, exactly. And then, and then beyond that, once they get in that role, what do we do for those folks? Yeah, we typically don't teach them about leadership. And if you don't have an intentional plan, what you end up with is 40 different cultures within your company and, you know, whatever door you open is a different culture.

Yeah.

And so that's ultimately what this book is about is, is attacking this culture by default and having a, an intentional plan and then getting buy in by leadership and buy in by the employees so that everybody is holding each other accountable to perform in the same way. And it's powerful when this happens. And I can share, I think all of us have worked at a couple of companies where things really went well together, where the Teamwork was great and the culture was outstanding and it's so much fun and you move mountains together and it's magical when that happens.

Yeah. Fantastic. So when, when's the, the book available, George?

It'll be released on July 11th. Okay.

I don't know exactly when this episode's going to come out. I should have looked at that ahead of time. So depending on when you're listening to this, it may or may not be released. We record, you know, a little bit ahead of time. So. But yeah, well, I look forward to, to checking it out myself, George, and maybe have to have you back on if I have some follow up questions or whatever after I, if I check the book out.

Well, great. Appreciate that. So, you know, I guess, you know, my, my goal is to challenge your listeners to, to challenge that business norm of a culture by default. Can I share, I'd like to, you know, if we're wrapping up, I'd like to share a quote if I could to finish that off. And it's a, it's a quote by a man that I was privileged to work for, the, the late Bob Pritzker. And he said people are not the greatest asset of your business. So people are your business. And I thought that was a, that was a great quote. And I've always tried to keep then people at the center of all my business equations. So I think that's something we could all think about as we go forward.

Yeah. Fantastic. We're going to see you in Cleveland.

I hope so. Yeah.

Cleveland this year.

Interesting. Some, the timing there will be fun. It'll be, could be interesting, huh? Middle of November and.

Yeah. In Cleveland.

Yeah, maybe there's some great companies to see around there though. I know, yeah. And it should be a good, good lineup as usual. Yeah.

Yeah. Fantastic. All right. Hey, George, if folks want to connect with you do or, or learn more about the book and all that kind of stuff, what's the best way they.

Can hit my website? It's www.georgesays.com so it's pretty easy to find. It's got all the information on there as well as a lot of materials from the past and current blogs and all that stuff. So, you know, hopefully we'll share some good insights there as well.

Good. And we'll have it all linked up here. So just scroll down on the app that you're listening to, folks, and, and we'll, we'll link to the website there and your LinkedIn and all that kind of stuff as well.

So.

All right, well, thanks again for coming on. George. It was a lot of fun.

I appreciate it. Ron. Take care.

All right, take care.

Bye bye.

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