GA 547 | Doing Lean vs. Using Lean with Gregg Miner

You got to go into it with that mindset that it's going to be something that takes time. Because if you think you're going to be lean and have a lean system and everything in 12 months, then you're setting yourself up for failure. You're setting yourself up for doing lean versus using lean.

Today I am excited to welcome Greg Miner back to the show. Now, I've known Greg for many, many years and he is a prolific lean thinker. As you'll hear his background, he's been practic focusing and. And using lean. You'll see why I use that word in a little bit for many years, like over 30 years. So this comes with a. Just a tremendous amount of. Of wisdom and knowledge and just a great guy. And today we have a really good conversation on the difference between doing lean and using lean. And we will define sort of terms early on in the episode, but this is one of those sort of episodes that really can be a game changer just for. From like a mindset perspective. You know, we don't get into specific tools or anything like that, but it's really more of a mindset, how to look at lean and continuous improvement from like a. More of a system base versus a point base and just really good stuff. So please listen to this one all the way through, even if you have to listen to it in a few different sessions. Now, show notes can be found over@gemba podcast.com. this is episode 547. Also, be sure to scroll down on whatever app you're listening to and go connect with Greg if you aren't already on LinkedIn and check out his consulting work because he's one of the best guys out there to bring in to help your organization. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Greg, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

Doing great, Ron. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me again.

Yeah, yeah, we were just chatting before we hit record. You were last on episode 462.

So.

Yeah, that was a. That was a little while ago.

Yeah, it's been a while, but it's. Glad. It's great that you guys keep this going because I. I watch them all at some point and they're all, you know, the content is just really fantastic. Good.

Well, thank you. Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, you know the drill, Greg. We like to get things going out of the gate with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, so my quote is from my sensei. So my sensei has been George Koenigseggar. For many, many years. 25 PL and his comment to me was always, when you're looking to improve, your target should always be double the good, half the bad. And when I say that to clients and to people, they really think that that's crazy at first. But then through this process, this lean process, Kaizens, it becomes a reality in many cases. And sometimes it's not even enough when you say double the good, half the bad. But it's really a great way to think about the levels of improvement that you should be targeting when you're practicing lean. So it's been my mantra for, for many, many years. And, and it's always kind of been a good starting point.

I mean, it's actually a pretty deep statement when you think about it. It's easy to just roll off the tongue. But like, like, what does it really mean to you, though? Like, to double the good and half. You know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, it's a pretty profound statement.

It is. And really the profound part of it really is you've got to think outside the box, right? In order to truly improve and get forced creativity. If I say improve 10%, any good manager should be able to find 10% about anything. And then a team or a manager will get 12% and they celebrate. But when you say you got to double the good or half the bad, they kind of look at you and say, well, we don't know how to do that. Well, that's a good thing, right? Because if you knew how to do it, you should have already done it, right? It's kind of a just do it thing. But if you say you got to double the good, half the bad, people have to really look at, how am I going to redesign the process to do that? Because that's what it takes to do it. You've really got to redesign. You got to throw out what you're doing and come up with new creative ways to do the work. And that double the good, half the bad comment or statement really drives creativity for people to think about, how do I redesign work, not just do the same thing, but run faster in the gerbil wheel? No, don't do that. Think about how do I change the work and remove waste, that I can actually do that. Double the good or half the bad, whichever it may be. Mm. Mm.

Wow. Good stuff. So, Greg, in case folks don't remember from the last time you were on, I'm sure they were all listening. Tell us a little bit about, about yourself. Tell us about your background. You got a Deep, deep lean background. Tell us about that. And then. Yeah, tell us what you're up to these days.

Yeah, sure. So, yeah, as you said, I've been practicing lean for, I don't know, I think it's about 30 years now, so mid-90s. So. Boy, that sounds. I must be getting old, Ron. Practice and lean, 30 years. But, you know, I started out doing that in the aerospace world, making windows for airplanes, and then moved into other. Other parts of. Of the aircraft industry, either building or repairing components, president of a couple different companies and. And, you know, the topic we're going to talk about today is the difference between using and doing lean. And I felt like using lean is the right thing to do. So I've been doing that since, you know, again, since the probably early 2000s, learning how to use lean to run the business or repair a business, if you will. Got into consulting for a few years and then went back into being an owner of the process and now have my own consulting firm doing work for, you know, friends and clients and helping them deliver breakthrough results that are double the good and half the bad.

Love it. Love it. All right, so you've already sort of let the cat out of the bag, really. The, The. I guess the main focus of today's conversation is this whole idea of really the difference between doing lean and using Lean. Like, let's start with just sort of like, definitions. Like, what do you mean, doing lean versus using lean?

Well, so doing lean is, you know, in my consulting career and even. Even companies when I was new at the company. Right. You know, on day one, and you go out and walk the factory floor or talk to the people that are there and say, hey, you know, are you, you know, are you practicing lean? Oh, yeah, yeah. We, you know, we got a great lean program. And you. You start asking questions and you'll find out that they did a value stream map, you know, two years ago. Okay. And then you ask the next question of, okay, what did you do with the value stream map? Well, we hung it up on the wall and. And it's over there. And, you know, you can blow the dust off it. Have you done a Kaizen event? Oh, yeah, we did two Kaizen events last year. Okay. How did you decide what to do? Well, there were things that were, you know, that were a problem for us. Okay. So there's no connection between the value stream map and the Kaizen events. They're just pain points that you felt. So you did lean, Right. You did a lean thing, if you will. You ran a Kaizen event or you did a value stream map, but you're not using lean to run the business. And for me, that's a significant difference is when lean becomes the work versus just doing a bunch of lean stuff, if you will. And again, I think pretty much, I don't think I've ever walked into a company that said, no, we've never done anything. Right. I mean, they've all done, yeah, we do 5s, right. But there's no sustainment. So they cleaned up somewhere. You know, about any company in the world you walk into now, you'll see a shadow board with, you know, a dustpan and a broom and something, and half the time it's not even there. Right. So they have done lean stuff, but they're not using lean to truly run the business. They don't have a lean management system. Right. And that's really the big difference is you're using lean to run the business versus just doing lean things. Mm.

So here's a odd question, especially asking you with your experience, but like, what is lean?

Ah. You know, that's a great question. It's for, for me, lean is a, is a culture, right? It's a culture of continuous improvement and respect for every individual. Right. And it's, you know, again, there's, as you, you know, I said there's lean tools, but the tools are not the thing. Right. It's really building a culture and a. And a mindset. Right. You'll hear Larry Culp at GE talk about having a lean mindset, and it's just learning to see the world, in a sense, through a different lens of waste. And once you learn the seven or eight waste, whichever your preference is, you start to see the world through a different perspective, right. That there's waste in everything. And there's all kinds of stories people, you know, start to tell about the waste they see in their everyday life. And. And it's just having that mindset of every process has waste in it. Whether it's, you know, getting ready for work in the morning, driving to work in the morning, or the processes you have at work or at home. You can make them, you know, you can make them better, and that's having a lean mindset. The tools are just the. The means to the end. It's really. Lean is a mindset and a culture at an organizational level.

Yeah. What do you think? I mean, you said that folks don't have a lean management system. That's when they fall into sort of doing lean. But is that like, is there more to it? Than like, if you, if you were gonna do sort of like root cause analysis on why do so many organizations or individuals do lean versus using lean? Like what else is there aside from just that? No lean management system.

Well, and I think what happens is they go do an event and they get excited about it and then there's no management system behind it to make sure those gains are sustained. And then what happens is people, no matter what, people are people. And change is a hard thing for most people. I mean, I happen to like change, but for most people change is a difficult thing. So you go out and change a process and then if the management team isn't watching carefully and going back and doing gimbal walks and helping do the problem solving that happens after you do the improvement, then the team is naturally going to move back or backslide to way they used to do things. And then the comment comes out is this lean stuff doesn't really work. Well, it's not the lean stuff that doesn't work. A hammer will hammer a nail every time if the user uses it correctly. So, and the user is leadership team, right? The leadership is, is the driver behind the process enabling people to change and requiring them in some cases, and I use that word, you know, kind of gingerly requiring them to change, but that's, that's the way you get better. You know, one of the things I talk about all the time is it's a, it's kind of an, I'm trying to think of the word, it's like a, a zero based account. You physically cannot get better if you don't change, right? So changes is the status quo or no changes, status quo. You can't improve if you don't change something. Right now you can get worse if you change something too, but if you do nothing, the best you can do is stay where you are. So in order to get better, you got to do something, right? And that something is change the process, right? And use lean tools and use that lean mindset of removing waste to improve the process. And you know, over my career doing this for, you know, 30 years now, the beautiful thing about lean is when, when the folks on the doers, whether they're the shop floor in a factory or quote unquote, the shop floor in a transactional process, when the processes get better and people remove waste, they get engaged and they start actually feeling better about the work they're doing, it's a beautiful thing when it happens, but it's a, it's a leadership thing that, that gets in the way of of the doing versus using. Right. It's really telling people we're going to use Lean to run our business.

So why do you, why is it so important, in your opinion, for. For leaders to really get this, to really understand the difference between using and doing Lean, or just forget Lean. Just improvement, you know, just the whole idea of improvement.

Yeah. Well, and it, and it's really any change, it's change management when it comes down to it. Right. Again, and I think, you know, I said it earlier, but I think that, you know, part of the root cause is people have a tough time changing, right. Unless it's, you know, unless they're really engaged in doing it. And you have to do it with them, not to them. Right. So that's where leadership has to come in and ask the right questions. Use that, you know, the Socratic approach and bring people to the change that they want, whether they know it or not. And I think that's where leaders need to say, this is my work. Right. Instead of barking orders, their work is actually leading people to the improvement and that becomes the work. And I think that's part of the issue with Lean and lean deployments is for a period of time, right. The problem becomes the program, if you will. Even when you're doing, you know, implementing a lean management system, while you're learning it, you're. You're having to do two things. You've got kind of your old, if you will, traditional management system in this new one that you're learning, but you have to have again that Lean mindset that says, eventually, when I learn enough, this is, this is going to be how I manage and how I run my part of the business or the business, and the other stuff kind of goes away. I remember a great example, Ron. It just came to me. I was working with a CEO and his leadership team and we implemented Hoshin Connery. And the CEO went back to his admin and said, here's the five things that we're going to work on as an organization and I need you to go back into my calendar and into all the emails I get. And if the, if the emails and the meetings don't relate to one of these five things, I'm not going to do them anymore. I'm going to stop doing this. And I ask this question all the time. I could even ask it of you is, we all have a to do list, but how many of us actually have a to stop list? Things that we really need to learn how to stop doing and replace it with something better? And that's really what he did. Right. What happened was that activity of removing things from his calendar, removing emails that he was getting freed up about 25% of his time. And what he did with that 25% of his time was went to Gemba, right. And taught others how to do that same thing, how to remove waste in their process. He became the chief change agent. And here's the CEO doing gimbal walks across the globe, making sure that people understood that's, that's the way he wanted them to learn to start doing work, was go to the gimba, go see what's going on, ask questions and, you know, the, the basically the kata questions, right?

Yeah.

And, and he was the, the champion of the program because he was able to free up his time and say, I'm not going to make this on top of I'm going to make it instead of.

Yeah, gosh. As you've been talking, I've been thinking about. There's a company that, that I've been working with personally just over the last few months. They came in for one of our live workshops and they brought their whole leadership team and this company, they're brand new to Lean, but they are wildly successful at what they do. Their business. I mean, they're making, they just turn business away because they're making so much money. They're just so, such a good company financially, but they recognize that operationally it's not really sustainable the way they're going about it. So I've been so impressed with the, their willingness to. Because to me, that's one of the hardest situations when times are so good and they are so good for this company. I mean, money is not the issue. But they understand the sort of like, you know, the, the overburdening of their, of their team members and so forth is just not sustainable. And I just been really impressed with them and their willingness to. And they're really, their humility to come into this to try to figure out how to get better, even though financially they're doing well. Because I would say sometimes lean to do, do or use whatever you want to call it. When times are bad. That's, you know, we got this burning platform like. But gosh, when times are good and you still have this desire, boy, it's just been, it's really been a mind bender for me because it's, I don't know, it's not the usual case study, I would say.

And I've got a client that's in very much the same situation. There's just no burning platform. The margins are great, growth is good, but they've got a new VP that is a, you know, a lean zealot. And he was brought in really to grow the top line. And he says, well, you know, the, the I. He's very confident he can do that, but he's been able to see enough operationally that he said, if I, if I start growing the top line the way I think I can, we're gonna, we're gonna run into operational issues before too long. So he's trying to, you know, he's making sure we, they get ahead of the curve and say, you know, let's go, let's go work on our process. Let's go engage our people. And, and we've run, you know, we've run two Kaizens now, and we're, we're about to do the third one. And the, the level of engagement by the people is just phenomenal. You know, they, they, they know that they, they have the capacity there. They just didn't know how to go get it. And now they can go get that capacity and they can free up the opportunity for growth. And, you know, the team is just really excited about it. So it just makes the process so much fun when people get engaged in improving their own work.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Now I'm wondering, Greg, if someone's listening. Say they're. Maybe they're in a leadership position and this is resonating with them a little bit. Maybe they've been dabbling with Lean. Maybe they've been doing it a little bit, not using it as much as they want. If they want to sort of commit to this whole idea of using Lean, like, what is your advice for them? Like, how should they go about that?

Yeah, another great question, Ron. And, and I'll go back to, you know, the comment I, My, my first quote that you said that you asked me for about double the good, half the bad. And, and there's another, you know, I'll go back to my sensei, George Koenigsegur. His, his rule of thumb, I would say it was never a strict rule, but his rule of thumb was that you should be running. The number of annual Kaizen events is equal to n over 10. And what that means is the N is just the number of people that are in the value stream. So if you think about a value stream as all the people that are involved from when an order is received to when that order is shipped, you know, and it can include the, you know, the accounting people, the HR people, include all the people that are involved in there. And we'll just use simple math. Let's just say it's 100 people in that value stream. You divide that by 10 and you get 10. Right? Pretty simple math. And what that says is over the course of a year, you should be running 10 kaizen improvement teams. Now those teams might be four to seven or eight people. So if you think about running 10 with an average of five, you're gonna, you're gonna, you should touch roughly 50 people. So that's half of that hundred people that are gonna get engaged in the first year. And the thing that, that, that n over 10 does is it becomes that forcing function that says every month we should be running an event, right? We should be doing improvement, not, not opportunistically. When something goes bad, we have to go improve because we have to run at this pace of n over 10 and it just, it begins to build the muscle memory that continuous improvement is continuous. It's not a spot thing that you do once. And you know, the other thing I learned from George was you don't actually get good at this until you've been doing it for, you know, five passes through the value stream. You're going to find additional waste. And again, the same CEO that I mentioned earlier about, you know, doing Hoshen Connery, his message to his leadership team is that he wasn't going to feel comfortable until they'd been practicing lean for 10 years, that it became embedded in what they do and how they do it versus just a thing they do. And actually it took about six years before the full leadership team became fully engaged and really believed. Because you've got to, you know, you've got to have enough at bats to get there and have that, that, that critical event, if you will, that becomes the thing that changes you. To have that Lean mindset again, to quote Larry Culp is I'm a firm believer that, that every true Lean zealot has had some kind of seminal moment that, that convinced them that Lean was the right thing to do. And until you've had that, it's just something you're going to do. But when that moment has happened, that's kind of for me when, when the, the switch flips to, I'm going to use Lean to, to run my business because it's the right thing to do.

So lean often is seen within the world for right or wrong as a.

More.

A lot of people in operations get going with Lean. Like why, why do you think that is? And do you think I mean, obviously, I know we've all seen, you know, examples of it working throughout the organization, HR and front office and so forth. But being honest, a lot of times it is more operationally focused. Like, why is that and how do we go about changing that?

Well, I think, you know, the simple answer is it's just easy to measure, right? You know, if you think about operations, right? We measure operations three ways from Sunday, right? But then when you go into the HR team or the finance team or whatever, and you say, well, what are your performance metrics? And, you know, they might come up with something like accounts receivable or, you know, time to hire or something like that. And they'll, they'll have a metric, but they've never really done much to improve it. But they're measuring it, but it's just really easy to measure operations. And the other real benefit is it's pretty close to the customer, right? So if you improve operations, you should be able to drive some level of growth or improvement in how you're servicing the customer. I think, again, to change it is you've got to. I mentioned earlier, if you think about a value stream as, as order to ship, right? So, and I, and I, when I work with my clients, that's usually where we start, right? We received an order, you know, so we've got demand from a, from a customer, and that customer, you know, has an unmet need and we need to ship them something. And we'll do that for a while, let's say the first year. And then, and then I usually look at expanding the scope to quote to cash, right? So now the customer says, I need something, but I don't know what it is. And maybe you need to engineer it to order or you got to do some design, and then you got to get cash in the bank and that brings in the accounting team. And now you have another whole set of metrics. And you've brought in engineering and you brought in design, you brought in the quote team and maybe even the legal team, because now there's a contract that needs to be reviewed before, you know, before we get the first order. We've got to make sure the T's and C's are. And now all of a sudden, the value stream scope has brought all of those administrative processes into the fold. And people realize that, wow, it's a lot more complex than any one person realizes to actually get an order and actually ship it. And when you do that, people start getting engaged and see the complexity and that even if it's an order to ship that's out of stock and it's hours or maybe a day, but getting that first order, getting that new customer and going through all those processes that has to happen before you even get an order can really be pretty enlightening to people. And they start seeing the waste in those processes, and it gets everybody engaged that every function in a business has processes, whether they're manufacturing or transactional. It's a process and it has waste, and it can be improved.

Well, it's so timely that you're saying all this because, you know, even just peeling back the curtain here again by Academy, like, you know, our core business is, you know, companies subscribe to our learning platform, and then we hope they're realizing value and then they'll renew it. Kind of like your Netflix subscription. Right, right. And but what we found is, like, if someone doesn't renew their subscription many times because they're just not using it or whatever, so, like, well, I wouldn't expect them to keep paying us if they weren't using it. So we've actually gone back even and working really hard, even with our sales team to say that, hey, when you're talking to Greg about bringing Gemba Academy into their company, you know, like, what problems are they trying to solve? What is winning look like, how do we help them? And so we're collecting all this data before the deal's even done. Right. And so that way, when. When you do come on board, then our customer success team can look at that and be like, oh, hey, Greg, so sounds like here's what you want to do, and you've already thought it through during the sales process. And now we're in a much better position to sort of, you know, even kick you in a butt if you need it. Six months from now, when it gets hard, be like, well, Greg, remember you said that this is what you. Is that still relevant? Yeah. All right, well, let's go. Let's do it.

Right.

And then we're so, like, cheerleaders. But, yeah, it's a whole system. Right. It can't just be. You know, it reminds me of Point Kaizen versus System Kaizen.

Right.

Like, Point Kaizen is not bad, but if you're just going around randomly fixing things that aren't connected to the overall system, then you're just doing lean. You're not using it.

That's exactly right. Yeah. The Point Kaizen versus system is another great example of a phrase that's the difference between just doing a bunch of lean stuff versus having a lean System and a lean management system. Right. And yeah. And looking at system level improvement. So that's a great example Ron. And you know, you know I've been in my past life, I've been a customer at GIMB Academy and one of the things I appreciated was your guys ability to give us the management reports to see how are we leveraging the system. And we did our own internal problem solving when it started to go down, you know, the users started to go down. We said well why is that happening? And we were able to do our own internal problem solving because we had data and the leader, you know, us as leaders got involved and problem solved around well why. And then all of a sudden it, you know, it picked back up again. So that's part of that system approach is we're not just throwing something out there, we're actually going to make sure that we're using it, not just doing it again.

Wow, good stuff, man. Well, this has been a lot of fun, Greg. It's been super important conversation really to really. I hope folks take away just the whole concept of use lean, use continuous improvement. Don't just do it, you know, it's.

And just go into it with the mindset that, that you know, it's a minimum of a five year journey to just to get to the point of using Lean. Right. You can start using it but you're going to, you're going to be doing stuff before you learn how to use it. Yeah. And there's got to be that transition and you got to go into it with that mindset that, that it's, it's going to be something that takes time because if you think you're going to be lean and have a lean system and everything in 12 months, then you're, you're setting yourself up for failure. You're setting yourself up for doing Lean versus using lean.

Yeah, exactly. Good stuff. All right. Hey Greg, if folks wanted to connect with you personally, what's the, what's the best way?

Hey, yeah, great question through LinkedIn is always a great way. And then I've got my own little business, GJM Consulting LLC. So you can email me@gjmconsultingllcmail.com if you're interested in talking about anything. I'm always glad to help. Even if it's just a question to ask and have a conversation like unr. I have a lot of passion or around Lean and just love talking about it. So if that's all somebody wants to do is is chat, that's great too.

Yeah, it's Greg with two G's people. Greg. G, R, E, G, G Minor.

That's exactly right. Yeah.

And we're going to. We'll link everything up in the show notes, so everybody just kind of scroll down on whatever app you're listening to this on. We'll have all of Greg's links there for you to click on. So, hey man, this has been fun as, as always, I appreciate having you on and keep up the great work.

Sounds great, Ron. I appreciate it. Look forward to doing it again in episode, let's say, let's call it 692.

692. All right, let's go, man.

All right.

Take care, man.

You too, Ron. Thanks.

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