GA 593 | The Importance of Simplification with Dr. Lucas Chesla and Kirk Nicholas

Leaders. Leaders lead and understand that they have a role in all of this. They can be the biggest blocks. And the book being written a lot of times for leaders especially is because we, we, he and I, deal with these leaders all the time. And they want to help, but they don't know how.

Today I am excited to welcome Kirk Nicklaus and Luke Chesla to the show. Now. So Kirk and Luke have co authored a book called Revolutionize Work, a Guide to Enterprise Transformation. And so today what we do is we. Well, we, we talk about the book, but we really spent a lot of time on their backgrounds. And as you're going to hear, both of them are, are military veterans and they go into great detail about the service that they have had for our country and really start talking a lot about how they came up with what they wrote about. In particular, they sort of talk about their continuous improvement journeys with Lane and Six Sigma in the military, how it came to be, and then what really inspired them then to write this book. And so in the book they talk about five pillars, people, process, technology, data, and leadership. So sort of get into that. We get into the weeds quite a bit on what these all mean. And then how do we go about ensuring that optimization really of all these resources. And towards the end, we sort of summarize things a little bit with simplify, simplify, simplify. That maybe their main message to the world, not just really with government, but I think with anybody in any industry, is that we, for whatever reason, we human beings, like to complicate things and we like to make things harder than they need to be to whatever. I don't know why we do that, but it's just sort of be. It's sort of in our DNA for whatever reason. So they really talk about sort of how to undo some of the damage that we do when we try to overcomplicate things. So really good episode. Now, I will tell you, this one's a little bit longer than normal, but man, it was a good conversation. And before I knew it, we were at, right, about 45 minutes. So hopefully you're able to chip away at this one and get through all of it because it really is a good one. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 593. Boy, we're approaching 600. Isn't that something else?

Wow.

593. So again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 593. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Luke and Kirk, welcome to the show. How's it going, guys?

Fantastic. Thank you for having us on. I really appreciate you, Ron.

All right, where are you guys calling in from?

I'm in Tennessee.

And I am in South Texas. Hook them horns, baby.

Well, we were having a little college football talk, you know, before we hit record. So we got all kinds of weirdness going on here. We got a. I'm a Buckeye. As most listeners know. I grew up in Ohio, and.

Yeah.

But I, I, I say I truly have no hate for, for, you know, anybody but the Wolverines, you know?

Yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you guys get on okay on college football?

I don't know.

I mean, Texas has kind of had the upper hand a little bit there, I guess, recently, haven't they?

Back in my day, Texas was a big rivalry for A and M. But then again, in my freshman year at A M, the only game they won was that team that crashed their airplane. Sad as it is to say, they didn't win a game the whole season. So that'd be Marshall. Yes, exactly.

So I'm a Longhorn through and through. So Ohio State, we'll settle the score here in a couple of months. Don't.

Yeah. Yeah, it's gonna be on. Yeah, it's gonna be good. Well, hey, guys, I. I am excited to have you both on. So, as you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guests. In this case, two of you sharing a quote. So what do you.

I would just say I always love Jim Mattis and call sign chaos. Okay.

Mine has got to be this. So there is. I always say this to people. There's. There's nothing more dangerous than a man or woman without a purpose. And I believe that's the same for organizations as well. I think there's nothing more dangerous than a man or woman without a purpose. That's my favorite quote.

What's that mean to you, though?

What that means is as soon as we've lost our purpose, we don't know where we're going. I liken it to the Tasmanian Devil. You see in the Cartoo, we spin in circles, and when we spin those circles really fast and furious, we're going very quickly, but we're breaking everything that's near us, and we really aren't going anywhere. We're just. We get all crazy and we're all spun up. So if you don't have a true purpose, even with a good vision. Hey, the vision says, I'm telling you, if you don't know your purpose and everybody doesn't understand that purpose. You have like a Tasmanian Devil spinning in place and just destroying everything.

Wow.

Got it. All right, well, hey, guys, let's jump in and maybe if you guys could tell us a little bit about your. Your backgrounds. Obviously you're both into all this continuous improvement stuff these days, so maybe kind of catch us up to how that all came to be. And you guys can go in any order that you want here.

I'll always defer to Kirk first.

Okay.

Okay. Retired Marine, retired civil servant, and a former Trump political appointee in his first term. Okay. So I'd have to say as the application to the business, what Luke and I have been working on was I got my first start in doing that when they put out the message from Congress that said, you can't buy a system for over a million dollars unless you prove through process work that it's there. So I had to find a tool. I had to find people to tell me what the tool did, because I was trying to buy money for a combat development system for the Marine Corps. In other words, something that went from strategy to requirements to application and business side. And so I did some of the first BPR work at dod, which, you know, that evolved over time because then we used the same approach to re engineer the Marine Corps on its business side, not the operating forces side. So that work led to just more opportunities as the. The toolbox improvement ideas and ways to do the improvements grew, you know, with more Lean, Lean Six Sigma, Agile, you know, they just all started to pop and somewhat roll together. So part of my 35 years of experience at doing it was trying to apply some of those tools at the same time with different organizations because of the cultures. You know, the agile folks who had a more systematic view of the world, they did pretty well when we used Agile. The other ones, it was better when we used Lean or Lean Six Sigma to walk them through and understand the process. And so a couple of years ago, Luke and I had gotten Luke on a contract with me to teach Lean six stigma to the Defense Logistics Agency. And I just. Out of that, we just grew a really great friendship and discussions about, you know, the world in general, you know, the work that Luke had done in several places, the work that I had done, and, you know, Luke suggested, you know, that sounds like a book. Well, you know, more than two sentences, I'm done. So Luke would. And his wife Sarah, both would spend a huge amount of time recording me, tell stories about the work and why we did it and what it was focused on. And so it kind of became this backdrop to a strange strategic environment of a way to help both commercial and federal agencies understand that they all have customer facing, which those processes are very flexible and adaptable. The problem was always the backside of it, where hr, the finance, your logistics, your acquisition, all of that stuff existed. And for most every place I went, it was horribly broken. So it wound up with smoke jumpers and firefighters. You know, it's just they'd wait till the blow up came, then they'd try to go fix it, and they didn't understand how to fix it. So Luke and I just, we locked on to that storyline and started working on it. And so the book that we're talking to nowadays is a capture. Probably the front part of the book about what I learned, how I used it to describe ways to get better. And then what would it look like if you took it all away from a large scale transformation of everything you own into a story that could do it? And then Luke piled right in with that operational level and the tactical level, like, what are you going to do today? What if you did this? What if you got your team together? So it's a wonderful book of a marriage of a story and ways to go fix stuff, you know, so it's, we're pretty proud of it. Got a lot of people have read it, gotten some great feedback from folks about it, asking good questions. And that's what we wanted to do, was just to prime them to ask good questions so that we could guide them or actually come in and help them fix whatever it is that they were trying to do. Got it? Yeah.

All right, Luke, what about you? Tell us a little bit about yourself and, and, and fill in where Kirk left out.

Oh, just, just a brief summary. So I was, my entire adult life, I was in the Marine Corps. I'm a retired Marine. I've been almost 21 years in the Marine Corps. I was an enlisted, I was enlisted infantry. And then on the officer side, I was artillery. Well, fast forward into my career. I get to Naval Postgraduate School. I went to University of Texas, by the way. That's where that came into play is actually I was active duty at the time the program, Marine Corps sent me to Texas. Okay, Smart move on their part.

Right.

So they sent me to Texas. But then years later, I qualified for another academic program, Naval Postgraduate School, where I'm going to get my master's degree. Now, the reason I say that is because that's where I learned about this whole, like, process improvement stuff. Right. Didn't think much of it. And then I was getting near the end of my career, and they sent me to Quantico, Virginia, for my payback tour. And I knew I wanted to get my doctorate. Well, I was. As I was earning my doctorate in business, they let me use the fact that the command that I went to was supposed to have a process improvement office to take on projects and stuff and to run the program. Well, they didn't have one. So I set one up from scratch because it was there for. There was a mandate for it from the Department of Defense level. And then it went away. Anyway, long story short, it took me a few years, like, literally about three and a half, four years to set up this office. And so in the book, my part of the story is, how did I take this from scratch? Fight an uphill battle against a general who didn't even want it to be there in the first place? And it earned me my doctorate. So, like, it's kind of a triple. You know, you may say kill two birds with one stone. I killed, like, three to five birds with one stone in that particular project. But then from there, fast forward and I retire, and I just loved it. It made sense to me. And the work that we were doing for organizations just, again, it made sense. So I went out on a limb and started a company doing this stuff. So we train, consult, you know, so now I do projects. I'll try to be as general as I can for a, we'll say, Fortune 100 company. I work on a lot of projects for them. We train for. We train for those guys. We train for in every. We train from everything from the government, through financial institutions, tech companies, you name it. Everything in the gamut. And so in that book, it kind of hits on everything from. From IT and HR through manufacturing and government and acquisitions and. And you name it. So it's a smattering of all these different experiences to show that this stuff works in every. Everywhere you go, it doesn't matter where you go. If you don't think you can take Lean Concepts with you, boy, are you somebody missed. Somebody didn't teach you right. Because Lean is literally can be done in your own garage all the way through, you know, excelling at a Fortune 100, a Fortune 50 company, to the next level. Right.

Lean can be careful when you try to adjust your wife's closet.

Just be cool with that.

I can't believe you actually said that, because one of the stories we tell in 5s is when she went on vacation, I 5s'd her closet. She's actually going to Ireland tomorrow for a week. So guess what? I had that on my radar to redo her closet. So. I just cannot believe you said that, because I'm about to do that tomorrow.

Okay, well, it's good that we've got you on the podcast now, because you might not be here and.

That's right. I may be buried in the backyard somewhere with the chicken.

Right, right, right.

Awesome. All right, well, hey, first of all, thank you both for your service. Man. I do have to ask you, Luke, behind yet? We've got our cameras on so we can see each other, but the final record is just audio. But value added 616. What's the story there?

Yeah, so our company that everybody knows what the value added part is if they listen to your podcast, right? Yeah. The 616 part, though, is a double whammy. So two things. One is it was the area code in Michigan, which you don't like, because I grew up in Michigan as a Wolverine.

Yep.

So six is west Michigan, where I. Where I grew up in Rockford. Then also, though, the reason we loved it so much and it was a double whammy is because it's also for your Marvel fans. It is Planet 616. Captain Marvel says, I'm on Planet 616. That means that we're value added for the whole planet. That was the kind of joke behind its value added for the. For the whole planet. But essentially we just say put it all started in, and you're like a.

Superhero kind of thing.

You know, it's Captain Marvel. When she's on the pay phone, she calls back to where she's at. Yeah, Planet 616. So that's where the 616 part comes in.

All right.

All right.

Well, one question I always like to ask folks that write a book is I've never personally written a book. But, like, what inspired you guys to do it? Like, what problem, you know, are you trying to solve with the book?

I'll give the inspiration and then turn.

It over to Kirk.

The inspiration, from my perspective was I had a mentor. Kirk is as. As you can tell, he's handsome as I'll get out, but he's slightly. Slightly older than I am. He has so much experience locked up in that little brain of his that he was just. He just kept giving to me and giving to me and giving to me freely, and I loved it. And I'm like, okay, stop talking. I'm gonna record you. I need to record this. And we need to take this into a book. Because people need to understand the journey of where this all began, all the way to where it is now and how it can go and still useful for the future. And so I basically wanted. I shut his spigot off in his brain for a little bit and said, let's pause, frame and turn this into a book. Because you are strategic and I am operational and tactical. And so it's like together, together, all the layers of implementation are there and people need to hear this story. And so that's my inspiration of where it started.

Kirk, what about you?

I think more so in recognizing where I was in my career versus where Luke was. And it was kind of frustrating a little bit for me because I had left the DLA contract to come take care of my father in law who had cancer, and I came down to Tennessee to take care of him. I was kind of off the map somewhat, but I felt like I still had something to give. I just wasn't quite sure about how to lay that out in some kind of volume for people to read, to understand, ask questions, you know, that they had people that were available to discuss it with him. And that's when in that conversation Luke said we should make a book. So I liked the approach that we did because Luke would just make me sit and talk and then flap some other apps on top of whatever it was I said to get out all the harsh words and make it resonate. And it evolved over the course of even writing it. We just tightened and tightened and tightened the story down to pieces. So it's like a. I think for me it was the first time anybody had really produced a book that was focused primarily on leadership. For them to understand their world and how it could resonate and how they could not be the smoke jumpers and firefighters and, you know, going down with micromanagement through a function pipeline into a whole enterprise of different kinds of work, some intersecting, some not, some consciously connected to a front end of another one. Just stuff like that that we had seen, you know. You know, because my last maybe 10 years with the experience of applying what I Learned in the 90s, in the early 2000s with the stand up and Department of Homeland Security, I used that model to help Mike Cooper, who was the CIO for DHS when they first stood up about what they could do and how to make it easier and you know, I did the immigration system, a couple other places like that that just the conversation was easier for me to have with leaders when you would get down to lower levels, you know, that's where I Had a lot of guys who were very great at project work and detail work who could do that. But I was always trying to teach them, don't teach the tool, teach the story. You know, I said, map their process, but use the one they did when they did it on a whiteboard or, you know, paper on the wall. Keep that in their spaces to remind them that's their story. And they can always talk about how they went from darkness to sunlight and wildlife, flowers and stuff growing up around them. That was important. I think at that point was all the lean Six Sigma and I managed like three of the five dods and I had the army, which produced in a three year time frame, some of it in the theater overseas, $54.6 billion in hard dollar savings and cost avoidance. And people would just said, you're lying. I said, well, here's the good part. I didn't put that together. The financial officer for the army did.

He better not be lying.

Yeah, I just said, yeah.

He said they got bigger problems.

Yeah, he was getting upset as well because, you know, he's, he was running into the frustration about leadership assigning, you know, fake hairy problems to one guy function. So I always told people that approach was always like solving brain cancer with a proctologist. You were coming at it from the wrong end. So, you know, you just tied those kinds of things together. For leadership to understand, you don't need to know if all the bolts are tight. You know, you don't even need to know, you know, certain levels of things in there. You just need to know you're going to get to where you told people you were going to be, you were going to deliver what you told them you were going to deliver. And you were going to be transparent about the work and the cost of the work getting done. That's your role of growing people who believe in the same concept and are agreeable to being transparent to that in order for it to work. So, you know, I'd spend a lot of time with leaders over that 35 years. I was a very privileged young man to get put into some big roles and responsibilities. When I came back to Washington D.C. as a major and then later on when I was GS15 in different places that, you know, that shine that was on senior leaders, that stuff faded really quick, you know, so I could, you know, being out of uniform, I could sit down and have very frank conversations with them like, why are you doing that? Well, no, nobody's in here but you and I, and I'm. You're lying to Me. So let's sit down and talk through this. And I want to understand your connectivity to where you're at now and where I think you can be. So it was just a wonderful life experience and I felt like with Luke as my partner that we would be the best two guys to share that story and make it work.

Okay, well, I want to jump in a little bit on some, some aspects of the book and, and we won't be able to get through everything here just in a 30 minute conversation or so because you guys uncovered a lot. But I know in the book you guys explain an enterprise model and I'm wondering if you could maybe sort of unpack that a little bit for us. Talk about like, what is the model and why did you, why, why did you present it the way you did?

That model came right out of my first big project with the Marine Corps and it's called the enterprise model and it demonstrates the two enterprises that live in every corporation and federal agency. There is a side that has a customer facing role, you know, the customers of all different brands and types, but they're very flexible, adaptable, lean, you know, they understand mission consistency and stuff. But there's the other side that nobody understood. That was the business enterprise. And the business enterprise was responsible for taking in emerging requirements to be worked and funded through a filter of a capability based strategy to, you know, define do we have enough already that we can do that? Are we going to have to build something new? Or that's just a requirement that that's really out of our ball league, we need to pass it off to somebody else. So it's a very simple dynamic of starting with capability based strategy to requirements management and then to understand hr, finance, logistics, acquisition, all of those are all supply chain models. They're not complicated, but they make them complicated. So you're just trying to say, look, you buy, build, deliver and sustain. That's your job on the business side. And you should very well know what it costs to maintain or sustain that model year in and year out. You know, it's like, you know, we're going to get this much money and they say, well, we're going to take half of it and buy shit. No you're not. Okay. You know, because what's going to happen is the core capabilities in those supply chains are going to come apart because they're not being sustained. So then you had a really good idea. If you knew that sustainment picture, even broad over time, it would let you know how much you could invest and then prioritize your investments based on the requirements and capabilities that were needed by the business, by the overall enterprise to do it. So it was to demonstrate, particularly for the military, a guy can be a great war fighter. But coming back to the business side, many of them just don't get it. The reason being, unlike being a Marine or a soldier, whatever, you grow up in a culture that you know inside of you, you know everything there is to know about how to make it operate. But you're dependent on an organization that has a whole different mindset, a lot of civilians in it, etc, to try to get that work done. And so what the generals would do is they'd come back and they'd say, well, I'm going to fix this. They get their best buddy, make him their operations guy. And all work went to that. And so it just, it keep consistently showing that, you know, if you don't understand the work and how you do it and the type of individuals and tasks and how much does it cost if you don't know that you're going to break your bank. So every year you watch it, particularly with the Army. The army gets onto a big thing. It's either like the new helicopter, a tank or something and they base everything they're going to do for the next 10 years on that. They blow through billions of dollars. And then one of the generals comes in and says, I'm going to stop that. We're never going to get it done. So it's just this cycle of death that was going on in there and trying to teach them about how they could stop doing that consistently was, was a big win for me. But it took a lot of time discussing leadership and not confusing them with, you know, you know, all the different kind of types of analytical tools that you could use. It was just to say, you need to get your leaders together and quit drawing pictures of yellow brick roads. You need to draw a picture what you all agree are the consistent and time over capabilities that you're trying to defend. Because you do like an NFL football team, you tackle, you pass, you run. You do the same things all the time in every war, but there are instances where it changes. So if it changes, you know how much you can tear down another capability to get that one taken care of. And so that was a lot of the focus, you know, for the concepts that came out through the story in the book. Lessons learned, some major disasters, some great unknown successes, but the story was good.

All right, well in the book you guys lay out five pillars. So there's people process Technology, data and leadership. So either one of you can take this one. Why do you guys present these the way that you did? And why do you believe they're the foundation?

So in the five pillars, this is actually one of my favorite parts of the book. So think of like a game of Jenga. When you're playing a game of Jenga, you're pulling out one stick at a time. You're trying to see who doesn't knock down the pillar. Right? That's exactly what people process, technology, leadership and data are. Every one of those pieces, when they're in perfect alignment like that. Think about your Jenga game when it's all stacked up, just came out of the box. You could put like 100 pound weight on the top of that thing. It's going to be just fine. Right? It can take all this compression and it can flex, it can bend a little bit. But as soon as you start pulling that out and you start the game, that's exactly what happens in an organization. You're like, oh, our leadership is now pulling his kind of out of alignment over here because they're working on some other. They said this was the vision, this is what everybody else is tracking. We've lost it. Okay, well, now we've pulled that string out, then it's like, oh, well, now they're starting a new Jenga game over to the side. It's the same. It kind of just pick any one of those. I know we're kind of limited on time here, but pick any one of those and they all have a detrimental effect that is associated with each one. When you don't have your people understanding what the leadership wants, what the data is or are.

Right.

Whatever the correct wording is there, you know, and how to use it, how it answers questions, how to. Or how does it help them to ask better questions, you know, and we're not, we're not training people right on it. I mean, we're in a big hurt there. We got high turnover nowadays. Why? Because there's this culture of it's not about loyalty to the company. Well, why? Because they're not being taken care of. I mean, again, I'm not going to go down these deep rabbit holes, but all this stuff plays in. So people process. And then the last one there, I mean, he's talked a lot about the process as far as kind of skipping over the process piece there. We've. He's discussed that quite a bit. So the people process technology, we've got things at our fingertips and we're trying To AI our way out of people in jobs. Well, that's making people more angry. You know, again, they're leaving. When AI and these other technologies and stuff, we delete, delete, delete from the processes. That actually comes from the Walter Isaacson book with Elon Musk says he goes in there and Elon says one thing, delete, delete, delete. But then what did Elon go back and do in the same book in Walter Isaacson, he went back and had to add stuff back in there. Well, in that time there are a lot of damages caused. Right. So it just happened with Doge to delete, delete, delete. That's the chainsaw effect that you keep talking about with him. So again, we're starting to use technologies, they're coming out, they're fun, we like to use them. But we're starting to use them to replace our humans rather than the old school kind of Toyota version of it was to use it to supplement the humans.

Yeah.

And so I think we've just got to, we have to almost do a tactical pause for a minute at organizations and say there is a cost benefit analysis that has to be done. That's more than just getting rid of people and putting in automations.

Right.

I mean there's so much more to this mathematical formula. People process, technology, leadership and data and all of those things. Like I said, just to sum it up, think of it as a game of Jenga. Each one you pull out is dangerously close to knocking the pile over. And so and each one you pull out, imagine this, two outside forces are acting on it. So it's almost like you're pulling out a piece and you're two year old. I've had five kids, so my two year old will say I have, my youngest is 19 but when she was two she'd come up and poke the game of Jenga, you know, and then it's rocking back and forth, right? Oh shoot. Or they're running around and playing and you know, they're wrestling around, they bump the table. So it's these are these external forces are acting on that game of Jenga. So not only are pulling parts out one by one, you're also having external forces acting on it that are causing it to sway. And just it's a recipe for that one. 1 millimeter of misalignment more and the whole thing crumbles down. And many organizations are there right now. I'll be quiet.

One thing as a side note, I didn't plan to ask this, but I want to. I'M curious to get your thoughts and maybe start with you, Kirk. What's your take on the world as it is today with ChatGPT and you know, all these AI tools out there, like what are your thoughts on, on where we are with, with this part of I don't know the world?

Sure, good question. So I'm an analog guy who now works in a digital world. So the part that I find to be tempting for me is the fact that when we started it in the late 80s in the federal sector, the promise was you're going to get two or three days, maybe three days, four days, who knows? Because it will take care of a lot of that hand jamming stuff that you had to do. So here we are, 35 years later, the biggest organization in the enterprise is the IT outfit because we keep buying systems, we're trying to integrate them. They have different writing codes. It's just a zoo. You spending more time on it thinking that it is going to replace people and labor of people. So when I talk to people about the story, I said I always start with it's people working in a process, all that other stuff downrange with the technologies and that type of stuff that folds up under. When you get your good enterprise model set, you may find out you only need one system to drive the whole organization, not 285. So I think it's nice that there's that kind of stuff out there, but it's never going to replace people. And the reason why is nobody trusts it. You know, they say, well this is a picture we did that somebody finally figures out no, that was AI. Well I don't want my IT system lying to me. You know, that's hard enough to deal with it as it is today. But I do need systems to move data through the model so that can be captured in the right version and at the right time. That's what systems should do. And so instead of handwriting like we used to papers and documents and policies, you know, we keyboards and computers and this, that helps us do that. But I don't trust it because now you're starting to create tools that can lie based on who's doing it. And so you know, I'm, I'm pretty people, people, people lie people because we're always going to have people.

No, I guess what I was trying to play a devil's advocate. I, I don't disagree with you but somebody's listening right now, freaking out. So I want to speak for them like so when we worry about AI or chat GBT lying or hallucinating, which it does. I mean, we all know it. The argument is, but human beings also lie. You know, you look at the scandals of the Fortune 50 when you look.

At an individual, we have physical signs in our face and our eyes and our hand movement that industrial psychologists can lay out for you. And go, he just told you three straight lies. Well, I don't know if the AI did because number one, I didn't even know it was AI. I thought it was a real person talking to me. So, yeah, it's that part about going, we want people in the work because it's their enthusiasm, it's their dedication, it's their desire to make things do really good work that, that evolves over time. With the changes of culture over time, the systems are racing around trying to get out in front of it. And the next thing you know, there's AIII and you know, chat a bit, chat a lot. And they just keep evolving. But their contribution sometimes isn't as good as getting a team together and talking to them about the works going on before you start putting data into the system or, you know, the data is clear because we know, you know, we've got the call sign for the data that's valued and it's true. As much as you can make it that you want to extract from. Yeah, I don't know if we get chat and AI in the middle of it, can I trust that data for me to be able to use to help them solve problems in the right place and the right time? So analog, Bubba, talking somewhat digital, who's probably still out by Mars somewhere.

Yeah, no, it's all good.

I appreciate it.

So maybe to wrap things up, I'm wondering if we could. Could talk just a little bit about. You mentioned earlier, some of the cuts and some of the challenges that were that we're facing. But talk about how in, in your book, you guys respond to these, these pressures and the demand for results. Like, what's the message that you guys.

Want the first part of it? Because this is what I've been talking to large numbers of people up in D.C. somebody came in with the axe and the machete and chainsaw and tore it all apart. Well, the federal government still needs to have structure. It still needs to be accountable, it still needs to get the things done for the public on both international and national fronts. But they don't have it. They just got the crap whacked out of them. And nobody knows if one of those saw blades took out the heart. So there's no blood flowing someplace you need to come back in. Even if DOGE is still working, we can better point DOGE at problem areas, big scale, that are money driven, that we can then come back and ask those questions is what that organization doing contributing to the health and welfare of the American public. But if you don't restructure the government around the theme that is in this book about being transparent, you know, integrated processes working together driven by a common strategy. If you don't do that, if you keep doing Doge, you're going to have a bigger mess than what you started with. That's my cut. And I know Luke's got some thoughts on that too.

I think we need to go back to the, the actual basics. I think we've gotten so far ahead of ourselves nowadays. Like again, I'm going to reiterate the conversation I on chat GPT and AI. And do I use AI yet? You're dang right I do. We get together, we talk about our problem statement, our business case, all that, and we take all our bullets and put it into chat GPT and it makes a beautiful business case and boom, it gets signed off that much faster because we didn't argue semantics. Okay, do I use it? You're dang right I do. But, but what we've got to do is we've got to back it up a little bit. This. I mean, think about what happens when you go to, you know, you're in the NBA championship, your, your college football championship, whatever. What do they always preach Recently? Yes. Ohio State. So Day coach have gone in that locker room and not had much to say. Coach Day would have been like, hey, I'm, I'm assuming it's like you guys got here by, by mastering the basics. Yeah, right. Coach Day would have done like, hey, you guys beat Texas by sticking to the game plan and mastering the basics. That is exact. I'm. I'm guessing that's what somebody like him would have said. Now I say that and there's lots of sports analogies and stuff in here today. But the thing is, is if we step back with all this stuff that Doge had happened, there are plenty of concepts. Is Lean your answer? Not the full answer. Is Six Sigma? No. Is Agile No. Collectively is the, is the whole toolkit of Lean, Six Sigma Agile, Human centered design, Design thinking and list goes on. You know, you know, all these different things we have, if we, if we can take these collectively together and use them for their intended purpose. Right. Not the chainsaw, not cutting people off, not Replacing jobs, but getting back to the basics of how do we run a well structured organization that's in alignment, People, process, technology, leadership and data straight up and down the Jenga. The Jenga block is solid. How do we get to that point? We take all these concepts, all these things we know, all these things we've learned and we don't just dump them on the front line and say go execute. We don't just dump them on middle manager say, make sure they go execute. We dump it on leadership too. That says let's cast the vision and give the purpose, make sure we're all in alignment and understand from the leadership down. And we take these things and say, now how can I as leaders support the managers who are supporting the people doing it on the front line? Right? So my answer for this is what do we do in this post Doge world? We go back to the basics of what's lean about finding and identifying waste and removing these things. Right. How do we get rid of stuff? We've had seven bosses who have added 17 different steps in knee jerk reactions in the past decade.

Good.

Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Let's go back to the original. So in summary, because this is a podcast, not an entire thesis here, but in summary, we've got to come back to the basics and I'm going to go right back to the people, process, technology and leadership and in the alignment, my game of Jenga. And we've got to put the sticks back into place and build a solid, a solid structure that can take my kids whacking the table and it can bend and twist and turn a little bit and it's going to be okay. And that comes back to leaders on leaders casting vision, knowing their roles, leaders understanding their role and how to support this say stuff, this continuous improvement, this isn't frontline. Execute managers, make sure it gets done. It's leaders. Leaders lead and understand that they have a role in all of this. They can be the biggest blocks. And the book being written a lot of times for leaders especially is because we've, we, he and I deal with these leaders all the time and they want to help, but they don't know no how. They yeah, they don't mean to be the roadblock, but they're the ones removing Jenga sticks and don't even know it. And so that's so my answer for what do we do with Doge and how do we simplify is to simplify, get rid of the clutter in your brain. You get rid of the new fangled lean 7.0 and this and that. Stop, stop, stop. Go back to the original. What was the intention? What was the heart of the law back then?

Yeah.

Lean your processes out. Use your data to remove that variation. Create processes, you know, get your people aligned. You know, aligned around these processes. Have managers who know what their role is, how to support them, getting, you know, running these smooth and effective processes. Have leaders who are casting vision, identifying the purpose of the organization. It's known throughout the organization. And they're able to support this entire concept of this solid Jenga structure.

Right.

Go back to the basics. As Coach Day would have said when he beat my Longhorns, go back to the basics and don't turn away from the game plan. Stop pivoting every 10 minutes, because that's the. The new word nowadays is pivot. Yeah. Okay, careful. You're going to pivot yourself in circles like the Tasmanian Devil. That's what people are doing like, ooh, pivot's a cool word. Well, I'm going to pivot this quarter. Pivot this quarter. Pivot this quarter. Timeout. Timeout. That's not what it means.

Yeah.

It doesn't mean pivot until you're. You're spinning and spitting like the Tasmanian Devil. It means only pivot when something requires it at a grand strategic scale.

Yeah. The phrase that keep coming in my head when you guys both were talking is simplify, simplify, simplify.

Yes. Yeah. None of it's that complicated.

No, it's not.

And so I wanted to give you one point, Ron. Now you can see why a guy who's 72 years old gets all liquored up when I hang out with Luke. This is just how this stuff starts revolving, you know, and it's just we've had some of the most mind blowing conversations over things that we both had that nugget, and it just. It came out in conversations and just fit together.

How did you guys meet?

When brought Luke on for Lean Six Sigma training on a Defense Logistics Agency contract. Okay. That was how we met. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was. And it was through. In passing. Just. Just previous to that. I met him literally briefly through a mutual friend, Dr. Scott Bonney, who's probably the most connected person in the entire Lean world.

Yeah.

But Dr. Scott Bonney had brought us on at, we'll say, said fortune, you know, 500 company or Fortune 100, whatever. And then Kirk and I passed because we were doing training for them, and so we met briefly and then fast forward, he's at dla. And then they needed training and then he brought us on.

Okay, got it.

Yeah, got it.

Wow, guys, this has been some conversation. Something tell us, man, we need to do a part two or something because I have a feeling there's a lot we didn't talk about. But yeah, I really do first of all appreciate both of you for taking time. And again, as I mentioned, thank you both for your service to our country. We are deeply indebted to you both. So thank you for that. Maybe to wrap things up, if you have any sort of like final words of wisdom. Let us, let us hear that. And then also how can people connect with both of you?

Well, the easy one would be get the book, read the book and then just call us. Yeah, it's like I've had a couple of guys who picked up the book and they've read it and they wanted clarification on some points in there and they said how much is this going to cost? Whatever you're paying on your phone bill, I want you to pick this book up and start to use it. And we are available. You know, you can see it, find it in the book. You can find us on indeed, you can find us everywhere to start that conversation. And if you want top down approach to helping your organization get healthy again and get happy with the work that they do, Luke and I and a whole host of characters are available and can roll into health help day one.

Love it.

Yeah, Luke, mine would have to be know your role in order for this to be a culture of simplify, simplify, simplify. Everybody has to know their role. Everyone plays a role. Some less, some more.

Yep.

But everybody has. So for my world, words of wisdom would be in order for you to have a culture that is able to, to stay above or stay in front of that curve is in staying up with the technology. But yet at the same time balancing people, process technology, data, leadership is know your role. That'll help you to simplify things. Because if everybody knows a role and executes a role, guess what? We have that alignment. We have our full game of Jenga right out of the box.

Awesome. Yeah.

All right, well and then in the show notes we'll get you guys contact information or LinkedIn accounts, whatever you got. And so and connect with you guys. Is LinkedIn probably a good way for both of you?

LinkedIn is. LinkedIn is probably the best way. And then Our website is www.valueatted616.com.

Yeah, got it.

Yeah, we'll have it all linked up on the show notes for people to go go connect with with Luke and Kirk. So thanks again guys. I appreciate it.

Thanks Ron.

Thank you Ron for having us on. Yeah, we appreciate you man.

Take of care.

Take care.

You too.

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