GA 595 | Dynamic Work Design with Don Kieffer

Team was made up of four people, two salary people, and two union people. And the salary guy sat me down after the audit of the plant. He said, don, I'm sorry, we can't use your plant for the tour. He failed the audit. And I said, oh, I looked at the score. Yeah, I was pretty low. So the union guy says, yeah, you suck.

Today I'm excited to welcome Don Kieffer to the show. Now Don, as you'll hear, has a really strong, deep background in all sorts of manufacturing and different environment, work environments. And now he's affiliated with MIT and he spends a lot of time now really focused on knowledge work. And Don has actually written a book. He co authored a book called There's Got to be a Better Way. And so today what we did was we talked quite a bit about the things that they're writing about in the book. And in particular there's something called a dynamic work design that dawn is passionate about. And so we sort of open up with that on like, what is a dynamic work design and how it different from more familiar frameworks. And so that, that, that, that led to some interesting conversation. And then again, he's got lots of experience and lots of years of research that he's done and so we kind of get into some, some ideas of some things that bug him or surprise him even today. And that opened up quite a bit of a conversation. So it was a really fun conversation. And again, don't got a lot of, a lot of experience and a lot of wisdom to share. So I think you're going to enjoy this one. So show notes can be found over at GE. Look for episode 595 again, GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 595. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Don, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It's good. Happy to be here, Ron. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, my pleasure. So where are you calling in from?

I'm currently in Boston.

Okay. All right. All right. Well, I'm excited for, for today's interview, Don. So maybe to kind of get us going, we like always begin with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, I have two actually. One is, I'm sure everyone knows this one and they've heard it a million times. It's from a guy by the name of Hajim Moba, who was a Toyota guy and one of the guys that, I guess my original sensei guy really spent some time with me and his big question, which I adopted And I've repeated a million times, which is, what's the problem you're trying to solve? And, you know, that really rings true, especially when you're working in complicated businesses and with higher management, and they're always talking in solutions. And this became my mantra. Got me in trouble a lot. My boss would say, don, I want you to do this, do this, do this. I go, well, that's great, Jim, but what's the problem you're trying to solve? Which just got him angry. Just do what I tell you. So, anyway, it's a very powerful question, as I'm sure everyone in the audience knows.

Yeah. In fact, we actually have made up, like little. I don't know if they're buttons or whatever. We have handed them out at conferences, literally, with the. With the statement, what problem are you trying to solve? You know, because. Yeah, it's so prevalent that, you know, people get enamored with tools or whatever it might be. But, like, why are you even using the tool? Like, what are you trying to accomplish? Right. So, yeah. Fantastic. All right. Well. Hey, and you have another one. You had a second.

I have one from Taiichi Ono from his book, and it's kind of relevant to the conversation with me. And he was talking about the difference between the Ford production system, mass production System in the 30s, and the Toyota production system. He says, I have no intention of criticizing Henry Ford. Rather, I'm critical of Ford's successors who have suffered from excessive dependence on the authority of the Ford system precisely because it has been so powerful and created such wonders of industrial productivity. However, times change, and I think that same lesson is one for us to think about considerably hard, because the Lean movement has been going a lot of years, and a lot of it's turned into very programmatic elements and people repeating and repeating and repeating. And I'm not sure they all understand some of the things they're repeating, the rules and the tools and I think. So it's really important to think about that question. What's the problem you're trying to solve? What are we really trying to do here rather than are we just teaching a program that some, you know, three generations down from the people that invented it?

Yeah.

And not really understanding why.

Yeah. In fact, it makes me think. And we were chatting a little bit even before we hit record, and people didn't hear that part. But, you know, based on what we've talked about already, like one of the. The statements that kind of comes into my mind a lot and has for many, many years as it relates to just continuous improvement in general is simplify, simplify, simplify. You know, like, how do we simplify all aspects of our work, Simplify our thinking, you know, just the way we communicate, you know, that sort of thing. So maybe the kids are onto something with these text messages, right? They're just like.

Maybe, maybe not so.

Many every day, but yeah, right, right. So. All right, well, good stuff. Well, hey, Don, tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into the sort of the topic. Tell us about your backgr and then what you're up to these days.

I call myself basically a factory rat. I went to work after high school in a machine shop and other frontline work, but mostly worked in metal machining. Worked my way up. Thirty years later, I was a VP of Harley Davidson running an engine plant and quite successful. And my kind of shtick was I was a problem solver as a natural problem solver. And I just kept finding my ways to bigger and more complex problems. And that's how I got where I was. And. But around 2000, I just had a huge awakening when the Ford, Ford company want to use our plant, our engine plant as a. On a visit for one of their seminars for the Ford production system. And they. So they came and did an audit, and they didn't look at really what we were doing, which was we were tremendously successful, but they audited us against the Ford production system. And of course we failed because we weren't following all their rules. And so they. The one team was made up of four people, two soured people, and two union people. And the sour guy sat me down after the audit of the plant. He said, don, I'm sorry, we can't use your plant for the tour. You failed the audit. And I said, oh, I looked at the score and yeah, I was pretty low. So the union guy says, yeah, you suck. And okay, you know, you have no idea what you're doing because he's auditing against Ford system. So that. That really shook me because I had been successful for a long time. Kind of a. I had gotten an engineering degree along the way, but kind of a pull up by my bootstraps. Had every job in the factory and. And by every external internal measure, the company was doing great. I was doing great. And it's like, what am I missing? And it was a big turning point for me because I could have said, hey, Harley's making a ton of money. I'm a vice president. You know, these guys have no clue what they're talking about. But instead, I decided to dig in. And, and it led me to Toyota, which I'd read some about, but I didn't really understand a lot about Toyota. And I talked to a guy by the name of Haji Moba, who ran the Toyota supplier support center for many years and he, he came and helped me. That, that totally blew my mind. And my 30 years of experience in manufacturing turned out to be not that really helpful at all, at all with what he told me. And the other thing that happened to me was there was an MIT social scientist who Harley hired to help them figure out what the next level of quality was. And his basic answer was, well, you've really fixed manufacturing, so the next period of quality, next place in quality is fix the design. And at the time I was running Harley's biggest engine project in 215 years, the engine they still have the twin cam 88. And so I said, you need to go see this guy Kiefer. He's kind of tearing things up. And so we had lunch together and I was, I'm like 15 years older than him. I was like excited like a kid. I was showing him all the things I had I'd done and he looked at some of them and he's like a old, wise old soul. And he goes like, Don, why don't you read a book once in a while? This was invented 15 years ago in the automotive industry. And another thing I showed him, he says, which I thought was kind of dumb, he goes, no, I'm really interested in this because the literature says you should do exactly the opposite of what you do. And you've had stunning results. And I went, this guy I'm going to hang around with. And that was Nelson Repenning, my, my co author of the book I'm here to pitch. And that was in 1996, Ron. And so for 30 years we've been making changes and fixing stuff and then with his help, putting rigor and science behind, why did that work? And really trying to get beyond the rules and tools and the principles about leadership. Like, what is this about human work? What works with human work? No matter what industry it's in, no matter if it's intellectual or physical work, what is it about human work? And what are the. Can we discover the principles and make it go even faster? And so that's what we've been doing for nearly 30 years.

So what's the name of the book?

Name of the book is There's Got to Be a Better Way.

So I'm always curious to ask people, authors I've never. I mean, I've written enough material for 30 books probably over the years, but I've not published a single one. So I'm always curious, like, why, why, why did you write a book? I mean, you're obviously very successful and all the rest of it. I don't think you need the accolades or anything like that, I don't imagine. But like, like, what problem are you trying to solve with the book?

We felt we were onto something different. And in fact about, I think in the early teens, Nelson Repenning, my MIT colleague who's an academic, he said, donna, I think we're onto something different. He says we're doing stuff different. He knows all about Toyota production system and all this kind of stuff. He goes, I think we're onto something different. He took some time off and he read all the literature all the way back to Frederick Taylor, and he goes, there's something different here. I can see what it is. And we need to record it. So I think we were getting stunning results in all kinds of industries really quickly, almost doing counterintuitive stuff than the regular lean movement. We don't do any training, we start small. We're very light touch. We don't run any programs. Very kind of counterintuitive. And. But it's very successful. And I think we wanted to record it, wanted to write it down for two reasons. One, when you write a book, you can't just talk loosely like we're talking. Every word's got to make sense. And then with, with an academic working with you, it's got to be right and it's got to be true, fact checked that there's no one else doing. It's actually got to be something new. And so we worked for several years on it. We finally got it. And in this space, in the lean space or the improvement space, I wouldn't call it lean. We don't say we're lean. But in the work improvement, productivity space, there are like just hundreds and hundreds of books. And so a lot of people would read the proposal and say, what's different here? And it took us a long time to really figure out what was different, get it on paper. We knew what we were doing was different, but we wanted to get on paper. We also teach this at the, at the mit, the MBA and the executive mba. And so we've had hundreds and hundreds of, maybe thousands of students who've had to do projects we supervise. We had unbelievable results in all kinds of industries. So we had a lot of feedback from the field in Our own consulting work and in this, that there was something different here and we wanted to capture it, to get it out.

Okay, all right, well, very good. So. So you mentioned MIT, so how long have you been affiliated with MIT?

I've been a senior lecturer there since 2008.

Oh, wow. Okay. All right, well that's good stuff. So are you, I assume you're obviously familiar with Mr. Womack and his work and machine to change the world and all that. So I'm curious, like, is this, like are you sure hope that this is the next machine to change the world or, or what? Because, because that book did, I would argue, change the world, at least from a productivity and manufacturing perspective.

He actually created the word lean and. Well, I'll let other people decide.

We think John Pajek, I think was the first one to use the word lean but made it popular.

So I'll let other people decide. But we do think it's important and something that's got a fresh look especially I think it's got a unique look at intellectual and knowledge work. That's where we've really focused for the last over 20 years.

Yeah, and I would argue that's been a very under appreciated aspect of, of continuous improvement really is, you know, I won't say it's easy to streamline, you know, manufacturing processes or whatnot because they're not easy, but, but you can see it and you can touch it and a lot of times in this information world you can't always see it and touch it. And there's this weird thing with personalities and human beings and all that, that doesn't always work as well. So together. Well, hey, let's jump in. So the first question is on this idea of a dynamic work design. And so I'm wondering if you just flesh out like what is a dynamic work design and how is it maybe different from other frameworks?

Well, most people that work in business are used to static work designs. So like the organizational chart is an example of a static work design. You put it on the wall, you change it maybe every 18 months or maybe more often than that if you're in a crazy organization. The human resource policies, those are all kind of piece of static design. Whether you're going to be hierarchical or more collaborative, people decide kind of the culture and then they structure the organization around that. But those structures don't really tell you what to do when work starts moving. So imagine from an org chart, a piece of work comes in from one side as an idea, whether it be physical or intellectual product and it moves to that organization. And everyone in that organization has some sort of role to play, be it indirect or direct, on getting that work out. That org chart doesn't tell you anything about how that work moves through the system. I often ask executives, I say, can you draw me the organizational chart that you work? And they go, yeah. I said, how long do you need? Oh, like five minutes. And they, they draw the hierarchy. I said, okay, now draw how a piece of work moves through that organization. And they give me rainbows, they give me waterfalls, they give me houses that we collaborate, they give me spaghetti diagrams that say, I don't really know. We start here. We have silos, we have processes. Out somewhere comes the end product. We're not really used to understanding the actual physical work as it moves from person to person, especially in intellectual work. In physical work, it's easier because you can go see it, as you said, but think about mapping a decision or a contract or a science discovery or new product development. It's really hard. So I think that's what we've done is when we do that and we can map it and put it on the wall, then you can actually see intellectual work moving, give it a visible face. Now we can see the word, just like in physical work. You can see where it's piled up, where it's moving quickly. And then we can go attack it together instead of sitting around in meetings telling stories. Well, the old story about the. We're one month away from the project being launched, and up till now it's been on time and one month before, suddenly we're six months behind because all of these hidden problems. So now that we can make that work visible, we can actually see it and interact it, much like you can dynamically in the factory floor and physical work, where when work stops moving, there's a problem called the andon cord, people go solve the problem and work on it.

So what's your favorite approach then? If you're going to sort of walk into Gemba Academy here and, you know, we're arguably combination of knowledge work and producing videos. And so there's some physical work, but like, what would you. Would you want to sort of just observe or would you be asking questions or want to see what sort of like, flowcharts we have or whatever? Like, how would you go about it?

First thing I'm doing is ask you the question that's on your button. What's the problem you're trying to solve? That's where we always start. Where's the problem? This is not about being lean or being dynamic. It's about making the business better. So we always, always start with, where's the problem? Let's dig into that.

What if they don't know? Because many times they don't know. Or they could just say, so I barely made payroll last week. Right. Like that's a problem. Right? Okay, so is it a sal problem? Is it a marketing problem? Is it a product part problem? Like, and so forth? Like, how would you go about sort of digging around that?

Well, actually that's the first part of the work because most people don't know what the problem is even when they think they do. Like, the problem is we need new software. The problem is we need AI. Or the problem is the salespeople need training. Or the problem is that there's no motivation. People aren't bought in all these kinds of attributions and solutions and people don't really know where it is. Well, I think it's a sales problem. So we actually. Can you quantify it? What is it? They don't know. So we actually help them kind of delayer that, get to the bottom of it, untangle that knot. And sometimes even when they come up with a good problem statement, for example, well, sales are at 47%. They should be at 57%. Okay, great, let's go look at that. Oftentimes we get into it and it's. The problem is actually different than they thought. When we go investigate much, much as with.

Or you have a lousy product that nobody wants to buy. Right. Like you could have the best salespeople and you have a lousy product no one wants to buy.

Exactly. That's the same thing people find with physical products and lean. Someone says there's a problem and you go to find out. Well, there's actually four things going on here, none of which people knew about. But the same thing happens in intellectual work. So that's always our first step is to sit down with the leaders and get a good problem statement to work on. And then, and then we go investigate.

Talk a little bit of maybe. I don't know if, I mean, obviously don't share anything. Not supposed to, but do you have any, like, maybe examples of situations where you've, you've, you've done just that? Again, don't, you know, name names or anything like that, but maybe just some tangible examples of where you've gone in and helped organizations who were flailing or whatever you want to call it and you know, you helped them sort of gain some alignment, maybe in that early phase, like you said, of, of figuring out the point of cause, if you will.

Well, you know, I've been doing this for about 20 years. So I trying to think of it. Our biggest running case is the Broad Institute in Cambridge. They do DNA sequencing, so they have a huge lab and they get tissue samples from all over the place, thousands and thousands of them, and they turn that into data and they give that data to research scientists. That industry grew out of the Human Genome project in around 2000 and you know, it took them $5 billion to get the first one. And now they do like one every 20 minutes and they do tens of thousands. But when they. The woman heading it was a student of ours and she got promoted. The lab was in three sections and they promoted her just as she was graduating to combine those three sections. And she said, I know what I want to do, I just don't know how to get there. Actually, she had two problems. We walked through the lab and it was a total push system. There were samples everywhere, multiple priority list. We had to just create a quick pull system starting from the sequencing machines back, which straightened out the lab. It took about six or eight months. The amount of change in that technology Ron is going and magnitude of order faster than than chips are. So the prices are dropping, the speeds are going up. So the other problem was the influx of technology they had. They were crushed with all these technological projects. And it was again a typical push system on the technology side. So many projects that would be try to jam through a small knothole, they were all late. And so we actually had to put a visual board. And one of the things that the woman did, Sheila Dodges, her name is. I said, Sheila, you first have to get the targets. What are you trying to ask people to do? And it took her two weeks to just think through to quantify what she was really asking people to do. And six weeks later they had those targets up and then they had a big board of all the science activities they were having. She said, don, we got it right. I have one question for. Are all those little post IT notes with the activities, is that what's going to meet the targets? And she said, no, that's just what we have going. So, okay, you got to take half of them down and match the activity set with a problem set. So that's kind of the same dynamic we see a lot of places is that they're doing a lot of work, but the match between a clear target and the reason behind it and the actual activities people are doing. Are not matched at all. And that gets back to the same idea was basically a pull system, but it's a little more complex to do it in that environment, but the idea is the same.

So obviously you've been at this for a minute or two in your career. I'm wondering if there's, I don't know, maybe one or two key insights or learning that you've discovered and that maybe surprises you.

It's all surprised me every time. It's just the things people are doing always surprised me. I was saying if you go to investigate a problem and you don't find something that embarrasses you, you're just not looking hard enough. So we've gone to people who grew up in their own family business and now they're leading it and they think they know everything that's going on. And we say, okay, but did you go see what's going on with the problem in the last. Have you been down there the last 10 years? I know what's going on. And they go down and they find all kinds of dumb stuff going on. One guy was running a corrugated box factory. He'd been working there for years and he had. They had a problem with productivity and scrap from the cardboard. And so he bought a lot of technology. But the problem got worse after he spent 50 or $100,000. So he said, okay, you have to go onto the shop floor and like, watch. Don't interview people. Just go, imagine that.

Yeah.

So he goes down there. It's a factory story. But he goes down there's in South America and you know, it's a huge piece of machinery making cardboard boxes. And at 12 o' clock, the machine shuts down and everyone goes off to work. And he goes, hey guys, where are you going? He was like, oh, we shut the machine down every. For an hour, every day, go to lunch. It's like a continuously operating machine. You never want to shut it down. He goes like. So he dug into it. It turns out that 15 years ago, the power system in the country was not very good. And the government had asked people to, to. To shut off their power at different times during the day while they built up the system. So they had been shutting the power down. And so when the power system got built, they no longer needed to do that, but they were still taking that lunch hour and things, you know, just all kinds of dumb stuff that people find when they go. So that's one thing is that never ceases to me, amaze me is that even good leaders who think they know the business. The amount of things they find when they go actually look in an intellectual work, Ron, it's even way worse. People said to me for years, oh, that stuff works in the factory, but it doesn't work in the office. I'm going to tell you, it works 10 times better in the office. The reason is on a stamping press you can only go so fast. You still need to stamp the metal. Okay, you can get rid of all, do all the smudge, get all the setup time out. You can just stamp one piece of metal. You can't go much faster than that. That in intellectual work it's almost infinitely compressible and sometimes you can make it go totally away. So the things that are happening in intellectual work, once you begin to see them, are just amazing, amazingly bad.

What's your take on the whole AI movement and what it can do for in the transactional world, whether it's chat, DVT or. Yeah, you name them.

You know, one, I'm not very fluent in it. I know generally about it, like most people, I use it a little bit. But my general impression of it, especially after reading the paper this morning that says that most CEOs around the country are reducing headcount because they're deploying AI in the front line, is that it's much like automation in the 80s. People were afraid of it. It's going to displace some types of work, repetitive work, but it's going to create other jobs. I think this is going to go much, much faster. It's also going to be abused like automation was in the early days. People try to automate before they fix the process. I think that's going to happen big time here. It's happening now. I think it will be used to replace people instead of support people's thinking and add people, make people more powerful instead of just helping people be used to replace people and turned into stupid stuff like you get when you try to get a automated call center and you get stupid answers because your, your question doesn't fit neatly into the category. So I think they're going to make almost all kind of mistakes like that. But I think it's coming and it's, it's going to automate a lot of intellectual work. Sooner or later people will figure it out.

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean even just here again by academy, I mean we're, we're creating all kinds of content and, and it's for sure. And like as a leader of the company, like my mindset isn't definitely Oh, I don't need Jessica anymore. And Jessica is listening to this because she writes the show notes. So don't worry Jessica, your job is safe, you know, but, but there might be opportunities to sort of elevate the work Jessica does right by saying, hey, yeah, you don't have to listen to every single episode anymore to write the show notes or whatever it might be, you know, like, and now go off and do this thing. So like to me what's exciting about it is I can see Gemba Academy doubling in people because of the things that AI affords us. And I'm going to need more people, you know, to be able to do it because the business is going to support it, you know what I mean? Sort of that abundant mindset versus a scarcity mindset.

So I saw some graphs and I was looking through the news today and it's the, the amount of job losses in the last couple years and in manufacturing it's been, it's been flat but in most industries starting to go down because of the AI effect because people are starting to substitute for the front layer. But manufacturing is kind of stabilized. They've automated what they can automate. So I said I think a certain thing that's probably going to happen with, in intellectual work also it's going to displace a lot of people, but as you say, it's going to create a lot more opportunities, but it's going to happen so much faster. Yeah, I think some of the mistakes are going to be much more dangerous.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, because, well, I'll never say never, but you know, Chat GPT won't swing a hammer, you know what I mean? Yet. Maybe there'll be some ChatGPT robot that will swing a hammer, I don't know. But, but yeah, like that type of work. You know, my, as we record this, I took some time off with building a big playhouse with my kids in the backyard. And I'm talking like this is a playhouse now let me tell you. Like, like I'm not an architect but I think I should go back to school for architect. Architecture, design. But like thinking about like the amount of work that we had to do on this playhouse and thinking about, yeah, there's no way automation is going to replace this, you know what I mean? Like it's just there's so, so there is some, some work I think some hands on work that's just not going to be touched. But yeah, to your point, knowledge work will and it is changing and you're really foolish. I would argue Gamba Academy wouldn't be doing our customers the way we should do them if we weren't, you know, leveraging this technology that's available. Shame on us. Like, why would we not? Because we, we can serve our customers better now, you know, because of these tools and so forth. So yeah, it's, it's going to be interesting though, for sure. Because, you know, like you said, people are going to use it for knucklehead, you know, applications and they'll pay for it eventually. Right when they do that. And the strong companies who are respecting people are going to continue to be strong.

So in dynamic work design, we think the approach is that the real machines are people's brains. So if you're just passing information and not processing it, that's all stuff that can be automated. So the real trick is to give someone really good input, then let them do the work to solve the problem or make a decision and then get really good output. And I think if we use it that way, that's the best way and that will really advance us and that's, that's actually allow us to do that human work better. But if it's just reading patterns and passing along information, yeah, you know, that's really not value added work anyway.

Yeah. So I know that in your, in your work you are passionate about saying that good work design is neither purely top down nor purely bottom up. So talk a little bit about that and this, how this idea of dynamic work design achieves this balance.

Sure, it's a good question. When we get called to a client and we get presented with a problem, we just saw this pattern emerge that the. We always end up working on three layers. One we have to go to the site of when we decide actually what the problem is and we go pick up a small piece of that problem and go look at it would be in sales or finance or legal, whatever. We go like, see what's happening at the front line. That's, that's a big piece of it. But the next piece is at the leadership. What are the targets? That is the organization really clear and are people working to those targets? Are they connected? And then the third place, and usually they're not that clear. They're all over the place or in a PowerPoint, but they're not really communicated very clearly like you would have in a good policy deployment system. Not translated all the way down mechanically. And the third place we go is the middle management where there's always more idea and work to do than can be done. And that's where the organization gets flooded with work. So we put the gate up for pull there and force the middle management to work together to say basically you can only get 20 tasks done next week, but there are 50 on your plates across you. So you decide which of the 20 don't dump them over into the front line and make them decide in a push system. So then we create a big pull system. Then we get a feedback loop between that front line is supposed to be moving. The middle says here's what demonstrated we can do and what we could do more. And three, here's the results we're getting. How do those match with the targets? And now we get really quick communication between the target, the activity, what was, what was done, what we learned and go back. And now we create a dynamic system that's moving all these. Can you not only get the work done, but can you figure out how to do more to get more capacity? Are we getting the results? Are we learning new stuff that we do use methods? So all that stuff then begins to play. But we have to work at all three levels. We can't just go like make the legal factory work better or make finance work better without connecting it to all that stuff. Because then the leaders, the management and the frontline people really get connected to the work and they start. Now they're on the path to discovering new ways because now it's fun and they can see, they can see the system moving.

What's your, your take? Are you familiar with the old the TWI movement and job instruction, job relation, job methods like, like talk a little bit about. Do you see any sort of similarities between what you guys are promoting here and sort of those original, the original premises of the, the J methods?

Well, I remember about it, I don't remember much of the content except the pocket cards and where it came from, the history. But I know the relationship between the manager and the employee was really good as a trainer and judging whether the person was capable and jump in if they weren't. So I think those are all really fantastic. I think in intellectual work it's so varied, you can't really carry a card around with what you're supposed to do. But I think the relationship that was created in that movement between here I know the work, I'm going to show you how to do the work and if something's new, I'm going to help you with it. And either you're doing something wrong or we discovered something new anyway, either way you're connected to the management system and we're Going to make this better. So I think that idea is alive and well and we try to implement that in a different way in the office area because you just can't, you can't do that with scientists, engineers, administrators. You have to work a different way in a much more complicated area. But the concept, it absolutely applies.

Yeah, got it, got it. Well, good stuff. Well, hey, this has really been a fun conversation, Don. I appreciate you carving out time to come on. Maybe is there any sort of like, final words of wisdom or some pieces of advice that you want to leave the listeners with?

I think the thing that drives me the craziest is when people get a. Take something good like Toyota production system or Lean, which is about discovery, and they turn it into a program and they put people in a classroom, they train them, they roll it out, and they audit people against the system. When this is about making the business better and discovering new ways, it's just too rote. And I think they take, they cut the heart out of all those, all that good work that's been done over the decades to. In this field, which is about discovering new and better ways for people to work. And they turn it into do this. Here's the rules. Just follow the rules. Like I said, that's kind of what's the most discouraging for me.

Yeah. No, and I think there's some, there's fairness to that, to that, that critique. I think it comes back to like we were talking about. I think we talked about it after we hit record. I know we were talking about before we. That's the problem. We chat too much before we hit record. I can't remember if we recorded it or not. But, but coming back to the whole idea of like, what problem are you trying to, like, just that. I mean, if just that's the only thing that you ever come back to, it's going to lead you in the right direction. Right. Because my, my personal opinion is the tools of Lean, of Six Sigma, of Triz, or whatever you name the improvement method you can fit. Anybody can learn them, right? Anybody can learn them, and you should learn them. I'd argue you're better off if you know a variety of different problem solving methodologies. But it's not about the methodology. It's about getting what does your. It's not even about your problem either. Customer. It's about the customer. Right. And how do we better serve the customer? How do we maximize value? So, Mr. Womack and those folks you know, so elegantly opined many years ago, how do we maximize value to our, to our customers. All the rest of it. It's, you know, it's, it's important. But it's not about that. Right. It's not about that.

You're absolutely right. That, that question, what's the point problem you're trying to solve is really the starting point. The first article my colleague and I wrote is called the Most Underrated Skill in Management. Getting a good problem statement. We're all over the map with attribution and solution, but trying to actually understand and go see what the problem is and fix it is a highly underrated skill. And most managers are really not that good at it.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. Good stuff. All right, well, hey, what's the name of the book again? Don't.

There's Got to Be a Better Way.

Okay. And it's available when?

Amazon. August 26th.

August 26th. I can't remember exactly when this is. This is going to be released around that time? I think so. So yeah, everybody go check it out and we'll have a link to it in the show notes. Everybody can go, go check that out. But hey, thanks for coming on, Don. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, Ron. Great to be here.

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