GA 619 | Don’t Walk By a Mess with Chad Bareither

I have seen it work, and now I actually believe I don't just know what the tool is or how to apply it. Like, I believe it changed our performance. I believe it made my life easier to operate. That then affects my values. That then affects how I think. That affects how we behave on a daily basis and gets the results.

Today, I am excited to welcome Chad Barather back to the show. Now, Chad and I had a lot of fun talking today. This is a pretty passionate interview you'll hear Chad's got a lot of. A lot of excitement, a lot of passion for lean and continuous improvement. And yeah, we got into some fun stuff today. We kind of opened up by talking about just culture change and sort of like how hard changing a culture can be. And so sort of talked about some different approaches. You know, you get the folks who want to just go in and implement some tools and hope that changes the culture and doesn't always work. And. And then Chad actually had some. Some really interesting opinions on the whole idea of looking to. For, you know, an example of how to do lean. And as you'll hear, he's got some opinions on that. So that was a lot of fun. And then we sort of wrap things up with just some practical examples of how we can, you know, authentically practice continuous improvement and the kind of things that we should be thinking about and doing. So, again, a lot of fun recording this one. I think you'll enjoy it. Show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 619. The show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.Com Just look for episode 619. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Chad, welcome back to the show. How are you?

I'm great. A little cold. It's about 5 degrees in Michigan today, so. Ooh, so Fahrenheit for our internationalists.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. I think he can't remember. Are you a Wolverine fan or.

You know, I didn't grow up in Michigan. I grew up in Illinois. But the. I married into more of a Michigan State Spartan family.

Michigan State. Okay, that's fine. Yeah. So I'm a Buckeye. You know, I grew up in Ohio.

It's a good week for you, isn't it?

So far. Like, why are you talking about. Because this podcast is coming out. We're like, many, many weeks ahead. So it was like, they're like, that game was like three months ago, Ron, move on with life. But, yeah, it's it's, it's still fresh in my mind. So I may be watching replays and highlights during every lunch for the last several days. You know, it's been a, it's been a minute since Ohio State fans were happy after this game, so. Yeah. But anyhow, where are you calling in from again, Chad?

Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Okay. Kalamazoo, Michigan. Right. Yeah. Boy, Ed, it's a. Yeah, that's a breezy place up there right now. Yeah. I mean, we're in Texas and it's like below freezing this morning when I woke up, but it's. Yeah. And so for us, that's, that's pretty crazy. So. But well, anyhow, hey, it's good to have you back on. You know the drill, Chad. We like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote.

So what do you got? Quote that's on my mind now? And I think pertinent to our conversation is from Tish Harrison Warren's book the Liturgy of Ordinary. And it goes like this. Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.

What's that mean to you?

So especially in our context today is like everyone has these big goals about what transformation is going to mean, and it's usually at like, top level business results. And there's the small daily disciplines and behaviors that get you there. Right. So you could put this analogy in any walk of life, not just business. Like, people would love to be an Olympian. They don't want to get up every morning at 5 and train. Right. People want to be a professional musician. They don't want to practice for two hours a day. People want a lean transformation in their company, but they don't want to be doing problem solving every day. But those are the companies that I see transform, are the ones where leadership on down are committed to the daily disciplines that build a lean culture.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. All right, well, maybe we'll get into that a little bit deeper in a little bit. But so in case folks missed our previous episodes with you on, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, Chad? Tell us about your background and, and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, sure. Well, I, I fell into the continuous improvement sphere pretty early in my career, got kind of lucky, was went to school for mechanical engineering and then decided that wasn't really for me. So studying industrial engineering. And in my first role as a quality engineer, the organization was piloting a program called Lean Six Sigma. And so I got trained and certified as a green belt pretty early on really loved it. Well, it's going to give away a lot about my personality, but structures and processes and tools and numbers. Right. But as I grew through that over 20 years now of practicing it, the empowerment that gives to people to solve their own problems is really what I've become passionate about. So I still love statistics. Kind of a nerd that way. But you know, the empowerment that that gives to someone to be able to quantify their problem, to be able to confirm results and like a lot of these tools so much more. What we'll talk about today is I feel like there's been this glide slope where I'm less concerned, less and less concerned about are you using the right tool or are you using the tool correctly? And more so do you have the right thinking and mindset and did it give you the answer that you needed to move forward? And I think we can get wrapped up around that. Too much about the right way or analyzing our way into perfection when it really takes the entire organization changing. So after working in three larger companies and organizations, I've now been consulting, doing this for mid market manufacturers for the last seven years. And this is what me and my team do is we come in and we either are targeted in a particular challenge in the business or usually more site wide transformation of the business.

Love it. All right. Well, as we were sort of brainstorming what to talk about today, we kind of stumbled into this whole idea of, of a culture change and really the hard work that goes into sort of making that happen. So maybe just open it up from there and like what's on your mind as it relates to that?

Yeah. So you know, kind of back to this, like does the tool matter? And I see a lot of organizations, and I've been in the organizations that have tried this things like we're going to 5s the entire shop floor. And I am yet to see where like tool based deployment changes the culture. Me personally. Right. So what I prefer to look at is more problem based deployment of like, well, let's show them the different tool or principle or method in the context of solving a problem that actually impacts that individual worker or that work cell or that business unit's performance. Then when they actually see the application of that, it actually changes their beliefs and values. Because if you think on the outside kind of like concentric circles, what most people are looking at is results. Most business reviews are looking at quarterly financials. Right. And monthly production targets. And that's the results of what happened. And one layer below that is we got that by how we behaved. But our behaviors in an operating environment. Right. Are driven by how we think about the business. How we think about the business are driven by Ron, like you and our core values. Now, organizations can try a lot to like, put values on the wall and talk about it in town hall meetings, but it's really through how we live and think. And beneath values is what we really believe. So take a simple tool to look at like Kanban and material handling. Right. I can teach you that and you can understand it. Right. I may even get you to think differently. It's very rare that you actually believe it improves business performance until after you've seen it work. And so when we're talking about a cultural transformation, it can't just be this stump speech or it can't be sending people on a study trip to Japan or bringing in a consultant and training in a conference room. It really has to be through a lived experience. Like, I have seen it work and now I actually believe I don't just know what the tool is or how to apply it. Like, I believe it changed our performance. I believe it made my life easier to operate. That then affects my values. That then affects how I think. That affects how we behave on a daily basis and gets the results. Is that a long journey? Yes, it is. But I think so often we're like, we want this lean transformation and we throw around that word transformation like it's easy. So I'm going to go back to my quote. Everyone wants a lean transformation. Nobody wants to do the daily leader standard work.

Yeah. Or they want to do a four day, four and a half day kaizen event with pizza at the end, thinking that that alone is going to be, you know, our transformation. Right.

Yeah. And I'm not trying to like, you know, shots fired here, but like people listening. We're doing a four day kaizen event. And how much of the event was the senior leader involved in? Came at the beginning. Rah rah, Go team shows at the end with pizza. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, yes, you know, and unfortunately, you know, that's a lot of situations out there. You mentioned lean in Japan and I know you've got some experience there and I think you may even have some, some opinions. So what's on your mind as it relates to, to that?

Well, I have a lot on my mind when it comes to that, but I, I know a friend of mine who just went on a study trip to Japan and while I think that's great and it can affect people's, maybe even affect people's Thinking, I don't know, that affects their beliefs and values. But we constantly. I'm kind of generalizing here. The Lean community looks to Japan and the Toyota production system and saying if Lean is kind of this abstraction of the Toyota production system, we say, well, those practices were perfected in Japan. But we need to take a step back and look a little bit in context of like the Toyota production also arose out of like a critical need in a very specific cultural ecosystem. So the one thing we can't overlook is that It's World War II recovery. They didn't have a lot of choice but to try and do something different.

Yeah.

The second thing is a lot of the things that we see in the Toyota production system and that a lot of Lean consultants and experts would espouse are things that are normal cultural behaviors in Japan. So I'll take one that is not a behavior in North America, but is very common in Japan is that in the school system, the children clean the schools. They don't have a janitorial staff, they have time set aside within the day and they get on their hands and knees or they wipe the walls and the children clean the school. And so they are taught to respect the institution, they are taught to respect what they own, they are taught to respect nature, et cetera. And so if I go into a company and that company says, well, now it's time to clean your workstation. That is a cultural norm. That is a. We have to recognize in other areas of the world that that is not necessarily going to be how our employees were raised. Where I tell you, Ron, okay, you're a, you're a CNC machinist now and this is your station. Oh, by the way, at the end of the day, we're going to give you 15 minutes and you need to clean it, you're going to be like, I run the machine, I don't clean the machine. Maybe. So we overlook some of those cultural norms. So it had this critical need burning platform of recovery. It's kind of like change or don't survive. And then it had this natural ecosystem of that a lot of what we see in Toyota production system is derived out of. There are three primary architects, right. That were actually from the US that helped influence his thinking. So it's kind of interesting that Lean is sometimes looked as an import to the US but we exported the knowledge over there for World War II recovery. Right. In W. Edward Zeming and Joseph Duran and to. What's the name of the last guy? Armand Feigen. Feigenbaum. Feigenbaum. Feigenbaum. That's his name.

I've never heard that.

Yeah, so he was less prevalent, but he's actually credited with, like, the language.

Some of those guys.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Shuhart influenced Deming, and we look at a lot. So let's just take Deming, and I'm not a Deming expert. Right. Don't claim to be, but if we take his 14 points and a lot of his writing, he doesn't tell you how to do it. It's really what should be done and why. Japan defined the how because it fit their culture. And so now I do think Japan has a beautiful culture, and I think it's this natural integration between a lot of what the Toyota production system has and what. What they have. But we're evolving past that, I think. So you look at a lot of what folks are doing, say, like Ryan Tierney is doing in Ireland and the movements there. I think what some smaller communities here, you look at Brad Cairns and what Chuck Ciccarelli did and what here, one of my neighbors here, Brian Myers, is doing and saying, like, okay, we don't have the same cultural foundation that those Japanese workers did, but Lean is working and thriving in these companies. Yeah.

Well, even if you think about Japan, like, you know, this whole idea of. Of death from overwork, you know, like, that's a thing, you know, like, that's not good, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So I just don't want to gloss over the parts of the culture that say, like, it's a beautiful culture. And there's definitely the other thing about Japan. Right. And not trying to. If you want to go to Japan, go to Japan. Amazing country. I've been there for leisure, not for a study trip. It's amazing. Right. You should go if you want to go. But it's not like every company there is a Lean company. That's another preconception that we have of, like, every company operates like this, which is not true. Right, right. When you say, like, overwork, there's a lot of organizations, especially, like, in the financial sectors, that it's just overwork. It's the expectation they work. It's command and control or something like that.

Isn't that the term for it? I can't remember.

I do remember that what you're talking about, it's about, like, death from work or something like that.

It's literally like these people work themselves to death. Like, they die because they work too much, you know, so.

So, like, Lean and, you know, I know people try to say it's tps it's not lean. So if lean is just this abstraction, let's talk about that and say that it found a natural home to thrive and the critical conditions to do that in Japan. I think there are shining examples elsewhere in the world where we can also go to and learn about how to apply some of these principles of respect for people, of continuous improvement, of autonomation. That's not to say don't go to Japan, don't take this away. But I'm like, it also, okay, we'll say that there's a client I've worked with before, and they are sending dozens and dozens of workforce to Japan on these study trips. And I'm like, has their culture changed? It's like, no, because I don't think they've changed their beliefs. They've seen something different. Maybe they'll go home and behave differently for a little while. Maybe it changed a little bit of their thinking, but it hasn't changed the values and the beliefs of the company. Right? And that just takes time, and it takes consistent, deliberate practice from the top on down. It makes me think of small example. Just to illustrate, this is one of my first roles in a exclusively, like, continuous improvement practitioner role. I had a network of five plants that I was responsible for supporting. And at one of the plants, the plant manager's name was Jerome Masculine, a French guy moved to the US to run this plant. And we were going to look at a problem on the line, and we were going to talk about some of the problem solving going on. And we're walking out with him to the line, and he just pulls up, pulls off while we're talking, and he bends over and he reaches down with both hands. He picks up a couple of pallet scraps on the ground, like broken pieces of wood. Now, in most plants I had been to up until that point in my life, right, the plant manager would either tell someone else to do it, right. Or ignore it potentially because they thought it was someone else's job. That setting the standard of, like, we don't walk by a mess, right? We solve a problem in the moment, right? Is something that your team watches that behavior. And I can definitely tell you that one instance that it happened to me still, when I'm in plants, even not my plant, going to visit a client for the first time and there's trash on the ground. I pick it up and throw it in a waste bin. And people sometimes look at me like I'm crazy, but I'm like, like, no, I. I can't believe you treat Your own plant like this. Right, Right.

Yeah, well, keep the rope tight as they say. Right.

You know.

Yeah, I'm wondering if, so obviously you got a lot of thoughts on, on Lean and continuous improvement, TPS and so forth. Like what are some, maybe some examples from today where, I don't know, like you're seeing things done well and you're like, yes, more of that.

Yeah, well I, I, those are a couple that people can go ahead and Google. You can look at what is the name of this podcast? Brad Cairns, I think it's called Shop Floor Podcast. But his company, which I'm blanking on right now is great. You can look at what Chuck Ciccarelli had done with in the Ditch Towing. You can look at what Ryan Tierney is doing in Ireland and here locally because I'm also friends with him. I'll promote Brian Myers and Lean by doing. But his company is called JCR Off Road. And you look at what some of these people are doing and you have the leader of the company daily involved in standup meetings and in problem solving. And to your point, I love that phrase, keeping the rope tight of like there's not a day to let this go by. And I think those are some great examples where you can say it's not a Japanese culture indoctrination that is making that work. It is the leader saying this is the culture of this company, of this group of people that are coming together to serve this client base or this customer and this is how we're going to win. And it's non negotiable. Kind of like you'd say the culture was non negotiable because it came with the workers into a lot of Toyota's area. But even so, here we, here we go. Here's Chad talking out of both sides of his mouth. Right. Then you look at Toyota. I recently sat in a presentation from Toyota Material Handling. So this would be the division that makes like fork trucks, et cetera, things like that, material handling equipment. And I had asked the question of like, well, is it difficult for you to onboard because I talk so much about culture in the presentation. Is it difficult for you to onboard leaders? And they say actually our preference is not to hire from outside. We hire from outside on more entry level and first tier super supervisor roles. And we would prefer to develop people because we've recognized how hard the cultural change is now, whether that's good or bad, that's, that's Toyota admitting like it's not for everyone. Everyone cannot survive here. Another example you can look at is Danaher. So Danaher is a conglomerate of like life science and med device and pharma holding companies, but they're unified in this Danaher business system. And I talked to one of the executives there of the Danher business system and I said, well, tell me a little bit about how you onboard senior leaders. When they bring a senior leader in, they don't report directly to their role. They spend months, about three months running Kaizen events, participating on teams, facilitating Kaizen events in operations. Why do you think they do that, Ron?

Drink your own kool aid kind of thing, you know, like you gotta, yeah, get in there and if I'm gonna.

Get to the top and I want different results, you know, think about my concentric circle. Like I want different results, I need to behave differently. I need to change your thinking. I need to give you different values. I need you to believe in lean or the Danaher business system in that case and the tools that we do. I need you to believe that it works so that you are aligned with company values, so that it changes how you think about the business holistically. Now you're going to behave in a method that's compatible with Danaher and that is our long term strategy for results. Think about any company, so any of the listeners thinking about the company that you're hired into or that you participate in supporting from a continuous improvement or a consulting standpoint, to think they would onboard a leader, probably a highly paid salary and say, we're going to spend your first three months like learning to assemble our product and participating in continuous improvement. It's a, it is a huge commitment. But if you're looking to, you know, again, I'm not saying a playbook. Right. Same as Denning. I'm not going to tell you how to do it. But companies have chosen to do this because they understand that the cultural understanding and the beliefs is so important to them. The tools. We could talk about the tools. Like I said, I spent the first 15, 20 years of myself getting really good at the tools and now I'm more like.

And I think it is important, you know, like to understand the order of operation. You know, could be debated, I guess. But you know, give me the best leader who doesn't know what 5s is and I'm like, you know, it's going to be tough. Right. Like so, so I think, I think that's not a one or the other. Right? I think it's one and the other.

Yeah, that's fair. That's a very fair challenge. Yeah. And that's another element into this. This quote we started with, right. Of like, no one wants to do the dishes. Of like it's hard work, it's boring work. Like I got to learn and study, I got to apply it, I got to do it. Yeah. And so that's how you keep a clean house. In this case, it's how you can keep a clean factory by 5s ing it every day. But again, you know, so 5s kind of pivoting into this relationship between tools and culture. Right. Is like a manifestation or a tool, but it's really trying to get us to believe something different about the organization. Right. That if i5s it's easier to do my job. And why is it easier to do my job? Because like stuff's not in the way and I know I have all my tools and I'm not not going to make quality issues and I can keep first in, first out product flowing in the line. But again, Ron, I can teach you that in a conference room. But I'm yet to meet someone who like walks out of a corporate training is like, wow, that just changed the way I look at life. But I have seen people do that in a Kaizen event.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I was just talking to one of our Gumba Academy customers earlier today and they're real big into the whole. I guess maybe Paul Akers was sort of. Maybe I don't if he was the first one to popularize this. I can't remember who it was. So my apologies to whoever first did this, but just the whole idea of. Of a sort of like a simple Kaizen, you know, like a small improvement and just put it on a piece of paper before and after. Not even an event. Just like, hey, I had his little thing in my, my workshop, my workbench and here's what I did to make it better. And then he put it up on the wall. And I remember walking into this company and it may have been like in the dish, one of those guys, I've been there and like the whole wall is full like top to bottom of eight and a half by 11. And again, these aren't like huge, you know, week long events or big black belt projects. Not nothing wrong with those. Those are great. But. But no, it was just like these simple improvements. But. And the guy told the story of the one person who was having a sort of like being a little bit grumpy about the whole thing. And. And he was like, what's going on with you? And. And the person admitted, well, I don't have anything up on the wall. Nobody, you know, and they just wanted something on the wall. And they were like, well, let's make something better. You can put it up on the wall, you know, and so what a powerful, you know, example of like a culture. That's a culture change. Like, you know, it's not even that they want to get it up on the wall, but it's just like, it's just part of how we do it. And then we. We get recognized for it and tell each other, good job, and we keep doing it, you know, rinse and repeat.

Gotta keep that rope tight though, right? I was just visiting a friend's factory this week, and they're rolling out kind of area to area these 5s boards. And it has like the daily tasks and then it has opportunities for improvement. So problems, right? And then they have like a simple, you know, personal command to do, doing, done for the improvement ideas. First area went to great. It's only been up for a couple weeks, maintained. We went to one on the other side of the plant and I looked at the one of the post. They're just using post it notes for the ideas. And it was dated April 2025. And so we're recording this now in December of 2025. And I kind of took them to task on it. I'm like, you know, this is. This is not going to change the culture if I can put an idea for improvement and like, nothing happens for eight months.

Yeah.

So I love that idea. And I don't know which company you're talking about, but all these improvement ideas, but what does it take? It takes daily focus back to doing the dishes. We got to pull that rope. We got to make sure it's tight every single day. And again, it's not fun. Right? Some days are fun when you get to celebrate. Some days are hard, and some days we just have to do it because that's the behavior. Right?

And then we learn.

Right?

So. Yeah.

Well, failure is an interesting thing to talk about in the context of improvement because sometimes to even want to socialize an improvement, I have to admit that there was a problem. And that can be. Or that I made a mistake, however you want to phrase that. But there's either a problem with my process or there was a problem with my equipment or like, I made a mistake in the process. And so even getting that down to like, we share about the mistakes and we share about the improvements. So now we get in even more of why it's so important that the leader has that change in belief so that they have the change in behaviors is that the leader by definition leads. By definition means I'm going first.

Yeah.

So who's going to be the first one to be vulnerable and say, this didn't go right and this is what I'm trying to make it better? And now you're paving the way for other people to say, oh, it's okay to make a mistake. It's okay to ask for help. Right. And then we kind of get back into this PDCA cycle. Then when I do ask for help, someone's got to be there to pick up the other. Other end of the rope. Right. And. And put some tension on it. That's right. We can't have that idea go up on the board and sit there for eight months because now no more ideas are coming.

Right.

Exactly.

Wow. Good stuff. Chad, man, it's always a blast talking to you. I. I love your passion and, and your authenticity. It's great.

Oh, thanks.

Well, I was wondering if the. As we wrap things up, if you had any sort of final words of wisdom for, for the listeners and then for sure, I want you to tell everybody how they can best connect with you.

So I mean, maybe this is cliche, but it's, it's start small. Start with what you can handle, like as a leader or depending upon like the size of your production team or the coaches that you're leveraging to help build this. Like if we roll out as an example, so early in my career, there was several different divisions kind of under. Under one umbrella. And one of the divisions rolled out a program called Quick Wins. No, I'm sorry, Little Wins. Little Wins. And like they had everything branded and these magnetic things. They were like custom post it notes, but they were magnet that they could put up on the Little Wins board. And they said, this is great. We're going to deploy it at all the plants. And then the same thing happened. I was talking about here is like the Little Wins would go up there and no action. So like we kind of rolled this tidal wave of a program out, but there was no, no one to do the dishes. Like I got all these dirty plates stacking up and like no one's there to help the people who are asking to improve their own process. What do I do next, Ron? And we just have to do it. So I'd say start small with what you can handle. Right. Because it's going to require follow up on a routine basis and then ask for help. Right. It doesn't even have to be. You go see what other people are doing like locally to you here. When I mentioned earlier this week I visit we stopped at three plants within 40 miles right of my house. They're around. Go see what people are doing. Go ask other people from help find a network. So start small, find a support group. That's it.

And how can best people best connect with you?

Chad? I'm probably Most active on LinkedIn so they can find me there. Otherwise our company website is is bereithergroup.com that's www.b a r e I t h e r group.com okay.

Yeah. And we'll have everything up in the show notes. So. Hey man, thanks again for coming on.

Always a pleasure. Thanks, Ron.

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