029: Paul Akers - How to Make Lean Simple and Easy

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Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business coach, Bill Gallagher. We're talking today about how to get lean done in your business, how to make lean simple and easy. And we're talking with the expert on it, Paul akers, author of Two Second Lean, founder and CEO of FastCap and now global coach in Lean, working with the biggest company in Kazakhstan in helping them to transform not only the company but in some ways, a nation. So welcome to the show, Paul.

Thank you, Bill. Glad to be here.

Well, it looks like you're working on lean yourself right now. I see you look different than the last time I saw you.

Oh yeah. You're making me feel good. Yeah, I am a little bit thinner than last time, like about 50 pounds thinner.

Yeah. Well, and it is lean too, isn't it? Right.

It's very, very efficient running of the body, that's for sure.

That's awesome. So we're going to talk about how to make lean easy and implemented in your business. But in particular we're going to focus on the three big things that get in the way of lean implementation. What prevents you from being effective at that? So why don't you tell us first, let's go back before we get into these three big things that get in people's way and what to do about those. How did you ever get curious about it? Where did you learn about it? How did it become? We know, kind of some of us who know what it looks like in your business and who've read your book and seen your videos. But tell us a little bit about where you got sucked in.

Yeah, no problem. It's a really quick little three minute story. So essentially my company was three years old, very, very successful. I had no burning platform making Lots of money, everything was going great. Winning a lot of awards. People tell me how great I was. People want to invest in my company. When are you going to go public? All the typical stuff you hear from companies that do really well. And that was all great. But the bottom line is I knew that organizationally it was running okay. It wasn't running great. I was frustrated a lot. I went home at night, kind of frustrated. Why are people doing this? Why is that happening? Gosh, I wish I could just get a hold on that. I stumbled across these guys from Japan who said they could come in and take a look at my company and help me with efficiencies and specifically inventory management issues. I brought them in and they charged me a ton of money, 10,000 bucks a week, which was an exorbitant amount of Money back in 2000 when I first started this. And in one week they took my processes that were taking me 45 minutes that I was an all time expert in. I'm very well trained in manufacturer. I knew what I was doing and took those to five minutes. They did that in two different main manufacturing cells within my company. At that point I was convinced that I didn't know what I was doing and I was actually clueless. So I quickly got on a plane.

That's a very high state of wisdom right there.

Yeah, exactly. And I'm so glad that I felt that way. Even though I was a very successful person, I said, okay, I obviously don't know something. I didn't make up all the excuses like a lot of people would do. Got on a plane, went to Japan, saw firsthand what Toyota and Lexus was doing, realized that my standards were completely dumbed down and irrelevant and realized that I needed to go to a whole other level, if not a different universe, to compete and be relevant. And that's basically how I got started.

That's really great. Yep. So seeing a need and a problem, then seeking some outside wisdom, some learning, and then bringing it into your world and having your world altered by seeing another. So what are you working on now?

Well, you know, the big thing that I'm doing is I'm teaching lean to companies all over the world. And the one company that I'm working with a lot right now is the BI group in Kazakhstan. Most people don't even know where Kazakhstan is, but it's one of the ninth largest land masses country wise in the world and they're located kind of right below Russia used to be a post Soviet country. And I'm working with the BI Group, a huge construction company, one of the largest, 156 in the world, actually, but the largest in that country. They have about 7,000 employees. They work with tens of thousands of subcontractors that help build their infrastructure projects. Everything from roads, railroads, oil refineries, condominium developments. They do everything right. They're just huge. And they contacted me a couple years ago about learning about Lean because they got hooked up with some consultants that basically took their money and ran and didn't do a very good job for them. And. And they wanted to embrace maybe a little simpler approach, the one that I espouse on my videos. So I went over there. It went really well. They asked me to come back, and now I go back every eight weeks. And now I'm in the process of training 500 of their top executives in Japan every week. I have 17 people in Japan. So they are completely committed to the idea of implementing and building a Lean culture.

So you've now seen Lean in Japan. You've seen Lean in your own business. You've seen Lean in countless other businesses. We've seen some of your analysts and amusing videos around the business and so on, and start to get a window into your world and how it lives for you. And now you're bringing Lean to a part of the world that we don't often think of. Right. Kazakhstan. I have another friend who's done some work in Kazakhstan recently, and I know that they've got some ambition there. So tell me what it's like to bring that there.

To be honest with you, it's no different than bringing it anywhere in the world. I say people are all the same. Doesn't matter what race, what religion, doesn't matter at all. All that matters is you have somebody that really wants to learn and move to the next level. So it's been great. I mean, the people are friendly and they're open. Not everyone's open. Some people don't want to learn it. But I'd say the vast majority or the preponderance of the people within the organization are very engaged. They want to improve their life, the quality of their work, and they're engaging. And the most important thing is the guy at the top. Aydin, is completely engaged, and he loves it, and he's pushing it.

So give us a quick recap, because everybody knows has heard Lean before, but I'm not sure everybody knows what really the key elements are. So why don't you just recap that for us?

It's very simple. Lean is simply one Thing, the elimination of waste. So in your life and in my life, every day, we wake up in the morning, we make our lunch, we take a shower, we get ready in the morning, we go to work, we answer our emails, we do a variety of different things, processes. Everything we do is a process. How you make your lunch, how you brush your teeth, how you answer your emails, it's all a process. All Lean is trying to do is take from the moment you start the process to the time you finish the process and look at all the little steps inside of there and say, can I do that a little more effectively? Can I shave a few seconds off here? Is there a way to accomplish the goal and add more quality with less effort? That's all we're doing. So I teach people how, within the constraints of those two walls, the starting and the ending point of any process, to fix what bugs you, what is bothering you about the process, what kind of irritates you? That is the starting point by which you start to apply your creative juices, which God has gifted every one of us with to solve the problem and improve it. And you don't make massive improvements. You make tiny little incremental improvements within the walls of the starting and ending point. And by the time you're done, you've got more joy in your life, you have more satisfaction, you have higher quality work with less effort, and you have more free time that's late.

So we go looking for all the things that bug you, that get in your way, that slow you down, that trip you up, and we find those things and we eliminate them. So we're cleaning up and we're cutting out waste and we're trimming time.

And you got it.

Yeah. Beautiful.

But off of everything, it's not the mistake people make, Bill, is it's not about manufacturing. It's about life. And when you get that in your brain, everything changes.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so let me just check in and see your thoughts on this. I had something that I didn't really think about this before, but as you say it. So I had this reminder in my calendar, and I'm pretty obsessive about organizing and designing my life and my calendar so that I don't forget things that are important to me. Right. And so my exercise and stuff is well planned in there. And I had this thing about. And I forget exactly. But it was like, put out your clothes for the next workout, for tomorrow morning's workout. Right. But I found after a while, it became like background noise. It didn't really make any Difference for me, right? It wasn't impacting me in the way that I wanted. And so I moved the time that the reminder came up and then I changed it to this question. I'm not quite sure how I came up with this, but I wrote instead. I wrote of like, set your clothes out. I wrote, what's the next workout?

Okay.

And somehow that completely altered it for me. So now that reminder comes up and I'm like, what's the next workout? And I'm like, now I'm intrigued. I'm provoked. I'm like, okay, well, I mean, I do have, I have detailed plan for what the next workout is, but somehow thinking about it, being asked that like, changed the whole thing for me. And now that reminder comes up and actually impacts me.

I love it. And that's really the essence of continuous improvement. The first thing wasn't really working that well, so you tweaked it and you got a better result. And then if that stops working, you tweak it again. Or if you find a way to even improve or enhance what you're currently doing, you tweak it again. This mindset of being deliberate and continuously improving everything and allowing it to touch everything, including how you lay your clothes out, is the essence of what lean thinking is all about. So you nailed it.

Well, when we're coaching folks, one of the things that comes up is people have breakdowns, right? And then they feel bad about the breakdown and they often resolve to do better next time. And I am always like, that makes no difference. Resolving to be a better human being or try harder or whatever. We want to think about why it broke down. Why did you not do it?

I mean, you got it all. You're turning yourself into world class problem solvers instead of bitchers and complainers and whiners. I mean, we've all mastered the latter, right? I mean, let's become world class problem solvers.

All right, so we told people that you had some secrets, that these are the pitfalls and what to do about those. So there's three big pitfalls that get in the way of people implementing lean. So talk to us about those now.

Well, the biggest one is the leader at the top of any organization. Usually there's a lot of ego involved. And unless that leader is really comfortable and very secure and comfortable, saying, I didn't know that. Wow, that's a revelation. And, you know, not feeling like they have to have all the answers, it will never work. So ego is number one. You have to have someone who's self effacing and just willing to say, I didn't know that. My best story of that is Aydin. You know, a billionaire, a billion doll company built the thing in 20 years. It's the most incredible success story ever. And when I got done speaking for eight hours, he stood up and said, I can't believe I didn't know this stuff in front of all of us leaders. This is the key to a lean success turnaround.

So there's openness and humility at the top.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That is number one.

I had this recently with a very large client, and the CEO wanted me to work with everyone in the team but him and his key people. Like, oh, we don't need it. Like, okay. The reason why the organization looks the way that it looks is because of.

You and your habits completely. We call that genius disease.

Yeah. So genius disease, right? Say more about genius disease and how do we overcome it?

Well, I don't know that you can overcome it, to be honest with you. I concluded. I just talked to Art Burns. He wrote a book called the Lean Turnaround. And I asked Art, what's the percentage of people that get this whole lean thing? And he said 4%. And I've always said 3 or 4%. You know, in my gut, that's what I feel it is. There just aren't a lot of people that are secure enough to be able to say they don't know it all. And when you become a leader, then you have to put on that facade and you've got to a degree of success. So why are you going to start admitting that you really don't know something? Right. So it's a really a very small group. And in some ways, Bill, I'm going to be honest with you. I want everyone to know lean. I want to teach lean to a country. But to be honest with you, the other side of it is the more people that don't know this, it makes it so easy for me. Nobody can compete with me. I mean, I would love everybody to do it because it's going to allow the resources in the world to be used a lot more efficiently and the world's going to go a lot better because people are going to solve problems instead of complaining about problems. That's really what I really want deep in my heart. But the bottom line is, if you don't want to learn it, no problem. I'm going to kick your ass. I don't know how to put it.

Yeah, I totally got it. Well, from an abundance mindset. Right. By implementing things like Lean and teaching lean and learning the lessons of lean. We do create a world that works for everyone and that benefits us all.

That is the best way, for sure. I'm being a little facetious on the other end.

No, no, no, I get. But in the meantime, when your competitors aren't willing to take it on, or other people, you know, whatever, you move on and you profit from the. From the difference. Right. So if the leader won't take it on, if the leader won't admit that they don't have all the answers, then it's pre hard to get lean done. Right.

It's a waste of time. It's not even hard. It's a waste of time. And you ask me, how do you get people to change? I don't know exactly what your question was. You don't? I've never got anyone to change. It is for a certain group of people, and it's only for those group of people, and it's for no one else. I don't know what to say. You have to have that ability, and that's the only way it can happen.

Well, you know, I spent a lot of time as a leader trying to have all the answers and being smart and articulate and that kind of thing.

And.

And then there was a day back in the 2000s where I, in a moment of crisis, said to the team, I don't know how to get us out of this. I got no answers. But I'm going to level with you. Here's the pickle we're in. Here's what we got.

I love it.

And by this point, I was crying, but I will not quit.

You're awesome.

And I'll fight until the sheriffs come and they lock us out and all that. And the thing that I learned, maybe by accident in the process and by watching some others, is that leadership is not about having all the answers. It's not about being the smartest person in the room.

Not at all.

Leadership is about the power of your commitment and your willingness to be accountable. I would say that I have seen some rare instances where a leader sees that having it all together is not great leadership. Power of your conviction and the courage to be open is people are like, well, I can't cry. Oh, you can cry. If your tears come from the stand that you've taken, that's powerful leadership. Right? So there is a path.

You said the word courage. Oh, so incredible. It's so true. You know, you nailed it. I mean, that's exactly what you said, is exactly what you need to make this work.

So it starts with the leader and it starts with your humility and your willingness to lead without looking good necessarily. Right. So.

Yep.

What's the. Well, in fact, Lean is about finding the parts that don't look good, finding the ugly bits.

Here's the way I Learned it from Mr. Yoshino in Japan, who is one of the guys that was responsible for the turnaround at NUMMI plant in California with General Motors. He says, no problem is a problem. If you have no problem, we've got a problem. We all have problems. And the sooner you quit hiding them or disguising them, the better off you're going to be. If you really want to become a lean thinker, no problem is a problem. You don't have any problems. You've got problem. You've got a problem. If you haven't got any problems, that's really great. Mountain is a problem. And I'm a world class company.

Yeah, because you're up to something. I would say if you're not up to something, you won't have any problems.

Right. You got it.

You'd be on the couch watching tv. So talk to us about pitfall number two.

Well, this is a really big one. Not as big as the first one, though. But the second one is wanting to delegate lean. So the leader says, ah, this is beautiful. If my organization had this, everything's going to go great. I can see the benefits of this. People are going to be happier, we're going to make more money, we're going to be more competitive. I get it all. But Bob, you go do it. Bill, you go do it. I got other things to do that are more important. Never work in a million years. The leader at the top has to be completely engaged in the transformation, completely leading the charge. Get their hands dirty every day on the Gemba, on the shop floor, engaging and embracing the problems and learning the problems with these people. Period. End of subject. It doesn't work any other way.

Totally get that. So if you're not willing to take the medicine. Right. It's not going to make any difference for you if you're not part of the thing. Get your hands dirty.

Yeah, right. Get your hands dirty. You know, Shigeru Shingo said it best. He said, you know, there are, you know, four kinds of engineers and the engineer that you really, you know, there's the catalog engineer, there's the net engineer that always says, no. There's the engineer that says, oh, we've tried it before, it doesn't work. And then there's the engineer that washes his hands ten times a day. The only engineer we can work with is the one that's got his hands dirty. Right. Is on the shop floor experiencing. The only CEO we can work with is the one that's washing his hands ten times a day, period.

Well, I always feel like when we work with a client, it's important. Like, all right, take me around. Let's go see. Let's see the flow of your business. Show it to me. And they're like, oh, you don't really want to do that. Oh, it goes late and long, and you don't want to. Let's stay here in the conference room. No, no, no, let's get up there.

That's where all the lies are in the conference room. You go to the conference room, you're going to just be lied to 24 7. You want to look at the data on a sheet, you're going to be lied to. Get on the shop floor. Go find out what your people are really going through. As I like to say, go look at the stupid process you set up as a CEO that you're making your people do. Because when you set up and what you're making your people do every day, you're going to be embarrassed.

Yeah. Years ago, I took over a product company, and I went around and people said, oh, you don't get your hands dirty enough. And I started to move around and notice the different things. And I went over to this one person in the company and I said, well, so what are you doing here? Tell me about this. What's going on? And she was making labels.

Yep.

I'm like, okay, you're making labels. So when do you make labels? How long do you spend on making labels? What does this look? And I started to realize her whole job all day long was making labels. Not to label product, but to label and relabel product. So they were labeling and relabeling product all the time. And I said, why do you do that? And they said, well, different customers have different labeling requirements. And I said, really? Because I know all kinds of product companies out there that have sort of one consistent labeling. And as I dug into it, one, I saw there was no effort to automate or change the labeling processes. And it was all being done manually and again and again. And then this whole business of relabeling was like, well, they decided they needed certain labels for certain customers in certain situations. And so since product would move between groups, it might get used for one event or go to a Trade show and then come back and then get shipped out and whatever. They had all these different labeling schemes and they were labeling really. And I'm like, okay, enough, we're done with this forever. And there were all kinds of errors in keying things and re keying things, so I just eliminated all that stuff. Well, that person lost that job that essentially eliminated a whole job and saved countless hours for everybody else. We moved that person into a different job. They had a facility. But it was just astonishing to me. And I think that going around and looking at where the time spent and where the mistakes occur and all that stuff is really critical. But if you're not willing to get down there and do it yourself, if you think somebody else is going to do it, it's never going to happen if you don't lead the way. Right.

Well, I can tell just by listening to you, Bill, you're a natural lean thinker. You totally get this completely. It's all common sense. It makes so much sense. It's almost scary that most people don't get it. But yeah, I can hear in your voice.

Well, I'm a designer, engineer kind of a person, so I love obsessing on stuff. I'm just not the operational person. Right. But I love to get it. All right, so problem number three.

Well, you know, I said that, you know, this could change on any given day for me. But the one that really comes to mind is, you know, just not willing to cut some people loose that you need to cut loose that are just there and are there going to do nothing but be an obstacle to your transformation and your team getting this. And people just want to make all kinds of excuses all the time on why they can't let this person go. I know that I'm dealing with a company right now, and they have a fair amount of people that are intoxicated by different substances and they say that's just our culture. And I'm going, well, you know what? Your customer really doesn't care that your people want to smoke pot before they come to work and after work. They care that they get their product on time and delivered correctly and that they're not faced with endless excuses on why they can't get their product. Because you want to have this warm, fuzzy culture where people can do whatever they want at customers expect. Sometimes you just gotta say, you know, that doesn't fly here. You know what? If that's what you want to do, you go knock yourself out. But our customers need 100% of our cognitive abilities. They can't rely on 60%, you know, so. And I just used a very rough example. There are people that just need to go, you know, and you need to get the right people on the bus, as Jim Collins says, and get the wrong people off the bus. And as a CEO, you need to be able to make those tough calls. And a lot of people are just way too mushy and cushy, and they just don't want to make any hard decisions. And that's just absolute nonsense.

Yeah, I deal with this all. I've got one client right now who hasn't made a change, and we've known for nine months that that's the change that needs to happen to get the growth going. Somebody's got to get replaced, and they're so uncomfortable doing it. The thing that I think is tragic, actually, I can think of different examples in all companies that people need to learn to make those changes rapidly. Is that the most tragic one is when we think we're helping someone and we end up hurting everyone. We're like, you keep someone on who can't win, right? You hurt the person because they're in an environment they're never going to win in. They can't be heroic in. They never get to be an A player in that environment, and they need to go. And all it does is perpetuate their smallness, their inadequacy. It's so tragic. And then the rest of the team just hates them and hates you.

It just starts this whole circle and everything doesn't work because the. The leader is unwilling to make the tough decisions. And you got to make the tough decisions in life. And if you're focused on the customer. See, for me, all these things are easy. I don't struggle with any of this stuff because I have one thing on my mind and only one thing, my customer. I don't make all the excuses why I can't do anything. My customer doesn't care about any of my excuses. They could give a rat's ass about my excuses. They want my product, they want it on time, and they don't want a defect. All the reasons I want to tell them I can't give it to them are totally irrelevant. So I don't laden my mind with all these silly little nonsense games that most CEOs play with themselves. I don't even go there. It's not relevant.

Yeah, so it's interesting as we're talking about Lean, which most people associate with improving manufacturing processes, we get to first. It's not just about your Manufacturing. It's about your whole damn life. And then we see the three big pitfalls of Lean.

Oh, I love you, man. You totally get it.

Yeah. And the three big pitfalls about Lean, and they're all people, right? The leader who thinks they already know it all and can't show any weakness or any fault. The leader who wants somebody else to do it, and then the leader who won't cut out anybody else who isn't on board, who isn't playing the game.

Exactly. And yet Lean is all about people, too, because the whole purpose of Leaning is to take a human being and develop them to what their potential is. That's what Lean's all about. We take human beings, we teach, and we train them in a disciplined and deliberate fashion on a daily basis. We take them from here and we move them to here, and we keep moving them up and up and up. So it's all about people, but yet it's all about people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Lean is really simple. Lean is eliminating the waste, right? Eliminating all the waste, all the waste of time, of resource, of people, all of that waste, and cutting it out as a kind of an ongoing, perpetual way of looking for what sucks, what doesn't work.

Right. I want to use the word not even perpetual, deliberate. You have to say, I'm going to do this every day. I'm not going to do it when it's convenient, when I have time, when the orders aren't so intense, when I don't have so many things coming across my desk. You say to yourself, lean first, and then I have time to do everything else. But if you don't have time to do Lean, it's because you're not doing Lean.

Right. That's the big catch. Right? And then we want to apply it everywhere with everyone, and we want to find all those things and make it a regular kind of a process. And we see that in your book and in your videos. The book Two Second Lean. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes, and we'll put a link to your video collection. Yeah. Anything else you want to link out to?

Well, you know, just so they know the book is free, you can get it online. You can download it. It's in 12 languages now. I mean, gosh, you can get it in every language. It seems like under the sun, and it's readily available. We don't charge anything for it. If you want to buy the hardcover copy, you know, it's only five bucks. If you buy 20 or more. We have companies Coca Cola buy three and 400 at a time. You know, they're big corporations. Buy hundreds and hundreds of them. We give it to. Basically it costs.

That's right.

Awesome book. And we have the biggest companies in the world use it for their textbook, for actually learning. We have universities using everybody. I mean, it's very popular book because it's so simple.

All right. And then our three big things are make sure that you as the leader are open and, and dealing with yourself first and foremost and that you're leading the charge on it and not trying to give it all away. And then you're willing to make the changes in the team if that's needed to get the lien implemented as a way of life.

That's what I say. You know, they could change a little, but that's basically the gist of what, what needs to happen.

That's really, really brilliant. Well, I think this is a totally efficient podcast. I help folks get right to the heart of it and, and take advantage of it. So thanks so much for being with us today and taking time out of your travel schedule.

My pleasure, Bill. Anytime.

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