speaker-0: Welcome back to Lead with Bubba Scott. Today's guest is an absolute legend in the world of manufacturing, management, and organizational improvement. Dr. Jim Womack. Dr. Womack is the founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute and one of the central figures responsible for translating the Toyota production system into what the world now knows as lean thinking. His work helped leaders across the West understand that lean is not just a set of tools for factories. But a way of seeing work, creating value, solving problems, and building better organizations. This was an absolutely incredible conversation with someone whose ideas have shaped manufacturing and management around the world. Let's get it. Doctor Jim Womack, so excited to have you on the show. How are you doing today, sir?
speaker-1: So far so good.
speaker-0: Yeah, this is incredible to get you on lead with Bubba Scott. Couldn't be happier that you're here. Very grateful to our mutual friend Ed Wilson for for the connection and excited to to get after it and talk about some good stuff today. So with that, I would love to just begin with a little bit of your background, where you grew up, what that was like for you, and ultimately your path to an incredibly successful educational career.
speaker-1: Yeah, I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. ⁓ in nineteen forty eight. I just went to my sixtieth high school reunion, ⁓ down in Little Rock. And ⁓ as a kid, I just always loved to look at stuff. Why would that be? Just sit still and don't do anything. I think the high s ⁓ the highlight of my ⁓ grade school life was the fourth grade trip to the Westinghouse light bulb factory in Little Rock, Arkansas. First time I'd ever seen a factory, I just thought this was the most amazing thing. Everybody's moving on high-speed conveyors, making those light bulbs. ⁓ but I'd just love to see anything. Go out and look at anything. My dad traveled for a living and I would go with him in the summer sometime. At the end of the workday, we would go to the airport and look at the airplanes, little town airport, go talk to the mechanic, go to the railway yard, talk to the guys in the engine house. Just like to look at stuff and see how it worked. And So that's a a lifetime ⁓ sort of thing, which gets us to the idea of gimba. ⁓ and gimba, the Japanese word, sorry for that, might not be the last one, ⁓ is simply the place where value is created. And ⁓ by the way, ⁓ value is between the ears of a human being. That's where value is. There's no there's no outside definition of value. Your marketing department can talk about value. ⁓ anybody can talk about it as an abstraction, but as a reality, it's between your ears. And so it was always ⁓ fun to ⁓ go out and ⁓ take a walk to see what people thought value was and what they were trying to do. ⁓ so that's who I am. I mean, why why would that be? ⁓ that's nothing about schooling. There was nothing in school that ever encouraged me to do that. I went to a liberal arts college, I studied liberal arts. ⁓ by the way, I liked to work in political campaigns when I was a kid, ⁓ down in Arkansas. Kind of ⁓ I would say ⁓ pretty fractious politics then and now. And ⁓ so I worked in high school and in college in political campaigns, and I thought at one point I might be a staffer. ⁓ be a hey, I'd be a good congressional staffer. And then I said, I can't do that. You gotta make too many compromises. I just yeah, I wanna say what I what I mean, so I better do something else. And I decided, well, actually, and this sounds weird, I'm a pretty good observer, so I thought I might be a journalist. But I didn't like the fact that ⁓ there was so little structure to that. So I said what I really am is a good problem solver. And ⁓ you know what is the problem? Dig down, figure out what the problem is, what are the alternatives? What could you do about it and how can you do it? So my life has mostly been about talking how to define problems and how to solve them. And that's why we start with the value thing. That ⁓ what is it that people actually want, or at least think they want? And then what has to happen in order to get them ⁓ that which they want? Pretty simple, but ⁓ that's ⁓ a central part of life.
speaker-0: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's it's so awesome to see even at a young age your interest in the factory and and manufacturing. Because obviously you said you went to study liberal arts and then ultimately you got very interested in manufacturing and different approaches to processes throughout the world. It could you talk about your studies at a at a younger age after college and and what what brought you, what was the actual spark? Because of course we know you're very interested in in Walking around, seeing how things are done and addressing problems, but you went on to actually pursue that academically post grad.
speaker-1: Well I got a lucky bounce ⁓ from General Hershey. ⁓ your audience is probably not old enough to minor remember the head of the of the ⁓ selective service, but in nineteen seventy my name got pulled out of the fishbowl, the the number of my birth date, ⁓ practically first, which meant that I was off the hook on the draft. And I I had made zero plans, I was quite fatalistic about it. I thought I'd, you know, need to learn Vietnamese or Swedish or something. This didn't seem to me to be heading in the right direction. So suddenly I was completely free. So I said, Well, gee, ⁓ I've loved to always go somewhere and see things. Why don't I just take a trip around the world? And I spent ⁓ some time making a little money, and then I set off and I decided I'd go to India. My ⁓ faculty ⁓ professors had been political scientists who studied India and they were going off for a sabbatical year, and I could be their traveling secretary. So I spent ⁓ a year in India, which is a fascinating place, but ⁓ it is not an orderly place. ⁓ there is an underlying order to India, but pff I never could figure out what it was. And on my way back from India after a year I stopped in Japan. And the reason I stopped in Japan was I had a cheap ticket and the cheap ticket stopped in Japan. So I got off the plane and never forget, ⁓ came out of the airport and I was you know, it's just a student, I wasn't gonna take a taxi, I was gonna try to find a bus. And there at the bus stop in a great long line are these Japanese standing in a perfectly straight line. And in India, ⁓ trying to get out of the country, there's this incredible scrum at the boarding gate of people just trying to figure out who's gonna go first. And because I was pretty big guy, well I could elbow my way through. But I said, Holy moly, I have landed on Mars. This is Mars. This is the weirdest thing I have ever seen. So that was my introduction to Japan. And I didn't spend very much time, didn't look at any factories, ⁓ did a lot of writing on the ⁓ Shinkansen and ⁓ doing other ⁓ kind of ⁓ things of that time. That was nineteen seventy one. ⁓ so then came back, long story, went to MIT and got on the research staff, and then from there it's a pretty straightforward story.
speaker-0: Yeah, so that that is a fascinating introduction to Japan and and especially at that time in your life as you're as you're looking at what you're going to be studying. And so ultimately you got introduced and interested in the manufacturing processes at Toyota. And of course, you're you're best known for translating those processes into a digestible language for the Western world. Can you talk about your first introduction to Toyota and and your Reason for beginning those studies and ultimately what that process looked like.
speaker-1: Well, ⁓ it actually begins with General Motors. That ⁓ at MIT, long story about why I was hired, but I was the project manager for a project on the future of urban transportation that was paid for by the federal government because in nineteen seventy five when I started, ⁓ we had the first energy crisis was still reverberating. ⁓ we had the smog problem because that was the year before catalysts were introduced. We had the body count, we had one in Vietnam and had a second one on American highways, ⁓ peaked at ⁓ seventy seven thousand ⁓ people got killed in you know blunt trauma ⁓ death. And so there were a lot of questions about what to do about urban transportation. So the department said, Hey, just take a clean sheet and I had a boss who was a very brilliant guy. Just forget all the constraints. What what can we do? And what we want you to do is suggest how to do better that we could actually do. So anything you might think of, you've got to multiply effectiveness by possibility, by practicality. And as we looked at that, ⁓ we said, gee, we better go to Detroit. So I was the guy who did all the traveling. I went out to Detroit to the Tech Center at General Motors. It's nineteen seventy five. And I was just amazed that they had six hundred PhDs on staff back in the day. And somebody there knew the answer to every question that headquarters would never ask. So that downtown at headquarters they're putting out press releases saying they would love to clean up the air, but it's impossibly expensive, and they would love to have more crashable vehicles, but mm, you know, it's just not affordable, and so on and so on. And out at the Tech Center, they're saying, Hey, want to look at how catalysts are gonna work? Wanna talk about electronic engine controls? ⁓ want to talk about crashable structures, want to talk about passive restraints. We can do all of this. It's you know, and the cost will go down and down. So that was my first encounter with big corporation where there seemed to be a disconnect between the tail and the head. ⁓ and second, ⁓ this kind of ⁓ you know sclerosis and lethargy. And in all my trips to GM nobody ever talked about the customer. I was really I thought, well gonna talk about the customer sometime. So I formed a pretty negative view, not of GM, ⁓ but just of big companies. And said, Whoa, ⁓ I just bet all these guys are brain dead. Brain dead was the term I always used. You know, there's no line, just look at the you know, ⁓ there's no it's not going like that, it's just going like that. So I should understand this. We could do better. And that was without ⁓ knowing anything about Toyota. ⁓ I just say that just toward the end I ⁓ since the My my fourth grade trip to the light bulb factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, I really hadn't been in a factory. And I asked GM if I could go look at a factory and spend the day. They said, Great, go to the Cadillac plant. It's right here in town. And ⁓ it's in line of sight from the GM headquarters building, Clark Avenue, Detroit. And so I went and that changed my life that day. ⁓ that I walked in and they're assembling Cadillacs. And Cadillac was the only GM division that still had its own manufacturing. All of the rest had been bundled up into something called the General Motors Assembly Division. So this is the Cadillac plant, and they were making 250,000 Cadillacs a year. And you walk in, and this is the most dispirited group of human beings you have ever seen standing there. And the cars are clanking along, and I note the line never stops, but I also note that often the person doing the work can't actually do the work. They don't have the right part, the part doesn't fit, something's wrong. So the steering wheel, they just toss it in the car, you know, toss it in the driver's seat. Car keeps going. And I asked what's the ⁓ management ⁓ criteria, and they said, ⁓ we've got KPIs, key performance indicators, and the one that really counts is uptime, so that we are determined to run the line a hundred percent of the time. Okay, and they did. Well, I stood there and watched for eight hours, never went down. And then you got to the end of the line and there were two doors. One said major repair and the other said minor repair. And I said, Well, where's the door that says ship it? They said, That's never happened. Okay. So can I go in and look at the repair building? I assume that's where the cars are going, and sure enough, then the this ⁓ called they had to get general manager to come down and authorize me to go into the repair building. And it turned out there were twenty five hundred people in the repair building and there were twenty five hundred people in the assembly building. Wow. And for every car they were parked nose to nose, and there's a manifest and the car talked, that's the build order of what the options are on the car. You know, and there's the build order, there's a big red circle around something, windshield wipers or whatever. And there's a guy with a box of parts and a box of tools scratching his head ⁓ trying to get this car to work. So they said, Well, you know, I said, Doesn't anybody get in trouble for this? And they No, no, no, this belongs to the ⁓ sales organization, it doesn't belong to manufacturing. And they've got entirely different KPIs. Okay, so we're over here and our KPI is to build ⁓ two hundred and whatever it is, forty cars an hour, a shift and four hundred and eighty a day. And by that time, the general manager's standing there, and this and this kid from MIT who clearly doesn't know anything, and I said, gee, this this is the most screwed up thing I've ever seen. And he looks at me and he says, You don't get it. The Japanese built tin cans. I build Cadillacs. Okay? And then turns on his heel and storms off. So that was the day, nineteen seventy-nine, where I said, Whoa, this country's in trouble. This is the largest and most successful, historically most successful manufacturing company in the world. And this is what I just saw. So suddenly I had a new career direction. I said, There must be something we could do about this. ⁓ Wonder how they do it in Japan where they build tin cans. And so just at that point we were transitioning to the next ⁓ project, which became known as the International Motor Vehicle Program. And fortunately I wound up as the ⁓ research director, and so I could do that. I could go to Japan, and ⁓ it was like having a hall pass when you were in high school. You know, you could just walk around and see anything. I had my pass, and I could ask all kinds of impertinent questions with the translator, because I don't speak Japanese. And I took one look and said, ⁓ my gosh, ⁓ that by the way, my virtue was what the ⁓ Buddhists, the Zen guys would call beginners eyes, that I didn't know what I was supposed to see. I hadn't been pre trained, like your AI. I hadn't been pre trained so that I could actually maybe see what was there and all the people who had been there forever ⁓ had become basically progressively blinder that this was just how things are. And for me, young guy, don't know a thing. Say, well, so that's how I got started. And at that time there were two theories about ⁓ the Japanese ⁓ success. ⁓ and theory A was that they lie, cheat, and steal. Okay, they steal IP, they've got secret ⁓ you know, secret supplier shops working under horrible, ⁓ horrible labor conditions, that they've got a trick currency they can manipulate, that they've got subsidies from the Ministry of Finance, they've got targeting through the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. The thing wrong with these people is they light sheet and steel. And an awful lot of Americans and Europeans were willing to ⁓ buy the premise. and just from my early going, I said, wait a minute, you know, th th this is I don't think this is right. I'm looking, and by the way, I didn't just go to the factory, I went to the engineering department, I went to purchasing, I went to the sales organization, I went out and watched them sell cars door to door. ⁓ I said, whoa, this is an entirely different business system. This is just different. And I think it's better, but we don't really have the evidence. We're not going to win the debate. Let's call that theory two. Theory one is light sheet and steel. Theory two ⁓ became ⁓ called lean. ⁓ we had no evidence, ⁓ we better get some evidence. And so it took us a couple of years to get the companies to agree, and ⁓ the twenty biggest car companies ⁓ in the world agreed that they would all play. And the deal was they would put in money, which was kind of unimportant because what we could spend was not even rounding error in the car industry. Right. But they would allow access. They would allow me to go to their factories and go in their engineering departments and go in their purchasing organizations. And we came up with a bunch of ⁓ you know ⁓ benchmarking ⁓ example b benchmarking methods. But it never occurred to us to ask the company to fill the stuff out because we just thought there were such enormous incentives to ⁓ jigger the numbers. You know. And so therefore we got a team and some really wonderful, brilliant young people, by the way, ⁓ you're in ⁓ a business school, these were many of them business school students, who had gone out in the industrial world for a few years, been pretty disillusioned. And ⁓ the automotive And came back in this case the Sloan School at MIT and ⁓ had gone through two years and they were thinking about ⁓ what to do and they needed to do a senior paper back in the day, they got rid of that. ⁓ and I could take those senior papers and say, Hey, look, go to Detroit and go to Chrysler and take a look at how they do whatever. So ⁓ they were knowledgeable people, they were dissatisfied people, they were smart people. And ⁓ my ⁓ number one guy is a fellow named John Krapchik, who was the first ⁓ person hired at the NUMI, ⁓ that's the GM Toyota joint venture in California. ⁓ and he was the first person to quit two years later when he came to work for me while going to Sloan. And I asked John to go visit every car assembly plant in the world and to do a benchmark, and I had already worked out how to do it, and he did it. And ⁓ holy moly was he good. And ⁓ later his last job in his career was the founding CEO of Waymo. And ⁓ wow. I've spent quite a bit of time riding around in Waymo Bills, ⁓ trying to think about how you take ⁓ an operation run entirely by coders and ⁓ turn it into an operating company, which turns out's not as easy ⁓ as we might hope. But ⁓ but help was on the way and so they're g they're gonna do fine. Anyway, that's awesome. So we were going all over the world and looking at, and again, not just the factory. Because we understood from the very first thing that there were really five parts. I mean, five parts ⁓ to the puzzle. ⁓ number one was production, but number two was product development. By the way, product and process development. It's just clear to us that the Japanese were way ahead. By the fact that when they launched a car, the process was robust. Whereas for American and European companies, they launched a car and they were just kind of making it up and would gradually iterate their way to something that was good quality and high volume. Okay. Didn't seem to us like a very good idea ⁓ purchasing. ⁓ Toyota said you there are no good suppliers, you create them. ⁓ the Western guy said let's find the lowest cost supplier. ⁓ that with regard to the customer, it's a shame that all the stuff they do in Japan to ⁓ take care of the customer never could export any of that. It was all thought to be too labor intensive, but pretty amazing ⁓ the the buying experience in Japan compared to the US and Europe. And then finally the fifth piece of the puzzle, that's the thumb, ⁓ was general management. There really was a management system. And so the machine book, a machine that changed the world in 1990, ⁓ Womac et al. And that et al. were very important ⁓ because ⁓ we did share that project ⁓ completely, ⁓ was an explanation of a business system that was an alternative to what we would call the mass production modern management system, of which GM had been the exemplar, and for sixty years was the most successful company out there. And then these guys show up with some things quite different. Just say one other thing about that that ⁓ On our first visit, really extended visit in the summer of eighty two with my ⁓ co-author Dan Jones, we spent a lot of time at Honda, a lot of time at Nissan, and a lot of time at Toyota. And as we were wrapping up, getting ready to go home, we looked at each other and said, There's no such thing as Japan. It's just an American, European concept. That there are such differences between Nissan, Honda, and Toyota that they're not. They're just not comparable. And by the way, Toyota's gonna win. We had no question in our mind Toyota's gonna win. And ⁓ Nissan was an old-fashioned general motor style bureaucracy, a lot of top-down command control, seemed to be mostly secure jobs for University of Tokyo graduates, ⁓ that Honda ran on adrenalines. I mean, jeepers, these guys, you know, we now hear about 699 or 996 in China. These guys were doing it in Japan then. And They failed fast, but boy did they fail. And we said, gee, when these people get a little older, they can't stand this pace, and they just make too many mistakes. It's a different type of rework. They would just go diving off into some crazy idea and spend a lot of money and time on it, and then discover it didn't work at all, and were so proud of themselves. And then Toyota, grim, relentless, marching ahead, like the Roman legions. In fact, that's what ⁓ the head of Honda told us. They're like the Roman legions. If we meet them on a plane, we're dead. So we fight in the hills, we're gorillas. I said, Well great, do you think the world's got more planes or more hills? Anyway. So that was ⁓ the story of how we got to ⁓ trying to describe these ⁓ two different systems. And I think we won the argument. ⁓ a lot of people didn't understand the argument that we had won. ⁓ they read the book and they got a few buzzwords and ⁓ that became apparent when they tried to copy it and ⁓ which led to ⁓ much ⁓ amusing nonsense. But ⁓ that's how we got there.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's that's incredible. I mean, what a what an incredible opportunity to get to observe all those things. And going back to when you were a kid, figuring out that you loved walking around, observing things, looking for problems, and getting to do that at such a high level with such a great team must have been so exciting. And obviously the ⁓ the fruits of that labor were incredibly successful and a huge benefit to all of modern manufacturing. You mentioned your book. ⁓ the machine that changed the world. I was doing some research and that it's that alone has been cited over 26,000 times in academia, in academic journals and academic ⁓ so it's an absolute behemoth in terms of its impact on on ⁓ modern manufacturing and academia. And so going into that, we talked about why you went there, what you saw when you were there, but I would love to talk about kind of a hip pocket class on the principles of lean. that can ⁓ that can set the table for our discussion about how it can be applied across industries. So can you give us a quick breakdown of the important concepts of lean and what you what your takeaways were?
speaker-1: Yeah. Well there's three levels. ⁓ top level, which you can see on the surface, this is the tip of the iceberg, is tools. But that's not the iceberg. And then below that you've got some principles, which are below the waterline, ⁓ which you can describe, but they don't work unless you have some basic beliefs, and that's the bottom of the iceberg that's ⁓ they're bumping along the bottom or whatever. So you need it to understand all three. And the world most easily understood the tools. So let me let me start with this the basic beliefs. And these are so different from what most people believe without even thinking about it. ⁓ the number one ⁓ was the power of stability. What if you had an organization where things actually worked because you had instant feedback loops, anything that was out of spec. Anything that didn't happen the way it was supposed to happen got immediate attention. What if you thought that just ordinary people, ordinary, regular, not so smart people could actually diagnose a problem and suggest a countermeasure? What if you believed that? Okay, back at that Cadillac plant at General Motors, the management didn't believe the workers could do anything, but maybe ⁓ screw a nut on a bolt, maybe. Okay? What if you actually believe that? And this is partly a Japanese thing, a very homogeneous society. ⁓ what if ⁓ every person thinks it's part of their job to identify anything that goes wrong? By the way, that is so unjapanese. Toyota consciously invented a corporate culture that said the one thing you can get in trouble for is not pulling the end on. That's the little cord you pull to when you got a problem. ⁓ that you must pull the end on. You must. And nobody wants to do that because it sorta says I screwed up. That's the way it you know, kind of common life. You pull a cord to say something's wrong, well that must be you is what's wrong. So no no no. That you're there to detect wrongness. That's your number one job is to detect anything that's wrong. So what if you have a system that ⁓ believes in stability, that thinks that ordinary people can actually be actively engaged in stabilizing and over time in improving the process, right? That you're just operating from a different mindset. ⁓ by the way, you know, a third thing that goes with that, if you're gonna have stability you have to have stability in people. So that ⁓ what if the organization says every individual can be continuously improved along with every process? And to make that work though, ⁓ they have to stay. So that we have a situation of reciprocal obligation. ⁓ by the way, there's no such thing in Japan, never was as lifetime employment, as a legal concept, it doesn't exist. Americans made that up. ⁓ what Toyota said after they went bankrupt in nineteen fifty and had to terminate a third of the workforce, they said to the two thirds that were left, if you will do the work the right way every time and engage in improving the work, we will take steps to protect you. But this is reciprocal obligation. We're committed to you, but this is not socialism. We live in the market. You have to be committed to us, to the team. So we're gonna give you the tools. The problem solving tools, okay, like five S and and I'm sorry, five Y's and so on. Five S is good too. But it's reciprocal obligation. And look, that's the foundation of the thing. So if you go to the Toyota in Japan today, there's nobody who hasn't been a Toyota their whole life. And Americans might just go screaming out of the room, out of the company. You know, I want the wide open spaces where the you know, the whatever, the antelope run free or whatever. ⁓ this was a system where you say if you come in and you do the work, you do it right, and you improve the work, we're gonna defend you. And by the way, in Toyota's case they have always carried enormous amounts of cash. That ⁓ every finance professor ⁓ you know, just said, What a what a stupid thing that is. Why would you carry all that cash? And the answer is because we make mistakes, because the world's a harsh place. And our people, you know, would we hit a trough and start putting our machine tools over the side? Why would other companies think it's okay to put their workers over the side that they spent years developing? We're not going to do that. But we have to there is a cost, which is that we forego ⁓ any returns more than money markets or something. ⁓ on all that cash that we've got around. And by the way, starting into this latest ⁓ mess in the car industry, Toyota had three times the cash of any other car company. Okay? And by the way, Toyota has not laid off an employee since nineteen fifty. Not a single one. ⁓ due to economic circumstance anywhere in the world. And they did just ⁓ leave Australia after all the car companies left Australia and they said, Well you know we just can't we have no ecosystem here. ⁓ but other than that They said ⁓ we've ⁓ the the the employees accepted our challenge to do the work, to improve the work, and we've accepted our obligation to protect them. But we in this very disruptive time, that's a tough one, and I don't know for a fact that Toyota can maintain that. Okay, if you're gonna go very quickly to electric vehicles with ⁓ AI plus A V, ⁓ that's autonomy. ⁓ being a central part of the product, well the folks with the skills to do that are not the folks who are making ⁓ you know, valve stems and ⁓ springs for valves and so forth ⁓ out in the supply base. So can they keep that going? Yeah. Anyway, so I ⁓ don't want to lose my rabbit here. So that's a foundation of what people really believe. Okay? And then there's some principles that go with it. ⁓ and one principle is velocity is good. Okay. And so therefore we look at any process, and by the way, it's all process focused. We start here, we do things, do things, do things, and we create value for the customer here, or the customers here, and you can work it backwards. We call that the value stream. Let's look at the value stream. We believe you can always increase the velocity. Now by the way, that's where where did this principle come from? Where's the proof? ⁓ that velocity is good. That ⁓ something is dead is bad. By the way, in the maps that they draw in Japan, everybody knows how to draw these value stream maps, ⁓ for inventory they use tombstones because that's dead money. So they've got cash, but they don't want the cash tied up in inventory. They want the cash out in some low yield investment that they can get instantly. Okay, so So there are lots of principles that go with it. ⁓ that principle that is the you know kind of the the hardest ⁓ to deal with is that you can always improve. ⁓ the Toyota is never gonna win one of these best place to work ⁓ contests. Okay. That's always gonna be won by people out in Silicon Valley in the early going, just after the IPO. When you've got so much cash you don't know what to do with it. Then you got hot tubs and saunas and gourmet lunches and so on. Tell you what it doesn't have any of that. And for every manager, every year, ⁓ your boss comes to you and says, Okay, what's your plan for a three percent improvement? Three percent improvement cost and quality and lead time, whatever. Just tell me about your plan. I'm not telling you anything, you tell me because that's what we do here. What we've got right now is never good enough. Never ever good enough. And one of the senior guys, first one of the senior managing directors I met years ago, and I said, Why are you successful? And he said, We worry more than other people. That's what we do, we worry and then we act. I thought, whoa, there's a nice principle. ⁓ worry and then act. ⁓ and then finally you get to the top, which is Kanban and Andon and Judoka. And all those kinds of things. That's the auto stop so that ⁓ process never produces a bad product that it moves ahead. Those are the principles that people see. The trying to apply those principles without ⁓ those ⁓ tools, without understanding principles, and by the way, without the deep beliefs. ⁓ best of luck. and so that's been the struggle ⁓ over all these years. The tools are easy and beliefs are hard. And ⁓ that's what I Spent a lot of time thinking about.
speaker-0: Yeah, that is ⁓ such a great breakdown of everything and and a lot of ⁓ fascinating insights there. One topic that we brought up earlier is Gemba. And so as you were talking through ⁓ everything about lean, I'm just thinking about ⁓ you know, I'm not really in a position to say if lean necessarily influenced the leadership development training in the Marine Corps or my experience at the Naval Academy or anything like that, but I certainly see A lot of parallels, ⁓ and particularly you know, continuous improvement, but really just looking holistically, working on systems and improving those, I think is a really difficult thing to actually execute, ⁓ which we've discussed a bit. But I want to talk about Gemba because I think that that is it, it seems like such a phenomenal tool for actually identifying issues and understanding at the point of friction, as the Marine Corps would say. But I would love to talk about that because it's also such an incredible leadership tool is the idea of Gemba actually going to the point where the work happens. You go see, you ask why, and then most importantly, you show respect for the people who are giving you that information. So I'd love to hear a a little bit further breakdown of Gemba, the thought process behind it, and then share some ⁓ some thoughts on that as well.
speaker-1: Yeah, ⁓ let me tell you about a great gimbal day I had, and this is now a few years ago, it's before the pandemic. ⁓ over the years we've gotten calls from companies saying we want to be the Toyota of our industry. ⁓ what do you think? And they're not looking for a consultant, they're looking for a second opinion. They've tried stuff. So this was a company, a household name company in the US. And ⁓ the CEO was a very interesting guy that his first job in life had been building the s first American supplier plant that was set up to supply Toyota in Kentucky, nineteen eighty eight. He came out of school, he I don't know what his background was, but they put him on the team to ⁓ set up this plant. And so he was getting direct instruction every day from the Japanese Toyota guys, because they at that time had a lot of Japanese in the States. They don't anymore at all. But back then. So he got trained and how to think. And very unusually he was an operations guy who became the CEO of a twenty billion dollar business. Because he was really good. So I said, Well look, why don't you and I go take a walk together? Because I just want to see how things are. ⁓ we'll call him Mike, 'cause his name was Mike. And ⁓ we went out to the corporate jet lot at ⁓ the in the headquarters city and we got in the plane and we started to go and stopped and ⁓ somebody was on the phone and said ⁓ the plant we were gonna go see, they just pushed the button on ⁓ ERP on on SAP, and we've lost visibility of all of our orders and all of our parts. So the plant stopped. So we're out really just out on the taxiway. And ⁓ Mike says to the pilot, How much fuel you got? okay, I got this. Okay, let's go the opposite direction. Instead of going south, let's go north to ⁓ one of the big ⁓ plants and the only plant that was not going to be on SAP that day, because they're running. So we went and it was great because there was no preparation. They didn't know we were coming. And look, you know, if you've been in any organization that the boss is coming, well, the reality doesn't look the way it did before the word got out the boss is coming, right? So these poor guys, they've they've had no opportunity to to ⁓ do anything but what they're doing. So we got there, and ⁓ Mike says, Okay, let's start back in the back, and let's ⁓ for this big product family, let's just walk the steps. And so off we go. And ⁓ What a what a wonderful guy. ⁓ everybody he sees, he goes over and says, Tell me about your work. And Helman said, Tell me about your struggles. What's the worst thing about this? Well, they they don't even know who he is. Okay, so they tell him. And ⁓ we go down the line, and this is a big machine, but it is an assembly line, and they're pulling machines off. So he says, Gee, why are you pulling that off? And they say, Well, we don't have the parts. Or the you know, this is broken or that's broken and so forth. So we get all the way down to the end, and the last person is the ⁓ crew chief for Final Assembly. And he says, Gee, tell me about ⁓ tell me about your struggles. And she said, Sir, I've been working here twenty years and I've been laid off twenty times, because it's a cyclical business. And so I've got a separate business that I run. And by the way, this is the frontline management, okay? Got a separate business that I run, which I have to do because you guys can't level the schedule. So I said, okay, thank you. I I I appreciate your service. ⁓ thank you. So then he turns to the head of the op ex team and says, Well, what do you think we ought to do? And the head of the opex team says, We need to do twice as much kaizen. And so Mike just looks at him. And says I think we've got proof here that Kaizen on top of chaos is chaos. Okay, because Kaizen is heavier than chaos and glob glob, it just sinks. I think what we don't need to do is more Kaizen. I think we need to work on basic stability. Because they haven't got the parts, they haven't got the tools, they haven't got the people. I don't know what their metrics look like. I'm just saying this. None of this is what it ought to be. So who's got some ideas about how we could deal with this? So we get through that that walk. He's never told them what to do. He simply said there's no stability here. Does anybody notice? This doesn't have to be this way. This is chaos. What do you think you should do to make this less chaotic? And by the way, how can I help? Okay. So that was the gimbal walk. And there are not very many CEOs who could do that. and it's a shame. And ⁓ again, most people think you're the ⁓ CEO and you're gonna do the gimbal walk, you're gonna do the walk of shame. And you're gonna go out and show people how bad they are. Well, everybody knew how bad they were. They didn't need to tell them that. He didn't say that. And he said, gee, tell me about your struggles. Tell me about what's going on here. Tell me about why is this machine over here? So, ⁓ that's the difference between the ⁓ the boss with the program. It comes in to make sure there's adherence to the program. You know, have you done that? Have you got the production control boards everywhere? Have you got Andon everywhere? Have you got, you know, all this stuff, because they read a book about that. And the guy who is genuinely interested in what's the problem? What are your problems and tra you know he said, Look, you people want to do good work, I know you do. And you got all these obstacles. So tell me about it. Now you shouldn't as a CEO have to take that walk very often because I guarantee and all the other plants, because eventually I looked at a lot of them, had the same problems. Yeah. And ⁓ they were all managing KPI. And the problem with KPI management, ⁓ key performance indicator, is that there are always about ten ways to make a KPI. Yeah. Nine of which are bad for the customer and the company but are easy. And the tenth of which is good for the company, good for the customer, and it's hard. That's why they haven't done it. So then if you're just a KPI manager, well best of luck, but I don't think you're gonna do anything sustainable. ⁓ that you really have to step back a step.
speaker-0: Yeah, and and when talking about that Kai Zen, we're talking about the process of continuous improvement, right? Yeah. So the idea there that they were like, ⁓ we just need to increase our continuous improvement, ⁓ which is kind of some a theme we talked about before we we got on today of use it kind of almost weaponizing this language, ⁓ and not employing it in the appropriate way. But I I love that story you tell because I think that that's At that scale must be incredibly challenging to do a gamba walk as a CEO of a corporation that has that many manufacturing plants. ⁓ and there are so many applications for a gamba walk that it just immediately come to mind to me. And the first one I'm thinking of is ⁓ when I was a junior co-pilot, and you know, you're you're still learning. I mean, you you technically know how, but you're you're improving your own process of conducting the safety walk around for the plane, the pre-flight walk around. And every month we had to do a walk around of the plane ⁓ just as an inspection for a maintenance program. And you could, of course, go out there and do it with the publication, do it by yourself. You know, it's your duty to do it. Or you could ask one of the maintainers or the crew chiefs, the enlisted guys and gals who know everything about the plane to do it with you. And I it was a piece of advice that was given to me by a by a senior captain at the time. Grab one of the Marines, ask them to show you and ask them to show you what they're looking for when they do their walk around. Cause of course they have a different, a different requirement. And it's it's so awesome. I think the the key point ⁓ of at least this this concept of Gemba that that I'm learning and that I think is so important is showing that respect and having genuine interest. Like you said, you're not there to conduct an ad hoc inspection. Of course, there are times to do that, but that's not the point of this. ⁓ But you're you're genuinely interested in what they're providing, what they're doing, what their work is. And in that process where you show the humility to learn from folks, you gain a little bit of trust. And then when you ask them those questions of, hey, what are the major issues that are facing you today? Because you've showed that interest, because you've shown up with respect, they actually give you good actionable feedback, which I think is such a powerful tool for any leader.
speaker-1: Well I've talked with lots of senior guys, mostly guys, manufacturing still, but not always. And one of the things you discover when you talk a little bit is that they don't much like this gimbal walk thing because they think they have to have the answer. Okay? Big boss, a lot of money, a lot of years in here, you must have the answer. ⁓ well that's ⁓ from a lean standpoint, that's ludicrous. ⁓ that ⁓ there's no way one person could ⁓ have the answer. And that scares them off. ⁓ so if you change the tone of saying, hi, I'm here, ⁓ yeah, I'm the big boss, but I'm here just to understand about the work. And I'm not looking at you, I'm looking at the work, and I'm thinking from the standpoint of the customer, which is also from the standpoint of the business, and I'm just wondering how we're doing. ⁓ forget the KPIs, I don't care about that. Just let's take a walk. And so you have to change that from what we call the answer man ⁓ to the question man. ⁓ that you don't have the answer. And you say, I don't have the answer, guys. I don't know what to do here. But is this a problem? If it is a problem, well what's being done about it and what should be done about it and so on. So it's just ⁓ it's upside down from where we are. ⁓ hey, let me say one thing about that though, ⁓ which Americans just still don't understand. That ⁓ Toyota ⁓ never talks about product development, they talk about product and process development. Okay? And they're supposed to be done simultaneously. It's not perfect possible to be perfectly simultaneous. But when they get to job one on any of their products, the process is very robust because the people who do the work have actually offline practiced doing the work. And everybody's talked about the best way to do the work. And so what most companies would call Kaizen, they call process development. It was done before they made anything. Okay, and so what you see in companies is you go out and the product's actually a pretty good product conceptually. ⁓ only problem is they can't make it because they're gonna backfill, and that's where they want their OpEx team to come in and backfill for the fact that they never really fully developed the process. Before they started. So that's why ⁓ my friend Mike, with our walk, ⁓ shouldn't have actually had to be asking the questions he's asking, because at Toyota that ridiculous mess would never have happened to begin with. so th that's a that's a key missing element. And hang on, we got the idea about OPEX ⁓ from Toyota and the Japanese, okay? And we'd always had things like workout at GE and other things in the States as a way to do cross-functional, you know, kind of function busting stuff. But ⁓ the idea was that that was how Toyota became so good that they did more Kaizen. Now, that ⁓ their organization called OMDD Operations Management Development, okay, they've got about seventy people in OMDD for the whole world with 350,000 employees. Okay. And they never go around to solve problems. They go around to assess the capability of the organization to solve problems. Okay, they're looking at something totally different from what we've been looking at. And this business of ⁓ modern management of delegating problems, which is really an amazing thing. That Sloan told you how to do it at GM, you set up the staffs, this is back in the twenties. GE was ⁓ the best at it. ⁓ that line managers don't actually need to understand anything except how to keep score, because when you do have a problem, you delegate. And there's this vast organization of people are gonna come and fix things. Toyota World, again, your basic beliefs, is that frontline workers can basically fix things. Okay, when I say the frontline worker, I mean the team leader plus the work team plus the area person. have got the skills, the know-how, and they're gonna have the time to work on things because the process is actually quite stable. So that you're not spending all your time firefighting. So you got time if you're a manager left to say, okay, well what do we need to do to make this better? Well that time doesn't exist for most managers and most modern management companies. They're just trying to get through the shift, through the day, through the week, through the quarter, through the year. It's no time. And they will all tell you how stressed they are and how hard they're working. And and they say, does the customer really care how hard you're working? You know? Have you ever gone in to buy a product and say, tell me about how hard the managers worked, okay? About ⁓ how how frazzled they were, about how desperate they were. No. And it's a good thing they don't ask that. So it's ⁓ again difference in in sort of beliefs ⁓ about what managers do. Yeah.
speaker-0: That this is this is so fascinating because kind of something that's really coming out with this discussion to me is how by creating these processes and and implementing these systems, Toyota and and a good manufacturer, a good team management creates this culture of respect with their employees and with their with the people who are technically subordinates. Right. The idea of end on that anybody can pull the lever, anybody can stop what's going on if they see a problem, empowering a junior person to raise their hand and then having the respect to act on that ⁓ that idea is so powerful because yeah, the idea that that the people who are actually doing the work should just focus on their specific item and and and is incapable they're incapable of thinking at a higher level or seeing the follow-on effects. It's it's so critical that people understand what they're doing and why they're doing it. So that when there are those opportunities to to take action and and solve a problem, you're able to tap into these resources. Everybody in your organization is a resource. And to write people off as as it seemingly was the case back in the day in American manufacturing, that individuals who are on the line are incapable of of thinking or solving problems. ⁓ it it totally cuts out this massive resource to your team. And I I saw this, you know, I've seen this in in other organizations and other teams. And building that culturally is is a a great challenge. But once you're able to empower junior people on your team to raise their hand, to call something out, to stop the process due to safety, due to lack of efficiency, you're able to tap into all these different nodes that have different perspectives and different experiences to really get the most out of your team and and and create the most high performance environment. So that's super cool to see how Lean and Toyota with this concept, it's almost like systematically and procedurally by the way that they approach problems and the way that they approach manufacturing and the way they approach business, they're able to inculcate this level this culture where people actually ⁓ raise their hand and actually call things out.
speaker-1: Well let's ⁓ just mention one more feature here. That ⁓ in a lean world, ⁓ every ⁓ person doing the actual work has a team leader. Okay? And at Toyota, I just was down at Georgetown a couple of weeks ago at the big plant. This is their world's largest plant, and ⁓ they have a team leader for every five workers. Okay, every five touch labor, you a team leader. And the team leader is not part of management. The team leader is not a manager in that sense. They don't take attendance, they don't do discipl they don't do annual review. ⁓ they just enable it's the phrase they use if you ask a team leader, I enable good work. Okay, my my team, they want to do good work. They really do. Humans actually like to do good work, but they get frustrated and angry when they've got all these obstacles. So my job as the team leader is to get the obstacles out. So in life, ⁓ we all need a you know a team leader. You're flying your osprey and you've got your crew chief. But this person is say, hey, what's your problem here? You're gonna get in this thing, how you feeling about this? ⁓ what what do you what do you need? Okay. So ⁓ we look at the world and we say, Why doesn't everybody have a team leader? I was recently in a big healthcare organization, big household name, one of the largest healthcare organizations, and A long story about why I would be there. I was not being paid to be there. I was just there. And I wasn't in the hospital. But it's the ward. And you go to the ward and you have the charge nurse. And that's the manager. Okay, that's the front line of management. And then you got lots of nurses and lots of techs. So this charge nurse, and I spent a whole day just sitting in the back, ⁓ has got twenty on her team. Her team. And she can't help any of them because the span is so wide. And t and the charge nurse is just desperately trying to protect the ward from the hospital. He keeps wanting to send them more people that they don't have the capacity to treat. ⁓ the equipment's not working and there's nobody on it, and so on. So you look at it and say, Whoa, none of these nurses or these techs Has anybody to ask, you know, what do you think? Is this right? Is there something weird here? Let me pull a cord. And these people are got your life in their hands. Okay? So I'm standing watching the nurse reading the bag, you know, ⁓ okay. No, well, okay. You know, like that. And it's clear, never done what this nurse is getting ready to do. She's gonna stick a needle in somebody and put a bag of stuff in. Never done this. doesn't know how to do it, has nobody to ask, but she's got nurse training, you know, a professional. I gotta go in there. Okay? Well imagine if you're in the army and ⁓ you've got nobody behind you to make sure you got enough ammunition and that ⁓ your equipment's actually gonna work and you're just gonna take that hill. ⁓ this is not good. Right? So in life, ⁓ as we say, everybody needs a ⁓ a team leader. ⁓ who can enable good work. And by the way in engineering, by the way in purchasing, ⁓ and that's a hard thing for us to ⁓ to get our heads around. Yeah.
speaker-0: No, I and I think that that's ⁓ it it couldn't be more true that everybody needs a team lead and and ⁓ that's a pretty instructive story as well. So we're actually coming up here on time. So before we close this episode, I would love to ask with your vast experience seeing hundreds of companies and and giving mostly free advice to to business leaders and and folks who are looking to improve their processes and and and do a better job. If you could give any young, aspiring leader or anybody who maybe is in a position that w that we've taught any of the positions we've talked about today, if you could give them one trait or thing that they can do as a leader or manager to focus on and hone, what would that be?
speaker-1: Well it doesn't make any difference where you are. And by the way, in my career I spent practically no time in automotive after nineteen ninety. Been in healthcare, been in various kinds of services, been in all kinds of manufacturing, been in shipbuilding, been in construction, been in any way. ⁓ the number one piece of advice is start with the work. What is the work to be done? Not the worker. Don't start with the worker. Just look. at the work and it's a process. It's always going to be a process. You start here and then you do this and you do this and you do this and you do this and then you're finished over here. Look at the work. Say do I understand the work? I don't mean understand it the little fine grained how do I put the nurdle in the nail, okay? But just the flow of the work. Can I see it? Can you see the flow of value? You need to train yourself to be able to see the flow of value from beginning to end. That's a tremendous advantage. Okay? And by the way, most work flows across organizational boundaries. That's a real problem. That's something you as a manager need to have an answer to. How are we going to deal with that? How are we going to do this? ⁓ one of the phrases that Toyota always uses is that lead as if you have no authority because for the important problems you don't. Lead as you have no authority, ⁓ lead through knowledge, through being able to see more and know more about the whole. than any single person. Stand back and look at the whole. So ⁓ in your career and whatever your career is, that's an incredibly useful thing to do. ⁓ say, gotta see the work, what's the process, and then we can begin to see the problems. And then what are the countermeasures that we might apply? By the way, Toyota doesn't use the term problem solving, they use the term countermeasuring. Because they're belief, and the older I get, the more I think this is true. Anytime you intervene in a complex process to try to improve something, you're probably going to succeed at that point, and you're probably going to cause lots of problems down here or up here. Okay? So when you do talk about PDCA, the P D C people get, but the A, the act or adjust, the adjust is about the collateral damage. Okay, now what are we going to do? That we've done P, D, and C, and that works, but everything else is now out of kilter or whatever. So for again I'm a young manager, ⁓ you must learn to see the work. You don't have to know how to do the work. You have to be able to see each value creating step, see the process, see the connectivity or lack of connectivity, and then be able to think about, well, gee, how could we stabilize this? Stabilization comes first, and how do we improve it? Improvement on top of chaos. Not gonna make any difference. Feels good. Feels good for a whole week. We're gonna do this Kaizen thing, we've really got it fixed, and then you come back a month later and where to go. And I've seen that so many times. Okay. So that's my advice to ⁓ particularly young managers. Train yourself to see the work, to see the process, to ask how you can enable good work, to ask what the problems are, to ask how you ⁓ deploy countermeasures. There we are.
speaker-0: That's awesome. No, thank you so much. And and just the the simple idea, it it seems it seems almost overly simplistic to just know what work needs to be done, know what the goal is. But these things actually, especially in complicated processes or complicated environments, are so critical. Boil it down to the simplest thing to get to start from a very clear position, and you'll be able to achieve a lot more. So thank you so much for that awesome piece of advice. And and ⁓ Dr. Womack, thank you so much for coming on the show, for educating our listeners. I learned a ton today and it was an absolute blast. And you know, who knows? We may we may have to get you back on the show to discuss some of some more of those stories that that you shared before about ⁓ how where you've where you've seen these processes implemented inappropriately. It's ⁓
speaker-1: If anybody wants to take a walk, ⁓ just give me a call. I'm just sitting here on the coast of Maine, ⁓ superannuated. I'm gonna be seventy eight next month. This is terrible. And ⁓ I try to go see stuff all the time, just ⁓ arranging a little later today for a trip next week to ⁓ just go see some stuff. Let's go see.
speaker-0: Amazing. It's not a bad place to take a walk either. Yeah. Thanks so much for listening to Lead with Bubba Sky, brought to you by the VA Lender. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the show and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also follow along on Instagram at LeadwithBubba and let us know your thoughts on the episode. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.
speaker-1: Sky for us.
speaker-1: So far so good.
speaker-0: Yeah, this is incredible to get you on lead with Bubba Scott. Couldn't be happier that you're here. Very grateful to our mutual friend Ed Wilson for for the connection and excited to to get after it and talk about some good stuff today. So with that, I would love to just begin with a little bit of your background, where you grew up, what that was like for you, and ultimately your path to an incredibly successful educational career.
speaker-1: Yeah, I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. ⁓ in nineteen forty eight. I just went to my sixtieth high school reunion, ⁓ down in Little Rock. And ⁓ as a kid, I just always loved to look at stuff. Why would that be? Just sit still and don't do anything. I think the high s ⁓ the highlight of my ⁓ grade school life was the fourth grade trip to the Westinghouse light bulb factory in Little Rock, Arkansas. First time I'd ever seen a factory, I just thought this was the most amazing thing. Everybody's moving on high-speed conveyors, making those light bulbs. ⁓ but I'd just love to see anything. Go out and look at anything. My dad traveled for a living and I would go with him in the summer sometime. At the end of the workday, we would go to the airport and look at the airplanes, little town airport, go talk to the mechanic, go to the railway yard, talk to the guys in the engine house. Just like to look at stuff and see how it worked. And So that's a a lifetime ⁓ sort of thing, which gets us to the idea of gimba. ⁓ and gimba, the Japanese word, sorry for that, might not be the last one, ⁓ is simply the place where value is created. And ⁓ by the way, ⁓ value is between the ears of a human being. That's where value is. There's no there's no outside definition of value. Your marketing department can talk about value. ⁓ anybody can talk about it as an abstraction, but as a reality, it's between your ears. And so it was always ⁓ fun to ⁓ go out and ⁓ take a walk to see what people thought value was and what they were trying to do. ⁓ so that's who I am. I mean, why why would that be? ⁓ that's nothing about schooling. There was nothing in school that ever encouraged me to do that. I went to a liberal arts college, I studied liberal arts. ⁓ by the way, I liked to work in political campaigns when I was a kid, ⁓ down in Arkansas. Kind of ⁓ I would say ⁓ pretty fractious politics then and now. And ⁓ so I worked in high school and in college in political campaigns, and I thought at one point I might be a staffer. ⁓ be a hey, I'd be a good congressional staffer. And then I said, I can't do that. You gotta make too many compromises. I just yeah, I wanna say what I what I mean, so I better do something else. And I decided, well, actually, and this sounds weird, I'm a pretty good observer, so I thought I might be a journalist. But I didn't like the fact that ⁓ there was so little structure to that. So I said what I really am is a good problem solver. And ⁓ you know what is the problem? Dig down, figure out what the problem is, what are the alternatives? What could you do about it and how can you do it? So my life has mostly been about talking how to define problems and how to solve them. And that's why we start with the value thing. That ⁓ what is it that people actually want, or at least think they want? And then what has to happen in order to get them ⁓ that which they want? Pretty simple, but ⁓ that's ⁓ a central part of life.
speaker-0: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's it's so awesome to see even at a young age your interest in the factory and and manufacturing. Because obviously you said you went to study liberal arts and then ultimately you got very interested in manufacturing and different approaches to processes throughout the world. It could you talk about your studies at a at a younger age after college and and what what brought you, what was the actual spark? Because of course we know you're very interested in in Walking around, seeing how things are done and addressing problems, but you went on to actually pursue that academically post grad.
speaker-1: Well I got a lucky bounce ⁓ from General Hershey. ⁓ your audience is probably not old enough to minor remember the head of the of the ⁓ selective service, but in nineteen seventy my name got pulled out of the fishbowl, the the number of my birth date, ⁓ practically first, which meant that I was off the hook on the draft. And I I had made zero plans, I was quite fatalistic about it. I thought I'd, you know, need to learn Vietnamese or Swedish or something. This didn't seem to me to be heading in the right direction. So suddenly I was completely free. So I said, Well, gee, ⁓ I've loved to always go somewhere and see things. Why don't I just take a trip around the world? And I spent ⁓ some time making a little money, and then I set off and I decided I'd go to India. My ⁓ faculty ⁓ professors had been political scientists who studied India and they were going off for a sabbatical year, and I could be their traveling secretary. So I spent ⁓ a year in India, which is a fascinating place, but ⁓ it is not an orderly place. ⁓ there is an underlying order to India, but pff I never could figure out what it was. And on my way back from India after a year I stopped in Japan. And the reason I stopped in Japan was I had a cheap ticket and the cheap ticket stopped in Japan. So I got off the plane and never forget, ⁓ came out of the airport and I was you know, it's just a student, I wasn't gonna take a taxi, I was gonna try to find a bus. And there at the bus stop in a great long line are these Japanese standing in a perfectly straight line. And in India, ⁓ trying to get out of the country, there's this incredible scrum at the boarding gate of people just trying to figure out who's gonna go first. And because I was pretty big guy, well I could elbow my way through. But I said, Holy moly, I have landed on Mars. This is Mars. This is the weirdest thing I have ever seen. So that was my introduction to Japan. And I didn't spend very much time, didn't look at any factories, ⁓ did a lot of writing on the ⁓ Shinkansen and ⁓ doing other ⁓ kind of ⁓ things of that time. That was nineteen seventy one. ⁓ so then came back, long story, went to MIT and got on the research staff, and then from there it's a pretty straightforward story.
speaker-0: Yeah, so that that is a fascinating introduction to Japan and and especially at that time in your life as you're as you're looking at what you're going to be studying. And so ultimately you got introduced and interested in the manufacturing processes at Toyota. And of course, you're you're best known for translating those processes into a digestible language for the Western world. Can you talk about your first introduction to Toyota and and your Reason for beginning those studies and ultimately what that process looked like.
speaker-1: Well, ⁓ it actually begins with General Motors. That ⁓ at MIT, long story about why I was hired, but I was the project manager for a project on the future of urban transportation that was paid for by the federal government because in nineteen seventy five when I started, ⁓ we had the first energy crisis was still reverberating. ⁓ we had the smog problem because that was the year before catalysts were introduced. We had the body count, we had one in Vietnam and had a second one on American highways, ⁓ peaked at ⁓ seventy seven thousand ⁓ people got killed in you know blunt trauma ⁓ death. And so there were a lot of questions about what to do about urban transportation. So the department said, Hey, just take a clean sheet and I had a boss who was a very brilliant guy. Just forget all the constraints. What what can we do? And what we want you to do is suggest how to do better that we could actually do. So anything you might think of, you've got to multiply effectiveness by possibility, by practicality. And as we looked at that, ⁓ we said, gee, we better go to Detroit. So I was the guy who did all the traveling. I went out to Detroit to the Tech Center at General Motors. It's nineteen seventy five. And I was just amazed that they had six hundred PhDs on staff back in the day. And somebody there knew the answer to every question that headquarters would never ask. So that downtown at headquarters they're putting out press releases saying they would love to clean up the air, but it's impossibly expensive, and they would love to have more crashable vehicles, but mm, you know, it's just not affordable, and so on and so on. And out at the Tech Center, they're saying, Hey, want to look at how catalysts are gonna work? Wanna talk about electronic engine controls? ⁓ want to talk about crashable structures, want to talk about passive restraints. We can do all of this. It's you know, and the cost will go down and down. So that was my first encounter with big corporation where there seemed to be a disconnect between the tail and the head. ⁓ and second, ⁓ this kind of ⁓ you know sclerosis and lethargy. And in all my trips to GM nobody ever talked about the customer. I was really I thought, well gonna talk about the customer sometime. So I formed a pretty negative view, not of GM, ⁓ but just of big companies. And said, Whoa, ⁓ I just bet all these guys are brain dead. Brain dead was the term I always used. You know, there's no line, just look at the you know, ⁓ there's no it's not going like that, it's just going like that. So I should understand this. We could do better. And that was without ⁓ knowing anything about Toyota. ⁓ I just say that just toward the end I ⁓ since the My my fourth grade trip to the light bulb factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, I really hadn't been in a factory. And I asked GM if I could go look at a factory and spend the day. They said, Great, go to the Cadillac plant. It's right here in town. And ⁓ it's in line of sight from the GM headquarters building, Clark Avenue, Detroit. And so I went and that changed my life that day. ⁓ that I walked in and they're assembling Cadillacs. And Cadillac was the only GM division that still had its own manufacturing. All of the rest had been bundled up into something called the General Motors Assembly Division. So this is the Cadillac plant, and they were making 250,000 Cadillacs a year. And you walk in, and this is the most dispirited group of human beings you have ever seen standing there. And the cars are clanking along, and I note the line never stops, but I also note that often the person doing the work can't actually do the work. They don't have the right part, the part doesn't fit, something's wrong. So the steering wheel, they just toss it in the car, you know, toss it in the driver's seat. Car keeps going. And I asked what's the ⁓ management ⁓ criteria, and they said, ⁓ we've got KPIs, key performance indicators, and the one that really counts is uptime, so that we are determined to run the line a hundred percent of the time. Okay, and they did. Well, I stood there and watched for eight hours, never went down. And then you got to the end of the line and there were two doors. One said major repair and the other said minor repair. And I said, Well, where's the door that says ship it? They said, That's never happened. Okay. So can I go in and look at the repair building? I assume that's where the cars are going, and sure enough, then the this ⁓ called they had to get general manager to come down and authorize me to go into the repair building. And it turned out there were twenty five hundred people in the repair building and there were twenty five hundred people in the assembly building. Wow. And for every car they were parked nose to nose, and there's a manifest and the car talked, that's the build order of what the options are on the car. You know, and there's the build order, there's a big red circle around something, windshield wipers or whatever. And there's a guy with a box of parts and a box of tools scratching his head ⁓ trying to get this car to work. So they said, Well, you know, I said, Doesn't anybody get in trouble for this? And they No, no, no, this belongs to the ⁓ sales organization, it doesn't belong to manufacturing. And they've got entirely different KPIs. Okay, so we're over here and our KPI is to build ⁓ two hundred and whatever it is, forty cars an hour, a shift and four hundred and eighty a day. And by that time, the general manager's standing there, and this and this kid from MIT who clearly doesn't know anything, and I said, gee, this this is the most screwed up thing I've ever seen. And he looks at me and he says, You don't get it. The Japanese built tin cans. I build Cadillacs. Okay? And then turns on his heel and storms off. So that was the day, nineteen seventy-nine, where I said, Whoa, this country's in trouble. This is the largest and most successful, historically most successful manufacturing company in the world. And this is what I just saw. So suddenly I had a new career direction. I said, There must be something we could do about this. ⁓ Wonder how they do it in Japan where they build tin cans. And so just at that point we were transitioning to the next ⁓ project, which became known as the International Motor Vehicle Program. And fortunately I wound up as the ⁓ research director, and so I could do that. I could go to Japan, and ⁓ it was like having a hall pass when you were in high school. You know, you could just walk around and see anything. I had my pass, and I could ask all kinds of impertinent questions with the translator, because I don't speak Japanese. And I took one look and said, ⁓ my gosh, ⁓ that by the way, my virtue was what the ⁓ Buddhists, the Zen guys would call beginners eyes, that I didn't know what I was supposed to see. I hadn't been pre trained, like your AI. I hadn't been pre trained so that I could actually maybe see what was there and all the people who had been there forever ⁓ had become basically progressively blinder that this was just how things are. And for me, young guy, don't know a thing. Say, well, so that's how I got started. And at that time there were two theories about ⁓ the Japanese ⁓ success. ⁓ and theory A was that they lie, cheat, and steal. Okay, they steal IP, they've got secret ⁓ you know, secret supplier shops working under horrible, ⁓ horrible labor conditions, that they've got a trick currency they can manipulate, that they've got subsidies from the Ministry of Finance, they've got targeting through the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. The thing wrong with these people is they light sheet and steel. And an awful lot of Americans and Europeans were willing to ⁓ buy the premise. and just from my early going, I said, wait a minute, you know, th th this is I don't think this is right. I'm looking, and by the way, I didn't just go to the factory, I went to the engineering department, I went to purchasing, I went to the sales organization, I went out and watched them sell cars door to door. ⁓ I said, whoa, this is an entirely different business system. This is just different. And I think it's better, but we don't really have the evidence. We're not going to win the debate. Let's call that theory two. Theory one is light sheet and steel. Theory two ⁓ became ⁓ called lean. ⁓ we had no evidence, ⁓ we better get some evidence. And so it took us a couple of years to get the companies to agree, and ⁓ the twenty biggest car companies ⁓ in the world agreed that they would all play. And the deal was they would put in money, which was kind of unimportant because what we could spend was not even rounding error in the car industry. Right. But they would allow access. They would allow me to go to their factories and go in their engineering departments and go in their purchasing organizations. And we came up with a bunch of ⁓ you know ⁓ benchmarking ⁓ example b benchmarking methods. But it never occurred to us to ask the company to fill the stuff out because we just thought there were such enormous incentives to ⁓ jigger the numbers. You know. And so therefore we got a team and some really wonderful, brilliant young people, by the way, ⁓ you're in ⁓ a business school, these were many of them business school students, who had gone out in the industrial world for a few years, been pretty disillusioned. And ⁓ the automotive And came back in this case the Sloan School at MIT and ⁓ had gone through two years and they were thinking about ⁓ what to do and they needed to do a senior paper back in the day, they got rid of that. ⁓ and I could take those senior papers and say, Hey, look, go to Detroit and go to Chrysler and take a look at how they do whatever. So ⁓ they were knowledgeable people, they were dissatisfied people, they were smart people. And ⁓ my ⁓ number one guy is a fellow named John Krapchik, who was the first ⁓ person hired at the NUMI, ⁓ that's the GM Toyota joint venture in California. ⁓ and he was the first person to quit two years later when he came to work for me while going to Sloan. And I asked John to go visit every car assembly plant in the world and to do a benchmark, and I had already worked out how to do it, and he did it. And ⁓ holy moly was he good. And ⁓ later his last job in his career was the founding CEO of Waymo. And ⁓ wow. I've spent quite a bit of time riding around in Waymo Bills, ⁓ trying to think about how you take ⁓ an operation run entirely by coders and ⁓ turn it into an operating company, which turns out's not as easy ⁓ as we might hope. But ⁓ but help was on the way and so they're g they're gonna do fine. Anyway, that's awesome. So we were going all over the world and looking at, and again, not just the factory. Because we understood from the very first thing that there were really five parts. I mean, five parts ⁓ to the puzzle. ⁓ number one was production, but number two was product development. By the way, product and process development. It's just clear to us that the Japanese were way ahead. By the fact that when they launched a car, the process was robust. Whereas for American and European companies, they launched a car and they were just kind of making it up and would gradually iterate their way to something that was good quality and high volume. Okay. Didn't seem to us like a very good idea ⁓ purchasing. ⁓ Toyota said you there are no good suppliers, you create them. ⁓ the Western guy said let's find the lowest cost supplier. ⁓ that with regard to the customer, it's a shame that all the stuff they do in Japan to ⁓ take care of the customer never could export any of that. It was all thought to be too labor intensive, but pretty amazing ⁓ the the buying experience in Japan compared to the US and Europe. And then finally the fifth piece of the puzzle, that's the thumb, ⁓ was general management. There really was a management system. And so the machine book, a machine that changed the world in 1990, ⁓ Womac et al. And that et al. were very important ⁓ because ⁓ we did share that project ⁓ completely, ⁓ was an explanation of a business system that was an alternative to what we would call the mass production modern management system, of which GM had been the exemplar, and for sixty years was the most successful company out there. And then these guys show up with some things quite different. Just say one other thing about that that ⁓ On our first visit, really extended visit in the summer of eighty two with my ⁓ co-author Dan Jones, we spent a lot of time at Honda, a lot of time at Nissan, and a lot of time at Toyota. And as we were wrapping up, getting ready to go home, we looked at each other and said, There's no such thing as Japan. It's just an American, European concept. That there are such differences between Nissan, Honda, and Toyota that they're not. They're just not comparable. And by the way, Toyota's gonna win. We had no question in our mind Toyota's gonna win. And ⁓ Nissan was an old-fashioned general motor style bureaucracy, a lot of top-down command control, seemed to be mostly secure jobs for University of Tokyo graduates, ⁓ that Honda ran on adrenalines. I mean, jeepers, these guys, you know, we now hear about 699 or 996 in China. These guys were doing it in Japan then. And They failed fast, but boy did they fail. And we said, gee, when these people get a little older, they can't stand this pace, and they just make too many mistakes. It's a different type of rework. They would just go diving off into some crazy idea and spend a lot of money and time on it, and then discover it didn't work at all, and were so proud of themselves. And then Toyota, grim, relentless, marching ahead, like the Roman legions. In fact, that's what ⁓ the head of Honda told us. They're like the Roman legions. If we meet them on a plane, we're dead. So we fight in the hills, we're gorillas. I said, Well great, do you think the world's got more planes or more hills? Anyway. So that was ⁓ the story of how we got to ⁓ trying to describe these ⁓ two different systems. And I think we won the argument. ⁓ a lot of people didn't understand the argument that we had won. ⁓ they read the book and they got a few buzzwords and ⁓ that became apparent when they tried to copy it and ⁓ which led to ⁓ much ⁓ amusing nonsense. But ⁓ that's how we got there.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's that's incredible. I mean, what a what an incredible opportunity to get to observe all those things. And going back to when you were a kid, figuring out that you loved walking around, observing things, looking for problems, and getting to do that at such a high level with such a great team must have been so exciting. And obviously the ⁓ the fruits of that labor were incredibly successful and a huge benefit to all of modern manufacturing. You mentioned your book. ⁓ the machine that changed the world. I was doing some research and that it's that alone has been cited over 26,000 times in academia, in academic journals and academic ⁓ so it's an absolute behemoth in terms of its impact on on ⁓ modern manufacturing and academia. And so going into that, we talked about why you went there, what you saw when you were there, but I would love to talk about kind of a hip pocket class on the principles of lean. that can ⁓ that can set the table for our discussion about how it can be applied across industries. So can you give us a quick breakdown of the important concepts of lean and what you what your takeaways were?
speaker-1: Yeah. Well there's three levels. ⁓ top level, which you can see on the surface, this is the tip of the iceberg, is tools. But that's not the iceberg. And then below that you've got some principles, which are below the waterline, ⁓ which you can describe, but they don't work unless you have some basic beliefs, and that's the bottom of the iceberg that's ⁓ they're bumping along the bottom or whatever. So you need it to understand all three. And the world most easily understood the tools. So let me let me start with this the basic beliefs. And these are so different from what most people believe without even thinking about it. ⁓ the number one ⁓ was the power of stability. What if you had an organization where things actually worked because you had instant feedback loops, anything that was out of spec. Anything that didn't happen the way it was supposed to happen got immediate attention. What if you thought that just ordinary people, ordinary, regular, not so smart people could actually diagnose a problem and suggest a countermeasure? What if you believed that? Okay, back at that Cadillac plant at General Motors, the management didn't believe the workers could do anything, but maybe ⁓ screw a nut on a bolt, maybe. Okay? What if you actually believe that? And this is partly a Japanese thing, a very homogeneous society. ⁓ what if ⁓ every person thinks it's part of their job to identify anything that goes wrong? By the way, that is so unjapanese. Toyota consciously invented a corporate culture that said the one thing you can get in trouble for is not pulling the end on. That's the little cord you pull to when you got a problem. ⁓ that you must pull the end on. You must. And nobody wants to do that because it sorta says I screwed up. That's the way it you know, kind of common life. You pull a cord to say something's wrong, well that must be you is what's wrong. So no no no. That you're there to detect wrongness. That's your number one job is to detect anything that's wrong. So what if you have a system that ⁓ believes in stability, that thinks that ordinary people can actually be actively engaged in stabilizing and over time in improving the process, right? That you're just operating from a different mindset. ⁓ by the way, you know, a third thing that goes with that, if you're gonna have stability you have to have stability in people. So that ⁓ what if the organization says every individual can be continuously improved along with every process? And to make that work though, ⁓ they have to stay. So that we have a situation of reciprocal obligation. ⁓ by the way, there's no such thing in Japan, never was as lifetime employment, as a legal concept, it doesn't exist. Americans made that up. ⁓ what Toyota said after they went bankrupt in nineteen fifty and had to terminate a third of the workforce, they said to the two thirds that were left, if you will do the work the right way every time and engage in improving the work, we will take steps to protect you. But this is reciprocal obligation. We're committed to you, but this is not socialism. We live in the market. You have to be committed to us, to the team. So we're gonna give you the tools. The problem solving tools, okay, like five S and and I'm sorry, five Y's and so on. Five S is good too. But it's reciprocal obligation. And look, that's the foundation of the thing. So if you go to the Toyota in Japan today, there's nobody who hasn't been a Toyota their whole life. And Americans might just go screaming out of the room, out of the company. You know, I want the wide open spaces where the you know, the whatever, the antelope run free or whatever. ⁓ this was a system where you say if you come in and you do the work, you do it right, and you improve the work, we're gonna defend you. And by the way, in Toyota's case they have always carried enormous amounts of cash. That ⁓ every finance professor ⁓ you know, just said, What a what a stupid thing that is. Why would you carry all that cash? And the answer is because we make mistakes, because the world's a harsh place. And our people, you know, would we hit a trough and start putting our machine tools over the side? Why would other companies think it's okay to put their workers over the side that they spent years developing? We're not going to do that. But we have to there is a cost, which is that we forego ⁓ any returns more than money markets or something. ⁓ on all that cash that we've got around. And by the way, starting into this latest ⁓ mess in the car industry, Toyota had three times the cash of any other car company. Okay? And by the way, Toyota has not laid off an employee since nineteen fifty. Not a single one. ⁓ due to economic circumstance anywhere in the world. And they did just ⁓ leave Australia after all the car companies left Australia and they said, Well you know we just can't we have no ecosystem here. ⁓ but other than that They said ⁓ we've ⁓ the the the employees accepted our challenge to do the work, to improve the work, and we've accepted our obligation to protect them. But we in this very disruptive time, that's a tough one, and I don't know for a fact that Toyota can maintain that. Okay, if you're gonna go very quickly to electric vehicles with ⁓ AI plus A V, ⁓ that's autonomy. ⁓ being a central part of the product, well the folks with the skills to do that are not the folks who are making ⁓ you know, valve stems and ⁓ springs for valves and so forth ⁓ out in the supply base. So can they keep that going? Yeah. Anyway, so I ⁓ don't want to lose my rabbit here. So that's a foundation of what people really believe. Okay? And then there's some principles that go with it. ⁓ and one principle is velocity is good. Okay. And so therefore we look at any process, and by the way, it's all process focused. We start here, we do things, do things, do things, and we create value for the customer here, or the customers here, and you can work it backwards. We call that the value stream. Let's look at the value stream. We believe you can always increase the velocity. Now by the way, that's where where did this principle come from? Where's the proof? ⁓ that velocity is good. That ⁓ something is dead is bad. By the way, in the maps that they draw in Japan, everybody knows how to draw these value stream maps, ⁓ for inventory they use tombstones because that's dead money. So they've got cash, but they don't want the cash tied up in inventory. They want the cash out in some low yield investment that they can get instantly. Okay, so So there are lots of principles that go with it. ⁓ that principle that is the you know kind of the the hardest ⁓ to deal with is that you can always improve. ⁓ the Toyota is never gonna win one of these best place to work ⁓ contests. Okay. That's always gonna be won by people out in Silicon Valley in the early going, just after the IPO. When you've got so much cash you don't know what to do with it. Then you got hot tubs and saunas and gourmet lunches and so on. Tell you what it doesn't have any of that. And for every manager, every year, ⁓ your boss comes to you and says, Okay, what's your plan for a three percent improvement? Three percent improvement cost and quality and lead time, whatever. Just tell me about your plan. I'm not telling you anything, you tell me because that's what we do here. What we've got right now is never good enough. Never ever good enough. And one of the senior guys, first one of the senior managing directors I met years ago, and I said, Why are you successful? And he said, We worry more than other people. That's what we do, we worry and then we act. I thought, whoa, there's a nice principle. ⁓ worry and then act. ⁓ and then finally you get to the top, which is Kanban and Andon and Judoka. And all those kinds of things. That's the auto stop so that ⁓ process never produces a bad product that it moves ahead. Those are the principles that people see. The trying to apply those principles without ⁓ those ⁓ tools, without understanding principles, and by the way, without the deep beliefs. ⁓ best of luck. and so that's been the struggle ⁓ over all these years. The tools are easy and beliefs are hard. And ⁓ that's what I Spent a lot of time thinking about.
speaker-0: Yeah, that is ⁓ such a great breakdown of everything and and a lot of ⁓ fascinating insights there. One topic that we brought up earlier is Gemba. And so as you were talking through ⁓ everything about lean, I'm just thinking about ⁓ you know, I'm not really in a position to say if lean necessarily influenced the leadership development training in the Marine Corps or my experience at the Naval Academy or anything like that, but I certainly see A lot of parallels, ⁓ and particularly you know, continuous improvement, but really just looking holistically, working on systems and improving those, I think is a really difficult thing to actually execute, ⁓ which we've discussed a bit. But I want to talk about Gemba because I think that that is it, it seems like such a phenomenal tool for actually identifying issues and understanding at the point of friction, as the Marine Corps would say. But I would love to talk about that because it's also such an incredible leadership tool is the idea of Gemba actually going to the point where the work happens. You go see, you ask why, and then most importantly, you show respect for the people who are giving you that information. So I'd love to hear a a little bit further breakdown of Gemba, the thought process behind it, and then share some ⁓ some thoughts on that as well.
speaker-1: Yeah, ⁓ let me tell you about a great gimbal day I had, and this is now a few years ago, it's before the pandemic. ⁓ over the years we've gotten calls from companies saying we want to be the Toyota of our industry. ⁓ what do you think? And they're not looking for a consultant, they're looking for a second opinion. They've tried stuff. So this was a company, a household name company in the US. And ⁓ the CEO was a very interesting guy that his first job in life had been building the s first American supplier plant that was set up to supply Toyota in Kentucky, nineteen eighty eight. He came out of school, he I don't know what his background was, but they put him on the team to ⁓ set up this plant. And so he was getting direct instruction every day from the Japanese Toyota guys, because they at that time had a lot of Japanese in the States. They don't anymore at all. But back then. So he got trained and how to think. And very unusually he was an operations guy who became the CEO of a twenty billion dollar business. Because he was really good. So I said, Well look, why don't you and I go take a walk together? Because I just want to see how things are. ⁓ we'll call him Mike, 'cause his name was Mike. And ⁓ we went out to the corporate jet lot at ⁓ the in the headquarters city and we got in the plane and we started to go and stopped and ⁓ somebody was on the phone and said ⁓ the plant we were gonna go see, they just pushed the button on ⁓ ERP on on SAP, and we've lost visibility of all of our orders and all of our parts. So the plant stopped. So we're out really just out on the taxiway. And ⁓ Mike says to the pilot, How much fuel you got? okay, I got this. Okay, let's go the opposite direction. Instead of going south, let's go north to ⁓ one of the big ⁓ plants and the only plant that was not going to be on SAP that day, because they're running. So we went and it was great because there was no preparation. They didn't know we were coming. And look, you know, if you've been in any organization that the boss is coming, well, the reality doesn't look the way it did before the word got out the boss is coming, right? So these poor guys, they've they've had no opportunity to to ⁓ do anything but what they're doing. So we got there, and ⁓ Mike says, Okay, let's start back in the back, and let's ⁓ for this big product family, let's just walk the steps. And so off we go. And ⁓ What a what a wonderful guy. ⁓ everybody he sees, he goes over and says, Tell me about your work. And Helman said, Tell me about your struggles. What's the worst thing about this? Well, they they don't even know who he is. Okay, so they tell him. And ⁓ we go down the line, and this is a big machine, but it is an assembly line, and they're pulling machines off. So he says, Gee, why are you pulling that off? And they say, Well, we don't have the parts. Or the you know, this is broken or that's broken and so forth. So we get all the way down to the end, and the last person is the ⁓ crew chief for Final Assembly. And he says, Gee, tell me about ⁓ tell me about your struggles. And she said, Sir, I've been working here twenty years and I've been laid off twenty times, because it's a cyclical business. And so I've got a separate business that I run. And by the way, this is the frontline management, okay? Got a separate business that I run, which I have to do because you guys can't level the schedule. So I said, okay, thank you. I I I appreciate your service. ⁓ thank you. So then he turns to the head of the op ex team and says, Well, what do you think we ought to do? And the head of the opex team says, We need to do twice as much kaizen. And so Mike just looks at him. And says I think we've got proof here that Kaizen on top of chaos is chaos. Okay, because Kaizen is heavier than chaos and glob glob, it just sinks. I think what we don't need to do is more Kaizen. I think we need to work on basic stability. Because they haven't got the parts, they haven't got the tools, they haven't got the people. I don't know what their metrics look like. I'm just saying this. None of this is what it ought to be. So who's got some ideas about how we could deal with this? So we get through that that walk. He's never told them what to do. He simply said there's no stability here. Does anybody notice? This doesn't have to be this way. This is chaos. What do you think you should do to make this less chaotic? And by the way, how can I help? Okay. So that was the gimbal walk. And there are not very many CEOs who could do that. and it's a shame. And ⁓ again, most people think you're the ⁓ CEO and you're gonna do the gimbal walk, you're gonna do the walk of shame. And you're gonna go out and show people how bad they are. Well, everybody knew how bad they were. They didn't need to tell them that. He didn't say that. And he said, gee, tell me about your struggles. Tell me about what's going on here. Tell me about why is this machine over here? So, ⁓ that's the difference between the ⁓ the boss with the program. It comes in to make sure there's adherence to the program. You know, have you done that? Have you got the production control boards everywhere? Have you got Andon everywhere? Have you got, you know, all this stuff, because they read a book about that. And the guy who is genuinely interested in what's the problem? What are your problems and tra you know he said, Look, you people want to do good work, I know you do. And you got all these obstacles. So tell me about it. Now you shouldn't as a CEO have to take that walk very often because I guarantee and all the other plants, because eventually I looked at a lot of them, had the same problems. Yeah. And ⁓ they were all managing KPI. And the problem with KPI management, ⁓ key performance indicator, is that there are always about ten ways to make a KPI. Yeah. Nine of which are bad for the customer and the company but are easy. And the tenth of which is good for the company, good for the customer, and it's hard. That's why they haven't done it. So then if you're just a KPI manager, well best of luck, but I don't think you're gonna do anything sustainable. ⁓ that you really have to step back a step.
speaker-0: Yeah, and and when talking about that Kai Zen, we're talking about the process of continuous improvement, right? Yeah. So the idea there that they were like, ⁓ we just need to increase our continuous improvement, ⁓ which is kind of some a theme we talked about before we we got on today of use it kind of almost weaponizing this language, ⁓ and not employing it in the appropriate way. But I I love that story you tell because I think that that's At that scale must be incredibly challenging to do a gamba walk as a CEO of a corporation that has that many manufacturing plants. ⁓ and there are so many applications for a gamba walk that it just immediately come to mind to me. And the first one I'm thinking of is ⁓ when I was a junior co-pilot, and you know, you're you're still learning. I mean, you you technically know how, but you're you're improving your own process of conducting the safety walk around for the plane, the pre-flight walk around. And every month we had to do a walk around of the plane ⁓ just as an inspection for a maintenance program. And you could, of course, go out there and do it with the publication, do it by yourself. You know, it's your duty to do it. Or you could ask one of the maintainers or the crew chiefs, the enlisted guys and gals who know everything about the plane to do it with you. And I it was a piece of advice that was given to me by a by a senior captain at the time. Grab one of the Marines, ask them to show you and ask them to show you what they're looking for when they do their walk around. Cause of course they have a different, a different requirement. And it's it's so awesome. I think the the key point ⁓ of at least this this concept of Gemba that that I'm learning and that I think is so important is showing that respect and having genuine interest. Like you said, you're not there to conduct an ad hoc inspection. Of course, there are times to do that, but that's not the point of this. ⁓ But you're you're genuinely interested in what they're providing, what they're doing, what their work is. And in that process where you show the humility to learn from folks, you gain a little bit of trust. And then when you ask them those questions of, hey, what are the major issues that are facing you today? Because you've showed that interest, because you've shown up with respect, they actually give you good actionable feedback, which I think is such a powerful tool for any leader.
speaker-1: Well I've talked with lots of senior guys, mostly guys, manufacturing still, but not always. And one of the things you discover when you talk a little bit is that they don't much like this gimbal walk thing because they think they have to have the answer. Okay? Big boss, a lot of money, a lot of years in here, you must have the answer. ⁓ well that's ⁓ from a lean standpoint, that's ludicrous. ⁓ that ⁓ there's no way one person could ⁓ have the answer. And that scares them off. ⁓ so if you change the tone of saying, hi, I'm here, ⁓ yeah, I'm the big boss, but I'm here just to understand about the work. And I'm not looking at you, I'm looking at the work, and I'm thinking from the standpoint of the customer, which is also from the standpoint of the business, and I'm just wondering how we're doing. ⁓ forget the KPIs, I don't care about that. Just let's take a walk. And so you have to change that from what we call the answer man ⁓ to the question man. ⁓ that you don't have the answer. And you say, I don't have the answer, guys. I don't know what to do here. But is this a problem? If it is a problem, well what's being done about it and what should be done about it and so on. So it's just ⁓ it's upside down from where we are. ⁓ hey, let me say one thing about that though, ⁓ which Americans just still don't understand. That ⁓ Toyota ⁓ never talks about product development, they talk about product and process development. Okay? And they're supposed to be done simultaneously. It's not perfect possible to be perfectly simultaneous. But when they get to job one on any of their products, the process is very robust because the people who do the work have actually offline practiced doing the work. And everybody's talked about the best way to do the work. And so what most companies would call Kaizen, they call process development. It was done before they made anything. Okay, and so what you see in companies is you go out and the product's actually a pretty good product conceptually. ⁓ only problem is they can't make it because they're gonna backfill, and that's where they want their OpEx team to come in and backfill for the fact that they never really fully developed the process. Before they started. So that's why ⁓ my friend Mike, with our walk, ⁓ shouldn't have actually had to be asking the questions he's asking, because at Toyota that ridiculous mess would never have happened to begin with. so th that's a that's a key missing element. And hang on, we got the idea about OPEX ⁓ from Toyota and the Japanese, okay? And we'd always had things like workout at GE and other things in the States as a way to do cross-functional, you know, kind of function busting stuff. But ⁓ the idea was that that was how Toyota became so good that they did more Kaizen. Now, that ⁓ their organization called OMDD Operations Management Development, okay, they've got about seventy people in OMDD for the whole world with 350,000 employees. Okay. And they never go around to solve problems. They go around to assess the capability of the organization to solve problems. Okay, they're looking at something totally different from what we've been looking at. And this business of ⁓ modern management of delegating problems, which is really an amazing thing. That Sloan told you how to do it at GM, you set up the staffs, this is back in the twenties. GE was ⁓ the best at it. ⁓ that line managers don't actually need to understand anything except how to keep score, because when you do have a problem, you delegate. And there's this vast organization of people are gonna come and fix things. Toyota World, again, your basic beliefs, is that frontline workers can basically fix things. Okay, when I say the frontline worker, I mean the team leader plus the work team plus the area person. have got the skills, the know-how, and they're gonna have the time to work on things because the process is actually quite stable. So that you're not spending all your time firefighting. So you got time if you're a manager left to say, okay, well what do we need to do to make this better? Well that time doesn't exist for most managers and most modern management companies. They're just trying to get through the shift, through the day, through the week, through the quarter, through the year. It's no time. And they will all tell you how stressed they are and how hard they're working. And and they say, does the customer really care how hard you're working? You know? Have you ever gone in to buy a product and say, tell me about how hard the managers worked, okay? About ⁓ how how frazzled they were, about how desperate they were. No. And it's a good thing they don't ask that. So it's ⁓ again difference in in sort of beliefs ⁓ about what managers do. Yeah.
speaker-0: That this is this is so fascinating because kind of something that's really coming out with this discussion to me is how by creating these processes and and implementing these systems, Toyota and and a good manufacturer, a good team management creates this culture of respect with their employees and with their with the people who are technically subordinates. Right. The idea of end on that anybody can pull the lever, anybody can stop what's going on if they see a problem, empowering a junior person to raise their hand and then having the respect to act on that ⁓ that idea is so powerful because yeah, the idea that that the people who are actually doing the work should just focus on their specific item and and and is incapable they're incapable of thinking at a higher level or seeing the follow-on effects. It's it's so critical that people understand what they're doing and why they're doing it. So that when there are those opportunities to to take action and and solve a problem, you're able to tap into these resources. Everybody in your organization is a resource. And to write people off as as it seemingly was the case back in the day in American manufacturing, that individuals who are on the line are incapable of of thinking or solving problems. ⁓ it it totally cuts out this massive resource to your team. And I I saw this, you know, I've seen this in in other organizations and other teams. And building that culturally is is a a great challenge. But once you're able to empower junior people on your team to raise their hand, to call something out, to stop the process due to safety, due to lack of efficiency, you're able to tap into all these different nodes that have different perspectives and different experiences to really get the most out of your team and and and create the most high performance environment. So that's super cool to see how Lean and Toyota with this concept, it's almost like systematically and procedurally by the way that they approach problems and the way that they approach manufacturing and the way they approach business, they're able to inculcate this level this culture where people actually ⁓ raise their hand and actually call things out.
speaker-1: Well let's ⁓ just mention one more feature here. That ⁓ in a lean world, ⁓ every ⁓ person doing the actual work has a team leader. Okay? And at Toyota, I just was down at Georgetown a couple of weeks ago at the big plant. This is their world's largest plant, and ⁓ they have a team leader for every five workers. Okay, every five touch labor, you a team leader. And the team leader is not part of management. The team leader is not a manager in that sense. They don't take attendance, they don't do discipl they don't do annual review. ⁓ they just enable it's the phrase they use if you ask a team leader, I enable good work. Okay, my my team, they want to do good work. They really do. Humans actually like to do good work, but they get frustrated and angry when they've got all these obstacles. So my job as the team leader is to get the obstacles out. So in life, ⁓ we all need a you know a team leader. You're flying your osprey and you've got your crew chief. But this person is say, hey, what's your problem here? You're gonna get in this thing, how you feeling about this? ⁓ what what do you what do you need? Okay. So ⁓ we look at the world and we say, Why doesn't everybody have a team leader? I was recently in a big healthcare organization, big household name, one of the largest healthcare organizations, and A long story about why I would be there. I was not being paid to be there. I was just there. And I wasn't in the hospital. But it's the ward. And you go to the ward and you have the charge nurse. And that's the manager. Okay, that's the front line of management. And then you got lots of nurses and lots of techs. So this charge nurse, and I spent a whole day just sitting in the back, ⁓ has got twenty on her team. Her team. And she can't help any of them because the span is so wide. And t and the charge nurse is just desperately trying to protect the ward from the hospital. He keeps wanting to send them more people that they don't have the capacity to treat. ⁓ the equipment's not working and there's nobody on it, and so on. So you look at it and say, Whoa, none of these nurses or these techs Has anybody to ask, you know, what do you think? Is this right? Is there something weird here? Let me pull a cord. And these people are got your life in their hands. Okay? So I'm standing watching the nurse reading the bag, you know, ⁓ okay. No, well, okay. You know, like that. And it's clear, never done what this nurse is getting ready to do. She's gonna stick a needle in somebody and put a bag of stuff in. Never done this. doesn't know how to do it, has nobody to ask, but she's got nurse training, you know, a professional. I gotta go in there. Okay? Well imagine if you're in the army and ⁓ you've got nobody behind you to make sure you got enough ammunition and that ⁓ your equipment's actually gonna work and you're just gonna take that hill. ⁓ this is not good. Right? So in life, ⁓ as we say, everybody needs a ⁓ a team leader. ⁓ who can enable good work. And by the way in engineering, by the way in purchasing, ⁓ and that's a hard thing for us to ⁓ to get our heads around. Yeah.
speaker-0: No, I and I think that that's ⁓ it it couldn't be more true that everybody needs a team lead and and ⁓ that's a pretty instructive story as well. So we're actually coming up here on time. So before we close this episode, I would love to ask with your vast experience seeing hundreds of companies and and giving mostly free advice to to business leaders and and folks who are looking to improve their processes and and and do a better job. If you could give any young, aspiring leader or anybody who maybe is in a position that w that we've taught any of the positions we've talked about today, if you could give them one trait or thing that they can do as a leader or manager to focus on and hone, what would that be?
speaker-1: Well it doesn't make any difference where you are. And by the way, in my career I spent practically no time in automotive after nineteen ninety. Been in healthcare, been in various kinds of services, been in all kinds of manufacturing, been in shipbuilding, been in construction, been in any way. ⁓ the number one piece of advice is start with the work. What is the work to be done? Not the worker. Don't start with the worker. Just look. at the work and it's a process. It's always going to be a process. You start here and then you do this and you do this and you do this and you do this and then you're finished over here. Look at the work. Say do I understand the work? I don't mean understand it the little fine grained how do I put the nurdle in the nail, okay? But just the flow of the work. Can I see it? Can you see the flow of value? You need to train yourself to be able to see the flow of value from beginning to end. That's a tremendous advantage. Okay? And by the way, most work flows across organizational boundaries. That's a real problem. That's something you as a manager need to have an answer to. How are we going to deal with that? How are we going to do this? ⁓ one of the phrases that Toyota always uses is that lead as if you have no authority because for the important problems you don't. Lead as you have no authority, ⁓ lead through knowledge, through being able to see more and know more about the whole. than any single person. Stand back and look at the whole. So ⁓ in your career and whatever your career is, that's an incredibly useful thing to do. ⁓ say, gotta see the work, what's the process, and then we can begin to see the problems. And then what are the countermeasures that we might apply? By the way, Toyota doesn't use the term problem solving, they use the term countermeasuring. Because they're belief, and the older I get, the more I think this is true. Anytime you intervene in a complex process to try to improve something, you're probably going to succeed at that point, and you're probably going to cause lots of problems down here or up here. Okay? So when you do talk about PDCA, the P D C people get, but the A, the act or adjust, the adjust is about the collateral damage. Okay, now what are we going to do? That we've done P, D, and C, and that works, but everything else is now out of kilter or whatever. So for again I'm a young manager, ⁓ you must learn to see the work. You don't have to know how to do the work. You have to be able to see each value creating step, see the process, see the connectivity or lack of connectivity, and then be able to think about, well, gee, how could we stabilize this? Stabilization comes first, and how do we improve it? Improvement on top of chaos. Not gonna make any difference. Feels good. Feels good for a whole week. We're gonna do this Kaizen thing, we've really got it fixed, and then you come back a month later and where to go. And I've seen that so many times. Okay. So that's my advice to ⁓ particularly young managers. Train yourself to see the work, to see the process, to ask how you can enable good work, to ask what the problems are, to ask how you ⁓ deploy countermeasures. There we are.
speaker-0: That's awesome. No, thank you so much. And and just the the simple idea, it it seems it seems almost overly simplistic to just know what work needs to be done, know what the goal is. But these things actually, especially in complicated processes or complicated environments, are so critical. Boil it down to the simplest thing to get to start from a very clear position, and you'll be able to achieve a lot more. So thank you so much for that awesome piece of advice. And and ⁓ Dr. Womack, thank you so much for coming on the show, for educating our listeners. I learned a ton today and it was an absolute blast. And you know, who knows? We may we may have to get you back on the show to discuss some of some more of those stories that that you shared before about ⁓ how where you've where you've seen these processes implemented inappropriately. It's ⁓
speaker-1: If anybody wants to take a walk, ⁓ just give me a call. I'm just sitting here on the coast of Maine, ⁓ superannuated. I'm gonna be seventy eight next month. This is terrible. And ⁓ I try to go see stuff all the time, just ⁓ arranging a little later today for a trip next week to ⁓ just go see some stuff. Let's go see.
speaker-0: Amazing. It's not a bad place to take a walk either. Yeah. Thanks so much for listening to Lead with Bubba Sky, brought to you by the VA Lender. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the show and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also follow along on Instagram at LeadwithBubba and let us know your thoughts on the episode. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.
speaker-1: Sky for us.
