Patrick Adams  00:00

Hello, and welcome to the Lean solutions podcast season three, led by your hosts, Shane, Daughenbaugh and myself, Patrick Adams. How’s it going, Shane?

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  00:44

It’s going well, sir, thank you very much. Happy to be here. Good

 

Patrick Adams  00:47

to see you. Good to see you. Hey, I’m gonna read just a little bit out of this book that we’re going to be talking about today with our guest and I want to read this paragraph that’s that really stood out to me just to kind of set the tone for today’s episode. So it says this to be successful. These team members need need a strong leader, stable infrastructure, process focused goals, well defined and robust measurement systems and standards and staunch accountability for the achievement of those goals. The group leader must have the ability to guide the work team’s performance on a daily basis. The group leader is ultimately accountable for the achievement of the goals and actions of their team leaders, teams and their overall department. And then the book goes on to list 10 team leaders responsibilities, which are which I think are super powerful. So some really, really great insight in the book Lean leadership basics, which is what we’re going to be diving in today. We are joined by Charlie Crossman. So Charlie is an internationally renowned lean implementer trainer and Shingo prize winning author with over 35 years experience in materials and operations management. He’s consulted with manufacturers, hospitals, government agencies and other service industries. He’s currently published leveraging to lean and healthcare series, one piece flow versus batching, card based control systems for a lean work design, the lean practitioners field book, as well as Lean leadership basics, which is his latest book, which was written with a couple other co authors as well. So welcome to the show, Charlie.

 

Charlie Protzman  02:26

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

 

Patrick Adams  02:30

Well, we’re excited to have you on the show. So season three, you’re one of our first guests for the season. I’m, I’m super excited to dive into your book, this is one of my favorite topics, talking with team leaders, group leaders and what it looks like to be a frontline leader. In a lean environment. I mean, such a such an important topic, so many leaders are promoted into positions, because they were really good at running a piece of equipment or, you know, whatever it may be, but they don’t necessarily have the skills or, or the knowledge to be a good leader. And so I’m excited to hear a little bit about that. But before we do, Charlie, I gave a little bit of an introduction into your background. But there’s a little bit about your family history that maybe people aren’t aware of, that are listening in. Can you just give us tell us a little further and tell us the family story and how you got to where you’re at today?

 

03:28

Well, sure, my, the family the family story, or the family history started with my grandfather, who was part of the civil communications section back with MacArthur during the occupation of Japan after World War Two. My grandfather was Charles prizeman, senior. And he was with another gentleman there named Homer Saracen, along with Frank Polkinghorne. And they became known as the three wise men in Japan. They taught an eight week, half a day for four days course to the CEOs and executive levels of all of the the Japanese communications companies back at that time. And companies like Sony, Matsushita, pioneer, Fujitsu all the big names that you hear today, or today taught in this eight week class that they gave on American Management, back in 1949, and 1950. So it’s kind of an interesting lineage back then, and the course was really all about American Management not just focused on quality. And they actually set the stage for Deming, who arrived in 1950. So Back in 1949, Jews, J U. S. E, which was the Japanese union of scientists and engineers, had asked my grandfather and sericin for recommendations to keep their work going over there. And at first they recommended Walter Schubert, but he was sick at the time. So she recommended that they go with Deming, Deming, actually was the second choice to go over to Japan. So it’s kind of interesting. And it’s, yeah. And, and it’s not to take it. It’s not to take anything away from Deming. Because imagine, if you were to go on over there, history may have been totally different than what it is today, wouldn’t have had that Deming prize. So it’s really this kind of interesting, when you get into all that. There’s also another story with PDCA that we’re working on publishing a paper on. Right now, we just did a research trip to Japan, back in August, September to meet with some professors over there. And there’s some interesting things there because actually, Deming didn’t create PDCA, Deming created PDSA, which actually came from Sure. So, Deming actually admits that he never knew where PDCA came from. We actually think we know where PDCA came from now, and we think it was from my grandfather’s course, or at least what’s known today as PDCA. So it’s, so it’s interesting. Very

 

Patrick Adams  06:38

interesting.

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  06:39

I always love quite quite the Yeah, Quick, go ahead, better go ahead.

 

Patrick Adams  06:43

I was just gonna say I always love tying, you know, PDSA or PDCA, back to the scientific method, which is what you know, all of us in the US learn, you know, in high school or, or middle school, and, you know, thinking through like, kind of a similar process of experimentation toward, you know, driving the root cause and then solutioning. But it’s always fun to hear, you know, as you go back in history, and really start to peel back the onion and understand exactly how things started and where they came from, and all that stuff. Shane, what were you going to say? I

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  07:18

was just going to, I mean, very, very similar to that. But I’m actually going to go into a question about about, you know, this in, yes, that is super interesting to hear some of this, how this all developed, in to kind of bring it back to your book that we’re going to be talking about here. In regard to leadership, you know, my question it for you is, what does typical leadership development? You know, what does that path look like? Typically, you know, because you just kind of rocked my world with just that little bit of insight or baseball there about the things that I’ve been trained on, and what I thought really, you know, happened two weeks, it didn’t even know that, like you said, that would have been, what if, if it was there would have could have changed all kinds of stuff? Yeah, so I’m interested to hear your idea in regard to that path, you know, the leadership development path, and how that how that typically is, and then possibly, you know, what should it be if it if not this.

 

08:18

So the, the leadership development path is actually a focus of is really a focus of the book. And it starts with, basically with customer first, everything is focused around the customer. You know, with Lean, everything starts around the customer. It’s built on the basics foundation. So basics is they is another book that we wrote, it stands for a baseline, analyze, suggested solution, implement, check and sustain. If you take the first three words of that baseline, analyze a set and then suggest solution, which is based on the root cause, that the P and PDCA when you get to implement you have to do and then check and sustain. So all of the problem solving models really go back to PDCA. So the foundation for the leadership book and the leadership development path, is getting is using the basics process, or we call the basics process to put the foundation and to get the lions converted from batch to flow, get standard work put in place, which is really the holy grail of lean and get your layout set up. And drive always be driving toward one piece flow. So that’s that’s the basics piece of this. And we’ve written a book about about that as well. That’s this book, The Basics lean implementation model. So that’s that’s kind of the The foundation for this because without, without having the stable processes and the standard work in place, it makes it difficult to implement the rest of the leadership development path. It does mean that you can, but it’s certainly a lot more difficult if you don’t have standard work and standard processes in place, then to train people up on those, you know, becomes nearly impossible. So, the basics process is the is really the only, I only know of really three implementation methods right now, out there and lean. One is called World Class manufacturing, which was done by a Japanese professor. It’s got, I think, 12 different pillars. And it’s very, very prescriptive model that’s implemented. Then there’s your, you know, Value Stream Mapping and kaizen event type approach. And then there’s what we call this basics approach. Prior to that, and I’m not sure if it’s still out there or not, there was one other approach called Demand Flow technology, which was based on a book called Quantum Leap by John Costanza. And John Costanza was actually an alumni of hp and j&j. And HP was one of the early adopters or experimenters with Justin time. I actually remember from an MBA course I took in 1986, I took a class and operational management. And we went through all the cost accounting standards and all that. And at the very end of the book, was about 11 pages on just in time, and how it was this Japanese system that was out there, but it would never work in the US. So that was just kind of interesting. So the the basics processes, a very structured approach to implementing Lean, what’s what’s the, where are you from the standard, because wherever you are from the standard, higher or lower is the gap. Right? So then, we call that pillar, team members self reliance. And it’s, it’s very similar to what Toyota calls J, K, K. And basically, it’s teaching everybody in the organization, whether they’re on the shop floor or in the office, teaching them countability for the process, and teaching them to have accountability for improving the process on top of that. So it’s looking at both of those pieces. So it’s all about instilling ownership for the job, instilling discipline, to create, follow, and how to improve standard work, have a bias for action, and continuously improving your processes. And then coaching and teaching them different lean technical skills, and then creating the metrics in order to measure your performance. The next pillar, go ahead, you have a question. I’m

 

Patrick Adams  13:24

just gonna say that, that gives you your baseline. So that’s your beginning. And you guys list you guys have another point in here around team member self alliance that says, This is the area where you’re learning to see waste, learning to identify gaps, and measuring yourself to the right is, like you said, that’s your baseline. Right? That’s the beginning.

 

Charlie Protzman  13:46

Correct?

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  13:47

Okay. Can I ask to jump in real quick and ask a question? Sure. Because you you hit a bell in my head, when you mentioned metrics, how do you help teams measure what actually matters? Because from what I have the little exposure that I have had, we have an overabundance of data that’s out there, and we’re trying to measure everything, but that doesn’t mean that everything really matters. In regards to moving us forward. It could just be data for data’s sake. But how do you help teams understand, in this in this idea, especially if we’re going to hold people accountable for you know, for the things that understanding what the problems are and accountable for actually, you know, finding solutions to those? How do you help them understand a metric that matters? Or Or how do you help them differentiate between noise and and a reality? Or that which is more important?

 

14:42

So I think it’s a really good question. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up Mike Myers in this conversation, and Dan proximate some of my co authors, but Mike Myers, this book originally started as a shop for man He’s been bought. And then it morphed into this leadership development book that was kind of interesting. And it’s really based on a lot of the history and experience that Mike had. Back with Donnelly Corporation, when he worked with Ross Cafferty, who was a VP or previously prior to that I was a VP at Toyota. And they took Donnelly mirrors from one of Honda’s Dirty Dozen suppliers, up to one of their premier suppliers. And I know Patrick, you know, Mike very well, yeah. So. So I’ve actually learned a lot from Mike, when we put this book together, because Mike’s Mike’s background and past experience is really all about implementing this process that that we described in the book. So to get back to your question, Shane, on the metrics piece of it, you really have to get into what are the vital few metrics that are going to move the needle of whatever it is you’re trying to measure whatever it is you’re trying to move. And there’s a difference between what we call results focused metrics and process focus metrics. When you’re going after results focus metric, which might be you know, sales or revenue, or anything that’s driving, just driving toward a result on time delivery, when you drive at metrics that are results focused, you can end up getting some really crazy behaviors, because people will do, people will basically game the metrics, they’ll do whatever they can to hit that number, even to the point of you know, I don’t want to say the word cheating, but where, where, though, they’ll go down slippery slopes in order to hit the metrics.

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  17:01

Tell me how I’m measured. Now tell you how I’ll behave. Yeah,

 

17:04

exactly. So what what we really drive toward is more results or more process focused metrics, where you’re looking at improving the cycle time, you know, as the product goes through or reducing, you know, the labor content that’s in the work, or improving the, you know, first pass yields, or, you know, mistake proofing the process, things like that. So, most of our our metrics are more you have to have the results, metrics, but we, the leap of faith is, is that if I get the process focus metric, right? It’ll drive the results focus metrics. Did I answer your question? Okay.

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  17:50

Yes, yes. Thank you. Yeah. So sorry to derail. I thought that was good.

 

Patrick Adams  17:58

So after team members learn to see waste in gaps, the next thing that they’re doing is they’re learning to solve for x. So this is the next pillar. Moving into the next one. So can you talk to us a little bit about what it means to improve business practices in the second pillar?

 

18:18

Yeah, so learning to solve is really implementing the PDCA model. And we call incorporating a three thinking. There was a book about art Smalley on Eighth rethinking that was published a while back, that’s a great book. And also, the book managing the Learn is another book that goes into this in some detail. So the the idea is really teaching people how teaching people about PDCA and how PDCA works, and the steps that you need to go through to do PDCA. And the challenge here for leaders is and this gets into some other models, we that that actually have another podcast we did on something called the OODA loop, which kind of ties into this from a change equation standpoint.

 

Patrick Adams  19:16

And talked about the OODA loop. In one of our previous episodes. We’re all the way back in season one, your son Dan Crossman. Oh,

 

Charlie Protzman  19:25

okay, good. 

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  19:28

loop is, I don’t know.

 

Patrick Adams  19:32

Oh, come on.

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  19:34

I know I feel bad. I feel bad.

 

19:36

So it’s a little hard to describe just the words but basically it goes back to Colonel in the Air Force, John Boyd and John Boyd develop this model. i After years of extensive research and history, he basically analyzed every battle that there was, you know, going back to you know, of China and BCE. And the art of war. But basically the letter stands for observe, orient decide act. And what’s more important than the words are the feedback loops that go from those letters. And one of the feedback loops goes from after you orient. So Orient is basically taking in the information or taking in what you’re seeing at at that present time. So we’re, we’re actually, the OODA Loop is really more or less synonymous with your cognitive function and how your brain works and all of the experience that you have amassed over your entire lifetime. So when you observe something, it goes into this big orient block, which takes all of your experience and tries to figure out what do I do with what I just observed? And do I act on it? Or do I not act on it? When people freeze and there’s a, there was a book on this I don’t have at the tip of my tongue. But there was a book about the Twin Towers and basically how people froze because they were taught for years that the listen to the PA because the PA will tell you what to do. Well, when the planes hit the buildings, the PA went off. And people were literally frozen. They didn’t know what to do. So they didn’t act at all. There’s another path that goes from Orient, right to act. So my example for this is there’s a fire, what do you do I throw water on it, right? We all know that we all have that, that orientation, that experience, it says that there’s a fire, you throw water on it. The problem that you can get into is, when you take that orienting act, Pat, if you don’t have the right experience, it can really put you into a mess. Because let’s say that’s a grease fire. And I just threw water on it. Right, so now it’s exponentially worse. So so the, the other the other path that people can go through, is to actually go through the entire thing, observe, orient, decide act. And that’s what we call the PDCA path, where I’m actually taking the time when I’m orienting to assess and analyze the situation, and then decide what action do I want to take, or what hypothesis am I going to put together. And then I ACT test out the hypothesis to say that I get the expected result. That’s really the PDCA path that’s in the OODA loop. The reason that this becomes important is that, at the 90% of us, when we’re faced with a problem or a new problem, we tend to go from orient to act, because that’s the low energy path. So basically, we just throw a solution at it, we just react. And when you just react, three things can happen. The problem can get worse, you might get lucky and it gets better, or it stays the same. Inevitably, it tends to get worse. And when it does, it always comes back and bite you at the wrong at the worst possible time. So the real challenge here and what Toyota has been so successful at, really since the 1950s, and implementing this is they have made the PDCA path, the standard path that people take when they’re problem solving. The challenge for every other company in the world is how do you do that? Because 80 to 90% of us always want to take that low energy path to go right from orient act. Because we don’t have time. Here’s a problem, right? We’re already we’re already we’re fighting fires, we’re busy. We don’t have time to go get data, less time to do that. Right. So the real challenge and the secret behind this book is you need to take that PDCA path because that other path from orient to act actually creates the firefighting because if you don’t fix the problems, so they don’t come back, you’re stuck with all the problems all the time. So you’re just constantly firefighting. So so the that’s the secret, this learning to solve piece is really key, because that’s what gets us out of firefighting. And that’s what helps you to stabilize your processes because if you’re if your supervisors if your group leaders are firefighting all day, you don’t have time to fix things that you’ve got to take that Time to fix things and fix the problem so they don’t come back.

 

Patrick Adams  25:05

So, so important, such an important concept. So many leaders go about their their day, their week, their month and just deal with the fires around them, you know, coming in to work on their cell phone listening to all the fires that are coming into. I mean, what a what?

 

25:23

A stressful, and that’s how you end up. That’s how you end up with this. Patrick, that’s in your book, The continuous improvement trap? Because the the appearance trap is the low energy path. Yeah, right. Anybody can make a company look good with five s. But any company I’ve been in most companies that I’ve been in where they do five s, they have very difficult time sustaining it. So so that’s the discipline piece that comes with this development path and the accountability piece that companies have to get in place in order to do that. But the real secret is, you’ve got to get, you’ve got to get people trained and problem solving and training going down the PDCA. Path. And, and giving them the time to teach them how to think I’ve literally spent I spent nine months with a gentleman in China teaching them literally how to think and in China that the way that they’re taught is basically when there’s the problem, they say, here’s the template, here’s the solution. Here’s how you go fix it. So his question to me was always well, what’s the template? Show me an example? How do I go? Do this? Give me something that I can follow? And I said, No, you have to think. So it literally took nine months, this was actually had to do with inventory turns in his challenge with the go from three inventory turns to eight. And he told me it was impossible couldn’t be done. Well, three years later, after, after we got down and got through and started teaching him how to think they actually got up to 14 terms. So but it’s it’s that the fisherman thing, right? It’s really teaching people how to think and forcing them to think, versus just throwing a solution at something or throwing the template at it and hoping it works.

 

Patrick Adams  27:18

Well. And that’s totally Oh, go ahead.

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  27:21

Go ahead. I’m just I’m just curious with that. Like, good night, you just said it took three years for you to work with this. Like I don’t I myself, I’m not involved in big, huge giant companies. I myself haven’t found a company that is willing. Okay. I’ll be patient while you teach us this path for three years before they actually see the result is is are their results coming along the way? Or how do you approach teaching leadership in this way? For the long run? You know, how do you? Or is there just times where you go, I’m sorry, I can’t work with you. Because this really has to do with, you know, a longer goal than what you want the immediate, because that’s what Firefighting is all about. And that’s what we want. We want immediate results, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, but you’re saying, Whoa, slow down. This is the long game. before?

 

Patrick Adams  28:17

You know, it depends. Charlie, before you answer that real quick, let me just jump in with my question, because it went right along with Shane’s. Actually, we were both connected on this one. Because I think this is the same problem that you mentioned, Charlie, that us in many other Western culture cultures got it. The problem that we fell into was, oh, Toyota has given us a, a roadmap, let’s just do exactly what Toyota did. And we’ll get the exact same results that Toyota got. And so give me the roadmap that 10 Steps to Creating a Lean culture, the 10 steps to developing a Lean program, whatever it might be, I just need the shortcut, the template that will get me there that really fast just let me apply these 10 things, and then I’ll be there. And that’s clearly not what it takes in order to have a true culture of continuous improvement and have the results that Toyota experienced and many other companies that did it proper experience. So now I’ll kind of turn it over to you with like, it’s it. How do you do it? It’s a long term play. How do you still keep them engaged in the short term, making sure that you know, we’re continuing to move forward towards that long term goal. 

 

Charlie Protzman  30:17

So if we, if we try to unpack all of that, yeah,

 

Patrick Adams  30:20

there’s a lot through a lot. And so

 

30:23

there, there are different types of problems right there, there are problems that can be solved fairly quickly. And there are problems that take a long time to solve the, the image, the inventory, one that I just talked about, they actually got to, I think six terms the first year, and then a turns and then up to 10, to 12. And then they they hit 14. So it was this ongoing continuous of improvement. The I never say never, but to go from, you know, three turns to 14 turns in a year, is is extremely difficult. So there, there are some goals when you’re into two really tough goals. And I think Patrick talks about that in his book a little bit, too, is that when you have a really a really, you know, what they used to call big, hairy, audacious goal, you have to go at those, you have to go with those in pieces. Gary combis had one of those, he had a three year goal to cut the warranty expense down at Toyota, I forget what’s a 50% or 80%. He talked about it in one of his speeches that he gave to the Maryland world class consortium a while back. And he talked about how how he went through that process. And that was a three year journey, you know, for that particular problem, there are a lot of problems that are very quick to solve. The challenge is getting people to go through the PDCA process to solve it versus throwing a solution at it, you can go through the PDCA process and you know, 15 minutes or an hour, it depends on what, what the problem is, the goal is to get is to get to the root cause. And this is where your TQ tools come into play as well, right? When you get into Pareto charts, or five why’s or, you know, checklists, control charts. That’s where you’re starting, you’re using those tools to help you come up with what’s the root cause. So you can go after the root cause of the problem versus the symptoms of the problem. So not every problem is going to take you three years to solve that this particular one, though, was huge, because it was it was a very large company, you know, hundreds of millions in sales. But so it, it took a while to implement that one. But the, the answer to your question was, I actually had a very, very patient general manager that I was working with. And he and I worked very closely together to coach people up. And we both supported each other as we went through this process. And he let me he let us go through that process for that nine months to to get this person to think and that person has gone on to have a very successful career, by the way. So you’re, as you’re going through all this, and it actually it actually kind of leads into the next piece of the development path. But the whole goal of this thing is coaching up and developing people. And if you don’t develop your people, you’re never going to sustain anything. And that’s one of the big challenges we have when we implement lean. And I know, I know. Patrick’s familiar with this, too, is is after you implement align, and you get standard work in place. And you have the management trained up you have the group leaders trained you have the team leaders trained. They used to call when the the fragile the fragile production system, because it takes years to implement, but you can undo it like that. That’s right. And Donnelly was a good example when when they were bought out by Magna, you know, they didn’t really understand what they had built and that they were the closest to the TPS model that I’ve seen of any company that I’ve ever been in. But you can really undo this overnight if you don’t have a good understanding of lean and the long term, you know, the long term play that’s involved with it. So it really is taking the time to develop to develop your people. And a lot of times today, how do companies develop people? They basically say, Okay, you’re promoted the supervisor here You go. Right. And, and that’s it, you don’t even see basic supervisory training today, at a lot of companies, you’re just basically it’s here it is. And the big challenges with companies today that we’re finding is that you have all these baby boomers now that are retiring that are leaving. And if you don’t have standard work in place, if you haven’t done all that knowledge is going out the window with them. And if you’re lucky, you can bring them back as consultants to help you. If you’re, if you’re not lucky, you know, basically, you lose the recipe. So of even how to do the work, so now you’re back, now you’re back into trying to recreate whatever it was that made it successful in the past. And we’ve seen this accompanies, I literally saw, as sad as it is to say, there was a company where a guy got hit by a bus. And they literally had to discontinue the product line, because nobody else knew how to build it. So you get into a lot of companies, you have what we call the single point of failures. And as people are retiring, those single point of failures are increasing. You know, it’s, it’s when you end up at a company where the machine has a person’s name, you know, oh, that’s Joe’s machine, or that’s Tony’s process, you know, and when they go on vacation, what happens? Everything stops. Right, so, so the next step, and these pillars is what we call on the job development or learning to share. And it’s basically taking the learning to see and the learning to solve pieces, which are more classroom training based, and then working to implement those with the team leaders and the group leaders. So as you as you, as you have the as you get the team leaders in place, so the team leader is generally that first level of supervision. And generally a team leader is is typically an hourly associate or hourly team member, that is leading the team but doesn’t necessarily have responsibility for discipline. The group leader then is over the team leaders. So in Toyotas model a team leader is typically over five persons, maybe up to eight persons, and a group leader is another has another five persons under them. And Toyota also has a lot of trainers in the mix and coaches in the mix as well. And you see a lot of that in some of the LinkedIn posts from people that have worked at in the past. So the it’s a whole different structure, organizational structure that they have in place, you know, in plants, I’ve seen it the US you might have a supervisor over 40 employees with no team leaders. So that makes it difficult to, you know, if they’ve got six or seven lines that they’re running, you know, how do they keep up with all that with day by hour boards with problems that people have tried to capture the problems trying to root cause the problems, it’s a lot. So span of control becomes a big piece of this. End span of control is something that has been talked about, you know, forever back in the, you know, very organizational textbooks that go back into the early 1900s. So the bigger the span of control, the more communication nodes you have, and the more difficult it is to communicate throughout the organization. So this so the the idea behind this learning to share piece, or the on job development is where the team leaders are training their folks, the team members and the group leaders are training the team. The team leaders, and when you’re training people, is really when you start to learn it. You know, it’s easy to sit in a training class and say, oh, yeah, I know that. I know that. I know that. But when you have to teach it. It’s a whole Yeah. Anyway. Right. Yeah. So so so that’s the the idea behind the on job development is by having the team leaders train their folks in a group leader is training the team leaders and the managers, training the group leaders is that through that training, not only are you developing the person that you’re training You’re also developing yourself. Because it’s it’s teaching you to be a better trainer. And this is where what’s interesting with all this.

 

40:12

And Patrick, as you know is the whole is the whole training within industry piece of this the, the what’s called Twi. And there’s three pieces to it jij, m and j are. The Ji is job instruction, the J. M is job methods, and the JR is job relations. Built into the first pillar that we talked about that team members self reliance is the job instruction piece. It’s teaching the workers, the employees, the team members how to break down the jobs. How which, which actually is the foundation for what became standard work at Toyota. We taught Toyota twi in 1950, or 1951. They took it and ran with it in the US, we forgot about it. It didn’t come back until the training with industry textbook came out. What, mid 2010 Somewhere in there. So it was it was more or less been rediscovered in the US. But it actually became the foundation for standard work at Toyota. The TWI Jr is really part of the on the job development piece. That’s the job relations piece. And it was teaching supervise or teaching supervisors how to interface and deal with problems that were brought up by their subordinates. So in the the team leader application, it would be where the team members are bringing up problems to the team leader and how do you manage that? How do you handle that? How do you handle the communication, and then the same way from the team leader to the group leader. And then the job methods piece really fits more into the learning how to solve, which is the PDCA piece of the whole thing. Right? So. So it’s interesting how, how all of this, the history is really, really important. In all of this, it is it’s how we

 

Patrick Adams  42:16

got to where we are. Yeah, it’s so important. And honestly, we can do a whole nother episode on Twi, we should should probably have you want to dive into that one. Because that’s a whole nother, I mean, into the background history of it and the value into so many organizations that are unaware of it. So powerful. Charlie, I wish we could continue, we do need to wrap up, I wanted to ask you, you know, kind of a final question on your book here. Lean leadership basics. Where can if someone’s interested to grab this book? Where would they go? Is it is it available on Amazon, or a certain website.

 

42:53

It’s it’s available on Amazon. It’s also available from CRC Press, or productivity press now, which is owned by Taylor and Francis. So a lot of times I know the the CRC Press at CRC press.com. A lot of times they have discounts that they offer on the books, I think like 20% off most of the time that you can get on the book, I’m not sure where, where Amazon is with the pricing. Okay,

 

Patrick Adams  43:25

we’ll drop a couple links into the show notes. So if listeners are interested to go out and grab a copy of the book, they can go right to the show notes and find a link to that. And then we’ll also drop your your contact in there as well, Charlie for connection on LinkedIn. And in your website for business improvement group, which you guys do a fair amount of coaching consulting training, you have a whole Academy setup with with some online training available. So we’ll do we’ll drop a link to that as well.

 

43:59

That’d be great. I think one other thing to mention on this was a good friend of ours was Ritsu Shingo, who was the son of Shigeo Shingo, he’s actually a better friend to my son Dan. And he actually wrote the foreword for this book. And it was just a couple of weeks I think before he passed, so so we were really sorry to see him go I was actually going to have him speak at one of my five day classes. But he wasn’t answering his emails and then we found out why. So that was a huge loss to the to the Lean community he was in he was certainly a good friend. So but but we were very fortunate to get his to have him write the foreword for the book as well.

 

Patrick Adams  44:51

Love it, love it and it is a great forward both him and Michael

 

44:56

so yeah, and Nigel as well. Because all This dovetails into some of the work Nigel has been doing with the flow system and that type thing. So we’re, we’re in one domain of conovan and Nigel’s in a different one. Yes, my JSON the complex domain, we’re in the simple uncomplicated domains. Right, right. Yeah,

 

Patrick Adams  45:15

we’ll have Nigel on here later on this season. He was on last last season as well. But we’re going to dive into that a little bit more this year. Well, Charlie, it’s been great to have you on so much appreciate what you and your team are doing at Business Improvement group and really appreciate your, you know, the value that you bring to the Lean community through the different writings that you’ve put out. And yeah, just want to say thank you and appreciate you on the show. We’ll have you back. For another episode, we’ll dive into twi maybe, or some other concepts. So thanks for being on. Okay. Well,

 

45:50

thanks very much to you and Shane for for having me on. And it was this was really fun. I really enjoyed it.

 

Shayne Daughenbaugh  45:56

All right. It’s been a pleasure.