Patrick Adams  

Welcome to the Lean solutions podcast where we discuss business solutions to help listeners develop and implement action plans for true Lean process improvement. I am your host, Patrick Adams. Hello and welcome. Our guest today is Jake Harrell, Jake is a supply chain enthusiast and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt committed to chasing excellence. He is also the host of A Quality Podcast and the author of the book Chasing Excellence. Welcome to the show, Jake.

Jake Harrell 

Thanks for having me. Sure.

Patrick Adams  

Absolutely. I listened to a few of your podcasts and love the work that you guys are doing in the Lean community just just to kind of kick things off . What was your motivation around the podcast? Tell us a little bit about the background there. And just you know why you guys did it? What what’s what, what is it? You know, what is the podcast? What do you talk about?

Jake Harrell  

Well, three to five days a week, circa 2020, I would just find myself either sitting on John packers porch, or hidden sitting on mine, sure, smoking a cigar drinking bourbon, and just talk, work life, thoughts, whatever it might be. And we found that as far as work goes, we’d always end up centering around three or four major topics like the criticality of what’s missing from people in the, in the middle of like, work as it is today. Right. So because of that, he got a job offer to move all the way across the country. And the last day he was here, he sat down, and we’re gonna record this conversation, in the same conversation we’d normally have kurset now ourselves, and it was our great excuse to stay in touch to continue having that type of conversation. We’ve done pretty weekly ever since about a, it was intermittent for a while as we found our groove, or the flow would actually look like and we’ve done it pretty weekly, for the last five, six months, over 40 videos up on YouTube was we’re doing video first. And it was really just a way for the two of us to engage and stay in touch. And when it’s involved in brings in somebody else, it’s still centered around us too. And they’re just kind of a nice extra flavor. So it’s been a fun ride.

Patrick Adams  

That’s great. I’m excited to hear a little bit more about the podcast here later in the show. But before we we go there, for those that are not seeing you right now they’re listening to the podcast, they wouldn’t see how you know how young you are, as far as like, I look at you, and I think you still have your hair, you know, I don’t have I don’t have my hair anymore. But your your, you know, your a younger younger person that we see out on LinkedIn, you know, in the Lean community that is, you know, an expert in your field and doing some really great things to just engage people and get them thinking about what is lean, and how can it benefit you and your company. And so, you know, again, nothing, nothing negative, but I’m just curious, like, alright, would you consider yourself the youngest guy on LinkedIn within the Lean community? Or where do you fall?

Jake Harrell  

I do. I consider myself the youngest guy on LinkedIn, in the community, there’s a bit of a stigma out there, that Lean is just for crusty old people to come and yell at you about fundamentals right, and I start off by saying that the brand’s introduction is that it’s funny and not taking itself too seriously. And then when we have a conversation around, when we immediately dive into like the same value proposition, you will get out of pretty much most folks, we kind of have a really similar set, but I’ve already got you hooked with the humor, and that I’m a human being that I’m young and vibrant and full of energy. And then we jump straight to whatever the value propositions

Patrick Adams  

Lean, lean is not boring by any means, right? But it is weird that there is that stigma out there that, you know, it’s like people are gonna come yell at me, you know about things that I’m not doing right, or whatever it is. And, you know, this is no fun. And you know, I hate coming to work and having to do this. I think it’s almost the opposite. Once lean gets introduced to an organization, there’s like this spark of energy that comes through, and especially if it’s done, right, like you said, I mean, we’re all human, everybody makes mistakes. And there should not be any kind of fear of failure. When you’re, when you’re on this Lean journey. You should be excited and having fun doing it. You know, what’s been your experience with, with, you know, organizations that you’ve worked with, in implementing Lean? What would you say are maybe some examples of how you’ve used fun or activities or whatever just your humor to engage them and spark that excitement and on their journey?

Jake Harrell  

Well, I would start by saying, the recurring theme I found is most humans, at least in North America, of course, my experiences are biased to just North America, because that’s where I’ve spent my life. They’re very biased into a binary thinking, everything is right, wrong, good or evil. And unfortunately, like most businesses, it just isn’t that way. There are a bunch of amoral non binary choices that either get more of the outcomes you want, or less of the outcomes you want from the world. less resources. And that literally, is when I start to engage in training, I first have to focus on breaking that paradigm. You’re not evil for making a mistake, you’re not evil for doing the wrong thing. You’re not dumb because I have a better thing for you to do. And if we come up with something better, like, I danger, I want you to improve it tomorrow. Absolutely. So when I engage with the team out in the field, most of the humor is my social media brand. There’s memes that come out. There’s videos I might take right to inculcate something hilarious. But that’s just you’re thinking about it and talking to me, most of the conversation, we jump right down to brass tacks, and that’s, where’s your problems today? How do we really clarify the problem? How do we bring measurable, sustainable change to the business? And we generally do that with like, the same set of simple tools, philosophies, methodologies, everywhere we go.

Patrick Adams  

Sure. Jake, let’s rewind just a little bit. What can you tell the audience a little bit about your background, just so they have an understanding kind of, you know, maybe the environment that you were brought up in from a lean perspective?

Jake Harrell  

Yeah, absolutely. So right out of high school, I worked in hospitality, I was the guy at the front desk to check in and smiled and told you to have a great day. And I think that shaped a whole lot about, like just the personality I bring to the world, a lot of really good soft skills that just for those of you can’t see me, I’m dancing on the podcast, but nothing about business. So I went hard the other direction when I got a job offer in manufacturing. And this place really fostered change improvement, doing whatever it takes to make it better by celebrating that we actually changed it. And because of that, I went really hard that the other direction, and I’m just going to be the best damn person in this building. And I would step on people. And I would run over everybody to just, I’m going to be the best one. It’s me against you. And I kind of found that that didn’t work either. So I just had some self reflection. And I thought, What if I just mix the two a little bit, right. And I immediately got buy-in from everyone I engaged with and I immediately got results from everyone I wanted to even if I didn’t know the problem, or have a concept of where to start, I was being asked to be included in solving a problem or talking about it because made a psychologically safe environment. They were a little light hearted, but still really cared and had a focus for getting those outcomes. And when I walk into a room, that’s the differentiators I already want more than you do. And then now we’re just working backwards together as a team to figure out how Sure,

Patrick Adams  

Sure, that’s a great approach. You mentioned memes earlier, I’m curious to hear a little bit more about memes, because you use memes regularly. And well, actually, before we talk about your memes. Can you define memes? If there’s anyone listening that doesn’t know what a meme is? Can you define that for us?

Jake Harrell  

Oh, absolutely. So it is taking a picture that got popular on the internet completely out of context.

Patrick Adams  

And they’re usually pretty funny.

Jake Harrell  

Yeah, they’re usually something to laugh at. They make a twisted point that if I were to tell a joke, audibly, it’s just a joke in, you know, visual format, right?

Patrick Adams  

And so what, why do you use memes in, you know, out on social media and in your training? I mean, what is the purpose of using memes?

Jake Harrell  

Well, I’ll tell you, I didn’t start with a purpose. It’s normally one today. But I started making memes when MySpace was popular to give you an idea of how long ago Wow, they were not business related. They were just highly offensive stuff, the world does not need to go look up that I created. And they were popping, I’d have several days in a row racket post, something that got a million interactions. And in mid 2020, I received a job offer switch career paths. And that career, they literally told me on day one, we don’t want you to do anything. Don’t change anything, don’t interact with anybody, you’re not even going to get an email, here’s your job, here’s your paycheck, you have to sit in this office and do nothing, which I’m so surprised that actually exists today. But literally, that’s what happened to me. So as I’m laughing as Jake is motivated by change and making stuff better, and you know, doing things and interacting with people, I thought what if I took all my funny bad experiences at work cleaned up a little bit of what I was already doing on Facebook and 4chan and Reddit at the time, and just try to see if I could put them together in a place businessy enough to fit on LinkedIn. And it blew up in a year like six 7000 People have followed me and that as far as lean content goes, it gets incredible engagement. And it’s been a fun little way for me to break into the community.

Patrick Adams  

Sure. So do you have a favorite meme?

Jake Harrell  

I do. And it’s one that got like, literally zero interactions. It’s the Backstreet Boys, right? And it’s whenever you need a root cause of a problem. It’s just a picture of the Backstreet Boys. Nobody got it. Nobody laughed at it, and I wasn’t getting my brain. Tell me why you know that for the five why? Oh, that’s good.

Patrick Adams  

You well, you have to know the Backstreet Boys very well. You know, when you said that, then I knew the song perfectly or when you saying that I knew the song perfectly. I think my wife was a big Backstreet Boys follower, back in the day she would have known right away. You have to know that and

Jake Harrell  

the five why to write exactly what to put those together that just don’t totally belong. That’s right.

Patrick Adams  

Absolutely. Have you had any memes that have gotten? Maybe some negative lash back on social media?

Jake Harrell  

A lot. And sometimes I seek out to do it intentionally as of late. But over the last six, seven months, there’s a lot of dissent within the community that takes a really fundamentalist approach. Like we’re doing it just because some older guy said we should do it not because it makes sense to the business. So I intentionally like poke fun at that. Like, if you’re doing just in time inventory, just for the sake of just in time, you’re missing the point. We’re doing just in time to solve a problem that we have. And so I will encapsulate that in a meme. I don’t know why. But my brain works that way. I just hop on to image flip comm I spend about five seconds on the first thing that pops up on the hot page, transform it into work related CI related, put it out into the world, five minutes of my time.

Patrick Adams  

Sure. So what would be one that one of the memes that has created some controversy or some negative lash back? And what were some of those conversations?

Jake Harrell  

Oh, it was? It’s a little deep. Okay, recent one anyways, the meme template for those of you who aren’t in this world and have meaningful lives outside of the internet. It’s it’s a couple of pictures of a guy looking at a blog. And he’s like, is this nature in the original thing, which isn’t funny at all. But what the mean community has done is, they’ll call it something ridiculous, like, give you an example. For those who can’t see me, I’m holding a mason jar, right? Okay. And they’ll point at it and go, is this Texas? Or is this south? And it’s supposed to be funny, right? So I put a picture of him holding up a tool I’m like, is this lean? And I shared it and said no, and the comments went mad with but that is a lean tool. But that is something I had to descend to back with no to heart lean, lean is set up to accomplish a goal, the tool makes sense to apply it to get the goal. Great. But it’s not the purpose, the focus or the requirement?

Patrick Adams  

Absolutely. It’s not about the tools, for sure. And we get a lot of really, really powerful discussions around that topic as well. So I can see where that would create some controversy on both sides, there are certain people that think, you know, you just have to apply these five tools, and then you can call yourself lean, right? Or you follow this, you know, 10 Step implementation method or, you know, do exactly what Toyota did, or, and that’s just not the case. It’s not going to be sustainable. It’s not going to be effective if you don’t understand what’s behind the tools with which you just mentioned, you know, what lean really is and what’s behind the tool. So I can see where that would spark some serious discussion for sure. What about I have

Jake Harrell  

a lot on LinkedIn, apologies, I see a lot on LinkedIn, that’s two consultants going well, if you just do Shoo it to not be me. But if you just follow Duran, why are we wasting the time fighting each other? And what’s supposed to be the most collaborative pie increasing philosophy now on demand? Should we be fighting again?

Patrick Adams  

That’s right. I’m with you. So what would be what would you say maybe was one of those memes that did not do so well, that maybe was just kind of put together. And it didn’t, didn’t do exactly what I thought it was going to do. Once I put it out. There was maybe not my favorite meme that I did.

Jake Harrell  

There’s a lot of those because again, my process is I’m not prepping these. I’m not going months in advance and like crafting the best thing is my brain the first thing I look at on the Hot page I got to work through. So yes, they’re not always going to like this case, sure. But a great story I’ve got recently is I had a mean, it didn’t perform well, I didn’t really like it. It was about the flash, if you ever seen the show, and he’s just full of electricity, in the caption from the show is my goals are beyond your understanding. And I use the exact same template and I’m like me anytime I met a gimbal or whatever, like everyone’s focused on productivity or efficiency and my goals are beyond your understanding. But it didn’t get good engagement. I didn’t really fall in love with it. And then six months later, I met a guy on LinkedIn where I was in San Antonio and he said, Hey, let’s go to breakfast because we’re in the same town. And we went in. He pulled out that it was literally like the background saver on his phone and sends it to his office. employees every time they’re having a conversation about some, so I still like got somebody’s heart even though I didn’t love it. Emily did love

Patrick Adams  

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s good. So when we talk, talk through that a little bit, so just so our listeners understand that, what would be your Who are you trying to reach with that meme? And what’s the reason behind it? What does it mean?

Jake Harrell  

The reason behind it is we don’t have binary one faceted goals in anything that we do. Humans are complex, we’re only system, a group of humans is the only system capable of producing more than the sum of its parts, the only one. So it’s a little counterintuitive math, when you look at how everything else is built. It’s like groupthink. Humans do not work that way. So you have to have a multi faceted approach to multiple outcomes. Yep. So if I make an employee satisfied, happier to work, they’re engaged, serve a boss and save money. That’s what we’re there to do. Right? We’re there to take a multifaceted approach, not just Bionaire. What can I cut to save money? Or what can I do to make these employees at any one point goal you look at and not see a wide enough slice of the pie?

Patrick Adams  

Yeah, powerful, powerful. So obviously, memes are meant to be funny, mostly. And we talked earlier about you being a pretty funny guy. And I’m just curious, you know, how does being funny, create great buy in because I will say just so you know, one of our company values at lean solutions, is, it’s fun to be fun, like what and everything that we do, we should try to make it fun, or figure out how to engage our clients and fun things, or whatever it might be. So fun is really important to us. So I understand the importance of it. But I want to know from a buy in perspective, how does being funny get great buy in? Oh,

Jake Harrell  

Absolutely. So it’s a narrow line as far as social media brand. Because it’s funny, and if you’re just another comedian on the street, none of your content actually gets taken seriously. Whereas if you’re too serious and dry, nobody engages with you, because you’re just trying to sell me consulting services. So there’s a really human middle line on social media. Sure. And then in person, just seek out when I start a conversation, to not make it about the work we’re doing or what we’re improving. That’s literally it. i If I walk into a place and we’re eating something, I’ll wait for someone to ask me. If I want some lunch now though. No, I just one floated a bag of Doritos. Everybody laughs I don’t even know where that comment came from. But if I say that literally everyone laughs It says after lunch, why don’t we, you know, you go show me what’s up. And if I got you to laugh first 99.9999% of the time, you will go give me whatever I’m after my secret extra goal of making the place better for everybody. And that’s generally the approach.

Patrick Adams  

Yeah, it kind of relaxes people, right? I mean, when you think about, you know, as a, if you’re a lean practitioner, if you’re a supervisor, a leader and Ops Manager, lean consultant, who, whatever role that you play, when you when you come out to an area where you know, someone’s working and you, they know that you’re there to initiate change, right, that can be difficult change is hard for a lot of people. And for a lot of people that could, you know, walls sometimes come up very quickly, and they’re not willing to share or they don’t, they’re not sure if they should share because they don’t know what this is going to get in trouble here. You know, as you know, whatever the case might be. So when you initiate with some kind of a joke, or make a comment, that’s kind of funny, and you know, it just immediately loosens the mood, it brings the mood down. And, and people you know, feel those walls start to come down a little bit. They’re like, Oh, this guy, Jake, he’s, he’s human, like me, he’s, he’s, you know, he’s a regular guy, you know, we can connect, so I can see where there would be some serious value in that.

Jake Harrell  

And I, the first thing I tells the company is, I might say some choice words, but they all have meaning, much like a psychologist. And then when I’m out on the floor, I’ll just be honest, like, I don’t give a damn about this company. I don’t think they paid me to be here. But that’s not the value proposition. I literally only care about what you want to change. And if I get them to laugh once, then I hit him with that. They’re like, Oh, they’re really on my side. Now a company is not a third party, not anything else. And then the world is my oyster. I can change whatever I want from there.

Patrick Adams  

Sure, sure. So do you like a go to joke or how do you usually initiate conversation? Is it to make things fun or funny? Is it you use a different popular meme? Or, you know, what’s your How do you open up that conversation?

Jake Harrell  

Well, it really depends on context. So like in Texas, I gave you one of them. Like if I come in around lunchtime, I always have that in my back pocket. The other thing is, I will I will immediately dig, get the Cowboys, because we’re like 99.9% of us are diehard, we’re gonna fight you if you say something bad about the cow. And so I’ll walk straight into a place. I’m like, Man, this place is it is it ran by the Dallas Cowboys, because it sucks or something terrible. And I’ll get Wow, come after it. And they’ll give me why they’re going to do better this year, whatever. And I’ll argue some specific banter, and then I’ll change it go, You know what, they do have a lot of opportunity, much like this place? What are your thoughts about something specific, I observed. And as soon as they’re like, emotionally involved and convicted in talking to me, it’s almost like this substitution theory, or now they’re gonna put all their effort into talking about the thing. All right, well, this is what we’re doing with that. And they keep that same level of passion. And we find a middle ground within the first five minutes of conversation.

Patrick Adams  

Oh, that’s great. I think, for those that are listening, you know, anytime that you can bring, you know, fun into the conversation, like you said, through sports analogies, or, you know, just understanding the context of the group that you’re working with, or the time the area, just thinking about things that are happening around you, and how you can just lighten the mood is really going to change the the outcome, you know, of that, whatever that activity is that you’re doing. It’s a lot of times why we incorporate different activities into our training, because again, it like, like icebreakers. Right? So an icebreaker will help just lighten the mood and get people thinking, like, all that stuff just drops out of their mind. And they and they, you know, their their mind is changed back to okay, you know, this is fun, this is engaging, I’m excited. And now I can think clearly, rather than having these things that are kind of holding me back, right? Go ahead

Jake Harrell  

for icebreakers is, I’ll have one person from an audience or group, they get to draw something, I’ll give them a bird or a specific car. And then they get to give one hint. And everybody’s got to draw what he drew without seeing it. And if it’s not exactly right, he gets to walk around and will deny did not, did not. And then he gets to give another hit and go back through. And then it’s just so fun, that we that it always devolves into a crowd roasting each like is that a bird that looks stupid, that looks like a deflated pumpkin, like everyone will always attack each other over. And then we’ll bring it full circle around when I show the picture. I’m like, This is what people’s thoughts, intuition impressions are in business every single day, you walk in with this ideal picture of what your workday is going to be. But the rest of the world doesn’t know that. And even if you describe what it is, even if you share and articulate your vision for what that looks like, nobody else can see it. So by coming together, forming some form of visual management, we all immediately know what the ideal workplace looks like for everybody. Instead of walking in with this picture, that’s impossible to replicate. And that’s, that’s usually team building exercise number one.

Patrick Adams  

I love it. Love it. That’s great. So when you think we talked earlier about the Lean community, and you being the maybe the youngest guy on LinkedIn, in the Lean community, you know, a lot of companies have a purpose. We have purpose. A lot of we talk to people about finding their purpose or companies about, you know, getting aligned with your true north. And there are a lot of different terms out there with that. But purpose is so important. So very important. And I’m curious to hear what your purpose is in the Lean community.

Jake Harrell  

Oh, what a deep, fantastic question. So thank you very much for bringing lean in a seductive manner into the 21st century. So it’s not just a bunch of old people arguing about something some famous person said, but it’s something we apply, internalize and use in the community today, specifically millennials and below. All the structure and data that’s out there now just doesn’t really sell that value proposition very well to the community. And nobody anywhere, like you’re not gonna go to high school, hears about it. Here’s what Lincoln can do for you. You’re not going to go to college and go after an engineering or math degree hearing anything about it. So I can proselytize a little bit by being funny and gauging also selling it to the next you know, demographic coming up with this. And that’s, that’s the purpose for Jake.

Patrick Adams  

No, I love that. So what happens when Jake gets older, and you’re no longer on LinkedIn?

Jake Harrell

I am going to be the crankiest old dude. I’m just gonna completely hard flip and I’m just gonna attack everybody for whatever their belief is. So back in my day, we used to do things in an ish way. Like I’m just waiting for that line. I think 3536 is the line we can go from young to old coot.

Patrick Adams  

I’m already there, then. Geez,

Jake Harrell  

you’re already an old kid. You grew up with our phone in your hand.

Patrick Adams  

Yeah, that’s right. And we hit so we had a rotary phone or the long lead to have Stretch a long cord through the House to talk on the phone. And then, you know, Mom would pick up the other phone and then she’d start dialing while you’re talking to your girlfriend down in the basement. It was rough, man. You don’t, you don’t even know.

Jake Harrell  

I don’t I literally don’t know. And all the people are younger than me. Like, it’s only going to be a handful of years before we’re like nothing you’re saying makes sense. I work in the fifth dimension shootout more out here. You know that that’s just the rate of change is so extravagant. We look at 60 years ago to where we are today. Yeah. And so all I can do is bridge that gap. And that’s what I can with these four years I have, and have a dang good time doing it.

Patrick Adams  

That’s right. And, you know, the world is changing very quickly, much quicker than it used to? Do you think that the Lean community needs to change as well, the, you know, as technology changes as the world changes? What do you think, you know, from? I don’t know, just for us, as lean practitioners, consultants, you know, wherever you are, what do you think we need to keep in mind, you know, as the world is changing so quickly?

Jake Harrell  

That’s, that’s, it’s such a deep question. It’s like, we have a whole episode around that that’s true. I would say that a good chunk of everything that happens in the world, is emergent by definition. When you look at animals evolving, when you look at, you know, climate, whether you believe in change, or whatever emotion is definitely changing, whether it’s up down to the same or in cycles, however you want to look at it, the world is emergent in nature. And everything that changes is emergent. So because of that, you can’t necessarily have a 100-200 year vision for the sake of we’re going to be a company that’s around 100 years old. You literally the speck of change in 100 years is so drastic, I think of cassette companies, right? No cassette company that wants to live, and you would have been able to go well, why didn’t you r&d and be in the CD industry? Well, not everybody can have an r&d the same size as their company, you know. So emergence will naturally change the course of things. And quite frankly, that’s okay, we should understand that and still do our best to create a long term vision for how we are going to take care of humanity as we go through that. It doesn’t necessarily mean your business will be around for 100 years. Or it could be and look entirely different, right? Like we move into robotics and AI and automation of all kinds can look entirely different. But we can still have a constant vision for how we want that to interact with humanity. And that’s the vision we need to take away. Sure, sure.

Patrick Adams  

What’s been I’m not sure what your background or experiences in Agile, I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are around. Agile is as again, as that has become very popular with things changing very quickly in the world. Any any just quick thoughts on agile?

Jake Harrell  

Absolutely. So I want to make an analogy to other systems first, before we hop into it, but I worked in two separate warehouses in the past handful of years WMS system was identical. One warehouse was amazing, one warehouse was absolutely terrible. And what matters with a system a given system, no matter how great or robust or bad it is, it is to how you utilize it, and how well you get a team to accept and adhere to whatever that system provides. So agile, safe if you go with the full broad acronym, if you operate in Sprint’s or Scrum, or use any other methodology out in the world is totally fine. What’s important is you have a structure, and you adhere to it well, as a group that is that matter so much more than whatever system you pick, sure, if you’re not going to be lean, fine. If you’re not going to be agile, fine. If you’re not going to be scrum fine. You can be your own unique system of things, as long as you have a system of things. And it adheres very, very well to look no further than the pyramids of Egypt. That is the capacity of people to have a plan and do all of the same things and accomplish something amazing, right? Something you look back and go, Wow, how do people even actually do that? Because humans are capable of being more than a sum of their parts. And having any system or structure in place elicits incredible results.

Patrick Adams  

I love it. That’s a great, great way to put it for sure. And definitely if people understand that, and they and they can adhere to a system. You know, again, there’s so many different companies that that I can think of that have created their own way of doing things right. And they might have pulled from different methodologies or philosophies and put that together in their own way. But those are the companies that are successful is when they have you know, basically made you know, what we would call lean the way that they do things and you know, again, they’ve learned through experimentation, failing fast and creating that that system but to your point, eventually adhering to that system training to it following it. auditing it, you know, creating sustainment around it, you know, that’s those are the companies that become successful,

Jake Harrell  

we had to more important to your adherence, any system than the robustness of

Patrick Adams  

said system. Sure, sure. And everybody, everybody’s problems are going to be different, challenges are going to be different. So the tools might be different in the system, the tools that you apply to help solve the problems are going to be different. So you know what worked for one company, a tool that worked for one company may not work in your system, or your way of doing things. I want to shift gears here just a little bit and go back to your podcast, I want to dive into that in a little bit more detail, and just talk. Talk to me a little bit about a quality podcast. What is it? What are the things that you guys talk about? What’s the structure around it? We talked, we kind of talked about the background, but what’s your why behind the quality podcast, a quality podcast?

Jake Harrell  

Why definitely to start, it was a methodology for John and I to keep in touch, because conversation we would have anyways. And then we thought, well see if other people are interested. We recorded it. People were very interested in and wanted to come on and talk to us about similar things. So the quality podcast centers around a consultant generally from a different industry every week, it’s not just the two of us chatting, the struggles, trials, tribulation, they have any central theme they want to hit. We don’t have any structure questions, we don’t have any format. If we devolve into aliens, or they’re just attacking Jeff Bezos, that’s fine. But for the full hour that literally doesn’t matter. I’m treated as if we’re sitting at a bar right across from each other. Yeah, so that’s how we operate through the show, we use it as a as a venue to make lifelong friends and engage, you know, I’m trying to leverage that in some shape or form to make a lean community that is fully collaborative. I don’t see any evidence of that today, it would be really cool to come up with some platform that brings it all home, everybody’s working together on problems instead of fighting over who’s methodologies are better.

Patrick Adams  

Sure, sure. Have you heard the term NEMA washi?

Jake Harrell

I have not.

Patrick Adams  

So it’s a Japanese term, that means kind of getting alignment or getting everybody heading in the same direction on a specific topic or a project or whatever it might be. And we tend to do our Nemo washes at the bar around a couple of drinks. So it just made me think of that when you said you know, this is kind of how our podcast is set up. And we’re looking to you know, create this alignment within the Lean community. So it’s like, that’s what it is. It’s like a Nemo wash for the Lean community. So I love it. What are the types of guests that you have on the podcast? So you mentioned to consultants from different industries, you know, what would be some examples of some of the guests that you have on

Jake Harrell

recent recent guests, Felipe engineer Henriques hosted Efdc show

Jake Harrell  

a guy he was on the Lean solutions podcast just a few weeks ago.

Yeah, actually, we have a lot of intermixing. They’d be on yours and then they’d be on mine. Right right. Sure. I’ll get Baba milioni Kyle coop has been on and he’s gonna be on again this weekend. Nice. Cool comes from my saying that right? 

Patrick Adams  

You’re asking the wrong guy on that one. I struggle with pronunciation. I always have to ask everybody is am I pronouncing your name correctly? And and and so obviously some really, really great guests great conversations. How would someone if someone wanted to subscribe to a quality podcast? I think you guys do video too. Right? So there’s probably a couple different areas they can tie into your podcast.

Jake Harrell  

There. There’s a YouTube primarily and then it RSS feeds to every known platform on Earth. If you listen to pod bean, or Apple podcasts, or Google podcasts, or Spotify, it’s out there a quality podcast. And YouTube is our primary because we do a lot of physical gags we get to go back and explain things like, John will talk and I’ll just fall asleep. He gets too deep in engineering. They both bring up sports, the guest and John I just I’m not a sports guy. Yeah. Bless all you folks who are capable of that, enjoy it. Great. I’m not one of them. So they’ll jump into like these Denzel Washington analogies. And I’ll just let the day go by. Right. We do a lot of fun stuff because we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Patrick Adams  

Nice. That’s great. And so they just go on and just search a quality podcast on YouTube then. Perfect. Let’s talk about your book as we start to kind of wrap up today. So you have a book that you published in 2020 called Chasing excellence. Can you give our listeners just a quick overview of the book and what it’s about?

Jake Harrell  

Absolutely. So in 2019 John chose a book called How to Win as an operation supervisor right now. He only wrote the book because He was in the logistics industry. And when he came up, he just came up because he was the hardest worker. And there were no tools, training or structure around how to do that. And actually when. So when he couldn’t find it, he just wrote a book about it. And we were connected on LinkedIn, but hadn’t really interacted with each other. We worked at the same company, but five miles apart in different divisions. So we didn’t know each other. And then he said, I wrote this book, would anybody like to read it?” I at the time was an operations manager. So I’m like, this is right in my wheelhouse. I’ll read your book, I’ll provide your feedback. And he sent it to me, I read it, I gave him some feedback that was good, bad in the middle. And, well, our conversation we both liked so much, he said, You got to come over and conduct a training around systems overview, because my comment on his book was like, you’re only ever as good as your system of review. And he brought me over to have that training. And before I walked out of the door, we were looking for ways for us to work together. And that inspired me so much that our relationship started with his book, I seeked out direct mail. So chasing excellence is about what some guy call the Idiot’s Guide to lean, but I hope it’s not taken that way. It is the simplest and easiest to pick up. The book is 116 pages long. I went back and engineered the language to have no jargon, nothing fancy, nothing longer than seven or eight words. Put notes on where stuff from and some questions at the end of each chapter, think through some concepts, simple concepts you can apply to solve problems, and reframe what problems are: No, sir, just barriers between yourself and excellence, right. So I call everything a barrier to excellence, and you’re thereby chasing excellence, you want to remove those barriers. And it’s 10 or 11, simple tools on exactly how to do that. And then the template you can take with you and go, this is a structured problem solving approach that actually works. That’s written in plain English for playing people, generally targeting folks that haven’t read a book, 10 years, they walk through warehouses and facilities handed to somebody. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t read, right, they work and they live their lives. So making a nice, approachable, easy to chew on sort of Who moved my cheese flavor. If you’re familiar with that book. Nice. I let you know, 10,000 words that you can just do it. And when right now, very nice.

Patrick Adams  

That’s why I wrote it. Where would someone find the book Jake, Amazon. com. So just go to Amazon search for excellence, J Carroll. And that book should come up, you know, we’ll throw a link to the Amazon page in the show notes too, as well as a link to your quality podcast in the show notes. So if you are listening, and you’d like to learn more about what Jay Carroll’s doing with a quality podcast, or grab his book chasing excellence, you can go right to the show notes and grab the links there and get a direct link right to grab those. Jake, it’s been great today just listening and laughing with you and just understanding the power behind fun and funny and what it means to get buy in and, and how you know that that is helping to change the Lean community or or move the Lean community in a positive direction. So thank you for what you’re doing.

Jake Harrell  

Thank you very much. And I appreciate the young comment. If you find somebody younger, we’ll get out there. 

Patrick Adams  

And there you go. That’s a great point we should if anyone knows someone they think is younger than Jake Carroll in on LinkedIn and lean community. That’s, that’s got a voice out there. Tag him in the comments. And let’s get a contest going on here and see if we can find anybody younger. How old are you? Jake 2929. Okay, that’s so yeah, you got about five more years before you become the old folks. Right.

Jake Harrell

I’m gonna shave the rest of my head and be grumpy old.

Patrick Adams  

Alright man, thanks again, Jake, for being on the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Lean solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai