ROI of Operational Excellence

Business901 Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

ROI of Operational Excellence
Guest was Dave Adams

Related Podcast:
Changing the Bottom Line thru Operational Excellence

Copyright Business901


David E. Adams is the executive director of the Kennametal
Center for Operational Excellence of the Alex G. McKenna School
of Business, Economics, and Government at Saint Vincent
College. KCOE delivers hands-on
coaching and educational resources
in operational excellence. KCOE
produces sustainable results through
a proven balance of lean tools,
employee engagement, continuous
improvement, and world-class
coaching.

In addition to his work at Saint
Vincent, Mr. Adams has served in
the U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Corps in various leadership
capacities during a 21-year career of both active and reserve
service including a tour of duty serving Presidents Reagan and
Bush at the Presidential Retreat, Camp David, as the command's
contingency readiness officer. In 2001 Mr. Adams was recalled to
active duty for his expertise in anti-terrorism and force protection
as part of Operation Noble Eagle – the President’s call-up of
reserves in answer to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Sept.
11. For his Navy service, Mr. Adams has received several awards
including the Presidential Service Award, Meritorious Service
Medal and the Navy Commendation Medal with 3 Gold Stars. He
retired on 1 October 2007 at the rank of Commander.

Operational Excellence is the contemporary, cultural adaptation
of the Toyota way and the Toyota production system as learned
and experienced by Mr. Rodger Lewis and currently implemented
by KCOE as The KCOE System.


Transcription of Podcast
Joe Dager: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of
the Business901 Podcast. With me today is David Adams. David
consults and coaches executives in implementing a
culturally-adapted, Toyota-inspired, continuous improvement
system across their total enterprise that balances the human with
the operational and seeks mutual trust and respect.
He leads the team of three other coaches doing the same and is
the executive director of the KCOE at Saint Vincent College in
Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Now David, most of us recognize Latrobe
as the home of Arnold Palmer. If I remember correctly, is Saint
Vincent where the Steelers have their preseason training?
David Adams: Absolutely, every season begins right here at
Saint Vincent College, right on the field outside of my office.
Joe: I was there once, so if I remember right, there is like a big
gully the football field is in, or something goes down in a big kind
of plateau on the side of the mountain or something.
David: It's a big bowl and we've actually constructed some
bleachers into the side of the hill here. It depends on when you
were here, Joe, because back in
the '70s, it was a lot different. Sponsored by
But now it's a pretty big
enterprise. Training camp is a
big, big enterprise here and it
looks like a circus carnival some
days out there.
Joe: It's been a while, believe
me. It's a beautiful area, and if I
can remember Saint Vincent's,
you look down over the valley
and that blue haze in the

morning, one of the very picturesque places in the world, even.
David: It's a great place to work. It's very therapeutic, if you
will.
Joe: What do the initials KCOE stand for?
David: I'm glad that you asked that, during the introduction.
Whenever you said that, I thought, "Huh, that's interesting." We
are the Kennametal Center for Operational Excellence. If you're
familiar with tool and die casting, Kennametal is a carbide steel
tool manufacturer, global company, headquartered right here in
Latrobe.
I actually work at the college for the dean of the Alex G. McKenna
School of Business, Economics, and Government, and Alex
McKenna, founder of Kennametal. We received a seed grant back
in 2002 to establish the center here at the college within the
business school, and that's why we are named Kennametal
Center for Operational Excellence.

Joe: Not to plug Kennametal, but I remember them from my
construction days. They put the carbide teeth on the recycle
claimers, or what dug up the recycle off the road. Is that right?
David: Yes, that's correct. Yeah. They have a construction
division; they have a mining division, and then they also provide
a lot of the things that you see in machining operations as well.

Joe: Well, I see both Operational Excellence used and Toyota
continuous improvement system in your descriptions. Can you
distinguish between the two, if there is any?
David: We're very particular about our wording there, because
we believe that Lean has taken on a kind of a language and a
framework of its own, and so we're careful to say, "operational
excellence," because we see that as a more comprehensive
system of which Lean, and by "Lean," I mean the traditional Lean

tools are a part. They're a subset of that.
The continuous improvement system that we coach and that we
help businesses implement, is definitely reflective of Toyota.
We're actually mentored by a fellow named Rodger Lewis, and
Rodger was one of the original GMs that Toyota had hired, one of
the original automotive guys whom they had hired to help them
set up the Georgetown, Kentucky plant.
Rodger was a class of '75 alum of Saint Vincent College, and has
been giving back to the college since about 2003, 2004 as an
executive in residence, and also as a direct mentor here to the
center. Rodger's got an interesting story, in and of itself. You can
check out our website at www.OperationalExcellence.com to see
his story.
Essentially, he went from being an exec at Volkswagen here at
New Stanton, Pennsylvania, where they used to build the old
Volkswagen Rabbit, which was kind of a failure in terms of North
American manufacturing and their marketing. From there, he
went down to Georgetown, and worked there for about eight
years, and learned, just like guys like Mike Hoseus and Dave
Meier, all contemporaries of his.
Rodger went a different pathway. Dave and Mike became
teachers and senseis in their own right, but Rodger went from
Georgetown to GM and did some greenfield work for GM all
around the world, and tried to establish a Toyota-like system for
GM. Then he was asked to come work for Bombardier in their
recreational product's division.
For a period of about 10 years, he worked for GM, and then
Bombardier. There, he really perfected this system for making
sure that you've got culture change working and in effect, before
you do the implementation of what I keep calling "classic Lean,"
or traditional Lean tools. He did it himself. As the president of
Rotax, he did it for about five years. He's now doing it with

Bombardier Aerospace as one of their senior VPs for continuous
improvement.

What's interesting is that he really hadn't thought about, "Well,
how do I teach this?" And, "How do I repeat this?" So when he
came to the college here, that's really what we did. We, at KCOE,
synthesized what he knew with some of the things that we had
been doing here at the college to try to serve local manufacturing
enterprises.
The result is what we call "The KCOE System," which is a
continuous improvement system, an operational excellence
system, that culturally is adapted, but principally reflects the
Toyota way and the Toyota production system as we see it in the
literature.
Joe: I want to sum that up. I would say that you're establishing
a method of cultural change, and then the continuous
improvement system.

David: The culture change is rooted and based in the continuous
improvement piece. Let me just describe it for a second. For
example, one of the first things we do - and we start at the top,
work with an executive team - we will start with a balanced
scorecard and have them go through a strategic, a mini annual
planning cycle; and establish a balanced scorecard that says,
"How do we want to improve over the next six years in safety,
quality, productivity, human development, and cost, in that
order?"

Once we have an improvement pathway of targets for six years,
then we establish a framework of PDCA cycles, daily and monthly
and quarterly. Then, we pull into those PDCA cycles basic
problem solving from the operation's side.
Then, from the human side, trying to unlock creativity, we bring
in a suggestion system. But I think you know, and your audience

probably knows this as well, that we're not talking about the
suggestion box on the wall. We're talking about small,
incremental, implemented suggestions -- implemented by the
worker right there were the work is being done.
Joe: That's a big chunk, isn't it?
David: It takes some time. It takes six to 12 months to get the
framework established, particularly when you're working with
executives that are generally pointing in their disciplined
directions. Alignment is one of the first things that we have to
drive, but you can tell from the system. Any time you have visual
management, PDCA, roles and responsibilities, alignment forms
around that.
That's where Toyota gets that sense of crisis every day. We call it
"crisis on the tip of your tongue" because every day you're
stopping for 15 to 30 minutes and say where the problems that
have occurred over the past 24 hours. We're not problem-solving
in that meeting. We're reporting on problem-solving activity. The
discipline that forms from that is pretty significant, but it requires
a lot of discipline at the executive level to get that to form.
Joe: Is this framework different than others out there? Or,
"Have you seen one similar to this?" maybe is the better
question.
David: We haven't. I know that there are others out there that
subscribe principally to the same ideas we try to teach and we try
to coach. I've been pretty vocal about essentially critiquing where
we've come in the past 15 years in North America as we've
pursued what I continue to call traditional Lean methods.
Jim Womack is an amazing, amazing thought leader in this area
and I've read and followed up on things that he's said. But,
essentially, we've taken that Womack five-step method and we've
made an industry out of it.

There are Lean consultants out there that will sell you a return on
your investment, but the problem with that is, how will that
return be sustained in a year, in three years, in five years? Can
you hold onto it? Can you hold onto the gain? There's enough
literature out there that clearly indicates that those gains are not
being held simply by implementing Lean events, Lean tools alone.
There has to be some sort of a management system that
undergirds the system of tools. It's the management system
that's the harder thing to get. You can throw a book about the
Toyota management system at a group of people and say, "Go do
this." But implementing a management system is like switching
from Windows to Mac OS. It's a painful experience. You have to
retrain your mind to think about the decisions that you're making,
perhaps even down at the values level, if you will.
What does customer-first focus mean? How does that translate
into a daily decision-making experience whenever problems are
occurring in, say, quality or productivity or cost? Which one do I
work on first? There're thousands of problems occurring every
day. Which one do I work on first? If I'm customer-first focused?
We may address the quality over the cost problem, depending on
the severity of it.
Joe: When you take this upon yourself as an organization to do
that, there seems there has to be such a leap of faith. It's not
quite the blind leading the blind, but you have that feeling, don't
you?
David: Absolutely. In your introduction, you mentioned mutual
trust and respect. The first thing that has to happen is mutual
trust and respect has to develop between the coach, and
substitute whatever word you want there. We use the word
"coach" the same way people use the word "mentor" or "sensei."
We've been down the road. We've seen the system and the
framework implemented in enterprises as far-ranging as car

sales, to automotive or motor manufacturing, to health care
settings and hospitals. A large portion of our business right now is
in hospitals. Part of that is just developing mutual trust and
respect, and it has to be at the highest level of the organization.
A perfect, perfect match for us is whenever a CEO, myself or my
colleague coaches, would see eye-to-eye. You've heard the
phrase or the cliché, "Being like-minded," and that's essentially
what it is. I can work with CEOs that maybe are expressing their
management system differently, but if we're like-minded, then
we can begin to have that mutual trust and respect.
It involves the kinds of things that you wouldn't expect, the CEO
who calls -- maybe even the most tactical question that he or she
might have -- they're calling back to say, "How does this work in
the system? How does this work in the framework that you're
trying to teach us?"
A lot of mutual trust and respect, and that faith has to develop
over a period of time. We have to prove that the system is going
to yield the kind of culture change results that we're looking for.
You don't have too many CEOs that are out there looking for
culture change.
They may be mouthing those words and saying, "We want culture
change," but truly what they want is a return on their investment
and a change on the bottom line. We can get you there, but we
can only get you there after you change the culture that
undergirds your improvement system.

Joe: You bring one thing up there that I want you to define a
little bit for me. What is the difference between a coach and a
consultant?

David: We definitely don't want to create an animosity towards
consulting at all, because essentially, we do that as well. The
difference between a coach and a consultant in our definition -- I

think we say this on our website somewhere -- we're not going to
come out and implement anything for you. We're going to come
out and we're going to coach you to implement.
To use, since football season is upon us, we're the coaching staff
on the sidelines. We can't play the game, but we can certainly
have a pre-game plan, and we can coach you during the game,
and we can have a post-game plan and watch the films with you.
But we can't get out there on the field and play with you, so
that's our definition. That's the difference between a coach and a
consultant, in my humble opinion.
Joe: When we talk about adult learning cycles, we go through
this "learn, do, coach" approach. Do you follow similar progress
with an organization?
David: At the outset of an engagement, what I want my
executive team to understand is that they are about to become a
team of teacher-coaches, and that about half of their time is
going to be spent teaching-coaching others in their organization
to learn how to use the framework, to create a situation where
continuous improvement is part of everybody's job every day,
and you can't get there.
This is classic Toyota. You can't get there unless your leader is a
teacher-coach. Mike Rother has done a fantastic job of
characterizing the essence of this in a book that he wrote called
"Toyota Kata," and I use it a lot in my coaching activities. I pick
off different chapters of it, just to let people know that, truly,
you've got to change the way you're doing business.
This is the difference that I'm talking about, that the biggest
cultural shift that has to occur right off the bat is that executive
leader has to rethink and recast who he or she is in the
organization with regard to their responsibilities. Half of their
responsibilities is to train up folks underneath them, or beside
them, in this continuous improvement framework.

Joe: Talk about the training aspect. Someone has to learn it,
and then they've got to go do and practice it, but is there like a
Stage Gate Review or something? How is competence
determined? It's easy to do in school, because they take a test
and they do it, but in the actual, real world, when do you know
someone's ready to go from the "learn" to the "do" stage?
David: We do some didactic classroom style learning, but most
of the learning that we do is coupled with practical exercises.
They may be tactical or tabletop exercises, or they may be right
there in a tactical situation, where we're taking people right to
where the work is being done and saying, "OK, this problem just
occurred. Now, let's do what we call "'The three Gs.' 'Go and see,'
'Get the facts,' 'Grasp the situation.'"
Toyota has the concept rolled up into Genchi Genbutsu, or direct
observation, but we want to take people right to where the work's
being done to be able to practice direct observation, so let's just
take that skill for a second, direct observation. That's what I'm
trying to teach and coach as a leader.

Why? What's the imperative there? The imperative is that if we
do that, then we're going to be using facts as opposed to
opinions, particularly when we're trying to make decisions that
are based on problems that have occurred.

I may do some introduction of the principle and the idea in the
classroom, or even one-on-one as I'm teaching, but I quickly
move that to, "Let me show you what I'm talking about here," so
I want to model that, and I want to have them do it by the
numbers with me, and then I want to go bounce back and forth.
We're so Western in our thinking that we look at a cycle, and we
even think that a cycle is linear, so it's "learn, do, coach." What
really happens is the cycle between "do" and "coach," we kind of
bounce back and forth between those things. We do it, and then
we coach it, and then we do it, and then coach it.

The problem with us as a Western culture is that we want to race
to - the equivalent situation would be, particularly in business and
particularly in manufacturing; we want a 250-yard drive every
time, all the time, and we want it right on target, but we're not
going through the necessary or macro movement steps to do
that, so the "do" and the "coach," we just bounce back and forth,
bounce back and forth.

To try to get to the answer to your question, "How do you know
when?" That's the importance of the coach. The coach, who has
been down this road before, who had done, and done a lot, is
able to see the basic skills emerging, and they are the
gatekeeper. The coach becomes the gatekeeper.
That's really the way we do it, and I think that's kind of what you
would find, even in job instruction even at Toyota that's exactly
the kind of thing that you would find. I've got to repeat this
operation, I need to show the trainer that I know how to do it 50,
60, 100 times. And then I can move onto the very next thing that
I need to be trained on.

Joe: Do you see someone headed down a path that is wrong and
do you just leave them go?
David: Sometimes. I don't know if you have kids, but I've got
four kids and sometimes I allow them to fail so that they can
learn the lesson. And to translate this into executive context, we
are a bunch of alpha types out there running around and we think
that we know pretty much everything.

I include myself in that equation, when I began to come under
Rodger Lewis' mentorship, I'm a retired naval officer. I served in
the Navy for 22 years, and you talk about type A personalities,
bump up against a crowd of naval officers, and you're going to
have a fight about who's going to lead where.
As I came under Rodger's mentorship, one of the things I first

had to understand was that I didn't know everything. And that's
kind of what I bump into most, it's the idea that I know or that
I'm going to default back to my management system that has
served me well for 20 years, and I'm not going to move to this
new way or this new approach.
I will often allow an executive leader to go down that pathway to
fail, because there's so much learning value in the failure. Now,
obviously, I'm not going to let him or her do that and be unsafe
in any way, or put the business at risk in any way. It would be a
controlled experiment, and again, as a coach you begin to know
and understand, and actually, leverage, you begin to sense these
controlled experiment opportunities.
I'll give you a good example. Next week, I'm heading up to a
client that's outside of our region - no names, healthcare client,
executive team - and they're really, really struggling with direct
observation. They are rushing and using opinions and
assumptions to try and solve major corporate problems that
require that entire team to slow down and get some facts, and
use direct observation to get the facts.
This week I'm going to show up. They know that they are to show
up at 11:00 in a conference room, and whenever they get to the
conference room, they're going to find a little index card laying on
the table that says, "Come and find me at such and such location
to do some basic direct observation training."
So we're going to go from the coaching, we're going to bounce
back up to the doing, and we may bounce all the way back up to
learning. We are trying to get them to move as a team, that's the
other critical piece here. We don't want them to move just
individually. We start with individual, but the way we characterize
that is "I to, We to Us." We need to teach them to be a "We," so
they can be a better "Us."
Joe: I think one of the things that I first made the mistake of

when practicing continuous improvement Lean, is that since we're
at Gemba, since we're at the root of the problem, those changes
are pretty minute and small in the overall structure, because
we're dealing with, for lack of a better word, the task at hand or
at the place of work. So, those changes, those failures are not
dramatic.
David: You are absolutely right. I'm going to be taking them to
a lab in a hospital setting and when we do this direct observation
exercise, we're going to be looking at task level things in a
process. The process is giving us a point of recognition of a
problem, but really when they do their direct observation, they're
going to be analyzing and trying to comprehend task level things.
Just like a good coach, a coach is not going to let someone fail
without failing forward. John Maxwell uses that cliché, the author
John Maxwell, "That when we fail, we want to fail forward." And
failing forward, to me, is failing with the objective of learning, so
I'm not going to let them fall headlong; I'm going to hold onto
their hand, so they don't fall headlong, but I'm going to grab
them right before they hit the ground, because the learning
opportunity is huge at that point.
Joe: We're always talking about the operational excellence, and
we always have to talk about getting leadership on board, but
leaders are pretty smart guys and we all want to have operational
excellence. Where's the disconnect?
David: I think it's the hard wiring; I think there are a couple of
things working against us in terms of hard-wiring. And by
hard-wiring, I'm thinking about not so much value system, but
pretty much mindsets and attitudinal hard-wiring. One is that
most of our culture is set up for individual success. You have
probably been in organizations -- I have been in
organizations -- where everything from your performance review
to your discretionary compensation is based on your individual


performance.
And in a system that is so individually performance-driven than
most of the continuous improvement activity, if you don't try to
disconnect that hard-wiring, most of your continuous
improvement activity is going to continue in that direction. So
that's one piece but I think, you've got to undo. And then the
other thing is, just kind of where we've come in the past - I don't
know -- 30 years or so, I guess.
I've been working for around 30 years, and I didn't see it in the
first part of my career because I was in the Navy. As I moved into
some larger organizations, corporate culture, and then into higher
education, there is just not a true call to action to move as a
team. We move as a team and we behave as a team whenever a
crisis is upon us.

I use this whenever I do training. I actually have people think
about the last major crisis that they had as a leadership team,
and then I begin to ask them, "Did anybody bring their personal
agenda to the table?" And the answer is typically, "No. No, they
didn't." "Did all of those personality quirks that you really don't
like about your teammate, did they affect the way that you
handled the crisis?" "Well, no they didn't."
So what explains that? Why did that happen? We could spend half
a day, and I can talk to you about why I think that happens, but
more importantly, for a leader, "How can I get that sense of crisis
to translate into something that I do everyday, so that I can
begin to break down the hard-wiring against individual
performance, individual improvement and move more towards
team improvement?"
Think about how we handle a Lean event right now. I've
witnessed this probably hundreds of times, where we come
together to conduct a Lean event and what are we
communicating to that team? Well, there's a time to do

continuous improvement, which is an oxymoron in this case. But,
there is a time to do continuous improvement and there's a time
not to do continuous improvement. And when you're together as
a team, we work on improvement activity, but what happens
whenever the improvement activity has ended? Are we still
intended to work as a team?
So what is your management system telling your organization
about team behavior? And, why am I going on and on about team
behavior? Team behavior is one of the things that undergirds the
Toyota way and the Toyota production system. And it's easier to
see in Eastern cultures. Folks who come from an Eastern cultural
background, they do display, in my humble opinion; a different
sense of connection to community than we do in the West.
Good, bad, or indifferent, it doesn't mean that we can't change. It
doesn't mean that we need to be exactly like Eastern cultures.
We just need to make sure as leaders that we understand that
and we create a system for change that overcomes that.
Joe: So is operational excellence the Western cultural version of
Toyota production?
David: In my context, yes. Just like Lean -- if you go out there
and you ask what's the definition of Lean? You're going to get
maybe 20 different answers. Operational excellence as a phrase
has taken on many definitions of its own. The reason that we
adopted it was because it does come up in the Toyota way
documentation, so we just felt that was a way to respect that.

For us, operational excellence is the human and the operational
balance and a culture that's moving towards mutual trust and
respect. Those are the two things and think about that. That
doesn't really sound very operational from a traditional
standpoint. If you want to define "operational," it's hitting
targets, getting better and solving problems. Well, yeah, it's all
those things as well, but you also have to pay attention to the

human side. So that's why we say, "Balance the human and
operational, and strive for mutual trust and respect."

Joe: Is it all culture? I mean, is that really just what it gets down
to?
David: You've got to have some system for continuous
improvement. There is no argument in my mind that in order to
get good material flow, the application of a Kanban system is
absolutely the best way to pull material into the process. We
teach it in two ways. We teach an early Kanban application. We
call it Kanban I out of II.
And Kanban 1 is getting material to flow to the process. But, the
reason that we do that is to give a living demonstration to a work
team as they live that material flow Kanban of how a pull system
works. So if they can understand pull systems as material is
pulled into the process, then they're going to be better equipped
to learn how to do production pull systems. As long as you've got
relatively level demand.

Quick answer to the question is "Yes." I think culture is the
end-all to whether or not you're going to have a sustainable
continuous improvement system. I would go even one step
further, use a guy named Edgar Schein, who has written quite a
bit on organizational behavior and organizational culture in
particular.
We use Schein's model for culture, in that he shows it as a
triangle with actions and behaviors at the top, mindsets in the
middle, and values, and then, beneath values, he even goes
further and calls them beliefs or convictions.
In order to get to behaviors that are culturally supportive of
continuous improvement, you have to have leaders who are
culturally supportive of continuous improvement and that's a
shift. It's a shift. It's one thing to want continuous improvement;

it's quite another thing to do and live continuous improvement as
an executive leader.

So Schein says that the primary responsibility of leadership is to
create culture. And so, based on that and what my personal
experience is, I think the answer to the question is, "Yes." Lean
tools have their place, and Lean tools are the way to solve
problems in a system of continuous improvement.
But we need to create a culture that allows workers, where the
work is being done, to be able to stop and solve problems. We
also have to unlock their creativity in solving those problems as
well. So that's the operational and the human in balance.
Joe: Everyone wants to develop that community where we share
ideas, improve that think tank or incubator-type thinking. Have
you tried that and can you discuss your failures and successes?
David: In the early years at the center here, we created a
networking group. I think one of the biggest failures was calling it
a networking group because, essentially, what we would have is
people who honestly wanted to learn from one another about
Lean implementation, and about operational excellence, and
about the things that we were doing in culture framework and
things like that.
But then, we also had about half the group that were, again, not
to be pejorative, but were consultants who were trying to sell to
the other half of the group. So that was one of the biggest
failures that we had, was just calling it a networking group. Over
the years, what that has morphed into is our Institute for
Operational Excellence. Again, if you want to learn more about it,
you can take a look at www.OperationalExcellence.com.

But what we were trying to do in the institute's case is to
occasionally convene face-to-face meetings or video meetings.
Like-minded people who were trying to learn, who were kind of

positionally connected with each other, so directors of continuous
improvement, director of Lean, we've had a CEO executive
leadership colloquium for health care leaders.
What we're trying to do is better understand our role as we
connect to the external community of learners in Lean and
operational excellence, and try to understand what they need and
try to meet their needs. We do that in different ways, but
generally, it's those two ways of convening meetings, and then
an online facet to our Institute where we have tried, through
social media, to connect people to each other.
I've got to tell you that, too, probably, in my mind is another
failure mode for us. It's difficult when we're conditioned to use
things like Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Twitter to introduce yet
another social network that connects people.

We're actually falling back; I think, over the next year or two,
where we're going to take the online effort from our Institute,
and we're going to fall back from the social media front, and fall
back into traditional social media methods. And then where we're
going to advance, we're going to advance on the front of trying to
improve the resource material that's connected with our standard
topics.
Joe, for example, we would do a standard topic called, "Daily and
Monthly Meetings." And we have all kinds of educational material
on that, that we have developed on our own. We've got video
content. We've got voice-over PowerPoint. We've got written
white papers. But we'd like to grow. Where we want to advance
on that front is to bring in other resources that specifically
support our position and advance our position.
So other voices, besides just KCOE. Other voices that would
speak to that learning community in agreement, and then we
would come away from that with some common learning there.
And a good case in point is, I mean Jeff Liker is a prolific author

in all things Toyota. He has a fantastic technique of pairing up,
partnering up with thought leaders that come right from Toyota.
So if you read the "Toyota Leadership," with Gary Convis, I think
it's a fantastic read. I constantly use that book.
I use "Toyota Culture" where Liker co-authored with Mike Hoseus.
I use the "Toyota Way" field book all the time, where he
co-authored with Dave Meier. And Dave and Mike are friends of
the center. They are great principal sources for us, and resources
for us, and for that learning community. So that's a way I've
tackled it. Like I said, networking from the days gone by was
probably our biggest failure mode.
Joe: With that network community, you're saying that you need
to get similar roles together to make it work?
David: Part of that comes from our understanding of culture. For
example, one of the artifacts that I look for towards the 9- to
12-month point in one of our implementation engagements is for
how prolific the new language has become in an organization. Are
they speaking in terms of points of recognition, target conditions?
The biggest thing I love is whenever I hear somebody use an
acronym that comes from our system, like the 3Gs, "Go and see.
Get the facts. Grasp the situation." Or, the 3Ps, "People, Patience,
and Passion." I'll actually hear that in casual conversation. You
walk down the hallway, and you can see people holding our
problem-solving sheet and talking about the 3Ps, or talking about
the 5Ys.

Language is really important, and realizing that, when you pull a
community of learners together, one of the biggest things that
they have to overcome is this lack of common language, or more
importantly, back to Edgar Schein and his work, he calls culture a
shared experience. And so, you've got people who are having
shared experiences out there.


A great example of this is as Lean is taking on new life, and
robust life in health care settings, many health care organizations
are adding at the director level, and in some cases, the VP or the
C-suite level, primary Lean implementation officers, if you will.
So the director of Lean, director of continuous improvement,
director of operational excellence, these guys are all swimming in
the same pool, and they have this shared common experience of,
"We're trying to implement a continuous improvement system."
Many other things in health care settings are working against
them. When we get them together as shared roles and shared
responsibilities, that initial common ground provides the binding
material that you need to get a good learning community
together, because they're learning about the same things, but
they're learning it, also, from the same avenues of approach, if
you will. I don't know if that makes sense or not.
Joe: Is there something that maybe I did not ask that you would
like to add to this conversation, or something that's coming up
that you'd like to plug?
David: On October 16th, this year, here in Latrobe at Saint
Vincent College, we have what we affectionately call our North
American Operational Excellence Summit. It's a one-day
conference here at the college. It's a really, really good event
where we bring out a thought leader who is coming on strong in
the literature that we're reading. This year, we're having Mr. John
Nance as our keynote speaker.

John most recently wrote a book called "Why Hospitals Should
Fly." John is a commercial airline pilot. He's a former Air Force
officer. He's got his J.D., so he's a lawyer, and he has been doing
health care consulting for about 20 years as well. His basic
premise is, "Why is it safer to fly on a commercial airline than it is
for you to spend three days in a hospital?"


With that as a background, as the call to action, our audiences
are always mixed, manufacturing and health care, service; it
really doesn't matter, because the call to action is safety first.
How does safety first result in a better bottom line? With that as
a background, we'll be talking about things like the balance
scorecard, daily and monthly meetings, problem solving, the
establishment of some sort of a steering committee for
implementation.

This is a gathering, essentially, of folks that are in our learning
community already, so we don't do any of the talking. They do all
the talking. We're just there to facilitate the discussions and it's a
one-day conference, and if you need more information, again,
check out our website at www.operationalexcellence.com.
Joe: Is the website the best way to get hold of you?

David: Yeah, absolutely. You could do that. You can follow me
on twitter at @commanderadams and you can also find me on
LinkedIn as David Adams. I'm always open to phone calls as well.
My local number is listed on my LinkedIn profile, so if anybody
wants to talk or chat about learning or about culture first and
then, Lean, I would be happy to spend some time.



Joseph T. Dager
Business901
Phone: 260-918-0438
Skype: Biz901
Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Website: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901

Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in
bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and
marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty
years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies
it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.

Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will
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