Management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., is the founder and senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc., a nonprofit research, education, publishing, and conference company that he began in August, 1997, to advance Lean thinking around the world.
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Related Podcast: A Gemba Talk with Womack on Lean
Transcription of the Podcast
Joe Dager: Over 20 years ago, under Jim Womack’s leadership, his MIT research team created the phrase Lean, which was based on Toyota’s business system. Lean has now extended into an entire management system, due in great part to the efforts of Dr. Womack, and the organization he founded, the Lean Enterprise Institute. With me today on the Business901 podcast is Dr. Womack. Jim, it might sound a little corny, but I’d like to take this moment to thank you for all your efforts and insights through the years that you’ve shared. I cannot think of few others that have influenced me more by their books than you. His new book Gemba Walks epitomizes his Lean journey discussing his lessons from the field. Jim I want to welcome you, and I have to ask you if Gemba Walk was meant to be your autobiography?
Dr. James Womack: No, absolutely not. I’m just getting started, just getting started buddy, chapter one. Hey look, thanks for the introduction. That was certainly generous, but I’ll take it and run with it. Look, not saying I believe a word of it, but I’ll accept it.
This is not the end of the trail don’t forget the journey never ends. People love to say that. People particularly love to say that; I notice, who aren’t getting anywhere. This is an unending journey, and I say, well you at least need to be moving forward, so I hope I am moving forward, but I am nowhere near the end.
Joe: I kind of meant it in a sense, that when you talk about yourself or when you talk about the things you’ve done, you talk through Gemba and from your journey through the things that you’ve done especially and most precisely in the last 20 years and that’s pretty much what I meant by it.
I thought it was a great book, a bunch of short story collections of Lean.
Dr. Womack: It’s a series of 50 different views from the road. Walking along, walking along whoops, here’s what I see over here. Oh, look what’s over there. I’ve said to others that this is sort of adventures of a bystander with just one or two exceptions. I wasn’t really directly involved with any of this. I was just walking past the building site and did ask a few questions about what they were building and why? And then reflected on that and wrote it down.
Joe: The idea of not only going to Gemba, I think most people take the time to do that, but they still perceive it from their point of view. I think few, really sit and turn around and perceive it from the customer’s viewpoint. I think that’s what you do and maybe not the customer’s word always, but from the operator’s standpoint. You actually walk out to the end of the pier and turn around and look at it.
Dr. Womack: Isn’t that a strange thing to do. I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do that every day, but there you have it.
Joe: I want to start out with a big picture question, you always talk about the term value, and customer value, but what’s the definition of that? Is there a simple one?
Dr. Womack: Well what’s valuable that the customers think is valuable. I always say it kind of ridiculous word, but I say it’s a sort of an existential thing. It is what people think it is. There are no independent way to judge value other than what people are right now are supposed to be the recipients of whatever is being done think is valuable. It’s in contrast of the accounting world where you go into an organization and look at all the assets and figure out which part is appreciated and say well that’s the remaining asset value, which of course has nothing to do with any customer whether or not an asset is valuable is whether or not a customer wants that asset to do them something for them at what price. So it can change overnight.
Big, big, big SUVs were very valuable until the world collapsed, about two and a half years, and suddenly their value plummeted. Now wait a minute, there’s another energy spike coming. But for the last year or so there has been a big comeback.
And by the way for anybody creating value that’s kind of irritating isn’t it? That what you thought was valuable when you started your design process, or your production process isn’t valuable by the time, you get through. Which is, by the way, one reason why you should shorten lead time, but nevertheless, value is what people think it is.
If you’re running an organization, you should definitely remember that. I find a lot of organizations that want to look inward, and value is what the employees think it is, or value is what the accountant thinks it is. Or value is what the shareholders think it is well of course that is what the shareholder values that’s something different we’re talking about the value that the organization creates and of course that is only determined by customers.
Joe: I don’t know what great measurement there is to that, because really it determines what value it is for the shareholders is what the customer’s value. What the value is of the company is really the future value of what the customers perceive, right?
Dr. Womack: Well it should be. Look, at the short term, there is a lot of ways to put them you can go short on R&D, or you can go short on hiring or paying people. You can do a lot of things in the short term to be profitable, but that then should lead to shareholder value. Well, sometimes it does but it shouldn’t, because those are not sustainable. So, therefore, it’s the sustainable creation of value should lead to other subsidiary kinds of value, like shareholder value. But customer’s definition of value should come first if you haven’t got that right, well best of luck.
Joe: Well I’ve noticed in most of your writings that I’ve read, there’s little in the way of any toolset, or talked about PDCA, or even talking about Dr. Deming. It’s really the closest you get in discussing that is value streams. Is that done on purpose?
Dr. Womack: Tools are secondary. The ability to see value, which has to be the organization’s purpose to create value, and to see the value stream that creates the value, and to see how to engage the people who operate the value stream, that’s what creates the value. Those are things that should be in your primary field of view, your focal plane. The tools are the means to an end, but you’ve got to get clear what the ends are to get started. I find right now that we’ve got an awful lot more tools than we have results. I started thinking about that some years ago of how could we know how to do so many fine things.
But it turns out; we either can’t do them or once we get them done, they weren’t relevant to the real problem. That is a hazard any time you get into the tool world. Everybody loves tools. My dad and I, when we were kids, man, we loved tools. We went to Sears every Saturday and bought some more tools. Sometimes we took the tools apart. It’s really fun taking a drill apart.
We never built much of anything, because we never could quite figure out what it was to build, so we just went back and bought some more tools.
I see an awful lot of people, if I may say, out in the Lean community who are tool heads, and that’s fine. And that’s often necessary, but it’s never sufficient.
So I’m just looking on a different plane which happens to be where I can be useful. I’m never going to be any great specialist on the fine details of using specific tools. But I might have something to say, I hope I have something to say about the bigger picture.
Joe: How did you ever coin the term Lean? I don’t know that I’ve read that story. I probably have through the years somewhere. But where did the term Lean come from?
Dr. Womack: Well, there was a simple need after 1986. The MIT team had actually started in 1979 to look at the future of the automobile, and that was in a time when we had had the first energy crisis and had a smog crisis and the body count was very high out on the highway and so forth. So it was a question about what’s the future of the auto. As we got into that project, we pretty quickly concluded that the old?fashioned kind of pollution, that smog ? not the new-fashioned issue of greenhouse and all that ? that fuel consumption could be dealt with pretty dramatically, that fatalities could be cut.
The issue was not whether the auto system was going to continue its dominance. The question was who was going to succeed in dominating that industry. And of course, the Americans, they had dominated it since very early in the game back in the time of Henry Ford, 1914, the opening of the new Highland Park Plant.
So they were used to running the show, and suddenly it turned out that people on the other side of the world also were intent on running the show and that created a great question of, “How can this be?”
How can it be that people in a country that was not very long ago just in ruins could suddenly look like they were going to become the dominant players in this enormous industry. The MIT team sort of switched course in the early 1980s and set out to answer that question. By 1986, we were ready to do a much bigger project that was paid for by all the auto companies in the world, and all the big car parts companies, collectively, to go out and do a global benchmarking on not just production but product development, on supplier management, on customer management.
Customers actually need managing, bless them. If you’re really going to help them, you have to help them help themselves.
So we went across the world looking at how people were doing. And we did a lot of benchmarking. We had a young man who had been the first engineer hired at the NUMMI joint venture that GM and Toyota had in California.
It was also the first manager to quit and Toyota I think, never forgiven me for that. I did not raid him. He just decided after two years that he, as an engineer, needed some business credentials, and he would go to business school. He came to MIT, came to me. This is young John Krafcik and said, “Could I write a paper on what I learned at NUMMI if I came to the Sloane School of Management?”
I got out the project credit card and said, “Here you go. Not only can you write a paper, I want you to visit every assembly plant in the world and to do a global benchmarking. What do you think about that?” Well, he thought that was a pretty good idea.
At the same time, we set out to do benchmarking product development in collaboration, informal but very real collaboration, with the group at the Harvard Business School. We set out to do a benchmarking, a purchasing practice with a different group. Then we set out to also look at how customers were managed and helped.
As we began to gather all of the information and to analyze it, it was just striking how big the gap was between best practice on the Japanese side, and that, of course, was Toyota and Honda.
By the way, the worst practice on the Japanese side was not very impressive. And the best practice on the American side… So take best Japanese practice, compare it with best American practice, best European practice ? big gap ? and then take best Japanese practice and compare it with worst American and worst European practice and you have just a staggering gap.
So we said good grief, this is not a single?dimension thing better at running factories. This is better at running product development, better at running production, better at helping the customer, better at dealing with suppliers, and, by the way, a better management system. This is not an accident. This is happening for a reason.
We began to create this whole notion of an enterprise that we were going to call an X enterprise, what are we going to call it? And that’s where we had a dilemma because we didn’t think this had anything to do with Japan. By the way, subsequently that has been shown to be absolutely the case. We didn’t think it had anything to do especially with Toyota, and subsequently I think that’s also been demonstrated to be the case.
So we can’t call it Japanism, we can’t call it Toyotaism with a T, and there was no point in calling it Toyodism with a D, that’s family. We’re going to call it Ohnoism, or how about Nakamuraism for the guy that invented the product development system or Kamiyaism for the guy who invented the selling system. Or Thai for the Toyota family that really had the idea for how to rethink the supply chain and purchasing. I mean, those names won’t work. What are we going to do?
So we got a whiteboard in the office at MIT. We had this team room. The first thing we did was push all the desks together and get rid of all the dividers so you had one great big table where the whole team sat around and did all their work and a great big whiteboard on the wall. I went to the whiteboard, and I said look folks, this is 1987 in the summer. We’ve got articles we’re going to start publishing.
We have to have a name for this. What are we going to call it? It’s a real problem. On one level, it’s just trivial. It’s a label that’s only as deep as the appear you write the label on, but people’s minds work in a way that they have to have a label for things and this is something new. So what do we call it? I suggested, and I’ll take a little credit for that, I said why don’t we name it for what it does?
You know, why don’t we do that? Let’s name it for what it does. So I wrote on the whiteboard it takes less human effort to design a comparable product, it takes less human effort to manufacture a product, it takes less human effort in the purchasing chain. It takes less effort everywhere you look at it, and, by the way, fewer errors both reaching the customer, and fewer end process errors, so fewer errors, less effort, less time.
At that time, there was a big gap in time to market. Comparing say, General Motors and Toyota, sort of five years versus three or three and a half years, so less time, but wait a minute, less front to back, start to finish time in the factory. The reflection of that is inventories and, by the way, less inventories and, by the way, less plant space for a given amount of capacity and, by the way, fewer injuries because they really did find there were fewer injuries in a Lean process than in the old?fashioned, what was called mass production process, and on and on and on.
So it’s less, less, less, less, less to create more value. Then young John Krafcik said I’ve got it, let’s call it Lean. You know, less, less, less, less, Lean. I remember writing that word on the blackboard for the first time. And we all stood back and looked at it and said that’ll do, that’s enough, let’s get going. So that’s where Lean came from in ’87. By the way, it’s a terrible word, because, and a couple of reasons.
It does rhyme with mean. It also rhymes with green. Make of that what you will, but the problem with the term Lean is that it talks about less whereas, we had even written on the blackboard it creates more value with less of everything. The more value got left out of the term, and all people heard was less.
For a lot of people, Lean sounds like anorexic. We tried using the term in Germany, and people literally thought it was anorexic. So, therefore, it’s a very imperfect term. I don’t take any pleasure in it. We needed something. That’s what, as of 1987, we could come up with. There it is.
People periodically come up to me and say, well, why don’t you change it? Why don’t you call it the Q Factor, or why don’t you call it Flubber times two? I just say hey, you guys, that’s somebody else, on some other’s watch, that this is the name it’s got for my time and in the future, they’ll come up with other names, that’s fine. But for now, Lean is going to have to do it and let’s just get on with it.
Joe: I think like any methodology or really culture, it does change. There are outbreaks of it and break?offs from it such as Agile or Scrum. Whether they are an extension of Lean, whether they are influenced by Lean or TPS or however you want to term it, it develops into its own little character and its own little. . . As it breaks off and branches out.
Dr. Womack: Well look, there’s a long, long human history of trying to do more with less. How far back people have consciously thought about that, I don’t know. I’ve visited the arsenal in Venice where they embedded flow?production by 1500. They literally had a flowing final assembly line for their galleys they used in the Mediterranean campaigns.
They put the hull in the water. Then it went past a series of assembly stations where pre-manufactured parts were very quickly snapped in place.
By the way, all these galleys were to a standard design, and they all had standard parts. They were wood. So when you’ve got wood, like in read?to?assemble furniture, well nothing ever quite fits unless you have put a lot of shims and other things in.
So, therefore, this was not quite what Henry Ford had in mind who said famously, “There are no files in the Ford Motor Company, because our parts fit.” But nevertheless, 1500 people had the idea of continuous flow, high-speed rapid production.
So it’s been around as a concept for a very long time. The real issue always has been who can do it? Henry Ford made the great leap of really doing it when it came to a completely standardized product with no options. Everybody knows there was only one color. But, there were no options of any sort in a Model T, other than the four bodies that were dropped on at the end of the line.
Then there were lots of people out in the world who were in the custom body business expertise, you just bought a chassis and took it off, and put your own body on it. Therefore, you can have what Henry called flow production with a vengeance as long as you had no variety. Then, of course, what the world wanted was variety.
That’s where the Toyota guys then came in and said, how can we have high?velocity, highly accurate, zero defect production in a situation of a high variety? That was their contribution.
There’s an accretion as you go through history. By the way, before the Venetians, well, the Romans must be out there somewhere. How did the Chinese build all those treasure ships to unite the world in Confucian Harmony as they tried to, in 1421?
I don’t know, apparently no one really knows. But, maybe there was something there.
So I think it’s kind of fruitless to figure out where the origin is. Humans have thought about it for a long time, and there are pits and jerks and starts moving ahead.
We had a couple of big leaps in the 20th century, and we’ll see whether people can leap further ahead in the 21st. Hope so, but don’t have a crystal ball. As we say, forecasts are always wrong.
Joe: Well, most people don’t think of Lean as, a capturing knowledge mechanism. Do you?
Dr. Womack: Well, of course. That’s what the whole idea is. It’s an experimental process that you try things. They are right. Deming most famously captured it in PDCA. But again, Deming didn’t exactly think of science. Hey, let’s give Galileo a little bit of credit.
Now look, it’s by design and experimental process. By the way, Kaizen is nothing but an experiment. There’s a plan based on grasping the situation; I hope, which is to say what is the issue?
Then you do it, and that’s to run the experiment. You can run a valid experiment because you have baseline data on how the current state works.
So then you change something in a future state, and you measure the difference and decide whether that’s a good or bad result and whether to standardize it or not.
The entire idea here is to capture knowledge in books of knowledge and the product development system in a progression of A3s which, of course, we talk about a lot at LEI.
But A3s are really nothing but a way to put an experiment in context. You put PDCA in context and so they become their own book of knowledge as time moves ahead.
If you’re not trying to learn something and not trying to cumulatively learn something, so you don’t have to do the same experiment over and over, as I often see in companies.
Well then, you need some sort of a way to write it down. To standardize it so you can sustain it as well as discover it.
Joe: When we talk about implementing Lean, it has to be supported by management. It’s typically blamed on management when it fails. That’s always is a little confusing to me, because they’re the ones that seem that they’re supposed to be the ones giving up control, to be a real flat organization, but then the blame still resides with them. It seems contradictory to me, a little bit.
Dr. Womack: Well, but look, most management’s approach the process improvement is how can I outsource this, so I don’t have to mess with it? That’s the real problem. That line management says gee whiz; this has worked for staff. Staff says why don’t we hire some consultants? The consultants say eureka, except we know this isn’t going to last. They’re right; it doesn’t.
The whole thing is backward. That Lean should be about what staffs do every day with the support of people with special skills on some kind of Lean team, or improvement team or Lean sigma team, or whatever.
But, the way it typically works, and I do get so many calls and emails about this.
You have very frustrated staff teams who have got a lot of tools, and they’re really good at deploying those tools. But, they note, that nothing really ever really sticks if it gets done. Often, things don’t really get done because what they’re trying to do doesn’t fit within the actual rules of the organization.
So if you’re going to do Lean, it can’t be a program, in my view. It has to be a permanent, enduring way of managing. Gosh, that’s pretty rare, to go out and find line managers who can actually incorporate all of these ideas into what they do every day, is they’re remarkably rare.
By the way, you won’t learn any of this in the business school. By the way, you won’t learn it in an industrial engineering program. By the way, you won’t learn it in the operation’s research program. Because, it’s interesting that no one really teaches management in management schools. What they teach is functional skills. That’s just a darn shame.
So my own objective, getting management to embrace the need to change what they do, and if we can get that to happen, well then all kinds of good things can happen. It’s a rare thing. I’ll just give an example. I was out looking at a company the other day. I do a lot of walking because it’s the only way I can learn anything.
This was a manufacturing company, as it happened, although I spend probably half my time at healthcare these days. I was out walking through a manufacturing company and didn’t know the company, really.
They had called me and said, “Why don’t we take a walk together and sort of grasp the situation.” This was a small business unit that just had a couple of hundred people, and they had three product families.
Met the general manager who just immediately was able to say, “Here’s what we think the customer believes is value. Here are the three processes, the three value streams that create it. Here’s how our people are engaged in making those processes better and better.”
Now look that could have been blown smoke, but he told me that out in the little plant and then I spent the day. By the end of the day, I said, “My gosh if this guy were running every factor and every hospital in the world, the world would be a different place. He’s got it.”
He’s doing it as if he were just breathing. This is what he does.
He’s continually grasping the situation. Continually saying what is the customer problem that we’re not solving, or what are we not doing for the customer that they don’t consider a full solution?
Then, how does our process have to change? By the way, how are our people going to change the process?
I had a similar experience the last two days in a government agency that will remain nameless that is in the regulatory business, looking at a regulatory process. A very complicated process.
Everybody there was a Ph.D., or better. Everybody was kind of too smart by half, in terms of having just extraordinarily deep silo knowledge, and no process knowledge, really fascinating. This organization has gone through failed improvement program after failed improvement program.
What we were doing with all of the senior management was just putting up on a wall. Creating a value stream map of one of the ten key processes in this organization, which it turned out, not surprisingly, no person was responsible for and which it also turned out, not surprisingly no one ? no one ? actually had much knowledge of how the whole process worked. Everybody knew a lot about a piece; nobody knew anything about the whole.
And this is 2011 in a supposedly very sophisticated, advanced country, and this agency has got 5,000 ? 6,000 people who toil every day with broken, pearly?understood malfunctioning processes. And again, this is 2011; how can this be?
That’s why I don’t have any hair on my head. I’ve just been scratching my head about this for a long time, and we do every day try to do better.
Joe: I see someone talk about the improvements they do and they decrease maybe their workspace by a third and they’ve got a third empty factory over here because they’re all U-shaped cells. They get flow. They got rid of the waste and everything. But if it doesn’t move the needle in the marketplace, what good is it? Is improvement good for the sake of improvement or does it need to move the needle in the marketplace?
Dr. Womack: Well, it’s a little bit like the confusion that people have between doing work which is making action and motion and creating value, that how hard you’re working and how much value you’re creating have no necessary connection. Only the customer judges value. You could be working, working, working, and just killing yourself to do something that no customer cares about. Similarly, you could be working, working, working, and just killing yourself to improve something that is actually of no consequence to the ability of the process to solve the customer’s problem.
You see lots of that, just sort of ritualized behavior that, “Hey, I love 5S, but its table steaks.” No customer goes and buys a product and says, “Gee, a lot of 5S. What do you got 6S in this product? I’ll pay more. Give me three. I thought I was going to get two, but I’ll take three. And take the price up 20%, will you, to pay for that extra S?”
Look, to repeat, I don’t know anything bad about 5S, but you only do 5S to make it possible to do other things. You don’t do 5S to do 5S. Draw a value stream map to draw a value stream map and check a box. Draw a value stream map of your current state to make it possible to envision the future state and to achieve that future state. If you don’t achieve it, well then everything you’ve done with your pencil and your paper to draw all those maps, it’s just more muda, a waste.
So, it’s just easy to fall into thinking, I’m working hard, so I must be doing something useful. Look, as human beings, I just see how that happens. I feel it myself sometimes. But the truth is only the customer is a judge whether you’re doing something useful. You cannot judge your own usefulness. It has to be the result of what comes out at the end and what the customer thinks of it.
Joe: Well, we’re talking about customer all the time and we talk about feedback and the value for the, but the closest one to the customer in most organizations is the sales and marketing process and that seems to be the one process that’s siloed out there that Lean doesn’t apply to.
Dr. Womack: Well, first off, it absolutely applies. It just hasn’t been applied. By the way, going the other direction, we know a staggering amount about how to do purchasing the right way and it is hardly ever done the right way. So you look downstream, you look upstream, towards sales and toward purchasing, and what you’ll often see is nothing happening that is going to support operating a good process on the production side or on the product development side in the middle, really product development and production.
And customer support. This is quite a step up from sales and marketing, but customer support. Those are really the three easiest to fix core processes of any business. But it’s hard to fix them when you don’t have a companion process stretching upstream and complimentary process going downstream.
And senior management has typically not seen much need to do it. I think partly because it’s just so easy to construct scoreboards that you say to your salespeople, I want you to sell 20% more at an average price of X, and you get an enormous bag of money. And there at senior management, I’ve done my job.
And then you say, well you’re purchasing and you want to save the following amount of my by reducing piece?part?price, and that’s easy to measure. Total cost is really hard to figure out, but piece?part?price, that’s easy. So take piece?part?price down by 10% and I the senior manager, will give you an enormous bag of money.
With no reference to, “Well, how would you do that?” By the way, to actually do that would require changing the supplier’s product development and production process, and probably their purchasing process as well. And to do it with the customer would require changing what we call the provision process which is how you get the product into the hands of the customer and go through the negotiation on price and make delivery and make them happy.
It’s just interesting. Those are treated by most senior managers as things that can be managed with a scoreboard. But what we call management by results rather than management by process. And look, that’s easy. It’s easy.
But to me, it’s like the team owner of some sports team who’s not doing very well so he concludes what’s needed is a bigger scoreboard because perhaps the players can’t see the scoreboard. What the team is saying, “Well, we don’t know how to block and tackle.” Then the owner says, “Gosh, not only do we need a bigger scoreboard. We need more data on the scoreboard. We need lots and lots of metrics on the scoreboard.”
The team is saying, “Well, gee, but we don’t know how to block and tackle.” So then the owner says, “Well, what we need is incentives. I’m going to give you big bags of money if you put points on the board.” The team says, “Gee, we don’t know how to block and tackle.” The owner in exasperation says, “Well, I’m going to give much bigger bags of money to put points on the board.”
So now you have a parody of management by results, except that what you actually see in a lot of organizations. That it’s just sort of magic that if you build a scoreboard with some metrics, and you put money behind the metrics, you will get a good result. That’s an interesting hypothesis, but I believe it has been disproved over and over again. Yet in the organizations it just continues as if there were no evidence that it doesn’t work.
Joe: Someone asked me this the other day. They said, “Six Sigma has the voice of the customer. They must be more attached to the customer than what Lean is. What tools of Lean do you use for the customer? I actually told the person there’s kind of a name for it. There’s a new book; it’s Gemba Walk. You walk over and talk to them; it’s one of the tools.
Dr. Womack: Well, look, it’s just a bunch of silly nonsense about Lean versus Six Sigma, versus TPM, versus theory of constraints, or versus Agile, Fragile, whatever. I just find that that’s almost entirely consultant-driven. That it is different consultants, they’ve got a product to sell. The best advertising is negative advertising. The politicians know that. So what you do, instead of talking about what you do, you trash what the other guy is supposedly doing. And straw men are pretty easy to construct. So goodness, I just stay away from all that. It just seems to me that that’s mega?muda.
Here’s what I think about the world, that all people are trying to create perfect processes for providing exactly what the customer wants. That’s what good people everywhere, and there are lots of good people, want to do. There are different tools, different tactics, and different sequences of doing things. That’s what all this pushing and shoving among the consultants is that they’ve got some special knowledge of one tool, one tactic, and one sequence. Of course, they have to argue that only that tool that tactic and that sequence are appropriate and will deliver the result. By the way, the only answer, if you want to do this right, is to try some experiments.
It’s just remarkable how little performance outputs data consultants can bring to the table when you really push hard. That’s just particularly odd in the process world. You would think that anybody who wants to play the game would have a lot of outcomes data. We changed this, and here’s what we got. We changed this, and here’s what we got. What you hear instead is, we changed this and got this wonderful result, while the other guys tried that, and they all died. Gee, let’s get some real data guys.
It really is something. When I was dealing with the government agency, not surprised at all, but they had a complicated, but very important process for which there was absolutely no outcomes data, none, zero. How well are you doing, first off, but wait a minute, what is it that the customer really wants? And I had very vague, just assumptions on that, without anyone ever asking very clearly. A process to create that result, and then no outcomes measures on how well it works. And no in-process measures to see how many turn?backs, how much weighting and so forth is inside.
It’s amazing that this is supposed to be a scientific society. Absolutely not just supposed to be, it is actually 2011. I believe that statement is true, and yet look how little scientific method we actually apply. As opposed to assertion without fact, and experimentation without bothering to either determine the original state or the new state once you’ve finished the experiment, shame on all of us.
Joe: Just today I got asked about doing a marketing plan, and I know that I won’t get the job unless I provide them some solutions to a problem that hasn’t even been defined yet.
Dr. Womack: Yep, yep. Look, it’s absolutely a good point you’ve got there. Every consultant or adviser is expected to have the answer, when there’s actually been no serious discussion about what the question is, and what we call jumping to solutions. You see it all the time in any organization, including at LEI in the days when I was running it. We would have to stand back and laugh at ourselves. Someone would say very vaguely, “I think we have a problem.” Everyone would be in a competition to propose an obvious, correct solution to that problem. It’s just a natural, human characteristic that we like to jump to solutions because we’re very uncomfortable in conditions of uncertainty. So the wrong solution being vigorously applied feels better than the time and effort it takes to understand what the problem is. To truly grasp the situation, to get to root cause, then to force yourself to evaluate all of the logical countermeasures that you might try, rather than jump to the one that you personally might feel comfortable with.
Boy those are tough things in organizations. To force yourself to grasp the situation, to force yourself to dig down to root cause, and to force yourself to list all of the possible, logical countermeasures, and decide which one seems the most promising, and then to run a rigorous experiment. All of what I’ve just mentioned is in the P?part. What we normally see is little P, big D, almost invisible C, almost invisible A. The consequence of that is that we just redo, redo, and redo. We all know better, and yet we do it. Management shouldn’t be allowing that to happen, but instead many of them are exacerbating it.
Joe: Is that how they are being trained, as in an MBA?
Dr. Womack: It’s interesting that what was decided in America and in a lot of other countries was that Gemba is for dummies, and the conference room is for smart people. That you can actually figure things out because you’re smart and a quick study, very quickly with about one fact, a whole lot of surmise, and some clever tactics or their techniques, and that’s really interesting but you know, at least in my experience it’s just not true. That when you go to a business school and say how much time do you actually spend looking at anything real, and the answer is we get the bus you know, once a quarter, and we go visit companies. They’ll say, well great, why don’t you visit a process every day? Well, we haven’t got time for that, ’cause we’re learning all kinds of advanced ways to quantify activities and to regress this and analyze that, and that really feels good.
It feels like professional work. What does not feel like professional work, apparently, is just to go to the place that’s the Gemba, where value is actually being created, and talk to the people who are doing it. And by the way, while you’re at it, talk to the customer as well. And by the way, that might just be the next customer in the next department in that organization, and say gee, what is the problem here? And then what are the root causes of the problem, and then what are the logical countermeasures, and then how can we test the most promising countermeasure.
Some are and that doesn’t seem to be part of management education. And yet that’s the core of what management needs to do.
Joe: Well, you raise a point there and what you made me think of Jim is the fact that when I used to work in process equipment. I would meet with family owned businesses and the founder of the company. The guy who sat there, he was out on, he was in the asphalt business, he was out on the paver. He had done that work; he had grown into it, learned to manage from the ground up. Then the second generation would come in, and they went to college and became the business men of the organization. There was a huge cultural shift when the baton was passed.
Dr. Womack: Yes, and then the third generation sold the business and took the money and set up a hedge fund.
It’s a complete cycle, there’s the one who founds it, the one who manages it as a modern sort of bureaucratic business, and the one that sells it and moves to New York to run the hedge fund. Then you wonder why the American economy’s not going anywhere. But, well, there you have it. Yeah, that’s true, but, by the way, there are other types of hazards there that you just mentioned. That even the founder boss, as time goes on, is always convinced that he or she could figure out the problem and has the answer. Whereas, when the organization grows, and the reality is as the organization grows, it becomes progressively less plausible that they know the answer to anything. As any organization grows, the people at the top get further and further from the Gemba.
Just so you have hands-on management, well gee, I don’t know what that means. If hands-on management means that you have a founder, who whenever he hears about a problem goes running up to proclaim the answer. Well, you may not be any better off than having a junior running the place and trying to manage by metrics with a big score board. I just find it really interesting as I walk around with big bosses, and I take lots of walks with big bosses. And the cultural presumption is that the big boss is going to say something profound that will enlighten everyone about what to do.
And this is just completely ludicrous. There is no boss, who can know, in any organization of any size, who can know the answer to any problem, or even if that’s really a problem. All the boss can do is, just ask the right questions. And then if the front line management and the second tier management are asking the right questions, then the boss doesn’t need to be running out there. Because what you’ll have is a stable process, and it works pretty good. And the managers are actually spending their time on improving this pretty good process, rather than nothing works, and everything’s unstable and there are all these crises, and everyone is driving fire trucks.
When you stick with managers and look at what they do during a day, a very high fraction of what they do is deal with things gone wrong. So, then you’ll say gee, why do things keep going wrong, and if they didn’t go wrong what would you do? And they say ah, well if things didn’t go wrong then I’d have time to plan. And they’ll say, you know you have to think about the future. And they’ll say how can we short circuit this death spiral, in which things keep going wrong which gives you less time to think about the future, and gives you more and more cause to go running out with the fire truck to tell people what to do. And for a lot of organizations they just can’t get out of that spiral.
Joe: It seems like everybody needs a class in how to ask questions.
Dr. Womack: Well, that would be a good thing. But you don’t really need a class, you just need practice. I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’re going to learn that from a class.
Joe: You think you’re going to have to learn it at Gemba, but you have to be inquisitive to begin with, right?
Dr. Womack: Well, the sad thing I also see in so many organizations is there just aren’t any bosses who can mentor anybody. One of the problems that Toyota has run into in recent years is their very high growth rate, which, by the way, turns out to become a self-correcting problem. With their very high growth rate they were growing the company faster, in my view, than they could manufacture lead managers, because in their classic management system, all of the management education is the Gemba education. It’s a boss, who we can call the Sensei and a pupil in Japanese; that’s the deshi. They’re in a dialog about how to grasp the situation, how to frame a problem, and how to figure out a root cause. How to figure out what the most appropriate countermeasures are, and then how to test those countermeasures.
In the Toyota world, that’s captured in the A3 process. But that is, in the old days, or was, the management education of Toyota. That was it. They didn’t send anyone to business school. They didn’t send anybody off to take courses.
It was just a continuous series of problem solving exercises between a boss and a younger person who was told to take responsibility for a problem or an issue, and then come back to the boss with their first thoughts about what their problem really was. Then with the next set of thoughts about what you might do about it, and with the third set of thoughts, about the best thing to try. Then the fourth set of thoughts about the experiment that would test this hypothesis. Then a fifth set of thoughts about what happened when you tried it.
What we can learn from that, to me, is real management education. You don’t need a school; you don’t need a classroom, and you don’t need power point. What you need is a boss who actually knows how to do this and a young pupil, or young pupils, who are willing to learn and are put in a situation where they can hardly avoid learning. And yet we just see so little of that.
I was just in yet another organization the other day that was trying to improve, and they had the improvement team. I asked to meet the boss of the process that they were trying to improve. This was your classic B?school graduate with a real clever air to him and told me he was a quick?study. It turned out from a little bit of questioning that he actually didn’t know anything about the process that he was managing except that he knew how to run the scoreboard. He knew that if he could produce some good numbers he would be in line as a hypo for a promotion. It was all just comical.
Yet this guy who had gone to a household name business school did very well on the test, did well in business school, and was now actually trying to run a process that not only didn’t understand but had no reason to understand. He was giving answers when he couldn’t avoid it but mostly just building bigger scoreboards with more metrics so that people would just automatically perform better.
Meanwhile the front of the improvement team that was trying to work with, that was about to jump off the upper balcony, and after I left, maybe they did. It was pretty clear they weren’t going to get anywhere, and that’s sad. That shouldn’t be in 2011.
Joe: Is there a different between Lean and TPS?
Dr. Womack: Well, that’s a funny thing about TPS. In the same way that Lean was a term coined to describe something that already happened, TPS was a term that was coined at Toyota at the end of the 60s, after they had already done it. There wasn’t a Toyota production system. There was just a way they did things. They started using the term TPS when they realized at the end of the 60s in Japan that they needed to convert their entire supply base to the way of thinking and way of acting that the Toyota Company at the end of the value stream had learned how to do. So hence, they gave it a name. But TPS as used is really about a very specific focus on process. TPS is about understanding the current state of a process, of trying to figure out what to get in terms of what performance is in relation to what the customer really needs; then to try to figure out what the causes of that gap are; then to envision a future state that would address those causes; and then to do experiments to implement that future state. So that was TPS.
You can call it the Toyota operation system if you wanted, or the Toyota operational system. They called it a production system. There is a companion system which is a concept?to?launch product development system. And there is another companion system which is a purchasing system and then there’s another system which is the support the customer system. Then there’s a fifth system which is the management system.
Those all have to interlock and work together. So that if you’re only doing TPS on processes, and particularly operational processes, that’s a very small part of the total puzzle. Nothing wrong with that, often people, when they see TPS, really mean processes in factories. That’s the kind of the tip of the iceberg in most modern organizations; there’s just so much more there. That’s where we started using the term not just Lean, but Lean Enterprise.
What we meant by Enterprise was an interlocking set of methods for solving customer problems; for producing? designing products, for fulfilling, that’s going from order to delivery, or dealing with the suppliers and for training the next generation of managers and managing every day. So you put that all together and you have what we have called a Lean Enterprise which is certainly more than TPS.
Now it’s completely consistent with TPS, but it’s more. Everybody in some way knows that, but then you fall?back into your functional focus. You go back to your factory or you go back to your design department, or go back to your purchasing office. Then the big picture, the total value stream from raw material to customer through the use life of the product that gets lost.
Instead, you’re back to optimizing your point. And we all know that point optimization is not likely to produce a system or a process optimization. Yet, it’s so easy to point optimization and so hard to optimize a total process or interlock?processes in a system. So, therefore, we don’t do it.
Joe: Does Lean always work, or would there be a place where you wouldn’t recommend using it?
Dr. Womack: Well, look, if you’re in any organization that creates value for somebody, I guarantee that you have processes. If you have customers and if you have processes, what we mean by Lean is try to judge the current state of your process by grasping the situation and then ask, OK, what’s the gap? What we’re doing in terms of what we need to be doing. What is a future process that is a better process that would fill that gap and how are we going to do it. That’s all pretty simple. But just interesting that it turns out harder to do.
Joe: Well, it should be an easy thing to do, shouldn’t it? I mean, this should be where management takes it.
Dr. Womack: No, that’s right. If you had been trained from an early age, If your father or your mother, when you were a little kid had said, well gee, you know, let’s talk about whatever we’re looking at here as a process; what is the current level of performance and what needs to be done and what do you think the root cause of the gap is and what would you think is a better process and how do you think we can implement that better process and that’s what education was about. Well, then we might find this easy to do. But in fact it’s not. I have a daughter, a lovely young person, who’s just graduating from a household name college and I guarantee in her entire educational career which is getting to be quite lengthy now that she’s done about 14 years of education at this point. No one has ever talked to her about how you grasp the situation to find the problem, identify the process, analyze the process, look for the root cause, think about countermeasures, test the countermeasures. I just guarantee that’s not part of the curriculum.
It’s interesting; she’s getting ready to go out in the work world where that’s what you do. I was thinking about that yesterday at this federal agency, not that that’s what my daughter’s going to go to that particular agency, but she will go into an organization which we hope is creating some value with absolutely no preparation for how to think about value and how to think about creating it particularly as a collective act involving many people as opposed to an individual act that involves one person relying on some special knowledge they might have which may by highly relevant useful knowledge but unless it is knowledge that is deployed in a good process it’s not likely that it will be deployed very well. So, there you have it.
Joe: I think that I just had a conversation earlier today with someone that they were talking about it was nice to see the Lean terminology used at the, I don’t know which school it was, household name school, that they actually used it in an MBA program, and I said well gee it would be really nice to see PDCA used in grade school. Instead of giving a kid a calendar to take notes off of the board or write assignments off of the board, why don’t they give them an A3 to write and plan his day and figure out the countermeasures to what he’s going to do with everything.
Dr. Womack: Now think back to your education, I don’t know where you went to school, don’t care, and I don’t know how educated you are, don’t care, but I will tell you at some point that you were told about science and you were told science is what scientists do in a laboratories. And then there’s life. And life, you know, well, we just kind of get by and we work hard and we try, stuff happens and then it goes away and then it comes back and the lesson is remember to duck. It’s just amazing that everybody is taught about science whereas all this Lean stuff is just applying science in real life, not in a laboratory.
My daughter, who is getting a Ph.D. in chemistry, is really a mathematician but is doing physical chemistry, is just kind of always marveling that science stops at the door to the laboratory. When you walk out you’re out in this free-fire zone with regards to society’s ability to think systematically about problems and how to analyze them, trace them back to root causes inside processes and then take corrective, at least improving, action in a systematic, sustainable way.
Once you get your head around this and you learn how to see in a different way it’s pretty striking how little science there is in society in what’s supposed to be the most advanced and scientific country . Looking at the bright side, it says we are just completely overwhelmed with opportunity, just a crushing load of opportunity out there if we could just figure how to move the needle a bit and get off dead center. Some really good things could happen fairly quickly.
Joe: What’s made the difference to you? What’s made how you could look at things differently from Gemba and see things and see problems or see corrections maybe or be able to ask the right questions Jim? What made that turning point for you, to be able to recognize that, because you do such a good job?
Dr. Womack: Well, first off I was always an outsider. It’s funny that I don’t really do that well inside organizations. It’s kind of irony, isn’t it? I, just by temperament, was always an outsider, and I love to observe. I was always what John Shook called an intense noticer. That’s actually a phrase from a Saul Bellow novel about some character in the novel who was an intense noticer. That’s just the way I was. I would spend a lot of time noticing. When I was a little kid, everybody else was a quick?study and would get an answer, and I would sit in the corner while my group of friends had moved on. After about 20 minutes I would say, you know, I think that was the wrong question. Everybody would look at me like what’s wrong with you, because they had all figured out the answer.
You know, years ago there was a wonderful book that people ought to read. It’s kind of interesting, Peter Drucker’s autobiography, called Adventures of a Bystander. Drucker was a refugee, and his whole life he was an outsider. I don’t mean he was a social misfit. I just mean he always just stood back looked at the situation. He wrote this book called Adventures of a Bystander about his life as a management thinker, pointing out ironically that he had never managed anything and that he had never been part of the management. He was always a one-man band.
By the way, that’s true of Deming as well. Deming never built an organization. He really was just a lone observer who walked through this world, standing back and reflecting on what he was actually seeing. We are socialized to see what we’re supposed to see, and the outsider is much more likely just to see what’s there.
So in a funny way I’ve been trying to teach people how to be, in part of their life, able to think like an outsider. Because if you are inside and you are just not looking, you’re just involved with the here and now at your point in your process. Well, it is amazing how much you fail to see.
That’s just how it worked out. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Goodness gracious, the world doesn’t need most people to be like me, but it does need managers who are able to teach young people how to think like an outsider, step back in the process, get themselves away from it, and reflect on it. One of the things that I saw yesterday that I had seen so many times in life, but it was amazing thing.
I was in the back, and we were taking some pictures at this organization that the internal management team was standing facing this completed current state map of this very complicated and by the way very important process. They were all staring at it and pointing at it whereas for the last 100 years, because this organization is a 100 years old, they mostly have been standing around, staring at and pointing at each other.
Saying this thing is not working because of you and you and you. Here you had the entire management with their backs to the camera with their arms out pointing at this horrible mess of a process on the wall which they had been present to document. Then they had gone for a walk, and everybody agreed this is what’s actually happening which, by the way, was not at all what’s supposed to be happening.
There is always the official way things are supposed to work. But this was a map of how it actually works. And they all are saying in unison; our baby is ugly. It used to be, who do we blame? But at the end of this session they were saying, what do we do about this?
I thought it was kind of a miracle. I was just sitting in the back and saying, isn’t this something? These people have the same intelligent quotient that they had two days ago when we started. And they are getting paid the same amount of money. The organization has the same pretty vaguely defined mission, and two days ago the feeling was that it will really be almost impossible to understand this thing, and that only some expert to put a lot of time to figure it out.
Instead, this group of people in a day and a half understood it pretty well and maybe for the first time, including all of the things that were obviously wrong with it. Once you stand back and look at the whole, and the connection between what’s going on here, and what’s going on here, and what’s going on here. The fact that these cancel each other out, and somebody really ought to do something about it.
As I mentioned earlier, this organization has absolutely no one or no process responsible. It’s just not anybody’s responsibility. The product just wanders as an orphan through this minefield. And amazingly some of the products get all the way to the end. But some dump. So that’s a . . .
Joe: It’s 2011.
Dr. Womack: Absolutely this is a fact. I am telling you the one fact I know. It’s 2011. Actually what was happening right there was a group of very smart people decided to together take a big step back from their joint activity. Instead of looking and glaring at each other, just looked at the activity, and they had become me. They had become the outsider to their own process. They had become the stranger who can see as opposed to the person who is in it every day and becomes habituated to the current, whatever, that is right around them. So as a conscious act you can say we will become outsiders, we will step back, we will disconnect our ego and our personal rewards from this process and talk about how we collectively could make it better and that’s magic.
I have been looking at that magic for many, many years, and that magic is not going to die out in this world. But that magic ought to happen every day and in every organization. And that’s how we will know we are getting somewhere if that starts to be the case.
Joe: And that’s truly what Lean is. Isn’t it? Just every day and every organization is working like that.
Dr. Womack: Yes, our little mantra is Purpose, Process, and People. Are we sure we understand our purpose which must be to solve some customer problem? And to do it better than anybody else can do it. Now that we know what our purpose is, what’s the gap? Let’s look at our process to figure out why we have a gap and then the process we got. Just running it harder, I can guarantee is not going to make it work better. That again is another just instinct of management is open the valves. This thing is not working. Let’s just increase the pressure, open those, turn those handles. Get a wrench and take it all the way open. Good luck.
The third part is how do you engage the people? Do we understand what our purpose really is? Do we understand our current process? Can we think together about a better process? We can only think together if all of us are engaged.
You can’t be a bystander once you step back to look at the process. But then you can’t be a bystander when it’s time to fix the process. You have to do your part. You are not going to have some consultant do it. You are not going to have some improvement team; some isolated part of the organization to come down in a helicopter to do it. People who are actually creating the value need to together figure out how to do more with less. That’s the magic I think they can make it happen.
Joe: Now that John’s taken over Lean Enterprise, what’s in the future for you?
Dr. Womack: Oh, I get to walk more. Here so far I think week 14, I have looked at 11 different organizations. Maybe its 10 or maybe its 11 but I am not, by the way, there as a consultant of any conventional sort. I’m just there to take a look, and that’s how I learn. It’s how I think new thoughts. My primary occupation is being a writer and sort of secondary occupation is being a speaker of some sort. I’m rarely anything but a bystander in that I’m never really diving into the process and saying “I will be part of the improvement. Let me help you move that machine. Let me help you reconfigure this software. Let me help you figure out how we’re going to talk to these customers in a different way. I’m not doing that myself; I’m just the person walking past the construction site who has some different perspective by virtue of being an outsider, but now I get to practice a lot more. I was never a genius at running an organization, and you can ask the people who have worked at LEI and they would agree unanimously that not only was I not a genius, I probably wasn’t a particularly good manager, and I never wanted to be a manager because, actually, that’s not my skill or my gift. I do have a gift, which is being able to just go look at things, and then think about it, and sometimes write something down that people might learn something from. Not because I’ve got the answer, but just because I have got a different way to think about it. If you thought about thinking about it this way is what a lot of the essays and the Gemba Walks book actually begin with.
I was walking the other day, and I saw this thing. What do you think about this, and that’s really true. It occurred to me while I was walking along. It did not occur to me sitting in an office. It did not occur to me while staring at a screen. It occurred to me while looking at an actual situation; in a real place; with real people, and just observing what was happening and what was not happening. And look, I can see what’s not happening better than most people because I have had the opportunity to see what it looks like when it really is happening, when something good is happening. If you have never seen anything good, you don’t really realize what bad looks like either. Since I have had a lot of opportunities to see good, it makes it easier to see bad.
That’s what I do, and, by the way, all over creation. I was just on the phone to some people from China who wanted to access their situation, a Gemba Walk. I don’t know whether I will do that or not, but that is another dimension. Which is to take walks in different cultures, and they will all tell you that their culture is unique, so they can only do it the way that they are doing it, which is exactly what the folks at the old GM plant in California told the Toyota people.
They told them when they proposed to come up with a completely different management system for the plant. It’s really interesting how people do take refuge in whatever it is about them that they figure exempts them from having to change. We can’t do that here because. Of course, my favorite Henry Ford saying is, “You can think you can do something, or you can think you can’t, and you will be right.” I think about that often when I’m walking around in places where people very solemnly tell me, well, we can’t do that in our country.
I actually have a story about one of the Gemba Walks, a story about going out to India where I went to a conference to start my visit. There I was solemnly told by senior managers that you couldn’t do any of this Lean stuff there for all kinds of reasons.
Then, once I got through talking at a first conference, I had a week to actually go look at things, and I found one of the Leanest industrial operations I have ever seen on this planet right there in that country after senior managers had assured me unanimously that this could not happen in their country.
I went back to another conference at the end of my visit and said, well gee, let me just tell you about what happened. The first conference everybody assured me that this was impossible. So, then I went out and found a group of real people in a real company who are really doing it, and now let me tell you about what they did and why you now have no defense in trying to claim that, for whatever reason, this can’t be done here.”
So, that’s fun. I enjoy doing that. As you may know, we have affiliates of the Lean Enterprises Institute in 16 other countries. I have, over the years, spent a lot of time visiting those affiliates, and then looking at organizations in those countries. I always learn something, and I think we always do more good than harm. I hope so. So now that I don’t have to run something, I have a little bit more time to go out and walk even more than I was before.
Joe: Sounds like there might be a sequel in the making.
Dr. Womack: Well, not just instantaneously, but I am asking myself sort of how to write this stuff down to communicate it. It’s a confusing world for authors. There used to be things called books, and there still are, although, I really think that most people . . . It’s very interesting that I meet people who want to tell me that they have read my books and they loved them or whatever, and there’s really a high fraction of the people when they said they read the book, what they mean is they listened to it. Where do you have time to think about things? For most people, it is when you are driving to work, and you are driving home. So that a lot of what people learn, they learn by listening, and if you are going to learn by listening, then the story line is very important. I always try in what I write to have a real concrete example, and a real story about how things were and then what happened, and how they got better. Somehow or another, books, they may be something that is going to decline as a way of learning. In listening or seeing, videos and audios may be how people really learn, and then those, of course, can be delivered in all kinds of ways, from the cloud or from the website, or wherever.
So as I move ahead the real question to me is what is the most effective way to communicate? The method I am using is probably not going to change. I go see, I ask why, I talk about purpose, I talk about process; I talk about people. Those things I think are pretty elemental ? that’s oxygen, and helium, and hydrogen. Don’t think those are going to get broken down below that level.
But then as you go see, you ask why you shall respect, you talk about purpose, talk about process, a people. How do you communicate the useful things that you might learn so that other people could benefit, be provoked, and be inspired?
I do try to do, as I say, and I think it’s true. I try to give people courage to try to do something new when you don’t know anybody else who’s done it. That’s pretty scary for all of us.
If, however, you want to try something new, and you’d just like to know somebody sort of like you who’s done it. I can tell you about that somebody or suggest how you get in touch with them, well that tends to give people courage to try. And in fact, they don’t even need to go talk or go see that person has done it. What they really need is just the courage to try it themselves.
By the way, no literal copying, paint by the numbers copying, is never going to work for anybody anyway. You have to adapt everything to your unique, specific circumstance. So I always encourage people instead of doing industrial tourism, well just take my word for it that this other fellow over here has done it. It can be done, so now why don’t you figure out how to do it for you.
Sometimes that’s enough to get them going but sometimes they still have to go see the other guy. Well, they just can’t quite get off dead center, if they can’t see somebody who’s done it, and who they can then cite to their boss, or their boss’s boss, as the evidence that they need to try it themselves.
Joe: I have enjoyed this conversation very much, and I do have to mention that both of your books Lean Thinking and Lean Solutions, I’ve listened to numerous times. The books are on my bookcase, because it’s one of those things that I still want to be able to reference the book, but on a drive there are certain times that I want to listen to certain books over again.
Dr. Womack: Absolutely, so I like that. I will say in defense of the little Gemba Walks book that the typical chapter is about three pages. I tell people, I’ve been telling them for the last couple of weeks since it’s been out that if nothing else, it’s a great airplane book. Do not read it on your Kindle or your Sony Playbook, or whatever, the Sony reader. Do not read it while driving. I repeat ? do not read it while driving. But it’s a great airplane book because you can read just as much as you’ve got time to read.
And while you’re out there taking off, and they won’t let you use your computer, well I guarantee you can read about three of the essays. Then after they come around and force you to stop using your computer when you’re getting ready to land, you can read three more.
So if you’re just going to be looking out the window and basically turning your brain to the off position, well it’s something you can do instead. So I hope that works for people. It certainly does give me pleasure when somebody comes up and says, “Hey, I just read that and now I’m going to try it.” Even more pleasure to say, “I just read that, and I’m going to try it, but I’m going to modify it in the following way to suit my situation.”
And I always say, “Well, look, send me an email. Tell me how it works out.”
By the way, if you’ve really got something interesting, well give a shout, and I’ll come see you. As I tell everyone, I’ve got 15 minutes of fame for anybody, but you actually have to do something. I don’t write books about theory. I write books about practice with real examples of real people who’ve actually done something, and I don’t expect to change that practice.
Joe: Well, I have enjoyed this very much. Is there anything you’d like to add to the conversation?
Dr. Womack: Well, look, a good bit of what we’ve talked about sounds a little bit negative about how hard things are. One of the advantages of getting older, I don’t know what the definition of old is. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but I have been out walking through organizations in a pretty systematic way since 1979. So that’s 32 years. And it does give you a sort of time series on reality, on what’s happened. It’s important not to forget that a whole lot has really gotten better that our expectation of whether goods or services are going to work are just a lot higher today than they were 32 years ago.
Our ability to create more value with less waste, it’s a ragged path of events, but the trend is positive, it’s not negative. The world’s not getting to be more and more inept, and processes are not getting to be worse and worse. They’re getting to be better and better, but just a lot more slowly than is necessary.
I always say I’m a long?term optimist because I’ve seen it in my own life that over 32 years the kinds of things that I look at, which is all of life’s value?creating activities, is things have gotten better. They just didn’t get better as fast as they should’ve gotten better.
So let us be positive about the long?term, but let us be skeptical about short?term. Why are you, why am I, not doing something today to make things better rather than saying I will do it tomorrow? Why have we gotten stuck and are trying to give ourselves an out by saying, well, this is just too hard, we’re just not going to do this here and now? Why are you thinking you can’t?
So let’s be optimistic about the long?term. Let’s be skeptical about the short?term. Let’s keep shuffling ahead together.
What we tried to set up, at LEI in particular and the other 16 global affiliates is a way for people with earnest intent who are trying to do things, to share experiences, and to gain some strength from numbers, so let’s talk to each other.
If we’re going to go out and try experiments, well let’s carefully document what those experiments are and let’s share them. What LEI and other organizations are trying to do is make that possible and to make it easier. Not just possible, but even easy. And then maybe we can all progress together faster. And that’s the objective.
Joe: Well said. I would like to thank you very much Dr. Womack. This podcast is available on the Business 901 blog site and also the Business 902 iTunes store. So thanks again.
Dr. Womack: Well, thank you Joe. I appreciate the work you do. You are aiding the cause, so keep on keeping on.
Joe: Thank you sir.
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