ROI of Operational Excellence

Business901 Podcast Transcription

Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Changing the Bottom Line thru Operational Excellence

Copyright Business901

ROI of Operational Excellence Guest was Dave Adams

Related Podcast:


http://business901.com/blog1/changing-the-bottom-line-thru-operational-excellence/





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.

http://www.operationalexcellence.com/index.php

http://www.operationalexcellence.com/index.php

http://www.operationalexcellence.com/about-rodger-lewis.php

http://www.operationalexcellence.com/solutions-kcoe-operational-excellence-system.php





Sponsored by

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. 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

http://leanmarketinglab.com





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: [email protected]

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 allow you to interact with like-minded individuals and organizations, purchase related tools, use some free ones and receive feedback from your peers.

Marketing with Lean Book Series included in membership

Lean Sales and Marketing Workshop

Lean Service Design Workshop

http://business901.com/lean-service-design/lean-service-design-trilogy/

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.business901.com/

http://twitter.com/business901

http://twitter.com/business901

http://leanmarketinglab.ning.com/

http://leanmarketinglab.com/

http://business901.com/implementation/vsm-registration/

http://business901.com/lean-service-design/