Norman Bodek on the First Anniversary of the Podcast, Gantt, and the Ninth Waste

LeanBlog Podcast #28 features our friend and frequent guest, Norman Bodek, noted lean author, consultant, and President of PCS Press. This also celebrates the one-year anniversary of the Podcast, which featured Norman as our first guest. As I've given him credit for previously, the Podcast really was Norman's idea when he said I should do “radio interviews” with him. Thankfully, this has turned into a series of interviews with others that I have enjoyed immensely. I hope you enjoy them as well.

If you enjoy this podcast, I hope you'll check out the rest of the series by visiting the LeanBlog podcast main page.

Keywords and Main Points, Episode #28

• Summary of Norman's talk at the TWI Summit and the “pledge of continuous improvement.”
• Gantt's book “Organizing Work” (via Google Books) — the stakeholder groups that a business must serve (including community)
• Lifetime employment and the obligation for good management
• Can you have a workplace with no bosses? Example of a Skippy peanut butter plant
• Is the ultimate goal automation? Norman's thoughts on that
• Managers' resistance to change as a separate type of waste?
• Being on the floor all the time as a manager
• Norman talking about “conscious learning” (his next book)

If you have feedback on the podcast, or any questions for me or my guests, you can email me at leanpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave a voicemail by calling the “Lean Line” at (817) 372-5682 or contact me via Skype id “mgraban”. Please give your location and your first name. Any comments (email or voicemail) might be used in follow ups to the podcast. Click here for the main LeanBlog Podcast page with all previous episodes.

Transcript

Lean Blog Podcast #28 — Norman Bodek on the First Anniversary of the Podcast and More

Recorded July 29, 2007

Intro

Mark Graban: Hi, this is Mark Graban from the Lean Blog. This is episode number 28 of the Lean Blog Podcast for July 29th, 2007. I'm very pleased to be joined once again by author and consultant Norman Bodek, who was the original guest on the first ever Lean Blog podcast just over a year ago. So we're celebrating the first anniversary of the Lean Blog Podcast with Norman again, talking about a number of subjects from the lean world.

I've taken a bit of a break, but we'll continue to post podcasts on a weekly schedule again, at least for the next four weeks. Upcoming guests include Dr. Sami Bahri, the world's first lean dentist, Bob Emiliani, the author of Better Thinking, Better Results among other books, and Chris Harris, the co-author of the book Developing a Lean Workforce.

So I hope you will subscribe or stay subscribed to the podcast and that you'll enjoy future episodes. As always, show notes and more information can be found at leanblog.org, or you can go directly to the podcast main page at leanpodcast.org. Thanks for listening.

Norman, it's great to have you back with us again here on the Lean Blog Podcast.

Norman Bodek: Hi, thank you. It's always a pleasure for me.

Mark Graban: Well, thank you.

Norman Bodek: And we just have to do this more often because I keep discovering so many wonderful things that I love to share.

Reflections from the TWI Summit

Mark Graban: Well, good. You decided to help share some of that here on the podcast today. I know we have a lot of things to talk about. One thing that I thought we could start with, I got a question from a blog reader and a podcast listener, Jeff Maling. He wrote and mentioned that he had seen you speak at the first ever TWI Summit, which we've talked about quite a bit on the blog. And he mentioned your opening address, which ended with a big ovation and what Jeff called the pledge of continuous improvement. So I was wondering if you could talk about what you spoke about at the TWI Summit, and Jeff was wondering about your reflections on the summit and thoughts that you've developed on how TWI can be used to help develop people.

Norman Bodek: Yeah, I'll tell you, it was really wonderful. Because I went there and I wasn't even sure why I went, because it's all the way across the country. I flew from Portland, Oregon to Orlando to keynote for about an hour. They're nice people and they're on the subject of TWI, which I knew very little about. Starting to learn a lot more now. And I do feel it's worthwhile for people to start to look at it. It is excellent. There's sort of a missing gap in so many American companies on how to train people, how to train people on their work. And this is really towards developing standardized work.

So I flew in quite a little bit tired, and I was very happy that Jim Huntzinger picked me up with John Shook. I never met John before, and we had a wonderful discussion coming in from the airport. Of course we have a lot of common friends and common things that we know. John worked 10, 12 years at Toyota, has written some books. Learning to See was one. And then we came to the hotel and they had the TWI Summit had a meeting room set up where they were having dinner, so we went in there and had dinner with them.

And then Jeff Mealing, what a wonderful guy, works with IBM, picked me up in Vermont.

Mark Graban: Yeah, I believe so.

Norman Bodek: And he brought with him a case full of books, old books, really old ones.

Mark Graban: Yeah. He told me to ask you about that.

Gantt's Organizing for Work

Norman Bodek: Going back about a hundred years. And I was fascinated, because I published Henry Ford's book from 1926, and I always wanted to go back to publish more of the old books. I always did, because you can learn so much from it. When we study Taylor or Gilbreth or Gantt, we're normally studying, I don't know how many iterations, which means how many people have written about them, written about them and written about them. And then you're getting like the ninth or the tenth distance from the originator.

Mark Graban: Sure.

Norman Bodek: And so it's fascinating to go back and look at what the original people saw. Well, I picked up one book by Henry Laurence Gantt. And, in fact, you can get this on the internet and it's called Organizing for Work. I'll tell you, it is absolutely fabulous.

Mark Graban: And this is the name Gantt from Gantt chart fame. Correct?

Norman Bodek: This is the man from Gantt chart. Now I've known about Gantt charts, never really worked with them, but known about him. And it's all part, many of the books that I published on quality, they're Gantt charts we talk about.

Mark Graban: Sure.

Norman Bodek: How to use them. Well, what I loved in the book particularly, became so fascinated with it, is Gantt talks about democracy in the workplace.

Three Systems That Have to Serve Society

Mark Graban: Mm-hmm.

Norman Bodek: He talks about interesting fundamentally that there are three systems. One is the political system. The other is the religious system. The third is the business system. And he said all of these three systems, to be successful, must serve society. Must. But a political system doesn't really serve society. It ends up in wars. It ends up taking from one group and giving it to another group, the way we do it, our tax structures. The religious system you have the same problem with, when it doesn't really serve people and serving themselves becomes very, very confusing. And he feels that religions today are utterly confusing. I mean, maybe there's nine to 11,000 different religions on the earth.

Mark Graban: And this was Gantt saying this when he wrote it, a hundred years ago, or how long ago was this?

Norman Bodek: Yeah, this was 1919. In this book, he's talking about fundamentally that these three systems, they must be organized around serving community.

To give an example, whereby when you lived as a farm community in early America, say early 1800s, and you needed to have the hay ground down, there might have been a miller in the area, and they would do that for you. They would mill the corn or the hay et cetera. Small little companies, blacksmiths, carpenters et cetera.

Mark Graban: Tradesmen. Yeah.

Norman Bodek: And then business got bigger. Business started to come in, this third area called business, and then it gave the example of the mill in Minneapolis. Because it was able to produce bigger equipment, it was able to do the milling so much cheaper than the local mills, that quickly it gobbled up the local mills and they went out of business.

Mark Graban: Sure.

Norman Bodek: And then big business starts to take over. Where the little mill used to serve the community, the big mill ends up not serving the community. Of course it has to serve its customers somewhat.

Mark Graban: Right.

Norman Bodek: But it doesn't serve the ultimate consumer.

Mark Graban: It's also looking at shareholders and all sorts of other structures that…

Norman Bodek: Yes, you're absolutely right. And Gantt was really concerned about this business community that started to grow, this business organization that started to grow, that if it didn't serve people well and ended up serving the stockholders and the senior executives, it would really corrupt the society that we function in. It's really wonderful when you read this, to think about what we really do want. We want a democracy in our society, and we want these three instruments. The educational system especially — education was very often taught to you by the church instead of the state, but now it's taught to you by the state as opposed to the church. And all of them really have to serve.

Lifetime Employment and the Obligation of Good Management

Mark Graban: Yeah. And when you look at mission statements of different companies, a lot of companies will talk about shareholder value kind of first and foremost. Toyota talks a lot about community and society, as other companies do. I was wondering your thoughts on how that sense of serving community ties into the Toyota Production System or lean more generally.

Norman Bodek: You're right, you're right on target. There's so many things, subtle but very powerful things, that have made the Japanese corporation so successful in the last 60, 70 years. Now remember, at the end of World War II, a hundred cities were totally destroyed. They were burned to the ground. And these companies had to start literally all over again from nothing, and to build up their companies very slowly through kaizen, through continuous improvement.

In fact, it's funny because Toyota thought at the end of World War II that MacArthur would only let them make bean paste. Bean paste is very popular in Japan for candy and for miso soup. But then the office said, no, you've got to make trucks and cars. The society needs you. MacArthur did that. And so many of the Japanese companies in their vision statements primarily talk about, look, you have to succeed, you have to make money, you have to make a profit. But fundamentally, they're in business to serve society, and they don't want to lose sight of that.

And so they came up with — and I think this is also MacArthur — they came up with lifetime employment. That we're going to invest in people, we're going to develop people. They're the real assets of our company. They're the real assets, and we're not going to lose them. So easy. And Toyota has not laid off a person, to my knowledge, in 57 years. Because when you have lifetime employment, it really forces a manager to be such a better manager. You have to be so good. If you can't lay people off, you have to figure it out. What am I going to do with these people? So they become so productive.

Mark Graban: Well, you might look at it that you have an obligation to your employees to make sure that the business is in a position to grow, or at least not be shrinking. Where maybe, like so many of the Detroit automakers, they've been in that cycle of shrinking and having to let people go.

Norman Bodek: Absolutely, Mark. You're absolutely right. The difference in Detroit — the Detroit corporations were in business for their stockholders and for the senior executives. And they looked at the union workers especially as adversarial. And the middle workers were just floating around. So in the middle of the eighties, they start to get rid of them. And so the corporation didn't really focus on serving people well the way Toyota does today.

Toyota, when it comes to a community, they went to Georgetown, Kentucky to build that plant. They gave about $8 million to the local university, to the engineering school. They invest in all of their employees. They encourage them all to go to college and they'll pay for the college. They continually develop people.

Ants, Self-Organizing, and the Skippy Plant

It's a wonderful thing. It's worth it to go back and look at Gantt and see how we could reorganize ourselves. Now, there's another thing I saw that I really loved. A few things I'd love to share today, if we have the time. In the current National Geographic Magazine, this is the July issue, there's an article on ants, bees, fish, colonies, swarms. And it's really saying the following. That an individual ant may not be the brightest, might not be the most intelligent ant in knowing what really to do, but it knows how to function in relationship to the fellow workers, to the fellow ants. And they communicate very well with each other. They communicate through pheromones, through smell, through touch. And so this ant, which is very adaptable by the way, this ant can literally do almost anything required by the community. The community has to make a dam, they'll make a dam. If it's go get food, it'll go get food.

Mark Graban: So I guess in a way you might say the ants are cross-trained.

Norman Bodek: Yeah, they're totally cross-trained in order to function.

Mark Graban: Yeah.

Norman Bodek: Now, the amazing thing about this colony: there is no boss. There are no managers, there are no supervisors.

Mark Graban: There's somehow…

Norman Bodek: They're part of the system. They know how to function in a community without the management structure that we have. Look at you, when you go home, when you go home to your individual community — you don't need a boss. You don't need a supervisor, a manager to have you live your life. But when you go to work, all of a sudden we need a different structure in order to function. And here this article is showing you that nature doesn't need that. Nature's able to — what's called — self-organize.

Mark Graban: Well, maybe there's more of a human need to be the boss. So we find outlets, political or in the business sense.

Norman Bodek: Well, it's funny the way it is, because we're not structured properly. I'll give you another thing that I always loved, which is what's called socio-technical design. I always thought if we took socio-technical design and we put it on top of the Toyota Production System, we'd have absolutely the best system to produce products.

Social tech started in England during World War II, a man by the name of Eric Trist. And Eric was doing some work for the Tavistock Institute. And he studied the mines, because the mines were vitally necessary. They needed coal to heat the country, to burn for electricity et cetera. It was vital to have the coal mines. But they also needed workers to go to war. They needed the men to go to war. So the mines were starting to be depleted.

Well, he did a study of a bunch of mines, and he found one particular mine was very productive, so much more productive than the other mines. And he went there to find out why. What do you think he found?

Mark Graban: Did it follow that ant structure?

Norman Bodek: It followed the ant structure. There was no supervisor, there was no manager. They had self-organized, where each one of the mine had to learn each other's skills. They had to learn to coordinate, they had to learn to move in sync. They had to learn what's called flow manufacturing, or flow management, flow for the process. So it all worked together well. They self-organized.

Now, social tech from this — Eric Trist really got excited and he started to study and to teach this, what's called socio-technical design. Socio means the social side of the business. Technical is the technical side of the business. How do we make sure that they both work in harmony?

So when I discovered this, somehow accidentally discovered it — Pasmore was the man's name, Bill Pasmore, who introduced me to it, I think that was his name. And then I did some research and I found Trist and I found Albert Cherns in England. And then I found Lou Davis at UCLA in the Quality of Work Life Center. Lou was a professor there. And he was teaching social tech in America.

And I asked Lou to speak in quite a number of my conferences. I got him some clients, Continental Can. And then he told me about Skippy Peanut Butter, and I interviewed the plant manager of Skippy Peanut Butter. They were in Arkansas. They had about 126 people in the plant. There was only a plant manager. No supervisors, no managers. In fact, his secretary, his assistant, was also the nurse.

And the way it was self-organized is when you would join the plant, the company, first of all, you'd be interviewed by your team. Your team would select you. And then when you came into your team, you were paid basic salary to get started. And the team would describe to you what the tasks are in this team. And they would give you six years. If you wanted to come to the highest salary level, it'll take you about six years. You could do it sooner. But in order to get to the highest salary level, you had to learn all of the tasks and become efficient in them. Not only efficient in them, you really had to know how to teach others these tasks. And these tasks were quality, maintenance, scheduling, all of the things that are running a plant that are required. All plants that we know of in America have all these separate departments.

Mark Graban: So there's specialization.

Norman Bodek: HR department, scheduling department.

Mark Graban: God forbid, you have a quality department responsible for quality.

Norman Bodek: And a quality department. And this is also funny, that this was the only plant that Lou Davis knew of where the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, said you didn't need a quality inspector. Because all of the workers were trained to be quality inspectors, not only know how to inspect, but they also had to know how to teach. They knew all the quality tools, and as an example, it was very exciting to me. The only thing that was missing, it was missing some of the Toyota understanding of how do you reduce setup time very quickly, the work of Dr. Shingo. It was missing poka-yoke. It was missing the idea of a pull system instead of a push system. Subtle differences.

Where Toyota Is Heading

Mark Graban: Yeah. So the thing that comes to mind to me, hearing about the structure of that Skippy plant and self-organizing or self-managed organizations — you look at the structure within Toyota, and sometimes compared to mass producers, they look somewhat heavy in supervision and management ranks. Fairly well-defined roles of how they're supposed to be supporting the employees and supporting production in a fairly defined and standardized way. So how do you bridge the gap?

Norman Bodek: Yeah, absolutely. Good observation, Mark. So how would you bridge the gap there? Yeah, very good. You see, if you're looking at Toyota today, you're looking at one moment in time. If you're looking at Toyota, where they came from, which is that totally destroyed city, and then you look, say, 50 to a hundred years today, where are they going? And that's what we should be looking at, is where are they going. And that's why this ant colony fascinates me, and social tech fascinates me, because that's where we should be going.

Now, if you get a philosophy in a company that you don't lay people off, then you're constantly training people to become what? To become engineers. So Toyota has a structure now that works for them, and it works for them very well because they're investing very heavily into every single employee. All employees are cross-trained. They're all cross-trained. They're all involved in kaizen, continuous improvement. They're all in quality circles. And it amazes me why American companies are not in quality circles. That to me is totally crazy.

So they have like one team leader for every four to seven people. But fundamentally, that team leader is a teacher. And a teacher teaching the workers, actually also teaching the workers to become teachers.

Mark Graban: Yeah, so they can promote up through the ranks.

Norman Bodek: Yes. And then look at the way Toyota grows. They just need people, because they're growing all over the world.

Automation, Attrition, and the Buffer of Temporary Workers

Mark Graban: So that's pretty exciting stuff. You were saying that, looking to where they're going, most of what we read and hear about Toyota probably has at least a two or three year lag time by the time they're willing to let information be public and books get published. And so we're all, in a way, looking in the rearview mirror. Do you think Toyota is trying to develop their people and their organization to move in the direction of being more self-managing?

Norman Bodek: Oh, sure. Oh, sure. I think so. In every possible way.

I'm going to be in Japan in September. I haven't been there in maybe 12, 15 years, so I'm anxious to see the vast changes in Japan. Because the American plant is very good, but I don't think it's equal at all to what's happening in Japan. The American managers don't push the American workers the way the workers in Japan are pushed.

Mark Graban: Even at Georgetown, it's been up and running for, what, 20 years now?

Norman Bodek: In fact, I walked into the plant and I said, what's your takt time? And I thought it was 53 seconds, but I'm not sure. So I said, what's the takt time in Nagoya? And they said, 53 seconds. I said, but I'll bet you have a lot more workers on the line than they have in Japan. And he laughed and he said, yes, that's true. What percentage more they have in America, I don't know. But surely there is a lot more. But that will slowly change. It will change as the American worker becomes more educated and more experienced, especially in self-managing.

The other thing, which is interesting of course, is ultimately — and I wrote about this on Northwest Lean — ultimately the goal is to automate a plant. It's the only way you can compete with countries like China or Malaysia or Indonesia or India. You have to automate the plant here.

Mark Graban: Yeah. And for the listeners, I will republish that. I'll link to it off of the page, this podcast episode. But Norman was good enough…

Norman Bodek: Yes, let me republish that. Because we have to automate. And Toyota did that.

In fact, when I was there last summer and met Gary Convis, the president, he was kind enough to meet me and my group. He said that in the last five years, they've reduced the number of people in Georgetown by 700. And they probably doubled the number of cars that they've been producing. And they moved in tons of robots into the plant. Now, they're not that excited about robots at this moment because their quality defects have been up.

Mark Graban: Mm-hmm. A lot of times people would think robots, quote unquote, don't make mistakes like people do.

Norman Bodek: Yeah, well, robots make mistakes because it takes time to program them and to get them super efficient.

Mark Graban: Right. A lot of times we have reflexes against automation, because automation is used to get rid of labor costs, and maybe it increases total cost overall, people get laid off, there's things that are bad for the community or bad for the company. What do you understand about Toyota's approach when you say they have fewer employees and more automation?

Norman Bodek: Nobody laid off, Mark.

Mark Graban: They had people leaving through attrition.

Norman Bodek: Well, the main thing is they keep expanding. They make another plant. They put a plant in Mississippi and they need a whole bunch of people to be kind enough to move there. They keep expanding. They make people into engineers and they don't have to hire as many. And Toyota did one thing, which is not advertised very much, but there's always a buffer stock of people. There's always a group that is temporary. That is there to protect the permanent employee, the long-term. They don't say lifetime employment. Since nobody gets laid off, you virtually have lifetime employment. So if anything, they cut back on these temporary workers.

Mark Graban: Right. And I did see an article in the news about how Georgetown had let go, or they had announced they were going to be letting go some temporary workers. And there were some reports that people were upset, because they at least had the hope — who knows what the exact expectation was, but they had the hope that being a temporary employee was that learning path to eventually becoming an employee.

Norman Bodek: It's an avenue. And it's still an avenue. But at least it gives Toyota some little buffer. Because there is ups and downs in the automobile industry. They're not always selling the same amount or always selling more. So they have to buffer a little bit. And they buffer through part-time labor that's very small. I'm sure it's less than 10% of the labor is part-time laborers or temporary labor. And most of them don't work for Toyota. They work for a part-time agency.

Mark Graban: Right. They're a contract firm.

Norman Bodek: Yeah. But they do try, people come in and they like them and they will let them come into the company as a full-time employee.

Honda did something very clever a long time ago when they ran into trouble. They asked the employees to go out and sell cars. And so they went out and knocked on the doors of their neighbors trying to sell cars. It's very tough.

Another thing I like, if we have time for a couple more things.

Mark Graban: Yeah, certainly.

The Ninth Waste: Managers Who Resist Change

Norman Bodek: I like talking with you very much, Mark.

Mark Graban: Thanks.

Norman Bodek: There are seven basic wastes. And I have a new book that I'm working on with John Stewart. John was the former manager of the final assembly line in Georgetown, had a couple of thousand people working for him. Then he went to England. He became the general manager of the Toyota plant in England. Now he's left. He's working in an investment company, but he is working on a book with me and it's wonderful. In the book he's very clear about the waste and the meaning of the waste.

And I love this. Here I've been studying the waste for what, 25 years, and didn't really know it the way I'm beginning to learn.

Mark Graban: So what have you learned?

Norman Bodek: Well, what I've learned, there are two things. There are seven classic wastes. And then I added one, I believe it was me, which was that the eighth waste is the not utilizing the talents of your workers — the unutilized talents. And then what came to me is the ninth waste. And the ninth waste is managers' resistance to change.

Mark Graban: So you break that out as a separate category?

Norman Bodek: It has to be. Because what stops progress? See, Toyota has a system, so the managers can't resist. In fact, Chairman Okuda said a couple of years ago, he said, look, I want everybody in Toyota to change. And he said, at least don't be an obstacle for someone else that wants to change. Most managers, unfortunately, are obstacles. They resist change. They're afraid to change. Afraid of making a mistake, and so they don't change that easy.

I mean, look at Quick and Easy Kaizen. It is dynamite. Every company I work with is saving about $4,000 a year per employee from their ideas. And these managers resist. Why aren't they doing it? Why aren't they utilizing the talents of the people that work for them? It is amazing. So the reason I want this as a ninth waste is we have to develop a way that will actually force managers not to be obstacles.

Give you an example that John has in his book. One of the things the manager has to learn how to do is be on the floor all the time. Ohno insisted on that. Gary Convis, the president of Toyota North America — his office is right in the middle of the factory.

Mark Graban: Right. Gary just retired not long ago.

Norman Bodek: He's close to retirement. I don't think he's out yet. He's shifted. There's a new president now in Georgetown. St. Angelo, I think is his name. Gary's office was right in the middle of the factory. Because that's where the heart of the company is, and you have the power to direct it where it's necessary, when it's necessary.

And so if you go out and you meet somebody and they present a problem to you, in Toyota, you solve that problem. You do it immediately. You go into five whys if necessary. But this is taught throughout the Toyota organization. You solve the problem immediately. You don't let it linger.

Mark Graban: You don't wait for a committee.

Norman Bodek: Yeah. I walked into a plant not long ago — we'd start over with the seven wastes. And the first waste I like to look at is waiting time. And it's so easy to see waiting time. You look at people not working. And so what do you do? Do you turn the other direction or do you go over to that person and do you say, you know, what's the next thing that you could do? What could you do next? What problems do you have in your area do you think you could begin to work on?

Ask, Don't Tell

Mark Graban: Yeah. Well, right there, that's a fundamentally different approach of asking people what they should be doing, as opposed to feeling like you have to direct them.

Norman Bodek: Yeah. Well, the trick is, that's another big power of the Toyota system, is to ask instead of tell. Ohno would never tell you. Even if he knew the answer, he wouldn't tell you. And this has been passed down to most managers at Toyota. If they know the answer, they don't tell you. They'd ask you. It's the Socrates basis.

Mark Graban: Yeah. It's so hard to do.

Norman Bodek: It's hard to retrain yourself. I know I had a company, I had a company with 127 people. I never asked anybody anything. I was the boss.

Mark Graban: Yeah.

Norman Bodek: I made the most money. I owned 100% of the stock. Why should I ask anybody anything?

Mark Graban: We should have asked. Recently here we talked to one of your old associates, Gwendolyn Galsworth.

Norman Bodek: Yeah, ask her. Except she's lucky. She's doing wonderfully well now. She's probably the best around with this whole visual system.

Mark Graban: Oh, sure is.

Norman Bodek: And very successful with it.

So we have to work on this ninth waste. And one of the best ways to do this, of course, is that the managers look at the waste. Look at the waste, go out to the factory floor and challenge people to eliminate those wastes, to continuously improve. We've got to do kaizen every day. Not just Six Sigma once in a while. Not just the Kaizen Blitz once in a while. But every day we have to do continuous improvement. That's the Toyota method.

Do you know, if you're successful and you succeed on something, maybe they'll say thank you. Not guaranteed. But they'll always tell you to do the next thing.

Conscious Learning After School Ends

Mark Graban: Yeah.

Norman Bodek: The last thing I'd like to talk a little bit about, and we can come back to this and revisit them in the future.

Mark Graban: Yeah, we can talk again.

Norman Bodek: Is what I call conscious learning. This is my new book that I'm working on.

Mark Graban: That's going to be the title of it?

Norman Bodek: Yeah, I believe so. That'll be it. I'm working on it. Hopefully I can finish it this summer.

The essence of this really is that you go to school. You go to grammar school, you maybe go to high school, then you go to college. And then you graduate, and you go out into your company, and learning fundamentally stops. You got a little learning — if you're given a new job to do, a new task to do, a new machine to run, you have to learn that. And the company gives you a little bit of training during the year. Not too much. Companies are pretty proud, hey, we give 24 hours a year to our employees in training. Something like that. They'll say that they do two hours a month. They'll put people in training, maybe three people a month in training.

But if we're going to succeed in this world, training has to go on. Education has to go on for the rest of your life.

Mark Graban: Yeah.

Norman Bodek: When I graduated high school, I remember the same song: no more pencils and no more books, no more teachers'…

Mark Graban: Dirty looks?

Norman Bodek: Dirty looks, yeah. So happy to get away from school. And now I'm telling everybody, forget it. Forget it.

Pick One Thing and Be Great at It

You want to do one thing, really. One thing. This is to everybody who's listening. You want to do one thing — you want to learn the rest of your life. You want to pick one thing. One thing to be great in. And there's so many needs in our society for people to be great. And just be great in something. And then become the Tiger Woods of that. Become the best in the world in that one thing. And you have to succeed. Guaranteed to succeed in life.

Mark Graban: Yeah. Well, the audience — you're listening, you're talking to the audience. And I think we're getting up to about 1,500 listeners per podcast. These are people — a lot of the listeners are taking their own personal time. They're listening during their commute, they're listening during their own time, which I certainly appreciate. But it goes to show people are interested in learning and thinking about things even in their own time, which is great.

Norman Bodek: It is great. Yeah, everybody out there, just become the best possible thing that you can do. What I want to do is I want to be the best in the world teaching Quick and Easy Kaizen. Which is how do you get everyone to recognize they're creative and to use it on the job.

At Gulfstream Corporation, one of my clients, a thousand people, gave 16 ideas in February 2005 — 16 implemented ideas from a thousand people in one month. And last year they got 20,663 ideas from the same thousand people and saved $1.1 million.

Mark Graban: Yeah, that's great.

Norman Bodek: And that was in Mexico. That's worth about $12 million in America.

So I thank you, Mark, very much. And the only thing I would say is, tell everybody to go out and read my book.

Close

Mark Graban: We always do. I'll put links — again, if people want to visit the website, they can come to leanpodcast.org. There'll be links to Norman's books, as always. In previous podcasts, if you're just getting caught up to it, if you're a new listener, there's a lot of good stuff in the archives. And as always, it's always very enjoyable talking to you, Norman. Thanks for being here.

Norman Bodek: Mark, you're wonderful and I appreciate it so much. And thank you everybody for being here.