Our guest today is Alan G. Robinson, PhD, an award-winning author, educator, researcher and consultant. He has co-authored six books, including Modern Approaches to Manufacturing Improvement: The Shingo System, Ideas Are Free, and his latest, The Idea-Driven Organization. His specialties include managing continuous improvement, creativity, ideas and innovation, and Lean production, being one of the earliest professors to visit Japan to study the Toyota Production System.
In this conversation, Alan shares surprising details about the history of suggestion programs, including their roots in 19th-century Scotland, and why most traditional suggestion boxes fail. He explains why high-performing idea systems are rare, and why incentives and cost-savings rewards often backfire–sometimes even leading to fraud. We discuss case studies ranging from Toyota to Scania, American Airlines to Kodak, and how frontline staff ideas consistently account for about 80% of meaningful organizational improvement when leaders create the right system.
Alan also reflects on the role of leadership humility, the deep grip of command-and-control thinking, and why forward-looking organizations intentionally “make time” for Kaizen. From Benjamin Franklin's Post Office to modern healthcare, the lesson is clear: the future of improvement belongs to idea-driven organizations that tap the creativity of everyone, every day.
We cover all of that and more in this episode.
Key links and websites:
For a link to this episode, refer people to www.leanblog.org/217.
For earlier episodes of my podcast, visit the main Podcast page, which includes information on how to subscribe via RSS or via Apple Podcasts. You can also subscribe and listen via Stitcher.
Some videos with Alan:
An interview after visiting VIBCO:
A short alk:
Transcript:
Mark Graban: Hi, this is Mark Graban. Welcome to episode 217 of the Lean Blog podcast. It's March 2, 2015. Our guest today is Professor Alan Robinson. He's an award-winning author, educator, researcher and consultant.1 He's co-authored six books including three that I've read, the first being Modern Approaches to Manufacturing: The Shingo System, which was followed by the books Ideas Are Free and his latest, The Idea Driven Organization, those last two being co-authored by Dean Schroeder.2 His specialties include continuous improvement, creativity, ideas and innovation, and Lean Production, being one of the earliest professors to visit Japan to study the Toyota Production System in the late 80s.3 And Alan will talk about that.
In this episode we cover a lot, including the history of suggestion programs and a surprising detail about their history, why 80% of an organization's improvement comes from frontline staff ideas, and why high-performing idea systems are rare. We'll also talk about some of the pitfalls of traditional cost-benefit analysis, the role of leaders and humility, and a company Scania that intentionally overstaffs to provide time for Kaizen, which leads to 12 to 15% annual productivity improvement. And we're also going to talk about, and I think there's some funny detail here, the real story behind American Airlines famously removing an olive from their salads. So we have a lot to cover. If you'd like to see links to Alan's websites and books and some of the things that we mention in the episode, go to leanblog.org/217. Thanks for listening, Alan. Thanks for being a guest and joining us here on the podcast today.
Alan Robinson: You're very welcome.
Mark Graban: So can you start off by introducing yourself and your academic background and what you do for the listeners?
Alan Robinson: Sure. How far back to go? I grew up in Scotland and went to university at Cambridge University and I majored in applied math. I got a bachelor's and master's there. And then I came over to this country and did my PhD again in applied math at Johns Hopkins and came into the Eisenberg Business School in the mid-1980s. I guess I would have been a traditional, business school, applied math person. There's a lot of need for applied math in business. But in the late 80s, maybe it was '87, '88, I became very… it was the time when US manufacturers and managers had kind of lost their confidence vis-Ã -vis the Japanese onslaught. And I got interested in why that was. And luckily I had family in Japan. My father was a professor at Tokyo University and my brother lived and worked for… lived there for 10 years and worked for Nippon Telephone and Telegraph as a middle manager. So I had connections over there. And I was one of, I don't know, maybe six to eight Americans who spent a considerable amount of time in Japan. There's only like two of us left now. But I visited a lot of companies. I studied what they were doing that was different. That was the time when I met Shigeo Shingo. I wrote my first book. And that sort of completely… that was an inflection point in my career and got me very interested in high-performance, continuous improvement. I ruthlessly dropped my background and said, “What makes organizations so stunningly high-performing?” And one of the things Shingo and others, I had a number of Japanese mentors, and they pointed me towards. They said, “The one thing we really do is bottom-up Kaizen. Look at what's happening here. We're getting so many ideas from our frontline people. It's a system. It's not just hanging up a suggestion box. You've got to train people, you've got to train managers, you've got to hold them accountable. There's a lot to this.” And so I became interested in that. And that's been a thread of my consulting work and research work and writing since then.
Mark Graban: Yeah. So you answered the question I was going to ask next, how did you get from Applied Math in this kind of happenstance way of being able to focus on learning from Japanese companies? And now as these practices have spread around the world, it's 25, almost 30 years later, not something we can label anymore as just “Japanese management.”
Alan Robinson: Right. Yes. And there was a lot of sloppy thinking about it back then actually. I remember getting all kinds of lectures from both Japanese and Americans. I was sort of bridging the two cultures and the Japanese would say to me, “Americans are all this and all that.” I'd say, “Well, there's like 200 million of us and we're all that.” And then Americans would say, “Japanese all wear white gloves and do detail work much better. And they're much more devoted to their company.” And I had met plenty of burned-out Japanese people who hated their companies. And so it just wasn't quite that simple.
Mark Graban: Yeah, and it seems fair to say today even. And I've only been able to go to Japan recently in 2012 and 2014. And one thing that seemed fairly clear in those visits was that you can't generalize about Japanese business culture. And one thing that people really pointed out is the cultural pressure to not speak up and point out problems which as you write about in the books, pointing out a problem is often the very first step in Kaizen or improvement. So I'm curious some of your thoughts about general Japanese business culture versus what Toyota and others have, I think, worked really hard to create.
Alan Robinson: It's funny you should bring this up because I just had a long discussion with my MBA class yesterday about this and I think people outside of Japan don't realize just how different Toyota was. This was not like General Motors decided to do this or Bank of America or a mainstream company. This was a sassy startup. The Japanese government tried to close them down a bunch of times by depriving them of raw materials or markets mostly in the '50s. But this is an upstart company so you might want to think of, I don't know, one of these Internet file sharing companies that got shut down.
Mark Graban: They were the Napster of their time.
Alan Robinson: Yeah, way out of the box. And so yes, you're right. I mean, I can remember being taken by one of my other Japanese mentors to a bar after work and he said, “Let's just have a drink and we can talk.” And he said, “By the way, you really would be interested in this.” He said, “I'm going to translate for you the conversations. This was at 8 o'clock at night, going on at the other tables because this will give you a good insight into Japanese business mentality because everyone does go out and drink.” The rush hour is sort of 9:15 to 10. And so he cupped a hand over his ear and he said, “You must do better at work. You are not working hard enough.” And it was an older manager with a younger female employee and they were smiling and laughing, but it was deadly serious, hard-hitting. If I had given one of my people an evaluation review like that, they'd probably be calling their union rep. But it was being done in this form of, “You know, we drink and we have food and the company pays for it, but that's where our real communication occurs.” And so it is, it's fascinating to me. And somebody has to write the history of this, of how this company sort of bucked a lot of its country's culture. And you know, it'd be like finding a communist collective in the United States being the most successful company. So anyway, they did it and they showed the world how to do a lot of things better.
Mark Graban: Now some of the history that you've explored in both Ideas Are Free and The Idea Driven Organization. I learned a lot from this. Some of the history around the origins of suggestion boxes systems and why those have been generally dysfunctional compared to idea systems or Kaizen. Could you talk to listeners a little bit about some of what were the things that were surprising or interesting to you about the history of suggestion boxes?
Alan Robinson: Well, I guess there's a couple of interesting things. First of all, that it doesn't go back very far. And so I'm a sort of, I love history. As I read, I read a lot of history. It's just always been a joy of mine. And at the moment, the furthest back, there's been some hand-waving, but the furthest back documented system where you can actually go look at the ideas and read all about it and it's in archives is William Denny, shipbuilders of River Clyde in Scotland. And that was sort of in the late 19th century. But my theory is that any large organization, say of several thousand people, that was organized and functioning relatively efficiently had to have some approach to listening to what was going on at Gemba, so to speak, or they wouldn't be able to just keep it together. So I'm looking right now, I'm reading the archives of the Springfield Armory, which was the first big factory with thousands of people. It was in a war situation here in the U.S. and George Washington commissioned it and they had to produce hundreds of thousands of muskets in time and ammunition to hold back the British. And there was considerable urgency about it and it was extremely well run and extremely well archived. So I'm sort of digging there. And another place that I believe they had a suggestion system and I have seen some smoke, I just haven't gotten to the fire yet is the Venetian arsenal in the 14th century.
Mark Graban: I've heard rumblings about that. I think Jim Womack wrote something about the Venetian arsenal and had a chance to visit.
Alan Robinson: Right, well.
Mark Graban: Or is it called the… Yeah, whatever it's called.
Alan Robinson: Yeah, no, it was. There's a lot that's been written about it. The small piece of it that I'm trying to get at is did they have some form of suggestion system or idea system. So it's long been known that they were doing… you can go to Barnes and Noble and find a book that will tell you about the factory and the way it was designed and how it was just in time. It was the world's first pull system. That's all known. But what I would like to see is a sign that they had some form of… at one point they had 7,000 shipbuilders and they were building ships for the entire Mediterranean. People would order. The King of France would order 100 galleys and the Venetians would make them and they were just incredibly advanced. And so… and then you think of all the big military operations, I mean some of the military, some militaries have paid a lot of attention to bottom-up ideas and it's had an enormous impact on outcomes. And so I'm sure that, you know, it's probably not going to happen in my lifetime, but. And you know, people like me who come from the Kaizen and continuous improvement background don't have the archival skills to go into Macedonia and look up what Alexander the Great was doing. So it's going to wait a long time. But that's one thing. Right now it's sort of all supposedly started at the end of the 19th century, which I don't believe.
Mark Graban: Well, it seems like a lot of the thinking or good improvement thinking. You hear examples from Benjamin Franklin and others, but the formality or bureaucracy of you have an idea, you write it down on paper and jam it into a box is maybe more recent.
Alan Robinson: Actually, that's a great idea. Benjamin Franklin, he was the first Postmaster General. He was running the Post Office. And today the Post Office has a pretty good idea system. And I bet you he listened to the postmasters and after a while, once he had a lot of post offices going, he had to make something formal because he couldn't take it in orally, so to speak. So there's that piece and then the other piece of the suggestion box history is it really tracks very closely, and this is sort of what I'm writing and thinking about right now for a couple of articles. It really tracks very closely, I would say, mankind's battle with command and control. Norman Bodek's latest book starts out with, “Command and control is dead.” Well, it's not dead yet. I think most people in the world work in top-down command and control environments and we all kind of know that that's better than anarchy. But now there are much better models to manage that get much better results. And the suggestion, I mean if we want to talk just about suggestion box type programs, most of those are online now. But those are a… the reason why the world is still looking at, a lot of most companies still use the suggestion box approach is because it fits very well with command and control. It doesn't threaten the hierarchy at all. It never brings in too much feedback and too many ideas. So it's kind of, if I'm a command and control leader, it kind of fits with, “Yes, there will be some stuff coming up, but not too much that's important.”
Mark Graban: I'll send you a link to the article I just saw today, an article about the Philadelphia VA that put in a new suggestion box system. And the article said they had two suggestions in the first month. The first said, “Could you buy us some polo shirts?” The second suggestion was saying that the suggestion box was a waste of time because you don't listen to us anyway.
Alan Robinson: Oh yeah, and the most common suggestion in the suggestion box is usually fire the CEO. But yeah, absolutely.
Mark Graban: And the other little detail was that they decided that because the box was hung right outside of the regional office director's office that that was intimidating and that they would relocate the box. So they will see it. I guess they'll see how that works, right?
Alan Robinson: I already know how it's going to work.
Mark Graban: Yeah. I'm trying to be kind. So I'm curious to hear. I know you've written about some of the dysfunctions with rewards with suggestion box approaches, especially the idea. Like when I worked at GM 20 years ago, I was part of a system like this. You submit an idea that saves money and we'll share a percentage of that with you. And on the surface that seems so reasonable and it sounds like good economics. If you want ideas, you need to give people incentives. But I think your research has shown that's not quite true, right?
Alan Robinson: Yeah, actually I didn't come up with that stuff. I just kind of was a voice for a lot of other. I first encountered that in Japan with the Japan Human Relations Association. JHRA used to take data on, I think it was, they had like 700 members and it was all the big companies plus some middle-sized companies that I'd never heard of. But a lot of them and they took a lot of data like, “How many ideas did you get? What was the measurable impact?” And one of them was, “How much money did you pay out in rewards? How much did you pay out in rewards per idea? What's the percentage rewards that you use?” And the person who collected that data for years just said, “It's so interesting. There's an inverse relationship. The more money these companies are offering, the fewer ideas they get.” And you can just see it in the data. You just plot a graph of 600 data points and it's pretty much a… it's not a straight declining line. The bottom axis is the percentage you offer as a reward or say the amount of reward you pay per idea. And the Y axis is impact of ideas or number of ideas you get. It doesn't really matter. It's not a straight line drop, it's a one over… it's a reciprocal drop, one over X, very, very fast.
And there's just lots of reasons why. And as I started to delve into it myself with the companies I was tracking and dealt with, we just ran into all kinds of crazy stuff. I mean, you get into. First of all, it takes. If you set up a reward system and you say it's a percentage of the cost savings of revenue from an idea, well, that immediately means you have to calculate the cost savings of revenue from every idea. And the data we got from several companies that tracked this, and I keep telling companies don't track it, but when you do, please tell us because it's a waste of your time. But was that it takes an average of four hours of a manager's or staffer's time to put an accurate number on how much an idea saved. So, you know, that was a figure from American Airlines, for example, across several million ideas, because American Airlines ran a 10% reward scheme. And, you know, you think about that's fine if you're running a… well, American Airlines, they had 90 people at one time whose only job it was to calculate cost savings from individual ideas, which as an aside is completely non-value adding information. It's only needed for the rewards and it's not very accurate as well. But if you look at a Toyota or a company like that these days that's getting millions of ideas from their people, you, a whole other car company with bean counters in it behind you add up the individual revenue. So it's an enormous, it slows things down tremendously. I mean you can actually track that. The bigger the rewards you give, the longer it takes to process an idea. And we came across several Fortune 500 companies with ideas that were more than 10 years old for that reason. Nobody wanted to put in that kind of time. And I still think of the… one of the organizations I worked with was the Brookhaven National Lab, I can name it. And they used to have a cost savings idea system. And the COO told this funny story when they were kind of revamping it and setting it up in a different modern way. He said, “Early on we got an idea that said we should use energy saving light bulbs throughout the 57 buildings that these 5,000 people come to work in every day.” And we owed them 10% by the union contract. “So myself and two others, we had to go around and count all the light bulbs.” Because you can't just read it off the meter. You know, there's other things that impact your electric bill. And then the guy grieved it because he disagreed. You can always say so much of this is fungible. Like, you know, people come in at 9 and leave at 5, therefore the lights are on so many hours a day. But then he would say, “No, but there's cleaning and they happen to leave the lights on all night anyway for security reasons.” So you end up with lots of disputes, a lot of overhead. I guess another point I would make is that the best idea systems in the world don't use rewards because they realize people don't need them. So why put them in when people don't need them? And then I had to put myself through the certified fraud examiner training course because I was seeing so much fraud. It's very easy to steal money and it happens in every reward-based suggested system, whether they know it or not. And we put a few horror stories in Ideas Are Free, but they were by far the least shocking that we found.
Mark Graban: Yeah, well, somebody's buddies with somebody and, “I'll approve your idea and we'll split.” Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of room for shenanigans.
Alan Robinson: Yeah. Or you. Because unless… and American Airlines had to do this. Unless you audit the ideas, it's usually a subject matter expert or the manager who says, “This will save 100,000 bolts per year.” There's no independent. The reason why companies have to calculate rewards is there's no independent check of this. You can't just look up and it's not like you have double entry idea bookkeeping. So they'll say it actually save 5,000. “I'll call it 50,000. Let's split the reward.” You know, that happens all the time and there's no defense against it.
Mark Graban: Well, there's a famous example from American Airlines of they had the idea, “Let's remove the olive from the salad,” and we save X millions of dollars per year. I flew American Airlines recently and there was an olive in the salad. So maybe they somehow are generating more revenue now because they put the olive in. We're supposedly happy.
Alan Robinson: Well, in an earlier book, we wrote an entire chapter about American Airlines and I spent two weeks inside there filming a documentary about their idea system, which was fascinating. And the olive story, there's more to it than meets the eye because the way salads were then charged, it wasn't that what happened was for three items, for just lettuce, it was a certain price for up to three items, it was another price. For four to six items, it was another price that American Airlines paid in catering. And the olive was the fourth item. So a flight attendant noticed that 78% of people were not eating the olive and so recommended they pull it. And since it was the fourth item, it saved like $800,000 a year. But then the Olive Growers of America found out about it and grieved and sued and all this kind of stuff. And so American's official policy became, “You have a right to an olive in your salad, but you have to ask the flight attendant to go get it from the drink cart.” But we've trained our flight attendants and they will do that. And a couple of friends and I, when that first happened, we tested that and the flight attendants hadn't heard of it. They go, “What? You want an olive from the bar?” Forget it.
Mark Graban: It's a different olive.
Alan Robinson: It is, yeah. You got black and green and… yeah. So it's just a whole fascinating story. And someone got a lot of money for that. But I don't… they were able to cost in the fight with the Olive Growers of America Association that was boycotting America, encouraging the restaurant industry too, and all this.
Mark Graban: So I mean, I agree with you and I've seen firsthand how powerful intrinsic motivation is, especially where I'm working in healthcare. People want to make things better for their patients or for themselves. And there's so many ideas that come out of that motivation. One of the numbers that's striking in The Idea Driven Organization is a figure of 80% of an organization's improvements coming from staff ideas. I was wondering if you could talk about that and how you came to that number.
Alan Robinson: Well, the statistic is, you can say it different ways, but the fact is that when you go into organizations that have high-performing idea systems–and they're relatively rare, so it's not everybody, most people will not see this effect–but if you go into a… and we have a whole list of them in the book, Ideas Are Free, and we have others as well. And you just say, okay, when they happen to measure it, which we don't want them to do because it's a waste of their time. But sometimes the leadership will say, “Why are we putting all this money into listening to the little people? It's not worth it. We've got better things to do. It's not a big. I once had a suggestion box and it was a waste of time.” So people have to take data to show that these frontline ideas what they're worth. And when you have an effective idea system and you do that, the 80/20 number, as you saw, keeps popping up. It's 81/19, 78/22, 85/15 in the case of a chemical company. And so the statement is, if you are that provided, if you put an idea system in place, that's what you will see if you do the right things, which is not reinventing the wheel to make it happen. But most organizations won't see that because they don't have a system. So then we frame it as, “80% of your potential improvement lies at the bottom.” But you have to have an idea system to get it. You won't just see it magically.
Mark Graban: Yeah, so you talk about trying to collect the data to convince executives and that was something else I was going to ask you about. There are so many executives that have three decades of bad habits from coming up and succeeding within command-and-control environments, have been rewarded for having the answers and instead of being rewarded for collecting and engaging and supporting ideas from their employees, I mean, at some point, I don't mean to sound too cynical, but maybe this makes for an interesting question. Is there hope that you can actually convince leaders through data that they should change their mindsets or do we need to wait maybe for a different generation of leaders?
Alan Robinson: You know, that's a great question. And it's like so many things, your attitude towards women in the workplace. Yes, there's a certain amount of “let time pass,” and a younger generation comes up that wasn't brought up on that sort of diet. But you're absolutely right. T.S. Kuhn wrote about this in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that your success in the old paradigm makes it much harder to shift to the new paradigm. So there's certainly that. But I also have come to believe that command and control is just deeply rooted in the human condition. And there's a… well, first on that, if you think about all through time, we've had slavery, we've had kings, we've had serfdom and pharaohs, and this command and control has been the model. And Frederick Taylor when he said, “Here's how you need to step away from the old arts and craftsman view of work,” his model was essentially a well-thought-out, top-down model. So it's just strongly ingrained for lots of reasons. I'm rereading The Origin of Species right now by Charles Darwin and I think there's something evolutionarily in there, but it's very strongly held. And so you have to show people. And what I find is the leaders of the old kind, if you like, they will change. But there's so many entry points into getting frontline ideas. What you need though is a burning platform. You need a sense of urgency.
So when I have a leader who says to me, “You know, I just don't know,” like in healthcare, like you, I work a lot in healthcare and these leaders of modern healthcare organizations or hospitals, they don't really know what to do to survive. And then they start to be more open-minded and say, “Well, where's a resource that I don't have?” And provided you have the data and you've got your arguments marshaled, they'll move along. So there's a lot of ways to teach people. As we wrote in the book, the best way is for them to go to Gemba with respect to ideas. So often when they go to Gemba, they kind of walk around and ask questions. But if you can show them a… this is why a successful pilot idea system is a great way for a middle manager to kind of get the leader interested in. Show them that. “Look at all the ideas that came out of this area and look at what they're doing for you.” And the problem is you can't really quantify it in the terms that the old command and controllers have been used to because they deal mostly with, as we talked, we're starting to talk about financial results. They watch the numbers. That's how you keep control at a distance. But many of these ideas are process ideas. “Giving me this wrench makes it really difficult. My wrist hurts and I can't work as fast.” Yeah, they don't see that and they won't see that. But giving them a new wrench so they can work faster and smile at the customers actually has a big impact on your bottom line. So they're trying to manage something with tools that are too primitive to pick up what they need to see. So somebody's going to write the book on this someday. But the reason why command and control is such a strong part of the way, and it's true around the world. I work a lot in Sweden and people think, who haven't been there that Sweden's this lovely, nice country where everybody's sweet to each other, but they still have big bosses. And all the Swedish workers say, “very top-down, no independence.” There's something fundamentally human about it. That's the scary part in this business.
Mark Graban: Yeah, I mean, in the positive, I mean, I think a lot of great Kaizen practices are very universal. But a lot of the problems and the starting points are often pretty, sometimes sadly, universal. And maybe the last thing I'd like to ask you about here, that seems to be a pretty universal concern. When I've met with people from hospital systems around the world, they're all asking questions about, you know, how they… they're wanting to, I think on some level, or at least those who were involved in Lean and similar approaches, they want to engage their employees. And when you talk about, “Why is this not happening?” the first thing that always comes up is, “Well, lack of time, not enough time.” And there's a story from Ideas Are Free about Scania, about being kind of intentionally overstaffed to work on Kaizen. Can you talk about what Scania was doing? Because I think that's really to healthcare. That would be a completely revolutionary idea that we would not just staff to the absolute bare minimum, cost-cutting type level.
Alan Robinson: Yeah, a lot of these companies get into that. Scania was basically trained to do that by Toyota which does a lot of that overstaffing. They just make it look a little different. But to me this goes back to Leonardo da Vinci who wrote a lot about the exploit/explore dichotomy. We all have a set of things we currently do and they currently drive our economic engine and bring in money and can make us successful. But you also have to explore and do new things. And that's where companies tend to have difficulty. Except for the ones that realize that putting some space in there for a well-structured exploration program, which means improving and working on ideas and innovating and all the future-oriented stuff makes sense. And I think once you realize that, it really does make sense. I meet a great many leaders who as you say, don't think it's worth time, meaning that they don't see that their future is going to be better enough for the taking the time out of current production, so to speak.
So Scania is just one of those. And they do overstaff so that they try to, if I had to estimate, I would say they're probably doing 10% exploration and 90% exploitation. They're spending a significant amount of their resources making sure people have time to improve and innovate. And you see this. Toyota, I was just at Toyota Hanoi last year and they have a full-time implementation department for continuous improvement ideas which can be bottom-up. They have 30 ideas per person implemented in Toyota Hanoi. But they also have process improvements and top-down driven stuff. You kind of need it all to work together. But out of 1,200 people, they have 97 full-time assigned to just implement these ideas. It's a little bit different model than Scania. I would say I'm working on this machine at Scania, I would like to build a Poka-Yoke and I would go along to maintenance and get them to come. And at Toyota Hanoi, you kind of pull a bell, stop and tell the engineer what you want and they go do it. It's done the next day. However you free those resources. To me, the smartest leaders, the ones who make the most money and run the best workplaces are the ones who realize however you make space for that and the way that that looks is different in every organization because of the way it operates. You've got to make space for it. And then that Scania thing is one manifestation of that.
Mark Graban: So what I'm hearing you say is that there might be different ways of accomplishing that goal. But if it's important, organizations and leaders find time, they make time for improvement.
Alan Robinson: Oh, there's a lot of very creative ways to make that time. A lot of… when BIC was starting out, they hired back a lot of retirees and they hired, in their context, they needed more engineers and maintenance people. In a bank, you'd need probably more IT people, these support functions to implement ideas. So BIC hired back, Kodak did the same thing years ago. They hired back a lot of people who wanted to work a day or two a week and were happy to and would be on their own schedule. But they could take some of the load of implementation off people who wanted to get production out the door, so to speak.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Alan Robinson: So it can look very different.
Mark Graban: Yeah. And Kodak being, I think, one of those very earliest examples of a suggestion system as well.
Alan Robinson: Yeah, yep. Some people it's often cited as the first one in the U.S. and that's not right. But I do see that in a lot of books that it's 1896 and actually what happened was I forget the name of the guy, but the CEO of Kodak, the founder of Kodak, met the Denny in London and that's how he got it. The first one in the U.S. was NCR with John Patterson, but Kodak was the second one, at least according to what everybody seems to understand about it. But Kodak didn't get it from NCR. They got it from Denny in London.
Mark Graban: Okay. Yeah, George Eastman.
Alan Robinson: That's right, George Eastman.
Mark Graban: I'll take famous CEOs for 200 now. Well, thank you so much for chatting today and thank you for all the work you've done to hopefully open people's eyes to the power of their employees' ideas and what an idea-driven organization can look like. The book website and I do recommend the book very highly. Of course it's idea-driven.com. Alan, are there any other websites or things you would suggest if people want to find what you're writing or find you online?
Alan Robinson: Well, I also have AlanRobinson.com and at some point I'm going to do some things with that. But we're right now working on our next projects and I just got my head down doing that. I do have people who run my website saying, “Could you write a blog entry?” And I'm sort of right now more interested in working on this new idea. But those would be the two websites I'd point people to, I think.
Mark Graban: Okay, well, great. Well Alan, really appreciate it once again and good luck with your next projects and everything you're doing.
Alan Robinson: Really appreciate it. Thanks. Enjoyed talking with you.
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Small wins and success keep the enterprise engages. That suggests that employees on the shop floor should only be involved in rapid improvement projects. The larger projects should be owned by CI experts. These experts should pull in required resources only when needed
I think the bigger opportunity is not referring to improvements as “projects.” Small improvements done in the Kaizen style, driven by staff, aren’t big enough to be called “projects.”
The idea of a “project” is often intimidating to people. Small improvements shouldn’t be intimidating.
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