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My guest for Episode #535 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Gregg Stocker, a seasoned Lean practitioner, consultant, and author. Over the past 30+ years, Gregg has worked across industries, including oil and gas, energy services, manufacturing, and construction, guiding both independent operators and major corporations on their Lean journeys.
He is the author of Profitable at Any Price: Lean Thinking for Safer, Cheaper, and More Responsible Oil and Gas Production and is revising his earlier book Avoiding the Corporate Death Spiral.
In this conversation, Gregg shares his Lean origin story, which began with exposure to Dr. W. Edwards Deming's teachings in college and later expanded through hands-on work with Toyota. We discuss the importance of daily Kaizen, the influence of Deming's philosophy of profound knowledge, and why psychological safety and systems thinking are essential to effective Lean leadership.
Gregg also reflects on his experiences helping organizations in high-risk industries such as oil and gas. He explains how Lean thinking can simultaneously drive improvements in safety, cost, and reliability — showing that these are not trade-offs, but outcomes of a stronger system. Listeners will hear stories of transformation, lessons from Toyota, and practical insights on structured problem-solving, leadership behaviors, and building a culture where people feel safe speaking up.
Whether you work in energy, healthcare, manufacturing, or any other sector, Gregg's insights are broadly applicable. This episode is a reminder that Lean isn't just about tools — it's about leadership, systems thinking, and creating conditions for continuous improvement.
Questions, Notes, and Highlights:
- How did you first get introduced to Lean and Deming?
- What did you learn from Toyota about shifting from TQM to daily Kaizen?
- How did senior leaders in your early company become engaged in Lean?
- What were your experiences attending Dr. Deming's four-day seminars?
- Which of Deming's principles do you wish leaders better understood today?
- How do systems thinking and psychology apply in high-risk industries like oil and gas?
- What are some Lean approaches to improving both safety and performance?
- What's the origin story behind your book Profitable at Any Price?
- How do oil and gas companies typically react to fluctuating prices, and how does Lean help?
- How has Lean adoption in oil and gas evolved over the past 15 years?
- When starting a Lean transformation, what should leaders do — and avoid?
- How do you define better problem solving, beyond just tools and structure?
- What leadership behaviors help create psychological safety and encourage people to speak up?
- Can you tell us about your upcoming books and where your writing is headed next?
This podcast is part of the #LeanCommunicators network.
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Automated Transcript (Not Guaranteed to be Defect Free)
Mark Graban: If the oil and gas industry could be safer, cheaper, and more responsible all at the same time. That's been the focus of today's guest, Gregg Stocker, for much of his 30-plus year career. Not all of that in oil and gas, but I think that focus on those priorities. So he has worked in oil and gas, energy services, manufacturing, and construction. And for the past 15 years, he's been guiding both independent operators and major energy companies on their lean journeys. So before I tell you a little bit more about Gregg, hey, welcome to the show. How are you?
Gregg Stocker: Great. Thanks, Mark. It's nice to be here.
Mark Graban: Yeah. I'm excited about the conversation on topics not just limited to oil and gas. Of course, we'll be talking more broadly about lean topics applicable to all. But Gregg is the author of this book out now, Profitable at Any Price: Lean Thinking for Safer, Cheaper, and More Responsible Oil and Gas Production, as well as an upcoming book, Avoiding the Corporate Death Spiral. And I think that you've got at least one more book in you, Gregg. Is that right? We'll talk about sustainability.
Gregg Stocker: I'll be working on that.
Mark Graban: All right. So, we'll, I think we'll get to talk about that later. His work has been interviewed and mentioned in a lot of publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and BusinessWeek. So, Gregg, before we get into your book, I've got a standardized work for the podcast and the questions. I love to hear people's lean origin story. You know, how did you first get introduced to Lean Thinking?
Gregg Stocker: Boy, it was a long time ago, actually, before there was a term lean. It was my senior year of college, actually. I had a course–I can't remember what it was called, business policy or something like that–but the professor was a Deming zealot. And we spent the entire term talking Deming. Well, I was just out of college. I mean, I got all kinds of stuff there, that's good and bad, but I'm from Detroit, like you.
Mark Graban: Where exactly, if you don't mind?
Gregg Stocker: West Bloomfield.
Mark Graban: Okay. I'm from Livonia, so not too far away.
Gregg Stocker: Right. For sure. I mean, I could see what was going on in the auto industry in Detroit. My father worked for Ford for 50 years.
Mark Graban: Wow.
Gregg Stocker: And I got to hear a lot of the problems on the inside, and I knew the quality issues and all that. So I was interested in Deming, and I remember talking to him about it, and he was like, “No, it's not going to work here.”
Mark Graban: What was your dad's profession or role?
Gregg Stocker: He was a designer, and mostly I think it was accelerator systems. That was his focus. And the funny thing is, Deming actually went into Ford right when Donald Petersen was there and did a lot of really good things with the company. But that kind of started my journey. Then I went into manufacturing. I moved down to the Houston area to get away from the cold, and that's where the jobs were. I ended up working for a plastics company. I was kind of doing lean in the company I was in, but we made plastic parts for the automotive industry. And we got Toyota as a customer.
Mark Graban: Ah.
Gregg Stocker: You know, and the discussions were like, “Oh yeah, we're doing this stuff. We're doing continuous improvement,” a lot of the stuff we've heard of Toyota doing, and this was probably 1990 or so.
Mark Graban: Okay. So not the earliest days of Toyota Georgetown, but relatively early.
Gregg Stocker: Pretty close. Yeah. And the funny thing is, we provided the plant in France with parts, not Georgetown.
Mark Graban: Oh. So, oh, okay.
Gregg Stocker: Well, it was a French company, so I think that's how it started there. Toyota came in and said, “Well, I don't know what you're doing, but this is not what we do.” We were doing quality circles, we were doing control charts, things like that. So that really kicked the journey up. So I really started getting into it then. I had been to a couple of Deming seminars, and I'm one of the people who believes you really can't understand lean unless you, I'd say, understand Deming. I still don't know if I do, but at least I've done a lot of Deming learning, right? And that along with a lot of the stuff from Toyota, from seminars in France, I just started my journey really big time around that.
Mark Graban: Yeah, there's a lot of parallels. My dad was an engineer at GM for 40 years.
Gregg Stocker: Oh, okay.
Mark Graban: Retired early. I mean, I guess there were two sides to that coin. The GM bankruptcy around 2009, he was offered retirement. But yeah, really before I learned anything lean or TPS, it was exposure to Deming. And I've mentioned in other episodes, through my dad who was in one of those four-day workshops at GM, Cadillac, he actually got to see Dr. Deming. He had a signed copy of Out of the Crisis. So yeah, it is just interesting to think about those parallels and yeah, it just makes me think and reflect, when I've gone to Japan, companies there, I think including hospitals, have evolved TQM into something more like TPS or lean. I'm a zealot, of course, for control charts. They can certainly be a part of lean, predate lean, and fit into that well. But what are your thoughts on what did you learn from Toyota about shifting from TQM? Where I'm going to characterize that, and you can tell me if you disagree, is trying to involve everybody, but typically like six-month-long projects that kind of meet like a committee every so often. It might be good, rigorous change, but it's slow change. And Toyota has tried to coach organizations, even in Japan, that, well, no, we can do quicker kaizen. Like, not everything needs to be TQM. I'm curious about your thoughts on that and then, again, more broadly, some of the other things Toyota was teaching.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, that's one of the early things they actually taught us was, don't–the big improvements? Cool. Like you said, that's good. You have to do some of those when you have to really change the system. But those don't even work that well unless you're doing the daily kaizen. And they were down to saying, “Just take a second out of the job.” And at the time we're thinking, “Yeah, one second. Okay.” Maybe it's good for you, you make these cars coming off the line. I don't know what their takt time was at the time, but they ended up convincing us that, okay, one second. First of all, you're going to get a lot more than one second usually if you start pushing people to and helping them and teaching them. But the innovation in the company is going to grow. People are going to start being sensitive to waste, and really, it will set you up for better problem solving on the bigger stuff. And even your objectives and trying to move forward. And fortunately, the company I was at, they really picked up on this, I mean, all the way up to the top. They wanted to do this. So that really helped us make those kind of changes.
Mark Graban: So how would you characterize… I mean, it's great to hear they picked up on it from the top. That doesn't always happen when organizations get introduced to lean or TPS or whatever labels we put on things. Do you think, was that Toyota engaging them where, you know, maybe the senior leaders had to be involved? Or how, from your recollection, how did that shift the way they were leading?
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, I think it really was. Before that, the company was trying to focus on automotive, and really, they were enlightened enough at the top to say, “You know what, if we get Toyota,” and Toyota was a very small part of our business, but they knew by getting Toyota in, we were going to really be looked at positively throughout the industry. Plus, we're going to start improving our processes and start reducing our costs all over. So I think they were enlightened enough to know that. They learned a lot as we started with Toyota, but they were open and they were willing to make the change. The egos weren't there, and that helped a whole lot.
Mark Graban: I mean, was that a good, Toyota-influenced TPS success story in terms of the different elements of performance and even going back to the title of your book, safer, cheaper…?
Gregg Stocker: Hand in hand? Yeah, definitely. For sure. It helped the company all over, in all the plants. We were in other industries too, and it helped us there. The company got into it, it was after I left, they got into buyouts. They got started doing some merging with other companies. So I'm not sure what it's like now at the company, but it definitely made improvements there. And from my personal journey, it helped a whole lot in my understanding. So, you know, I have to say early on I was very tools-focused, 'cause that's kind of the way a lot of people start, I think. And I started learning it's a lot more than that. It's the system, it's the thinking, it's the leadership. So I can take that into other companies and other situations and other industries, and that really helped me in my journey.
Mark Graban: Yeah. I want to ask again, you know, kind of back to Dr. Deming. I'm jealous or, you know, I always love hearing about the stories of other guests that have had that experience you did of being a participant firsthand in the Deming seminars. I never had that opportunity. He passed away when I was in the middle of my college years and didn't get that firsthand experience. But what are some of your memories or recollections of the four-day seminar experience in particular?
Gregg Stocker: There are actually several, and I think about them. Actually, one of the four-day seminars I did was at General Motors; it was hosted by GM.
Mark Graban: So maybe your dad was in there.
Gregg Stocker: Maybe, yeah, through one of them. But, I'd say one thing that's just, it's kind of different than what most people think or believe is, there were a couple of times where I saw people really get excited about what Dr. Deming was saying and really want to talk about it during breaks. But I've seen other people that would sit and hear the same words, and they wouldn't come back from the break. We'd have a break, come back, and they were gone.
Mark Graban: Wow.
Gregg Stocker: It's like they thought it was not worth it. And I actually had one person come back, pick up his books, and leave, and said, “This is just garbage. This isn't helping me.” So the different reactions was interesting. I also liked seeing the fact that he taught the theories. He taught the system of it. But when people asked specific questions, “How do I do this in my company?” he would say, “I'm not a leader in your company. You're a leader in your company. You need to figure that out. If you don't understand, you need to learn more before you do it.” So, that I thought was interesting too.
I actually got to talk to him on one of the breaks at one of the seminars too, and I kind of had the same thing. And I was a quality manager of the company I was at during one of them. And I was saying, “Hey, I get this stuff. How do I get my leaders on board?” And his feedback was, “Well, if you got it, you'd be convincing them. So I don't think you have it yet.”
Mark Graban: It was humbling to hear. Yeah, that's challenging.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah. But it made me, I still think about it. And funny thing beyond that is, for years after that until he died, I used to get, not Christmas cards, but I would get a little sheet of paper on his stationary saying, “Merry Christmas, best wishes.” And I thought that was kind of cool. I still have those, actually.
Mark Graban: That is very, that's very cool. The one thing you talked about, somebody reacting, “these ideas are garbage.” I mean, I've seen a wide range of reactions in organizations to lean concepts and, I can't put ourselves directly in someone else's head, but it makes me wonder, did they think the ideas were garbage? Or, “these ideas won't be accepted here,” or “this is a waste of time because where is it going to go?” That cynicism or the questions about, is it worth my time to learn if the organization might not really be any different afterwards?
Gregg Stocker: Yeah. I think it's something I've thought about for many years and had discussions with people on: what makes somebody open to transform? And I think that the people who said it was garbage and left were following their traditional leadership model. I say traditional, but especially at the time, it was the way MBAs were taught back then, and this was different. And they were like, “I don't need this. That's not going to work where I am.” Because I know, I had a conversation with a CEO. I went, actually, after I was in the plastics company, I went to a division of Emerson. And it was the flow group, and I had a conversation with the CEO of our group and he was a Deming zealot, and it was amazing to see this guy. And this is why I got hired, I think, 'cause we clicked during the interview. But people would tell me, “Oh, you didn't know this guy before? It was terrible. He was a tyrant. He didn't get it. He didn't want to understand.” So I asked him one time, “What made you click? What made you transform, be open to the transformation?” And he went to a company, he said the company was a mess. Their inventory turnover was terrible. It was like one. They weren't meeting deliveries, and he was just grasping at straws saying, “What do I need to do to make the change?” And he went to a Deming seminar and he said that just the light bulb went on 'cause he was open to it. And I think I was open at the time early on because of Detroit. The recessions in Detroit were just horrible. I think it's different for different people. And I've fought that and struggled with it for years. You got to meet and you got to sit down with every single person to try to help them.
Mark Graban: And you know, I could see where more traditionally minded managers could just outright reject many, if not all of the 14 points or the Deming ideas. They might reject that quality is made in the boardroom. They might want to blame the quality manager, the quality department, or blame the workers. Or they might reject the idea of 90-something percent of problems are caused by the system. And I'm paraphrasing Dr. Deming, but I think it's close. He would say, well, senior leaders are most responsible for the system at the high level. Like, all the things the frontline employees can't kaizen out of the process. So, and people I've seen on different levels outright reject lean ideas. They're addicted to push. They're addicted to batches. Their system might include accounting measures that reward overproduction or reward them for blaming and dumping the qualities on the frontline employees. Not that I ran across… no, I did run across all of that at GM 30 years ago. But, you know, the personal transformation I think is rare. I always admire the leaders I've met in my 30 years who had that spark or that moment of kind of wondering, “Gosh, how could things be better and how could I lead differently?” I think that's pretty rare.
Gregg Stocker: Agreed. Agreed. I could probably count them on one hand, the number of leaders that I've dealt with who are like that, but it's just so refreshing dealing with someone like that.
Mark Graban: So maybe one other Deming-related question before we talk about the book. Is there one particular Deming lesson or principle that you wish was more broadly understood or embraced, you know, even in the context of kind of current day lean management and lean thinking?
Gregg Stocker: Yeah. To come down with one would be an issue because there's so many.
Mark Graban: You can give a longer list. But where would you start?
Gregg Stocker: Psychology, I think, and profound knowledge, the understanding of psychology. I think it's so lacking. Leaders tend to get promoted in general, not everybody, but in general because of their technical capability or they did their current job well, or they're just liked by the person making the decision. And they don't understand psychology, a lot of them, and they don't realize that everybody's different and you have to spend time with them to understand. So I think that's definitely one thing I'd like to see a lot more of.
The other is the system appreciation of a system and systems thinking, because I don't know if it's just natural. I've been studying this stuff for so long, it's hard to go back to that. And not that I am an expert. I never call myself an expert in anything. But the idea that people, they fragment and they manage in a fragmented way, and it's very hard to get them to understand the system. And in oil and gas, just say as an example, the drilling rig, the drilling is so expensive. You know, onshore drilling is probably $40,000-$50,000 a day for a drilling rig. Offshore could be $300,000 or more per day. So the focus becomes that and forgetting about the rest of the system, forgetting about the other parts of it and trying to make things flow. It's like, “How do we get drilling down?” And yes, that's commendable and you have to try to do that because of the cost, but having a well drilled and then it's not completed, which is the next step, for days, weeks, months, doesn't help the process, doesn't help the overall system get better.
The other side is safety, safety issues, and trying to make people realize–and I know you're obviously very close with Paul O'Neill; you published a book on some of his speeches–and if there's anything that he taught us among the many things, it's that you get better safety by improving your system, by improving the problem solving, the coaching, the work instructions, the standards, tooling, those kind of things. But I think a lot of people, like a lack of systems thinking, they focus right in on, “We got a safety issue, drop everything. We're just going to look at this. Why did the person get hurt?” and not dig deeply enough to realize there are system issues that caused that.
Mark Graban: Yeah. ‘Cause the bane of my existence sometimes, and I know others feel this way, is when the quote-unquote problem solving stops at, “Well, the person didn't follow the procedure, so our countermeasure is we're going to retrain them.” And that might be stopping a little short in the problem solving.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, for sure. I actually had one situation once where a supplier had a problem, and we were going to try to figure out… I was called in, “Okay, help us with this, solve this problem.” And I said, “Okay, well let's talk to the operator who was closest to it first.” And the supplier said, “We fired him.” It's like, wow, you lost that knowledge as to why this problem really happened.
Mark Graban: Right.
Gregg Stocker: If it's the person's fault, what makes you think the next person's not going to have the same issue? It's just, it's frustrating.
Mark Graban: It is. And you could describe that in Deming language, I guess, as lack of appreciation for a system. Or there are frameworks I'm fortunate to have run across in healthcare that I think are applicable back in the other settings. This idea of a concept and framework called “just culture,” of trying to figure out when is it fair and just to punish an individual. It probably roughly falls back into that 94-ish to 6 Deming kind of ratio of completely intentional acts versus things people are pressured into doing. Like that's a fine line around, “They didn't follow the process.” “Well, why?” “They were being pressured on production numbers above all else.” Oh. Well, if you put–this is the one other just culture test of “if you put another similar professional in those same situations, would they have likely made the same decision?” If the answer is yes, that's a system problem.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, for sure. And we do the same in oil and gas, the just culture, because of the safety issues. Getting people to all understand it and apply it and not get emotional and jump to the countermeasure right away is difficult. But yeah, same thing. It's how do you get away from that? Even when you're coaching and somebody's learning it, when there's a big enough problem, I think they go back to their comfort zone and that's the old way, and that's letting go of some of these things.
Mark Graban: Or I think of, I have zero firsthand experiences of what different risks might be in different aspects of oil and gas. You know, you've got oil rigs, you've got flammable materials. I mean just a lot of, from the public perspective, you say, okay, there are a lot of different risks. But back to Paul O'Neill for a minute. When he was CEO of Alcoa, the one thing he led with was kind of trying to dissuade people from saying, or making the excuse of, “Well, this is an inherently dangerous business.” Yeah, right. Making aluminum. And people say sometimes in healthcare, like, “Well, there are inherent risks to being a patient.” And it's sad, but whether it's a death in a foundry or a patient dying of an infection, I think Paul O'Neill's leadership was unique in trying to push people beyond just kind of falling back on that and saying, “Well, what can we do?” Like really do some problem solving around what can we do. What are some of the ideas and applications in oil and gas of focusing on, as your subtitle says, Lean Thinking for Safer Work?
Gregg Stocker: And it's getting people to really learn during problem solving, I think is a key. The idea that, yes, you need to figure out what happened. And I've run into the same things you have where there have been people who have said, “The only way we're going to be perfectly safe is to quit producing oil.” Okay. I don't agree with that at all. But there's that mentality in the industry. And I think a lot of it is in, well, it's a systems approach, but starting with the problem solving. You have an incident, you have a near miss, you got to get out there with the idea of trying to learn first. You could put mitigations in that maybe will cost more and it'll just make it safer for now.
Mark Graban: Add another person out there or whatever to watch, or a short-term countermeasure if you will.
Gregg Stocker: Right? Yes. But don't rush getting to the true root cause or root causes of the problem. Try to understand. And when I provide coaching to people doing problem solving, that's one of the things I always do is we do eight-step problem solving. We've learned from Toyota, we've had several Toyota people in companies I've worked with. But after every step, I stop people and I say, “Okay, what did we learn? What did the team learn? What did you not know coming in that you know now?” And when the answer is, “Not a whole lot. We just knew we had to pay more attention to it or whatever,” you know there was no effort going on.
So I think that's a big part of it. The other part is when you're looking and helping and going to gemba and trying to coach leaders is to say, “Put some effort on standards. Put effort on your standard work instructions. Make sure that everybody understands how to do it very clearly.” And that's one major step toward trying to reduce safety incidents. And by the way, we'll see that we probably reduce our costs, we increase production. Those other things come along for the ride.
Mark Graban: So again, our guest is Gregg Stocker. The book, again, is Profitable at Any Price. I'd love to hear the book's origin story other than, I think from knowing a little bit, you like to write, but that doesn't always then turn into a book work. And other than working in oil and gas, what… you know, I just would love to hear about how it came to be because, you know, again, congratulations. You know, it's a big undertaking.
Gregg Stocker: Thanks. I appreciate it. And it's funny that it came to be. I was… I've always wanted to write down what we were doing. I worked for a supermajor for a while in Scotland with trying to help them with lean. I've worked, as you mentioned, with service companies. And then I worked with mid-size companies, and I wanted to get this down so I'd have a standard of my own to help this. I was between assignments. I happened to be in Denmark at the time, and had like three weeks between assignments while I was over there. They have great coffee shops in Copenhagen, so I'd go there and drink. And my idea was, “Okay, I'm going to put a little pamphlet together. I'm going to put like a 10 to 20 page pamphlet on how to do this, how to think of it. Here's the process.” Just so we can talk from the same place.
That started growing as I wrote. I go, “Yeah, you know, this didn't really convey the message I wanted. I need to put a little more, I need to put examples. I need to put exhibits.” And eventually, that thing just started growing, and I said, “Okay, the pamphlet idea is gone. It's 200 pages.” And I started hitting it on weekends and a lot of time off, and that's kind of how it came to be. And eventually, I stopped. Well, my wife kept saying, “Well, how's the book coming?” And I'd say, “Well, it's getting there. I just want to add something else.” And she was my coach there saying, “Stop. You got to stop. Get it out, deal with revisions or deal with a new book or whatever. Quit it.” And that's how it happened.
Mark Graban: We all need that push to the finish line, whether that's a book coach or a loved one. My book coach, Cathy Ace, who I've used in my last two books, would say, “An imperfect book that's in people's hands helps the world more than the book that you're still trying to perfect.” Because, look, I think there's some lean thinking here, perhaps, with the pursuit of perfection. It doesn't mean we can't ever reach that stage of perfection. It's heartbreaking. I'm sure you know in early printings, I'm guessing you found a typo somewhere or it was pointed out for you, right?
Gregg Stocker: Yeah. As much as I've had people read it, I know I've read it, and yeah. And I've seen with you and your books on mistakes. And then I've seen it and I've read it too, and I go, “Oh, I wonder if you knew that.” And you did, 'cause you've came out since and said some things.
Mark Graban: Yeah. But I mean, a book anymore is like software. You can update it and fix the typo and there are not too many defects out there in people's hands. It happens in almost every book, every book ever printed. Jeff Liker's book, The Toyota Way, the first edition has a typo on page one. I'm not picking on Jeff, I'm not picking on his publisher. But I mean, it's just, it's hard to write the book right the first time, and it's really hard to inspect in quality.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, for sure. I agree. And I kind of think of your quote there, which was really good. It makes me think of Taiichi Ohno saying, basically, “A bad standard is better than no standard,” because then you can start changing it. You can start helping people start realizing how they can improve it. So it's the same, I think, with the books.
Mark Graban: So, I don't really know much about oil and gas other than, you know, we hear the economic news of peaks and valleys in oil prices over time, how much that relates to gas pump prices. You know, we're aware, I think, of the economic impacts and I'm kind of guessing, I would love to hear you explain, it sounds like the title Profitable at Any Price is kind of related to the core problem statement or the core opportunity in oil and gas. Tell us about that.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, it's amazing how… I mean, oil and gas is a very, very profitable industry to begin with, and that's because of the market price of oil. No one company really has any effect on it. So what the companies tend to do is they react to it. And I've seen really good people get laid off and, you know, think of the knowledge that gets laid off when oil prices fall. Projects stopped because oil prices fell. And you hear this in all the meetings and every month we look, and even more than that, saying, “Well, what's the oil price today? Okay, well here's our budget, but what's our budget based on what oil price?” So it's just an obsession with oil price. And I think it's because of the waste in the industry. And there's just so much. The thing is, there's millions of dollars in waste, hundreds of millions, depending on which company we're talking about. And the problem there is they make billions. So trying to get them to think about that is a challenge to say, “I see, if you attack the millions, not only can you make more when prices are high, but you could really keep being profitable as prices fall.”
Mark Graban: Is there a dynamic where, when prices are high and profits are high, there's not as much pressure to improve, and then things get into the bad cycle and they get in the cost-cutting mode? And they might say, “Well, we can't afford to improve.” That sounds funny to say out loud.
Gregg Stocker: Definitely. That is definitely the case. I think it's probably in a lot of industries too. You're blowing and going when things are good, so you don't have time, and then you've laid people off and you don't have time. There's so much room for improvement, but there are companies that are really starting to take it seriously. We'll see where they end up going, but yeah, they're… it's more so now than it was when, 15, 18 years ago when I got into the industry. The word lean was not even understood, or it's like, “What?” So I am seeing more of it now.
Mark Graban: Yeah. So tell us more about that. Is that a dynamic of the last decade as a timeframe or what? Different industries embrace lean at different times. In healthcare, I'm not saying this was the earliest time, but the 2000s decade was, especially the second half of the 2000s, was when healthcare started… the enthusiasm for lean and knowledge about lean was spreading. In the auto industry in Detroit, nineties, maybe when they begrudgingly started picking up on this, and parts of aviation maybe later. Is it a more recent kind of, if you will, discovery? You've been at this for 15 years, but trying to see what you know of the industry.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, and there were companies way back then that were doing it. I'd say there was a company called Aera Energy that was a… and I think they're still around, maybe, but it was a joint venture between Exxon and Shell. And I know several people who were there. They actually came to Hess, and I worked at Hess, but they kind of started the ball, I think, in this. They went from basically being on the block to be sold. Shell said, “You're not profitable, you're too small. We're just going to sell you.” So they went on the block to be sold and the people there, led by one or two people kind of leading it and getting it started, said, “No, we're going to fight this.” And they actually called in Toyota, TSSC, and they were being helped by TSSC.
Mark Graban: Oh, wow. Okay.
Gregg Stocker: So they, I'd say they were kind of the pioneers. 15 years ago, Hess Corporation picked up on it because a lot of the people from Aera went to Hess, and they were in unconventionals, which is all the stuff in North Dakota and Permian Basin in Texas, and had to get some costs down to be able to compete. So those were helping, and I think a lot of people, quote, “jumped on the bandwagon” then, but they were Six Sigma, doing a very little bit of real lean and really understanding lean. So that, as could be predicted, didn't sustain. So those companies kind of dropped it. But more recently, I think as the prices started dropping, companies like Exxon became very serious, and Exxon's really starting to make some strides in it, offshore, onshore, all over. So they're trying. A huge company with it is hard to even realize or understand how much they've got going. So they've got a long way to go. It's going to be slow. Hopefully they understand that. But I'm seeing it now more because of that. Someone like Exxon picks up on it. I think that helps. There's a Norwegian company called Aker BP…
Mark Graban: Mm-hmm.
Gregg Stocker: …which actually brought in some Toyota help and started doing some really good stuff.
Mark Graban: They're not BP?
Gregg Stocker: It's a Norwegian company, but they've done some pretty cool things and they got a CEO who's a zealot on lean, and that's helping keep it going. So I am starting to see more of it now.
Mark Graban: Yeah. I would expect maybe in an industry that it would be the smaller upstarts as opposed to the big behemoths that could embrace… I mean, like Toyota in the fifties and sixties and seventies had to be the smaller, scrappier company compared to the Detroit Big Three and other global large automakers. But where… oh, go ahead.
Gregg Stocker: No, and it's weird that the smaller companies generally aren't picking up on it like that.
Mark Graban: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Gregg Stocker: I think one part of that is a lot of smaller companies don't necessarily do their own drilling, their own completing, their own operations. They farm it out, and you don't have a lot of control that way, especially when you're small. So they haven't picked up on that that way. I think, although I've had a smaller company just reach out to me recently knowing that, to start doing some limited consulting going forward and saying, “Can you help us?” So it was good to see that. And they were a small company out of Utah that has done that.
Mark Graban: I want to ask about a couple of other things that I think are… I'm going to provide some lessons that are broadly, you know, relatable. For anyone who wants to deep dive into oil and gas examples, the book is there for you, Profitable at Any Price. But as I go through the book, there's a lot of lean goodness, I think, and applicability for others. So one thing I wanted to ask was your thoughts on starting the transformation in a company, any type. If you were thrown into that situation, what are some of your thoughts and key tips or things to avoid?
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, so one thing to avoid, which, you know, most people in lean know, is if it's being delegated and the leaders don't want to be involved. You know, “Have you come in and consult, but go help IT and don't bother me.” That's definitely a thing to avoid because I think starting with Deming early in my career, you got to get the top people on board. They've got to be a part of it. They got to be involved in it. But I think beyond that too, it's a big part is just getting and starting to help. If people aren't thinking it or they're fighting it, get out there and help them. In oil and gas, it's like go out to the platform, go out and spend time with those guys and watch what they're doing, start talking to them about their problems, help them understand how they can maybe address some of those problems little by little. And that's kind of what I've done in oil and gas. It's just get out there and build some trust to get them to start thinking it. And then start with, I know, start with standard work, start with dashboards. Even there, there's, I don't know if there's one right way to do it. The one thing I will say is start in a small pilot area. Don't try to roll it out across the organization. Make it small, make it compact. Get that little pilot working before you start spreading to other areas.
Mark Graban: That is a very good general tip indeed. I wanted to ask a little bit more about… I want to ask about how you would explain structured problem solving. Because in my experience, you go into organizations and sometimes people don't like to admit that there is a gap or an opportunity. People have said, “Oh, we're great problem solvers.” And then what you see being demonstrated is, let's say there's blaming or there's band-aiding. When I worked at Johnson & Johnson, by the way, they said, “Don't say ‘band-aiding',” because that was one of their brand names. My apologies to whoever owns the Band-Aid brand anymore. But how do you define, beyond being structured, better problem solving that avoids some of those traps that we see so often?
Gregg Stocker: Yeah. Instead of making it about the structured problem solving, as I mentioned earlier, I try to make it about learning. Let's… the idea is something went wrong, something we didn't understand. Or if we didn't understand it, we wouldn't have let it go wrong. So there's parts we don't understand about our own business and our own processes. So let's get in there and start learning. And I try actually to do it more that way and lead them through instead of going, “Okay, we're in step one. All right, we're in step two.” I don't know if that's as important as it is. From… and this we're talking about a big problem here where I'd say, “What is it? What did we expect to happen? What happened? And what are we trying to get to? What do we want it to be?” Then, and talk them through it to try to get down to some numbers instead of just text and gut feel. Then say, “Okay, so let's look at what happened. Let's break it down. Let's talk about where did it happen, when did it happen, when does it not happen?” And let's get into that kind of thing. And I try to lead through that discussion more than even like, “Here's an A3, let's follow the A3 through.” And what I also want to do, I think it's important to do the thinking no matter how small the problem is. When we're doing our daily standup, when we're looking at our dashboards, um, let's say, “Oh, we didn't meet the production yesterday.” “Okay, what should have happened? What didn't happen? Can we look at the data? Can it tell us anything? Or do we need some different kind of data to try to get down to what are we going to do to get back on production? Get back on forecast?” So, you know, I don't know if that's enough of an answer to your question, but it's…
Mark Graban: Yeah, we're scratching the surface and there's a lot of depth here. One other thing around problem solving, there's some kind of interconnected examples here where one of the examples you talk about in this multi-step structured problem solving, there's a problem statement defined as a gap between how much do people feel comfortable speaking up and how much do we want them to feel comfortable speaking up. Like, people not feeling comfortable speaking up can be one of the causes of why we don't have better problem solving, more problem solving, more improvement. And then in and of itself, it can be a problem statement. So at the risk of the listener scolding me for asking you to jump to countermeasures, around that issue, around helping people feel more comfortable speaking up, what are some of the mindsets and the leadership behaviors that can help people feel more comfortable bringing up problems and things that seem to be taken for granted at a place like Toyota?
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, I try to always make sure when I'm helping a company in lean, I also do some coaching at the leadership level. And I watch and I see how they react if they come into a standup meeting, say, “How do they react to the problems that are brought up?” You know, even from the look or what kind of, are they jumping in and asking questions when they really shouldn't? And I provide feedback on that.
I work too with trying to get leaders to say, “You know, we want to not only encourage problems being brought up, we want it as a requirement. I want to hear your problems. If there's going to be pressure, it's when you're not bringing up problems.” So try to get that through. In one situation, and this was probably six, seven years ago, I was working with a vice president who ran an asset at a company, production in oil and gas. And he was known for jumping, kind of overreacting to things. So people weren't bringing up problems. He changed and he kept saying, “No, I want to hear it. I'm sorry. I know I jumped, I had bad reactions,” and people still weren't doing it. So what we did is I had, you know, in the areas that I had some responsibility for, he and I scripted a conversation on that, and we practiced it. So we got into the meeting and I would kind of jump over one of my problems and he'd have to stop me and say, “Wait, I'm not quite understanding. Can you explain that a little bit more?” And where I came out and said, “Okay, yeah, that was a problem,” he would make some comments to me about, “You know, I need to hear these. I want to help you if I need to. You know, can I provide help to you in any way? I've got to know they're there.” So that really helped. It took a lot of effort. It took a vice president who had an open mind and was willing to do that, but scripting it, and I was the guinea pig there for playing it out in front of the others, and I think it really helped. But it took a good relationship to do that.
Mark Graban: Well, and it's rare. I mean, I love that story that you shared. And you know, we said earlier, I think that personal transformation can be rare, but even when somebody has that moment and that spark and they're changing, it's hard for others to believe that they've actually changed or they're continuing to grow and change. And you know, the leader, “Well, yeah, they started saying we want to hear, you know, but I don't believe it yet.” Oh yeah. It can bring people along and building trust and building psychological safety, it's not like snapping your fingers and saying, “It's safe now, I'm different.”
Gregg Stocker: No, for sure. And it takes a long time to build up trust, and the leader needs to understand that they're paying for that. On the other side of it, I've been in companies where we went through the psychological safety journey. In some cases it's just done as training. “Let's just train our leaders in psychological safety.” Well, I mean, you know this, it doesn't work that way. If you don't have it inside and you're not the right DNA, it's not going to work.
Mark Graban: Right. I mean, knowing what psychological safety means is a first step, because that word gets thrown around the way the phrase “lean production” gets thrown around. People say, “Oh no,” I mean, they jump to an assumption of what that means. And a couple times in the conversation here, I've been wrong on an assumption, so thank you for challenging me on some of that. I'm not always wrong. I don't think any of it was a big deal, but thank you for challenging, sharing, you know, most importantly things from your own lean journey, from your most recent work from this book. So, you know, I feel like we're scratching the surface. You know, we could come back and take any one of these topics, maybe, you know, some point down the road, we'll do another conversation if there's a topic you want to take a deeper dive into. I would love to.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, I enjoy this as you know, and you and I have talked before. It's something I'm passionate about and it's hard to stop talking. That's one of my problems.
Mark Graban: So before we wrap up, again, Gregg Stocker–it's Gregg with two Gs. I'm sure if you Google it, the Google machine would correct you if you were wrong. Hopefully. Profitable at Any Price: Lean Thinking for Safer, Cheaper, and More Responsible Oil and Gas Production. I encourage you, if you're looking for another lean book or a first book, and there's not a book about lean for your industry, there's a lot that I think would be good and transferable for people in other settings. Tell us about the next book, Avoiding the Corporate Death Spiral. That's taking on a big challenge, right?
Gregg Stocker: Well, actually, it's a rewrite. The book was published in 2007 by Quality Press.
Mark Graban: My mistake.
Gregg Stocker: No, it's not. They took it out of print. And so I worked with them and got it back to me. So now I'm rewriting it. I don't know if you're the same way or not, but I really have trouble reading what I've wrote before.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Gregg Stocker: ‘Cause I find so many things I should have said differently or I learned something that I didn't know then and… wow. So I'm going to do that with Avoiding the Corporate Death Spiral. I'm not sure having the term “death spiral” on the title is a good thing, so I don't know if I'm going to change that.
Mark Graban: Good question.
Gregg Stocker: It's the warning signs of a company in trouble is what I did. It's very heavy Deming, I think, but when I read it, I go, “Wow, I should have explained that better.” So, there are copies out there, but I'd say it's going to be better on the next one as I start working on that.
Mark Graban: Hey, Kaizen and the pursuit of perfection.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah. And at some point your wife will probably say, “Okay, come on, Gregg.” She determines when the alarm goes off on the takt time and it's time to get this one out. Get on the next one.
Mark Graban: And then the next one that'll be a new book.
Gregg Stocker: Yeah, that'll be about sustainability. So I'm going to, I've already started it, so I've got a couple going now and knowing where to go, where to focus is a challenge for me. But yeah, it's how to apply, it's sort of lean thinking for sustainability. ‘Cause, you know, the lean thinking, the Hoshin Kanri process is, in my mind, how you do anything really and how you stay focused and how you keep moving forward. So it's going to be applying that to sustainability.
Mark Graban: We'll have you back to talk about that.
Gregg Stocker: Great.
Mark Graban: Those books as well. So, Gregg Stocker, thank you for having the conversation today, sharing insights, and again, congratulations on the book.
Gregg Stocker: Thanks. I enjoyed it.
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