In July 2006, I pressed record on a conversation with Norm Bodek. The audio quality was poor. I had no idea what I was doing. Norman, who had spent decades going to Japan and had published Ohno and Shingo in English, was patient with me. “I want to thank you very much for doing this with me,” he said. “I think it's going to be a lot of fun.” That recording went up as Episode #1.
This post is the first in a series marking 20 years of Lean Blog Interviews. It starts with Norman because Norman started it.
We had been doing Q&A on the blog in typed form, back and forth by email, when he told me I should do “a radio interview with me.” I said let's make it a podcast instead. That was July 2006. Fourteen episodes with Norman followed over the next seven years, the last one when he was moving into a new phase of his teaching with the Harada Method. Across those fourteen episodes and the many phone calls that weren't recorded, I think I understand what he was up to better now than I did then.
Norman can be described as “the Godfather of Lean in America.” The publisher who brought Ohno and Shingo into English. Industry Week Hall of Fame. Shingo Prize. None of that is wrong. But that framing misses the thing that actually mattered about him, which is that he was a man who kept finding things, and he couldn't stand to find something without sharing it.
That's what the podcast was, from his point of view. He had just come back from a study mission, or he'd just read something old and brilliant by Henry Gantt, or he'd just visited a plant in Mexico that had gone from 16 ideas a month to 20,000. He wanted to call and tell someone. In Episode #28, recorded a year after we started, he opened with, “We just have to do this more often because I keep discovering so many wonderful things that I love to share.” A year in, and already onto the next thing he'd found.
What Norm Bodek learned from Ohno
Norman had studied with some of the most important figures in 20th-century manufacturing, and the stories he told about them were almost never about his own closeness to them. They were about what they wouldn't tell him.
The Ohno stories he recorded with me in 2012, on what would have been Ohno's 100th birthday, are a good window into this. Every time Norman tried to get Ohno to explain the Toyota Production System, Ohno said some version of the same line. “Norman, you don't understand just-in-time.” Norman would press. Ohno would repeat it. He told me once that Ohno never told you how to do anything. He'd say what he wanted done. He'd walk away. A year later the warehouse would be gone and the people who had worked in it would be trained as mechanics.
Norman took that approach into his own teaching. Ask, don't tell. In the first-anniversary episode, we got onto Ohno's habit of asking rather than telling, and Norman said something I still think about.
“I had a company with 127 people. I never asked anybody anything. I was the boss. I made the most money. I owned 100% of the stock. Why should I ask anybody anything?”
He said it with a laugh. He wasn't bragging. He was saying he had learned the hard way that owning the company didn't entitle you to the best ideas in it.
Baptist Healthcare, and the phone calls
Norman had a particular thing about healthcare. I didn't fully understand it when we started. Early on he kept coming back to the Baptist Healthcare story: a hospital system in Florida that had been the lowest-rated in the state, put in an idea system that had every employee contributing, and eventually won the Baldrige. “I'm sure they did other things,” he'd say, always careful. “But the catalyst was getting every employee involved in continuous improvement.”
That story lives in Episode #95, recorded in 2010. It also lived, in one form or another, in a lot of our phone calls that weren't recorded. We'd do a podcast maybe once or twice a year. We'd talk in between more often than that. I'd be worn down by something I had seen in a hospital, some piece of leadership behavior that had embarrassed me on behalf of the field. Norman would come back with Baptist. Or with a plant he had just visited. In his telling, there was no field that couldn't climb out of its own mess if the leadership would stop criticizing ideas.
The cheerfulness was unreasonable, which is partly why it worked. Norman believed the people in healthcare weren't the problem. He thought the field was full of people who would do extraordinary things if someone would stop punishing them for having ideas. In my worst moments about the industry, he'd remind me that he believed that.
“What day of the week do you like?”
In that first-anniversary episode, Norman did a thing he did often. He turned to the listeners and told them to pick one thing.
“You want to pick one thing. One thing to be great in. Become the Tiger Woods of that.”
He might use a different example today. It sounds a little corny on the page. It didn't sound corny coming from a man who had spent 40 years deciding that the thing he wanted to be great at was finding other people's good ideas and making sure someone else heard about them.
He'd ask audiences, when he keynoted, what day of the week they liked. Almost everyone said Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. He thought that was a tragedy. Not in a sentimental way. He thought something had gone wrong if the majority of your waking life was the part you were trying to get away from. The whole Harada Method turn of his later career, which we talked about in his last appearance with me in 2013, came out of that observation. He wanted people to pick a goal they cared about and have a coach who would actually meet with them about it. Simple, mostly unglamorous, and hard for companies to sit still for.
What Norm Bodek might say now
Norman passed at the end of 2020, so he didn't get to see the podcast make it to 500, or to 20 years. I think he'd be genuinely delighted and then, probably within about 30 seconds, he'd be telling me about something he had just found. A new teacher. A new book. Another place that had gone from one idea per seven years to one idea per month. He'd want to call. He'd want to share it.
The thing I keep coming back to, now that I've had a few years to sit with the fact of him being gone: Norman was wrong about one thing. In our last recorded conversation, he thanked me for being one of his students and said, “I feel that I'm your teacher.” He said it warmly. He meant it generously. But it was only half the truth. Norman was a teacher to a lot of us, including me. He was also the person who, on an ordinary day in early 2006, said: you should do radio interviews. And then, over the next fourteen episodes and many phone calls that no one recorded, helped me figure out what kind of interviewer I wanted to be.
The series continues next week with a look back at episodes with Jim Womack.
