Hyundai’s Humanoid Robots, GM Layoffs, Jim Farley’s Ford Quality Turnaround, and Toyota Kaizen for Coffee Farmers
Formerly known as “Lean Whiskey”
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In Season 2, Episode 9, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh recap the World Cup, declare a “dealer's choice” coffee round, and wade into a very full news roundup of robots, layoffs, and quality turnarounds.
Jamie, the resident soccer expert, breaks down Spain's dominant run to the title, Argentina's grit in a 1-0 final, and why the Golden Glove winner is a bit like a running back who owes his offensive line a thank-you. Mark, the confessed casual fan, finally understands the offside rule (mostly) and connects VAR reviews, baseball's new ABS challenge system, and NFL holding calls to a bigger question: how much precision do we actually want in enforcing our standards? Jamie's take, after decades of playing and coaching: referees make far fewer mistakes than players do, we just like blaming them more. We also touch on the backlash to FIFA's World Cup stake sale and its 64-team expansion plans.
Coffee-wise, Mark sips a bottled La Colombe cold brew while Jamie recovers from a mason-jar-of-cold-brew tragedy (grounds everywhere) with a Nicaraguan pour-over in his Lean Coffee Talk mug. There is still no merch store.
The lean conversation starts, fittingly, with coffee: a Toyota Times story about Toyota bringing kaizen to coffee farmers in a Thai village, where six years of PDCA, standardized harvesting, and an irrigation project helped lift cupping scores from 76 to 85.5, from commercial grade into high-grade specialty territory. We loved the story, though the “coffee on a slide” delivery rail leaves us asking a classic question: did they improve the flow, or just automate the waste?
From there it's on to the robots. Hyundai finalized its ownership of Boston Dynamics the same month its Korean workers staged a partial strike over Atlas, the six-foot-two humanoid headed for the factory floor aimed, the company says, at jobs that are 3D: dirty, dangerous, or dull. Meanwhile, GM laid off over a thousand workers at Factory Zero while installing fifty cobots, an implied cause-and-effect the headlines got a little too excited about, but still a very bad look. Jamie argues this is just the next chapter in a very long-running automation story, and he goes further in his article AI Fragility: Why I'm Not Pro-AI or Anti-AI, but Pro-Thoughtfulness. Mark shares how our friends at KaiNexus are taking the people-first path with AI.
Then we dig into Ford's quality comeback. Jim Farley, who says he's watched Ford “fall in love and fall out of love with quality” four times in his career, has been going to the gemba, and Ford just topped the J.D. Power Initial Quality Study for the first time since 2010. But is initial quality the whole story?
Jamie offers a broken-windows-theory analogy (a bit of a stretched analogy), and the two dig into Farley's eyebrow-raising comments about Ford's China and Mexico plants outperforming its American ones: finger-pointing, or an honest statement about management systems and the “dignity of the workplace”? Coverage from autoevolution and The Detroit News fills in more of what he actually said. Mark adds some GM Northstar engine plant history about what happens when design flaws poison a plant's quality reputation for a decade, which connects to his post Ford Process Coaches Quit Within 18 Months. Here's Why.
And speaking of quality turnarounds, Burger King has a new “Your Way Champion” role and a Whopper Guarantee, which Dexerto covered here. Mark and his wife ran their own field test and got sad, smashed Whoppers anyway. Timing your ads to your actual quality rollout: still hard.
We wrap up with cultural shares that bring things full circle to soccer: Mark just watched the new trailer for Ted Lasso season four, premiering August 5 on Apple TV. Jamie's family has already started their rewatch. Jamie's share is a category: go rediscover the games that existed before you were born. His find, courtesy of a friend and eBay, is a long-forgotten card game called Flinch. Some things are just meant to be.
Also mentioned: Jamie's book People Solve Problems: The Power of Every Person, Every Day, Every Problem and Mark's podcast My Favorite Mistake.
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