Exploring the 'Say Do' Principle, Business Efficiency, and Leadership in the Modern Workplace

I'm not that good, but, you know, I'm a little older, so I guess I can have an excuse. You put a blog up, and I think it goes up tonight. You sent it across to me last week. It really got my attention, and the headline on it, the way that I looked at it is, Say, Do. And I'm going to take a little bit of a shortcut on it, and then I'd like you to expand on that. A lot of people say they're going to do something, but Not as many do what they say they're going to do. And that the reason it gets my attention is that drives me crazy.

Did I misunderstand that? No.

Yeah. I'm not so sure that it isn't built into how we operate anymore. There's not a lot of change in the world that I experience. A lot of people are sticking their hand up now saying they want to embrace change, but they don't know how to go forward. And when I say that I think it's gone away is people are focusing on jobs. doing a job and doing the job the way the job was originally given to them, presented to them, trained to them. And if an employee has the courage to stand up and say, well, why the heck do you do it that way? They almost get smacked down today. I'd be dead because that was, you know, why the hell do you do it that way was a common thing of mine. And, you know, are you seeing that in the market that more and more people are just doing the job they were employed to do without the opportunity to change it or improve it?

It is weird. Do you think the culture at GE is still the same as it was when you were there? Or has it gone into the same dark hole?

Yeah, very much.

Yeah. Yeah, yes, yes. Like you'd say tunnel vision in Welsh. Welsh was an anomaly. He, and I think the business community in America, if not internationally, is accepted and understands that. And Jeff Immel was a much smarter man, and he presided over a company that was on top of the hill, and he had a heck of a time trying to stay there. In fact, he didn't. And then, you know, we got Bob Iger, a similar situation at Disney. And he left and then the company changed and their stock value is about half what it used to be. General Electric basically was sold almost at an auction price level. It seems like we've got different leadership styles now, too. Like you say, no teamwork. We don't have leaders that seem to trust their employees. They'd rather tell the employee what to do rather than ask. Is that too harsh, do you think?

Yeah. You know, I talk to a lot of different. schools and a lot of different people in schools. And one of the things that they're, a lot of schools are transitioning from one generation to the other. And you and I've talked about this in the past. I think my generation has stuck around too long. And there's a lot of people that talk, like that's why the say do thing was so appealing to me. I think there's a lot of people that want, especially the younger generation, but they don't get the support. And I think the older generation, again, this is opinions and it's not necessarily backed up. So I'll be interested in commentary we get from this. The older generation are risk averse. So they don't want to change things for fear that it'll cause a problem and they don't have enough time to recover versus the younger generation aren't worried about making mistakes. The trick with mistakes is they're going to happen.

You just got to identify them quickly and adapt and adjust and fix. And don't wait around.

Yeah, it's like firefighting. If you catch it early enough, it's easy. Yeah. If it isn't, it's, oh boy, oh boy, it's a problem. And so, you know, and again, that goes back to data analytics. And I think that also highlights the difference between generations with artificial intelligence and with data analytics. we can process data like it's going out of style. Sure. So, you know, I can run a year's worth of data and come up with changing buying patterns and give people a list of customers that the buying habits they have have changed and you better intervene. You better call them.

Exactly. And the people that I talk to are in two camps. One is, I don't know how to get that. And two is, oh, damn, would that be helpful? And that's almost age separated. It's really remarkable. I'm older than most, but I don't think I'm old in my head and how I look at things. I don't understand how people, whether they're 60 or 50 or 20, get stuck. How can you be happy with what we got forever? It's not the way it is, you know? Yeah. So how do you overcome that? People say they're going to get it done, but they don't. As a project manager, as a leader, how do you make sure that doesn't happen?

the pleasure and the opportunity at a very young age to work with a project manager for IBM who worked, he directed the lunar landing project. Oh. And he was an amazing guy. But one of the things that I will never forget is he made this bold pronouncement. If it ain't in writing, it don't exist. And if you're looking at large projects like what he was involved with, I mean, if you don't document things, you're cooked.

Yeah. Well, another friend of mine, a partner of mine, actually, Malcolm Ferry, he's since passed, but he was the project manager for Boeing on the same thing. Awfully smart people. And I think we've got smarter people today, better breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding. But I don't see the risk taking today like there was. Like chat GBT, everybody's pronouncing that as being one of the greatest things since sliced bread. Well, that damn thing has been 40 years in the incubator. Sure. You know, data management, data analytics, you know, the database management structure, you know, that's been around since the 60s.

And it kind of takes me back to, and I wrote about this a number of years ago, when the electric engine came in and replaced the steam engine, that was done reasonably quickly. But to take advantage of the opportunity that the electric engine provided, it took a generation of leaders to get it to the point that it was used properly. Probably the same thing's true with cars, same thing's true with planes. I don't know. I haven't looked that deeply at it. What are we doing now that's earth shattering? I don't see electric vehicles as an earth shattering event.

Telepathics or telematics has been good, but hell, that's been around forever. Sure. Where are we? That might be why we're in the state. We don't know what to do anymore. If we're on a project and it's specifically defined, that's pretty easy, right?

But I don't know how many employees, at least the ones that I interact with, I don't see that many employees that either are interested in developing or improving or know where to go to look or how to identify.

I agree with that.

So that's kind of typical of what I'm talking about. It's the same thing's true with the equipment. Any piece of capital good, whether it's a washer at your house or a locomotive and pulling a train. We've got life cycle data.

We've got markers. We've got tools that can analyze. metallic wear, fluid pollution, you know, all kinds of things that accelerate wear. So we have the data. And, you know, the supporting data is if you can repair something before it fails, you can reduce the bill by 50%. It's plus or minus five or 10 points, but it's still material as hell.

That's right.

it's funny. I was talking to a fellow today about an inventory application on their business system and they didn't. have a system set up very well. So we were adjusting things and correcting things. And we're talking about performance criteria and measurement and all the rest of this stuff. And I said, if you put this in, you're going to have a higher level of availability for your customers. And he says, well, I don't know that I can do that because I haven't got enough warehouse space. So, you know, now I got... The whole damn business held up because nobody designed the facility properly. We didn't design the facility properly. That was a common problem back in the 70s and 80s with John Deere dealers. They didn't have any space in a warehouse. It wasn't important. You need the shop to prepare machines to sell, but that's really it. And that's an advanced company. It's a leading business. It's been around 150 years or close to it.

But that big deal. Another guy yesterday or the day before, we're talking about, he was a manager at a major brand equipment house. And he took over a job. And there were outstanding issues in payments and credits and collections. Okay. And there was an invoice that was worth around $10,000 that the customer had not paid. And there wasn't supporting documentation. So what this new boss did is he wrote him a letter. attach the bill and tell them whatever you think is fair, pay it. And the customer wrote a letter back with a check for the full amount saying they would be a customer of that particular dealership forever because of that approach.

At the end of the day, we're people.

You know, and we forget about that. I've been a man. Not about understanding. Everybody has to understand what we're trying to do. Acceptance. Everybody has to have the opportunity to fight with me about why I think that's the right thing if they don't. And if we don't have that fight, we never get agreement that we're going to be committed to time. We get a lot of people giving us lip service saying things. But fewer people will do it because part of that dilemma, I think, is they don't really understand what we're trying to do or they don't agree that what we're trying to do is the right thing. Yeah. It's really weird. As an example, the national anthem of the United States of America is very rarely played the way it's written. Russia requires that the national anthem, whenever it's used in an international forum, is exactly the way that the Russian national anthem is supposed to be.

They're the only country in the world that I'm aware that does that at the Olympics, the gold medal ceremonies, etc., which is why you hear the whole damn thing. And it's a long one. But we don't tend to do that. I don't know that we've got documented procedures like we used to. I don't know that we have annual.

Well, exactly. One of my standard complaints, and you might have heard me talk about this. Mechanics ordering parts at a dealership. The mechanic in the shop leaves his bay, walks to the parts department, and stands and talks to another person who gets the order for the mechanic. Many times the mechanic looks at books before they leave their bay. They have a piece of paper that has it all written on. They still walk to that back counter, and now I've got two people involved. And everybody looks at me like I've grown horns when I say, why the hell don't you just have them pick up a phone?

that's even... I don't want it to go too far. I'll shop. Pick up the phone and order. Oh, you mean I could do it on a tablet or a laptop? Hell yes. It's, you know, and I call her. I don't know if I'm the one that started this or not, but we call it paper to glass. When we brought something into the computer world, all we did was we took the paper form and we put it on a screen. So instead of writing it by hand, you typed it. I can't type to save my life, which is why I don't subscribe to that so much. We went into, I became a data processing manager and I looked at every single damn form. We had 150 different forms. How many forms have not been used in the last 12 months? Came up with 30 of them, throw them away. Don't do that anymore.

I don't know what caused that regression.

Is it that simple? We're understaffed, so we don't have enough time to do everything the way we should. So we kind of, it's a lick and a promise like my hair. Is that kind of becoming the deal? Yeah,

It was, it was really interesting. You know, Dale Hanna, who we, you're aware as a colleague of ours and a partner of mine in other enterprises, he's got what he calls fleet management. And he's been using texts for a long time and telematics and GPS locating and all those things for a long time. And we did a podcast a week or two ago about a new product he's got. He's created an app that's voice activated. So anybody who wants anything to know a place of equipment talks to the phone.

And the thing that he told me that really got my attention or one of the conclusions he came to, the users of his tools, all of these tools are there already, but the entry point was a laptop or a tablet or a phone.

And he said, people are telling me that training is their biggest hurdle. that people don't have time to learn how to do things anymore. And that brought me to, you know, I still don't know how to use pivot tables that well. You know, I don't keep up with software the way that I should. And he came to the conclusion that it's time that's causing that. And we've had unbelievably low unemployment for a long time, but we've got 10 million that's now less than that. But we've had 10 million people looking for work for probably five years now. We don't have enough people doing the work. And a lot of businesses seem to drive their profitability on the backs of people. I either don't have enough or I don't pay enough. The reason labor issue with the automotive companies. Ford said, you know, our bill is going to go up by $8.8 billion. I said, congratulations. In another five years, half the workforce will be replaced with robots.

So I hope you enjoy the raise you got, guys. But at the same time, the manufacturers were not paying the guys properly. They didn't keep up with what was intended. And that's almost the same trigger that caused unionization in the 1800s. Abuse by the employer, which is the old feudal system, isn't it? And that comes back to exactly what you and I are talking about now, because the Lord told the serf what to do. The serf was not expected to be creative at all. Now the serf is the worker bee, and the worker bee is told what to do, and they go out and do it. And they know damn well, because when they get home at night, they'll tell their wife or their husband or their children or whatever, boy, you should have seen today. I remember sitting at a dinner table when Medicare was introduced in Canada with one of the leading surgeons in the world. He was the second man to do a heart transplant. He said, I had a really good day today.

I don't remember the exact numbers. He said, I made $1,500. I did remove two appendix and I did one thyroid operation. Fixed price, here we are. And he was kind of laughing at it. It was too late for him. At a certain age, you're not worried about money. But when you're younger and you're starting out, you want to have the opportunity to challenge yourself and be the best you can be, I think. But we're stifling that now, my opinion.

How do we change that? How do we get more people doing and less people saying?

So this discussion, your blog, but, you know, like you say, you're setting expectations. I don't know that we've created expectations that are strong enough. And then you talked about guardrails and checking. Yeah. This is common sense stuff, isn't it?

And then adapting and adjusting as necessary is also common sense stuff. And then you're going to achieve the goal. You're going to satisfy the need, the purpose. But we seem to have lost that.

Sure. Is it lack of preparation?

Probably a bit of all of that. You know, maybe it's a reflection as well, Sarah. We've got so many choices today. When I was hitting university, you either took a science track or you took an arts track. Today, God knows how many damn tracks there are. You know? And yet the end result of it is we've got a whole bunch of people that are a hell of a lot smarter than I ever was at that age, or probably even you, but they aren't. They don't have critical thinking skills anymore. And I don't know how well we there are ways that we get that back, but it's education driven and it'll take a while. But, you know, this COVID thing where we shut people down, didn't go to school. We're going to pay for that for the next 10,20,30 years.

Yeah.

Yeah, my daughter's a teacher in middle school and high school. And she's got the same thing, with the exception that they're, I don't know if you and I have spoken about it, but she's following a program called AVID. which is advancement by individual determination, which is a completely different thing than gait. This applies to everybody, not just gifted and talented people. And what her characterization of it to me was that every student in every class every week has to stand up and make a 10-minute presentation to their peers, the people in the class, about what they learned in that subject and what impact that had on their lives.

That's really cool. That's kind of scary cool that people that are 10 and 11 to 14 are being taught to think that way.

It is. And that's been around since 1980. And it's only in the last 18 months that my daughter's been involved in teaching it in the school districts that she's in. It hasn't been there before. But it's coming. And so I think slowly but surely we're identifying those gaps. I was talking to the president of Troy University in Alabama, I think it is. He was the first one, his school was the first one to go international because of the military. where they had internet-based classes back in the 80s. Okay. That's way the hell ahead of everybody else. But what he said to me, yeah, critical thinking and analytical and communications, those things, everybody knows that they've been eroding. But he said, and this is about a year ago now, he says, I'm really worried because I'm not seeing leadership skills anymore. And is that a reflection that we're spending so much time walking down the street with our phone?

Not looking where we're going, but looking at the map on the screen.

There's a wonderful short YouTube called Look Up, which is exactly about this subject where a guy is walking down the street with his phone. And you should watch it. It's wonderful. Everybody should watch it. It's a heck of a statement. The audience that you and I deal with, employees in businesses, businesses are constantly trying to make more money. a DNA type, a genetic type of thing with a company. But they seem to have been doing it on the backs of people.

Yeah, get more units. You know, GDP is a funny measure because it's units of work per unit of worker. Well, if I shrink the number of workers, I can make my GDP look great. Yeah. It doesn't mean anything, you know. So a whole bunch of people are saying, well, democracy is not that good anymore. We need a combination. so that we can get, you know, these hedge funds at trillions of dollars. That's too much money. And it's hard to argue that, Sarah. But I need more people to do. I need more people to want to do. And I'm going to tell you that that means that I've got to get more people trained. I've got to expose more people to more things.

And then when they come back, I want them to tell their peers, their co-workers, what the hell they learned from that class.

Exactly. And that causes people to think. Yeah. So when I ask that of people, they kind of look at me funny. Nobody's asked them that question. You know, one of the things, and I think you've heard me talk about this, my five things routine. Make a list of five things that if you could change would make your life better. Make a list of five things that are a pain in the butt to do. Make a list of five things that would help your company be more profitable. And the number of things that are on each of those three lists that are the same, it's astounding. And if it's true, why is it still? Why is it still?

Well, you know, and a lot of that is, again, because I think we've spent too much time in a very simple statistical model where exponential.

that cost to move at one percent exponentially it gets

yeah right and and as a result of that we say stop you know that's okay we'll see we'll leave it the way it is but that that one percent change you know it's it's it's huge i should say i don't know if i've sent you those five things you should use that as a as a device

I'll send it to you. It's nothing fancy. Make, you know, make it yours. The anything and everything that we can do to help people feel better about what they do and are able to measure. This is one of the things that I really get cranky about. When people go home at night, they do not know how to measure their performance for that day. If I'm pulling a wrench on the shop floor, I can. I do. But every other job functions, it's not there. And I think that's something that we should pay attention to. Let's find some measures that you can use yourself when you go home to say, you know, I could have done that better. Or, wow, that was a good day.

We don't have that today.

Oh, no question about it.

Yeah. I don't laugh at this before I get out of bed in the morning. I've gone through, I have three different email accounts and four different social media accounts. I go through all of them before I get out of the bed. And if I don't, somehow I don't feel that I'm ready for the day because I don't know what I'm going to get hit with. Okay. So I'm using that time, those seven activities to avoid problems, not to improve things. It's more defensive than offensive.

And the fact that I bring it up to you drives me crazy. I've been doing this a long time.

Well, and I'm getting them from all around the world to some degree. It's exciting. You know, I hear from somebody in Belgium or in Tokyo or, you know, Sao Paulo. You know, we've got a hell of a problem at Sao Paulo. The airport's a zoo and nobody knows how to do anything there anymore. It's, well, who's asking you to look? And off we go, you know. So that's the same thing as this discussion about inventory. Well, I can't put my availability in the right place because I don't have enough storage. So wait a second, you can rent warehousing. Don't give me that nonsense. That's easy to fix, you know. But I think it's part of our landscape now. that we're stuck continuing to do what we've always done, even if you find evidence that requires you to make a change that'll make it better, as your case was.

And we've got a lot of employees who've been smacked down when they bring forward suggestions to the point that they stop bringing forward the suggestions.

Yep. And now we've got the younger generation that the older generation is not very respectful of because they're not going to hang around like we used to. That's right. If they're not learning, they're gone. Yeah. And guys my age, they look at me, they ask me, Ron, what happened to people? I always did what my boss told me to do. Well, I learned that from my father. And as soon as I got away from him, I stopped doing that. Yeah. I think it's almost built in, Sarah, and that really is troubling to me. So where you are on the forefront of this with analytics and the quality of data, which is an issue also. Yes. And then the ability to analyze it, to create a case, to look for continuous improvement, to make things better. There's not a big audience that does that anymore.

Well, you should be able to. Every department should have somebody that does nothing but think about how they can do things better. Yes. And maybe that could be a rotating job.

And learn.

Yeah, we used to, you know, I used to have meetings, monthly meetings with the team. And it was an hour and a half and it was half an hour on product, half an hour on process and half an hour, whatever the hell was important now. And the half an hour on process was always taught by one of the employees. Good. And that's devious because they wanted to know that damn thing because they didn't want their coworkers to jump all over them because they didn't know something. So everybody got better in the process. Right. We we have we don't do those as much as we used to. No. So it's a series. Now, there's a there's grist for your writing in the blogs. Here's a series of things that we need to do to get ourselves back on track. The same do is a bit of a trigger. OK, what do I and that's that should be opportunities for you in the work you do. So it's a crazy subject, but I'm glad we touched it.

I don't know that many people that are listening are going to pay attention to it other than maybe it'll provoke a little bit of thinking, which I hope it does. Every single business that I touch, every single school that I touch has a thirst for wanting to do things better, but they don't know where to start. They need somebody to come in on a white horse that'll show them away. That's you. I'm too old.

Oh, I know. I know. Well, look at how old is Jack Welch now? He's still working. He's still teaching. He's still writing. Amazing, isn't it? Yeah. Sarah, it's wonderful. How do you want to wrap this up? Moving from saying to doing. You've got all of the tools, setting the expectations, the guardrails, checkpoints, making adjustments, adapting. How do we get that to bring it to life inside all these different businesses? How do we get the locomotive project so that, you know, instead of four times, we only need to do it twice or three times? Three

It'd be huge. Well, we got rid of cabooses. How long did that take? Well, yeah. How do you wrap this up now?

Yeah.

Celebrating successes.

We don't do enough of that, and we don't do it in public either. We got participation trophies anymore rather than exceptional performance. Everybody's okay. We're all the same. Don't want you to feel bad. Wait a second. When you get out and you're earning a buck, all of a sudden it's not participation. You're not going to be looked at. You're just as good as Mary or George. You're expected to be better.

So we run up against a wall because we can't really give specific advice that could be a solution. But I'd like to have more people thinking about this, talking about this inside their companies, inside their families, inside their schools, about how do we make things better for the people that come behind us? How do we make things better for ourselves while we're here? And I don't know that there's enough of that.

I've got the same thing around our house. You know, my granddaughter is in Hawaii now taking her master's and she's just finished the semester. Her last quote, quote, presentation exam was yesterday. And I said, are you going to relax for the next two or three weeks? He said, oh, I've got papers to grade and I've got labs to run. You know, she's working. My grandson goes to school eight to four or five days a week and has two hours of tutoring one-on-one every night. He's not coasting. My daughter's having to rebuild curriculum all over the place. And we're nuts in this place. It's nuts. I don't think we're unusual, but we're blessed with. the opportunity that not everybody has. So that's, you know, that's the other thing that people need to recognize. So, you know, it's, I don't want to beat this thing to death, but I think we've got terrific need.

I think we've got a bunch of smart people that have not been challenged to the degree, like show me how good you are. And I think it's something that we have to come to grips with. And this discussion hopefully causes people, this conversation hopefully causes people to think about it a little bit and maybe start acting on it. So thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you to the people that are listening. And I look forward to seeing you with another Candid Conversation in the very near future. Aloha and thank you. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com The time is now. Mahalo!