Sara Hanks and I talk about Process Improvement integrated with Six Sigma and Project Management.

But it's interesting that the school asked you to do that and then the way that you twisted it, because those two things are mutually exclusive from an education perspective. Budget management is a subject matter all of its own and continuous improvement or Six Sigma, whatever we want to label it, that's another one. You have to have facility and expertise in both. in order to be able to do what you're able to do and putting them together. I'll bet you the audience was a little bit taken aback by that.

Yeah, and I think that's pretty typical of the way technology has evolved. If you think about the origin of Six Sigma. TQM, CQI,5S, all of these other things. That was industrial engineering. It was a very rudimentary, very detailed, laborious task that would have been there for hundreds of years. And Juran and Deming kind of were the late 70s, early 80s here, earlier than that in Japan. So it's only been 50 years,40 years. which in the overall scope of things is not very much time. And then if you bring it forward and start looking at data analytics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, telematics, all of this stuff, it's each of them is being treated as a discrete, unique task function when they need to be merged and make this jigsaw puzzle or this mosaic, whatever you want to call it. That's a tool that everybody not only can use, but can understand. Yeah. A lot of people look at Six Sigma and Sigma. What is that?

But that's, I think that's a very natural circumstance to find the limits, the boundaries of the use of this tool. We have to pass them. We have to cross them. So like you said, Motorola tried to shoehorn everything into it and found, oh darn, it doesn't all work. So now we start getting selective, but we'll put down that channel and guess what? We left all that other stuff alone. We didn't do it. Yeah,

Yeah.

The trick with that again, though, is that hardly any businesses have the scope of employees that have that skill set. General Electric, when you were there, it's a large company. There were a lot of people trained in the same discipline. But if you think back to the folks that really got it, you're still looking at single digit percentages of the total population that was involved in the classes. Sure.

And they were the ones that taught the curriculum. And everybody knows who they are.

Yeah. Yeah, and it comes back to discipline in every respect. Example, documentation. We're terrible at that. Yeah. And, you know, if you're looking with data analytics, what you just wrote about, without good data, we're dead.

Well, and I'll bet you money that 80%,90% of the data that everybody's playing with today is dirty. Yeah. It's not clean. I just went through a project with a rather large organization, and they had five to seven years worth of history. We ended up only being able to use six or eight months of this year because of changes in systems, et cetera. One of the things that you write about and that you and I talked about, ownership. of data. Yeah. Somebody has to own that piece of information. And if anybody tries to change or touch that and it's mine, I own you.

You're not going to do that a second time. Yeah. We don't have that discipline either, do we?

One of the things that seems to be going on also is that a lot of businesses are using different software packages for different functions. And rarely do they talk to each other. And another element is, well, they'll have a whole bunch of data elements that are common. And two systems updating the same data element, now we have fun. Oh, yeah. And that's going to be a huge job opportunity for a lot of people in the future, synchronizing all of these different systems. You're going to have to have a translator out there. Here's Salesforce. Here's a DMS. Here's a financial package. Here's an HR package. Put them all together. So you're going to have this group in the middle that's going to pull from all these places and create a new one. Yeah. That's the only way it's going to work.

Yeah, it's like chief information officers are becoming. relatively common, but like you say, that requires a big budget. Yeah, it does. Most of the companies in the world are small. Yeah. A hundred million and down is almost in an investment world, investing in the company world, dangerous. Because you can spend three to five million, three to five percent of your business in a heartbeat. Yeah. And in many cases, the net... Taxable income is less than three to 5%. So you're rolling the dice on the whole damn business. Yeah, oof is right. And like you said, there's three or four people that we call on all the time because they're the ones that know how to do it. Yeah. It's kind of cute. So how do you like teaching?

Much harder.

Yeah. Well, the other thing that you want to do, and I don't know if you've done this, but next time you're in front of a crowd, they've all got laptops, PDAs, something. Put a question up on the screen. And take 45 seconds and have them answer the question. The 50-minute university class or hour and 15-minute university class, they found in the last three years that breaking them up into 8 to 15-minute chunks with a question increases learning, but more importantly, retention as much as 50%.

Yeah, and in the classroom, I could always do it because I can see whether they're getting it. And I'm one of these jerks that I would get right up in somebody's face, you know, what's going on. But virtually putting that quiz in there, we've just segmented all of our classes so that we've got between five and 15 segments in a three-hour class. So the worst case is. 20 minutes between. And there's a quiz at the end. So I don't think our experience is different than other people. The first time we did this,30 to 50% of the kids, people, adults got it right. We only have one question. The second time we did it, another 10 or 20 or 30 minutes later, it went to 50 to 75 because some people figured, well, wait a second, this jerk's going to be asking me a question.

That's right. The third time, it was well above 90% got it right all the time. And from that point on, so they knew what the routine was. When I was going to school, we'd have these things. We would find out who liked to take notes and the rest of us didn't need to go to class.

You know, honestly, you know, very few, this is a slam at what I used to do, but very few professors actually are good teachers. They're good at talking the subject. They're very smart. They know the subject matter cold. Yeah. But transferring that information to other people, that's a different gig altogether.

fine. Subject matter experts are very important. Yeah. There's just not many of them. That's the trouble. So the teacher, again, go back to systems. The teacher is a translator, an interface between the subject matter expert and the unwashed brethren that have to do it, have to work with it. And somebody is always necessary to be a communicator in the middle. And that's where the teaching, my granddaughter is going to be teaching next semester a couple of... I'm hopeful that she likes teaching because she's a bit of a nerd, kind of runs in the family, but her specialty is animal science.

So she's dealing with sheep and cattle and chickens and things of that nature and diseases, which is, I said, that's really cool. She said, I love research. And I won't tell you some of the things that she gets involved with because they're rather crude and rough. But I said, is that what you want to do? And think about it. The people in the room listening to you talking, you're giving them a foundation that allows them to evaluate whether that subject matter is something that's of interest to them. Yes, they're taking the class, but some people it's going to resonate with and they're going to let's go. This is it, which is Neve. And I said, she said, I love doing the research. And I said, well, how about you be a teacher and you have three or four researchers that do projects for you like you're doing for your professor? She said, well, yeah. I said, that'd be more interesting, right? She said, oh, yeah. My grandson, he's going into university.

How do you know what you want to do? The people that are transferring information like you just did at that school. made the subject matter real. And then they can draw a conclusion as to whether that's something, even the professors, I think you were indicating saying, well, gee, I'd never thought of it that way. Yeah. This is important stuff.

You need to transition the company, the department, from transactions, from being a transactional organization to being an aspirational organization. And no joke, those words are powerful. If all you're doing is your employees doing everything they were told what to do and being asked to do it faster and with less mistakes. Sooner or later, how can that be exciting to any person on the planet?

Well, not just that. You're not going to keep the employees. Anybody that's worth keeping is not going to stay in an environment like that.

One of the transitions we're going through, and maybe you see that in the classroom and in your work, the last 40 years, we got kind of complacent. Inflation was relatively static. Unemployment was static. GDP growth was static. Yeah, there were some blips, but as Wells used to say, they're getting shorter and shallower every time. And now all of a sudden, we've got a major disruption. And people don't know what to do with it. No. It's just batting the hatches, continue what we've been doing because it's worked so far. Yeah. I'm not sure what to do anymore. That's what happens to innovation, doesn't it? Yeah. And it's not just a worker bee, it's leadership too.

You know what I mean? Does it make the person who's yelling feel any better?

As you know, I used to travel all the time in airports and there's a lot of rude people. But I used to love the situation in customer service where somebody's really upset with me for something that the company has done. And they're this far from my face. They're screaming and yelling and spittles going everywhere. You know, they take a breath and I look them in the face and say, do you feel any better now? And that causes them to go up the wall, cross the ceiling again. Yeah.

The only reason, you know, you're not mad at me. I just happen to be nearby. Yeah. You know, and seriously, do you feel better by being an idiot? What's the problem? Let's look at it calmly. Let's fix it.

Yeah, it really is. So, Sarah, we're giving a little bit of a hint away, but Sarah has agreed to put together a lecture series for us on this whole thing. Because of her expertise in manufacturing and Six Sigma and project management and all the rest, the process mapping that you put into the newsletter has received unbelievably powerful. response. And the same thing is true with your blogs. There's a thirst for this information. So, you know, the more that you can get it out there, and I think it would be beneficial for your team and your employer to get it more broadly understood. And a byproduct you shouldn't overlook is put together a book that can be sold along with it. Yeah. We're putting books up on our website. Afterwards, go to the homepage and slide down. We're going to have a bunch of different people putting their offerings out there.

Yeah, there's enough there, isn't there? Yep. I've got to update that list, by the way. There's probably 50 to 70 books that aren't on there that should be. How can we fix this data issue other than ownership?

No, I'm concerned about the multiple systems and how we fix that. Is there an alternative for a small business? Is there an alternative that would work other than outsourcing and having somebody put together a mechanism that's like a central station for everything?

So looking at those, you mentioned seven things, I can only think of four. Your employees, your customers, your suppliers, your assets.

Okay. Okay. And then the other piece is what I call delivery systems, which is we transact things on the telephone, on the internet, in person, fax, the different, and each of those has a different process map, has different skills requirements. And Mary, very few companies have these things. Just those, the four or five. Yeah. You know, just listing everything that's important from a supplier perspective. What data do I need to, what data elements do I need to have? We've had data dictionaries, Sarah, for 50 plus years. But it's interesting you still referred to let's do it in Excel rather than access. But somehow the perception of the database, oh, that's too complicated.

No question about it. And then the other side of that is go back to the same thing about those three or four people. Yeah. That Excel is a really good tool. How many people do you know that are really good at pivot tables? Because I hate one.

But that's an important piece of the puzzle, isn't it? With pivot tables, we're making Excel operate like it's a database.

Why have we chosen to do it that way? Is it because our implementation, our learning curve is easier? I

Yeah, and I guess the publishing software has done the same thing, right? They take a Word document and it allows to make it look pretty and create a book. Yeah. So, yeah, so I guess it's learning curve, implementation of familiarity. The database is still my choice, my preference, because I'm lazy. With database, I don't really need to duplicate things. And I can use the same process for multiple.

Yeah, we kind of had the computer take a long circuitous road to where it is now. I need an engine that does computations by itself. And I need to feed that computation engine with problem solutions. Process solutions, product solutions, employee solutions, customer solutions, all of these different things, right? And those are all going to be expertise-driven like what you're doing now compared to what you were doing with GE. Yeah. You've got a much broader scope today, I'm assuming, than you had with General Electric.

You're touching on more things than you were doing at General Electric. Right.

Yeah. Everything, everything is going to rely on funding, isn't it? It's going to be really interesting because everything is predicated on productivity. And productivity, like waste, is lack of productivity. But we don't really look at waste as being, I mean, we should have sacred cow hunts looking for wasteful things, non-value-added things. That should be a constant deal. Every quarter we should kick off a nurse.

I don't know that there's anybody truly, Sarah, in a business whose job function is to find and eliminate waste. Should be.

Like forums today. Is there a need for a forum anymore?

Yeah, but again, those are fundamental questions. Originally, when I started, a part sales order had six copies, and it was carbon-separated. And you had to have specially named colors, and each color went to a specific place. Yeah. That was one of the first things that I thought was important. If you need to have a paper document, why don't we just have one for them and one for us? And that's the end of it. Yeah. And just that one statement, any document you have in any company that has more than two copies, one for us and one for them. Yeah. It's waste. Yeah. Filing cabinets. Why do we have them?

Why don't I keep them electronically?

I'm running a computer shop in the 70s in Canada. The Canadian government asked me to provide to them on electronic form my receivables file, my payable file, and my payroll file, which I refused to do. They went to the owner, said, it's required by law for you to give us this stuff. And we're not getting it for your company. So he comes up to me and he says, why did you turn them down? I said, you want them to be able to analyze all your customers and what they buy and all your suppliers and what you buy and all your employees and what they pay? Yeah. Without somebody sitting in front of you? No. And he said, oh. I mean, it was just a 25-year generation difference. You know, I'm a little bit more current on it. But you have businesses everywhere. Data ownership, that's an alien term. How do we get people to start understanding that somebody has to own that?

And the reason I'm going this way is who determined what the metrics are that are important?

What would you say from your experiences with your clients and with General Electric, forget sales revenue, forget profit, forget asset management. What are important metrics? What are the things that you want to be able to look at a company and say, those guys are good?

Well, I always do. It's not fair to ask you that question without some warning, but we have that everywhere. Yeah. Is sales for employee a good metric?

Okay. So why don't you? I agree with you, by the way.

And I don't either, but it's, it's one that has been very seriously used by people everywhere. Number of widgets produced per hour. Doesn't say anything about the quality. Nope. So, you know, a productivity number without a quality. attachment is not a good measure.

So in the 40 years from 82 to 2022, Sales for employees, a metric in the parts business has doubled.

Is it coincidental that market share is halved at the same time? But nobody looks at that. Yeah. You know, that's, again, when we look at process mapping, we look at waste, we look at data ownership, the whole thing with Six Sigma and project management, these metrics. typically come from financial systems, not management systems. And financial systems are black and white, and that's important. Don't get me wrong. Yeah. But that's not the be all and end all of everything or discussion.

They're static rather than dynamic in my view. You know, the challenge on Six Sigma, Everybody wants to be a black belt. And that's cool. And there's classes. But then just like what you did in the classroom, putting project management and process management together, six in by itself is nothing. Applying it and how and where you apply it is the whole magic, isn't it? Yeah. So identifying where it is necessary. You were kind of, we're going to do a risk analysis. Wherever there's risk, let's have a look. Wherever there's leakage, waste, whatever, let's have a look. Let's take a look. Let's identify what those things are and get down in depth with people that know what they're doing on that particular, it's like medicine. You know, gastroenterology and obstetrics are different.

One of the things that we used to use this in the customer service training side of things. And one example was a restaurant that operates seven days a week. It's open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And a guy goes in with another fellow. There's two men going in to have dinner. And it's six o 'clock at night and the place is busy. And he says, okay, I'd like a table for two. And he says, well, it's going to be a wait about 45 minutes, sir. And he said, okay, but you've got a bunch of empty tables over there. Why don't you open them up and let us go sit there? He said, well, we're never busy on Tuesday. Well, you're busy tonight. Well, we don't have enough service here. Well, do you mind if I sit there with my friend? So they did. He gets on the phone. He orders a Domino's pizza. He gets delivered to the front door. Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith, your delivery is here. And the people at the front desk over said, you can't do that. You can't eat here.

So why not? You're not using this. It creates like the airport example is perfect. A line at a grocery store or a drug store or getting into a theater or trying to evacuate something, a stadium when there's a fire. We have no idea of all of these different applications. When you bring them up, people can resonate with that example, this airport check-in line. You know why we have problems with security at airports? Seriously. Do you know why? No. The airlines want to have the flights between six and nine in the morning and between four and eight at night. Oh, yeah. And if the airports were smart, they'd say sorry.

And then everything's easy. Right. And that applies to everything, Sarah. That's the tarmac. It's the baggage. It's the gates. It's everything. Yeah. But oh no, we can't do that. We can't inconvenience the public.

Did we not learn anything in the WFH era?

Nine to five has nothing to do with anything. No. Not anymore.

I mean, there's almost everything that we do anymore is subject to your expertise in completely radically reforming it. Shopping, grocery shopping. We can do that all online now. That's right. Somebody can deliver it to us now. Yep. I mean, all of these things. And, you know, it's going to be really interesting because I'm convinced and I'm just a, lonely idiot out here, that people want to use their time in different ways than my generation did. We would go to work eight to five or whatever the hours were, and that was it. If there was overtime available and you needed more money, you took the overtime. So instead of being away eight hours, you were away 10 hours or 12 hours. And that way one parent was able to work and the other parent could stay with the children. Can't do that today. So all of these things start changing. Working from home opened up a lot of people's eyes that, well, wait a second, I don't need to go in.

Now, generationally, guys my age said, no, no, you got to come to the office. And I think we talked on the phone the other day, you know, perhaps not, but my daughter's a teacher. For two years, they taught virtually. She was not in the classroom. The first year that that came down, her school district mandated that the teachers had to go to the classroom.

None at all. Like you really trust your employees, right?

And I can know more about them on the computer than I can if they're in the classroom.

But their minds haven't got there yet. So that familiarity in Excel that you gave us the example of why we use Excel rather than their database is perfect. There's so many examples like that. Yeah. Why don't we go to church anymore? Well, I'm playing golf or some other, like I want to be hiking in the warm weather with the beautiful colors in the fall. That's right. I got other things I want to do. Other things that make me happy. Work? Well, but if you were asked as a person, as an employee to how can you make your job better? I think there would be a lot of people who would stick their hands up and say, yeah, I want to participate in that.

Yeah. What wakes you up at night? Yeah. It's, you know, have I mentioned to you my five things routine?

Every quarter to twice a year, I would ask everybody to write down five things on three different subjects.

Give me five things that if you could wave a wand, you would change to make your life at work easier.

Give me five things that at work are a real pain in the butt to do. Give me five things that if we could wave a wand and get them done, it would be beneficial for the company, either profit or customer service or... Do those and we get into a meeting room and you just list them off and I put them up on a whiteboard or a flip chart or whatever. And we eliminate duplications and we have three lists.

The number of items that were on all three lists would make your life better, would be better for the company. And currently it's a pain to do was amazing.

And I did this in some places as long as. 10 consecutive years, and they were still amazing.

Well, you know what my question is. If it's all the three, what the hell is the matter with you guys? Why haven't we fixed this? Why haven't we changed it? Well, we're waiting for somebody, George or Mary, to get off your train. Come on. Let's go. Stick your hand up. It's a sore spot. Let's fix it. We're not conditioned that way, Sarah.

Yeah. Yeah, we got a long way to go, don't we?

Which is good. I think that's always going to be the human condition, that there are always going to be things that we can do better. But these things are a little bit too numerous and a little bit too obvious for us to be still talking about them, in my view anyways.

Okay, so when are you going to start the lecture series?

It's the learning objective side, like the process improvement and, you know, the. The ISO standards, et cetera. They've got those for schools. We had to go through that for ISET first. Okay. Provider in education. So learning objectives, pretty common. Do you use voice recognition software yet?

Go by Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Okay. It's, I don't know,75 to 100 bucks. And once you've used it a little bit, I just talk to the computer. The first classes we did back in the 90s, it wasn't anywhere near as powerful as it is today, but that's how I did all our textbooks. 250-page books. Wow. I would talk to the computer, then I'd go back and edit it. But insofar as organizing your thinking, it's a wonderful tool. Okay. And it's inexpensive as hell. You've got it on your phone, too. You can record into your phone, either Android or Apple. But anything that makes the task easier, because putting together content for an hour lecture, you're going to be looking at maybe 45 to 75 slides with audio. And then what kind of, you know, diversions do you want? You can make film clips. With the camera you've got coming in, you're going to be able to stand up and talk to it or you can sit in front of it and talk to it.

And, you know, it really makes a nice presentation tool. Okay. So also for Six Sigma or project management or whatever, all of these aids, communication aids. Yeah. Are really important.

But also copyright them. Okay. You know, it's your content. Make sure you get it looked after and you own it. You know, you're never going to catch everybody, but it'll... It'll slow some people down, you know. But yeah, it's, you know, what you're doing, what the message you're getting across is so critical today and so important, but it's also fraught with resistance. People, it scares people when they're asked to do, my best example, I'm in Moscow and I'm working with a company and the guy I'm talking to is an MBA, really well-educated guy. And I did my five questions with him. He said, no, no, don't do that. I said, why not? Why? No, no, don't. That's not the way. Just tell me what you want me to do and go away. They just were so conditioned. I said, this is how things are. I'm not going to like you get whacked over the side of the head. If you try and do something out of normal. Yeah. I couldn't believe it. There was a guy exactly.

He was born the same day and the same year as I. Single man. 20% owner of a corporation was a colonel or higher with the FSB. Okay. No family to speak of. Had an apartment in Moscow and a Dachau out of town 45 minutes or so away. And he's frustrated. I said, well, why don't you leave? He said, I can't leave. I said, sure you can. You can get on a plane with me. Where can I go? You can come to Canada. Anywhere you want. Come to Canada with me. He says, no, you don't understand. This has been thousands of years. We're downtrodden. I said, that's just an excuse, buddy. Yeah. You're afraid. And that's true with everybody on all of these things. It's out of their normal way of thinking. Yeah. So it intimidates them. Keep doing what you're doing. It's really worthwhile and really valuable. I appreciate it. How do we wrap this up?

That's good advice there. Start small, something that everybody can identify with as important, and then just give them the model in a small taste treat. Yeah. And they say, well, that wasn't all that bad. Well, let's try another one. Maybe two or three of you can do one individually and just start growing it that way. Yep. It's important. Change is very difficult at the best of times. This is a period of intense change. And there's going to be an awful lot of people are going to be left behind this time.

So a lot of people that are breathing a sigh of relief that things are going back to normal. Yeah, well, no, they're all over the place. It's really disheartening to me.

They had the opportunity to make wonderful changes. Look at your children. Yeah. It's remarkable when you take the blinders off, what people see. It's, you know, a great adage that I've had. What would you do if you weren't afraid?

Thank you for the time. Thank you for the blogs. I look forward to the outline. And don't forget music and everything else. You're going to make this in a real production, you know.

There you go. Thank you very much, Sarah. And thank everybody for listening. We look forward to having you with us at the next Candid Conversation.