726: Make Work Better Through Simplicity, with Paul Akers

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
We often add more in order to make a system better. The opposite tactic is often more useful, making things simpler. In this episode, how to make work better by starting small. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 726.
Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:37]:
And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. One of the challenges that so many of us face each day is the complexity of everything coming at us. The complexity of what’s happening in the world, all of the digital and notifications and information coming our way, and also the complexity of our organizations. Today, an invitation on how to make things better, both at work and at home, through a bit more simplicity. I’m so glad to welcome a guest who is an expert at how to keep things simple. I’m pleased to introduce Paul Akers. He is the founder and president of FastCap, a product development company specializing in woodworking tools and hardware for the professional builder. Through a series of twists and turns, he discovered lean and the Toyota production system, which was instrumental in propelling FastCap as an example of lean manufacturing and culture, now followed by thousands of companies around the world.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:38]:
He is the author of 2 Second Lean: How to Grow People and Build a Fun Lean Culture at Work & at Home. Paul, so good to have you with me. Hello.

Paul Akers [00:01:49]:
Thanks, Dave. It’s a pleasure. Looking forward to it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:52]:
Me too. I had so much fun getting into your work. I mean, the word fun keeps coming up again and again for me. Like, life and work really should be fun. Right? And as I was thinking about your story, I let’s think it back to how this all started. And you tell a story in the book about getting into business and having the bank come by and look at your business and approve you for the loan, and they they loved what they saw, and we’re all excited about you starting up. And then you hired a consultant to come in and help you out with a with a few things. And the story was really different when they showed up.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:27]:
Wasn’t it?

Paul Akers [00:02:28]:
Oh, was it? It was very, very different. So just a little background for the listeners. So I’m a carpenter, a cabinet maker by trade. I built guitars with Bob Taylor. So, I love doing nice work. And I developed a product when I was about 37 years old called the FastCap, a peel and stick cover cap, And that product took off, and today we have about 2,000 products on the market. But back in the very beginning, when I started the company, I was three years into the company, and I was cash flow short. And I needed a loan, so I went to the bank, and I maxed out mortgages on all my properties that I owned.

Paul Akers [00:03:05]:
I own some real estate. And now I needed to get some cash flow, and I needed about a quarter of a million dollars. The bank came to approve the loan. But in this case, because I was not an MBA student and I didn’t have a background and everything, the president came to the company to kinda look and say, do we wanna put this kind of money into this young guy that is really not a business guy? He’s a cabinet maker. So he walked around our facility, and he was blown away because I’m super OCD and super organized. Everything was beautiful. The floors were painted. Everything was just pristine and perfect.

Paul Akers [00:03:42]:
He goes, Paul, I’ve never seen a company so well run and so well managed. We had about 30 employees at the time. I’d give you any amount of money you wanted, and that was a nice compliment. I I like that a lot. And we got the money. And then what happened next was even more interesting. So about a week later, I had some consultants come in who were Japanese, and they looked around my facility. And I needed some help with some inventory management problems and just different little things that I was struggling with because I wasn’t an expert in running a company.

Paul Akers [00:04:16]:
And I said, can you help me? And they said, I don’t know because you’re clueless, and you don’t know how to manufacture. So one week, the bank’s telling me I’m the best they’d ever see and give me any amount of money, and then these Japanese are telling me I have no clue what I’m doing. And that got my attention, and I said, okay. What do I need to do? And they said, you need to learn the Toyota production system. And I said, what’s that? That’s the story.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:46]:
And that took you on a journey that has, taken you some really interesting places and really fascinating places over the years. And you write in the book, “your pride will blind you to what you most need to learn.” Tell me more about that.

Paul Akers [00:05:03]:
Well, I I think that the big thing is you you have to know my background. I’m a master craftsman. I built some of the most beautiful homes and restored some of those beautiful homes in Beverly Hills and Pasadena. I worked on Greene and Greene homes. And I built 2,000 guitars with Bob Bob Taylor. I mean, I made guitars for Crosby, Steel’s, Nash, and Young. I mean, I was doing the highest level stuff at a young kid. Yeah.

Paul Akers [00:05:26]:
As a young kid, I was doing that. And so for somebody to tell me that I didn’t know how to manufacture when I was trained by Bob Taylor and I’ve been trained by the best people in the world, been on the most beautiful homes, or work for the richest people in the world, I mean, that’s like, go soak your head. You have no clue what you’re doing. Right? But for whatever reason, I was curious, and I said, so what do I need to do? Instead of saying, let me tell you something, buddy. I make a lot more money than you. Get the hell out of here. You don’t know what you’re talking about. But I didn’t do that.

Paul Akers [00:05:53]:
I said, what do I need to do? And they said, learn the Toyota production system. And they started to explain it to me. And it was very interesting. About a year earlier, I was visiting San Diego, and a friend of mine took me to this cabinet shop. And this guy had a beautiful Porsche parked out front. I walked into this facility. It was super clean. There was no inventory anywhere.

Paul Akers [00:06:15]:
And at that particular day, they didn’t have any work. And so the company was not working, but everybody was cleaning the facility. Everybody was working on machineries and organizing things and oiling and maintaining things. And I thought to myself, this guy’s crazy. You need to be working, working, working. You need to be getting after it. You know? Don’t waste a second. And he was super calm, and he mentioned that he does the Toyota production system.

Paul Akers [00:06:38]:
But at the time, that flew right over my head. I had no idea. I thought the guy was crazy. Nobody was working. Everybody was just cleaning. And he was practicing just in time. All the material arrived at the day that he needed it. He didn’t have any extra inventory.

Paul Akers [00:06:51]:
One piece flow cabinets were being built and going out the door and being installed. He didn’t have them stacked up like most cabinet shop. And all of a sudden, the whole thing started coming together for me. I go, oh, that’s what that guy was doing. And that’s kinda what happened. And then I hired the consultants. They cost me a fortune. And they came in, and they took processes that were taking me thirty minutes and turned it into five minutes.

Paul Akers [00:07:17]:
And then they did it again and again. And with and within three months, they added $30,000 of net profit to the bottom line month after month. There was that much waste in what I was doing. It was insane. But I was blind to it. I didn’t see it until I learned in the Toyota production system.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:36]:
The word simple keeps coming up for me when I’ve gotten into your work of learning from you and thinking about how to approach things. And I think I shared with you as we were talking about this conversation, Paul, that I have a master’s degree in making making things more complicated than they need to be. A good one. You know? That’s a great line.

Paul Akers [00:07:53]:
We all do, don’t we?

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:55]:
Oh, yes. I’ve and I’ve earned that degree many times over. Yeah.

Paul Akers [00:07:58]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:59]:
And the the invitation you really make is that lean is about making things simpler. What does that look like in practice?

Paul Akers [00:08:11]:
Okay. I’ll give you a great example, and I think your listeners will be shocked at what I’m gonna say. So everybody wakes up in the morning, and they wanna have a meaningful life. And you kinda wonder, what do I need to do to be happy? What do I need to do to be successful? Everyone’s trying to figure this out. And the truth of the matter is it’s like the simplest thing in the whole world, and it all starts with one concept. It’s not about you. Life is so powerful the second you realize it’s not about you. It’s about what you contribute to society and humanity and how you improve other people’s life.

Paul Akers [00:08:55]:
This will give you meaning. You don’t need to do anything more than realize get off your throne and start helping, nurturing, encouraging, and inspiring people. When you do that, your life becomes rich and full. That’s an example of simplicity. Now how you apply lean is also very simple. You start by simply three s ing. We call it sweeping, sorting, and standardizing. So every day when I get up in the morning, I got up this morning at 04:00 in the morning.

Paul Akers [00:09:26]:
I cleaned the entire house. I made sure everything was organized, made sure all the drawers, everything was put away where it needed to be, did all the dishes. Everything was dialed in and prepared, made some improvements on where I put the water and how I how I retrieve the water and and just things like that. And so that’s the sorting and getting rid of anything that I didn’t need and creating new standards. So sweeping, sorting, and standard. So before I ever do anything in the morning, before I answer my emails, before I study Spanish, before I study Japanese, before I play the guitar, before I do anything, I start with a simple practice of three s’ing for ten or fifteen minutes. Sometimes it lasts me an hour, but generally about ten or fifteen minute. And I just make sure my environment is prepared for me to be successful.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:11]:
One of the big insights that you talk about in your journey of doing this is the importance of people, what you just said a moment ago. And I think a lot of the times we think of lean, we think of manufacturing, and people who haven’t gotten into it think like, okay. Well, it’s about saving money, making things more efficient, all of those things. Yes. But you say at its core, lean is really about the process of growing people.

Paul Akers [00:10:39]:
Mhmm. Yes. Lean is a human development system. The Toyota production system oh, my one of my closest friends and, like, a father and mentor to me is the vice president of Lexus, mister Amazawa. I work with him extensively in Japan because we train people in Japan on the Toyota production system. And mister Amanzawa would be the first one to say the Toyota production system is a human development system. The secret behind what Toyota is doing and why Toyota is so successful and most corporations can’t do it is because everyone’s focused on building cars. Toyota’s focused on building people.

Paul Akers [00:11:12]:
The development of human beings because they know that’s their most valuable asset. It’s not that automation is bad, but automation is not the end all be all. Ultimately, it’s about the human being. And the more you develop a human being, the better you are. There’s no better example than historically in society. You look at any flourishing culture in the world, it’s an educated society. It’s a developed human resource. If you wanna look at a society or culture that’s underperforming, it’s always an undereducated or an underdeveloped.

Paul Akers [00:11:45]:
So as a as a leader, if you spend your time developing your people and developing yourself, obviously, at the same time, the it makes no sense in the beginning because it takes some time. But the flywheel effect takes in as Jim Collins talks about, and it’s unstoppable.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:03]:
Indeed. When you think about the simplicity part of it and helping people to get started on this, of taking out the complexity, of taking out all the stuff and the thinking and the waste, what helps people to start?

Paul Akers [00:12:21]:
Well, the biggest thing is just fixing what bugs you, and this is a chapter in the book. I mean, if something bothers you, for instance, this morning with the water let’s give you an example. So I live in a small little studio on the beach, and you can’t drink the water. So I have a little water purification thing, and I fill this five gallon jug of water. And then when I need more water, I have to pull it out of the cupboard and pour it into, another smaller container. And this morning, I had to do that, and I just looked at I looked at going over to that that counter and picking that heavy bottle up and doing all that. And I thought, how could I do this better? And I got this smaller pitcher, and I went over and filled it up and then put it by the coffee maker. And now whenever I need to make coffee, I can just pour directly from there.

Paul Akers [00:13:08]:
And so once a week, I go to this big huge jug to fill it up. It’s just a simple thing that bothered me, and I fixed it. It made life just so much more elegant and simple and and enjoyable. So it just it’s simple things like that. But then at my company, I have 50 employees, and and I’ve I’ve got 50 people doing this every day. Could you imagine what my place looks like? We’ve made millions of improvements. I mean, you can barely breathe and things get done. It’s like they hop into place.

Paul Akers [00:13:36]:
It’s everything is so well dialed in. And I mean everything from cleaning the toilet to setting up a million dollar injection molding machine. Everything is absolutely wherever you ask the question, that’s where the answer is. So you walk up to a machine, you say, how do you do that? There’s a QR code right there that says, this is how you set up injection molding machine. You scan the QR code. It gets a video. It shows you how to do every step. There’s no question.

Paul Akers [00:14:01]:
You go to the coffee machine. There’s a QR code. You scan the QR code. It shows you exactly how to clean the coffee machine. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. You’re cleaning the toilet. You’re cleaning the bathroom. You’re doing an invoice.

Paul Akers [00:14:12]:
They’re everything. Wherever you ask the question, that’s what the answer is because we have fixed all the things that bug us. You have to teach someone how to do an invoice. Oh, gosh. It’s gonna take me fifteen minutes. I gotta go through this. No. Here’s a video that shows you the step by step process.

Paul Akers [00:14:29]:
Everything you need to do, you can pause it. You can check. Why do we all go to YouTube? We all go to YouTube to learn how to do everything. So we do the same thing in our company. We have videos that support everything that we do, so nobody’s struggling because we stopped and fixed what bugs us.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:45]:
And you’ve zeroed in on two seconds as a metric for where to start. Tell me about two set seconds. What’s significant about two seconds?

Paul Akers [00:14:55]:
Well, you wanna make the the target so small that nobody can make an excuse for not to do it. And so the I what did I say? Maybe five seconds this morning with my water improvement that I made. It’s just it’s about being simple. So the story I’ll tell you about how that came about is really easy. It’s a really great story, actually, not an easy story. It’s a great story. I was walking through my facility about twenty years ago, and I had this one guy named Nick, and he didn’t wanna improve. You know, after we started in Toyota production system, I’d always walk into his area.

Paul Akers [00:15:27]:
He was in injection molding. And I said, Nick, have you made any improvement? No. What do you mean, Nick? You mean everything’s perfect? Yeah. Everything’s pretty good. I mean, there’s nothing that bugs you. He goes, no. Not really. Come on, Nick.

Paul Akers [00:15:38]:
There’s gotta be something that bugs you. And he goes, well, maybe. I go, come on, Nick. Tell me what bugs you. And he goes, well, when I put the injection mold in, it’s gotta be level, so I have to put a level on top of it. But I gotta bend my neck way inside the machine to be able to see, if the level’s there. And I go, oh, okay. Well, Nick, how can we make it so you don’t have to bend inside the machine? I didn’t give him the answer.

Paul Akers [00:16:03]:
He says, I don’t know. I said, well, show me what you gotta do. And he bends inside the machine. So how can we possibly see that vial, that level without having to bend in? And he goes, I don’t know. I said, come on, Nick. You can come up with something you can do. He’s 18 years old. Young kid.

Paul Akers [00:16:16]:
And he goes, I don’t know. Come on, Nick. You can do it. How about a mirror? He goes, oh, a mirror. Yeah. So I said, we happen to have a mirror, and we are building these point point of purchase displays. We use mirrors for our safety glasses and stuff. So I went and grabbed a little plastic mirror, and I said, hold it up there and see what happens.

Paul Akers [00:16:32]:
He goes, oh, yeah. If you hold it right at the right angle, I actually don’t have to bend in there. I can just see if the vial’s level and adjust the machine, put the clamps on, and done. I said, okay. So how are we gonna hold the mirror on? And he goes, I don’t know. And I said, come on, Nick. So, well, what do you think about hot glue? So we went and got a hot glue gun, hot glued it on there at an angle. And then it was pretty good, but it was a little bit floppy.

Paul Akers [00:16:53]:
I said, so how can we make it not as floppy? I don’t know. Just the same thing. How about a Popsicle stick? We got a Popsicle stick. We glued a little piece of wood on there as a gusset, and we put it on there. And then he took the level and he put it on top of the machine, and lo and behold, he could see perfectly the vial. He didn’t have to bend it. He didn’t have to do it. And I said, Nick, that’s all I want you to do.

Paul Akers [00:17:13]:
Just save the two seconds of you bending in. And that’s how two second lean came about from that simple thing. And Nick went from being the worst guy improving to the best guy improving because he realized it was really very simple what I was doing. And the problem was me, not him. I didn’t communicate clearly to him what I wanted him to do with the Toyota production center. But as soon as my communication skills got better, my training, my development of him got better, I got him on board. So, generally, the problems always exist with leadership that we’re doing a crappy job of explaining what it is we really want to have happen.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:50]:
I I think coming back to the pride that blinds us or that we can’t believe it can be this simple because, like, we’re we think we’re so smart about things is Yeah. As I’ve worked with leaders over the years, I’ve made almost the same discovery you have. Obviously, did really different venue, but, like, the more simple we can make it, the better. And we have a rule now in our academy conversations that when we’re trying to shift behavior on something, it the actions are five minutes or less of doing something five minutes a day or less. In fact, this conversation is making me think maybe it even needs to be less than five minutes. Yeah. And it’s really interesting how so much of my work as a coach is trying to get people to do less of simplifying, of just taking five minutes a day. And when people first hear about that and we talk about it, and I say, no, I really want you just to do five minutes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:44]:
I don’t want you to try and do fifteen or twenty or thirty minutes a day. People sort of nod, but they kinda look at me like I have three heads. Like, really?

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:52]:
And then we’ll get we’ll get three or four months in on doing it, and then then I’ll start to hear the real story of, like, you know, when you said five minutes a day, I was really suspicious. So, like, I went along with you because I know you’ve done this before, but I was really suspicious of this seems almost silly. It’s see and I think about your story with the water pitcher, like, this morning. Someone may hear that and they think, okay. Yeah. You saved five seconds on doing something with the water. What does that matter as far as leadership and movement and efficiency and developing people? And yet, because it’s so small, because you can start, because you can get momentum, it changes the dynamic. It changes how you think about it.

Paul Akers [00:19:31]:
Yeah. It does. And, you know, there’s a there’s another psychological principle that’s going along there in my opinion, Dave. And that is when I’ve analyzed people and myself for that matter, what really makes people happy in life when they feel like they’re improving, like, when things are getting better in every regard in their life, the minute things are staying the same, that’s where frustration builds. So if you’re developing a habit in the Japanese vernacular, we call this a kata, a routine. If you develop a habit that pushes the ball down the court, maybe just one or two yards every day consecutively for the rest of your life, then you’re automatically buoyed by the spirit of, wow. My life’s a little bit better. I don’t have to struggle anymore when I do this.

Paul Akers [00:20:23]:
I don’t have to struggle when I do that. When I walk it I I made another improvement today. I actually hung a different light up in my little kite shed where I have all my kite surfing equipment because I had one light that was just not very good, and I put another one in there. Now when I walked into this morning and pushed that switch and that bright light went on and I could see everything, I felt like, woah. I feel good. This is nice. Well, if you’re doing that nonstop for five minutes a day, you’re always making something better. I mean, that’s incredible.

Paul Akers [00:20:52]:
Today, I’ll tell you what I did just before I went to- I’ll tell you another improvement. I make so many improvements every day. I make 20 to 30 improvements a day, but I’m just thinking of all the improvements I made today already. I didn’t even prepare myself to do this talk with you. But so when I get out of the water, my hair is pretty long. I look like a surfer. And I went to the dollar store and bought a little brush that I’m gonna put my kite locker today. So when I come in and put all my stuff away, my hair is not all tangled up in a mess after taking a shower.

Paul Akers [00:21:19]:
I can just brush my hair real quick, and I’m just hang it there on a little screw, and and I’m done. So all these accumulations of all these small little things, whether it be the water, whether it be the light in my kite locker, whether it be the brush, it all makes me feel better and makes me wanna do more improvement. And I can literally point to millions of improvements that I have made in my life. And that’s why I’m such a happy person because I get stuff done so easily.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:48]:
Yeah. And the psychology of it, like, that’s so key what you said. And I see this too so much in the shifts that the people who really thrive in becoming better leaders are the ones that find small wins every single day. Something that keeps them like, they set the bar low, not because they want to do less, but they actually wanna do more in long term. They set the bar low. They clear the bar. They feel that psychological win. And then it’s enough to keep them going for the next day versus setting the bar really high.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:25]:
And this actually leads to something else I wanna ask you about. You said the term one piece flow a bit ago. And oftentimes, we think about this only from a manufacturing standpoint. But actually, I think there’s a lesson here of, like, batching, which is what a lot of us tend to do in our lives, in our work, in our learning versus one thing at a time. Tell me more about that.

Paul Akers [00:22:46]:
Well, one piece slow is like one of the magic things in life that, unfortunately, most people never understand. Most people have a bunch of uncompleted projects. I basically don’t have any uncompleted projects. When I start something, I finish it. I don’t let anything hang. And the secret to that is not taking on any new projects till the other projects are done. And this is the way cars are made. They make one they pay one car and it gets passed.

Paul Akers [00:23:12]:
They put the seat in, then they put the windshield in, put the tires on. Eighteen hours later, a car rolls off, and one minute after that, another car rolls off. So there’s always flow. So one piece flow, the critical word there is flow. So everything in my life is flowing to completion. There aren’t a bunch of uncompletes. I’m gonna say it again because your listeners have to get this. It’s so critical.

Paul Akers [00:23:44]:
Everything is flowing to completion in my life. I have completes after completes after completes all day long, but I never say yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m gonna do this, this, and this. And then I’m overwhelmed and I’m paralyzed.

Paul Akers [00:23:58]:
I don’t do that. I say, no. I can’t do that. I’ll give you an example of that because you like examples. I get three requests a day from people all over the world that wanna tour my company, and I say no almost always to them. You have to meet a certain criteria to come to my company. And if you meet that criteria, the answer is then yes. But I don’t just say yes.

Paul Akers [00:24:18]:
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And then I’m overwhelmed. I got people pounding down the door from people all over the world wanting to see my company. I have no time to get the things done. I need to get done.

Paul Akers [00:24:26]:
That’s stupid. That isn’t the way you do it. Very slowly, very methodically, one piece flow, one thing at a time, get it done over.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:34]:
How’s that different than batching? Because I think a lot of people tend to think about things through batching and tend to operate that way.

Paul Akers [00:24:41]:
Well, let’s I’ll give you a good example in the kitchen, in the, culinary world. Okay? So let’s say you’ve got a table of but you got you got 30 tables, a a restaurant, 30 tables. And it’s a five course meal, and everybody’s eating the same thing. And they say, okay. Now we gotta make 100 salads. So they lay out 100 bowls, and then they put lettuce in 100 bowls, and then they go put tomatoes in 100 bowls, and they put onions in 100 bowl, then they put olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and they do the whole nine chuck. And the whole time, the whole restaurant is waiting to eat until they’re all done. And then altogether, you gotta have all this manpower that’s gotta take all these out there simultaneously as opposed to making one salad real quick, lettuce, tomatoes, onions.

Paul Akers [00:25:32]:
Boom. Done. And it’s delivered to the customer. And another one. And every thirty seconds, a salad is being delivered to the customer throughout the restaurant. So people are eating, and instead of having a batch, then everybody’s finishing at different times, which is good because then the next course is sequenced in there. So now you don’t have to have this huge batch and all the meat and all the chicken’s getting cold, but everything’s being delivered when it’s hot because you didn’t batch it. You created a flow of the product.

Paul Akers [00:26:03]:
And you can go to Costco. You can go anywhere in the world and see batch work. It’s everywhere. It’s in McDonald’s. It’s in Starbucks. Batch work is insane, and people don’t even understand what they’re doing. That’s the difference between one piece low and batch work. Did I explain it well enough for you?

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:19]:
You did. And I think that the the missed opportunity in batch work is when you’re doing a ton of stuff all at once, you don’t have the opportunity to do the two seconds improvement in each one. Right? And, you know, I was thinking about what you just said in the world of podcasting. And I know people who have podcasts who do three or four interviews a day. They kinda batch it all together. They do everything all at once. And you don’t have the opportunity then to really hone your craft on each individual conversation and to really do the prep work and all that. And I’ve always done, like, one or two interviews a week all this time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:07]:
One, so I can improve as I go, and I can learn a little bit each time, but also so I can really hone my craft on each conversation get a little bit better. And I think a lot of times we think of, like, okay. I’m just gonna gonna get better as a leader today. I’m gonna do my leadership development work today versus a little bit at a time over the course of sixty days or a year or a month or whatever that time frame is. And just, like, it’s a mindset shift of, like, opportunity to actually be able to do more.

Paul Akers [00:27:39]:
Yeah. It’s completely a mind shift. And so the you really brought up a great point, Dave, and you’re obviously a lean thinker by by default is there’s another advantage to one piece flow besides just the flow, but it immediately identifies a mistake. So in the case of the salads that I was telling you about, let’s say we inadvertently forgot to put the salt or the pepper on. Then immediately, the first one that goes out, the customer says, hey. Where’s the pepper? The waiter returns back to the kitchen. Hey. The pepper’s not going, but, oh my gosh.

Paul Akers [00:28:13]:
We forgot the pepper. That immediately is changed so that the rest of the 99 salads have the pepper. And any little tweak along the way allows for immediate adjustment instead of making a huge batch and having to go back and bring a salt pepper salt shaker to every table or a pepper or cheese or whatever it is that the the defect is. So that’s a huge issue. What you brought up is exactly right. One piece flow allows for immediate improvement.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:45]:
Two seconds. Right?

Paul Akers [00:28:46]:
Right.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:47]:
Comes back to two seconds. You invite people when they’re thinking about this from an organizational standpoint of, like, alright. I get it. We could do better. We could take this two seconds. We can start eliminating waste. We can do the continuous improvement. You make an invitation for people to start in the bathroom.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:05]:
Why the bathroom?

Paul Akers [00:29:06]:
Yeah. Well, the there’s go back to the human side of the whole thing. I mean, the the greatest respect you could ever show a person in my mind, and particularly if you’re an employer, is to give your employees a really beautiful place to to relieve themselves and and not a dirty toilet that, you know, that that nobody really cares about. It’s the toilet. You know? You start in the bathroom because that’s the place that shows the highest level of respect that you really care about people, and the people instantly go, woah. I’ve never seen a boss like this. We have Japanese bidet toilet seats. We have granite countertop.

Paul Akers [00:29:45]:
We have fresh flowers on the countertop. I mean, our bathrooms are, like, better than the Ritz Carlton, and we’re a manufacturing company. And this shows respect for people. That’s the first reason. The second reason is because we set a standard for what the work environment should be like, and the bathroom is used by people four or five times a day. And so if every day they’re confronted, if you will, with this standard or they’re engaged with this super high standard, and then we say to them, hey, Bob, Mary. I want your work area to be held to the same standard that the bathroom is. They instantly understand what I’m saying about.

Paul Akers [00:30:26]:
When they go to the Windex, the Windex is exactly the same place every time. It’s labeled. It’s kanban. Kanban means there’s a refill point where it has to be refilled. Every every detail has been accounted for, and so that instantly transfers to their work area and their work environment. So that’s why we start in the bathroom for those two reasons.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:46]:
You’re modeling the behavior, the culture that is in the place every as you say, everyone sees every day, multiple times a day. If you start there, then you model the behavior and you set the culture for what things should look like everywhere else. You’ve been at this a long time. You as you have mentioned today, you’re continually improving. Right? You’re you’re doing this as a practice.

Paul Akers [00:31:12]:
Nonstop. Nonstop.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:14]:
As you have been doing this work, especially over the last couple years, as so many people ask you about it and get your opinion on it, what, if anything, have you changed your mind on?

Paul Akers [00:31:26]:
Wow. That’s a really good question. Well, I think the biggest thing, hopefully, you like this answer because it’s a little bit controversial, is I only allow my time to be allocated to people who sincerely want to change, and I immediately and quickly dismiss everyone else. So if the attitude is not right, I don’t ever try to convince anyone of anything. It is just a waste of time because lean is basically the laws of nature. I will explain by simply saying this. God gave us a big brain for a reason because we have the capacity to solve problems, to go to Mars, to build power plants, to build complex cars and robots. That brain is a gift from God, and that gift was for this express purpose of solving problems and improving.

Paul Akers [00:32:31]:
This is the laws of nature. This is self evident. And if I encounter someone that doesn’t understand something that basic, and I might take two or three minutes to explain it to them, and they’re still like, oh, I don’t have time to do that. I’m not doing that. I’m going the other way. I’m looking for the people that are hungry, that want to change. That’s what’s changed for me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:56]:
Paul Akers is the author of Two Second Lean, how to grow people and build a fun lean culture at work and at home. Paul, thank you so much for your work and all the fun.

Paul Akers [00:33:06]:
My pleasure, Dave.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:13]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, three related episodes I’d also recommend. One of them is episode one twenty two, how to create joy at work. Rich Sheridan was my guest on that episode, and you heard some joy in this conversation with Paul and just the attitude he brings into his work. And one of the things I appreciate about the conversation with Rich is him sharing the story at Menlo Innovations and setting joy as the value for the organization and what that means from a mindset for a team, a leader, but also what that means tactically and how they do it. Episode one twenty two, I think a great compliment to this conversation. Also recommended episode five seventy one, engaging people through change. Cassandra Worthy was my guest on that episode. She has this message for us.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:59]:
Changes aren’t happening to you. They’re happening for you. You heard a lot of elements of change in this conversation today. And I think Cassandra’s message, a wonderful way to think about change. Of course, a lot of times, change starts happening to us, and we see all the negatives of change, and we don’t necessarily think about the other side of it. Episode five seventy one for that invitation from her. And then finally, I’d also recommend episode five ninety two. How to change the way you think.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:26]:
Ari Weinzweig was my guest on that episode, and we talked about the fact that as he looks at it, our beliefs, many of which we may not consciously be aware of, are often calling the shots in our daily actions and behaviors. And one of the invitations he makes is change now, find the facts later. I think it’s a great compliment to this conversation with Paul of getting moving on something. Again, that’s episode five ninety two for that. All of those episodes, you can find in the coachingforleaders.com website and inside the library. And in fact, all of these episodes are filed under organizational change or organizational culture. We have had so many dozens of conversations over the years on both these topics. If that’s your focus right now, set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:12]:
It’ll give you access to the entire library of episodes that I’ve aired since 02/2011 every single week, and the ability to search by topics. So you can find what is most relevant to you right now. And by doing that, you can zero in on what’s most helpful. The podcast apps are great for being able to find the most recent episodes, but they don’t allow you to search by topic. That’s why we’ve set up the membership and the website the way we have free access. Go in there, set that up, and you’ll be able to access everything you need. The episode library, again, at coachingforleaders.com. And perhaps you’re looking for a bit more.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:49]:
And one of the conversations that came up in the last week or so inside our community is how do you better earn attention, especially when you’re asking something of somebody else. And so often, we think about making an ask of someone else from our perspective. What does it mean to us? What do I say? How do I sound? What’s important to me? That’s just human nature for us to begin there. What we don’t often think about is what Dale Carnegie said of trying to honestly see things from the other person’s point of view. In my most recent journal entry, I talked about when I made that mistake in a big way, how I corrected it, and how the results were so much different in being able to earn attention. It is, my most recent journal entry. Those come every single week to our Coaching for Leaders Plus members. And if you’d like to get access to those, in addition to all the other benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus, just go over to coachingforleaders.plus.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:45]:
You’ll see all the details there. Coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Andrew Brodsky to the show. We are gonna be talking about how to show off authentically in tough situations. Join me for that conversation with Andrew. Have a great week, and see you back Monday.