Kevin Meyer

Life and leadership at the nexus of lean and zen.

The Simple Leader: What’s Your Why?

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This is an excerpt from The Simple Leader: Personal and Professional Leadership at the Nexus of Lean and Zen


Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Vision and mission statements have long been the rage in organizations as they supposedly define what the organization is about. Do you know what your organization’s vision or mission is? Could you tell me what either one is, right now—without looking it up? I thought not. I bet they’re hanging on the wall in some conference room, gathering dust. Unfortunately, this is all too common.

Another problem with vision and mission statements is that the terms themselves aren’t very clear and create confusion. Employees always seem to wonder what the difference between the vision and mission is. Also, the mission statement of the company often does not reflect the reality of what the company is trying to create. I’ve seen many cases where the true mission of a company was to make money and the vision was to make a lot of money. Seriously.

This is why I prefer a purpose, or “why?” statement. I believe it is far clearer in terms of definition, and therefore easier to own and promote. Why did you create your company? Why does it exist? What problem are you trying to solve?

The why? of Gemba Academy is to “remove the struggle of continuous improvement training.” It’s simple, but it says a lot. We started the company to help smaller organizations that other- wise could not access high quality continuous improvement training, but we also include large multinationals that are struggling to deploy training across global locations.

Like many other organizations that use a purpose statement instead of a vision statement, we also have a mission that further defines what we are trying to accomplish. Our mission statement talks about how we create high-quality content, then we help organizations undertake and sustain their continuous improvement journeys.

The ideas behind these statements are only useful if a company puts them into practice, and to achieve this, everyone in an organization needs to be involved. Although the founders, owners, and leadership team often work to create an organization’s principles, why?, and mission, it is important to engage employees by involving them in the planning process (we’ll discuss this in more detail in the Create the Hoshin Plan section). By doing so, you create acceptance, ownership, and understanding of the foundational statements. Then everyone can use the same core set of principles, the same why? statement, and the same mission statement to review and analyze your organization.

Going beyond your organization, what about you? What is your purpose, your why? Cornell University researchers recently confirmed that a sense of purpose decreases impulsivity, thereby making choices that pay of better in the long term. This is something to contemplate on your next seijaku (quietude) experience.

The Simple Leader: Respect

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This is an excerpt from The Simple Leader: Personal and Professional Leadership at the Nexus of Lean and Zen


If you want to be respected, you must respect yourself.
– Spanish Proverb

Respect for people is one of the two pillars of Lean. However, “people” doesn’t just mean the people that report to you, but everyone else in your organization, including your team, your boss, your customers, your suppliers, your community, and your- self. The “respect for people” concept from Toyota is more accurately translated as “respect for humanity.”

To respect people, you must take into account that there is a brain attached to each pair of hands in your company. In addition to the cost of the pair of hands that is represented on traditional financial statements, those brains hold tremendous value. As a leader, your job is to figure out what environment, both physical and organizational, is necessary to optimize and leverage that value. You increase the value by soliciting and using people’s ideas, creativity, experience, and knowledge.

When dealing with people, don’t forget that respect can also mean being up-front with
them, in an appropriate manner, giving them areas for improvement, or even letting the person know he or she is not the right fit for a position. Remember to be respectful in how you give such feedback, however. One of my early bosses had a favorite saying: “Are you incapable, or just incompetent?” When he offered me that choice, I didn’t know what to say. But I did know I wouldn’t grow in such an environment, so I soon left to join a different company on the other side of the country. (The man treated everyone, high performers and otherwise, with such disdain, and wondered why his group had such high—and expensive—turnover.)

We must also remember to treat people with dignity. A couple years ago, I read an article on the power of calling people by their names. Using someone’s name creates a connection that can be very powerful. Instead of yelling “hey you!” to someone, learn their name and use it to address them. When you write emails, greet them before launching into the subject. Do the same when talking in person and on the phone. Great leaders are able to connect with their workers by taking a little time to acknowledge them first, before getting down to business.

The Simple Leader: Define Principles and Values

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This is an excerpt from The Simple Leader: Personal and Professional Leadership at the Nexus of Lean and Zen


Clarity of purpose, Clarity of understanding.
– Zen saying

Many organizations jump to trying to write down their vision or mission statement before taking the time to really think about and define their core principles. Principles are the foundation upon which the company is built and (hopefully) operates. They are so important that you should be willing to sacrifice significant business, or even the company itself, to preserve the principle.

In private companies and smaller organizations, the principles often come from the values of the owners or founders. For example, a company I used to work for was owned by a couple of devout Catholics. Because of this, the entire organization knew there were some products that we would not make for any price because they conflicted with Catholic beliefs. The employees fully supported that principle, even though it cost the company business.

I’m very proud that the company I co-founded, Gemba Academy, values ethics, integrity, and respect for people above all else. We know our success is built on the efforts and creativity of our people. We respect our people by having an unlimited vacation policy, being transparent with our business operations, and, for a very small company, having a strong benefits package that includes health care, 401(k), and profit sharing. This respect extends to our customers too. We’ve had situations where customers wanted to purchase a product, but we knew it wasn’t the right fit for them. We openly told them, demonstrating respect for the customers and our values.

Think about your personal principles and values. What do you truly care about? Your principles should be so important that you’d be willing to give up business—such as not taking a job, even if your livelihood depended on it—to not cross them. Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and currently a professor at Harvard, calls this the True North, or inner compass. Principles are important because they create the perspective, boundaries, and culture for the organization. Without them, there is a good chance that the culture will evolve on its own, based on the values of the stronger- willed employees.

What are the core principles and values of your organization and yourself ?

Designing a Lean Home

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lean-houseI’ve received several comments on The Simple Leader, with some of the most unexpected having to do with the section where I discuss my desire to design and build a home with Lean principles in mind. If I hadn’t studied chemical engineering I probably would have gone to architecture school – it’s been a passion of mine for decades.

For the past several years I’ve been looking for the ideal piece of property to build on, but nothing has been the “right” one.  In the meantime I’ve remodeled every room of our current house, but although we have a nice ocean view and the fixtures and amenities are perfect, it still has issues.  1940s house, many rooms, many halls, many doors.  Barriers to simple, minimalist, meaningful living.  Not to mention lots of maintenance.

Still, I couldn’t resist designing the ideal residence, so I worked with an architect friend of mine on several ideas.   Then, just a week ago, an existing home came on the market all of two blocks from us that has nearly ideal bones, and we’re now in escrow.  Incredible unblocked views of nearly twenty miles of California coastline and our small fishing village of Morro Bay, privacy from nearby homes, and a simple layout that can be changed into what we want.  So the plan has changed from a ground-up build to an extensive remodel of a current home with the right fundamental characteristics.

So what are we doing to convert it into a “lean house” – and what are those characteristics anyway?  Here are a few (my full list is a couple pages long!):

Optimized Floorspace

As I describe in my book, we almost bought a much larger home several years ago near the peak of the housing bubble.  Thankfully it didn’t happen when the bidding went above our price, which helped us think about our true needs – one of which was less space.  This flies in the face of traditional thought where as you improve your financial situation you generally go larger – whether you need it or not.  In our case we began to embrace a minimalist lifestyle, requiring less and less space.  Remember that minimalism doesn’t mean doing without – it means ensuring that everything has true value and getting rid of the rest.

We’ve gotten rid of possessions that add little value, requiring less space.  Our new home is almost 20% smaller than our current home, and that is still more than enough.  Extra space is a waste that then requires additional cost in cleaning and heating, extra time to walk, and creates separation between you and your family.  Though perhaps that’s a benefit to some folks…

Less Storage Space

minimalist bedroomNine years ago I wrote a post on how my desire for less storage space created a conflict with my mother in-law, and eventually some puzzled looks on the faces of real estate agents.  I now believe in this idea more than ever.  Storage space, like extra space in a factory or home, has a tendency to get filled – whether needed or not.  Back in the days when companies regularly moved me from place to place I had several boxes that hadn’t been opened over two or even three moves.  Value?  I ended up simply tossing them, sometimes without even opening.

So as part of the remodel of our new home, we are removing many extra and unnecessary cabinets, especially including a monster entertainment center.  The kitchen, closets, and bathrooms are being remodeled with minimal cabinet space.  Yes, this could affect the resale value since most people believe storage space to have value, but I’m hoping we’re in this home for a long time – perhaps forever.

Remove Barriers to Flow

One of the problems with our current home is that there are several rooms on two levels, plus a detached garage.  We’re on a corner lot, on a hill to boot, so the easiest path from the kitchen to the trash bin is out the front door, around the corner and down the street, and into the garage.  Really.  To get anywhere in the house there are usually two or three doors and a flight of stairs involved.

screen-shot-2016-01-11-at-3-59-31-pmSingle level living simplifies flow right off the bat, and that’s one welcome characteristic of the new house.  One challenge my architect friend and I often worked on was to see how few doors, walls, and corners a house could have.  Bathrooms obviously need privacy, but for other spaces there are ways to create segregation without significantly disrupting flow.  For example, removing line-of-sight but without disruption of walls or the feng shui poison of sharp angles can be accomplished with curved walls.

No, I’m not designing a factory, but I’m using some lessons from when I did help design a large manufacturing facility several years ago.  Spaghetti diagrams help locate processes and functions to minimize walking and transportation.  Our garbage cans will now be just a few steps from the kitchen, with just one (necessary, due to fire regulations) door in the way.

barndoorDoors themselves are interesting.  A traditional swing door creates considerable non-usable space.  Because of this I’ve become a fan of pocket doors, although they can be a nightmare if maintenance is ever necessary.  There’s a recent trend toward the similar barn door concept, which is something we’ll be using in the new house.

Barriers to flow are also barriers to communication – visual and otherwise.

Fewer Horizontal Surfaces

Although I’m not a big TV watcher, I’m a big fan of flat screen TVs.  Perhaps some of you still remember its predecessor, the monster tube TV… with the big flat surface on top.  Inevitably stuff would get stacked on top.  Clothes on the bedroom TV, magazines on the living room set, and so forth.  Flat screen TVs changed all that, hence why I’m a fan.  I’ve never liked the impact that horizontal surfaces can have on clutter when, ahem, everyone in the household isn’t as steeped in the power of 5S as I am.

Because of this I’ve tried to remove as many horizontal surfaces as possible from my ideal home, and will in the remodel as well.  No flat surface in bay windows, only the necessary counter space in the kitchen, and no extra chairs in the bedroom.  If I was the boss even the counters would have an angle on them – flat enough so work could be done, but vertical enough that nothing could be stored on top.  The real boss is probably right, though, that there would soon be sliced fruit and wine on the floor.  But you get the idea.

Smaller Capacity Appliances

We’ve seen many homes that have the largest washers and dryers, multiple ovens in “chef’s kitchens,” and so forth.  Why?  Are they really necessary?  I can see a large lawnmower if you have a large yard, or large washers if you have a large family.  But for two of us?  If we entertain, it’s probably just another couple.  So we need a small washer and dryer, just one oven, and I have come to like the dish drawer concept.

fisher_paykel_dd90Instead of waiting to fill a standard size dishwasher over the course of a week, generally creating some odor in the meantime, a day or two’s worth can be washed almost on demand.  As an aside, I’m personally a fan of washing dishes by hand anyway.  It’s a classic mindfulness exercise, being aware of each dish and each activity to clean the dish, and provides some time for reflection.  I’m sure it’s similar for fans of gardening and other activities.

In our current house I replaced the old huge hot tub with a small wooden soaking tub built for two – max.  I’ve loved it.  From a maintenance standpoint I used a UV unit so I wouldn’t have to worry about the regular chemical treatment nightmare of traditional tubs.

Perhaps some appliances aren’t necessary at all.  Do you really use the bathtub in the master bath?  We don’t, so out it goes so we can have a larger walk-in shower – which is more valuable to us.  We’ll keep the tub/shower combo in the guest bath.

How many of you in factories have taken a similar lean approach, replacing a single large press with multiple smaller (and flexibly redundant) presses, and so forth.  Same concept.  Minimize the monuments.

So there are some concepts for starters.  How much space and support equipment capacity do you really need?  How can you configure that space to remove barriers and waste? Can you reduce waste and clutter by minimizing the opportunities to create it in the first place?  There is value in living simply, but living simply does not necessarily mean removing luxuries if they truly add value.

I’ll now get back to the fun of planning a big remodel.  Besides the kitchen, closets, and bathrooms, we’re replacing all the windows on the ocean side with floor-to-ceiling glass, refinished deck, new garage door, and possibly a new EPDM roof.  Whew!

The Simple Leader: Discovering Lean

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This is an excerpt from The Simple Leader: Personal and Professional Leadership at the Nexus of Lean and Zen

 

Ten years after graduating from college with a chemical engineering degree, I was doing pretty well. I had progressed up through the engineering ranks at a Fortune 50 medical device company, moved into operations, and was running a business unit responsible for a high-profile drug infusion pump product. Although work consumed much of my life in Silicon Valley, I was able to balance it with friends and recreation. Then I got a call from corporate headquarters asking me if I would like to run a large factory in Salt Lake City. To a young career-oriented guy, it sounded like a great opportunity. I would have my own operation, live in a new city, and take a big step up in the company. Without asking a single question, I said yes. (Soon thereafter, I learned an important lesson about why you ask questions when offered new opportunities. Questions can be good things, and the more you ask before getting yourself into an unknown situation, the better.)

In Salt Lake City, I had to oversee a molding operation with sixty heavy presses running at full tilt, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. The plant was already three months behind schedule when I got there, and it was falling further and further behind every day. Additionally, the operation came with some unique extracurricular challenges. It supplied components to some critical downstream plants, which made it very visible in the eyes of executives, who closely monitored our output and put a lot of pressure on us to improve results. If that weren’t enough, there were also some questionable “activities” occurring during the night shifts. Soon after arriving, I realized that sleep would be a scarce luxury for a while.

Luckily, I had one huge asset in my favor: a bunch of talented folks equally frustrated with the situation and eager to find solutions. Looking for new ideas, I poked around on the internet and discovered something called “Lean manufacturing,” also known as the “Toyota Production System,” as well as an organization called the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME). AME put me in contact with two of their board members, David Hogg and Dan McDonnell, who helped me analyze the situation and what Lean concepts could be applied. Shortly thereafter, I began collecting and sharing Lean concepts with my staff. (As I studied Lean, I collected many resources that would later turn into a side endeavor called Superfactory.)

As a team, we learned how to describe value from the perspective of the customer and how to focus on flow, reduce inventory, and streamline processes. We experimented and failed often, but our efforts soon led to success. We discovered the concept of the “quick changeover,” a method that reduces down- time when preparing the machines to manufacture different parts. This allowed our operators to be much more productive, and after a year, we had caught up and were even finding ways to get rid of antiquated equipment while increasing production. When the new presses that headquarters had purchased to add capacity (spending millions of dollars in the process) finally arrived, we did not even need them. Lean really worked, and in the real world no less.

Seeing our results, my passion for Lean grew rapidly, but the company wasn’t at a point in its evolution to fully embrace it. In hindsight, this was a lesson on the importance of executive commitment to the Lean transformation process—great improvements can be made at lower levels, but a true organizational transformation requires a cultural change driven from the top. After a frustrating couple of additional years, I decided to leave this company. (Interestingly, the company is now known for its Lean prowess—perhaps the early efforts by our team did have some residual impact after all.)

In 2000, I moved back to California to run a facility recently purchased by a large telecom equipment manufacturer. When I came on board, the operation had an order backlog of nearly a year, and the long lead times were costing the company significant business. Once again, the pressure was on to improve operations. By implementing Lean methods, our team increased output from
$500,000 to $5,000,000 a month in less than six months, using the same floor space, equipment, and people as before. Once again, our Lean transformation efforts were doing great things for the company.

Unfortunately, around the middle of 2001, we began to experience a few order cancellations. Little did we know that this was the edge of the cliff that many technology companies went over later that year. The drop off came so fast that we were still hiring when we began planning our first layoff. On September
10th, I laid off the entire operations group, including myself (a painful experience, although the events of the next day would put that pain into a different perspective). The remaining operations were consolidated into the corporate facility several hundred miles away (a decidedly non Lean operation) and our product line was soon shut down, demonstrating that without executive leadership support, Lean transformations are very fragile.

Although the companies I worked for did not believe in Lean, my own confidence with it had grown to the point that instead of looking for a new job, I got together with a couple friends and started a contract manufacturing company. We thought we could leverage the power of Lean to tackle the difficult jobs that no one else wanted. We also thought that since we had such a compelling business model we would have no problem finding business. On the first point, we were correct, but on the second one, not so much. Before having to find customers for myself, I was always somewhat envious of the jet-setting lifestyle of my friends in sales and marketing, never understanding why they were paid so well. My two business partners and I, all operations grunts, learned what selling is all about—the hard way. After three years of basically paying our employees but never ourselves, we decided to admit we had learned our lesson. We shut the company down and went our separate ways.

Even though our contract manufacturing operation did not prosper, my knowledge of Lean continued to pay great dividends. Over the years, the list of Lean resources I had been collecting morphed into one of the largest and most comprehensive websites on Lean (Superfactory.com), bringing me into contact with Lean specialists from around the world. I also joined the AME board of directors. After shuttering our company, I leveraged the wealth
of contacts from those activities to join the consulting world. One of the contacts helped me find some contract work at a medical device company a short drive from my home on California’s Central Coast. One thing led to another, and I soon found myself as the president of the company, overseeing plants in California and Michigan.

In contrast to my earlier experiences, the long-term vision, commitment, and patience of the owners of my new company provided me the opportunity to try some radical Lean experiments over the eight years I was there. We reorganized the company into value streams, developed incredible teams, and even eliminated budgets. Thanks in large part to Lean improvements, we were successful enough to build a large new facility (in expensive California, no less) during the middle of a recession. We also turned traditional outsourcing thinking on its head by shipping products from California to China and India.

Along the way, I learned many valuable lessons, including how to use many of the same Lean concepts to become personally more productive. Later in this book, I’ll be sharing these lessons, from both personal and professional perspectives.

The Simple Leader: Start, Now

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This is an excerpt from The Simple Leader: Personal and Professional Leadership at the Nexus of Lean and Zen


The secret to getting ahead is getting started.
– Mark Twain

Getting started on a new project is tough. If you’re trying to transform an entire organization, it can be even tougher because it requires you to make some changes. Changing yourself is often the toughest part—especially if it involves losing weight or modifying a habit. So what do you do?

The secret is to just start, and to do it now. You’ve already clarified why and how you need to change. You just need to do it.

This is easier said than done, as most of us are experts at coming up with reasons to procrastinate. We give ourselves excuses to avoid dealing with unacceptable behaviors or situations until the “right” time (e.g., the start of a new year) arrives. If our behavior is truly unacceptable, how can it be okay to wait to change it?

Another way we like to procrastinate is to form teams and make sure every detail is in place before we start anything new. This is folly. Your team is ready, with you as their leader. It is impossible to plan for everything that could possibly go wrong before you start a project. What are you really waiting for? How does delaying look to your team? Is it authentic? Is it respectful?

Last year, as soon as I learned how Paul Akers lost over fifty pounds, I was motivated to lose weight myself. If he could, I could—especially since I only needed to lose half that. Instead of waiting until the new year to change my eating habits I began at that very moment. Five minutes after reading his email describing what he had done, I went to Starbucks to get my usual vanilla latte. Instead, taking a cue from Paul, I bought a regular coffee and skipped the latte. That was the beginning of my health improvement journey. Ten weeks later, I was fifteen pounds lighter. (Coincidentally, the end of ten weeks happened to coincide with the new year, when I would have typically started pursuing a new goal.)

Don’t wait. Start. Now.

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