The last month of my life has been nothing short of extraordinary. That includes the people I met, the factories I saw, and most importantly the learning that went along with it. Even as I write this article, my head is still whirling.

I’m going to attempt to share something that we all sort of know, but for some reason tend to ignore. 

Perhaps “ignore” is the wrong word, because we talk about it, but do we really internalize it? And ignoring this one principle is the difference between making lean stick in your organization or feeling like keeping it going is equivalent to pushing a train. Let’s get started. 

I was in Germany visiting a good friend, and one of my favorite people on this planet. His name is Michael Althoff, he runs a company called Yellotools. Check out our YouTube channel, we have the plant tour there.

Yellotools is nothing short of amazing, one of the leanest companies I have ever been to, everyone is super engaged, they all participate in the morning meetings, actively make improvements each day, and it shows. Each time I am there, the place just keeps getting better and better. 

Well on this visit, I was excited to do another plant tour video of Yellotools to share with the world. But then it hit me. Why was I about to do another video showing how clean the factory is? Do we really need another video showing that people can put their tools away, or create shadow boards? I stopped filming right there and just stood in the middle of the shop. I was staring at a shadow board, and I started to ask the Five Why’s:

1. Tools were hung on a shadow board, why? 
2. Because someone put them there. Why? 
3. Because someone made the shadow board. Why?
4. Because someone designed the shadow board. Why? 
5. Because there was a need for it. And it was at this moment, I knew I was getting close and had to find out the “why” behind that. 

Was it because Michael said to do it? Was it because the employee wanted to make their job easier? Did the employee even know why they were doing it? Because they saw a video that had shadow boards? And the list goes on.

There was only one thing to do. Abandon the plant tour video and start talking to the people. I set up my cameras in the break room and started interviewing anyone who could speak enough English to answer a few questions. 

What happened next was nothing short of unreal. All those interviews are recorded and available on our YouTube channel.

Person after person had almost the same story. They all had a deep understanding of lean and continuous improvement, yet they told me there was no training program at Yellotools, they actually hardly even spoke of lean at the company, yet somehow they all knew it. I was intrigued to say the least. 

The first commonality was the word “fun.” Almost everyone mentioned it. They said that work was fun. Yellotools was simply a great place to be. When you think about work, we spend more time there than anywhere else, so cultivating a place where people like to be is critical, and it was obvious Michael and his team did an amazing job of that. 

During my personal time with Michael, he often speaks about creating an environment where his people are sad it’s already Friday afternoon, and get excited on Sunday because they get to come back to work Monday.

The second thing that kept coming up was that failure was OK. It was encouraged that everyone try new things, and don’t sweat it if it doesn’t work. No one is going to yell at you for a mistake. We all know a mistake is the greatest point of learning, yet we go to great lengths to prevent this from happening to our people.

At Yellotools, experimenting, failing and trying again is not frowned upon, but encouraged. People seemed to love the freedom to try new and different things each day. 

But these two things alone were not answering my original question, “why” did everyone understand there was a need for that shadow board? 

And then it happened, one after another they all said, “We do it for the customer.” 

 

This was wild. How could the people at the factory in Germany, have a connection to the customers in Los Angeles? Yet, they all did. I needed to know how this was possible. Like everything else, the answer was so simple that I felt stupid. We all have a really close relationship to a picky customer. It’s us! When we go to purchase something, think of this scenario.

Two cars, absolutely identical in every possible way.

However, Car #2 comes with a really cool and convincing explanation.

Here at the Car #2 factory this is how we do business:

• We allow all our people to scroll Facebook during work hours.
• We move all our parts around the factory as many times as humanly possible.
• We make a lot of defects, and don’t trouble people to fix them.
• We let everyone come and go as they please.
• Everyone has the freedom to work how they see fit, no need to follow standards.
• We love searching for parts, so we don’t need an organized Kanban system.
• We defiantly don’t track our performance, so we have to bump prices to make sure we’re gonna have money at the end of the month.
• And we love to batch produce, making big batches is more comfortable.

Isn’t this so cool right? Obviously now that you know this you are surely willing to pay the extra for the vehicle, right? 

There isn’t a human being on the planet that would go for this, and when you think of this scenario you can actually feel it. At Yellotools, waste isn’t something they just see. They imagine they are the customer, so they can feel when they are doing something that is wasteful. Another way of looking at it: If the customer was standing there watching you, would they approve of what you are doing? 

After that understanding, lean as we know it becomes a byproduct of just doing the right thing.

And there you have it ladies and gentleman. Smart people can’t believe it’s this simple. 

Don’t forget to tune into the the podcast with Michael, the car ride I recorded cause I knew he would be dropping gold nuggets on road. Wonder if you could hear the panic in my voice as he hit over 235 km per hour on the Autobahn. 

As always, I hope this helps in some way. If you need help with your lean journey, give us a call.