Paul Akers

First of all, let me say that this trip took like 10 months to prepare.

I got the contact through Paul Akers, and he was a little bit hesitant to give me the contact because he's very good friends with the president of the company.

And he said, if you shoot a two-minute video and send it to him, he might consider letting you come tour their company.

And so I did the two-minute video, sent it to Paul to check it, and it was completely wrong.

Number four, even in Japan, they have to remind employees to speak up if something is wrong.

They must reinforce that it is safe to do so.

See, when I went to Japan with Paul Akers, I kind of got the impression that that just because you're Japanese, you're

naturally gonna speak up.

My background is in lean and continuous improvement.

And I found a specific method of that called Two Second Lean written book written by Paul Akers.

And I love Paul Akers videos and things.

And he really introduced me to the concept of instant turnaround and emails.

Instant turnaround.

And I, I, I know I will see people without glasses and certain types of PPE.

And when people come over, Paul Akers said people always tease the Japanese people about that, but Paul was like, "If you look at it, they have mostly..." And, and he said all the way, but I didn't get to prove it, so I'm not gonna say that.

But they've mostly engineered out the root cause f- in the first place.

Like, anything that would create sawdust has a vacuum attachment.

And the more times I read that, the more I realize, wow, I think that's my number one.

And then while you're implementing all of this cool stuff, you know, you want to read Two Second Lean by my buddy Paul Akers.

And then in order to not make everybody around you mad, you better read How to Win Friends and Influence People just so you don't piss everyone off along the way.

Great.

We shut down the whole plant and We put together a team.

We call it the red team.

We learned that from my buddy, Chuck Ciccarelli in the ditch towing.

We have a red team and whatever operators are necessary.

So I have become a huge believer in standard work, and Super PM Bootcamps, every single thing about the bootcamp has been standardized.

There is a Paul Akers visual with a visual and text, visual text, visual text in Canva that's printed out and laminated.

And every time we go set up the camp, uh, we hand, uh, one of those standard work cards to a volunteer for our setup team, and everybody knows what to do without having to ask me all the time, and that has opened up so much improvement.

And at the, uh, we do the same thing in our construction company.

Well, let me back up just one step.

The type of lean that we do, we learned it in a book called Two Second Lean by Paul Akers.

And that's what kind of got me started in lean about eight years ago.

And The reason that that book was so powerful for me was that it's written for just anybody could pick it up.

So, um-

One of my mentors, so I'll just plug Paul Akers, he wrote a book called "Two Second Lean."

Love it.

Uh, and I just love the thing that he always says whenever someone's implementing, um, kind of lean thinking and behavior inside of their business, is he's always a big, uh, proponent of saying, like, "You, the individual I'm talking to right now, have enough waste in your life and your work for 10 lifetimes." So it's, it's kind of the whole old adage within the Bible of even like, there's a log in your eye, don't worry about your brother's speck.

Like, why, why do we do it this way? What, what else could we do in here? What, what could we use that we have here so we're not spending that much money, but we can utilize the resources that we actually have at hand?'" Um, and then leaving it better than you found it, you know.

This is such a great term that I got from, um, Paul Akers, who got it from the, the Boy Scouts, right? E- essentially, it's everything is about leaving it better than you found it.

If you think about it, like the customer, you wanna leave the customer better than you found it, but you got internal, you got external customers, and it's, it's... you have that ability, uh, if you feel empowered, you've courageous and curious, you're automatically gonna go, "Okay, well, what am I gonna do to make somebody else's life a little bit easier, a little bit better? The, the next guy down in the line, if I can just set it up and get the right information there so that once, once it gets to his section, he's already set up and he can go.

There's no, no searching for information." Small things like that, that's, that's really powerful.

So w- what you're talking about is the ANZ, so it's Australia-New Zealand.

We've got a, we've got a chat group together, uh, of other lean companies, just small, so SMEs.

And, uh, so a year ago, I ha- I was on a podcast with, or had a podcast with Paul Akers and Ryan Tierney.

Um, and the- we were covering Ryan's book, uh, Lean Made Simple, the last step, which is, uh, connecting with o- the community.

Yeah, I don't know.

That said, in terms of on the flip side of morale, I will say like fix what bugs you from Paul Akers, I think is a really useful thing to kind of remember.

as far as boosting morale while also moving forward.

So, like, I've just kind of given Sam the keys.