Paul Akers

creating absolutely and i think the world is divided into two types you're either a consumer or a creator and i would rather be on the creation side so i would rather create content than be a consumer of content But that night I was a consumer of content and thankfully I was.

The particular guy I came across was a guy called Paul Akers.

He has loads of videos on YouTube.

He kind of internalized the content thing about 20 years ago.

So when I became passionate about lean manufacturing, straight away I said, who's the best in the world at lean manufacturing? Well, I quickly found out after a small bit of research that the Japanese are like a way ahead of the rest of the world.

So in the last 11 years, I've been to Japan on five different occasions.

learning from the Japanese learning from Toyota learning from Lexus learning from Paul Akers learning from industry experts that are a hundred steps ahead of any other country in the world in terms of manufacturing in terms of productivity in terms of engaging their people to come up with ideas and come up with improvements they're just the best in the world And every time I come back from Japan, I would make a big change to our company.

Like the first time I came back, we renovated all the offices to make it more open plan, to create that respect for people.

And I was eating white rice.

I was with Paul Akers, so we were jamming, so I ate plenty of food.

I'm having steak.

I'm having even the little...

They really will.

And this is where the sources introduce a transformative philosophy developed by Paul Akers called two second lean.

Two second lean.

It completely subverts the traditional narrative of efficiency.

And I'm like, there's no way around it.

My guy, Paul's like, no, I think there is.

And there is now.

I can't recall it now.

time.

Yeah.

We follow the Paul Akers.

I believe I'm just going to attribute it to him, but the safety, quality, simplicity, speed, you might know better of who that came from.

I have, I look at, and by the way, Kate says, and I don't know if this is something to be proud of, probably not, but that when something annoys me, I treat it like German cockroaches.

You know, Paul Akers in his book, Two Second Lean says very clearly that if you wanna make a two second lean improvements, if you wanna have a lean culture, One of the really important steps, and I'm not saying it exactly right, but one of the really important steps is to learn the eight ways and, uh, to, you know, have them by memory, know why they happen.

And I, I like the Paul Akers order better than, um, The, what is the other one? It's downtime, the acronym.

I don't like that at all, actually.

I'm fine if other people do it, but I definitely don't do it.

Like this is not a given.

Your list of external should be very, very, very, very small.

In fact, here's how Paul Akers does it.

Um, and I'm in here in the office space laminating sheets because we have standard...

You know, like, Paul Akers talks a lot about standard work and two-second lean improvements and things like that, and I love it.

And people can get overwhelmed.

But every day in our shop, we do, uh, our success, which includes safety.

I mean, cleanliness, safety, and organization, I mean, cleanliness especially is the most or is the most difficult thing to control on a job site.

And w- you know, w- when you think of patent Paul Akers-esque kind of environmental control, meaning that you actually have control of the project site, you have to get really creative with your leadership to figure out how to do it.

I, for cleanliness, would always, in the contract and then in practice with the entire team, shut down the crew if they weren't, uh, clean.

And, and, and, you know, in a nice way, I'm not punishing anybody, and they would clean.