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Business901                      Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems


 Approaching Lean from a Different
 Perspective
                  Guest was Robert Fritz

          Related Podcast:
              A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz




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               A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz
                      Copyright Business901
Business901                      Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems



                                  Robert Fritz has been around the
                                  Dr. Deming world, which we
                                  discuss in the latter part of the
                                  podcast, since the 1970s. You may
                                  even recognize his work as he was
                                  an instrumental part of the original
                                  Systems Thinking Group with Peter
                                  Senge. Peter actually offers a
                                  marvelous introduction in the book.

                                Robert Fritz, composer, filmmaker
                                and organizational consultant is the
                                founder of Technologies for
Creating. During the past twenty-five
years, over 80,000 people in 27 countries
have participated in trainings created by
Robert Fritz. His insights on the creative
process and structural dynamics serve as
the foundation of meaningful and lasting
change for both individuals and
organizations.


In Robert Fritz’s, The Path of Least
Resistance for Managers (In the new
edition, Robert has added a chapter on
Lean in the update) and calls it “The New
Lean.”




                   A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz
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                    Transcription of Podcast
Joe:      Yes, how did your workshop go? Were you pleased?

Robert:   Great. It was really great. It was a three -day
          workshop and we covered traditional Lean and then
          transferred it into the structural approach to Lean and
          everybody saw how much more efficient it was. The
          structural approach toward it created these tremendous
          efficiencies, we designed many, many systems.

          We had a couple of experimental ones, model ones,
          demo ones but then the rest of them were all from real
          life, from people in the room. It was really quite
          extraordinary to see how quickly through more of a
          compositional approach they could design very, very
          comprehensive and economy of means types of
          systems.

Joe:      I'm intrigued by it, because are you familiar with the
          Toyota Kata work that Mike Rother did because it's
          very, very familiar. I mean it's very similar type
          thinking and talk.

Robert:   It's not. Not in orientation - not in orientation at all.

Joe:      Really, why?

Robert:   I really think, Joe; we're breaking new ground here in
          reinventing the whole subject matter. So it's not like
          theme in variations. It's really like a new song; it's like
          a new... It's like another generation of Lean.

Joe:      I think you are breaking new ground with it. It’s
          discovery. It's creating that tension. It's in creating

                   A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz
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          really that structural tension with the customer.

          Welcome everyone; this is Joe Dager the host of the
          Business901 Podcast. With me today is Robert Fritz.
          Robert is a composer, filmmaker, organizational
          consultant, and founder of Technologies for Creating,
          and author of numerous books, including the bestseller,
          "The Path of Least Resistance." His latest, I believe is a
          re-write of "The Path of Least Resistance for
          Managers."

          Robert, I'd like to welcome you and mention that I'm a
          long-time fan back from the mid-90's in my systems
          thinking days and where I first ran across your first
          book and later read your book "Creating". I have to
          admit that I lost track of your writing and did not read
          "The Path of Least Resistance for Managers" until
          probably around 2006 or so, when a colleague of mine
          recommended it by saying that, "I wish this would have
          been the first business book that I've ever read."

          Give me the elevator speech in why you re-wrote "The
          Path of Least Resistance for Managers."

Robert:   The reason I wrote the first version of it was because
          what I was seeing in organization. First of all, let me
          sort of describe what I mean by the path of least
          resistance - just the phrase itself because there are two
          meanings to that. One is the colloquial meaning, which
          is the easy way out and the other is the scientific
          meaning which is an energy moves where it's easiest
          for it to go.

          What I'm referring to is the scientific meaning, not the
          colloquial meaning. What I saw in organizations over
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        the years was that organizations were often structured
        in such a way that success did not always succeed. I
        saw that there were two patterns that were common.
        One was advancement in which you set out for
        something; you get it, and the success becomes a
        platform for future success, and of course that's how
        we would all like it to be.

        But too often it's not that way. It actually is something
        that's a different pattern, one that oscillates. That is
        you set out for something, you get it, and then
        something happens and there's a reversal, and you lose
        what you gained. This kind of oscillating pattern we've
        seen over and over, over the last 30, 40 years in
        organizations. Where organizations build up capacity
        and then they downsize, and they build up capacity and
        then they downsize.

        They decentralize decision-making, and then they
        centralize it again, and they decentralize and centralize.
        They focus on shareholder return on investment and
        then they switch to customer satisfaction, and then
        back to shareholder and on and on we can predict, we
        can see these oscillations and they are predictable. And
        the question then became what gives rise to these
        obvious patterns of behavior.

        By the way, when you're in those systems, they're not
        obvious, but when you back out of the system and just
        look at it from a longer-range time frame, they become
        kind of hard to miss.

Joe:    Do companies do that when let's say they, change
        CEOs? I know in football, it always seems like you have
        an offensive type coach and what you need is defense
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          so the next time they hire a new head coach, they
          always hire the defensive guy then because that's what
          they're doing wrong. Is that kind of the oscillation that
          you mean?

Robert:   Sometimes it's within the same management system
          and sometimes it's the change of a management
          system which then changes back, which then changes
          back. It almost doesn't matter if they're in a structure
          that gives rise to an oscillating pattern of behavior. The
          last point I want to make before saying why I rewrote
          the book is that it is the underlying structure.

          By “structure," I'm not talking about reporting
          relationships. I'm talking about the combination of
          ingredients of all the elements, the desires, aspirations,
          reward systems, market, product, etc., etc., etc. All of
          those things combine to create a like a musical piece.
          They combine to create a tendency for behavior.

          If you don't change the underlying structure, and if it's
          not an oscillating structure, and if you try to make a
          change happen within an oscillating structure. We will
          see the pattern of the change first being accepted and
          then being rejected. It doesn't matter how good the
          change effort itself is, it's the underlying structure that
          will determine whether or not it succeeds.

Joe:      Is that the culture?

Robert:   No, it's something that causes the culture, the
          underlying structure. A good example of a change of
          underlying structure is when Steve Jobs came back to
          Apple. If you remember at that time, Apple was being
          talked about as being sold; they were being talked
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          about as being a clone, like a PC clone. When Steve
          Jobs came back he changed the underlying structure of
          the company and of the business strategy and that's
          led to their tremendous success.

          But a change of underlying structure was required and
          that's what Jobs did when he came back is he really
          changed not the culture. The culture is a by-product.
          People talk about culture, but it's ridiculous because
          they never ask, "What causes the culture?" It's the
          underlying structure that causes the culture. If I don't
          have a change in the underlying structure, I don't have
          a change in anything. So the best efforts can fail
          because there's no change of what's causing the
          behavior that we're seeing.

          I rewrote the book because 12 years later after I wrote
          the original version I had seen so much, I had put so
          much to the test of what was in that book. I had so
          many more examples and it was 12 years later and it
          really needed an update. So I rewrote it and added
          probably 100 pages, emphasized leadership more than
          ever as you and I have just been talking a new chapter
          on what I'm calling the new Lean or the structural
          approach to Lean, which is a rethink of Lean
          management.

Joe:      Smaller picture we see it practically day to day. So
          what you're talking about doesn't necessarily have to
          apply just in the big picture, the Apple to Steve Jobs
          thing, this also plays in day to day work.

Robert:   Oh sure. Look, I'll just give you a quick example. If I
          reward the sales of folks for building up sales and I
          reward the factory for making quality and suddenly the
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          sales overwhelm the factory where their quality goes
          down and then what happens from that is customers
          start going away. When they do that, the sales senior
          sales people say we need more sales; they build up
          more sales.

          Again, there's a cycle where it overwhelms the factory
          and you have oscillating quality; you have oscillating
          sales, and often it's thought that you have a personality
          conflict between the head of sales and the head of the
          factory and you don't. What you have is a structure in
          which rewarding people for doing two different things
          that are contradictory.

          The way to change that is to really have the sales goal
          and quality goal be exactly the same, so we don't make
          more than we sell more than we can make, but we do
          sell as many as we can make. But that's thinking
          relationally. I'm thinking about quality and sales
          together versus fragmenting them like most
          organizations do.

Joe:      But that's not really possible. I mean you're always
          going to have an unbalance aren't you? I mean, there's
          never going to be that commonality in that example. I
          mean there's always . . .

Robert:   No, it's not possible if you don't do it. But it's possible if
          you do it. And that means I've got to get sales and I've
          got to get senior management in the room. This is
          where leadership counts. You know we just don't sort
          of reward, set these guys off on their journeys, reward
          them for success and not notice that if one of them is
          successful, it's going to hurt the other one.

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          We really have to think about it more systemically,
          more holistically, more structurally, more like putting a
          composition together, more like how music is written
          where the parts really fit together rather than
          inadvertently fight against each other. When I look at a
          lot of organizations all, I see is bad composition. By the
          way, I'm a composer, so my reference is how we write
          music.

          I look at these things and it's really not that
          complicated both to understand but also to change
          because what I've got to do then is start to understand
          the relationships or the networks of relationships and
          the dependencies of them to each other and then how
          to better organize the goals.

Joe:      I think that's the key understanding the networks. Is
          this, what hinders when we talk about the failures of
          any type of a transformation and mostly in my world,
          we talk about a Lean transformation and how often
          they fail. Is this underlying structure the key to why
          these failures occur?

Robert:   I think there are two keys to why those failures occur.
          One is certainly structural. But the other I think is also,
          there's the nature of the way traditional Lean has been
          set up that builds in its failure. It's just the nature of
          how it is. Let me say about traditional Lean, I think
          there're some very good things about it and I think
          when it has worked it has produced some tremendous
          results.

          But as most Lean people know it really is hard to put it
          into an organization and have it sustain itself. I think
          there are reasons for that, structural reasons for that.
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          That's the nature of the beast. I've gotten interested in
          over the last number of years is to redesign, reinvent in
          a way, the whole process of Lean so that in fact, it is
          sustainable, it does work.

          People are interested in it and enthusiastic about it not
          from a devotee kind of point of view. Because a lot of
          times when you look at Lean organizations, you've got
          a group of folks who are almost like religious nuts.

          You know and everything is waste unless it's value to
          the customer and their complete purists and there's the
          rest of the organization who hates them.

Joe:      Is this what you mean by the new Lean? What you're
          proposing here?

Robert:   Let me tell. Let me say some of the differences
          between traditional Lean and what we're doing.
          Traditional Lean is problem-based. So the first thing
          that people do is they look for problems and then they
          try to eradicate the problems and here's just a fact that
          all of us as human beings will know. You can solve all
          of your problems and still not have what you want.

          One of the things that, if you notice, in my books, I'm
          always criticizing problem-solving, particularly if it's
          chronic. I know managers love problem solving but
          probably one of the worst things you can do is spend
          your time problem solving. What the difference is when
          we work with organizations one of the first things we
          do is help them change their orientation from a
          problem orientation to an outcome orientation.

          Rather than asking the question, "What are we trying
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          to get rid of? What problems are we trying to solve?"
          The question becomes, "What are the outcomes we're
          trying to achieve?" What are we trying to produce?
          What are we trying to create?" And that's not just the
          change of a question it really is a change of orientation.
          How we think about things.

          The second step in that orientation is to look at current
          reality. Where are we now in relation to where we want
          to be? That will not only include the problems. It will
          include everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
          You know, everything there is to see that's relevant to
          that outcome we need to be looking at and that
          includes the advantages as well.

          The question becomes how do we move from where we
          are to where we want to be and that's really the key to
          innovation. That's when we begin to understand and
          conceive of things, we hadn't thought of before, some
          of which will be real innovations in process
          improvements. In a way, limitation of traditional Lean
          is its problem based.

Joe:      One of the things that I want to ask you before you go
          on though. It seems a lot of people have problems with
          identifying current reality. I hate to say it that way but
          there's always a “What if?” Or “This isn't quite true,” or
          they paint different scenarios than really accepting
          what current state is and you expand on that in your
          work. I'm not sure which book cause I got them kind of
          comingled in my mind a little but is there a secret to
          defining current reality?

Robert:   Well, remember one of my famous quotes according to
          Google is, 'reality is an acquired taste'. And I think
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          that's true, but if we start with, "What is the outcome
          we want?" We're not looking at general reality, "What is
          existence?" We're looking at reality specific to the
          outcome. And when we can measure that we measure
          that.

          It's not so much a matter of opinion because, let's say
          you and I are disagreeing about what it is instead of
          fighting it out about who's right and who's wrong, we
          ask each other questions. "Why are you seeing what
          you're seeing?" "What do I need to know to understand
          the difference between what I'm seeing and what
          you're seeing?"

          You would ask me the same question, "What do I need
          to know?" "How are we to explain the discrepancy?"
          Let's together look and study reality and find out what
          there is to see and we'll either change our minds or add
          insight or we'll certainly come up with a fairly objective
          understanding, an adequate understanding of where we
          are in relation to where we want to be.

          The other thing is we'll test that out over time because
          as we create a strategy to move that strategy will let us
          know how well we're doing because what we expect is
          that reality will change in favor of what we want and if
          it doesn't we then study it some more to find what we
          got wrong. So instead of just being an opinion dump
          what we really do is become students of reality. We're
          motivated to do that because we want the outcome.

Joe:      It sounds like a great way to enter a sales
          conversation.

Robert:   It's one of the best ways to enter a sales conversation
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          because the essence of really, real sales
          professionalism is to find the match between the
          customer's motivation and desires and the offer that
          we're making. If it's really a good match, we have a
          basis of doing business.

          The professionals, the really great professional
          salespeople study the motivation of the customers. I'm
          really on purpose now saying motivation rather than
          need because people don't always do what they need,
          but they always do what they're motivated to do. So
          how are they making their choices? How are they
          deciding what they're deciding?

          How does that compare to what we're offering and if
          there's a good match, I call this the secret to good
          business strategy. Make them an offer they can't
          refuse. Not in “The Godfather” sense, but in the sense
          that it's so good that you really want to say yes to it.

Joe:      You know it sounds similar to Toyota Kata and then we
          have a current condition, a target condition, and we
          aim for that. Can you explain some differences between
          what the new Lean is as you describe it and the Toyota
          Kata?

Robert:   Yes, ironically I think that in the process of Lean itself,
          there's a lot of waste.

Joe:      Oh, you'll stir up someone on that one.

Robert:   Let me give you an example of this. We just did a
          training here last week on the new Lean and I did it
          with Elsie Ford, who's a traditional Lean expert; she's
          also a structural consultant, so she's done a lot of our
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          work and Elsie's role was to sort of educate the folks or
          remind them of the traditional Lean approaches like
          Toyota.

          She brought with her one of the games that they do;
          it's the putting a pen together thing and there're
          instructions and so on, and the way the traditional Lean
          would work is you go through this exercise and you get
          rid of all the wastes and you go through cycles where
          you get rid of the waste and eventually you can put a
          pen together.

          What we did is, after the first iteration, we just
          designed a process by which to put a pen together.
          Two or three iterations to perfect it and at the end it
          was perfect. I mean perfect in the sense, optimal in the
          sense that you really couldn't make it any better than it
          was given the assignment and the resources.

          Now, I've taken. If you read my chapter in Path for
          Managers the new version on the new Lean, I've taken
          all the wastes and turned them in to instead of things
          to get rid of, things to put into place. One of the lines I
          think you'll get a kick out of Joe is that I wrote in that
          chapter is that, "you cannot put traditional Lean in a
          start-up new company. First, you have to screw it up
          and then you can put Lean in."

Joe:      I highlighted that in the Kindle version.

Robert: What we're looking at is how to create processes that, in
         fact, are efficient, have economy of means, make a lot
         of sense. I mean some of the things from traditional
         Lean I really like are minimizing steps, are minimizing
         handoffs, some of the ergonomics, where you put
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        things physically, where we're also looking at economy
        of transportation, at economy of scale, and economy of
        production, and workload capacity relationships.

        In a way Lean is very much fixing, fixing, fixing versus
        designing. If you throw away the current process and
        you rethink it all in terms of the outcome you want but
        have a really good fix about where you are which will
        give you the current process. Okay, current process is
        current reality. And here's where we want to be.

        You can rethink the whole process and bypass a whole
        number of steps. Well, let me give you an example. I
        work with one company and this is a car dealership.
        Once a week for 45 minutes I'm in a meeting with their
        service department guys doing design work. That's it,
        right, 45 minutes over the last two years, same set of
        folks, and same number of folks.

        In fact, I think they have a few places they need to fill,
        and they have increased their volume. And just that
        one group alone, you have to remember this is the
        garage at the service department; they have increased
        their efficiency in revenues $500,000 a year, same
        group of folks.

        That's just from little iterations every week improving. .
        .designing what they're doing?

        First of all, I'm describing where we're really looking at
        the outcome we're after, where are we now, how do we
        move from here to there. The other thing I really like
        about the notion of Lean is that it's grass roots. That
        it's people around the table really working it out who
        are there close to the situation and another, I know you
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          read this in my chapter.

          But a real irony about traditional Lean is the whole
          black belt and sensei deal. Because Lean is really
          designed to be grass roots rather than expertise and
          certainly, at first there needs to be some guidance or
          some facilitation but the notion of some kind of master
          coming in really misses the power of the original quality
          circles and all the Deming stuff that made it so
          powerful.

Joe:      I think the real true Lean people that I'm familiar with
          believe that there is that hierarchy that has developed
          in six-sigma.

Robert:   There's one more thing that happens. We've seen it
          with the quality movement as well is that originally it
          was designed to be mindful. You know people sitting
          around thinking. Then the forms really are designed to
          be mindless so you don't have to think, you fill out the
          form. It really takes away from the actual creativity
          that we need around the room.

          I'll tell you, it's very impressive of how creative people
          are when given the opportunity to think about how to
          better a system.

Joe:      I think you bring a point when you're talking about the
          service guys. Everybody is always worried about failing
          and major changes. But when you do everything at the
          place of work and at Gemba as we call it in Lean,
          changes are all minor. There's not a drastic change that
          when you do fail that the whole company structure
          drops down.

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Robert:   No, you're not betting the farm, but on the other hand,
          let me give you some real life examples that this
          service group had to think about: When to have cars
          come in? How to talk to people about when to pick
          them up? How to designate who/what mechanic should
          be working on what difficulty of job? You know there's
          a lot of scheduling stuff.

          There are a lot of systems that needed to be in place to
          communicate with the customers. Then there's the
          relationship between the people taking the phone calls
          in the reception area to the technicians. As I'm
          mentioning some of these elements, you can see that it
          was not anything too elaborate. By the way, that
          includes bringing making sure the parts were there
          when the technicians needed them.

          We were creating a relationship between the parts
          department and the service department and these
          networks of relationships. They were just able to little
          by little by little design systems that accommodated
          the outcomes. Which, by the way, the outcomes
          included fixing the vehicle first time and having it really
          be right, having loaners available for the customers,
          having parts available for the technicians, and so on.

Joe:      I think you bring something up there that I want to
          touch upon is that I see where people want to, they
          want these customer experiences and start
          collaborating with customers and we talk about co-
          creation and open innovation, but unless that structure
          is already happening with a collaborative type of
          system within a company versus a normal command
          and control situation, unless that's happening internally
          is it possible to do externally?
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          Are you going to fail? Is that failure just sitting waiting
          to happen?

Robert:   The answer is no. It's not that it's impossible. It's
          impossible to do it that way. It's also impossible to do it
          as grass roots from the standpoint of, management has
          to support it. It is one of the aspects of my latest
          version of “Path for Managers” that I emphasize
          because I saw it in abundance over the 12 years that I
          had written the first version to the second version was
          a lot of times it was the failure of leadership to support
          the kind of change efforts.

          Without their support, it wasn't going to go anywhere
          no matter how many people within the company
          wanted it. You can't drive it through grass roots and so
          there's a function of leadership, and so we always have
          to drive it up to the senior-most leader to make sure
          they're, in fact, not only supporting it, but insisting
          upon it.

Joe:      If I want to have a collaborative structure externally, I
          need to have one internally first. It is the best way to
          do it.

Robert:   Yes, let me give you an even better, almost immediate,
          almost visceral example. When the CEO and the
          Executive team are not aligned, how do you expect
          anybody else in the organization to be aligned?
          Everybody take a real quick survey of the companies
          you know and love and notice how often, in fact, the
          senior team is not aligned.

          You've got the Vice President of this going in that
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          direction disagreeing with the Vice President of that and
          they have what Deming called their own little fiefdoms.
          Below them, everybody is supposed to self-organize
          into utopia.

Joe:      When you talk about your workshop and a structured
          approach to Lean, it's a three-day workshop, it's pretty
          intense I would imagine for three days. What does
          someone learn and what types of people come to it?

Robert:   Well, first of all, that workshop there was a prerequisite
          what you had to be, have done our four-day
          Fundamentals of Structural Thinking. So, all the folks
          that came had done that course, so they were familiar
          with structural thinking. Because that was important,
          they needed that to be able to really go at the pace
          that we went.

          Just generally what we did was we compared traditional
          Lean to the structural approach with a new Lean. We
          experimented with both and saw which one was
          superior and people got their arms around it and every
          person went out ready to put it into place.

          Either some of them were consultants and said they
          were ready to put it into place in their client's
          businesses and organizations and some of them were
          practitioners; they were from companies, and they
          were ready to put it into place in their companies.

Joe:      Did they also have Lean experience or did a lot of them
          not have general Lean experience?

Robert:   I had everything from people who never did anything to
          black belts. By the way, all of them had all the people
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          that had experience with Lean also had the typical
          frustration that people do.

Joe:      Does the new Lean follow Deming? I mean is it an
          extension of that or do you take a different direction
          than Deming?

Robert:   I don't know that. It doesn't follow Deming; it is
          influenced heavily by Deming and Deming's notion. By
          the way, I think Deming was probably the senior-most
          wonderful innovator in this area and I'd like to point out
          that he was a composer. Well, he was and Drucker was
          a musician. There is something about coming from
          music where you really understand in an extracurricular
          way how things are put together.

          So it does, and I'm not just sort of saying this because
          I'm a composer, but that what one learns as a
          composer actually has an impact on how you look at
          organizations because in some ways they're very
          similar in terms of elements in relation to each other
          and how they work together. It relates to the statistical
          approach that Deming has for manufacturing in terms
          of minimizing variances and building in quality. So, you
          don't inspect it at the end.

          It's actually really built in. I think is quite extraordinary
          insight and I'm totally in love with it. When people try
          to take quality and then put it to other realms of
          organizations where they were not looking at
          reproduced processes, like real management where you
          have to make decisions based on unexpected things
          and you can't minimize variance when you're, when
          you've got something new that's thrown at you that
          you've got to make a command decision about.
                   A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz
                          Copyright Business901
Business901                      Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

          On the other hand, Deming really understood this
          principle of outcomes. Because he said that "Look you
          could really create the perfect buggy whip and it would
          be obsolete." So it wasn't simply minimizing the
          variances, it was also understanding the strategic
          outcomes that companies were after. And also the
          other thing is the kind of wisdom; Deming really
          understood the wisdom that the rank and file have and
          how we are not making great use of that wisdom,
          which we should be learning from each other all over
          the place.

          In the collaborative structures that we're talking about
          now because of the ease of communication and
          everything, I think goes right along with what Deming
          always thought about just in a different time frame.

          But remember he's a real innovator. He wasn't just
          taking somebody else's system and following it. He was
          rethinking systems and so he was so in touch with what
          it meant and why it worked, how it worked. . .

Joe:      I have to ask you, how did a composer ever get
          involved in Lean and structural analysis?

Robert:   To make the long story short. I was teaching
          composition at the New England Conservatory and I
          created this particular approach to teach that and I
          wondered if I could use that approach for non-
          compositional aspects of life-like people creating
          things. I created a course around Boston and I had
          teachers teaching this course and so on and some of
          the folks at MIT Sloan School of Management took the
          course.
                   A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz
                          Copyright Business901
Business901                      Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

          The next thing I know I got invited to join a company,
          to form a company with Peter Senge, Charlie Keefer,
          and myself called Innovation Associates. And then
          that's when I really learned about system dynamics and
          the great work that's going on a Sloan School of
          Management and got very interested.

          The system dynamics and structural dynamics are very
          similar. But they’re like cousins. They're not identical
          and one is more from a compositional process and one
          is from a systemic process which originally was maybe
          from electronics. There was just great co-collaboration
          there.

          At first, I was only interested in organizations from the
          standpoint of it's a place that people create and so I
          wanted to help them be more effective but then I
          started to understand the organization itself as a
          structure and started to see that success did not always
          succeed and understood, came to understand, what
          was causing that.

Joe:      Is there something you would like to add that maybe I
          didn't ask?

Robert:   One is the whole notion of customer value and trying to
          drive everything through customer value. I really think
          that's ridiculous. There are some things that certainly,
          where customer value would be the organizing principle
          but there are other things, which are not, like
          infrastructure stuff or things that are under the hood
          that have no impact at all on the customer.

          I mean you can always argue that they can, but you
                   A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz
                          Copyright Business901
Business901                      Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems
          have to get so indirect and convoluted that it becomes
          not practical because you're no longer in touch with the
          real motivation. So there are other reasons to perfect
          systems other than customer value. If you start to
          divide the word world into customer value or waste,
          you miss so much.

          I think that's another limitation. I do have respect for
          traditional Lean; I just think that it's really in many
          ways obsolete and is based on some wrong premises,
          but I certainly love its intention and it often can be
          tremendously successful.

Joe:      If someone is interested in finding out more, how can
          they contact you?

Robert:   Two places to go. One is our website, which is
          www.robertfritz.com and the other is an online course
          that we do with a partner company, and that is a great
          thing, by the way, it's a personal on-line course,
          lessons every day, me on video; it goes for over three
          months, very powerful, and that's www.wisepond
          that's W-I-S-E-P-O-N-D dot com.

          Of course, all of my books are on Amazon and all of
          them except for one are in Kindle. Also, if you come to
          our website, you'll see other things that we offer CDs
          and so on. So I also write a blog every week on the
          Wisepond site and we have a pretty active Facebook
          page which is Robert Fritz Inc.

Joe:      I would like to thank you very much Robert. This
          podcast will be available on the Business901 blogsite
          and the Business901 iTunes store.

                   A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz
                          Copyright Business901
Business901                      Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems



                                                                Joseph T. Dager
                                                                   Business901
                                                           Phone: 260-918-0438
                                                                 Skype: Biz901
                                                             Fax: 260-818-2022
                                           Email: jtdager@business901.com
                                     Website: http://www.business901.com
                                                       Twitter: @business901


Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in
bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and
marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty
years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies
it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.

Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will
allow you to interact with like-minded individuals and
organizations, purchase related tools, use some free ones and
receive feedback from your peers.

    Marketing with Lean Book Series included in membership
               Lean Sales and Marketing Workshop
                 Lean Service Design Workshop




                   A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz
                          Copyright Business901

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A New approach to Lean

  • 1. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Approaching Lean from a Different Perspective Guest was Robert Fritz Related Podcast: A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Sponsored by A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 2. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Robert Fritz has been around the Dr. Deming world, which we discuss in the latter part of the podcast, since the 1970s. You may even recognize his work as he was an instrumental part of the original Systems Thinking Group with Peter Senge. Peter actually offers a marvelous introduction in the book. Robert Fritz, composer, filmmaker and organizational consultant is the founder of Technologies for Creating. During the past twenty-five years, over 80,000 people in 27 countries have participated in trainings created by Robert Fritz. His insights on the creative process and structural dynamics serve as the foundation of meaningful and lasting change for both individuals and organizations. In Robert Fritz’s, The Path of Least Resistance for Managers (In the new edition, Robert has added a chapter on Lean in the update) and calls it “The New Lean.” A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 3. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Transcription of Podcast Joe: Yes, how did your workshop go? Were you pleased? Robert: Great. It was really great. It was a three -day workshop and we covered traditional Lean and then transferred it into the structural approach to Lean and everybody saw how much more efficient it was. The structural approach toward it created these tremendous efficiencies, we designed many, many systems. We had a couple of experimental ones, model ones, demo ones but then the rest of them were all from real life, from people in the room. It was really quite extraordinary to see how quickly through more of a compositional approach they could design very, very comprehensive and economy of means types of systems. Joe: I'm intrigued by it, because are you familiar with the Toyota Kata work that Mike Rother did because it's very, very familiar. I mean it's very similar type thinking and talk. Robert: It's not. Not in orientation - not in orientation at all. Joe: Really, why? Robert: I really think, Joe; we're breaking new ground here in reinventing the whole subject matter. So it's not like theme in variations. It's really like a new song; it's like a new... It's like another generation of Lean. Joe: I think you are breaking new ground with it. It’s discovery. It's creating that tension. It's in creating A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 4. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems really that structural tension with the customer. Welcome everyone; this is Joe Dager the host of the Business901 Podcast. With me today is Robert Fritz. Robert is a composer, filmmaker, organizational consultant, and founder of Technologies for Creating, and author of numerous books, including the bestseller, "The Path of Least Resistance." His latest, I believe is a re-write of "The Path of Least Resistance for Managers." Robert, I'd like to welcome you and mention that I'm a long-time fan back from the mid-90's in my systems thinking days and where I first ran across your first book and later read your book "Creating". I have to admit that I lost track of your writing and did not read "The Path of Least Resistance for Managers" until probably around 2006 or so, when a colleague of mine recommended it by saying that, "I wish this would have been the first business book that I've ever read." Give me the elevator speech in why you re-wrote "The Path of Least Resistance for Managers." Robert: The reason I wrote the first version of it was because what I was seeing in organization. First of all, let me sort of describe what I mean by the path of least resistance - just the phrase itself because there are two meanings to that. One is the colloquial meaning, which is the easy way out and the other is the scientific meaning which is an energy moves where it's easiest for it to go. What I'm referring to is the scientific meaning, not the colloquial meaning. What I saw in organizations over A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 5. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems the years was that organizations were often structured in such a way that success did not always succeed. I saw that there were two patterns that were common. One was advancement in which you set out for something; you get it, and the success becomes a platform for future success, and of course that's how we would all like it to be. But too often it's not that way. It actually is something that's a different pattern, one that oscillates. That is you set out for something, you get it, and then something happens and there's a reversal, and you lose what you gained. This kind of oscillating pattern we've seen over and over, over the last 30, 40 years in organizations. Where organizations build up capacity and then they downsize, and they build up capacity and then they downsize. They decentralize decision-making, and then they centralize it again, and they decentralize and centralize. They focus on shareholder return on investment and then they switch to customer satisfaction, and then back to shareholder and on and on we can predict, we can see these oscillations and they are predictable. And the question then became what gives rise to these obvious patterns of behavior. By the way, when you're in those systems, they're not obvious, but when you back out of the system and just look at it from a longer-range time frame, they become kind of hard to miss. Joe: Do companies do that when let's say they, change CEOs? I know in football, it always seems like you have an offensive type coach and what you need is defense A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 6. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems so the next time they hire a new head coach, they always hire the defensive guy then because that's what they're doing wrong. Is that kind of the oscillation that you mean? Robert: Sometimes it's within the same management system and sometimes it's the change of a management system which then changes back, which then changes back. It almost doesn't matter if they're in a structure that gives rise to an oscillating pattern of behavior. The last point I want to make before saying why I rewrote the book is that it is the underlying structure. By “structure," I'm not talking about reporting relationships. I'm talking about the combination of ingredients of all the elements, the desires, aspirations, reward systems, market, product, etc., etc., etc. All of those things combine to create a like a musical piece. They combine to create a tendency for behavior. If you don't change the underlying structure, and if it's not an oscillating structure, and if you try to make a change happen within an oscillating structure. We will see the pattern of the change first being accepted and then being rejected. It doesn't matter how good the change effort itself is, it's the underlying structure that will determine whether or not it succeeds. Joe: Is that the culture? Robert: No, it's something that causes the culture, the underlying structure. A good example of a change of underlying structure is when Steve Jobs came back to Apple. If you remember at that time, Apple was being talked about as being sold; they were being talked A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 7. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems about as being a clone, like a PC clone. When Steve Jobs came back he changed the underlying structure of the company and of the business strategy and that's led to their tremendous success. But a change of underlying structure was required and that's what Jobs did when he came back is he really changed not the culture. The culture is a by-product. People talk about culture, but it's ridiculous because they never ask, "What causes the culture?" It's the underlying structure that causes the culture. If I don't have a change in the underlying structure, I don't have a change in anything. So the best efforts can fail because there's no change of what's causing the behavior that we're seeing. I rewrote the book because 12 years later after I wrote the original version I had seen so much, I had put so much to the test of what was in that book. I had so many more examples and it was 12 years later and it really needed an update. So I rewrote it and added probably 100 pages, emphasized leadership more than ever as you and I have just been talking a new chapter on what I'm calling the new Lean or the structural approach to Lean, which is a rethink of Lean management. Joe: Smaller picture we see it practically day to day. So what you're talking about doesn't necessarily have to apply just in the big picture, the Apple to Steve Jobs thing, this also plays in day to day work. Robert: Oh sure. Look, I'll just give you a quick example. If I reward the sales of folks for building up sales and I reward the factory for making quality and suddenly the A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 8. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems sales overwhelm the factory where their quality goes down and then what happens from that is customers start going away. When they do that, the sales senior sales people say we need more sales; they build up more sales. Again, there's a cycle where it overwhelms the factory and you have oscillating quality; you have oscillating sales, and often it's thought that you have a personality conflict between the head of sales and the head of the factory and you don't. What you have is a structure in which rewarding people for doing two different things that are contradictory. The way to change that is to really have the sales goal and quality goal be exactly the same, so we don't make more than we sell more than we can make, but we do sell as many as we can make. But that's thinking relationally. I'm thinking about quality and sales together versus fragmenting them like most organizations do. Joe: But that's not really possible. I mean you're always going to have an unbalance aren't you? I mean, there's never going to be that commonality in that example. I mean there's always . . . Robert: No, it's not possible if you don't do it. But it's possible if you do it. And that means I've got to get sales and I've got to get senior management in the room. This is where leadership counts. You know we just don't sort of reward, set these guys off on their journeys, reward them for success and not notice that if one of them is successful, it's going to hurt the other one. A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 9. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems We really have to think about it more systemically, more holistically, more structurally, more like putting a composition together, more like how music is written where the parts really fit together rather than inadvertently fight against each other. When I look at a lot of organizations all, I see is bad composition. By the way, I'm a composer, so my reference is how we write music. I look at these things and it's really not that complicated both to understand but also to change because what I've got to do then is start to understand the relationships or the networks of relationships and the dependencies of them to each other and then how to better organize the goals. Joe: I think that's the key understanding the networks. Is this, what hinders when we talk about the failures of any type of a transformation and mostly in my world, we talk about a Lean transformation and how often they fail. Is this underlying structure the key to why these failures occur? Robert: I think there are two keys to why those failures occur. One is certainly structural. But the other I think is also, there's the nature of the way traditional Lean has been set up that builds in its failure. It's just the nature of how it is. Let me say about traditional Lean, I think there're some very good things about it and I think when it has worked it has produced some tremendous results. But as most Lean people know it really is hard to put it into an organization and have it sustain itself. I think there are reasons for that, structural reasons for that. A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 10. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems That's the nature of the beast. I've gotten interested in over the last number of years is to redesign, reinvent in a way, the whole process of Lean so that in fact, it is sustainable, it does work. People are interested in it and enthusiastic about it not from a devotee kind of point of view. Because a lot of times when you look at Lean organizations, you've got a group of folks who are almost like religious nuts. You know and everything is waste unless it's value to the customer and their complete purists and there's the rest of the organization who hates them. Joe: Is this what you mean by the new Lean? What you're proposing here? Robert: Let me tell. Let me say some of the differences between traditional Lean and what we're doing. Traditional Lean is problem-based. So the first thing that people do is they look for problems and then they try to eradicate the problems and here's just a fact that all of us as human beings will know. You can solve all of your problems and still not have what you want. One of the things that, if you notice, in my books, I'm always criticizing problem-solving, particularly if it's chronic. I know managers love problem solving but probably one of the worst things you can do is spend your time problem solving. What the difference is when we work with organizations one of the first things we do is help them change their orientation from a problem orientation to an outcome orientation. Rather than asking the question, "What are we trying A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 11. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems to get rid of? What problems are we trying to solve?" The question becomes, "What are the outcomes we're trying to achieve?" What are we trying to produce? What are we trying to create?" And that's not just the change of a question it really is a change of orientation. How we think about things. The second step in that orientation is to look at current reality. Where are we now in relation to where we want to be? That will not only include the problems. It will include everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly. You know, everything there is to see that's relevant to that outcome we need to be looking at and that includes the advantages as well. The question becomes how do we move from where we are to where we want to be and that's really the key to innovation. That's when we begin to understand and conceive of things, we hadn't thought of before, some of which will be real innovations in process improvements. In a way, limitation of traditional Lean is its problem based. Joe: One of the things that I want to ask you before you go on though. It seems a lot of people have problems with identifying current reality. I hate to say it that way but there's always a “What if?” Or “This isn't quite true,” or they paint different scenarios than really accepting what current state is and you expand on that in your work. I'm not sure which book cause I got them kind of comingled in my mind a little but is there a secret to defining current reality? Robert: Well, remember one of my famous quotes according to Google is, 'reality is an acquired taste'. And I think A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 12. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems that's true, but if we start with, "What is the outcome we want?" We're not looking at general reality, "What is existence?" We're looking at reality specific to the outcome. And when we can measure that we measure that. It's not so much a matter of opinion because, let's say you and I are disagreeing about what it is instead of fighting it out about who's right and who's wrong, we ask each other questions. "Why are you seeing what you're seeing?" "What do I need to know to understand the difference between what I'm seeing and what you're seeing?" You would ask me the same question, "What do I need to know?" "How are we to explain the discrepancy?" Let's together look and study reality and find out what there is to see and we'll either change our minds or add insight or we'll certainly come up with a fairly objective understanding, an adequate understanding of where we are in relation to where we want to be. The other thing is we'll test that out over time because as we create a strategy to move that strategy will let us know how well we're doing because what we expect is that reality will change in favor of what we want and if it doesn't we then study it some more to find what we got wrong. So instead of just being an opinion dump what we really do is become students of reality. We're motivated to do that because we want the outcome. Joe: It sounds like a great way to enter a sales conversation. Robert: It's one of the best ways to enter a sales conversation A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 13. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems because the essence of really, real sales professionalism is to find the match between the customer's motivation and desires and the offer that we're making. If it's really a good match, we have a basis of doing business. The professionals, the really great professional salespeople study the motivation of the customers. I'm really on purpose now saying motivation rather than need because people don't always do what they need, but they always do what they're motivated to do. So how are they making their choices? How are they deciding what they're deciding? How does that compare to what we're offering and if there's a good match, I call this the secret to good business strategy. Make them an offer they can't refuse. Not in “The Godfather” sense, but in the sense that it's so good that you really want to say yes to it. Joe: You know it sounds similar to Toyota Kata and then we have a current condition, a target condition, and we aim for that. Can you explain some differences between what the new Lean is as you describe it and the Toyota Kata? Robert: Yes, ironically I think that in the process of Lean itself, there's a lot of waste. Joe: Oh, you'll stir up someone on that one. Robert: Let me give you an example of this. We just did a training here last week on the new Lean and I did it with Elsie Ford, who's a traditional Lean expert; she's also a structural consultant, so she's done a lot of our A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 14. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems work and Elsie's role was to sort of educate the folks or remind them of the traditional Lean approaches like Toyota. She brought with her one of the games that they do; it's the putting a pen together thing and there're instructions and so on, and the way the traditional Lean would work is you go through this exercise and you get rid of all the wastes and you go through cycles where you get rid of the waste and eventually you can put a pen together. What we did is, after the first iteration, we just designed a process by which to put a pen together. Two or three iterations to perfect it and at the end it was perfect. I mean perfect in the sense, optimal in the sense that you really couldn't make it any better than it was given the assignment and the resources. Now, I've taken. If you read my chapter in Path for Managers the new version on the new Lean, I've taken all the wastes and turned them in to instead of things to get rid of, things to put into place. One of the lines I think you'll get a kick out of Joe is that I wrote in that chapter is that, "you cannot put traditional Lean in a start-up new company. First, you have to screw it up and then you can put Lean in." Joe: I highlighted that in the Kindle version. Robert: What we're looking at is how to create processes that, in fact, are efficient, have economy of means, make a lot of sense. I mean some of the things from traditional Lean I really like are minimizing steps, are minimizing handoffs, some of the ergonomics, where you put A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 15. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems things physically, where we're also looking at economy of transportation, at economy of scale, and economy of production, and workload capacity relationships. In a way Lean is very much fixing, fixing, fixing versus designing. If you throw away the current process and you rethink it all in terms of the outcome you want but have a really good fix about where you are which will give you the current process. Okay, current process is current reality. And here's where we want to be. You can rethink the whole process and bypass a whole number of steps. Well, let me give you an example. I work with one company and this is a car dealership. Once a week for 45 minutes I'm in a meeting with their service department guys doing design work. That's it, right, 45 minutes over the last two years, same set of folks, and same number of folks. In fact, I think they have a few places they need to fill, and they have increased their volume. And just that one group alone, you have to remember this is the garage at the service department; they have increased their efficiency in revenues $500,000 a year, same group of folks. That's just from little iterations every week improving. . .designing what they're doing? First of all, I'm describing where we're really looking at the outcome we're after, where are we now, how do we move from here to there. The other thing I really like about the notion of Lean is that it's grass roots. That it's people around the table really working it out who are there close to the situation and another, I know you A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 16. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems read this in my chapter. But a real irony about traditional Lean is the whole black belt and sensei deal. Because Lean is really designed to be grass roots rather than expertise and certainly, at first there needs to be some guidance or some facilitation but the notion of some kind of master coming in really misses the power of the original quality circles and all the Deming stuff that made it so powerful. Joe: I think the real true Lean people that I'm familiar with believe that there is that hierarchy that has developed in six-sigma. Robert: There's one more thing that happens. We've seen it with the quality movement as well is that originally it was designed to be mindful. You know people sitting around thinking. Then the forms really are designed to be mindless so you don't have to think, you fill out the form. It really takes away from the actual creativity that we need around the room. I'll tell you, it's very impressive of how creative people are when given the opportunity to think about how to better a system. Joe: I think you bring a point when you're talking about the service guys. Everybody is always worried about failing and major changes. But when you do everything at the place of work and at Gemba as we call it in Lean, changes are all minor. There's not a drastic change that when you do fail that the whole company structure drops down. A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 17. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Robert: No, you're not betting the farm, but on the other hand, let me give you some real life examples that this service group had to think about: When to have cars come in? How to talk to people about when to pick them up? How to designate who/what mechanic should be working on what difficulty of job? You know there's a lot of scheduling stuff. There are a lot of systems that needed to be in place to communicate with the customers. Then there's the relationship between the people taking the phone calls in the reception area to the technicians. As I'm mentioning some of these elements, you can see that it was not anything too elaborate. By the way, that includes bringing making sure the parts were there when the technicians needed them. We were creating a relationship between the parts department and the service department and these networks of relationships. They were just able to little by little by little design systems that accommodated the outcomes. Which, by the way, the outcomes included fixing the vehicle first time and having it really be right, having loaners available for the customers, having parts available for the technicians, and so on. Joe: I think you bring something up there that I want to touch upon is that I see where people want to, they want these customer experiences and start collaborating with customers and we talk about co- creation and open innovation, but unless that structure is already happening with a collaborative type of system within a company versus a normal command and control situation, unless that's happening internally is it possible to do externally? A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 18. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Are you going to fail? Is that failure just sitting waiting to happen? Robert: The answer is no. It's not that it's impossible. It's impossible to do it that way. It's also impossible to do it as grass roots from the standpoint of, management has to support it. It is one of the aspects of my latest version of “Path for Managers” that I emphasize because I saw it in abundance over the 12 years that I had written the first version to the second version was a lot of times it was the failure of leadership to support the kind of change efforts. Without their support, it wasn't going to go anywhere no matter how many people within the company wanted it. You can't drive it through grass roots and so there's a function of leadership, and so we always have to drive it up to the senior-most leader to make sure they're, in fact, not only supporting it, but insisting upon it. Joe: If I want to have a collaborative structure externally, I need to have one internally first. It is the best way to do it. Robert: Yes, let me give you an even better, almost immediate, almost visceral example. When the CEO and the Executive team are not aligned, how do you expect anybody else in the organization to be aligned? Everybody take a real quick survey of the companies you know and love and notice how often, in fact, the senior team is not aligned. You've got the Vice President of this going in that A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 19. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems direction disagreeing with the Vice President of that and they have what Deming called their own little fiefdoms. Below them, everybody is supposed to self-organize into utopia. Joe: When you talk about your workshop and a structured approach to Lean, it's a three-day workshop, it's pretty intense I would imagine for three days. What does someone learn and what types of people come to it? Robert: Well, first of all, that workshop there was a prerequisite what you had to be, have done our four-day Fundamentals of Structural Thinking. So, all the folks that came had done that course, so they were familiar with structural thinking. Because that was important, they needed that to be able to really go at the pace that we went. Just generally what we did was we compared traditional Lean to the structural approach with a new Lean. We experimented with both and saw which one was superior and people got their arms around it and every person went out ready to put it into place. Either some of them were consultants and said they were ready to put it into place in their client's businesses and organizations and some of them were practitioners; they were from companies, and they were ready to put it into place in their companies. Joe: Did they also have Lean experience or did a lot of them not have general Lean experience? Robert: I had everything from people who never did anything to black belts. By the way, all of them had all the people A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 20. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems that had experience with Lean also had the typical frustration that people do. Joe: Does the new Lean follow Deming? I mean is it an extension of that or do you take a different direction than Deming? Robert: I don't know that. It doesn't follow Deming; it is influenced heavily by Deming and Deming's notion. By the way, I think Deming was probably the senior-most wonderful innovator in this area and I'd like to point out that he was a composer. Well, he was and Drucker was a musician. There is something about coming from music where you really understand in an extracurricular way how things are put together. So it does, and I'm not just sort of saying this because I'm a composer, but that what one learns as a composer actually has an impact on how you look at organizations because in some ways they're very similar in terms of elements in relation to each other and how they work together. It relates to the statistical approach that Deming has for manufacturing in terms of minimizing variances and building in quality. So, you don't inspect it at the end. It's actually really built in. I think is quite extraordinary insight and I'm totally in love with it. When people try to take quality and then put it to other realms of organizations where they were not looking at reproduced processes, like real management where you have to make decisions based on unexpected things and you can't minimize variance when you're, when you've got something new that's thrown at you that you've got to make a command decision about. A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 21. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems On the other hand, Deming really understood this principle of outcomes. Because he said that "Look you could really create the perfect buggy whip and it would be obsolete." So it wasn't simply minimizing the variances, it was also understanding the strategic outcomes that companies were after. And also the other thing is the kind of wisdom; Deming really understood the wisdom that the rank and file have and how we are not making great use of that wisdom, which we should be learning from each other all over the place. In the collaborative structures that we're talking about now because of the ease of communication and everything, I think goes right along with what Deming always thought about just in a different time frame. But remember he's a real innovator. He wasn't just taking somebody else's system and following it. He was rethinking systems and so he was so in touch with what it meant and why it worked, how it worked. . . Joe: I have to ask you, how did a composer ever get involved in Lean and structural analysis? Robert: To make the long story short. I was teaching composition at the New England Conservatory and I created this particular approach to teach that and I wondered if I could use that approach for non- compositional aspects of life-like people creating things. I created a course around Boston and I had teachers teaching this course and so on and some of the folks at MIT Sloan School of Management took the course. A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 22. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems The next thing I know I got invited to join a company, to form a company with Peter Senge, Charlie Keefer, and myself called Innovation Associates. And then that's when I really learned about system dynamics and the great work that's going on a Sloan School of Management and got very interested. The system dynamics and structural dynamics are very similar. But they’re like cousins. They're not identical and one is more from a compositional process and one is from a systemic process which originally was maybe from electronics. There was just great co-collaboration there. At first, I was only interested in organizations from the standpoint of it's a place that people create and so I wanted to help them be more effective but then I started to understand the organization itself as a structure and started to see that success did not always succeed and understood, came to understand, what was causing that. Joe: Is there something you would like to add that maybe I didn't ask? Robert: One is the whole notion of customer value and trying to drive everything through customer value. I really think that's ridiculous. There are some things that certainly, where customer value would be the organizing principle but there are other things, which are not, like infrastructure stuff or things that are under the hood that have no impact at all on the customer. I mean you can always argue that they can, but you A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 23. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems have to get so indirect and convoluted that it becomes not practical because you're no longer in touch with the real motivation. So there are other reasons to perfect systems other than customer value. If you start to divide the word world into customer value or waste, you miss so much. I think that's another limitation. I do have respect for traditional Lean; I just think that it's really in many ways obsolete and is based on some wrong premises, but I certainly love its intention and it often can be tremendously successful. Joe: If someone is interested in finding out more, how can they contact you? Robert: Two places to go. One is our website, which is www.robertfritz.com and the other is an online course that we do with a partner company, and that is a great thing, by the way, it's a personal on-line course, lessons every day, me on video; it goes for over three months, very powerful, and that's www.wisepond that's W-I-S-E-P-O-N-D dot com. Of course, all of my books are on Amazon and all of them except for one are in Kindle. Also, if you come to our website, you'll see other things that we offer CDs and so on. So I also write a blog every week on the Wisepond site and we have a pretty active Facebook page which is Robert Fritz Inc. Joe: I would like to thank you very much Robert. This podcast will be available on the Business901 blogsite and the Business901 iTunes store. A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901
  • 24. Business901 Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joseph T. Dager Business901 Phone: 260-918-0438 Skype: Biz901 Fax: 260-818-2022 Email: jtdager@business901.com Website: http://www.business901.com Twitter: @business901 Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design. Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will allow you to interact with like-minded individuals and organizations, purchase related tools, use some free ones and receive feedback from your peers. Marketing with Lean Book Series included in membership Lean Sales and Marketing Workshop Lean Service Design Workshop A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz Copyright Business901