Jesse & Thomas Lamay are at again talking about engaging with the Trades, constraints and making construction better for everyone involved. Oh Yeah and they talk about The Goal also ;-)
Engage with a community of Industry Professionals focused on expanding their leadership skills: https://www.depthbuilder.com/a/2147560101/25qqpH4D
Coupon Code JESSE
Jesse & Thomas Lamay are at again talking about engaging with the Trades, constraints and making construction better for everyone involved. Oh Yeah and they talk about The Goal also ;-)
Engage with a community of Industry Professionals focused on expanding their leadership skills: https://www.depthbuilder.com/a/2147560101/25qqpH4D
Coupon Code JESSE
The only way to engage with trades is to actually do it. To have real conversations and meals. I have some pretty good relationship with people who are working in trades. And I couldn't consider those people my friends, you know, as human beings. Like my friend who's a owner of a business and I have a friend who is a iron worker. And I consider them both equal friends as the hierarchy of friends go in my world. But I've been trying to think about that and this is how you truly engage. Bring these people over to your house like they're your friends because they truly are, or go to their house and even though they might be culturally different with their family, if you're truly friends, even if you don't speak the same language, doesn't matter at all. So I think that's really cool we get the opportunity to do that. I'm trying to do that more often with people we work with. Yeah, man. we gotta do better. I was at a lean Coffee with Skiles group yesterday with Jen, with Keyan Zandy and Buddy. Got to hang out with Buddy. He's awesome. And one of the things I put on the board was like, let's talk about deepened connections. I think it's an important point and I've seen it, I saw it again, totally different group of people. Same thing. It was two big takeaways in the little 10 minutes that we talked about it. I was like, guys, do y'all ever notice when you walk a job and you go to interact with a trade worker, how they stare at the ground and kind of scatter ? And everybody's like, oh wow. Like, yeah, you're right. I was like, that is because we have conditioned them to view that human interaction as punitive. When the people come around with the clean vests and like, you see all of us straighten up. Go away. Get off your ladders. Go throw the ladders in the closet. But we train them, we train them to go and hide. Now I'm not a big shot or anybody, but I'm not typically on the project. So if I'm walking the job I'm a new face. And my vest is pristine. My boots they're clean. I keep myself clean. So it's obvious that I'm not a working person and it's obviously I'm not part of the normal project team. So immediately I get treated like what's happening here? And I've done it, like I've trained, I've given advice, I've shown pictures. Hey is this guy shows up, go away. Go the roof. Oh yes. Collab Session number five has finally dropped. That is my buddy Thomas L and you are gonna notice in this conversation, it's a little more free flowing. A little more freestyle baby. Uh, Thomas brought the game. The first four collab sessions? Yes, I said four. So that means that there's some more for you to go in and enjoy and consume, especially over the holidays Now, the conversations were kind of framed around some notes and some ideas or some thinking rather, that Thomas put into play in preparation for you guys. from here forward, these next few collab sessions are gonna be a little looser, which is more my style. You may notice that I'm gonna be talking just a little bit more, Before you get to the rest of the conversation, I wanna ask you to give a shout out fist. Hugs, love, positive vibes, all of those things to our patrons. We're wrapping up 2022 and we've had some patrons that have been committed to us all year long, some of them longer than a year. They have contributed to the experience that you're having. Uh, so if you've enjoyed it, let us know. And if you haven't, like, let us know. Uh, patrons. Love y'all very much. Hope to spend another year with y'all and the intent is for us to continue providing some type of value, some awesome experience, uh, that you're proud to be a part of, and we appreciate you for that. And then we'll be calculating the amount of money that we're gonna be contributing to the Skilled Trades Alliance, because that's part of the idea, right? 80% of whatever we get from the patrons, we're turning around and contributing that to Skilled Trades Alliance because Skilled Trades Alliance got it going on, baby. You gotta check them. and we're gonna make a little switch. Normally we would have a LnM Family member shout out at the end of the episode, and I'm not sure if anybody's actually listening all the way to the end, you know, who knows? And so I wanna make sure that the LnM Family members that are going out of their way To leave a comment or a review get recognized, and I want everybody to know that you leave a comment, you leave a review. We're gonna be recognizing you, baby. So here we go. This shout out is for LnM Family member Mr. James Gable, host of the Uncommon Communicator Podcast dropped this comment for us. He says, Jesse, I've really enjoyed the collab sessions on the goal. With Thomas Lame, keep them coming. I have encouraged several others to read the book. We all have a couple of Herbies in our lives. In the last collab session, we start talking about Herbie. We talk about Herbie some more. Uh, so help people understand what that Herbie is and more importantly, go out and help a Herbie. and before we go, one more thing. The Lean & Love Reflection Journal is out the final. Final, final edited version of it is available for you on the Amazon. And also, I gotta give another shout out to another LnM Family member, no BS tribe member, uh, Maria Martin and Krista Ales. They both went out of their way to give us feedback in terms of what the journal, how the journal needed to be tweaked. Their feedback has been incorporated into the final available for purchase Lean & Love Reflection Journal. So go to the Amazon, get you a copy. It's a monthly journal if you've already got one leaving us a review, some stars, um, all of the above would be deeply appreciated. Okay, and here we go onto the rest of collab session number five. And now I'm probably the one there showing the picture too. How do we change that? The only way that I can change that is to change the way I interact with people. And it's super hard because it takes a lot of time and when your time is limited, it is for me, I can't, I wish I could be everywhere at all places at all times. So how do I engage with people? Here's a cheat code for me it's hard to come off genuine when you do this especially if you're like the pristine boots and pristine vest and hard hats impeccable. It's obviously a corporate guy here. But you go to a crew that's doing any kind of work and hopefully not stop them from doing their work, but if there's a break in the action like tell me about what you're doing and I'm super curious about exactly how are you doing? What are you doing? And try to be super open and genuine about it. What do you think about that? Do you appreciate that as a tradesperson? So that's the thing, right? Is tell me about what you're doing. Help. Tell me what you're doing. The times that I've seen people do that, once they get through, like, is this a trick? Are they trying to trap me? Yeah. Cause I mean, that's part of the problem, right? Is most of the fancy boots or even the general contractor that's on site, they rarely interact with them unless they're getting on their ass about something. And so then they gotta figure like, is this okay? This is safe. They are happy to tell you all the intricacies about what they're doing because nobody ever asked them. Nobody ever asked them, what are you doing? How do you do it? What is this like? And that's the thing. So like in that conversation, I was talking to the team, they're like, well, it's kind of hard. I'm like, it's not that hard. You just introduce yourself. Ask them their name, ask them why they're in the trade. Right. Learn their name. Why are you in the trade? How long have you been on this job site? How is this job site different than the last one? What do you do on the weekends? Do you hunt? Do you, are you traveling? Are you suit casing in? Talk to 'em like they're a human being. Like you would talk to anybody. You're been standing in line getting coffee, standing in line at the airport. You strike up conversations all the time. Why can't we do that with the men and women out there in the field building our stuff? You don't to buy a expensive barbecue. You don't have to, have a raffle of swag. Don't have to post it on LinkedIn., just be real. It's hard. I hope I kind of tricked you into that conversation cuz it links into chapter 20. Ooh. So our merry band of Misfits, right? We got the gang at Unico in chapter 20, and they have to go out into the fab and interact with tradespeople. They have to do this, this is now, they no longer can do their planning or evaluations with computers and simulations and talking to high priced consultants like Jonah . So Jonah does inspire them he's teaching them that, Hey you gotta distinguish between types of resources and the fab. That means , for every unit that goes through that bottleneck, that's the pace of the work. And all of a sudden you have to choose. And the choice, this is a difficult situation because when you start talking about bottlenecks and resources, you start talking about human beings. And human beings in a process. Paid for one 90. Is any resource whose capacity is equal or less than the demand placed upon. So Jesse, if you need to run 80 feet of sanitary line, you got eight hours. Yeah. Say we gotta cover this line up for us to start the foundation., you're the bottleneck and you need 80 feet. That's the demand that's been put placed upon you and your crew. Also behind you is , a crew of 40 carpenters, laborers, rebar, dump trucks, excavators. But the sanitary line is 12 feet deep. So it's not exactly easy so , any resource whose capacity is equal or less in the demand placed upon it, and a non bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed upon. Yes. So if they got capacity that's greater than the demand. The demand currently in this instance is 80 feet of sanitary line. The capacity is, hey, we can do a whole bunch of concrete, but we can't do it because there's, Jesse's got the Grand Canal dug out, It wouldn't be safe to place a heavy excavator next to a 12 foot deep excavation so, we have ourselves a constraint, or at least the bottleneck. It's not a complete constraint cause you have some capacity. And so the exact scenario will use the same numbers and apply it to like a real life situation. So I know my in estimated install rate, so my estimated install rate is 10 foot of cast iron per hour. In that situation, in an eight hour day, I can do 80 feet. That's good. So I'm at the limits of the threshold, so I'm already a bottleneck. Now, just for anyone listening, who'd be like, what, 10 feet an hour? This seems crazy, but this is 12 feet down in a ditch in the south and today it was a hundred degrees and you ain't moving fast. And so things need to be hoisted down into it. Shoring gotta be moved. So estimated conditions are 10 foot an hour. And this is fake. People don't freak out. So I'm already a bottleneck because I'm at the threshold that does not account for any problems. So as soon as something a hiccup happens, I will not meet the. I will not meet the target period. Now what I've done, and it's funny cuz I've lived it, it was happening to me and then I went and did it to people until I kind of figured it out is I've been on this job, I know it's estimated at 10 foot per hour. I know it can be done at 10 foot per hour, but the past three months, because of the conditions on site and all the stuff, we've been hitting about seven foot per hour. And I'm still gonna commit to the variation that lives. And so here's the thing, right? It's like ideally we're gonna manage the variation out, but our history, like our real life recent history tells us at peak, we're only able to do seven foot an hour, but I'm gonna plan to hit 10 foot an hour. And we do that over and over and over again. I mean, the bigger scenario is, you know, projects, rough project, we're running up on schedule, we're already working overtime, we're gonna start, we're working long days, we're gonna start adding Saturdays and we're gonna start stacking trades. And I'm looking at my budget, my projections of manpower and dollars and I'm like going at the rate that we've been going at, I'm gonna bust by 20%. So the financial forecast I'm gonna make on the project is to bring it back to budget. That's not po Let's, that's your total denial. Like my history shows, given all the con, all the contributing factors, 21.2. is the ratio, my performance rate. That make sense? So the plan should be, we're gonna be at least 20% over budget and not surrender to it. But let's get real, because when I account for the plan, like really we're 20% over, we've been 20% over, and if we go 20% over, this is the actual impact. All of a sudden, people are gonna say, whoa, whoa, whoa. We can't do that. Okay? We have to make significant change to bring us back to one and even greater management and resources to keep us under one. So when you have that bottleneck, and if you're clicking on all cylinders, I'm gonna do 10 foot an hour, I'm gonna hit that at 80 foot in a day. That's not without extra effort. I need to have some mechanisms in place to absolutely address any variation. Because if I don't, we ain't gonna hit it. That's right. So your capacity is less than the demand. And there's a cost to that. Then to increase your capacity means you have to increase your operating expense. You need more resources, right? Lou straight up says this in the book, 80% of our products flow through the bottlenecks. Not only is there a cost, an operational expense to your third party company, there's a cost and operational expense, of your work, of your capacity, because it's also holding up this huge crew of foundations. And this is 1980s, it comes out to$2,188 an hour of their operating expense. So I think every hour that plant is down, they just burning 2200 bucks.. But if you think about it in this instance if Jesse's the sanitary gang is not installing at their full operating capacity and they're not meeting and they're a bottleneck. So now behind Jesse's sanitary gang that's 40 people. But that's for times the operating expense, probably more than that cuz the equipment and all the materials is super expensive, right? Oh that's a dollar waiting on a dime.. How do I know? Cause I've said these words, but what we do typically is we just pressure Jessie instead of lightning the load. Right. We gotta go back to her. What would I typically do? Here's what we would typically do. We would have you create some fun, fancy contraption shoring system that you gotta go get special order. That way we can set our excavator and our concrete pump right next to it so you can work safe. And so it's like, was that the right answer? The whole cost of the entire job is going up based upon our inability to relieve the bottleneck lightning, some kind of load on Jesse's sanitary crew, So, hey, all of a sudden we just found a Herbie and maybe this situation got resolved, but that's like, Hey, that operating expense didn't even increased because the work that we were gonna pay, Jesse's crew we're just gonna pay the Earth working company. Yeah. And if we did it on a time and materials basis, there's no materials. It's just Earth. So then it's just time. And if they're super efficient, This is a scenario everybody. We don't need any armchair estimators,, but the idea is lighten the load. We don't have to go straight to our scope of work and be like, no, you have to do this and cuz this is what you do. Think outside the box. Yeah. And find a bottle. And I couldn't figure out a situation to do that. So they go out into the factory and go Looking for Herbie. Yeah. Looking for Herbie . Yes. Not to make fun of him. Let's just go find Herby so we can fix, so we can help. Yeah. So Donovan he's the operation manager page 1 63. He goes, why don't we go ahead with the easier things right away and see what kind of effects they have while we're developing the others. That's what he asked. He's ready to go. And they go, okay, well we gotta find Herbie. So they're like, well it is gotta be in a bottleneck according to Jonah. So Jonah is like, anything that's in front of a bottleneck is piling up inventory, right? Have you ever seen inventory start to pile up? Oh my god, yes. Too many times. Well, and confession I've intentionally piled up inventory, but that's a different chapter. I wanna just point that out like you've said it, but just in case anybody missed it, let piles of inventory be an indicator of a problem. If you see inventory, stop investigate because are hidden problems there. It actually says it in the book, don't you see ? If we got a Herbie, it's gonna have a huge pile of working process sitting in front of it. Yes. He's like, Bob goes, we got huge piles of the all over the place out there. But you gotta find the biggest pile of inventory and then that's your leading indicator of you got a Herbie. And then don't get mad at the Herbie. Think about lightning. The load. Why do you think it's important to learn? You have to learn to see bottling. What do you think it's important? Well, one, I'm gonna give two points. One is for my experience, right before I knew what to look for or could see, it was always there. So I was swimming in it, right? Like I was swimming in the problems. They were all around me., I was conditioned to that and just kind of dealt with it. And the way I dealt with it was pushing the people. But it wasn't the people, it was the system., the system was busted. And so that being able to see, helped me say, oh, it's not the guys. It's the way we're doing things. It's the way I'm ordering stuff, it's the way I'm communicating, it's the way I'm planning, it's the way I'm orienting things. Like all of a sudden I was able to shift the way I was operating to set the guys up for success. And like, make their day a little bit better. Now, the downside of learning, there's a second point. The downside of learning to see is once you learn to see you can't unsee. It's like somebody's butt crack. Exactly. He's not. And that image is imprinted in your head and then ., so now that I can see all the waste, my experience was at that time I had like anxiety, like, oh my God, we're never gonna be successful. Everything's gonna be a failure. We're losing so much. Because I could see it everywhere. And the truth is it's not different. It's always been there. All this nervous energy I have, I need to apply it to redesigning the system. Bottom line, let's evaluate it. Let's redesign it. Let's look, let's find the biggest pile and let's go do something about that one. Run some experiments and make things happen. Let's go find us a Herbie. So when all processes completely fail, still don't do that. Just go help 'em , right? So you have to learn, you have to teach people how to do this. And this is incredibly hard because teaching people takes capacity. You have to have the capacity to learn. So if you're completely buried in all of your day to day goings on, you have no capacity to learn. So you have to number one, like, Hey, I'm gonna help you and this is super important. So whatever you're doing, you would now have permission to turn that in three days instead of tomorrow. Right? So if you're in a management position, give somebody an out a little bit, we give'em an inch and now they have capacity. And be like, now instead of doing that thing super tedious, let's go walk the , and I'm gonna teach you what it means to me. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, we got a constraint. Our plan was, we were doomed to begin with because we didn't plan this change, this added scope. Then if you find those resources that are idle, that's your inventory. The step in front of that idle resource, that's a constraint. No matter what. Are there lifts sitting around? Are there stacks of stuff? Are there things missing? But all of a sudden, like it takes the, kind of the BS out of it. And when you teach people that it's like going to school. You learn this little sick secret cheat code, like go sift through the trash, look for what's in there and what's not in there. And somewhere in that pile of trash and the piles of inventory and what's idle resources is the problem. And once you find that problem, you've struck gold. Yes, gold, yes. Like a prospector. And then when you find that gold, you gotta be happy about it. Cause it's super valuable stuff. But you have to figure out which of the things are slowing all of the other things down. And once you find that you found your Herbie. That's the theory of constraints, at least , the fundamental piece of it, just because it happened on the Empire State Building doesn't mean it's gonna happen on your high rise . Right. Or whatever. Right. You have to treat every bottleneck as a unique, problem to solve. And when you go into it in that mindset and not go into it alone., it creates teams, it creates trust. There's respect because all of a sudden it's like, Hey, Jesse, your little mini backhoe, like, move the, this thing outta the way. We got you. We got you, bro. We got backfill list. We got, they have these like robot, have you seen these? Like the, the rover robot that like, instead of the tamper drive. Oh, so cool. We got three of those. Jesse, like, get outta the way. Just give us a signal when you pass your inspection, we'll just bury this and it'll be done in an hour. We just solved a problem. We've now alleviated the bottleneck and then we're moving forward on our original path. They're like, it feels good. Yeah, it feels good. And nobody was bickering, nobody got thrown off the job site. Like we didn't have to go down that, that road. No. We just look for the slowest part of the operation. The back filling process. Cause Jesse's, they got the line. They can run some pipe, but the back filling piece give that to the experts. But in essence how you manage your resources and how you manage your bottlenecks and how you get trashed out of the freaking way. It's like that's how you create flow on in a construction job site. At least in my experience. Yes. That's chapter 20. There's a couple of thoughts that triggered in my head. One, maybe it's one of the inventories that I forgot about until you were describing the situation. And so in that situation where we're behind and we're off schedule, right? We're consistently off schedule. There's a problem. The inventory that we get, the extra work that we get is we need a recovery schedule from you. So now you're gonna take my field leadership and my office leadership Oh yeah. To sit down and produce this stupid thing to make you feel better when all that energy could have been applied to limiting the constraint, right. Addressing the bottleneck. The other thing when you were talking about like going into the trash and invest, doing your CSI investigation of what's going on there and when we're looking for these bottlenecks, there's a magic skill that's required. We have to be able to zoom in and then zoom out, right? Because if we just zoom in and stay zoomed in we're going to assign responsibility for the bottleneck to the things that are in our immediate field of vision. And if we zoom out, we can see the entire system and understand Oh. Ah, there's some other things. So example, I was on a project, the steel team, they were working on building catwalks and handrails and we were supposed to be studying 'em, showed up to watch them do their work and they weren't working in the area they were supposed to be working at. So we walked around the building, found them, and what they were doing was they were loading, packing their stuff to go move somewhere else. And the young man I was walking, this was all new to him, and he is like, man, like they just don't know what they're doing. Look, they're just kind of hanging out. They don't have a plan. They don't know what's going on. And I said, ah, okay, cool. So well, let's keep walking to where they're going , and see what do you see over there? He's like, man, well it looks like those big old air handlers, they're not in place yet. Like, ah, okay. And I said, okay, what do you see down the road here? Quarter mile long, man, I see air handlers all over the place. Like, okay, why aren't they in place? He's like, oh, I don't know. I was like, okay, well let's go find out. So anyways, track it down and find out. There was a piece, the connector between the building and the air handlers. There was an adjustment made to them for safety reasons, and so that, that impacted, like, it slowed the production. So what happened is these, these, the adjustments they were making to the connector was not, those pieces had not been delivered to the site yet. And so since the pieces had been delivered to the site, they couldn't install the connector, they could install the air handler, therefore they could not install the handrails and the catwalks. And so they were just looking for work. That was not their problem. The problem was further upstream and it went, so anyways, when I showed it, he's like, oh my god, man, this whole time I've been beating them up. I'm like, I know that's natural. Is to say, well the steel, the welders, they're just lazy. They don't know what the hell they're doing. They don't have a plan, there's no sense of urgency. Ah, no, it wasn't them, it was further upstream. I mean, we could even go as far as to say it was a poor design because safety wasn't designed into that piece because people were getting hurt, installing it, and because of that, they made an adjustment. Oh wow. That impact, that impacted the plan. So good, good on them for making the plan. But for the young man that I was coaching, he was able to see like, oh, I says that's an important part. When you see the problem, let's zoom out and look at all the stuff. Let's get a broader understanding of the whole operation. Even outside of the point of failure. So what I heard was you found an idle resource Absolutely. And blame them. Yes. For the situation was, Hey, what are you doing? What are you over here? You're supposed to be up there like what's going on? Left it on the surface and didn't learn to see a bottleneck. That's legit. And that happens all the time. All the time. I've done that thousands of times myself. Yes. And mostly out of sheer ignorance. Cuz I don't know the constraint. I didn't know the issue. Y'all don't expect you to answer this. Just a thought. What are the seven deadly sins of constraint management? Oh, you were talking, I wrote, I wrote a few down here. No way.. Number one, if you see resources and you blame the human beings in that resource, sin, sin, that's number one. Number two, if there's a constraint that you're uncomfortable about, like you have to have an uncomfortable conversation with the authority , now you've located Herbie, you got him in your sights it's slowing him down. And you let it sit there, because I'm afraid that's the most cowardly thing you can possibly do. And then the third one is if you can't have that uncomfortable conversation, but you elevated it to somebody, They also do nothing that's worse. It's a double whammy, double C. It's not double. It's like exponentially worse. damnation , because usually when you elevate an issue, it goes through someone in leadership . And if they don't do anything that's that BS that Jen and Jess talk about. But there's many more. I wrote a couple down. When we get to the end of chapter 23 I'll round it out. 21, 22, 23. These are the sins that they kind of talk about here. So let's get into 22 and they're out in the field and I'm sorry, maybe we alluded to it before, but they went and found the huge stack of inventory and Alex's and our dear friend Jonah, who doesn't even work there he's just such a sage that Ncx 10, the robot, the big oh yeah. Thing that's got all the big wigs up at corporate. There's gonna be an article in a trade magazine like this is serious business and that dang thing is a constraint . So that's number one. But in 20, in chapter 22 Alex is having a rough time at home, by the way. I really gotta put a little backstory in here. Seven issues at the home life. Mostly with his wife. So he is trying to regain the trust with his wife. Also he's trying to rebuild , the workflows at the factory and his relationships with people on the work site or I guess in the factory. And then also with corporate. We've got all this stuff around in his work life, but there's no separation at home. You take all that with you, whether it's in your conscious mind or in your subconscious mind, it's there and it's on your mind. So when you're dealing with your personal relationships, it's still, it applies no matter what. I don't care what you're doing. So he also has to spend time and energy repairing his relationship with his wife. So like you only got so much hours in a day, number one and two, so much energy to give is just eventually you burn out of energy and you have to lay down and go to sleep. So how you choose to spend that energy is incredibly important. So part of the prioritization that Alex Rogo was learning is , it's not all about work. Cause at the end of the day, if he loses his entire home life and his personal relationship, like what is he working for?. And I wanted to make sure I didn't skip past that, cuz it definitely weighs on people when they're trying to make improvements at work. But in chapter 22, he gets back, he comes in the next day and he is staggering in cause he had this long conversation with his wife, and she's staying with her family. And so he comes in and Bob's there and he is like, we got another Herbie. So now not only is the Ncx 10. Herbie, they got two bottlenecks because there's two sets of inventory piling up., I guess the Ncx 10 is some kind of milling machine. And then after that parts get heat treated. So when you mill materials you can't be super brittle and nor can they be super flexible And you put that metal into an oven and , it sits in there and it has to go through a series of heating and cooling and heating and cooling cycles. And it takes a lot of time. So here comes old Jonah gonna sneak in here with some fluctuation. So if we have one bottleneck that's not outputting, in a timely manner, if you think of this heat treating oven, there's only so much space inside this oven the capacity of this oven is fixed. So you can't grow your oven. I suppose you could go buy one, but they're in the middle of a financial meltdown. They even like have an argument. They're like, why don't we just build another oven? So now we made a list for both heat treat and Ncx 10 as of which parts they each haven't processed in what order. Again, it's the same sequence of latest order to least late and a day or two, are creating, they're finding that both of these bottlenecks are creating the late orders. They're like, they can trace all of these late orders back to bottlenecks, either at the Ncx 10, or they can trace late orders all the way back to the freaking heat treating. So they're like, we gotta dig into this. This is a problem. Cuz not only is this an inventory problem, cause wait a second if there's fixed capacity in this heat treat oven, why isn't the heat treat oven full to the brim when they run their cycle? And they're like what? I'm like, yeah I'm looking at the heat treat oven and it's only filled up 60%. Like, what's the deal here? And they're like, well this order that only was 60 filled the oven, 60% is a special order. It's a special order. We had to rush through it expediter. Oh. So yes, this, the panicking mode of the expeditor so the optimal production of that heat treat oven was like fill the Dan thing up a hundred percent and run it through its cycles. Not every assembly needs the same heat treat cycle as every other assembly. You have all kinds of variations. But you have dependent events. And now all of a sudden we have a freaking bottleneck . And even worse, they're rearranging the inventory in front of the bottleneck. So they're making the inventory in front of the bottleneck. The process of redoing the rearranging is the bottleneck. It's not the heat treat of it, it's the rearranging process. They're like, you mean to tell me this expediting process is the problem But it was an to all our problems.. I'm like greatly summarizing, I'm probably getting half of this wrong, they start having this argument. The stake are high. Cuz if they don't figure out the problem, they're all gonna lose the jobs. So what do you think about that? Like all the sudden they learn to see the issue, and then what they see is their freaking mirror and it's pointing back at them. The decisions that we make as leadership are the bottlenecks, not the inventory is all these bottlenecks., it's in the decisions to make all these rearrangements and rush these orders because the orders are late and the orders are late because all this variation that we created and then also we're not managing these bottlenecks and we're not running our bottlenecks at full capacity. So we're not even meeting our system capacity because we have bottlenecks. It's like this vicious cycle. And they finally kind of start to get it here.. We now have to somehow figure out a device to prioritize those constraints. So they do that. But , I'm gonna pause there cause I haven't heard anything. I feel like you're about to burst. But have you one, been in that situation? I certainly have two. What did you do? Oh, so the one that comes to mind how I was specific, and it's still one that I struggle with. It's saying yes all the time, right? Like, if I don't say no, I'm gonna be exhausted. You and I were talking earlier I'll have these intermittent burnouts because I just take on too much work. But, and I think everybody out there, like if you're tired all the time and you feel like you ain't got time, guess who the bottleneck is? It's you, it's your system. You're letting that happen. Anyhow, but the more specific one in the workplace there was a project manager I worked with at this time, I was like in charge of all the labor and distributing labor to all our projects. And we had one project manager who was specifically targeting owner direct work. And so it was real small projects, high margin and long lasting stuff, right? It was really good for us. But what he would do is when the client said, Hey, we, you know, we gotta upgrade this air handler unit, or we wanna change out all our grills or whatever, didn't matter, whatever it was, he would tell them like, can you have somebody here Monday? And his answer was always yes. And then he'd call me, oh, I got this job. We need three peewee, two duck guys, and we need a pipe fitter. And I'm like, dude, it's Thursday. We don't just have people hanging out. Oh, I gotta have it. This is my most important customer. You know the whole story, right? This, oh, I'm doing this for y'all. Whatever. Okay, jump through hoops, get 'em a crew out there. And then Monday I'm getting a call, Jess, what the hell's going on? Your guys are just out here standing around, they don't have any tools. The budget for this little project, we can't absorb this kind of downtime. And I'm like, okay dude, you screamed and yelled that you needed somebody Monday. I got you somebody Monday. Now you're screaming and yelling that we're blowing up the budget. It's a bad image, or people are just standing around. And we went through the, and like it was screaming matches between he and I for months. And finally I said, okay, time out. The one thing I can do is not give him the personnel that he wants cuz he doesn't know what he needs. All he cares about is that the client is going to think he's a star and that the client isn't going to complain and then he is worried about the budget, right? So what I started doing was like, okay, I'm not sending you people. I would send the superintendent to go scout it. Like go check it out, get with the owner, get with whoever you need to get with. So I come up with the plan and then let's you and I get together so we can align our resources appropriately. And I still had to fight with the project manager, but the long-term implications was, it was a good win for us financially and we still had a good relationship with the client. Now we finally, I'm like, look dude, we're fighting all the time and there's no point in us fighting. So here is my request. When that client tells you they have an emergency, they need us out there. Wawa, I need you to just ask them, can I get you somebody out here to look at it and advise us on the best course of action next week? Like that's all you gotta ask. They get to say no. If they say no, I need somebody Monday, let's do that. But just ask them that. He started asking 'em, and guess what? 90% of the time they're like, yeah, sure. Here's my whatever, maintenance, head of maintenance, here's their number. Have your guy contact that guy, schedule something. Come look at it, come up with the plan and let's reconvene. And then everybody was super happy because now the superintendent that I was sending out there didn't have to drop. He, they were able to get that into their workflow and things worked better. But it was that , the inventory was there, like all this, just the way we function and the way we communicated, the way we thought about things. We were creating our own damn problems. And it took some iteration, but we finally got to a point where it's like, dude, just ask them, can I send you my guy next week to assess the situation and come with, come up with a plan that's beneficial for everybody. That was it. Not that hard, but we were the problem . We were the problem. And was amending it hard.. Well, for me, yeah, because, It's his damn fault kissing up to the client. Right? He don't care about, like, it was so easy for me to blame him for not caring about us and only being worried about his own bones. But that wasn't the truth. I mean, there was a system problem. We had no system in place. So he was doing what he would naturally do. That made sense to him. I was doing what I would naturally do. That made sense to me. And I had to say, wait a minute, how am I contributing to this? Like, oh, well, I'm giving him what he wants, knowing what the outcome's going to be. I can change that. And so little by little we had to come to terms with it. How about. When she had the honest realization from that moment. What was uncomfortable after? So the uncomfortable part after was all the guys that I would ream because they were not as productive as they could have been. Like, come on guys, like, you know, y'all could be cleaning, you could be order, it wasn't their fault, man. It wasn't their fault. It was my fault. And I had to like face that. Like, here I was getting the pressure from my project manager knowing that it's wrong and it's like coming from a bad place and then passing some of that onto the guys. Like that was, that's just not cool, but I was doing it right? Like, it was those kinds of things. The guys would be like, man you've settled down. I'm like, yeah, I just kind of stopped causing my own problems, man., You just uncovered another sin. Oh, cause you nailed it. When you uncover a bottleneck and it's people are uncomfortable or worse, you've uncovered a constraint you're gonna face resistance. Oh yes. And don't let that resistance stop you. Yes. So the sin is like, if you're mining for gold and you gotta get to the seam, but the seam is like a mile under the ground and you stop 10 inches from the seam and you don't know Right. Don't let non-believers gaslight you into thinking you're the crazy one. If you have influence in your own personal life, If you face resistance, don't give up. Try again. You might have to try a different tactic. So that's kind of like the summary of chapter 22 , there's some arguments happening, some shouting matches. Because we need those parts now, not tomorrow. the non bottleneck parts we might not need for weeks or even months, maybe never. So by continuing to run the non bottleneck parts, this guy was actually interfering with our ability to get an order out the door and make money. He's like, this guy is the reason why we're losing money at this plant. If you're gonna start prioritizing your constraints, be also prepared to design in a system for conflict resolution that like walk together . That's chapter 22. What do you think? Oh man. So the idea here takes me back to what we're talking about a little while ago in learning to see, right? Like the tactical patience required for a change agent is enormous. Right? And a method or system. To facilitate the change with the naysayers and maintain because you are the tip of the spear, so you are going to hit all the friction first now that you can see it. No, you gotta assume nobody else can see it. And changing it, even though you understand it's an improvement, is going to change the way people function, period. Like period. All the business sense it makes is great. It doesn't matter because if I have to change the way I behave, the way I've been showing up, the way I've been doing things, the way I, my universe has changed all of a sudden, and I don't under, I don't want that. It's gonna take extra energy. And so just because you can see, you need to like pump the brakes big time because people, they can't see. And so you're this crazy profit saying that the world's flat or the world's not flat or whatever, you know what I mean? You got this idea that nobody else understands. Where in the world are you coming from? You're crazy. Why would they change? And if you're not patient and respect the people and meet them where they're at, you are going to give up. You're going to quit or you may get fired. Right? I think about the people that were like lean champions within their organization that are now consultants, , and some of them, not all of them, some of them got sick and tired of swimming uphill with an organization that wasn't open to that kind of change. And so they blamed the organization saying, well, they just didn't wanna change. You were the zealot, raising hell, pushing, screaming, and yelling. So yeah, maybe they didn't wanna change, but also what was your organizational patience? How much tactical patience did you apply? By the way, there's some tactics about to get dropped, I grabbed the book by Jaco Willin, it's Leadership Strategy and Tactics, and it really talks about that., you gotta know how to flank 'em, right? Not everybody goes and becomes a consultant. Some of us just go , roll back into operations. Yes, if you're into this continuous improvement or like, good on you for doing that, because that is a super risky psychologically unsafe position to have a such different mindset about your work than everybody else, and you are like the few, the proud, the lean champions, But it won't happen overnight and you can't just assume people see things the way you do. So if you haven't, this is the tactic. You have to also design in a system for conflict resolution. And you also have to design a system and to do these silly simulations, right? So people can learn how to see waste and learn how to see bottle. Yeah. So man, that's incredibly powerful statement. So let's talk about the tactics Alex and the gang do. So they use the coloring system. They use signaling. They do two markers. They say, okay, we got working process. We're gonna tag the bottleneck workflow we're gonna give that a red tag. And if it goes through a non bottleneck, so it doesn't go through ncx 10 and it doesn't go through heat treat. It gets a green tag. So , if you're at your workstation and two sets of inventories roll in, you have a choice. But now we've taken that choice away. We've designed the system to remove the choice. We've also designed the system to remove our bottleneck. The expediting process. Say no more expediting. There's, one choice. If it's red, you do it first because whatever your part of the production is, that's the critical, cuz that has to go through the ncx 10 or it has to go through heat treat or both rule one, rule two, green. If it shows up, you don't have anything. There is no reds. Then work the greens. So they're like, we're removing the first bottleneck that we've discovered that we created in this decision making system. We've limited decision making system. We're gonna use signals. We're gonna say red do first, green only if there's no reds, yep. You know, this is gonna be maybe a stretch and I'm thinking about it because it reminds me of the first job you, I walked together when I was onboarding. Ooh. The smell of pan oil is a signal to me. You know, when they'd spray the panel on the sh or the pan when the pouring, it's a very distinct smell. Yeah. Yeah. I love that smell. I know that's weird, but to me it's like, oh yeah, we got a brand new baby. For me, it was like, it was right. We got right. Hey, check can get ready. Who's gonna come in at two in the morning for the damn poor? Like, that was what it signal. Ah, mm-hmm.. That's a good one. I didn't even think about that smell. Mm-hmm.. my favorite signals are for issues. So if there's some kind of problem, you flag it. Flag can be many things. That signaling process resolves so many. Yeah.. So the signaling tactic . The red and , the green tags or the smell, I guess . . I like it is important. And if you have those tactics, make sure that they're implemented and implemented well. So chapter 22 talks about quality control. Oh, damn. Is quality control a constraint? But here's the thing. What they did was, okay, so we have this constraint our decision making, our expediting system is causing all kind of problems. Boom. Fix that. All right. What's next? Heat treat is not running at full capacity. And even though we're now filling it full, the capacity's not meaning the demand. It's still a bottleneck. And we don't have the capability from corporate to go build another eat treat machine. However, we do have the capability to, subcontract out the heat treat process. When these set of red tag parts sits in front of the heat treat machine, every day at one o'clock we're gonna have a truck pick, pick whatever inventory's in front of it and ship it to this vendor. And that way the next day, all of the parts are through heat treat, no matter what. They went through the third party. And yes, it's a premium to go to third party, you're actually saving money in the long run if you get everything through the bottleneck. So , they come to that realization. So they're like, okay, damn, we're kind of like on a roll here. And this is when you have to engage with your field leadership or actually trades. The people who actually do the machining that aren't robots have to know how to use all kinds of micro millimeter make adjustments they're not as productive as the robot, but the robot is a bottleneck. We have idle resources. We have some of our machinists just sitting around doing nothing who could be operating these manual machines. Mm-hmm.. Oh damn. Now all of a sudden they found the Herbie and they found the capability to lighten the load off of Herbie with an old school method. And I think that's incredibly important. I wonder how much that's designed into this book. But, as you go out, you find the bottleneck and you're like, well, how are we gonna make this machine better? And then the actual solution, or at least a partial solution to the problem was let's use a completely manual method that was like, we've been doing this since like LeBron age. Right. So you take a completely traditional approach , to a completely like old school method is the solution. That's a good story. Yes. Have you done that? Sometimes. Oftentimes the solution is right there in front of you. Super simple. Or the person, the guy who you think is like crusty and stuck in their way and super old school doesn't like technology. They got the solution. They got it. Yes. This is gonna seem silly, but, remember when lasers all of a sudden you had these little remote lasers they could transfer a license. I love 'em. I love 'em. Yeah, right when it first came out, it's like, man, right. We can lay out, it'll make lay way faster. And there was a whole bunch of sheet rocking stuff in the way so that we couldn't really get our points so that we could have a laser transferred up on overhead. Right. Cuz we had to do a bunch of stuff, some intricate stuff overhead and that laser was gonna help us. And man, I'm like, all right, let's , go get the pipe fitters so we can move all this stuff and let's get some more people. And old boys looks at me, he's like, dude, like really? You're gonna move all of this stuff so you can get your little laser out there that we can barely see because the sun's. I'm like, well, yeah, but this is what we need to do. And he's like, yeah, but you don't need a laser man. He says, you got your plum bob. I'm like, man, I don't wanna use a plum Bob going up. And he said, no, no, no, no, no. He says, do you have your plus? Yeah, I got my plum bob. He said, okay, let's mark a point here and mark a point here. Okay. I'm following you. So we just marked two points, transferred him from the ground up overhead, and we use the string on Mym.. Woohoo. Right? Like it's a string dummy. Never. I'm thinking I'm bringing all kind. We need higher powered lasers. We need the green laser that you can see in the daylight. We gotta move all this, but like, no dummy, just use a string, bro. Like, okay, I'm gonna shut my mouth now. You got it.. They used the plum bob. There's actually artifacts of that technology being used in pyramids. That's a tried and true method. Like it's been used for thousands and thousands of years. That's awesome. Yeah, man, and it works and it function. But here's the thing. The only way to learn how to use a plum, bob, gotta learn how to use a plum. Those are awesome. But the last paragraph of chapter 22, it's, I think it's my favorite paragraph in the book. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but I'll read the last they bring in these ancient milling machines in the maintenance man connects the power cable to an outlet on nearby steel column. Bob reaches for the power switch and hits the on button for a second. Nothing happens. Then we hear a slow gathering word from somewhere in the guts of the old machine, poofs of desk blow out of the antique fan hosing. Bob turns to me with a dumb grin in his big face. Guess we're in business. like, yeah, this was Bob's idea. So think about that. You've just invested like some serious social capital and trust into these craft workers people are gonna be like, okay, we're gonna get excited. This is a reinforcing effect. This is our most profitable line and we're gonna trust you to do this manually., we took these machines away from you and gave you this robot. Now we're gonna bring these machines back and we're gonna trust you to do this as effectively to make sure that we become super productive. It's an important part of this chapter. So in this chapter, Ralph Nakamura is the plant data manager. He's the numbers cruncher in terms of production. He knows exactly when things turn on and off. All this manufacturing facility, we build them all the time, all kinds of controls on them and sensors and stuff. So Ralph comes in everybody's high fiving. They're like, oh, we're gonna save our jobs. Ralph's like, we're still not doing good., he ruined the whole party. I'm gonna summarize here a whole bunch, but he's like, Hey, you know what's happening is that, yeah, you've eliminated some bottlenecks, but we haven't completely resolved it and now it's worse because you're bottlenecks keeps switching. So they go in CX 10 and it's like heat treat and it goes over here. That just keeps moving around cuz they haven't completely optimized the system and figured out what is the optimal resource capacity., where are the true constraints?. He said, Hey this is great. We got these machines rolling, but here's the problem. This NCX 10 machine still needs to run. And if we're running these machines with machinists, the machinists used to set up the robot, they used to do the setup. So now it makes the robot even less productive because the guys are over there running these these milling machines by hand, and they're not being super productive on the CX 10. And he's like, well, that's only part of the time though. You only have to be over there setting up the ncx 10 when you have to do a changeover or a setup. And Bob goes, what happens if stealing people turns non bottlenecks into bottlenecks? So he's like, Hey, if we pull people off one and send 'em to the other one, and even though they're on a non bottleneck, , does it just switch? Do we just change the bottleneck? So you have to think about this because once you start to do optimization, you can't even let off the gas. You almost have to double down. That's whyt planning comes into play. You can't do tack planning on a non-optimized system. But once you have some just minor levels of optimization and you apply tack, now you start to see all your bottlenecks start to show up, then you start to make adjustments and you add buffers and do that stuff. This is exactly what's happening in this chapter is don't let up. Don't let off, and don't give up . So they start to talk about. This magical word called flow Just think about flow. It's like water. And you think about a stream, and if you think about a stream having a boulder in it and in front of the boulder, there's another boulder , but it's smaller. If you spend a whole bunch of your energy removing one of the boulders, do you not still have a roadblock? Right. You still do, so you can't let off. But perhaps the process of removing one of the boulder slow down the flow enough. I forgot who told this to me. It was so genius. I'm like, maybe the flow was wrong to begin with , like if you would've just slowed the flow down just slightly, we could've just removed one boulder but instead we went after this big, huge, nasty boulder., you have to start understanding that when we're dealing with flow and you're dealing with bottlenecks, bottlenecks might move around and stuff. We have to think about that optimization piece and we have to think about starting to prioritize. But the only measurement we should worry. instead of these the tactics that we said, Hey, only work on the red. That tactic was right when we started it. Now that tactic created new bottlenecks. Because of this decision we make. So they start to look at heat treat. They look at the stacks of inventory . It's like, oh my God we're overlapping batches. So our priority system was good , but now it's flawed because we've changed the flow of the work.. Yeah. We've started to pick up the speed of the work, but we haven't really fixed the solution. So now we have non bottlenecks becoming bottlenecks. They're moving around on us. Yep. So the rule that Dr. Gold teaches us is that, hey, when you remove a bottleneck or you remove a constraint, another one's going to appear and you have to be ready for that. It's okay, right? Like it's a natural occurrence. It's not because people suck. It's not because you pick the wrong one. It's not because you're doing it wrong. It's because when you remove a bottleneck, another one will appear always, every single time This is deep and this is important to kind of think because you're gonna do optimization, you're gonna have some early wins. But oftentimes the the changes create more capacity. So now we say we've unloaded Herbie, but now we've overloaded one of the faster kids and now that kid's getting tired. Yep. We have a new Herbie well, the problem was that it wasn't even Herbie's fault, it was the fact that we didn't plan out what exactly how we're gonna load the kids. Right., that was the problem., I guess that's the parent's fault., I don't know, go down that far. But that's the idea that if you have constraints and you create changes,? You gotta set up work I think that's entirely important. That's a new rule, . So when you do work on constraints and you don't set up the next task for success, they might have been the A player before no more. But now , we've changed the rules and the A players, now the B players rank people. But , that's often what's happened. So you have to not only be like, Hey, we gotta, we gotta start this next. And we now have to be like, now Jesse's crew is not doing 10 feet per day. He's got, he can do 30 feet a day and now all of a sudden he's out. He's almost to the street. Like we, he wants to do his hookup. I don't have a permit Yep. To do the hookup Yep. To make the connection in the street for his sanitary line, because I haven't paid the bill for the water department. Yes. I think your, I think your brother does this right?? Yeah. Yeah. He works for the, for the local water system. Now, you know, this reminds me, Thomas, and remember when you said it, but, but now it's a new constraint. Like if you haven't thought about, oh, damn. Jesse's crews like getting, he's knocking down the park. He's like, he's almost ahead of schedule. Like, oh, hey, did you did you get the permit yet for the city to come make the tap? Oh shit. Right., how do I know this cuz I've said those words. Yep. But now I've just placed a constraint, Jesse, because I didn't plan the work ahead. So you have to think about, you can't only just think about the, the bottleneck, but you have to think about if we've removed this bottleneck, what's the thing that the next constraint that's gonna, yeah. That's gonna come up. So you can't ever get up or ever start high fiving himself and, and Ralph Naam mirror kind of like blows their candles out. But it's a, it's an important learning moment, I think. Yes. Yes. Well, so couple things. One, you um, I remember we were in Chicago, we were at a face to face with all the RLMs and you said finishing early is waste. Is this the infamous like CPM summit? No, no, no, no, no. I think it was before that. Think it was before that. But you sat there and you said, finishing early is waste. And I was like, Finally somebody that I can relate to because I have a problem with the finishing early thing. Like if the, if the next thing isn't ready to go. So what? Yeah. So what if you finished early? Yeah. Um, if you're, anyhow like a big discussion, right? With the whole crew. Oh yeah. People get, people get all off the rails there. Luckily I didn't give up . Yes. I wasn't ding into thinking I was crazy cause I had No, no, no, no. It's, it's a problem. Yeah. The other thing you mentioned earlier, finishing early and is not necessarily bad, finishing early and not having a plan for that crew to finish early is now waste because you just, the whole point of, um, finishing early is defeated. Yeah. You accomplished nothing if that's, you've, you've, you may have received a, the gold star for pro production, but the next week, um will have idle constraints again. And there we go. Here's a mortal sin. Give constraints, resources, . Yeah. Don't let 'em sit idle. And if you're uncomfortable or afraid, go find help. And if they're, if they're afraid, then we're screwed. don't, don't let up. And I'll tell you like, um, that company that we used to work for, they actually got, had a constraint that was so big. This is a hospital project that they were working in, in Aurora, Colorado. Um, needed an act of congress, an act of congress in Washington DC and needed an act of Congress to restart that. Talk about, oh, man. Like, talk about, like, I'd probably flip that one up to the top of the constraint list. Yep. That's a big one. So, um but yeah, like, don't let off like, and keep elevating, keep elevating. Hey, your boss doesn't wanna do anything. Get outta the way. I'm gonna go talk to the general manager. General manager. Right. You don't like it. We'll go talk to division manager. Get to Division . That's, that's called managing up and down the chain of command. Yes. That's a, that's, that's a, that's a extreme ownership reference, but yes. Um, that's man, that's, um, important. So yeah, that's why it's that's a soup super long. Thank you for triggering me. Why finishing early is, is bad. It's be, and it's only bad if you're not ready for that. So if you just be like, Hey, they finished the three weeks early. Congratulations is, did we, when we update the, the critical path that we pulled in by three weeks, well, big deal. Well, what? Right. What you do. Yes. I'm definitely go congratulate that crew for doing a good job. But yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The other thing you mentioned, perhaps they could have worked six hours instead of eight or, or whatever. Or the crew, right. Clean the corners or maintain their equipment or sharpen blades or do that kinda stuff. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The other thought that you, that's chapter 25. I'm like, it's so press the brake, but we gotta talk about when Alex Rogo gets hammered. Oh, we have to put that in first. Yes, yes. I don't know anything about that, but that the, what I think there's, there's so many lessons to be learned there. You have to learn how to see problem. Once you see problems, don't trust that you know that that's the problems you, to let the facts and data tell you that your assumption is correct. And then when you find that assumption is correct, you make a decision. You move the UDA loop, do the , and sometimes those solutions might be highly manual and then don't stop there. Keep going. Because when those solutions are going to change the flow of work, they're gonna change capacity of, of processes, of dependent events. And when those those changes happen, stuff's gonna finish early and wait, . Yeah. So you have to start anticipating those. So how do you anticipate those start looking, start doing, um, time in motion study on your a crew? Yes. You don't, they're, they're three weeks ahead scheduled. Thomas, why are you doing time in motion study? I'll be like, because the, when this crew that's behind them is now doing work at twice their rate, they're going to catch them. Yes.. And that happened in the, in the, the, the, my, my construction project Yeah. Yeah. Actually found that. And what happened was we found that the the drywall, so the dr you know, like the, the drywall early on had, didn't work at a very productive rate. And if you, if you've done high rise work or at least vertical work, it's the first few floors are really difficult because just the capacity is different. Your crew is smaller, it's hard to get in the building. Things are still rough because the project is set up for structure. So set up for hoisting things in the air, now all of a sudden we're putting finishes in permanent. Studs and drywall. And especially the drywall piece because it's a very fragile and, and yes, it gets ruined with moisture. Yes. So what we had was, hey, and the initial plan was you always do the enclosure, make it dry temporarily, and then you put the drywall in. Well, we had a problem on our project with supply chain . Yep. Um, and I won't get into the ins and out of it, but we had a supply chain. We had actually, we had many supply chains, so we had to make a decision. And this is that, this is the, the moment when we had to make this decision, and this decision had to be made by project leadership because it had, it, it became a, we had to spend some money on our idea, and this money was not insignificant, but we, we decided that if the enclosure and the drying part of the project was the bottleneck, and it, and it is, because you can't install drywall, even in California, it's gonna get rain, it's gonna get moldy. It's bad. You don't want the good people at LinkedIn to have a unhealthy air quality. So , um, we made sure that none of that drywall got destroyed with rain by having a temporary enclosure. And this temporary enclosure was like shrink wrap. You know, like when you winterize a yacht or like you put, put this really heavy duty, um, plastic wrapping and then you heat it up and it shrinks. We did this on a building in San Francisco and it wasn't perfect. It was, it was, it had all kinds of issues, but what it did was it kept water when rain would come out, kept it from getting into the building. Touching the drywall. And what that allowed us to do was open up flow, because now we're not waiting for this supply chain issue of enclosure. We're gonna put a temporary enclosure on it. That's the work, that was the work around, but it's not such a workaround where it's gonna get us in trouble, right? We're gonna manage our water with this temporary enclosure. And we made a decision. It was like, damn. Then all of a sudden, drywall was able to pass the the enclosure crew, and they were, they're, now they're like, there's nothing stopping us, cuz we're not waiting on the enclosure piece as everyone building behind me. That's maybe not, but there's nothing, there wasn't anything stopping them. So now the, the, the, their capacity like went exponentially huge and now they can add all kinds of resources to it. So their crew size got huge and their production went, if you were charting it, like I was on a, on a line and it went, the pitch changed very significantly and they were able to move up that building incredibly fast. So that they actually caught the, the next constraint was the fire stopping, you know, they looks like oatmeal. And if you remember my previous story, the fire stopping was constrained by concrete. Yes. So like we were starting to tighten through looking for bottlenecks. We were starting to increase our, increase our capacity through looking at bottlenecks, making decisions, creating temporary stretches, whatever it is, by thinking out outside the box, executing it, making decision, going, doing that operation, spending the money. Yep. We were better for it. And that like, I'm not saying everybody here like goes shrink wrap. Your building has a solution. It only works in this specific test case. Um, but and it wasn't perfect. It had all kinds of issues with it, my God. But we had to look at the, the brutal facts and make a decision and not lean on the people, the trades being like, Hey, you guys are super slow. You should work faster, . So, um, that's that's kind of the chapter 24 and a little, a little preview 20 or chapter 23. Little preview 25. 25. Ooh is so good. But yeah, we got about, we gotta talk about boozing it up Chapter 24. So, yes. Um, that Bob, let me, let me get to it.. But they started to have some wins and they're like, we need to toast. We need to have a toast. So they break out the the bottle of Amber liquid in the office. This is, this is day drinking at work.. I guess it's, I guess it's champagne. Yeah, I get the, the champagne in the coffee cup. I may or may not have done this. You just, we'll just let that line. Yeah. Yeah., no witnesses. You're good. Yes. There, there may have been some amber liquid in a coffee cup once, once or twice, but, um, only in an office. Never on a job site. But so they, they start to have a, have a, have a few and they're starting to feel the , feel the effects and Bill Peach calls. And wanted to thank Alex for, Hey, you really came through on that, that shipment, that Johnny Johns, he's super happy about it. And he is starting to turn the ship around. They're like, they're. Like even their little improvements that they're making customers at the end of the line, these, their, their end customers are starting to notice and they're starting to notice like very rapidly. And not only are they feeling the effect, so this is that reinforcing effect. It feels good, the team gets involved, we start being more productive. This is like, really feels good. And, um, it ha it starts to start to have indicators. And usually we're in my job, especially as a quality leader, that indicator is satisfied customers. And that that's, and like people on the end who pay our bills become satisfied and they tell us about it. Yes. And I have no greater satisfaction than taking those calls and, and then being like, Hey, and going back to that team and being like, Hey, like, like great job and here's why. And I wanted to tell you that, that I was on your case before and now I'm sorry. So now like a, like a weight has lifted and through this optimization, peach, peach, bill Peach, I guess he's like the CEO of the division and Alex the plant manager are repairing the relationship and it was super strained. Yep. Before. So, yeah. So , what do you think about that ever been? Now, now Alex goes on to have a few too many and he gets a ride home with his with one of his female coworkers, and They walk in the door and there's a, there's a, there's a moment and it's very light. It's not serious, but they, they fall on the floor and his wife who comes home and is trying to surprise him, finds him hammered and on top of his, his female coworker. And they're laughing. Yes. Dangerous. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta, um, you gotta take everything with moderation, what I'm trying to say. But, um, it, it does feel good to, um have a reinforcing effect and it, and it starts to build upon itself, and then there's output from it. Um, but you still gotta take, take that home. Take that win home. Don't just, don't just let the good times roll at work and then come at home and just blast it in front of her. Um, because the people at home don't know that you won or they don't know that you, you're feeling good. You gotta tell them. And if you, if you just go out there and you, and you tie one on, and then you come home in a puddle, that's all they see is you intoxicated in a puddle. And it's it doesn't, right? There's that transition piece when you go from work to home and there's pain that goes, that's associated with that. So I think that's, it's kind of like the, I don't know the lesson to be learned when you think about that. Yeah. I, I, there's a bunch there, right? So I know for me, when I was in miserable states, there's one project, like the worst one I was ever on. I was in a relationship and I told her, I was like, Hey, I gotta go dive into this lake of misery, so I'm not gonna be available. And I didn't call her for five months. Um, and then I called her after five months, which was awkward. But to me it made perfect sense because I said I'm gonna be busy. Um, and but the, and the learning I had, which is relative to what you're saying is. The people in our lives care about us and they want the best for us. And we usually don't mind sharing our misery with them, but we're horrible at sharing our wins with them. And in this situation, he, he was celebrating the win with his team, but hadn't planned or had anything in place so that he could celebrate the wins with his wife at home. And I know, cuz I, I'm guilty of this, like, no, no, no, no. I separate, I leave my problems at work and, and I don't bring them home. Maybe I don't, just because I'm not talking about 'em doesn't mean I'm not bringing my problem home. Because if I'm short and I'm frustrated and I'm distracted, I may not be talking about my problems at work, but I'm bringing my problem home and they are living through that mm-hmm. and then all of a sudden I'm in a good mood and they're like, what the, what, what are you smoking bro? Like, what's going on? Literally. Right. Like, what is happening with you? And so we we're human beings. We cannot completely separate. Right. What's the word you use? Like it permeates, it gets through the membrane. Membrane. There's no membrane. There's no membrane. Or the membrane is porous. Yeah. Yes, yes. And so when we're having a tough time at work, our family feels it. The people they care about, they feel it. They see it. And, and they're there for you during that time. And when you have a win, let them be there with you. Yeah. For that time also. Like it takes a conscious effort to really make that and do that well. Yeah. And give a little credit to Alex. He didn't know his wife came home to surprise him, but I guess these days would be like, Hey, gonna go have a couple pops with my friends. We had a good day at work. Be home late. You know, give somebody a heads up. And then they, that's the communication piece that hey, we, we've, my mood has changed because we've had, we've had, I've had a shift in mindset and we've done this, all this cool stuff, and I want to tell you about it. But instead, he didn't do that because he left, put a, he put a wall in between his work and his, his home life. Yes. And there's consequences. There's consequences.. And all his wife saw was him walking in with his with Stacy, I guess she's like a, one of the expeditors. And I was like, what the heck? And she hasn't been home. Like, what does that look like? That doesn't look like horrible. Oh, good at all. Even though it was all innocent, it don't look good. Yeah. So, um, yeah, it's there's a lot of lessons that unpack there because you're having a good day at work. You're gonna, you're gonna hopefully take that home and have that good day at the rest of the night. But if you don't, um, you might also have problems at home that you're going to run into, and then you'll, you'll feel it. And then also, if you have a bad day at work, you're gonna bring that in you. And whether that's in your conscious brain or in if it's in your subconscious, it's still gonna come out . There is no membrane. And, um, we have to, um, we have to carry that and communicate our emotion no matter where we are in our world. Yes. I think that's incredibly important. And, and that's true for me. And I still need to work on that so much. Um, but I, I, at least I try to, now we have good days. We have, we have rough days that we, we share that, that way, um, you come into the conversation kind of understanding what's, what the mood is. But that's 24 25 My summary, that's all I wrote. Stop. Futile work. Oh, oh, yes. Jonah comes back right outta the gate. Jonah, they pick him up at the airport. Jonah is doing a sidewalk. He is going. And scene Genbutsu gets boots on. Jonah's got, he's got questions. He's got questions. He's doing the David verbal thing, questions. And so they're, they're walking around and they've had some wins, like, they're like, Hey, this is awesome. Like, we check this out. Like we have these bottling, we have this, we have this robot, and we have the machinists helping out with capacity. We got the heat treat. We send the, the excess stuff to the third party. And then at the end they're like, they're all like thinking they're gonna get high fives by Jonah, but, oh, no, start, they're starting, they're bragging. And this is probably like half the sidewalks I've been on with my management. They're like, this is, this is not great, Thomas, but I'm thinking I'm just the be's knees . But they start bragging about their tag system, their signaling system. And it's again, he goes, he starts to challenge Jonah. This, this jet setting consultant starts to challenge the signaling system. He starts to challenge it. And he says, you're only getting so many works out of the day. Like, you're only, like, you're, you're like, how do you know that the red is the true? Like, like how do you even know? And. He starts to challenge us and they actually find an error. They find somebody doing green tag work when there's a red tag stuff and he is like, Hey, well we got, we got this problem , and it's right there in like right there in front of Jonah. And they start to see inventory again. Oh. Oh. And they're like, it's, and I like this. It's, it's, um, it's page 2 75 and it's like, it's stacked as high as the, the biggest forklift can reach. It's not just a mountain, but a mountain with many peaks . Yep. Piles are even bigger than before. We identify the machine as a bottleneck, we tied to every bin hanging from every pallet is parts is a red tag and somewhere behind it all it's own hugest, obscured from our view is the Ncx 10. So they, even though they were like, we got this figured out, they just, all that they did was create more inventory. They haven't mastered the they haven't mastered throughput yet. Yeah. And it was only through like a, like a series of questions that Joe, they actually see this. So John goes, by the way, do you remember when I told you that a plan in which everyone is working all the time is very inefficient? Cause they're like, Hey, everybody's back on task. We got, we got capacity over here. These guys are doing this. We're Santa step off at third parties. Boom, boom, boom, we got this. And we're like, Jonah's like, now your back to where you were. Everybody's working again. Like this is bad. Mm-hmm.. So he, um, oh God, this is so good. I wanna read this whole chapter,. Well what do you think about that? Let, let me read ahead. What do you think about. When you think you've, you've got it down and you have somebody be like, what's up with this quality control process at the end? And like, why are they reworking red tagged things like this. This assembly has defects and it's went through a red tag process. So that means it got priority and that it went through here, it went through this machine. We did all this stuff. We had all this stuff, we had all these conferences and like, and at the end of the day, we're still throwing away a part of, part of the we're having to send these defective parts back through machining again because they didn't pass quality inspection. Is that an issue?? Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. So yes. So, um, Jonah gets a piece of chalk and he writes it on the floor and he starts to, starts to, starts to write this equation on the floor. And he starts to draw like, oh, see this problem right here? Then this is defective piece. It goes back and like, you don't have 600 hours to do it. You only have 450 hours because of all this rework. Yep. Yeah. So it's, um, again, they have what's 600 must for, they have 150 hours of idle resources Because of quality errors. Yes. Because they put their quality check at the end. Yes. Oh yes. This is why, this is why this is my favorite chapter. Cause this, this, this cuts deep. Yes. Cause, um, if you're only inspecting quality, like looking for errors in defects at the end of that entire production, All that entire production crime run that has defects. You just created trash. Yes, yes. Or you created something that you have to go run it again. Doesn't that suck? It does. It brings, they hate it. Hate it when the quality guys shows up and you're like, ah, crap. You we're gonna fail in an inspection. Never failed in an inspection. Oh God, yes. You know, we had, oh, nightmare. Two things it reminds me of. It was a project and, and I was, we were, our production planning was very tight, and it was just internal. It wasn't with the GC was just trade. And my, the foreman asked me, he's like, Jess, so how many, like, your plan doesn't account for leaks? I'm like, okay. He says, so how many leaks are acceptable? And I'm like I don't understand the question. Like, none. Like there's no leaks in the drawings. There's no spec item calling for leaks, so we don't need to install'em like we don't have to for real. Um, which was kind of funny. It wasn't funny to him, but it was funny to me and what we did, and to this perfect example of what you're talking about, because of the way the build, there was a whole bunch of stuff going on on the first floor of this building. It was a renovation of a old historic brewery. And the design hadn't been worked out. Elevations hadn't been worked out, but they wanted to hurry up and go with the guest rooms. So there was hotel rooms up above. Okay. So we go to town roughing in all the cast iron for all of these guest rooms. But because we weren't tied into the bottom, the decision was made. And I was ignorant. Like I didn't pay close enough attention to not to continue installing without. So we installed a whole stack of rooms because you know what? They're gonna get the answer next week. Next week, Kane. They still don't have the answer. Okay, well let's do another stack of rooms and another stack of rooms. While Tommy knew it, we had like, who knows, I don't know, 40 units roughed in. None of them had been inspected at this point. It's like, okay, they're never gonna fig, like we cannot be waiting for them anymore. We gotta test. We can't test with water because there's nowhere to dump the water because we can't install the mains. So we start testing with air. It's very difficult to find your leaks on a no hub, cast iron system when you're testing with air and you have, I don't know, 3000 joints to find them and what we, what we just, so it was a, it was a bear, right? We had to hunt in for Lee. Wasting time, wasting time, wasting time. Anyways. Got to the source of it. Cuz we kept installing No, no, no, no, no. I said whoever's in like, is it the same crew? Yeah, it's the same crew. It's like, okay, stop. I'm like, what do you mean? Like we gotta, I said, no, no, no, no. Stop. Cause they've installed all of these leaks. like they're doing something, something in their process is creating these leaks. Oh, come on Jess. I'm like, man, it's not a curse. Like this is, let's just go watch what they're doing. So what ended up being, they had one of the helpers on the team, on that cast iron team when he was ins, when he was assembling the bands. He wasn't torquing them down. He was using this, we bought these torque mil, fancy Milwaukee torque screw guns. They weren't screw guns, but they were specifically for no hub bands and they, they had a certain torque adjusted a tight to the right torque. Oh yeah. He had his own little Milwaukee drill that he used. I. Like an impact. Yeah, yeah. Like just a little impact or something. It looked, it wasn't calibrated. Yeah, it wasn't calibrated. So he was going to town with this drill, but it never torque the damn bands. So every damn band he installed had a leak. Yeah. And so to your point, right, the quality check was at the end of the installation. And so, you know, of course I lost it a little bit. Had to go, come back, walk off, come back and say, all right guys, I, I, I'm sorry, but this is the deal. We've lost 120 man hours testing and we still haven't found all the leaks. We testing is not a very productive use of anyone's. Not at all. Not at all. It's still filling it up with water. Yes. Looking for errors. Yeah. Yes. So I said, let's, I want to, let's go through, let's get two pieces of cast iron. I want you to cut it and I want you to assemble it. And I wanna watch how y'all are doing. Damn. You did a mockup. Yes. Because I'm trying to figure this out. And that's when I realized like, wait a minute, I see what the, and I had my own old school torque wrench, right. To make sure, cause I was automatically just blaming the tool. Oh yes. Right. And so I said, person A, go for it. Boom. To torque. Okay. Okay. Good. That one's a good one. Next one, person B. Torque tort. Okay. Good person. C. Like, oh man, I still, I had to crank down on it and I look, I say, oh man, it's your drill. Son of a gut. Like, like, dude, how long you been using the drill? Since I got here? Like, he was excited. I just bought it. I'm like, calm down. It's like, all right bro, I love your drill, but you cannot use that drill on this system. I'm not blaming you, but I'm going to bet that that's the source of our leak. No, it's not. Check it out. Okay. Let's do another. and then I want you to use my torque wrench to torque to see if it's set. Okay. He did the other one. He is like, oh, and he like turned over. Yeah. Yeah. I was able to, he was able to give it a couple turns. He was like, oh, like, you know, he didn't do it on purpose. Just didn't know. And we hadn't designed like from that. My takeaway was like, man, how often, how many times have I put somebody to install cash down or run domestic water, pro press, soder, doesn't matter, whatever system we're using, and just said, go do it. And didn't verify that they had the right tools or the right technique to use that system. So by failing to do that, that little introductory, Hey, when you're running cast iron, this is what you do when you're soldering copper. Use this size tip, not this size tip for this size copper. We don't do that. We just say go run it. And then we got leaks and we're wonder, or my favorite is, um, threaded pipe. I love running thread. That's my like, ultimate favorite is to run screw pipe. But you gotta check the threads every like eight to 10 joints that you make because the threading dye it, it's got some wiggle in it. And after you've threaded so many joints, you gotta adjust it again. You got Oh, the machine. Yes. Teeth of the dye, the threading dye. You gotta adjust it. And I was really good at it because I would do that and I wouldn't have a lot of leaks if people thought I was just like super strong and would tighten the hell out of it. No, it wasn't that. I was always checking my teeth to make sure they were the right. Yeah. And so anyways, moving that quality check to the back end of it cost it was, it was a damn nightmare. Gave me a couple ulcers., yes, but okay. Boom. You nailed it. While you were talking, I wrote down some rules, some summary points that was kind of rambling, but. Page. He Jonas says exactly what you said. Um, he says and, and the example you were saying was, Hey, we had a, we had a quality problem because the torque, um, the machine that we're using didn't torque it, right? Yep. Torque it down to the specification that was required, and we made a mistake and we didn't stop the futile work. The futile work was the guy thinking he was twerking into specs, but not, and then not checking it. Yes. So, um, so Jonah has the same issue because they got, they have, we're like, we're so productive with this red tag green tag system. Now we're killing it. And he's like, you got piles of inventory, . This is not a good idea. He says, create a simple rule. He goes, , we can form a simple rule, which will be true in every case. The level of utilization of a non bottleneck is not determined by its own potential, but by some other constraint in the system. So if you have a non bottleneck, you got, what's the thing on a horse? The rains. The rains, slow it down. I don't ride horses, but I do watch Western movies. So they pull on the rains to slow the horse down. Um, and the horse is trained that, that it knows that when the rains get pulled, it's supposed to slow down. So what he says is, you guys, if you have non bottlenecks, don't work them. And it's like, oh my God, no, not possible. What do you mean? And then like, they're like, what do you mean if we don't keep our machines and our workers productive, we will get bad production numbers. And those go to. Like it's fear now. It's like, it's like, guys, you're not, so the note I wrote was kind of cryptic here. Um, do not pursue an activity that, that does not progress towards the goal. Mm-hmm. do not pursue an activity that is not lead to achieving the goal. Mm-hmm., repeat, stop futile work. Yes. Um, and it's hard because oftentimes raining in the the, the thoroughbred is not allowed. Yeah. Or there's consequences. Yes. Um, be because of the traditional mindset of things. But what Yes. I wanna say is that if, if you have non bottlenecks working even at a lower, even lowering, and they're still producing and they're producing inventory and the inventory's getting all piled up, you're just creating waste. Yep. Take that a team . Yep. And have 'em, have 'em go do training or Yeah. Deep clean or go torque test the bands. Yes. On the, or do let's do extra water testing so that when we do the water tests in front of the inspector, no factor good to go. Right? Yes. So it's, it's, you have to stop futile work. And this is a, this is a rule or a law. I don't know what it's, but, um, if you're, if, if, if you don't take that step, you'll have. You might be super productive and everybody's humming along, but your, your, your operation will be not running at optimum capacity because all you're doing is creating inventory and getting them the way, and you're burning people's energies for nothing. For nothing. And then also when you have inventory, here comes the secret about overproduction. It leads to all of the other eight or seven waste. It's the mother of all the waste. It'll lead to all your quality problems. So if you have any inventory laying around, you're gonna have quality problems. So guess what? Quality leader of, of a very large general contractor, what is my indicator for quality problems? Overproduction, any kind of overproduction that's happening. I already know. I already know. I don't know what the situation is, but I already know there's gonna be some errors and defects and that we're gonna do forensic analysis on that inventory. And that's what they do here. That's what they do in this chapter. They stopped futile work. So ? Yes. And guess what it is? This is the, this is the zinger. Um, and it's right here on, I dunno what it's trying to find it real quick, but it's, um, so you don't do the inventory. And then I wrote, do not optimize Hollywood metrics. Ooh,. But I, what I mean by Hollywood is that it's an actor or it's it's fiction. Yes. Or it's, um, it's a metric that looks cool on a dashboard. I, um, and it makes it feel, it makes us feel good. It's like, damn, the guys are super productive. They're knocking it outta the park. If that, if that metric doesn't lead us towards the goal, if it's only a local optimization, it. So don't even pursue it. Don't even put it on your dashboard. Throw that thing, delete it off your power BI or your whiteboard or whatever it is. Whatever. Yep. don't, so don't pursue it. Creating excess inventory and two, don't even measure that. Just not even worth your time. So he's such a, he's such a sage. Yes. But he, he literally stops that group. We're like, and puts 'em in place, but only, he's like, I understand these, like, these simple rules and I'm trying to learn, trust me, like if I walk on your job site, I see inventory. I'm not gonna be like, oh, we got issues here, . But, um, I, I always, constantly are like, let's not try to chase down these Hollywood metrics that just look cool. Yeah. What do you think about that? I think here, I'm gonna say something controversial. The Hollywood metrics of contractors, project teams, general contractors, trades of, we finish on time and we finished on budget. I especially, oh yeah., especially for GCs. I say it's a Hollywood metric for two reasons. One big fricking deal. You were under contract to do that. Two at what cost? Right? Because general contractors, most of their staff are salaried, so they're not, they have no idea how many hours their people are working. And so how many of their people are on their second or third divorce or on the verge of their first, how many of their staff are self-medicating? How many of their staff are freaking miserable? But they're touting on scheduling. Oh yeah. That on schedule and on budget don't mean jack when your people are unhealthy and falling apart. So it's like, I've always, I've asked this question several times, like, why, why can't we track the number of hours people are working? Like I'm, I understand like it's not a time thing cause they're salary, but you're celebrating something and you think you're winning, but you're not. You're killing your people. Yeah. And we can very easily with smartphones. Yeah. So easy. And every time I brought that up, people I'm like, I mean, come on. Okay, maybe let's not track their hours. Let's look at how many ball games they didn't go to. How many vacations they rescheduled or canceled, how many rehearsals they didn't go to. Let's look at that. Nobody wants to look at that. That was harder to Yeah. Yeah. It's invisible. Almost invisible. Yes. Yeah. But so big deal on time and on scale. But that, that weighs in, that weighs in, um, the, this week, um, the Lane Foundations podcast. Oh yeah. I was on it to it. Yes. And I actually talk about that. Yep. But I was saying, I, I couldn't raise, like I was, I thought I could be more productive and have more capacity by working more. Nope. Right. That's what I thought. And then I was working on a project that was huge city center, massive. Like it ran 24 7 and um, I wasn't. Rockstar or any anybody special out there at all. Um, but I thought I could like grow my brand by just grinding. Just, just grinding. Just getting after it and getting into, getting into everything, all the stuff. And it was seriously, it was like they were like, people were appreciate appreciative. Yeah. Of, and I was promoted and given raises and all kinds of stuff. And but what I told Walker and Davis was, um, I wasn't raising my capacity. I was taking out my energy for personal relationships. Yep. And whatever, like all like having a good home life, like all this stuff. I didn't burn that out. Like I had no hobbies. I, what did I do? I went to work, I went to bed, I went to the bar and then went back to work. maybe not in that order, but like those were the, the things that was it own a home. Um, like it was very, my life was very work focused. And like, I don't even look at pictures when I, of, when I was very few. I mean, I'm a hundreds or thousands of work photos in the album, but very few, um, photos of like, when I went to Bryce Canyon for a weekend, or the Grand Canyon or Death Valley, like all these places are around that area. So, um, it's, and that's a hard one because it's like you're also building your career that way. So, but I guess my, my thing was to them was like, yeah, you gotta manage that and don't, don't let your own ego take advantage. Yes. Of that. So be, become more effective. Don't just work harder. what I was trying to say, learn these techniques, like in this book by Dr. Gold. They are, they're very sage advice. So let's do chapter 26. I think we wrap it here cuz it's, um, this is genius and this is why the home life, it trickles in and I'm like walking in. Um, and he actually does it. They're, he's having breakfast, breakfast with his daughter and his son at the table. And he actually is honest with him. He's like, I gotta, I got, I got, I got a problem. Yep. I got a problem. We got two herpes. And they, the kids know the Herbie story. He's like, we got, we got two herpes. Um, but how do we keep the line from spreading? So he is like, okay, each of you 10 minutes, go into the room and come with, come up with an idea of how we're gonna do with Herbie. So they do, they do this. He's like, the, the, the winner gets a present or something and his daughter comes back, Sharon daughter. He's like, okay, what's the what's the solution? And Sharon goes, you need a drummer. It's like, you know, like in a parade. He's like, yeah, there's, she's like, I think I get it. Like there's no gaps in a parade. Everybody's marching in step. Yeah. And then Dave goes, but how do you keep the people in front of Herbie from setting the faster pace and Sharon Wise, beyond her years, Yes. You gotta give Herbie the drum. Oh, awesome. Right? Like, okay, who sets the pace? Herbie, who sets the pace in front? Herby. So even if Herbie's in the middle of the line, the signal, the drum. Yes. You know that signal? That's the signal to go. Mr. Schroeder would call that tact, but yep. I think that's a German word. But, um, the drummer, so that way Herbie, even if he's not in front of the line, he signals the whole line how we, um, how we keep together. And that's why it's so good. And children, they just know. Yes, Dave, Dave hits this is like a one two punch. And this gets, um, this is another book by gold rat. But, um, let's, maybe we'll do that another year.. The way we're going here, , Dave goes, that's really good. I have a better idea. You use rope like mountain climbers. You know how mountain climbers I don't know if you watch mountain climbers. Um they used to do this in iron workers too. So you type people together with rope. That way if one person falls, Yeah. The other person jumps the other way. And then you, you know, you fall. Right? So, but if you have a drum, people perhaps might, you know, be like, ah, that doesn't apply to me. Yeah. These rules, these, these, these are rules. I don't, they don't apply to me. I'm, I, I need my freedom. But if you hadn't rope mm-hmm., no one can left behind because you physically can't. You're physically bound. Yes, So he is like, oh, come to think of it. The rope makes it sound like having physical links between all the equipment, which is like a assembly line. Dave's like, yeah, an assembly line. Didn't you tell me once that assembly line is supposed to be the best way to make things? He's like, well, it's, he gets, he's like, oh, I'm Henry Ford. Now , the problem with the assembly line is it doesn't work through the whole plant. Like you can't literally, right. We have too much variation. We're not just building model tsr. So like they, he's sitting here doing corporate level problem solving with these two children who are like eight and 10 years old. Um, so to keep the line from spreading, you gotta get everybody to march in the same step or tie 'em to rope. Like, so herbes like signaling in front that the people in front of him, its like we just tie the rope from Herbie to the kid at the front so that everybody else along the middle stay in there. They don't have to be tied together. They can, they can have variation. What's important, what's important is the piece of rope from Herbie to the front. Yep. This is, this is like, oh my god. What does that create? Mr. Schroeder . Yep. So if you have, if you have the drum, I got a rope from Herbie to the front line. So my, my inventory does not grow. I'm prevented from increasing inventory. Yep. It's impossible. I created a rule. Um, they have the signals, but the people, the people in the middle between Herbie and the the person in the front, they all have buffer. Because they, they can fluctuate. Yep. They can, they can only fluctuate in between each other when they start running into each other. But they're all working on this drum buffer, rope drum, buffer, rope drum buffer, rope drum, buffer rope. This is the underlying production theory that, that is theory of constraints. And they're, this is fictional, but it was figured out by , by a, by a plant manager and two children. Yes. So it's like if we can hold material for red parts instead of pushing them back out, as soon as the first bottleneck has nothing to do, the million machines will then have time to work on the green parts and the parts we're missing. We'll reach assembly with no problem. We have a drum system that keeps everybody in place and check that way. We don't ever grow inventory. So if, if the drum don't beat you, don't take a step, stop. If there's problems, we stop the line. And how do we stop the line? We gotta rope from the, from the bottleneck all the way to the, to the front. Yes. That way we can stop the line if there's a complete constraint. But also there's variation. We are also designing the variation in between the front of the line and Herbie, people can float. There's some float time. So that way you can choose to work on bottleneck, work on non bottlenecks, but only when it's the beat is happening. This is the theory of constraints. It's drum, everybody worked attack buffer design in fluctuation for statistical variation and a rope having very specific rules about not over producing . Yes. And then. How, what, what metrics are we gonna measure? We're gonna measure inventory, we're gonna measure operating expense. Yep. Right? And that's, that's how we, um, we don't pursue any other Hollywood metrics if that, that metric isn't allowing us to move towards our goal is waste. We stop doing. Yes.. Yes. So like Alex goes back and he tries to implement this in the factory and he is like, this is genius. Where did you come up with this? Well, the kids, he's like, well, you know, I'm just such a, um, but that, but I, I think that was really cool. But I think the, the, the, the thing that is important and the, the work life balance thing and for me is especially true, is you gotta do that night thinking. Mm. You gotta do the night thinking. Yes. Um, or if, what I mean by that is like, you have to like, introduce diverse sets of inputs into your train of thought or else you get trapped in this mind. So if you're at a conference, oh, like, perhaps gonna happen, the most important conversation is not the one that you listen to, it's the one that's out in the hallway. Yep. The one after your like sixth IPA at Toots, you're in Nashville, . Um, so, so it's like, don't just get tied up in your own, um, traditional ways. Obviously we wanna have, um, we wanna attack these problems in very systematic ways, but also like when we're doing problem solving, we want to have a diverse set of inputs, including children in this case, my God, But then also if they have a really good idea, That makes, that makes systematic sense. A minute. Let's do it. Let's try out. So yes, I wanna leave it there cuz that is, that is great. So we have now introduced all these production rules. Don't let resources sit idle. If you have constraints, you have to focus on them, even if it makes you uncomfortable, even if it makes the person that you're going to talk about uncomfortable. And then when you approach that improvement, I'm kind of summarizing my rules here. If you, when you approach that improvement, you only use data. Yes. Is data. So if there's any kind of assumption that you gotta go test it out, you gotta be like, Jesse, you gotta be, Hey do this. Um, what was it? Ductal iron connection in front of me or a hub? Helpless. Do the hub connection and show me how you do it. Don't just rely on assumptions because the red Milwaukee impact and, and the special one for that hub device, they look almost the same. Yep. And then, um, you gotta set up your work ahead of the constraints. Yep. You gotta, you gotta set up. So if, hey, if I gotta work, I'm gonna relieve this constraint. The next phase. So that means your A team, you gotta watch them too . Yeah. You gotta measure everybody. Yes. So not only don't always do the force ranking. In fact, if you have an A team and they're not willing to work on constraints, they're not the A team. They're cheaters. Yes. Signaling drum set up a signaling process. Signals are so important. Apparently there's a new one. Smell. Yeah.. Um, but don't let signals only be written word or audible. It's gotta linger. That's why I smell. It's got, it's getting late. We're getting late. We're gonna punch you here. But it's got a linger. That means like, it's gotta, it's gotta, you have to be able to see it or sense it without somebody being there to tell you. And the same thing, when that issue is resolved, the signal tells you it's like a drum. And if you don't hear the drum, you don't take a step. So if, if you're creating inventory, don't over build it. You're creating waste. You're gonna create errors. You're going to, you're over producing something. And that's the mother of all waste. Being early is bad . Yes. And then don't pursue an activity that doesn't lead you to the goal. And I'm gonna leave it there. So if we're pursuing an activity that looks cool, um, or maybe it's, you know, we're trying something new, but it's, it's led by an initiative that's not leading us to the goal, we should challenge that. We should always challenge that. And also be like, if, if there's a traditional method or an old school way, then we're gonna go get the get the old World War II milling machines out. Yep. If that's the solution, then take action on it and go do it.. Yeah. I'm wanna leave it there. Cause that, like, those gets us at chapter 27. But it's like, you learn this method. You're convinced through a series of simulations. You go try, you do implements, you run experiments, you get wins. You're, you understand that your winds aren't, are just like the tip of the iceberg. And you need that third party. You needed Jesse Hernandez to come in because me, as operational, I'm only, I can only see the boundaries of our work. And you need that third party because that third party will challenge your assumptions that you're blind to just because it's just how a human bias works. Yeah. It's so important. And at this, at this point in the book, it's like, oh, damn, we have a system. The system is so simple, it can be improved by eight and 10 year olds that have no concept. No MBAs not even what's a 10 year old, like fifth, sixth grade? Sixth grade. Yeah. So it's, it's this very simple, almost universal process. If you trust it, it's like, it's magical. So, um, trust the , you gotta trust and you gotta work towards the goal. So yeah, that's, that's, um, for me, once we started to try those types of things, and then the vanity metrics or the Hollywood metrics idea was like, I've been doing all this measuring stuff wrong. Mm-hmm., that was the moment when I stopped or I changed the way I graded PPC and I just And then the reason why the PPC is the reason why, when you had that discussion with Felipe on the collab session with his podcast, that's what drew me into your orbit and put me out here onto the the, the, what do you call it? The Omniverse. The Omniverse , yes. But, um, but that's, that's that's incredibly important because if I didn't read that and I said, I, I need to start challenging some of my scheduling metrics, and we started challenging that kind of stuff and we, we made decisions and these decisions were based upon data instead of assumptions. And we were better for it . So I thought it was incredibly important. I wanna share that. And that's, that's all I got. What about you? I think the key thing. I'm gonna hit it again because I want people to, to, you know, this whole mental wellness and suicide epidemic that we're dealing with in our industry, I think this is a big contributing factor, especially at the GC level. And that stress just trickles all the way through to, to the trades that are doing the work. Finishing on time and on budget ain't good enough. Our people need to be healthy. Our people need to be growing. Our people need to be experiencing an enhanced quality of life onsite and offsite. Um, and so these, these, you ain't, you ain't accomplished nothing. And if all you're doing is finishing on time and on schedule and have no idea that your teams are working 80, 90 hours a week Yes. You might have some sophisticated budget tracking mechanism, but you know what? Budgets aren't hard. That's easy. You may have some sophisticated planning stuff. Guess what? The sun tracks time for us. You ain't accomplished much. The hard stuff. Yeah. The hard stuff. The quality of life stuff. The mental wellness of our people stuff. All that talent you got on putting together your Power BI dashboards, apply some of that to, to men measuring., the quality of life your people are experiencing. Mm-hmm. That's it. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you.. Yeah, man.. All right. I almost end the recording. That was, that was the best one. Oh my goodness. You're either driving down the road or just so enthralled with, uh, with this whole podcast that you went all the way down to the very, very, very, very end of it. And we appreciate you and just, we're going to take this as an indication of your dedication so we got a little special request of you, a call to action, because everybody tells us that like, you need to have a call to action. So here's the call to action. Be kind to yourself, go out there and share a smile with someone