"Fix Your Processes, Fix Your Business" - The Fast Slow Motion Podcast - Ep 034

In episode 034, Sam Donaghey and Michael Johnson are joined by Derrick Mains—also known as The Process Fixer—to explore one of the most overlooked growth tools in business: process.

Derrick shares how mapping, measuring, and mobilizing your team around better processes can unlock innovation, drive profitability, and help leaders build a business that runs smoothly without burning out their people.

Tune in for real-world stories, practical frameworks, and a fresh perspective on how intentional process improvement can fuel both business success and a better quality of life.

Transcript

Even if we take no action afterwards, there is a result and that result of paying attention. People only respect what you inspect and when. When people see you come out to their work and say to them, this is very interesting, I really like this. Look at how your results are different from last week. Why do you think that is, even if you do nothing else

as a manager, you have pretty much assured yourself that you are going to get an increase in productivity.

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped thousands of growing businesses build scalable systems on the Salesforce and HubSpot platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I'm your host, Sam Donaghey, and today we have Michael Johnson joining us, our Director of Growth.

Hey, Sam. Nice to be here. Excited about this conversation today. Really looking forward to this one, Michael, because today's episode, we're going to be discussing something that really impacts every business, big or small and that business processes. So whether you're scaling for growth, streamlining operations or you're fixing inefficiencies, processes are the backbone of your success. And joining Michael and I today on the Fast Slow Motion podcast is Derrick Mains.

Also known as the Process Fixer. Now Derrick has actually built a career helping businesses identify what's broken, and then he implement systems to drive efficiency and profitability. So Derrick, it's really great to see you today with us on the podcast. Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here and, excited to, to chat about process.

That's what I do. So, I mean, when you name yourself and your company after process, you better be pretty good at it. You've got to live up to the hype, right? That's right, that's right. Awesome. Well, listen, Derrick, you know, for those who might not be familiar with your work, can you share a little bit about your journey and how you actually became the process fixer?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think I've always been a systems thinker, and I think I've recognized that when I was a small child that I always like things in grids. Anybody that's in my office will notice. We only have grid paper in my office. I don't use anything else. Everything to me has to be put in very orderly fashions, even though my penmanship is very, very poor.

As you can see from my notes, I like to have things in this order. And that really had translated into a career in sustainability early on in my career, particularly around recycling and the end of life use of products. So if a company is making an item like an iPhone, there was a time where we didn't really think about what happened to that object

once it was discarded, the supply chain ran through till then. The consumer bought the product. And no brands were really thinking about was what was happening to it afterwards. And that changed in the early 2000s. And a lot of that had to do with just environmental regulation and that really became an entree to me to get into that industry, to help larger organizations think about the entire product lifecycle from what materials you put into this, how do you build it, how do you deconstructed it at the end of its life?

What things can be reused? And that turned into a career in sustainability. And then once I got out of the sustainability game and the company went public, and actually that I decided I was going to try to turn that into a career. And people kept calling me and asking me about other systems and processes, and I'm like, I'm here for sustainability, not here for that.

And then eventually I'm like, you're paying that much money. Okay, okay. Yeah, right. I can I can pimp myself out a little bit and use that skill, in other areas. So that's really how I got into the game and have been doing this now for over 20 years. I have written a number of books on this, and lots of podcasts and lots of public speaking.

I'll do over 100 events next year talking to CEOs about process. And it is really my passion, as you will soon see, once I get on a real rampage here. Well, looking forward to that. So I suppose when I've looked at your website and I've heard a few things that you've talked about, we had process triage and we have the forums.

Right. Why do we still start with the process triage? I believe this was an acquisition, right? It was right. So one of the largest telecom companies in the world had created a methodology in the early 2000s, and that methodology, they attributed it as their secret sauce. It was the reason that they kept their costs lower than anybody else.

And it was a process map mapping method. That was not done by the people in charge, but was done by the actual people doing the work. And, when they got into the field and started working with the people actually doing the work, leaders began to understand. At that telecom company that the people doing the work actually knew more about the work than the executives did.

Surprise. Imagine that, yeah, imagine. And when they realized this, they came to understand that many times there were things standing in the way of the people at the front of the organization, things that weren't hard to fix, things that were simple to fix things that were a couple of hundred dollars that were really standing in their way from doing a great job.

And, this telecom company turned that into an entire methodology, turned it into a department, and they traveled around over the course of about 15 years and, mapped out 2500 processes, not only internally to that company, but with all their subcontractors and vendors and suppliers. And they just kept this conversation going about process and really empowered the people at the front of the organization, the class of people that we call the believable, empowered, those believables to have a voice in the work.

And they found really amazing things. Not only did they find inefficiency and things that they could fix for very inexpensively, but they also found that just by the observation and doing the visualization of the work with the people, that their productivity went up once they understood that management was looking at this and management was trying to find ways to improve things, even the person who never said anything eventually raised their hand and said, hey, I've got an idea.

I've been thinking about this for ten years. What if we did it this way? And the company found these revolutionary ideas that were hidden inside the brains of many of the people that were there at the front lines of the work that had been doing the work for ten or 15 or 20 years. And maybe for one reason or another, those ideas either had been beaten out of them, or they had become dormant, or they were told many times, you know, that's not your job.

Go get back to, you know, work. And in the end, what they found is that these ideas were like the gold. They were literally these treasure chests all over the organization that anytime the organization wanted to improve their profitability or efficiency or increase their customer satisfaction or their reduced their employee turnover, they just went back and just ask again, what is it now?

We changed all these things. What? Now what? Well, now things have moved this way. And now here's the challenge. And that really turned into a methodology. And when I saw it the first time I saw it, I had been doing process work for many, many years. The first time I saw it, I actually I choked up. And then I showed it to a friend of mine who's a very well known process person, and she cried when she saw it and she was like, this is really something, you know?

So we decided, to acquire that company and, and to merge it into the work that we were already doing. How do you feel the the work, this visualization work that you're talking about, how do you feel that that impacts the trust in the organizational culture when a company goes through that process? Yeah, it's it's astounding. You cannot underestimate the value of what happens when you begin this work of visualization.

And you begin asking the people doing the work to help you better understand it and then help you improve it. And this is not just this is new material I'm working on right now, but this is not just because I've, I'm a I'm a person that likes to sit down and look at the work that we've done and say, what is the impact?

And what am I missing? And recently I've really become really infatuated with this concept called the Hawthorne effect. And the Hawthorne effect was actually discovered by the Western Electric Company in the 1930s. They had factories where Bell Telephone was building their telephones, and they were creating radar and all these new innovations. And there was a bit of research that was done.

And the research done was to determine if we could improve the quality and quantity of the output of work by adjusting the working conditions. And this is before, like if we're thinking in the 1930s, you know, you weren't thinking about people as a commodity. Well, you were you were thinking about how you exploit people. So Western Electric began taking researchers and putting them out on the floor where work was being done and adjusting factors.

And at one point they adjusted temperature. What is the optimal temperature for people to be working with? And then they would track the results each day with the employees sitting down with the employees and saying, hey, how much did you produce this hour? Oh, you did 63 last hour. You only did 60. And we adjusted the temperature. Do you feel more comfortable?

And they began doing all this research, and they really found this direct correlation between modifying the place where people were working, and it directly resulted in a dramatic improvements in productivity. And they began really researching this and doing extensive research for over five years. And then something interesting happened, and that is that they realized that by improving conditions that it would improve the workers output.

So they decided, this is very American of us to decide, well, what's now that we know the top limits, like where we can push the limits, let's figure out the bottom limit. So let's start deteriorating conditions so that we can understand what the bottom is here. And here's the fascinating thing. As the researchers went out and began adjusting the conditions and making conditions worse, to the point that the researchers said, we can no longer continue because we have made the work extremely dangerous.

They found the odd thing that happened, and that is that every adjustment they made, if it was positive or negative dramatically affected the work of the people in a positive way, even if they made it worse, if they made the conditions to a point where it became dangerous, the work improved. And that's when they discovered the Hawthorne effect.

And that was that just management, caring enough to send researchers out there to spend company resources, to observe the work happening, and talking to the people and asking them about the work and saying to them, wow, that's great. Look at this. Look at your results. Let's compare it to yesterday and getting people excited about the work. Improve the results even when the conditions got worse.

So so getting out and observing the work, standing together with people and saying, what is it that you do? Show me, tell me more. How can I make it better even if you don't take action to make it better? The work improves, which is a really fascinating thing. And essentially says that if we pay attention to things, those things come into the order and actually align more closely with what we want, what the outcomes that we want.

So that's a big part of this is it's really about even if we take no action afterwards, there is a result. And that result of paying attention. People only respect what you inspect and when when people see you come out to their work and say to them, this is very interesting, I really like this. Look at how your results are different from last week.

Why do you think that is? Even if you do nothing else as a manager, you have pretty much assured yourself that you are going to get an increase in productivity. And that to me is fascinating and that is the work that I do. I don't want to deteriorate conditions for anybody. Right. But I also understand that there's a benefit just in doing the actual practice.

Absolutely. You know, there's the old adage of what gets measured is what gets done. But this is one step a little bit further. This is asking why. And pulling in some organic and natural involvement from the team. What what gets observed gets done in our reality right when we pay attention and when when people just think about that.

I mean, if you go home from work and you, you have a drudgery job and you're there every day and you go home from work and you sit down at the table and your wife says housework and you just grunt, right? It's just, man, right now. All of a sudden, the CEO creates a mandate and says, I want people out there on these forklifts that are understanding the work that are happening by these people and paying attention and helping them measure and trying to find ways to improve things.

When you walk home from work that day and your wife says, how is work? You go, you know, a funny thing happened over there today, right? And I'm and I got a little energy out of it and I and I'm, you know, and it's interesting and and then you later that person goes to bed and they're, they're laying there never having thought about work ever before.

After they clock out and they're laying there at night and they go, you know, I wonder if we did move this machine over here ten feet closer, would that improve conditions for everybody? So now I've taken an asset that in the United States, unfortunately, Western management believes in the all hands approach and that is that I, the almighty head, will come to you lowly hands in a in an all hands meeting, and I will dictate to you what my demands are.

And it's like we hire people only from the neck down. And now all of a sudden, this engages them to say, hey, you know what? I actually can think as well. I am a, a thinker, and I want to think about improving my conditions because I, I wouldn't mind staying here for 5 or 10 years through the rest of my career.

So there is a direct correlation between the observation and the result. And I think it's something that's been downplayed and diminished too much. And I think we've got to have a revolution of looking at that as statistics again. And becoming engaged with the work and understanding how we can improve the quality, quantity, speed and value of work by just paying attention to it.

Yeah. And what you've just mentioned, how do you typically get leadership to trust frontline employees to solve the problems, as opposed to having that all hands approach? Listen, I, I met Michael through Vistage and that's an important piece. I am a firm believer. I do not work with companies that the CEO is not in a peer group. Why?

Because I understand that if a CEO chunks out a half a day, a day of their time each month to sit in a room with other executives and to essentially say out loud, I don't know what the hell I'm doing, can you help me? Those CEOs tend to become more successful. They tend to be prospective seekers. They tend to be open to messages like this.

Many in particular. I do tend to work with a lot of construction companies in particular, some of the reason for that is because most construction companies are run by people that actually were at one point, construction workers, and they understand the direct correlation between conditions on the job site and the productivity of the work. So when I say this to them, they go, yep, that's exactly right.

I remember the days that the boss came. I remembered when the safety inspector was coming. We cleaned our stuff up on that day. Right? We we paid closer attention when other people's were paying attention. So I try only to work with companies that come out of that environment, because the mentality and the mindset of those executives is already aligned with that philosophy.

And, so if you're not in a Vistage group, don't call me. I was what I'm pretty much saying. I might work with you, but I'm going to charge a pain in the PITA fee right? That says these ones are going to be tough. And I've just found over time that working with companies that don't have executives, that have that mindset of improvement, many times it's just it's the efforts just don't materialize, because they're trying to figure out, well, how do I cut people?

And it's like, that's not what it's all about. This is about making people more efficient, more effective to produce better value and higher quality and quantity of work. Right, absolutely. And a lot of focus immediately goes to, people like you said, it goes to people problems must be this person. Let's get the right person. Right seats. Which is you know, an adage and a philosophy that's been around for a while.

Then you talked about, leaders that may be a little more vulnerable, open to open input, open to feedback. Does data and analytics play any role in that, or are you are you showing them some data, or are you showing us some history that to help open their eyes to that possibility of adjusting the process? Yeah, many times we do.

We show them examples from other companies that are like them and what we've discovered in those processes and how that played back in. So we do we've got lots of data, not just from the work that we've done, but the work that process triaged did over the years of, you know, all of these different processes. I just had a client reached out to me and said, hey, they've got some people certified in my method.

Their operations team is and they're like, we're getting ready to do HR onboarding process. I went into the database, sent them to HR onboarding processes from other companies, not the same as them, but other companies. And now they can look at that and go, oh, well, that's how it works. And then, oh, here's what the pain that company had.

I wonder if our pain is similar. Right. And that's really helpful. You mentioned right people right seats. And this is something you know, not to take a shot across the bow at Jim Collins but I regularly do. I'm not a big fan of some of the philosophy of Collins. I'm not a big fan of the philosophy of Drucker. I think those things are very, extremely outdated ideas that were developed inside of an environment where 17 million people were coming back from fighting a war, and when you ask them anything to do anything, they always answered, sir, yes, sir.

So that philosophy of man and try doing that with a millennial right now. Right. Just demand they do things and then force them to salute and yell, sir, yes, sir and click their heels together before they leave your office. It's not going to work in this day and age. So those philosophies, those ideologies are very outdated. And listen, I want right people in the right seats when it comes to to my right hands and right around me.

But I want to create a system that I don't need to have the best people. I want to be McDonalds. McDonalds does not need to hire PhDs to run their fryers. They don't need to hire PhDs to run their point of sale systems. They have created a system that is so easy to do, so simple, that anybody with a heartbeat can do it and feel like they've succeeded.

That's what I want to do. Systemize my organization so that the right people right seats isn't a requirement of the business. Let's just think about for a moment what what is the what are A players, right. People say I'm going to get A players okay. So let's just, you know, an A player is what the top 5%, top 7%.

So if 100% of businesses are going after the top 5%, what's the statistical probability that you're going to get one of those people? It's almost zero. So instead focus on making the system so good, the process so good that you don't need to have the best people and that anybody can walk in and do great work again, if you can get them, my God, let's get the best people we can possibly get.

Are there any industries that come to your mind about this coming to you because you've mentioned that you, you know, you like going from the kind of the construction folks, right? And obviously, manufacturing, let's say, sounds like it'd be a good fit there. Are there any industries or companies that you tend to see that just don't work with the triage method?

I really don't I would say that there are some industries where it's a little more tricky, like ad agencies, because there's a tremendous amount of rework and creativity in the process. Yeah. So you have to think about their process a little differently. And it's hard to say to them, how long does it take to build a logo? I can get an average.

But I also recognize that one project can take 10s. I mean, I'm working on a book cover for my new book right now. I have to admit, we are probably at the 40th iteration. I hate every single one of them. So over the weekend I threw something together after a couple of cocktails, and we looked at it this morning and we're like, that's it!

We found it. Like, we don't need to change anything. That's it. But it took 40 iterations to get to this moment. So that's the only industry that I find. Sometimes we have to make accommodations to the process, and we have to be able to allow some boundaries and say, here's the trigger, here's the milestones, here's the externalities that affect these things.

But there is this creamy center of the magic. We do all this preparation. And then where the magic happens, the magic could take a day. It could take ten days, but I don't I talk a lot more about manufacturing and construction because of the visualization of being able to make a change and fly a drone over the next day and go, well, that's a 25% increase.

That's a little more tricky to do when it's email. Now I will tell you, we have found ways to quantify that. We work with one client right now where we measure the volume of email being sent each month, and the volume of Slack messages being sent each month. And we're trying to reduce email and increase Slack and we're tracking that.

Right. So so that's not as much about working as a process. It's more about educating the people and saying, hey, look, okay, look, in this last quarter, here's what we found. We sent emails for this 5% should have been Slack right. And everybody goes yeah, that could have been okay, let's work this quarter to try to reduce that.

And I realize that we're still going to forget. But I will just come back each quarter and remind ourselves of this. And they're seeing dramatic improvements in that transition from writing out a long, drawn out email. We're having a meeting that should have been a long, drawn out email that actually should have been a Slack message right there, finding that correlation.

So I wouldn't say that there's anything that it doesn't work with. I mean, process triage helped create a number of of the departments for the federal government. And the funny thing is, if you ask people in the federal government which departments work the best, they will name them for you, and then you can show them the maps from process triage.

And then say, isn't it funny that this system was created using that methodology? So nobody that's that's immune to this. But it's just a little bit of a modification, particularly if there's a rework or creative loop. You know, Derrick, with the with the rise of remote work coming into play, the gimbal walk, right, the the banners about walking around, it's a little more difficult to do because you're not in person.

Do you have any best practices for companies that are primarily or I do, yeah, stop doing remote work is the first. Oh, no. That's hard, right? I mean, it's it's tricky, but you we have to understand something. We do have to question the validity and the power of remote work. And I don't want to knock it because we use it here.

I. I do it myself. But I also am very conscious that for 300,000 years of modern human evolution, for 299,995 of those, we didn't have Zoom. So I have evolved in an environment in which I need not just feedback, particularly in the negotiating position of being face to face, which human beings tend to. As I am watching your expressions here, I am adjusting my tone, my language, the types of words I used based upon your expressions and your acceptance of those things.

So I'm modifying what I actually want to say to reflect back to you what you are looking for me to say. This is this is a negotiating position. This is a negotiating position, right? And this is not a position that human beings are comfortable in long term. If you think about your earliest memories, Sam, Michael, as a child, with your mother, with your grandmother, fishing with your grandfather, woodworking with tools, none of those were face to face activities.

Your strongest emotional bonds were not created in face to face negotiating positions. They were put together in areas where you had some shoulder friction, where you were working not with two hands, but with four or 6 or 8, and you were building something together. In the construction industry, they get this you cannot build a construction project on Zoom.

It just does not work. And there are certain things about our businesses that we cannot build on Zoom. So if companies are remote, I highly encourage them to get together at regular intervals. And that might be once a month. It won't be months a quarter. But it's like, look, if you're going to be fully remote and your team is all over the place, then once a quarter you need a two day offsite where everybody is together, everybody is socializing.

One thing that when you work with companies, hundreds that thousands of companies, what you see over and over and over again is the environment really does dictate priorities a lot of times. And so how do you and your process get companies to focus on the important versus the urgent? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a there's a couple things you have to think about when it comes to any work in process.

When you are process mapping things, it's important to do the actual base map to understand the function of the work. But then the next piece of that is the conversation that occurs, and that conversation of stepping back from the wall, not having the shoulder friction together, but stepping back, crossing your arms and abstracting and saying, okay, how would we do this better?

How could we do this better? And then hearing out from the people that are doing the work and you not as a leader, saying, I think we should do this, but hearing from the people. And when you hear from the people, what you tend to find is that their pain, their problems is problems. Their challenges are not brand balance sheet budget things.

They're not even resource things. They're the observation of things that are broken that should be fixed. And when you do that and you have that conversation and they come up with a list, here's their list of ten things. What I always do is I say, look, Pareto principle here. List up the ten things that you think we need to improve and then fight it out.

Rank them between each other. Everybody has a voice. Everybody has a series of votes, not just one vote, but maybe five votes where they can say, hey man, I think this is the most important. All five of my votes go here. Let them force rank that for you so that you and his executive are taking maybe the 1 or 2 things off that list that the majority of votes in the room have said.

This is the thing that will make the biggest impact, and then that is where your attention and focus goes. I can't chase 25 things, but I can prioritize 1 or 2 things, particularly if I know that my people have said these things will help us work ten, 15, 20% better. Most of us won't make it 10 or 15 or 20% improvement on our bottom line this year.

When my people raise their hands and say, oh, you want to make a whole bunch more money, I should probably pay attention to those things. Absolutely. Let's shift to the M4 method map, measure, manage, mobilize. Could you walk us through that framework and absolutely transform businesses? Yeah. So for me this is really a culmination of bringing in process triage about a year ago and the AMP methodology that I had been teaching for years, accountability, measurement and process, where I discovered very early on that when we when we started doing process and we started not measuring individuals in the system, but measuring the system performance itself because teams are very important.

I was a lineman in high school football. I scored a total of one touchdown my entire career. It was not on purpose. The ball came out. I ended up grabbing it. At the end of the day. I stood up from the pile and everybody's like, where's the ball? And I'm like, I have it. And they're like, we're in the end zone.

I'm like, I scored a touchdown. I mean, it was completely made up. Yeah, it's great, but if you were to judge me on the number of, I would not have been judged very well. And sometimes this happens with teams where we get into judging individual performance, failing to understand that the reason that you perform so well is because you have the support of Sarah and you have the support of Janet, and then Janet's numbers aren't great because she's been supporting you.

And we get rid of Janet, and now you're support mechanism goes away and now your numbers deteriorate. So I don't like individual performance numbers at all. I don't think they make any sense. I think we've proven time and time again that they just don't work. Taylorism. The idea where this came from that you should judge individuals based upon their individual performance.

This happened in the early 1900s. By 1920, the New York City School District said we should adopt this method of rewarding children for their performance. And three years later, the people of New York City had had to literally storm the board meetings and demand that they eliminated this, because, as the people at the time said, our children are now mercenaries, our children will do anything to get the candy and toys, including sabotaging the results of other children.

We're literally creating a sociopath society, so I'm not big on the measurement piece of individuals. We've got a map. We've got to visualize things. We've got to understand what the system performs, and then we have to talk to the people that are in the system and say, how do we improve the team's performance, not just think about it.

If I'm a if I'm a fan of a football team, are they working on getting individual performance to improve? Sure. But they also understand the team performance is the only thing that matters, that that team congeals together. So once I have mapped and I have taken away the KPI aspect at least where I can and I'm, you know, I'd like to say we can throw them all away.

I don't think we can. But once I've now moved to the system measurement, then the management of people is quite simple because the things that I am doing, the change that I am making in the organization, are the things that people are raising their hands and saying, can we improve this? Because I think it would make us 10% more efficient.

And then when I bring that change back to the front line, do you really think they're going to fight me? No, because it's their idea, right? Right. To map, measure, manage and then mobilize. So now that I've got them into that cycle of visualization and talking, now I mobilize them and empower them to, say, become analysts inside my organization, move from being a soldier that just listens to my commands and defends the position and move into a position of a scout that looks at their job on a daily basis and goes, something ain't right, something's not right.

I don't like the way this material looks. Hey, boss, can you come down here and take a look? I just I've been doing this for 20 years and that doesn't look right. And I have a feeling, right. And then we look at it and we go, now we've got a full fledged organization of map, measure, manage, mobilize where the people are trying to improve the work on a daily basis, and they are doing that with a direct line of communication.

Not that everything makes it to the top, but the ranked items make it to the top so that executives focus on the things that the people know that need to happen to make the work better. How much does compensation structure move the needle for that mobilization aspect? Yeah, I don't think it does as much as everybody thinks. I think that people work for one of three reasons.

They work for fear, they work for money, or they work because they want to. And the reality is, is that the Western management has moved into a philosophy. We don't manage people anymore. We try to manage psychological manipulation of people through psychoanalysis. Through using things like Colby and Culture Index and all these kind of things which are okay, right, that that does some benefit, identifying some things.

But in reality there is less about the compensation and more about that feeling of pride and joy in the work. I want people that want to be here, that have a dedicated commitment to improving the process and the system, and then my job as a leader has to be then to have them share in the uptake of that.

And I like what the Japanese did in building Six Sigma and lean in Toyota production systems. They did not use individual KPIs. They created performance bonuses for entire teams, but also companies like Mitsubishi. In the 1970s, 80% of their profit. Instead of giving it back to the people, they gave it back to the people and saying, here's a budget now to improve the process and to make it easier so you don't have to work as hard.

Maybe we don't even need to work Fridays. Maybe we'll still pay you for Fridays, but we don't need to work. Here's a sum of money that management has come up with. Ideas to tell us how to make it easier, so that maybe Fridays are your automatic day off. I just was talking to a company here recently and he said, what can we do?

And I said, promise your people that if you can hit these goals around process improvement and systems improvement and we can get things mapped that next year, we'll move to a 38 hour workweek. And then if we can do it again, we'll move to a 36 hour workweek and then a 34 hour workweek and then a 32 out.

Now all of a sudden, people are going, wait, I get the same pay. Hold on, I get the same pay, but I work less. Okay, game on bro. And you're challenging me to come up with the ideas to figure out how to automate my job so I don't have to work nearly as hard and work as many days, and you're still going to pay me the same amount, bro.

I'm in. And all of the sudden they're mobilized and they're like laying awake at night. And on Sunday, before they as they lay down for bed at work, they're like, man, I gotta go to work tomorrow. It's going to be incredible. That's what we have to do, move away from the money. Money's important. But. But if I have a whole lot more money because my business is being dramatically improved all the time, and I'm folding that back into process improvement, and I'm folding some of that back in to them and giving them a reward in the process.

All of the sudden, I have taken people that weren't the right people and weren't in the right seats, and I've actually built an organization with the wrong people, wrong seats, but a system that's so dang good that anybody can succeed in that, and everybody is empowered in that process. Derrick, do you feel like there's got to be like a big cultural shift for for this to happen?

I do, but but I think here's the great news, Sam, this is not a new idea. This idea was used by the United States in the 1940s, when 35% of all Americans working in manufacturing and construction and really in every industry, 35% where they were drafted and shipped overseas, and they were replaced by 8 million women and 3 million children.

FDR passed a rule in 1942 that said children as of the age of 12 have the right to drop out of school and go work in a factory. I don't know if you have any kids around the age of 12, but imagine them coming home from school today and say, I've dropped out of school, I'm going to work in a factory, and there's nothing you can do about it, because the president passed a rule that said, I'm allowed.

This is what Americans had to manage in 1942. In 1942, in the U.S., a woman working in a factory was 20 times more likely to be killed or injured than her husband was on the battlefields of Europe. That's how dangerous it was working in these factories. And these managers had to deal with the situation they had never dealt with before, because it wasn't just the frontline people that had been drafted.

200,000 American managers were commissioned officers. If you want an award for a great manager in 1940 and 1941, the federal government took note and made a little check. But they were like Michael Johnson, Director of Growth. This would be great. War breaks out. They just give two guys, show up at your house and say, you're now a major in the U.S. Army.

Come with us. And you're like, no, I never served. I'm 68 years. And they're like, does it matter, bro? You have been identified as a great leader. Well, I don't even know how to salute. It's fine. You got three days on the boat on the way over. Will show you everything. I mean, this is the way it worked.

So all of these women and children came into the workplace, and American management executives tried to manage them in the way that we had done before, and it just did not work. Instead, executives learned that by going to the front line, standing shoulder to shoulder with the women and children and the older people that were working in the front lines and asking them, what do we need to do to improve?

They found fascinating things. Women that were like, look, a lot of women are being injured because their fingers, because our gloves are too big and they don't fit our hands. Are these tools? They're too large for us. Go, go, Mr. Ford. Go shuffle off and get me some tools and some gloves. Give me some hair ties so that my hair doesn't get caught in a machine and I get injured.

And if you do that, if you adjust your schedules so that I can still drop my kids off and pick them up from school and I can work in between, I can bring you ten other housewives from my neighborhood that would come and work here as well. And management listened. And did it work? The fact that I'm not speaking German right now is a pretty good indication that this worked.

We doubled the GDP, we doubled frontline wages, we doubled corporate profits. Unemployment fell to 1.7%, and it set America up for 20 years of absolute economic boom because of what we learned during that time. Unfortunately, by 1949, these ideas were wiped from American history because they were considered to be communist. This idea of empowering employees to control the means of production, 1949 right, has the Cold War is breaking out and Europe is starting to be reestablished and Stalin is starting to put up the Iron Curtain.

And this in the stones are going up in Berlin all of the sudden, this these ideas don't sound so good anymore. That doesn't sound like capitalism. And American managers just decided to reject these ideas and throw them in the trash heap. And fortunately for us, they were preserved in Japanese culture and became Six Sigma and Lean and Kaizen and the Toyota Production System.

And then the Japanese used that to beat us about the face and neck for the next 25 years in becoming the second largest economy in the world. So I think there is an ideological shift that needs to happen in Western management. I think the good news is what I am out talking about is not a new idea. It is an idea that was an American idea.

It is the idea that beat the fascists and the Nazis and stop the empire of Japan from its encroachment into China. This is this is what we did to win last time. And now that we sit here saying, oh, we're the greatest in the world. And yet you look at all of the statistics that say the America is in the a long, but, but, but ever exceeding decline.

Maybe we just need to go back to do what we did in the first place. What made America great in the first place is actually available to us. If we just are willing to lay aside that ideology, to look at some ideas, like the ideas of Drucker, that, you know, are 70 plus years old now and say, do these ideas fit the American workplace of today?

And I think what you will find in just a cursory glance over them, that they do not, and that we need a new ideology. Well, they're you know, you're a bestselling author and a thought leader in operational excellence. You've got some awards behind you. Do a few of those. Yeah, few of those. Can you tell us about your books and some of the key messages that you hope readers take away?

So I have written four books so far. I have a new one that's coming out next year. That's a totally different style. It's much more philosophical. And it goes to Sam's point of this ideology. I originally wrote that book and I called it How, and it was how to do this work. And then as I got out and I started talking about how to do the work, I realized that I had, like Simon, I missed Simon.

Sinek’s point. And that was you got to tell people why this is really important. You have to show them statistically why this is really important. So that new book will come out next year. I think we're going to have probably by the time this episode hits, we'll have a presale page up. We've been working on that for a while.

My other books, though, the first one was really about theory. The second and third were fictional stories. They were stories that I wrote as a as a fictional book to embed these ideas. And I tell about characters that are struggling with these challenges in restaurants and factories and how they overcame them, and how some of these simple ideas just flew in the face of traditional management philosophy and how they radically improved organizations.

So I feel like, unfortunately for me, there is a, a retelling I need to do of these books. I need to go back to them because my ideology, my belief structure, I have shifted as well. And because of that, I read some of the old stuff and I'm like, I can see the thread. But for me, part of my A Christmas holiday is going to be going back and rewriting these and making a new version of these that I feel like is more relevant to the message of today.

But to that point, you know, I love talking about this stuff. I've been developing my methodology for many years and really utilizing the works of folks like Henry Kaiser and W Edwards Deming, and Shewhart and others who who gave this message in a time before when the world needed that. And that was unfortunately, after it saved the world.

Everybody was like, we got better things to do. So that's the good news, Sam, is that it is not just theory. You can find this in practice, in economies around the world. And it's funny, last week I gave a talk to a group of CEOs, and there was an older Japanese executive in there, and I gave a three hour talk about the difference between Japanese and American management.

And I'm thinking the whole time I'm like, I'm not Japanese. This guy is going to stand up at the end and just totally berate me, right? And be like, you got it wrong. And at the end, he stood up and he said, that's what we used to have. But in the last 10 or 15 years, we have started to adopt the Western philosophy and it's destroying our economy.

You can now see the invert. You can see how Japan took these ideas and built an economy out of it. And now they're switching to our ideas, and all of a sudden they're not the second biggest economy. They're not the third, they're not the fourth. They are literally on a rapid decline. As soon as they adopted these ideas.

And I think you can look at even American productivity and American productivity pretty much peaked in 1952. And then it never got any better after that. Once these ideas were washed away, we just became sort of static. Derrick. Yeah, it's obviously something that I've so you doing recently is now you're offering folks to get certified as a process fixer.

Can you talk a little bit about that. What's it all about. Yeah. So that really is this message that I've just talked about in the last 40 minutes, that is a training that we're doing, here in Tempe. We're going to move them around a little bit throughout the year. But it really is for operational leaders to come spend three days with me and my team learning this method, not just how to do it, how to build.

They're going to learn all of that stuff. You're going to go back and be able to build maps and do all of this kind of work and think about how systems relate and flow and all these kind of things. But but I'm really a part of that teaching itself. I think of the 21 hours of that course is, is it's about 15 hours of me talking about theory, talking about practice, telling stories, playing games, helping people understand why these things are really important, and empowering them to go back into their organizations and to bring this philosophy in there.

I think the difference for me and some of the others, like Deming and Six Sigma, is, you know, when you get into a philosophy like Six Sigma, everybody has to buy into it across the entire organization, and it all has to be done succinctly together. That's not the case with what we teach. We teach, get in and get get build groundswell in the organization by learning these methods.

Replace one of your meetings a week instead of sitting down and meeting about a project, let's get sticky notes. Let's use oh, I don't even have my custom ones here. I have my own custom ones that I had created. But let's use our lines. Let's let's use let's map this thing out instead of writing it and just talking about it.

Put it up on a wall, stand together and go, that's what we're going to accomplish this week. Start bringing that in. And it's amazing. I was I was in North Carolina a few weeks ago. I did two workshops with a company where we mapped out process and, the guy, the director of operations got certified in the method.

He emailed me on Friday and said our CEOs approved seventy two process workshops for 2025, 72. He's like, take people from, this is so valuable. I want you to take people from the line, from the field, from the sales operation, put lock them in a room and say, we need to know this information. That's how we obtain profound knowledge of our business.

That's how we truly understand what's happening, and that's how we don't get surprised. This is this is how we build a strong, healthy organization. I hope this makes sense. And I know that I did a lot of talking, but I and I know this a lot of this is philosophical, right? It is it is fundamentally shifting the ideology that we have about business.

Let's just be honest, since you first entered the business, there is a protocol, right? There is a way that things get done that has been imprinted on you for a very long period of time. There is nothing to say, and there is no mechanism in place to ever ask yourself, how does that ideology actually make sense for 3000 years, the primary form of health care, even into the 17 and 1800s, was bleeding.

We cut you and let you bleed. George Washington died of it. They just cut him so much that he eventually just bled out for 3000 years. The greatest minds Aristotle, Socrates, the great Ben Franklin. All of these people believed that by cutting you and letting you bleed out, that was the best way to cure you. Anybody today will tell you that is utter and total nonsense and doesn't make any sense.

Yet for 3000 years, everybody believes it. For the last 70 years, everybody believes Drucker's five core fundamentals of management, that you send a company goal and you break that down to departmental goals, then you chunk that out to employees, then you measure the performance of everybody against that, and then you give rewards and consequences based upon their individual performance.

Everybody believes it. But at the time when he came up with that idea, he replaced the idea that made America great. He replaced the idea that the Japanese used to become the second largest economy in the world. Peter Drucker proposed a theory of management, and that was the five steps of it. And 70 years later, we still have a 70% failure rate in our businesses here in the United States.

If you were to go to Vegas and they when you walk up to a table and you say, what are the odds? And they said 70% of the time, put your money on the table, and we're just going to take it from you and you're going to lose. What would you say? You would say, I don't want to play this game anymore.

Yet, for some reason, every day we start businesses and we follow the same philosophy. And everybody Jim Collins, all the others. And listen, no offense, I mean, I was on Verne Harnish’s Scaling podcast recently. No offense, but the fundamental idea is flawed. The idea that you built this on the foundation of American Western management is just incorrect.

Or maybe it's not applicable to today, but it doesn't work. 70% failure rate tells you it doesn't work. That's a problem. Yeah, well, a bad process would beat a good person every time. Absolutely. And the opposite is also true that a bad person inside of a good process. I promise you, there are people that work at McDonalds that don't care $0.02 about working there, and they still are productive and they still produce a result because the system is so good that even when they try to screw it up, they can't.

That's what I want. I want a system that the Japanese call okay yokai it is idiot proof. I want to be able to hire idiots. I want to be able to hire former senators and congressmen. That's how low on the totem pole of intelligence I believe that you can go into business. You can go as far as to hire people from Washington, DC to come and work for you.

That's a astounding. Those that level of moronasy see could work inside your business to your advantage. You can hire your brother in law. You can hire that neighbor kid that you're like, I don't know, man. Sometimes he just stands out in the yard for 3 or 4 hours staring into space. You can bring that guy in, not that you want to, but make your system so good that you could if you had to.

That's a great. That's my message. That's a great line. Actually, it's a good segue because we always like to end on a quote. Derrick. I mean, you've given us so many great quotes, but is there any quotes that stand out to you day that you'd like to share? Wow. You know what one I wrote last night? I stood back the other day with a CEO.

We were looking at his process maps and I said, what about that process do you know nothing about that's terribly important? And he was really taken by that. He was like, wow, there is something in that map. And I'm looking at that I know nothing about that's terribly important. And it could be the thing, right? It could be the thing that collapses this whole thing.

What is it? And just standing back and looking at that, what is there about the process that you know nothing about that's terribly important? That to me is something if you're it's if you're a decent CEO, that that quote right there should keep you up at night. Derrick, thank you so much for joining us today. You got it.

It was fun. But look, that wraps up today's episode of the Fast Slow Motion Podcast. A massive thank you to Derrick Mains for sharing his wisdom and expertise. If you're ready to start fixing your processes or you want to learn more about Derrick's work, visit his website at theprocessfixer.com and remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform and check out past episodes at fastslowmotion.com/podcast.

And if you have any topics that you'd like to hear more about, or questions about what we've covered in an episode, then you can send your requests and questions to us at fastslowmotion.com/podcastfeedback.