Lean Agriculture

What do a foot pedal trash can, Japanese automakers, and modern ag sales have in common? 

They were all invented (in a manner of speaking) by Lillian Gilbreth, an engineer, mother of twelve, and one of the most influential figures in modern management science. 

In this episode, host Sarah Mock and co-host Trey Malone trace Lillian's remarkable legacy from the factory floor all the way to the American farm.

Alongside Scott Downey, Director of the Center for Food and Agricultural Business at Purdue University, we unpack how Lillian, and her husband Frank, pioneered the study of human motion, and laid the groundwork for Lean strategy, the waste-reduction framework that Japanese automakers like Honda and Subaru used to quietly overtake American car companies in the latter half of the 20th century.

Then, we connect Lean thinking directly to the world of agribusiness — exploring what it really means to eliminate waste in ag sales, why risk management (not relationships) may be the true product a salesperson delivers to a farmer, and why so many sales managers can't answer the simple question: "How much does it cost to put a salesperson in front of a customer?"

The conversation also tackles the data overload facing both agribusinesses and farms today, the overlooked problem of labor waste in agriculture, and how AI may be shifting the most valuable skill in ag sales from providing answers to asking better questions.

In this episode:

• Why it's motion, and not time, that makes businesses more efficient
• How Japanese automakers used Lean to overtake American manufacturing — and what agriculture can learn from it
• The real product ag salespeople deliver to farmers (hint: it's not information)
• Why knowing your "measure of motion" is the first step to eliminating waste
• How "just in time" gave way to "just in case" — and why both are valid Lean outcomes
• Why the future of rural America might hinge on creating smarter, leaner agribusinesses

Resources: Learn more about Purdue's Center for Food and Agricultural Business at agribusiness.purdue.edu

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

You know the push pedal trash can, the kind where you step on the pedal on the floor and the lid flips open and then closes when the pressure is released? Maybe in the pantheon of great inventions, the push pedal trash can doesn't sit quite as high as the wheel or the smartphone. But what most people don't know is that foot pedal trash cans are a pretty simple way to dramatically increase the efficiency in a kitchen. Not only are they convenient and quick to learn how to use, they also save cooks either a lot of hand washing from having to lift a lid by hand, or a lot of unpleasantness related to an uncovered wastebin in an active kitchen. Maybe it's surprising to learn that the inventor of this clever little contraption was not a lifelong garage tinker or reclusive inventor. Quite the opposite. The foot pedal trash can was invented by an engineer and a mom.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

And imagine being the first female engineering professor at Purdue University, but also having to raise 12 kids.

SPEAKER_03 1:03

These aren't just any 12 kids either. They're the ones that inspired a book and a 2003 movie franchise called Cheaper by the Dozen. And the engineer in question, Lillian Gilberth, didn't stop inventing at the easy open trash can.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Lillian is like, oh my gosh, I have 12 kids. I have to be hyper-efficient. So like the L-shaped design of a kitchen did not exist before her. Because she came up with this way to design a kitchen that made more sense. Door shelves in a refrigerator. That was her. Before that, you opened the refrigerator and there were no shelves. An electric mixer. Wall-mounted light switches. She was one of the core pioneers in shifting the efficiency of a household because of this knowledge on the management side and then this, I think, day-to-day life that was raising 12 kids with a late husband.

SPEAKER_03 1:54

The contributions that Lillian Gilbreth made to the worlds of industrial engineering and managerial science go well beyond the modern home or commercial kitchen. Their discoveries formed the foundation of many tools that continue to shape modern manufacturing, jobs, and of course, agribusiness. Lean management comes to the farm. Today, on Agribusiness Blueprint. This is Agribusiness Blueprint, a limited series podcast about American agriculture's most impossible challenges and the agribusiness leaders who solved them. You're here with me, independent ag journalist Sarah Mock, and my co-host Trey Malone, Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics, and the Bulgy Chair at Purdue University. Today, we're talking about Lillian Gilbreth, a notable Purdue alumna and engineer who not only reshaped kitchens, but also factories, the automobile industry, and eventually all of business management, with her focus on empathy, efficiency, and most importantly, movement. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. First, we've got to learn about Lillian's work. And for that, we reached out to one of her biggest fans, Scott Downey, the director for the Center for Food and Agricultural Business at Purdue University. That's the same Purdue where Edward Elliott, a former president of the university, gave Lillian Gilbert her start all the way back in 1925.

SPEAKER_02 3:22

So he hired Lillian Gilbreth to come here to Purdue, and she was the first female engineering faculty member in the country. And she and her husband Frank had become very interested in the emerging area of measuring human activity. So if you think about where the world was at that time, it was the dawn of the industrial age, you had the Model T, you had the assembly line, and the management science area began looking at human beings as a resource to be managed.

SPEAKER_03 4:00

This era was really the heyday of seeing workers as cogs in the machine. And the main idea behind the emerging management science of the time was to make your workers into more efficient cogs. This was especially true on automotive assembly lines in Detroit, like the ones making the Model Ts, where time was money and managers were obsessed with maximizing every second.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

So originally had this guy named Frederick Taylor, and he says that managers shouldn't do things, the workers should do things, and then the managers should time how much time it takes for the worker to do the thing, and they'll decide if the worker did a good job if they did it fast enough. And so this was the birth of what management was supposed to mean. So then you have the Gilbrists, and the Gilbrists say, these people are humans, they move. It's not the time. And if you think about them as humans, you realize that it's their effort that matters, and it's not just that they are an input in this massive system.

SPEAKER_03 5:12

Believe it or not, managers on automotive assembly lines didn't really buy into this new empathetic outlook. This was a radical departure from conventional thinking. And the thing was, the conventional methods seemed to be working just fine, especially for the American auto industry that had just helped the nation win a war and was widely considered to be the best and most efficient in the world. What's more, the destruction in Japan at the end of the war had been a windfall for American automakers. Their biggest competitor had just been wiped off the map. And now their dominance in the global auto market seemed like it would last for decades, maybe even centuries. But then it didn't.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

And within a few decades, those car companies were outproducing the US. Their cars had fewer defects, their cars were lower cost, their cars had better gas mileage. All of these things were more or less just crushing the US market. So here in the US, we took a look around and we thought, what's happening here? How are we losing? Well, come to find out, the Japanese got really into lean strategy.

SPEAKER_03 6:36

Lean strategy is a management idea that's made its way from manufacturing to every corner of the business world. And it's another of Lillian Gilbreth's children. The core of Lean is pretty simple that the primary goal of any organization should be to reduce waste. And that includes all kinds of waste: wasted time, effort, energy, space, whatever. But one of the challenges of applying lean is that a lot of waste is hard to spot. It doesn't just look like defective product heading to the landfill. It looks like overproduction, overprocessing, excessive movement and transport, excess inventory, excessive storage, and delays. Lillian and her engineer husband Frank laid the foundation for Lean with their empathetic outlook and their focus on motion studies, which helped them identify a lot of these new types of waste that no one else was really thinking about. And even though many in the US turned up their noses at the Gilbreath's recommendations early on, as Trey pointed out, the Japanese auto industry embraced them. But creating a lean system at Honda or Subaru didn't start with motion studies. Instead, their first step was to focus on understanding exactly what drivers wanted from their vehicles, whoever those drivers might be.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

So let's talk about a Honda Odyssey. It's one of the best-selling vans in the world right now. Well, there was a time where actually it wasn't such a great selling van, and they were trying to figure out why was it that their van wasn't selling the way that they had expected it to. So they sent one of their engineers to just observe people driving vans in the US for a while. And so he would just sit there and he would watch like at a grocery store or just to see what it is that these people are putting in the vans. And so obviously, the thing that people ended up using vans for that they didn't, I think, realize would be as popular as they are is hard labor.

unknown 8:35

Right?

SPEAKER_01 8:36

It's honestly easier to do a lot of construction work in a van than in a pickup. And so what they were noticing was anytime somebody would buy like some sheetrock, the sheetrock wouldn't fit in the back of the van. And so he realized one thing that we could do is we could just make it easy to slide some sheetrock in. And by just changing that minor little tweak, they increase the value proposition of that van for people in an industry that I don't think everybody was considering at the time.

SPEAKER_03 9:03

This obsession with understanding the real needs of the end customer is bedrock lean thinking that the Gilberts would have approved of. It goes beyond asking customers what they want and instead focuses on how customers actually use the product. It's the difference between a car having a hundred costly bells and whistles from countless cup holders to massaging seats and the blander, affordable, reliable cars that have proved dominantly popular in recent decades. Subaru, another Japanese automaker, has a similar strategy around prioritizing exactly what the customer wants and standardizing their cars to maximize affordability. But for Subaru, low cost doesn't mean low quality. And they achieve those seemingly opposite aims by doing something unexpected.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

So if you go to the production facility here in Lafayette, you'll see it to this day, and this is true in any Japanese system, there's actually either a rope or a button that you can push to either slow, every person on the line can either stop or slow down the production line at any given time if they see anything wrong. Because you're way better off catching it before you send it out than having to deal with the back end of managing the mistake. That's remarkable, right? That looks completely different than having some manager up in like the crow's nest watching everybody and cracking the whip. It's a fundamentally different perspective in terms of how they produce things.

SPEAKER_03 10:33

For anyone who's ever worked in a big organization, maybe the idea of any worker being able to grind the whole company to a halt sounds like a recipe for wasting a ton of time. But what's happening at Subaru isn't an exercise in arbitrary perfectionism, nor is it, as many often say, about a fundamental cultural difference between American and Japanese companies and workers. Instead, Subaru hands over the power to stop the whole production line to each worker to prevent waste, not to cause it. The idea being, better to stop the line when only one faulty part has been manufactured, than wait until a foreman, say, notices after a thousand have piled up. Stopping the line might cause a little bit of waste from lost time, but it's preventing a lot of other kinds of waste. In other words, pay a little now to avoid a huge cost later. So the Gilbert's advancements in making people more efficient proved incredibly valuable to auto manufacturers in Japan in the mid to late 20th century. But what does any of this mean for agribusiness? How did these learnings make their way from autofactory floors to shaping the world of U.S. agriculture? That's after the break. Agribusiness Blueprint is brought to you by Purdue University's Center for Food and Agricultural Business. This year marks the center's 40th anniversary, and its mission remains the same: connecting evidence-based insight with the decisions agribusiness leaders make every day. From strategy and marketing to sales, finance, and risk management, the center helps organizations and professionals navigate what makes agribusiness fundamentally different. Learn more about the center's programs and research at agribusiness.purdue.edu. Now, back to the show. So on a factory floor, following the tenets of lean's strategy to optimize movement and eliminate wasted time and resources might seem obvious. But for those in agriculture and agribusiness, the usefulness of all of this might not seem so obvious. So connect those dots for us. How does lean apply to this very modern space where no one's standing around in a factory trying to find the most efficient way to move a car from hunks of steel into something you can drive off the lot?

SPEAKER_01 12:56

Waste doesn't have to just be physical motion, right? There are so many things that I do on a daily basis that was a waste of time, right? Anytime you try to send an email and you overburden yourself with trying to figure out what the email needs to say, that's a waste.

SPEAKER_03 13:13

So assuming that there is most likely some waste, even in efficient industries like agriculture and agribusiness, what would the Gilbreths and their acolytes in the lean movement have us do about it? As an example, let's talk about one specific function: ag sales. Luckily, Scott Downey is not only a Gilbreth super fan, he is also an ag sales expert who's helped shape how things are sold on American farms for decades. From his perspective, the first step in applying lean thinking to ag sales would be to look all the way through the supply chain, just like Honda, to the end customer and determine what it is that they really need. So, what is the real product that ag salespeople are delivering to their customers?

SPEAKER_02 14:01

The sales function in some industries is very much about persuasion. In other industries, it's very much about information. But in agriculture, the predominant driver is risk and how we deal with it. And the role that salespeople play in that risk management for farmers is tremendous. It probably outpaces their value as an information source or an advisor.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

The way that it shows up is relationships. So, like in sales, you say, Oh, it's a relationship thing. So, for example, in ag input sales, there was a real big concern about 25 years ago that there was going to be an Amazon for ag inputs. And so everybody was going to buy just online, like everything else. And yeah, there has been some growth there, but it hasn't been this rapid adoption that I think there was this fear of a few decades ago. Why? Because Amazon is really bad at risk management. How often do you order something on Amazon and they send you the wrong thing? And so that is not risk that somebody is willing to take on at a farm. If I have a problem, I need to be able to call Chad or whoever it is to say that there's a problem and then somebody will respond to me. Also, have you ever tried to get any type of response from an online purchase that you said you guys sent me a small, a size small, and I needed an extra large? Good luck. You're not going to find much help. But in ag we can't afford to do that. So this amount of risk is baked into what I think is the relationship aspect of sales. And so we talk about it like AG, what distinguishes us from other industries is the relationship aspect. And that's true, but that's a second-order effect to the risk associated with the purchasing process, more so than the relationship itself.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

And one of the challenges is we've talked about relationships for so long that we're almost convinced that it's the relationship that's the issue, as opposed to what that relationship does. And it's not like when you go ask a farmer, why do you work with that salesperson? It's not like the farmer says, Well, they're my risk management tool. But that is a huge part of it.

SPEAKER_03 16:26

Whether or not risk management is the key product in every ag sales role or not, having this kind of clarity around what the product is is huge. Because now we know what we need to measure. We need to evaluate how effective the sales team is at providing this risk management function to customers. In other words, we need to measure the motion of the sales team to figure out where time and resources might be being wasted. And here, Scott leans on Frank Gilbreth's additions to Lillian's work.

SPEAKER_02 16:59

Frank's contribution was that he created a unit of measure based on the amount of time it takes to lay one brick. And that unit of measure is called a third lig, which is Gilbreth spelled backwards. So once you figure out how you're going to measure that motion, then you can begin to put motion over time and think about efficiency. And once you have that measure and you can begin looking at efficiency, you can begin saying, okay, where's the waste?

SPEAKER_03 17:29

The go-to measure of motion in the modern business world, the one that we use to quantify efficiency most of the time, is money. But it's not the only measure. Notably, Scott says there is no right measure to look at when evaluating sales or really any other part of the business. What's critical is to clearly identify the thing you are measuring and understand how it fluctuates, which in his experience is a thing that many in the ag sales space don't do.

SPEAKER_02 17:57

There's two questions I always ask sales managers. What do you manage? Oh, I manage people. What does that mean? What do you manage about those people? And so if you're a sales manager, you say I manage sales. And so the second question I ask is, how much does it cost your organization to put a salesperson in front of a customer? Hardly anybody can answer it. They've never even looked at it.

SPEAKER_03 18:25

From Scott's perspective, a sales manager who doesn't know how much it costs to put a salesperson in front of a customer might be akin to a 1950s factory foreman not knowing how long it takes for a car to be assembled on the line. This figure is, in a lot of ways, the fundamental measure of their success. And too often it's simply written off as a figure that can't be calculated. Or worse, it never occurs to anyone to try and calculate it in the first place. The problem with this oversight is that you can't eliminate waste that you can't identify. And in today's world of intense competition in agribusiness, even sales teams are being forced to prove their efficiency to the overall business.

SPEAKER_02 19:07

If we don't figure out what value salespeople bring in dollars and cents. And we don't figure out how to have sales as a process create value, salespeople will go away. We already have sales organizations in agriculture today looking at the productivity of their sales force and recognizing that the 80-20 rule applies, that 80% of their revenue and profits come from 20% of their sales force. And so at what point can you no longer afford to put a salesperson on the farm? And we're past that point now. And retailers are just starting to recognize oh my gosh, I can't afford to do it the way I've always done. If we don't figure it out in time, that means we'll need fewer salespeople in agriculture. And the consequence of that, many of the jobs that are accessible in agriculture are in that sales area. And those people live in small towns, small communities. And without those jobs, the social implications of that for rural communities could be pretty dire.

SPEAKER_03 20:19

Faced with this existential threat, we're challenged to answer a question. How do we prove that something like a sales process is valuable to customers? The fact is, this question will likely have a unique answer on every team and in every organization. Often it'll require tracking multiple types of data across obvious things like marketing spent and sales expenses and less obvious things, like the kinds of topics that salespeople cover in customer conversations and even sales call length. What's important is identifying the data that actually informs us about our desired outcome and doesn't bog us down with data just for the sake of data.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

What salespeople always say around data is do you want me in the office putting my data into the computer, or do we want me out selling? The answer is it's a false dichotomy, right? Because maybe what we need is the right data, the data where it has the potential to have impact. And I think the way growers are looking at data today, and I think a lot of us, the amount of data is overwhelming. And so I very quickly come to look, who cares about data? What I need are things that are gonna help me make better decisions, and some of that is within that data. But a lot of it's noise.

SPEAKER_03 21:45

This is the part of the process where the experience of agribusinesses and on farms starts to converge. Because farmers, perhaps even more so than their partners on the agribusiness side, have been inundated in recent years with data that. People insist is so valuable that people should be willing to pay you for it. The problem is, a lot of this data has actually turned out to be just noise. Because much of it doesn't actually help us make better decisions or identify and reduce waste, it's not actually helping improve efficiency. The wrong lesson to take from this experience with farm data is that because some of it hasn't proved useful, none of it ever will. In the tradition of the Gilbreths, our challenge is to continue refining our data collection techniques until we find the indicators that really help us understand what our customer really wants and where we're wasting resources in delivering that to them. And just as Detroit was tricked into complacency in the years after World War II, many farms and agribusinesses are likely overlooking pockets of waste that they don't even realize are waste. And this is true even in otherwise highly efficient businesses.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

I always love talking to somebody who says, I have no waste, and then you go visit and you look in their barn and there's just stuff everywhere rusting. And you're like, hand me a hammer, and then they have 900 hammers because clearly they they never find their hammer, so they go get another hammer. So I think there are plenty of opportunities to reduce waste. I think there's a lot of labor waste, specifically on the HR talent management side that has been overlooked on farm. We talk about labor constraints all the time, literally all the time in agriculture. But maybe that is a really interesting area to really take a step back and think all right, where are the real gaps in what we're doing versus what could be done with the talent and labor that we have?

SPEAKER_03 23:40

Labor waste can manifest in a lot of different ways, from the waste of an experienced operator who's relegated to a junior position because an older farmer won't let go of decision-making power. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, the waste that comes from overburdening employees in such a way that they become error prone and eventually burn out. And then there's one of the most difficult to measure types of labor waste, emotional hardship.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

There's nothing like sitting in a combine and listening to talk radio or whatever, and you're just getting all of this bombardment of emotional stress from whatever you're watching or listening to. That's waste. Like that is not helping you make any better decisions. So anytime you're like engaging with some new information or you're trying to evaluate some new choice, or even decide if that choice is worth making, you're wasting your time if you don't start with the fundamental process that I have to begin with the end in mind, and then I need to go collect the information to make that choice. It's all too common to just get lost in the pool of information overload and not know how to evaluate those things. And I think lean is a very helpful perspective in that world.

SPEAKER_03 24:55

So whether you're a farmer, someone on a nag sales team, or you sit in some other food nag chair, it's likely that Lillian Gilbert has either helped shape your career already or will in the future. Businesses the world over use lean strategies every day because lean is a framework that can help you adapt, especially when conditions change.

SPEAKER_02 25:17

The key thing that's relevant today and connects with AI and manufacturing operations and supply chain and business is the idea that we need to find our third lecks. What AI lets us do is not focus as much on the answers, but focus on the questions. And what I mean by that is we have to figure out what are we going to feed it to get the most out, which is measurement of a lot of things that we haven't measured. And so, as a manager today, if all you're going to use are the measurements that other people have come up with, you're probably not going to find the advantages going forward that you would have over the last 50 years.

SPEAKER_03 26:12

According to Scott, new measurements and data emerge when we ask new and better questions. This specifically is a role he envisions future ag sales professionals taking up with AI as a valuable tool in the process.

SPEAKER_02 26:28

Where we're going to need salespeople is asking better questions. Most of what we do is provide answers, and we've taught learners how to answer questions, and that was the differentiator. I don't think that's going to stay the differentiator. I think the differentiator is going to come from our ability to ask better questions. So I love what Lillian and Frank did to identify okay, what can we find out? Ultimately it's about curiosity. And what AI lets me do is be far more curious than I've been before, because I can access things that maybe I would have come up with some of them on my own, but mostly it just makes me faster at doing that.

SPEAKER_03 27:19

As farms and agribusinesses roll on, we continue to see adaptations based on the lean framework. An interesting case in point, for decades, the lean idea of just-in-time inventory management, where products only arrive in your warehouse exactly when they're needed in order to reduce storage waste, was popular. But then multiple supply chain disruptions, including the COVID-19 pandemic, led many in Food and Ag and beyond to transition to a just-in-case strategy instead, which involved keeping slightly more inventory on hand in order to prevent disruptions from having catastrophic effects on the business and its customers. Though these two ideas seem like opposites, they're both practical outcomes of lean decision making. After all, what you measure matters. And so when conditions in the world change, the decisions you make and the outcomes you reach should change too. And given that market conditions, policy conditions, environmental conditions, and so much more are changing all the time, it's vital that you understand the needs of your end customers, identify and collect the data you need to determine how well you're delivering those needs, and be on the lookout for new ways to create value. Accomplishing this is what is going to define the next generation of agribusiness leaders. Maybe today this work sounds new, and for those who do it, from the Gilbreths to Japanese automakers to modern agribusiness, it always feels like crossing a frontier. But we have the tools, like lean, that other pioneers have used, and they're there to help us navigate into the unknown. Perhaps the biggest challenge we face is that the consequences of getting it wrong now are so high. In the food and ag world today, margins tend to be incredibly thin, and there is almost no room for waste. If we can't figure out how to create and share value with customers, whoever they may be, tolerance for this wasted labor resource is low. That's the challenge that current and future agribusiness practitioners have to tackle. How to optimize effort and movement and create tools that support that effort. Our job is to find the push pedal trash can that makes us more efficient in our modern agribusiness kitchen, and the stakes are high. We've got even more than 12 kids counting on us. The future of rural America may well hang in the balance, and the risks are only rising.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Literally, zero papers in the farm management literature use the word risk.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

COVID was an event where people said, that can't occur. That will never occur. COVID did occur. And that kind of black swan had happened before. And it will happen again.

SPEAKER_03 30:05

Farmers face risk. Also, agribusinesses face some of those same risks, and some of the same risks in different ways. Risk and uncertainty come for agriculture. Next time on Agribusiness Blueprint. Agribusiness Blueprint is a production of Purdue University's Center for Food and Agribusiness. I'm your host, Sarah Mock, along with my co-host Trey Malone. This show was produced and mixed by me, Sarah Mock, with editing support from Trey Malone and Mike Bolgy, additional support from the wider team at the Center for Food and Agribusiness. And special thanks to Scott Downey for his participation in this episode. To learn more about programs, classes, and continuing education opportunities through the Center for Food and Agribusin, visit our website at agribusiness.purdue.edu and follow us on LinkedIn for the latest news and updates. For specific questions about the show, contact Trey Malone in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University. Agribusiness Blueprint is sponsored in part by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Program of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, award number 2022 68006 36433.