Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The utility group came in and said, mayor, we have to buy a new centrifuge. I said what's that going to cost? And at the time, well over a million dollars. I think a million seven. And I said, well before we buy that based upon the EPA mandate, can we get rid of and this was an internal verbal joke. You know, in the Japanese system, muda, can we get whatever waste in the waste process improvement process, Are there steps we could cut out? Are things we could do differently? Kevin after three different projects within that one of the women came up to me and she said, mayor, I gotta tell you, I'm using this for my kids soccer team. I'm using this process at home. My husband is about ready to go crazy because everything is demay. You know what?
Welcome to why they Fail, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on why continuous improvement efforts fail. Buckle up because we're not here for motivational fluff. We're dissecting the short sighted decisions and leadership agendas that sabotage CI success. But don't worry, we'll clue you in to the few simple keys to success to avoid these pitfalls. If you're ready for the truth, let's do this.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Welcome to the why they Fail podcast where we explore the toughest deployments of continuous improvement. We often talk about the private sector, but what happens when you try to apply lean Six Sigma principles to an entire city government? Is it possible to cut through the bureaucracy and truly serve the taxpayer? My guest today is a pioneer who proved it can be done. I'm honored to have Graham Richard the the former mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana. From 2000 to 2007, Graham led a citywide grassroots effort to create a high performance government using lean Six Sigma principles. His work, which saved millions and drastically improved city services, earned him the title of Government Leader of the Year from the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and led him to write the book Performance is the Best Politics.
Today he advises leaders on accelerating a clean economy, still applying the lean Six Sigma principles he mastered in public service. Graham, welcome to the show.
Welcome to Richard.
[00:02:32] Speaker C: I followed your career, especially as a mayor for Fort Wayne, and you really did a grassroots effort of putting lean Six Sigma into a municipality.
So I'd love to talk about that. What, what was your catalyst? What got you started and then led you to Fort Wayne?
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Well, thank you. I've been a longtime resident of Fort Wayne, which is Indiana's second largest city. For your viewers and listeners, we're equidistant between Indianapolis and Detroit. And for basketball fans, the Detroit Pistons got started in Fort Wayne, Indiana as the Zollner Pistons before they were moved to Detroit and founding ball team of the now the NBA. So what I had the good fortune to do, Kevin, was most of my life I was a business owner and an entrepreneur. I had the opportunity to work with General Electric when they had their motors division still here at one point. Fort Wayne, after the invention of the magnet wire in Fort Wayne, ultimately had almost 25,000 General Electric employees beginning around the, you know, 1940s.
And then those jobs were eventually offshored and sold off. But there was a remaining cluster in the 90s, late 80s and 90s, and I had a contract working with folks there to create a supplier quality network.
And that was just as they were getting going with Lean Six Sigma. But initially we called it tqm, Total Quality Management Network.
And those suppliers were encouraged through our network to visit each other's plants to understand and work with the supply chain managers from General Electric to improve the quality of their supplied parts to the special motors and other assets that General Electric still had. So I got my training by working in this network and then eventually we expanded it to over 40 companies before I became mayor elected in 1999. That was my cauldron for really understanding what was happening in manufacturing, getting schooling and everything from Deming to the Toyota way to.
And then we, we would go to each other's plants and factories. So itt, Raytheon, all those companies we would share. And the motto of our network was by sharing we all gain. And so obviously there were some proprietary issues, but by touring all of these plants once a month, a particular member of the network would host us and we would have a half day learning session seeing and understanding what they were doing with their process improvement and what was working and what wasn't working. So it was that experience that prepared me to bring into city government the Lean Six Sigma Six Sigma. And we hired retired master black belt from General Electric. We brought in special trainers and others to work with us on our projects, particularly in those early formative years in 2000, 2001 and 2.
[00:06:04] Speaker C: That's the introduction to your transition over to the, over to being the mayor of Fort Wayne. You really had incredible Success Implementing Lean Six Sigma in Fort Wayne, achieving over 27 million in savings.
My book why they Fail points to a lack of genuine leadership buy in as a top reason for failure. How did you as a top leader move beyond just lip service to actually actively engaging your team and even the city's unions to drive such a tremendous transformative Culture shift.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Well, we looked at this from a systems approach.
So we saw Lean Six Sigma as tools in a toolkit for improvement. The city of Fort Wayne was in a recession mode in those early years of the beginning of this, this century.
And we knew that because of previous annexations from my predecessor, that a lot more people and property would be added to the city, but no revenue until a full 18 months after the annexation. So this was part of a strategy. And the tools of lean 6, 6, 7, we melded into our overall strategy.
So we characterize this in sort of three very significant ways. One, we call it our best building excellent service teams. That was an initiative to be the very best in our kind of comparables would be other cities of our size. So we wanted to have the lowest crime rate, we wanted to have recognized winning city services, and we wanted to make sure that we could retain and gain jobs as a Rust Belt city that had lost over 50,000 jobs from the urban core in the previous four decades.
So the idea here was make the Lean Six Sigma process be a part of the overall strategy that I campaigned on and that we set as citywide goals.
So you do that incrementally as well. The first thing we did was to say, okay, let's take two very specific projects, get some wins on the board to prove that this new mayor who was elected by 76 votes, a lawsuit and a recount, that we could get something done that had not been done before. And so I selected two projects that had high visibility and we used the domain process, but we also made sure that we had trained sponsors, champions and then team leaders for the project. We didn't talk a whole lot about Lean Six Sigma at the front end. That was our toolkit.
But we said, let's set a goal that we will fill every pothole that's called in and that we identify within 24 hours.
Now how are we going to do that?
And so we built this team of folks from the public works department and then we brought in external outside the city government folks who were experienced to add to that best team. And within a relatively short period of time, we were actually hitting a number of fill the potholes in every four hours of time. So we beat the 24 hour goal.
So that gave us some credibility and some visibility within city government and in the community. The second project, there are a number of others going on at the same time internally.
Second project again had visibility to the community and that was to reduce the time it takes for an investor or a developer.
We call it our Permitting time for land improvement process. So if you're going to build a building, you're going to expand your manufacturing, you're going to whatever the development might be. Healthcare was starting to blossom.
I was hearing on the campaign trail. Mayor RICHARD I'm not going to do any investments in Fort Wayne because it takes so long. It's so difficult. So we said, well, is that really true? Again, you look at your Pareto, look at all the different ways that you can bring data to that. Well, we found out, Kevin, that a lot of the problems were with entities that the city did not control that were under the county's control.
So we chose a young woman who was just really effective at communicating and also understood data.
And so we then created a best team. But we had to go beyond the city employees to the county employees that had certain parts of this process.
So you have right of way, you have the issues of plan commission approval for a particular project. You know, all these different steps. And everybody, Kevin was. I called it throw it over the transom.
I do my little piece and I throw it over the transom.
I'm not talking to the other people, I'm just. And it's all sequential. And so I said, we were saying to the team and the champion. That was a really wonderful champion. I said, let's see if we can do, you know, failure effects analysis. Let's do some mapping of this. Let's get our mini tab filled up with some good data and software. What we found was that no one was talking to anybody and everything was being done sequential rather than in parallel processing. There's no reason why you can't get your curb cut at the same time you're doing your permitting for the structure that you're going to build.
You know, working with the building department, you could do that simultaneously. So we did that. Long story short, we reduced, within a year, we reduced the time it took from. I'm not remembering this to the day, but it was like 60 days, roughly down to 12. And then we started trying to put everything online that was. That you had to stand in line for. And this is in the early 2000s, where a lot of the digital technology was just getting going. So we had to kind of invent that, create our own ways of measuring and make sure the KPIs were in place. At the same time.
We needed to educate our own employees. We had nine separate unions and find a way to get buy in from folks who basically were skeptical and probably somewhat rightly so, because previous attempts to try to do Process improvement didn't work out well.
[00:13:09] Speaker C: That's an excellent story about how you improve those two critical processes at Fort Wayne. I want to ask you a question.
You solve the problem through Leon and Six Sigma. These two processes really the why in this case is time.
We look at the time it takes to fill a pothole. How many in the past, how much data did you have to understand, you know, how much time it took?
Why is there so much variation in the time that it takes?
And then what are the x's that affect Y? What I'm trying to get to here is, is I think most people listen to this and think we sat around the boardroom table and brainstormed the solution. But there was a process to get to that understanding of why those potholes took so long.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: Kevin, you asked an excellent question.
And of course as the mayor, that was a question I was asking across the board for many different processes and systems.
So we didn't have data. Most of the city departments had no data.
And so the domain process took longer to get to the end of the process because we had to go back and recreate and find out and go into the field and do studies and analysis because there wasn't data on how long it take, for instance, to pick up late trash pickups. That was a project we had. We had over a hundred projects eventually and we got down to projects like in the city of Fort Wayne. It has a one of the largest publicly owned wastewater, stormwater and clean water utilities in the state. That's under the control of our Fort Wayne Municipal city utilities. And unlike other parts of city government, they had a little bit of data because they had to comply with water pollution control with the idem, Indiana Department of Environmental Management and epa. But we had to almost recreate team by team. And this is where I would say it wasn't the tools that mattered. It was the leadership of the division heads who stepped up, took the two day initial just overview from a master black belt about how you use tools. But it was really, for example, in the utilities area we had a guy who was very skeptical when I came in. He'd been with the city for many years, but he understood that he had within the city utilities a lot of problems. And this gave him both a leadership backing from the mayor and resources to do that process improvement. I remember vividly a group of folks that were and we selected them, were selected to be on the team.
When the utility group came in and said mayor, we have to buy a new centrifuge. I said, what's that going to cost? And it was at the time well over a million dollars, I think a million seven.
And I said, well, before we buy that based upon the EPA mandate, can we get rid of. And this was an internal verbal joke. You know, in the Japanese system muda get, can we get whatever waste in the waste process improvement process? Are there steps we can cut out? Are there we could do differently? Kevin and this team just really took to it seriously and just in time learning getting the tools. So if you were to set ahead of time to these people who worked in the wastewater treatment area, what is a failure affects the mode analysis. What is, you know, any of the 37, 40 different tools, they would have shook their heads that we have no idea what you're doing. After three different projects within that one of the women came up to me and she said mayor, I gotta tell you, I'm using this for my kids soccer team. I'm using this process at home. My husband's about ready to go crazy because everything is domay, you know what?
So I love that story because it became deeply personal. And she ended up being on, oh, I don't know, five different projects raising her hand and some and sometimes the Greg Mazaro division. He became a huge believer in this. And so in the book Performance is the best Politics, we specifically Kevin had at the back an index if you will.
And every person's name who was on a team in each chapter celebrated a successful lean Six Sigma project.
And we really put out front the champion team leaders, whoever we brought in from the outside the city government to help with that team. And I remember vividly when I chose not to seek re election after having been reelected once, so I would be going for my third term. Greg came in and he said I worked for the city for over 20 years and mayor, I'm kind of embarrassed to tell you this, that I've been recruited to head up the Austin water district entity there. Yeah. I said, craig, why are you upset? He says, that's fantastic. How did you get that? He says, somebody heard me give a lean Six Sigma presentation about what we were doing to improve the city utility, how we got the number one city utility in a country award. And they came up to me said I'm a recruiter, I've never heard a presentation using business process improvement down to the detail of all the things that you did.
And so he got recruited to run a utility he just recently retired from that that was bigger in a budget than the entire city of Fort Wayne budget. I said, Greg, why are you apologizing? I feel like Jack Welch at ge when all of his top executives were getting, you know, recruited away to go run out of their businesses. And I said, this is fantastic. This is a great opportunity. If I hadn't have gotten involved with Lean Six Sigma and made these improvements, I would never have come on the radar of the recruiters.
So that's a story of, you know, how it changed a person's career opportunity by embracing something that at first he was very skeptical, very resistant to.
[00:19:55] Speaker C: Graham, that's, that's a, it's a perfect example. We go back to when you, when you went into the, this municipality, so you started the culture, and the culture has to start at the top.
So you had, you had that ability to put that down. And then you train people at different levels to solve quick problems, started to understand what priority of problems that we need to solve because we need, we need to get momentum.
And those problems that you solved got momentum for the, for the city. But when you, when you see somebody like the gentleman you were just talking about, the, the lady, when they're, they're excited and they're coming to you saying, this is awesome. I've never done this before. This is a whole new way of thinking.
That's, that's when you know you turn the tide. That's when you know you've transformed an organization. When, when they come to you and ask you, hey, when's the next training? How can I get into this? How can I do this? And unfortunately, a lot of companies do it the other way around. They, they push people into training and expect them to come back and kind of save the world. And those people get overwhelmed because they don't have a structure that's been built for them to survive.
So that's an awesome story. I want to ask you a question. You were talking about best. What is. I think BEST is an acronym. Correct?
[00:21:23] Speaker A: Right. We just created it, Kevin, because my experience visiting these companies that were in the TQM network, that were practicing Lean Six Sigma business process improvement was, I think, when people feel the opportunity to make a contribution that is special and unique and by saying you are being asked to participate in this best team building excellent service, team building excellent service with training, building excellent service with technology.
It depended upon what we were doing.
So that acronym, people want to be the best. They like to have the best. Here in Indiana basketball team, that's a big deal, and you want to win. People are excited about something that turns out to have impact in a way that is Recognized beyond just your own colleagues and fellow workers. So one of the things that we did, I remember particularly one, we would always have a showcase, and this is put on by the network.
And we would have those 40 companies come, we would invite a speaker and then we'd have breakout sessions. But we'd also have storyboards where a person from the city government would be showing what it is that they did in their project, what were the outcomes?
And they would be right next to somebody from Raytheon, from itt, from Dana, from Felstod, Ray Magnet Wire.
And in that same room, they were going, wow, I'm a city employee and I'm right here with all of these other Lincoln Financial Group, largest hospital system, Parkview Health Systems.
And so that celebration, and we made sure that we celebrated internally and externally. So every month there were about 80 department heads that we had a meeting. And one of the things we'd lead off with is celebrating a particular best team's progress, even if they were just, you know, kind of halfway there. So let me give you an example of one that was really heartwarming for those of us that are old enough to have lived through Katrina and Rita and the horrible deaths in New Orleans. Just, it was just heart wrenching to see all the deaths that came about after the devastation of the flood when people had no emergency communications system that was operable.
It's hard for us to think about that, but that was one of the reasons that led to the deaths. So we immediately went to itt, which had their Syngars radio manufacturing communications, radios for the military in Fort Wayne, and Raytheon. We went to both ITT and Raytheon. I called the site executives in, I said, we need your help.
We're putting together a team.
And the team's mission statement is we want to have the very best emergency communications disaster recovery system of any size city in the country.
If a tornado, something happened to our system, how could we know that our police and fire and EMT and all the surrounding volunteer organizations that would come to help? So we created that team.
They were the champions. With me, we got a county commissioner who understood this because the city and the county had systems that didn't talk to each other. And over the course of six months, and the biggest problem was we had no data.
So we had to go and actually understand what was the operational communication system and where was it not connected and working. And, you know, so your whole failure effect mode, all that kind of stuff. And they loaned us one from each master Lean black belts and those folks committed to work one full day a week for six months with our team internally.
So we were borrowing executives from two of the leading military communications manufacturing companies in the world that happen to have plants here.
Long story short, they came up with a whole new system, how it could work. What we need to do, interoperability, you know, we're talking before a lot of some of the technology we have today was in the end, I asked them to come in the mayor's office. We gave a little proclamation to them that they could share with their team.
We'd already shared it with our team, and they said, no, Mayor. Mayor Richard, thank you for your appreciation for us. But do you realize because our two plants, which were within two miles of each other, we hadn't been working together.
So the two senior executives through this process got to know each other better and they said, well, well, why don't we go in together on this bid for some sort of, you know, radio contract with the Navy? I'm not sure. He says, we just won a $400 million contract because the two of us worked together. And we built then an application that won this contract.
So the sidecar benefit was we had an emergency response system. In fact, ITT said, as a deep failsafe, if you run out, we will give you our own Syngars radio system.
So that's your fail safe number 2, 3, 4.
And it was a wonderful story of collaboration using tools that we all understood and were using in our own companies, the city, the facilities.
It was that ability to have a common language. We did that over and over again. I could give you 10 other examples where you, you build with the community, the assets that you need, and because you're using a common system, everybody was none of this. It's your fault, it's your fault. Blame, blame, blame. You know, obviously Deming and others said, take blame out of the equation. It's the systems that aren't serving people.
And then we can get into the union situation, which was problematic at first. But then we set up a performance based compensation system for a unit, not for one individual. So if you hit the goal for how to improve snow removal, street resurfacing, street light repairs, traffic signalization. There was a metric every year we negotiated in the contract that every employee, if we hit that particular target, would get 50 extra bucks and bonus and then maybe 75 for this at some point. You know, this was like $2,000 per employee of benefit, but it was one for all and all for one. It wasn't. John gets it and Mary does it, it's. You have to as a unit participate in these processes of improvement. And if you help us, some of that savings goes into your pocket. And some of the savings would go back to the street department who said, we want to buy more laptops, we want to get a mini tab for more people. We want.
In fact, it was really wonderful that a lot of the, the desire to split the savings went for enhanced training, technology and tools to keep doing improvement. That sharing gave a culture of, you're important, you're valued here.
[00:29:50] Speaker C: That's, that's an awesome story. You said something about common language and that's what really amazed me about what you did at the city. You gave them a common language that bridge the gap between city and the industries that were, you know, in the city. I want to ask you questions.
Implementing in a city, a municipality is that, that's really kind of grassroots. I've been to several cities and, and we get the same pushback. So we're not manufactured. This is a technology, technology made for manufacturing. It's. We don't have data.
Although you walk around, you kind of go to Gemba and do a tour of, of the main city building and you see stacks of paper everywhere.
And you ask what, what are those paper? What is that? Well, that's back order of deeds. That's the back order of marriage certificates, right? And then you start to say, well, do you take data on how long those are been sitting there? Well, we, I'm sure we've got it in the database somewhere.
You created the link between, between the city of these different businesses to where they were all talking the same, same language through these continuous improvement methodologies. And because you put in such a strong structure infrastructure and you were at the head of that infrastructure, it flowed down through and you helped them not by teaching them really advanced tools, but by giving them just the tools they need to drive those improvements. And you made sure, this is really key, I think, in what you said. You made sure that we had measurements, we had KPIs, right? You were talking about, you know, the union and they had numbers to hit. And that's an amazing thing because a lot of companies you go into, they say, well, we've got a union environment. You know, we can't, we can't necessarily improve in that unions.
You can improve in unions just like anybody else, but you have to ask the right question, right? In your case, you set the right metrics and the metrics were correlated to what makes them and you successful.
[00:32:09] Speaker A: Whenever we Sat down to do a project. And there's processes everywhere in all governments of all types. And so the issue became how do you build the trust so that folks will be willing to with some sense of an open mind. I've always said to our team members, skeptics are fine cynics, you're going to have to work around and isolate. But the skeptics are asking questions. If they're asking questions, you know, that's a person who we want on our team. We want them to be asking questions. You know, the five whys. You end up just using some basics. And so the way I found to make sure there was engagement was lots and lots of communication. You just have to spend time and effort.
I'll give you the background on one. One union situation. Because we had to hold the head count flat because we were running out of money to service the new areas. And it was a recession, so government revenues were tight.
And so the individual who was the union head was being paid to be a full time union head rather than a worker in that particular bargaining unit.
And so their reaction was, well, wait a minute, if you hold the headcount flat and you use business process improvement and you make savings so we don't need as many employees, then the dollars per hour that come out to pay the union leadership, per union member, his view was it'll go down.
So we ended up having to discuss and get an understanding somewhat quietly. And in some cases it had to be running in parallel to the actual union negotiations.
Look, we're going to turn that around into a bonus.
We're going to turn that around into higher wages.
We're going to turn that around into additional training for your members.
And you can negotiate with the union, you, the union, you can negotiate in your contract with your members that you get some small percentage of the savings their bonus you get. So you could end up creating a supportive pool even though you're holding the union headcount flat. Well, it took a while for that to process, but it's what's in it for me. Here's a way for you to do something that your union members want.
They're going to get paid more even though there will be a slower growth of headcount. And when that communication and recognition took place, we begin to get support from the union leadership, not push. Now that didn't happen in all nine unions. We continued to have a public safety challenge with the police department and the fire department. We did some, but our projects and success weren't as great. And as they were in what we would call the non public safety unit.
[00:35:28] Speaker C: You're, you're talking about some of the different projects that you did. What are some, some projects that were done in the Fort Wayne city when you were there?
[00:35:40] Speaker A: Well, it covers everything from, and I'll give you another example.
I, I'm a big believer from my private sector experience. Ray Magnet Wire, for example, was part of, of Alcoa at one point. And o', Neill, the CEO of Alcoa some time back said I ask one key question in every Alcoa site around the world. What is your safety record? How many days lost due to accident or injury on the job do you have at this plant?
I started to ask that in Fort Wayne. I mean because we have fire department, police department, we got people climbing, trimming trees. We've got, you know, a lot of rolling stock. You know, people can get injured and not, not just those that are on sort of, you know, the front line of the, of the police department, of the fire department. Those are ones you always think about.
So Kevin, it's the curiosity and the forcefulness as the leaders and we trained all of our division heads and all of their finance officers in the 80 different departments how to ask these questions. We gave them activity based cost accounting. So we were always asking what's the cost per. So you got to get that data but then you have to link it to a specific goal or action. So in the case of this lack of data, the city of Fort Wayne was within the first year or so I kept asking for that safety data which has to be filed with OSHA in our state, Indiana, OSHA office.
And I found out the city of Fort Wayne, we train people in safety and OSHA and hazmat and all that. We weren't even filing what was required by law, federal law and state law. Terrible problem.
So got in the car, took a couple of our key people, went down to the governor's office, did a mea culpa, went to the head of the department of labor and did a mea culpa. And I said we're wrong.
We're going to make it right. And I'm going to be back here in less than a year and we're going to show you all of the systems that we've put in place in addition to the reporting that's needed. Because the goal is not just the reporting.
The goal is to have one of the very best actuarial records because we're self insured, we have an insurance pool to pay out when somebody has an accident or injury on the job and they're disabling conditions and you know, all the things that go with that.
Long story short, we went out and put together a best team using lean 6 sig well and we brought in people from the local hospital from Ray Magnet Wire. We matched up our risk profile because we have a lot of rolling stock. So Dana and Fruehof and others were in that same category. School corporations with a lot of school buses in the course of that period of time. The actuary came into the office within a year he said I'm making the annual presentation about your self insurance pool for accidents and injuries. He said I've never done this before.
You have too much money in the reserve vent. You now are performing at the top more than 1%, top 1% of all the governments that I advise actuarially for an insurance pool.
So we've saved money but that's lives and limbs and, and you know that's something that you know, delighted the union that we were paying attention to the things that could go wrong.
And we created safety protocols and you know, whole invention reinvention of our not just reporting but our systems of safety.
And so that's the kind of thing that gets embedded and builds trust but that requires leadership.
So you could have somebody that understood how to use the tools of Lean to evaluate this system and get better data. That doesn't mean Kevin, you're going to get a better outcome.
You can't just focus on the data.
You've got to focus on the whole domain process and the improvement in the control, the innovation and the control.
That's really important. Another thing that I big believer in for my private sector experience was you can't change because there's a lot of automation going on. At that time everybody was buying expensive systems for 31 1. So you have your 911 system which is help, somebody's dying.
But your 311 system is really concerned about the potholes or the lack of snow being removed or a late trash pickup.
Trash removal came by and they didn't pick mine up. What's going on here? I'm really, you know, it was bitter cold and I took the trash to the curb and they didn't pick it up.
You know, so we, we had vendor after vendor saying Fort Wayne, you're a city of 250,000, you should have a 311 set. We said we agree.
The person that we put in charge of that had experience with Lean Six Sigma as a tool set.
But our instruction was don't automate an old creaky paper process system.
Improve first make the systems that we can do manually work better.
Then go to your digital 311 system.
And it took us longer, but in the end we got a better system, lower cost, more effective from day one. And we got the buy in of the different city departments who all said we like answering our own phones. We don't want to have a central 31 1. We're the parks department and we know parks and 311 people, they are going to know parts.
Every department had that same excuse. So we got the buy in because we were improving the process before we automated.
[00:42:05] Speaker C: Wow. I see that all the time. The company deal with the same thing. They, they want the shiny thing, they want the new app, the new system. And I've seen companies, I've seen municipalities, I've seen the federal government do it. So that's a, that's a great, it's a great story because that's something that I preach all the time, is you can't, you can't replace complexity with automation because all you get is complex automation, right? You can't, you can't take a complex manual process and put a digital process over it because you're just going to get a complex digital process. I go into so many companies that have implemented an ERP or financial system six months down the road. Everybody's using Excel spreadsheets and they're on access data databases. Nobody's in, nobody's interacting with the system because it doesn't do what they want it to do. And that complexity is still there. They've got automation, they got workflows, they got alarms that go off when things don't get done. But that ends up being the rule, not the exception where the alarms are going off. I got one last question for you. You know, the ultimate test of continuous improvement deployment is to see, see a sustainable continuous improvement effort. Unfortunately, over 90% of efforts for continuous improvement either fail or they're abandoned within 18 months. When you left office, your successor picked up from you and you created the high performance government network to, to share those lessons. So what are those key elements you put in place to have that sustainable endeavor from, from the point that you left and went off to do other things.
[00:43:50] Speaker A: Last day in office was January 1st of 2000. My successor, fortunately, had been a member of the city council and I supported him and he was successful in that election and four more terms. His experience wasn't as deep in Lean Six Sigma and process improvement, but he, I was forever grateful that he did not, as sometimes happens in a new administration, get rid of all the senior leadership. In fact, he kept all of the key leadership except the utilities public works area where, as I mentioned, that executive took a new job in Austin. So one of the continuity issues is division and department head leadership. Now after his reelection there was a change in his leadership internally and the that particular person deputy mayor didn't see the value and therefore let go some of the internal staff people and didn't participate heavily in the high performance government network. So there was a change, but I think there was momentum because the division heads and directors were getting results and continued for four more years after I had left the mayor's office.
But without that top leadership. To answer your question, good things whether it's public, private, nonprofit, if the leadership does not champion performance, high performance, highly focused business process improvement, it fades What.
[00:45:25] Speaker B: A powerful conversation with Graham Richard. My biggest takeaway is that performance truly is the best politics. Graham's story is a case study in leadership, proving that continuous improvement in a municipality isn't just a theory. It's a practical, grassroots solution for delivering better services, engaging employees, and being a better steward of taxpayer money.
It proves that even the most complex organizations can transform.
Thank you so much for listening. To learn more about building a sustainable continuous improvement deployment and avoiding the common pitfalls that leadership makes, be sure to grab a free PDF copy of my book why they Fail and the Simple Key to Success.
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