Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: One thing that I, I see from companies is I get asked to train green belts and black belts and, and most of them don't have a project. When they, when they come to me from, from their company, they want, they had to go find it. And to me that, that's your sign. You've already failed. If your belts have to go find a project, then you haven't done what needs to be done before. And that's what we're talking about. We're talking about building a plan. And then I, I think we talked about the leadership. You have to have good leaders. You have to leaders that are determined leaders that understand the process and metrics and they're not trying to implement Lean, implement Six Sigma, implement TQM or whatever the goal is. I want to improve this operational metric.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: 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.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Tired of watching improvement efforts fail? Welcome to why they Fail. I'm your host, Kevin Clay. Today we're joined by Six Sigma pioneer Mike Carnal, who was there for its genesis at Motorola. Mike shares why your job isn't to do Six Sigma, but to solve problems. The absolute necessity of a plan, and an unforgettable lesson he learned from GE's Jack Welch. He'll explain why strong leadership with a clear, measurable target is the ultimate key to success. Let's dive in.
Mike, you just got back from, from Africa, is that correct?
[00:01:52] Speaker B: That's correct.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Okay. And where you were doing consulting in Africa?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: No, I was just hanging out with friends that I been on a deployment with from 2003 until 2010.
I worked in platinum mine down there. Lots of friends. Good to see everybody again.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Awesome.
Mike. This, this podcast was really for people listening in who may be part of, part of a deployment that may not be going correctly. It may not be creating the output it should or they've been, they've been tasked from their superior to go out and implement Lean and Six Sigma. People that are kind of new to this and not completely understanding what they're getting into. And so I wanted to, it's your, your background and you know, what led you to, what led you to continuous improvement and then ask you a couple of questions about different deployments that you've seen over, over the years and some things that I've seen in the LinkedIn channels to where I think last conversation we had was around the term belts and, and why that has provided kind of a negative connotation.
Can, can we start out with your background where, where you're, you're from? You've been doing this for a long time, I think.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1952, but that's probably a little bit farther back than you want to go right now. Actually, it started Motorola. I was hired out of the Marine Corps to work on some projects there. Ended up building test equipment. And part of what happened when I was working on some stuff at radar operations, radar, microwaves, back then all the calculations were by hand. It was complicated. But they had a product that had been defective for about 19 years. And they hired this guy to come in and he had just an assembler with him.
They sat down and they worked for three days. And he came out and he fixed a 19 year problem in three days. I'm pretty sure it was Dorian Shannon. And he was using a technique called component search. Had no idea back then who it was. But I just went, that's cool. That's what I want to do. So that's kind of where I kind of got off on that tangent. We just kind of got going over the years and you know, we got.
Luckily we got into Motorola. We had some really good people pushing quality. We probably struggled as much as anybody. We lost our TV business go to the Japanese. They bought our stuff and our designs and our parts and made money at something that we couldn't figure out. So we got a big push from management, you know, to really get that going. I worked with a guy named Mike Harry, which most Six Sigma people recognize that name.
But most of the people you see around that came out of Motorola Government Electronics are the guys that you saw consulting.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: That's kind of how we got started. I'll be honest with you. I didn't, I didn't want anything to do with consulting. I'd gotten pretty tired of big companies living in the Rocky Mountains as we're living on some lakes and I could go fly fishing. I was cool. And so they called me and Mike Galton said, you want to be a consultant?
And I said, nope.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: It's a tough life having to travel around, you know, on almost on a weekly basis somewhere, flying all the time.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it sucks, but, but it keeps you from living in a cubicle Mike called and I kept saying no. And finally, my wife at the time, people knew her from Motorola too, because she'd worked there. They called her and they said, do you know how much money we're offering him? And she said no.
They told her, and she said, he'll be right there.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: And so I became a consultant. I had some automotive guys, especially along the border, Mexicali. I had some awesome people to work with. So, yeah, I had a good time. As to this day, I still keep in touch with those guys from 1995.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: And for those who don't know, you know, Alice, Signal, Motorola, GE were the first adopters that, that formally created Six Sigma. But Six Sigma and Lean and these methodologies, they're all just kind of tool sets that, that were put together and formalized under a certain name. And I guess that name's going to change over time. It might be something else 10 years.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: From now, if you look at all of them. And Rob Tripp and I wrote an article. It's in I6 Sigma.
[00:06:36] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: It's called Toolbox. We don't need no Stinking Toolbox. And basically we introduced the idea that no matter what you're talking about, PDCA or whatever, the Demings thing is, dmaic, it's all the scientific process. It's the same thing we all learned in third grade. So there's nothing special about it.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just putting a name to it that's. That's a good epiphany to have for those listening. If you had something to tell them from back when you started, and they are getting into this, Six Sigma, Lean, tqn, you know, whatever you want to call it.
And a lot of them get into this because they're tasks. A leader may send them to a green belt course, a lean course, to come back and save the world. So other people are doing it to get a credential. What would be your.
A word of wisdom to somebody new that's coming into this, this methodology? What would you tell them? You know?
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Well, first off, you got to be careful who you listen to. You listen to everybody, but you don't really listen to a lot of them. You see these guys online, I'll certify you for free. If he was any good, he would be getting paid to do it.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: You're going to get your money's worth out of that, but you still want to listen to them. Even if you pick up just one thing, you know it's worth it. Right. The thing that drives me Crazier than anything else is. You get this thing where people go, well, I do Six Sigma or I do Lean. I just saw this guy do it the other day. Six Sigma has never delivered this. It's never delivered that. Da da da da da da. That's about as dumb a statement as you can make. You're not out there to deliver Six Sigma. You're not out there to deliver Lean.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: You.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: You're out there to improve a company, to help somebody fix something. And you've got to remember that.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Yes, that's the core of it. Right.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: That is exactly where it is. And if I got to take this tool from here, and I got to take this tool from there, I mean, you never hear anybody talk about Shannon. Right. Shannon had his whole techniques. You don't find them written up very often, say, in Keki Boats books. Yeah, maybe if you got. If you're fighting a problem and you can't tell whether you got an assembly problem or a component problem, Component Search is probably one of the best techniques you can use. Nobody talks about it. They've got this defined box of tools that is Six Sigma. And if you don't do exactly that, then you're not doing real Six Sigma. And the Lean guys are getting worse because they label everybody fake, fake Lean. I don't care about what somebody thinks is right, wrong, or different.
My job, regardless of what that CEO said, is to fix a problem.
He may have. He may have decided he needed to do Lean or Six Sigma to fix it, but he most of the time has no idea why. So he'll ask you, can you do Six Sigma for me? Yeah, I can do it. No. But then your job is to find something that's in the middle. I need this stuff from Lean. I need this stuff from Six Sigma. Maybe I need this stuff from, you know, tqm.
And you put a program together for them. Oh, I don't know. We started doing Allied in 95, so, yeah, probably in 25, 30 years, I don't think I've ever done two programs the same, because there's no two companies that are same. So you gotta match the company with what you want to do. And that's what you need to pay attention to early.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: The tool that you're bringing to the table. It's the fact that you know the tools, it's the fact that you know how to use it and how to insert those into certain problems. It's just like fixing a car or building a house or plumbing the different tools. And sometimes those tools are the Same. And sometimes they're very specific to that, that discipline of that problem.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Sometimes you got metric, sometimes you got standard.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Don't get yourself locked into being a zealot for somebody. Remember we had a customer at Motorola that they would go, we're a Taguchi company. What's that mean? I mean, it's a, it's a highly fractionated toe.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: Why are you a Taguchi company? Why aren't you just a company that's interested in looking for factors?
[00:10:51] Speaker A: So, yeah, I get calls from companies wanting to be certified as a Six Sigma company. And I tell them that's, that's not what it's for. It's not so you can get certified and be able to market Six Sigma. It's, it's, it's something that you, you embed into your company to continuously improve. And I think there is a method to that, whether it be labeled as the MAIC or PCAA or whatever. But I do think there has to be a way to structure a continuous improvement effort from the beginning to the end. You have to start out with your, your leaders having some kind of understanding of what their responsibility is. Right. And then understanding what your KPIs. I go into so many companies that they have no clue what their targets are. Everybody just runs around like lemmings because they don't have any. They don't know what they're trying to affect. Understanding what that is and then starting to understand what are those quick wins we can take on in order to gain traction quickly. Most companies don't do that. Most companies, they, they want to train a green belt, have that green belt come into an organization and save the world, and then the leadership delivers projects to them that half of the projects aren't even projects that are just move this, justify this. This is what my podcast is about, is that so many companies do this wrong, that Lean and Six Sigma and Quality as a whole gets a bad name. But you and I know it very much works if you do it right.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Where I start, like you said, you need a system. I've got a system on the front end. But it starts with a conversation with the executive team, especially the CEO. They'll go, okay, we want to do Six Sigma. And you go, okay, why do you want to do Six Sigma get better. And, you know, you go through the whole thing. But like when I was doing BHP Billiton, I'm sitting with this with the president and CEO Ed Mills, and said, so what? What do you want? And he's gone. I need $98 million in EBIT improvement over the next two years. Perfect. Okay? He's not telling me I want to do Lean or not. Try and tell me I need to Six Sigma. This is what he wants, okay? Somebody's convinced him that Six Sigma is the way to go. And actually it was corporate.
And he'd been trained by corporate as a green belt and then wondered why they weren't getting the same results that Allied Signal and GE were getting. Luckily, his CIO had been an ally. And I trained some of her people. She said, use the same guys. But then when we were in South Africa, it's like, what do you want? We want 300 million rand in improvement in the first year.
And 20% of the projects need to address safety. Perfect. That's all I need right there. And I can start to build a program around that, but I can't really. That's the other part of it. I know how to do Six Sigma. I know how to do Lean, I know how to do all the bits and pieces, but I don't know the company. So we always have what we call a design team. And we take leaders and formal and informal leaders and we put them all in a room and say, okay, this is what we got to accomplish. How are we going to do it? And so we build a plan and we spend a while. There are two one week sessions, but they're, you know, two weeks apart. So it's, it's a month's time, but we spend a month's time building a plan before we ever do anything.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: That's a great, that's a thing to pass on to somebody that's new to this, right?
So I talk to people on a daily basis from different companies that call us and want training. And, and I wrote, I wrote my book just because these people call me and they, I want 20 green belts train, I want yellow belts. Or I want you to come in and do lean training or a Kaizen event. And, and I asked them the same thing, what's your plan? You know, it's like building a house, right? So when you build a house, I ask in my class, I say, when you build a house, what's, what's the first thing that you have to have? And most people say foundation. And I say no, even before you foundation. What do you have to have? You have to have money, right? You have to have resources. You have to have buy in. You have to have people that really, you know, understand how to do it. And you have to have a plan. So I don't just go out and start swinging a hammer without having a very detailed plan of how I'm going to build my house. And I can tell you that most people that I talk to who call me to get training or to get project work, the same thing, I ask them, you know, have you built a plan? Do you have, do you have your executives? They understand what's going on. Do you know your KPIs? You. Do you have an infrastructure? And most of them give me the equivalent, equivalent of a blank stare. It's really silence on the phone. Then they go, well, I know. I just, I just want green belt training. Right. So, yes, I, I mean, I hear you. Any place that I go, where I, I can tell the success that will happen from a deployment, if there is one, there is the engagement of their people, their, their executives. And having a plan.
Most people go into it. Most companies go into it without any plan. They just say they, they want somebody trained and they want them to take on arbitrary projects. There isn't even a project hopper that has projects that are prioritized to their targets. So you talked about that with your, the CEO who said, I want to increase ebitda. He's got plan. He knows his metric. He understand what he's trying to affect.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I mean, you know, you look at this and, you know, you can go all different directions, but, you know, the, the minute they say I want to improve you, the. You just, you know, you put that onto a tree diagram or actually what they call dupont diagram, and that makes it simple. You start chasing it backwards. And you know exactly what things you have to work on. You know, everything else is out there. It's not going to touch ebitda. Okay, so how you just eliminate those as possible projects. You've got this little narrow slice. I'm going to do this, and that's what's going to happen. And he'll get what he wants. And actually, we gave him 108 million in one year.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: We're shot a little bit, but, you know, that's part of the problem with minerals. Right. I mean, as it goes up and down, all of a sudden, what looked like it was going to be good, you get a lot of extra, you know, because all of a sudden the price went up.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Okay, excellent. Excellent.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: Makes us look good though, right?
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
In, in your, your book, you know, talk to kind of give a narrative story of some deployments.
Have you ever been part of a.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Do I know Everybody in the book is a real.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Okay, excellent. Excellent. All right. And, and, but have you, in your, in your, your experience, have there been deployments to where they didn't follow the structure?
All right? So they, they said, you know what? I don't need to train my executives. They know what they're doing. Right. I just want you to focus here versus companies that, you know, they really did start with a structure. They built a plan, they knew what they were going to do. You know, six months, a year later, they knew where they were going to focus. And then they enacted that plan and, and had change engines start focusing on those things. Give me, give me an example of a company or a deployment you know, that went well and one that went bad.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: Okay. One that went extremely well was GE Aircraft Engines.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: God. Now, I'm gonna struggle for his name, but he was great. The guy they put in charge of the Six Sigma deployment was a retired Air Force general.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Okay. Excellent.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: And it was like he was invading a country. Okay. I mean, and my, my God, I'm not a morning person, but he wanted you to be in his office. Like, if we were doing project reviews during the day, start at 8 o', clock, he still wanted you in his office at like 5 in the morning.
And he'd have these huge plans laid out on the table, and he was constantly monitoring the program. Just an amazing, amazing deployment. But we also had a guy named Jeff Heslop who was already there doing training, but he was using another type of material. So, I mean, basically we took and said, you don't have to change your material. Use whatever material you do. You keep doing the training. Okay. Because he was good at it. He was established in the company. People trusted him. He had a track record, you know, and so that one went really, really well.
You know, I mean, what I'm, what.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: I'm hearing from you. And a takeaway for listener would be that if you're going to deploy, lean in Six Sigma number one. We talked about, you know, there has to be a system, there has to be a plan. There has to be.
You have to know what you're going to do before you ever do it. Instead of just jumping in and saying, okay, let's. Let's tackle these five things that are a pain to us. Right?
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: But you also have to have the discipline to do that. You have to, you have to monitor it. You have to give feedback. You have to audible when you need audible. Right. And you have to be, you have to track data. You can't just say, well, I think it looks good or it looks bad. So let's change. We have to monitor. We have to understand exactly what's going on throughout the that deployment or that implementation. Not just say, okay, Johnny Bag of Donuts, you're the CI leader. I'm going to throw all these projects at you, come back and tell me when they're done. Right. Is that. Does that resonate?
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. We do it right down to the level where we try and plan.
Okay. Most of the time, your leadership team are all high personalities.
Okay. And they don't have any patience at all. And they don't read anything. Okay. So you've got to force feed them.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Whoever can scream the loudness.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Yeah. It's, you know what they call feeding a gorilla.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:25] Speaker B: But you've got to make sure that you've got results every month, okay. Because to ask them to go 30 days without seeing anything, they get. They get really nervous and then they decide they want to help you. And the last thing I want is their help. Okay? So you know, you've got different types of projects. You got optimization projects. You know, you've got things where the basic process isn't capable. You gotta fix a process, then you gotta fix control of the process. So there's a lot of different kinds. There's basically four different types of projects that you can get into. So we try and make sure we got a mix of those. When I started, when you say we.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: That this is Mike, you and the internal team that you've trained to kind of carry that on after. After you leave. Right?
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Yeah, them. And. And I've got. I've never carried a big headcount, but I carry good headcount.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's something that we all work out together.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: So, yeah, we're always watching that. But see, when we first started out, like when I started at the one in South Africa, the first thing I did, I knew I was going to have a month where I was going to be planned deployment. So I've got a guy who does really good. And I know everybody gets all excited about. Well, they're. You don't call them Kaizen events. I don't care what they call them. Okay? Rapid improvement events, Kaizen events, whatever you want to call.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: So the Lissies rolls in, he does a Kaizen event. All of a sudden, you know, we are not outsourcing, you know, underground you have these little locomotives that haul or around, and they couldn't build them fast enough, so they were outsourcing them. After one Kaizen event, we were building everything inside you know, and so you, you start doing that. And so anytime everything's sitting still, you've got Kaizen results coming in. So there's always something in front of them. Okay. And that keeps those guys calmed down. If you keep them calm down, they'll support you. Okay. But if you let them sit, they're going to be the biggest problem you got. So, yeah, we spend a lot of time managing up as opposed to managing down. And I don't think a lot of people do that, you know, I mean.
[00:23:31] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: And I mean, I've had, I had Jack Welch as a customer, you know, manage up with Jack Welch, you know.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: He's a smart guy.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Huh?
[00:23:40] Speaker A: I said he's a smart guy.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: He's a smart guy. Yeah. And he's pretty, pretty strong willed too, you know, I mean, I mean, again.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: It goes back to some of the traits that you're talking about of a good deployment leader. Right. Somebody that, that is, is very organized, very.
They, they really understand what's going on. They've got, they got good management skills. And, and they're direct. They're type A.
Oh, yeah.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: But, you know, I mean, where we started out was Welch and Bossity had been, well, Bossidy was Welch's number two guy, right. Sat right beside him in the office, did all his M and A activity. So they were close. And then Bossity moved off and took over as CEO of Allied Signal, which eventually became Honeywell, you know, and then Bossity's doing Six Sigma. The story goes. And nobody, I don't know how anybody knows it's true, but Welch and Bossy are playing golf. Welch goes, what's this thing I've read in the newspaper? You're doing Six Sigma, you know, And Bossy said, excuse me, says, no, I'll send some people over to talk to you. So then you end up over at General electric. He had 13 sectors and any single sector was bigger than most companies inside the United States.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: Wow. Okay.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: Okay. I got one of the best entertaining stories you're ever going to hear, though, because this is what it's like in there. One of my business partners has got one of the sectors and I'm not going to really name names on this, but he goes in and we're just starting out and he's explaining to this leadership team, this is what you have to do. And he gets to this part. Now you got to remember this 1996 laptops are pretty new.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: And he gets to a slide and he says, every black belt gets a laptop. This guy Goes, we're not doing laptops. We've already talked about laptops. We're going to do just desktops, okay? And so my partner goes, didn't say a word. Turned off the projector, took off, turned off his computer, unplugged it, put it in his briefcase, rolled up the electric cord, and here's the entire leadership team of this sector just sitting there. And he starts to walk out the door, and finally one guy goes, where are you going? He goes, I'm going to go tell. I said what? He goes, I'm going to go tell. And he's going to go tell Jack Welch. He goes, I told you what you had to do. And he goes, and you told me you weren't going to do it, so I'm going to go tell. Well, come back, you know, let's talk about this, you know. And then they made the decision that they were going to get laptops. We say we're going to get them anyhow. It's just whether Jack told them to or not. So, I mean, that's. That.
That's where you get the power of having a Jack Welch in your corner. You know, it says, this is how we're doing it. You know, And I mean, I used to have. Yeah, I used to have.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: And I think that. I think that's. That's very important in. In any deployment to have a good leader. Not a leader that says, I want to bring in the continuous improvement that's going to be looked over by this guy and this team. And I don't really want to deal with it. Right. Because I got 9 million other things to do. And, and when, when that happens. I've seen when that happens, it goes away, it travels down the path and. And things go wrong. It doesn't make any money because we're not picking the right projects, we haven't got the right people. And it's. We cut that eventually. So I. I can see that Jack Welch was a great leader.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: No, absolutely. But, you know, if he knew what.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: He wanted, and he also understood his. His targets, his KPIs, right. And it was all based on number.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Yeah, people like to talk about, you know. Well, you know, he'd fire people and stuff like that. And then that five minutes later, they're talking about accountability. Well, this guy should be held accountable, right? Jack Welch held accountable.
Yeah, I mean, he. He held people accountable. I mean, anybody that was around GE back in those days knew that the one word that you had to live by was make your numbers. Okay? And it's it wasn't optional, you know.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: And there were two sectors out of 13 decided that they weren't going to do six sigma. And one of them was very big and very influential. And I think it was April of that year, he got fired. And the next day, I had the other guy, hey, you got to remember, this is when we had cell phones that were like the size of a brick. Yeah. I got a phone call on that phone, which scares the crap out of you because nobody ever called on him, you know, and they said, you know, will you hold for the president of Da da da da da? And it's like, well, actually, what I said is, are you shitting me? And she said, excuse me? And I said, yeah, I'll hold. You know, and the guy gets on the phone. The first words out of his mouth was, I need a master black belt. And so, yeah, we fix him up. And he. He didn't get fired. Fired.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: But that sends a message. I mean, if you got one piece of the company, that makes 55% of your or 51% of your revenue, and you fire the. Fire the guy that's run it because he decided he didn't have to follow the corporate direction. Everybody else gets in line. Yes.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: Yes. That's. That's.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: Welch never told him how to do it.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Just told them to do it.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: And that's. That's where I've found in. In my experience and my studies of. Of deployments of past. Those deployments of the past, that had strong leaders and that had a goal and had metrics and be able to follow it and analyze it and get feedback from it. Those are the leaders that succeeded. So, you know, and Jack Welch is definitely one of those. That's awesome. That's good. So let me kind of recap. We talked about, you know, if you're coming into continuous improvement, maybe you're coming into a deployment, maybe you're a leader of a company. You want to make continuous improvement a part of your culture. You're not really sure how to do it. Right. You talked about, don't just jump into it and start solving problems. Right. Start with the plan. Understand the plan. Understand what you're going to do, who you're going to train, what problems you're going to take on. Track your processes and metrics so that you don't just arbitrarily point the things you talk about with the tree and understanding what actually affects Ebitda. So build that plan, and then start to enact that plan. Train the right people, give Them the right projects, which we've already chartered. Well, before they ever get the projects, one thing that I, I see from companies is I get asked to train green belts and black belts and, you know, yellow belts, whatever belts, Lean agents. And, and most of them don't have a project. When they, when they come to me from, from their company, they don't. They want. They had to go find it. And to me, that, that's your sign. You've already failed. Yeah.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: You're in trouble.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: Yeah. If you're a project, if you're, if your belts have to go pick, find a project, then you haven't done what needs to be done before that. And that's what we're talking about. We're talking about that plan, building a plan. And then I think we talked about the leadership. Right. You have to have good leaders. You have to have leaders that are strong leaders that are determined leaders that understand the process and metrics and they're not trying to. I want to implement Lean, I want to implement Six Sigma. I want to implement TQM or whatever the goal is. I want to improve this metric, I want to improve this operational metric. Oee, ebitda, whatever. Right. And then using the tools of any of the tools to then tackle that. So I think that at a high level, that's kind of the takeaway from what we discuss.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:28] Speaker A: That makes sense.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, that gets you a good start.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, excellent. The, the other thing I want to talk about if we, we've got a little time, is I'm on LinkedIn like you, and kind of read and gauge where everybody's mind is from these different groups. And, and I hear, I hear a lot, I've been hearing a lot lately about, you know, belts. We don't need belts or we don't need these monikers or these delineations.
What, what's your take on this?
[00:32:00] Speaker B: I don't care one way or the other. I mean, they can call them whatever they want.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:32:05] Speaker B: You know, and I mean, God, I forget who it was. I think it was Bombardier up in Canada. I think they had another name for their belts. I can't remember what it was, but I mean, basically you're just looking to be able to identify the people that have had some, some training that got skill sets. To me, it's no different than saying, okay, that's your industrial engineer for this area, you know, that's your manufacturing engineer. And I mean, I've never a big fan of being a black belt or yellow belt or whatever kind of belt. But I don't care if that's what they want to call them. Call them whatever you want, just so you know who's had the training and you know, once they've got that and they've got that skill set, you know, you want to use it. But in terms of sticking a label on them, I don't care.
[00:32:52] Speaker A: I think you're exactly right. There, there is moniker doesn't make the person right, but not at all.
I wrote an article and you'll probably enjoy this.
It's about paper belts. It's about people who take a four hour course and a 20 question test that you can take over and over and over again until you pass it and then you're awarded a green belt. Right. You've got companies all over the world mostly you know, in the Middle east where we've got, got online training. You know again that it's very rudimentary, doesn't even have statistics. It's amazing to me. I go into companies that have black belts and when I have an informal interview, just when I'm talking to them just to kind of gauge their experience, you know, asking them about different projects and, and I'll bring up the term capability, right and use the term PPK and interchange it with cpk. But, but based on, you know, are we looking at long term or short term? And they really have no clue what I'm talking about.
It doesn't register to them. I've seen black belts that have never, never experienced the doe, right. So this is, this is what, what I've seen from, from these people on LinkedIn is this head with these, the people that are getting these different belts from these different organizations. But there's, it's almost like religion. It split off in so many sections and a lot of those sections don't even cover stats that have no clue. But they still call it a green belt. Right.
So that, that's kind of what I'm seeing is, you know they're, because of, of there isn't a set standard. If I, if I meet, I meet a, a master electrician, I know what that person could do because I know what they've been through. But if I meet a black belt, I don't really know if that person is truly a black belt. Does that make sense?
[00:34:59] Speaker B: Absolutely. I was asked by a company outside the United States and I thought oh God, this is great. This is a big company, this is going to be good. And turns out they said we don't want you to, We've already got Somebody does six sigma, we want you to take a look at what they've done and tell if it's an ain't good or not. I went, okay, that's unusual, right? But yeah, I'll do it. So I. I'm in one facility and this lady's doing a project review. And she goes, okay, now I'm going to do a multivariate study. And I went, okay. And so she puts up, you know the graphics and you know the numbers, and it's a two sample T test. And I said, I thought you're going to do a multivariate. She goes, it is.
And I said, no, it's a T test. And she goes, that's a type of multivariate study. I said, no, it's not. It's a type of hypothesis test, right? And she went, no. She goes, it's in our training material. It's a multivariate study. And I went, all right. Said, as long as you all are talking to each other and you understand that, that's great. I said, but if you talk to anybody outside this company and say that, they're going to think you don't have a clue what you're talking about. But that, that is. She showed me it is that way in their training material. And you just look at it, okay. How did somebody actually have the audacity to say, I'm going to certify your people, and they don't know the difference between a multivariate test, hypothesis test?
[00:36:24] Speaker A: It's very, very prevalent. Very pro.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: Absolutely. But, you know, and you can almost see it. You've got a experience. I don't know. Did you ever do any time on the website I Six Sigma?
[00:36:36] Speaker A: I did, yes. It was, it was a good forum for practitioners all over the world. But I don't know if it's used for that anymore.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: No, I don't think so. But, you know, we had some of the best. What Bill Hathaway over at Morse Team calls. We had some of the best food fights you ever saw in there.
But.
[00:36:53] Speaker A: But yeah, I know Bill.
[00:36:55] Speaker B: Yeah, Bill's great, isn't he? I mean, he's built just an awesome company. I love that company.
But you can watch the I Six Sigma and you can see where all of a sudden it breaks. Okay. So in the early years, everybody was focused on deployments, and then all of a sudden it caught on. And so people started going, I need black belts.
And so HR starts looking for black belts. And HR is typical for hr. They don't have a clue what they're doing. Right. And so I know I just upped your reader listenership by saying that.
[00:37:32] Speaker A: Well, it's true.
I get HR people calling all the time as a gatekeeper for people in the company, and they're not educated on what black belts are. They're just told to go find black belts. Right.
There's some loss in translation there. And it's not their fault. It's that somebody's asking somebody else, that somebody doesn't know what they're talking about, and then they're asking an HR person who also doesn't know what, you know, what's going on. And so it's like seven degrees of separation, right?
[00:38:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you know. Yeah. And the only way they knew how to do it was ask for a certificate. Right, Right. It's like I get kids. You a black belt? I don't know the difference. So give me your certificate. Okay. So now what that did was there was a very distinct shift where I went from a focus on deployments to a focus on certification.
[00:38:23] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: Okay. See, I don't certify anybody outside of a deployment. Okay. I don't have classes or any of that other stuff. You know, we've got some online training, but, yeah, we don't. We are not in that training market. And so, yeah, we don't go out there. But I mean, if you want to see what happens. Do you know?
[00:38:46] Speaker A: I do. I know.
[00:38:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: Very well.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: That's very interesting, isn't it?
Yes, but ask him. I think he sat down one Saturday, and he's a smart guy. He knows this material really well.
[00:38:58] Speaker A: Very smart guy. Used to work for him a long time ago.
[00:39:02] Speaker B: God. Have you recovered yet?
[00:39:05] Speaker A: He's a very, very interesting guy. He's like you said, he's very smart.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:12] Speaker A: And, you know, I'm in the training industry as well. And how we've. We're trying to battle the. The paper belt, the certificate meal mills, they're everywhere. Right. So we've. We've gained a little renown in the fact that our certificate is not easy to get at all. And it's based on a project, and you have to go through a very rigorous debate process to. To finish it. And a lot of people come in our class and say, I don't. I don't have data. I mean, how do you expect me to get through it? I don't have data in my company. And we step back and say, you know, we've been doing this for almost 30 years and we've never not seen data. You Just don't know it's there.
[00:39:55] Speaker B: So somebody, there's always somebody that's got it.
[00:39:59] Speaker A: Every company has it and every, every single student that we've had that goes through our process, they all say the same thing and some of them leave. I've lost a lot of clients because of the rigor of what we do.
But it also has gained us fame in the fact that we don't back down. You, you either do it right or you don't do it right. You know, in, and I'll, I'll give you a little background on, on our kind of our domain phases. So in our DOMIC process, you have to, you have to prove your baseline with, with a good representative sampled set of data. You can't just say I think it's there and I think I want to go here, right? I just want to make, make it better. But you have to have a good representative sample data in order to understand where you are presently. And most, most people, when they come in their projects, they're like, I don't, I don't have any data on that. I said, well then you're going to have to find some, or do choose another project. Then we go in to, you know, that takes us to the measure and when we get the analyze phase, they have to, they're responsible for finding one or more significant inputs through a hypothesis test through, through, you know, statistically proving something's going, something's happening and they, they have to show us a high R squared. So again, people freak out. They're like, how am I going to do this? I said, you're going to have to dig deep. You're going to find, have to find the inputs. Every person that's ever went through our pro, our process, our project, our debate process has found it. But most of them are drug into a kicking and screaming, right?
And then when we get into the improve phase, they have to improve the inputs that they found because most of the time what happens, they'll get into the improve phase and then they'll improve stuff that they wanted to improve. Well before they started the project. They just checked off the boxes to get there, right? And we'd say, nope, not going to happen. It has to correlate directly to what you found. And then in the improved phase, they have to be able to show us statistically that they have made the change that they put in the charter. So if their goal was to, you know, get from a PO processing time of two and a half hours down to 30 minutes, they have to show Data that shows that the 2T test, moods, median, whatever, that shows that they actually did that because if they don't, then they can't move to the next phase. All of this, all of this just freaks out our students, you know, at one point in time because it's almost like we're weaning them away from solving problems with gut feel right. And emotional activity and we're pushing them into data and they don't like that. They don't like, it's. Nobody likes stats in college. Right. But at the end of it, they all come out with the same, the same answer. When they, when they finish, they go, man, that was tough. But, but I see how it works. Right. And it changes the way to think. So we are, I mean we've, we've, we take on the certifications, but one thing that we don't ever want to be is that mill. We want, when somebody comes out and gets certified by us, the companies we deal with, they know that their, their people actually know what they're doing. And so that, that just. So we, we. Because I know what you do. You, you do the internal to the company and you do phenomenal things. I, I studied for a year.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Yeah. The reason I asked about was he sat down and I may have the numbers wrong. You know, you can check with him. But he sat down one weekend, one day on one weekend. And he took, he got certified by four companies, I think it was as a black belt and he got certified by two other companies as a master black belt all in one day.
[00:43:57] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: You know, and I mean that's what you're up against, you know, and I mean that's somebody, they just want a piece of paper. I mean, if that's all you want, I mean just go out there and you know, fire it up on your computer. Make yourself.
[00:44:09] Speaker A: Yeah, you can go on chat GBT and get a certificate. You know, it's pretty easy. You can get a college certificate. So. Yeah, that's good. That's. I'm really trying to promote that term paper belts, you know, because we work with a lot of different staffing companies and, and we vet six head going practitioners because those staffing companies know that they don't know what, you know how to vet that the staffer doesn't. So they pass them off to us and we go through, you know, a short interview process and just by asking a few questions, we, we can tell, you know, pretty easily whether they know what they're doing or not.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yep. Very easily.
[00:44:50] Speaker A: Yes. Well, Mike, I'd love to. I could sit and talk to you for hours and hours, and I'd love to have you back on. I love what we do. You know, you get to see new problems every day, and it's a joy to do it. So it's been awesome talking to you, Mike, from the ground level or leaders that are wanting to deploy, but they don't really understand how and they don't want to do it wrong. So, you know, people like you giving this knowledge about making sure we have strong leaders, making sure we have leaders that have numbers that they're trying to get to, not just deploying lean and Six Sigma and that we have a plan and that we have all this stuff built before we ever train a green belt or a black belt or a lean agent. Right. So I think that's a great takeaway from today.
[00:45:43] Speaker B: Absolutely. I love your idea too. It's because I agree that completely. If you belt goes has to go out and find his own project, you're in trouble.
[00:45:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes, absolutely.
A huge thank you to Mike Carnal for sharing his incredible wisdom. The key lesson is clear. Success isn't about the tools. It's about having strong leadership with the measurable goal and a solid plan before you ever start. Without the foundation, you're set apart to fail. Thanks for tuning in. I'm your host, Kevin Clay. Be sure to subscribe to why they fail for more honest conversations that get to the heart of continuous improvement. We'll see you next time.
