Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.

Transcript:

Agile.FM radio for the agile community.

[00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Welcome to another episode of Agile FM in the Agile Kata Series here. Today I have two authors. I have an author on the call and I have a character. I have two characters from a book and a comic illustration, which is called Engaging the Team at Zingerman's Mail Order. That is Betty Gratopp and Jeffrey Liker.

Thank you for joining me here today.

[00:00:34] Betty Gratopp: Thank you for having me.

[00:00:37] Joe Krebs: All right. So this is a book, the it's a comic. And this book was published in 2023. And it's really a book that illustrates the journey from, in, in terms of Kata up at Zingerman's mail order. And before we talk a little bit about the lean journey, What is Zingerman?

Zingerman, I have visited Zingerman in Ann Arbor myself. It's a mail order business of a a company that is shipping the most wonderful cheeses and breads. I can smell it in the in the warehouse. And but there's much, much more to it. Betty, what is the size? What's the scope of Zingerman's?

What do listeners have to picture? Not familiar necessarily with the service? What do you guys do and how big is the operation?

[00:01:20] Betty Gratopp: Oh, excellent. That's a great question. We are a warehouse and a call center. The warehouse employs approximately 55 people year round, and then we grow to a peak of about 400.

Warehouse staff people during our Christmas holiday at the service center. I would say is about 20,25 people and they have, they experienced the same growth during that peak season.

[00:01:45] Joe Krebs: Yeah, excellent. In the comic, you are a warehouse manager.

[00:01:49] Betty Gratopp: Yes, I am one of three warehouse managers that manage the warehouse and have been the three warehouse managers that have taken us through our lean journey and our transformation to trying to be better scientific thinkers.

[00:02:05] Joe Krebs: And as a character, you were visualized by the illustrator, Jasmine Morales, who is visualized this entire comic, the book, and she did a really good job knowing you obviously listeners cannot see you right now, but this picture is really nice. So is. Jeffrey as a character also drawn in the in the comic

[00:02:24] Jeffrey Liker: and Skinnier and better looking in the comic.

[00:02:28] Joe Krebs: And Jeffrey, I do have to mention the other two authors on the book. That's Eduardo Lander and Tom Root, which are not on the podcast today. But we are talking about this book, the three of us. More importantly than the book itself, obviously describes a story that describes a bumpy story of introducing lean and Kata within a Zingerman

when did your journey start? What was the situation like that led to it? And obviously the origin of the book, that's where everything started,

basically.

[00:03:03] Betty Gratopp: Yes. I think back to 2003 when our business was growing in double digits. So we were a bunch of. Intended foodies who started this business and then had to get better at process because we weren't doing very well.

We were not schooled or learned in anything that had to do with process. That was the environment. So we didn't know how many people to hire. We didn't know how much space we needed. We didn't know how many sales we could take. Really basic things about our business were not clear to us.

[00:03:40] Joe Krebs: Sounds like a startup kind of environment.

Like everybody who has worked or seen startups, it sounds very typical. Doesn't

it?

[00:03:47] Betty Gratopp: Oh yeah. Everybody did everything. Yeah.

[00:03:51] Joe Krebs: Yeah. And you guys had some form of a warehouse. Is it the same warehouse as it is, or did you guys relocate it over the years? Was there also like growth or.

[00:04:00] Betty Gratopp: One of the major motivations to moving to a more, more scientific thinking and lean lean process was the fact that we were moving our operation every two years.

So I was hired in 97. I think we moved twice in four years. And then that fifth year or so is about when we started to think about, we had to find a different way. It was too costly. Ten months of the year, our building was way too large for what we needed it to be. Two months of the year, it was way too small for what we wanted it to be.

And so we had to make a commitment to stay in the building that we were, and we had to figure out how that was going to happen. At that time. My boss, one of the managing partners here was going to the University of Michigan and met a gentleman who you already mentioned, Eduardo Landers, one of the authors of the book, and they were going to U of M together, and that's how that connection was made.

I don't remember actually whether we met Jeff first or Eduardo.

[00:04:57] Jeffrey Liker: I don't remember either, but I did get contacted by Tom Root, and he explained that there were Kept on growing out of their quarters and they understood that lean would help you save space and use space more efficiently. And he said, you know, do you think that it might help us in our journey?

And at the same time, Eduardo was my doctoral student and he was trying to define a dissertation topic. And his interest was in lean and a high variability business, but he couldn't find any that. I had implemented lean as a case study. So this came along and I said Eduardo Maybe you're not gonna be able to find a case study to study and maybe you're gonna have to create your own and become like a consultant and advisor to Zingerman's mail order.

And that's what ended up happening. It was just kind of a coincidence marriage his need and their need. And I was watching the whole thing unfold. And when he first came, and I visited the warehouse and he visited, it was clear to both of us that we talk in the Toyota production system about the seven wastes.

And there was seven ways every place you looked, it was just a complete disaster from our point of view. So in other words, it would be a target rich environment for improvement. You could practically, you could probably throw a lean tool any place and. something. But his, he had been, I've been teaching them that in the Toyota Way of leading, which is asking questions and guiding them step by step, taking the whole enchilada, the whole big problem and boiling it down to small pieces.

And then starting with a first step and then guiding them and getting them to do the thinking and the work. And that's the approach he took, which turns out to be very consistent with Kata. We didn't know about Kata at the time, but it was very consistent with that approach. ,

[00:06:54] Joe Krebs: I just want to go back to that quick is I think this is an important comment you just made is the initial approach was more focused on lean rather than Kata because it was quite a while ago, like, when did this all start?

[00:07:07] Jeffrey Liker: 2003

so 2003 he walked through and then he started going there like several times every week.

And again, what he did was what he could have done is he could have said, here's the Toyota production system. I'm going to lecture you about standard work. I'm going to lecture about Kanban. I'm going to lecture. He didn't do any of that. He just went with them to the floor and say, what's your biggest problem.

Let's start there. And then he would ask questions and, you know, example, why do you have to build up a whole, why do you have to build all your gift boxes overnight? So that they're ready when the shift starts. Why can't you build them as the customers are ordering them? And they said things like, because this is a Star Trek and we can't just beam stuff to where we want to instantly.

[00:07:57] Betty Gratopp: I think my exact words were, because we're going to fail.

[00:08:01] Jeffrey Liker: Yeah, exactly. So they didn't believe, you know, what he was suggesting was possible. So he would say, I understand. Is there something we can try right now? And they would say I guess, you know, and then pretty soon they were generating ideas instead of pushing back and they were trying it.

And then they also found their own analogies, like in the book, the original book, lean and high variability of business. We have a case where one of the, one of Betty's colleagues said, I guess it's kind of like subway. Where they make the sandwiches to order, but they have a certain number of sandwiches in a case in a cooled case that you could pull off the shelf and maybe we could develop both kinds of situations.

And so that's the way it got started. Again, there was no lectures about except for very brief introductions. There was not. Here's 15 tools. I'll teach you all the tools go apply them. It was here's a problem. Let's test some ideas and let's do it right now. And then what do we learn from this?

And then most of the ideas came from the group, like Betty, not from Eduardo. Is that true? Betty.

[00:09:16] Betty Gratopp: Yeah,

what I remember when he was first teaching us, he was very he didn't give us a whole lot of, he didn't give us a whole set of tools at one time. The first thing we learned was pull, the second thing we learned was kanban, the third thing we learned was timed routes, because now you have kanban, so it's At the time, I had no idea that these skills or tools were layered and connected and making a whole system.

Had he come at us with all of that. I mean, even just coming with us with one thing and saying, Hey, we're going to make gift boxes just in time. What do you guys think? That was enough to make our brains explode and us want to stick our feet in the mud. But once we got over that, once we tried it, once we said, yes, we'll at least give it a shot and we saw the value of that, that set the stage for the rest of our growth because we had a problem that we thought we couldn't do.

We learned that we could do it, we did it, and it made us stronger for the next problem that was coming down the way. Yeah. And none of that was like, I had no idea any of that was happening as the person that was being taught and led. Yeah. It's really remarkable

and . Cool.

[00:10:26] Jeffrey Liker: So they were being, they were the students, but, and the, they're, they were the top management.

So in a sense this was a top down approach, only teaching the top managements. On the other hand, if you only have 40 people and three of the managers are leading this, that's a large percentage of the workforce. Yeah. Getting deep exposure to the way of thinking of linear. So that went on to for about 10, 10 years till 2013 when Kata was first introduced.

[00:10:57] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So that's an interesting thing. Why? So there was a transition towards Kata and I just want to. Check in with you. Like, how did, what was the trigger for that? And obviously, why did you adopt this approach? Kata most specifically,

[00:11:10] Betty Gratopp: I remember, I can still remember Eduardo.

I remember when he brought the book. I remember the day he brought the book and I remember it actually happening because we had been through three or four different programs iterations trials of things to get the frontline crew involved. So programs or ways of now that the managers were bought into this work and saw the value in it.

And we wanted to bring more of the frontline crew along. But we weren't having much success with that. So we tried out. There was a. I forget the names of the initiatives, but there were two or three or four programs that we tried.

[00:11:48] Jeffrey Liker: This was one practices one.

[00:11:50] Betty Gratopp: Another one was was something Tom came up with where we were going to have extra.

I forget the name of it. Sorry.

[00:11:56] Jeffrey Liker: They're incentivizing

with money. Yeah. You got some percentage of the savings. Yeah.

[00:12:02] Betty Gratopp: So we tried a couple different things to get frontline engaged with the managers. So, and it didn't work. So the next thing that we were going to try was Kata. And I remember actually saying I was willing to try anything at that point that was different than what we'd been trying.

And this stuck. So Yeah. Yeah. I can, I remember asking the crew one time to come along with us on a Toyota business practice thing. And they were like, literally, I'd rather go to the dentist. I'd rather go anywhere right now than come with you on this little project that you have laid out of when Kata came.

And I don't know if it's because it's four steps and five questions, or if it was the time in the business or what the case was. But people gravitated toward it. And if I had to guess it's because it defaults to action, like we are not a team that likes to sit around in a room and strategize about what a word means.

It would make us crazy with the like perfect problem statement and things like that. We're just not geared for that. We're warehouse folks who want to be out on the floor doing things. And I think that's part of it. So it looks simple. I look at the recipe, I'm looking at it on the wall right now, and I go, wow, 1,2,3,4, really cool, really simple.

Then you get into it and you find out what, how challenging and engaging it is, and it's enough to keep you going, right?

[00:13:30] Joe Krebs: Yeah, and that was 2012 2013, somewhere in that time frame, right?

[00:13:34] Betty Gratopp: Yeah, right around 2013.

[00:13:35] Jeffrey Liker: At the same time as Betty was adopting this, because Eduardo has suggested it. Yeah. I was being kind of indoctrinated by Mike Rother, and we live in the same town.

He was one of my students, and I decided to change my graduate course. I taught a graduate course for about 30 years and on organizational theory. And I decided to change it to lean think lean thinking and use kata as the framework for the whole course and have the students do projects and local companies.

So I approached Betty to ask if our students could do kata projects. And I was like, how do I say this to Betty, like, how do I explain Kata? She's going to think I'm from Mars. And I mentioned Kata and she said, that's what we're doing. On my list of things for the year is to introduce Kata. I think we need to talk.

So then I went and visited her that same afternoon and it was again, a perfect meeting, coincidence of goals. And it was really my students. Working with her people on the floor on kata that really started driving it as well as her at some point. They asked if her student if her people who are warehouse workers, a lot of them didn't have a college degree, but she asked if they could sit in on my graduate course.

And that's what happened. So I had about 15 of these Zingerman's Warehouse met people in my graduate course, and then we're having breakout discussions there with my students and we, and it was the discussions were really rich, and the students are working with them in the warehouse and they're the experts in the warehouse.

So the course turned out great. And what we did is in that first semester turned out great.

[00:15:31] Joe Krebs: I can only imagine how rich the conversation conversations were between, you know, people at a university, but also bringing the real life and real world touch into the conversation

[00:15:41] Jeffrey Liker: And they brought food. We would have, of

[00:15:44] Betty Gratopp: Of course, we brought food.

I take food wherever I go.

[00:15:48] Joe Krebs: That is fantastic.

[00:15:49] Betty Gratopp: The relationship between the students and our frontline coaches or between the managers and the, our frontline coaches and the students is really where a really nice piece of the benefits of working kata come in. When you're first learning this thing together, everybody's new.

I didn't know what I was doing and in order for me to help teach others, I had to be willing to kind of step in it a lot. Over and over again and do it wrong. That's an amazing example for anybody else who's trying to learn something. I think one of the biggest things that we've had to get over here and it still comes up.

It's not something that we ever stopped working on is. Is the environment safe so that people feel like they can test, try, fail, learn, whatever word you want to put on it. This gave us something to point to that said, we want to do this and we're going to not do it right all the time. And that is to be expected.

In fact, it's desirous. That's a really different mind frame than most or mindset than most people walk into a workplace with each day. It really does put us into a laboratory where, you know, we love our food. We love that we pack boxes, but it's so much more. What we do out there is so much more in the relationships that we build and the way that we learn to interact and work on challenging goals together.

It's super cool.

[00:17:18] Jeffrey Liker: The we needed challenges. They needed the first step is to find the challenge. So they had to find projects based on challenges. And at one point we had eight student groups in there. So they had to have eight projects, eight challenges going on simultaneously. But so they would find, and I said, it has to be something where they can make a dent on it.

And run through several target conditions over a semester, you can continue working on it after that, but it can't be too big and it can't be too small so small that they have the solution immediately. So they would pick not redesign the whole warehouse problems, but more like there are errors that are made when people take things off the shelf and put them in the boxes, and you don't get exactly what you ordered.

They call it mis picks. So that was a recurring project is reducing mis picks. And another one was that was in the book was that it takes too long to take bread off the shelf and bag it. And get it to the production line and just in time and sometimes we are too late and also we're going to have to scale up and we expect the busiest season Christmas season ever.

And we're going to have to scale up to work to a fast, much faster tack time. So, that was in that book, so that there was significant problems. They tend to be within a process rather than across the whole warehouse. And they would have a bunch of these going on at one time, and there are problems that they haven't been able to solve easily.

On their own.

[00:18:51] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Betty, you have touched a little bit on that already from a Kata and cultural perspective, but I want to go a little bit deeper on that. And I was just looking at the timeframe you guys mentioned before, and it's kind of, it's interesting because like your, the original start 2003, Kata came 2012, 13.

And if you want to look at this timeline right now, we're recording this in January 2024, somewhat in the middle. So you have been going like 10 years there and 10 years after. I want to talk a little bit about the culture, like the culture of the company, the teams, the crews what the culture was like that enabled Kata in 2013.

Like what were the signals and the signs there that you would say Oh, these were like, you know, setting the stage for us to be successful. Because you are successful with this. And then also I would love to see from both of you obviously to what has Kata done to the culture and positively impacted the culture at a Zingerman's mail order.

Can you explore a little bit both of you on this because I feel like that's an it's an important piece and from it's unique if you're thinking about a company being trying to do it, not trying to do this, being successful with this Kata approach, being in this journey for such a long period

of time.

[00:20:05] Jeffrey Liker: Maybe you should go back to the kind of unique people oriented culture of Zingerman's.

[00:20:10] Betty Gratopp: Yes. Yes, absolutely. So, you know, when I hired on here, I hired on in Zingerman's, I'm not going to give you a year, a long time ago, because otherwise, I'm really old. That was 1997. And I worked in catering. So I hired on as a frontline employee at Zingerman's Deli, one of our sister businesses.

And I was immediately taken by the culture and the people from day one, I felt valued. It was really apparent that they wanted more from me than just putting meat on trays or making nice catering trays, which is also a really great thing. But They wanted to know what I wanted to do. They wanted to know what I thought about things that we were doing at the time.

I felt heard and I felt valued. There's not a lot of places when you walk in the door into a new job, I don't in my experience anyway, where I felt that valued from the get go. And I stuck around and as a result, I've been able to grow into the position that I have now. Mostly because I've been willing to learn and I've been given a really safe place and a really great learning environment to do that.

So my, what I want to do is provide that for everybody else that I work with, and that's the culture I think that Jeff was describing, our unique people based culture, I think is how you said it, is that it's a cycle of everybody trying to help everybody else have a more engaging job. You know, we're all striving for that success

[00:21:44] Jeffrey Liker: and they have profit sharing, very active profit sharing and they have, they call it open book management where everybody could see all the numbers and how much

[00:21:52] Betty Gratopp: servant leadership

[00:21:53] Jeffrey Liker: It is a very open culture.

And they provide somebody who was standing behind a counter. That's who's making a sandwich for you. That person has benefits and they're making a living wage.

[00:22:03] Betty Gratopp: So it is really is about respect for people and, you know, providing an opportunity for growth.

[00:22:10] Joe Krebs: But if I understand that that was already prior to the arrival of Kata.

[00:22:13] Betty Gratopp: Yes.

So what's really fun about that story though, is even with that culture. Adopting Kata was not like one, two, three, four, go. Everybody was energized by it. Everybody wanted to learn to do it. It doesn't mean that it's easy. And that was true with even all the Lean tools as well. So Kata wasn't unique in that way.

And when you're trying to learn new things, we expect that it's going to be fun. I always expect things to be fun or try to make it fun. And we want it to be easy, but that's not when we learn. And we're not advancing our knowledge as a warehouse team if we are not struggling in some fashion towards something.

So there's a little bit of a disconnect between how America or whatever thinks that we want work to be like, we kind of want to come to work and check out if you're practicing kata. That's not what you're able to do. You have to be completely engaged. In your in whatever it is that you're doing.

[00:23:11] Jeffrey Liker: Yeah.

The Toyota Way. There's respect for people and continuous improvement and a lot of companies I've worked with get the continuous improvement part and the tools pretty quickly. But they're weak on respect for people. And Zingerman's was the opposite. It was very strong in respect for people and very weak on the tools and the concepts of continuous improvement.

And we thought from the beginning that it was easier to teach the tools. Within a favorable culture, then to teach the tools and then try to change the culture. So we thought it was a very nice fit and it turned out that way. That the fit was very strong. Yeah.

[00:23:54] Joe Krebs: Thanks for pointing that out, Jeff. I think that's a that's an important takeaway also to see that there was a specific culture there that actually enabled what was.

About to happen with the introduction of Kata, but then once scientific thinking took over 2013 and following, how did Kata positively impact the culture? How did it drive forward? What happened to it? I would assume it did not

[00:24:23] Betty Gratopp: stay the same. I was thinking of the years from 2000. We started in 2013, 2018 was our best year ever best year.

When I say that, I think of in terms of capacity the quality of our work, internal mistakes, things of that nature. Those were the years that we were, we had an engaged warehouse team. That was working on Kata, we went to school every year that kept us accountable to Dr. Liker's class. We're still doing that.

Actually, we were inviting people in for tours and things like that as a way of elevating our work, because when our crew on the floor sees people come and they're curious about what it is that we're doing, that's kind of new and different for a warehouse staff person to have that sort of experience.

I just lost my train of thought, but I was going somewhere

really good.

[00:25:14] Jeffrey Liker: So you were talking about the peak. So what was different?

13 to 18. We're learning. We're driving down the stakes. We're engaged. What happened in 2019 is we took our the eye, our eye off the ball a bit because of the COVID epidemic.

And we started ticking back up, but you can look at our year over year, both in our capacity and our quality. And you can see when we started Kata. Actively practicing it and then you can see, so you can see mistakes going down. You can see revenue, things like that going up and you can see when the pandemic stopped our practice and what the impact of that was on our business.

Mistakes went up. We weren't paying a lot of attention. There was a lot of other things going on. So it wasn't that we weren't paying attention. It was that our attention was on other things, like keeping people safe. And that's when our scientific thinking kicked in again, only in a different fashion.

So it wasn't that we had storyboards everywhere. But every day that we came to work, the three managers were very active in thinking, what is it I can do today to keep people safe? What is it today? I can do now that people are safe to increase capacity. What is our next goal? How are we going to get there?

It was pretty fascinating.

Yeah. One of the things that impressed me because I bet he was kind of reporting to me at the time what's happened with COVID. And one thing is that people had to think about their jobs and what they touched and using sanitizer. And. What I would see in companies is that somebody say in human resources, which is responsible for safety, would come up with policies and then they would spread the policies every place.

But in Zingerman's, they had the group leaders who had a small group and each group leader had to study the job and find out where their touch points and find out how they should use sanitizer. And. They tailored the solution to the standardized work of that particular job, and it was much deeper than the kind of more superficial thinking of everybody has to use sanitizer, you know, and yeah, so I could see the thinking way, even though they weren't formally using the method or storyboard.

[00:27:32] Joe Krebs: Yeah, just to that point you're making, right? So sanitizing people, keeping people safe, respecting people, right? As a cultural anchor, as well as having a scientific thinking pattern for continuous improvement. Those two things might be really good attributes for navigating through the COVID crisis.

[00:27:58] Betty Gratopp: What was yes, and what was surprising to me is I remember thinking that I might have misstepped by not having a storyboard. And then I think it was Jeff that said, no, actually, it was like the thinking in action. Like you were doing it the workout. I knew that the work was outpacing the storyboard and I knew I couldn't keep it up to date.

It was good. That's good.

[00:28:18] Jeffrey Liker: But I have the I think often what happens if you have a company that's good to its workers and is strong in respect for people. Is they may lack discipline in executing in a sort of systematic way and also improving in a systematic way. And I think that's what lean and then Kata introduced was a lot more rigor and discipline in how they structured their daily work and how they structured their approach to improvement and reaching their goals.

.

[00:28:53] Betty Gratopp: It's interesting that you say that because It is true and when, you know, when coven did happen and we were, we had an amazing amount of demand and growth and we tried to, we were hiring during COVID. But so there was like, 3 years there where. I think we did what other companies may experience where the demand hides perhaps some of your missteps internal mistakes were creeping up.

We weren't quite aware of that. Standard work wasn't getting used as much as it used to get used. And we weren't really aware of that. And I say all these things just, Because in 2022, when we came, when we started to come out of the pandemic and look at our situation, because of our Kata training and our scientific thinking and.

Having advanced to where we had, we were able to look at those years with a different set of eyes, not to say that it didn't hurt to think that we didn't we weren't paying attention to internal mistakes and we weren't auditing our standard work and we weren't focused on growing our.

Staff during that time, but we knew that it was just a break. We think of it as a, we had a critical break in 2022 and we had the observation also that we had been here before in 2013, ironically, 10 years ago, as Joe pointed out, and we knew how to do the work. So it wasn't so much it wasn't a self defeat moment.

It was a moment of, oh gosh, it's kind of not great that we're here, but we knew how to do the work, and we knew the next step forward, and we knew what we needed to do. And that makes it okay. It makes it. It actually makes it inspiring. You're not inspired at first. At first, you're just okay. But by the time you walk through it and you're like, Oh yeah, we've been here before.

And you start getting some traction and the crew starts coming along again. Then it starts being inspired.

[00:30:49] Jeffrey Liker: Busy season. Betty was another, it was another pretty successful season, right?

[00:30:54] Betty Gratopp: It was better than 2022 markedly. Yes, we had we saw good results of the work that we did last summer. So coming out of holiday 2022, we had our work cut out for us.

We spent the summer or I'm sorry, 23. we spent the summer working on that. Yeah. And we had a better year because of it. And when I say by working on it, we were using our scientific thinking to reach our

goals.

[00:31:20] Jeffrey Liker: I think that one, yeah, one of the things that I think Betty's saying is that the Mike calls the kata starter kata.

So the starter kata includes here's the four steps, your challenge, your current state, your target condition, and then experiment and put it on a storyboard. And there's a coach and the coach has a question card and every day ask these questions. And that's the, those are the kata to the tools to help you get started.

But the goal of kata is actually to eliminate the kata, is to get to the point where it's just the way you naturally think. And you don't need to say, wait a second, I better write that down on a storyboard. Yeah.

[00:32:03] Joe Krebs: What's the fourth question?

[00:32:05] Jeffrey Liker: People like Betty had gotten to that point. Not everybody in the warehouse did, but the leaders, all the leaders really of the warehouse had gotten to that point where they're thinking scientifically not necessarily grabbing the tools.

[00:32:20] Joe Krebs: That's right. Absolutely. It wouldn't be continuous improvement without continuation. The comic you guys have published is a snapshot in time. It had to end somewhere. It had to go to the printer and has to be shipped. But the journey is going to continue. I would assume that the Kata journey will continue.

I don't know how much you can share. You're very open and public with tours and everything on the floor. What are some things you, I don't know if you can share of anything or Jeff by working with Zingerman's, it's just like, where's the Kata journey gonna go? Are there, what are the goals?

What are you, what's on your mind if you're thinking about Kata and the next steps? There's another year ahead of us. 24. You just mentioned 20 coming out of 22 busy season. There were some changes. What's happening now for you guys in Kata,.

[00:33:14] Jeffrey Liker: We started to address that at the end of the book, and I think it's pretty accurate still, but there's a concept in Toyota hoshin kanri.

It's also called strategy deployment where you start top down and you say, these are our biggest challenges. And, you know, there's four big challenges and then for each of those this year, we're going to have a big challenging audacious target for the year. And then that cascades down. So everybody has a piece of that problem of that goal, and they have their own goals that are aligned with those goals at the top of the company.

So far, mostly what you saw mail order was individual projects. And it wasn't guided by a strategic vision. So getting to that point where it becomes natural to have an annual plan. And to execute the plan through the year with people involved at all levels. That's one thing. I know that Zingerman's working toward.

It would be a huge step forward.

[00:34:23] Betty Gratopp: Yeah, that's interesting. You mentioned that we just rolled out a, I call it the big goal instead of challenge your vision. We've called it the big goal. So now we have a, it's written as a Zingerman mail order wide, and then we'll take it and it'll be more specific to the warehouse, but it has to do with capacity, quality, and cost.

So it has a I could read it to you if you want.

[00:34:45] Jeffrey Liker: Go ahead.

[00:34:45] Betty Gratopp: It's not, it's just a challenge. The beginning of a challenge statement, it's two days old, so you have to cut us some slack too. . It says literally two days old. ZMO is a dynamic team able to meet demand defined as 9, 000 boxes in a single ship day.

While maintaining an internal quality percentage of 93 percent and offering a Zing org experience. This is to be done by December 2023. So it's a one year challenge for the warehouse and mail order as a larger business. It's not perfect. It'll probably change.

[00:35:26] Joe Krebs: It will probably change,

[00:35:27] Betty Gratopp: It'll probably change.

[00:35:28] Joe Krebs: The journey continues.

[00:35:30] Betty Gratopp: Yes. But yes.

[00:35:32] Joe Krebs: And I do want to thank you guys for sharing that story a little bit making it really real and building that connect from a mail order business, a floor, very actionable to everybody listening out there. Some of my guests on agile FM, we're talking about sometimes about organizational culture.

This is real. This is the culture in, in action. So I want to thank you for spending that time here with me and with the listeners. Thank you, Betty. Thank you, Jeff.

[00:36:01] Jeffrey Liker: Thank you.

[00:36:02] Betty Gratopp: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

#77 The trap of building the first "solution"