 I'm going to go ahead and get started since it's five o'clock and I hear there's quite a few parties tonight and hopefully we can get out of here and get ready for those. So I kind of developed this with this five o'clock time slot in mind where I'm kind of going to go put everything in the beginning that I think is super important and then we either end up early, we can, or we can keep talking about some of the other things if you'd like, but I know if you're anything like me and it hits about five thirty you start getting a little hangry and need to go out and find some food. So go ahead and get started with some of this stuff here and if you're in the right spot if you want to learn about stats but I'm going to do a shameless plug first and mention that Drupal Govcon is coming up and if you registration just opened and speaker submissions just opened so we would love to have you guys come and join us. We are free three days kind of similar to this in Washington DC and you get to learn some more Drupal fun stuff so if you have any questions about Drupal Govcon in Washington DC definitely let me know and I can get you some information. All right so introduce myself it's Amy Shropshire. That is the old English spelling of my last name. It is a city in England I don't expect you to be able to say that Amy is just fine. My background I actually started building websites back in 1997 on Angel Fire. They're somewhere still out there and I'm not going to tell you where they are because they're awful. I would actually take graph paper and draw what I wanted the website to look like and then write the HTML in on the graph paper and put it into the system. Went on and got my degree in digital design and graphics and decided why am I designing these websites so then I got a bachelor's degree in advertising and thought why am I selling all this crap so then I got my master's degree in marketing so hopefully that kind of can give me a nice round 360 picture of what goes into the entire process. I promised my parents I am never ever ever going back to school after that. Currently I am the founder and principal consultant for Cast Communications. We work primarily with nonprofits and startups. I've found that the organizations that have the least amount of money let me spend it in the most creative ways. So left the corporate world I actually was working in virtual reality and augmented reality if any of you came for that session earlier today. I was working in the VR world for a high-tech R&D company for about five years as their director of marketing and decided I'm leaving this corporate stuff and going back to the nonprofit and startup stuff to do some fun. So that's about me. Who is this statistician guy? It's this curmudgeon-y guy right here named W. Edwards Deming and the funny thing was is that I had no idea who this person is and as a digital design major getting my associates degree we had to take an entire class about him and how it applies to digital design. And you're going through your course classes that you have to take and are like why are we learning about this guy? Nobody's ever heard of him. Why do we have to learn about statistical process control and total quality management? About halfway through the class I realized this is kind of some interesting stuff and it's so we already know the stuff he talks about but the way he phrases it is really kind of interesting. So the quote I pulled out here, 85% of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the system not the people. That was his biggest proponent is that the people you have in your organization are not the biggest problem. The biggest problem of your organization is your organization. So a little bit about this guy. He was born in 1900. He had a PhD in math and physics from Yale. No business experience. He developed the sampling techniques that the US Department of the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics still use to this day to develop their data sets. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1987 and the National Academy of Sciences Distinguished Career and Science Award in 1988. So he was brought to Japan by General Douglas MacArthur who was frustrated because Japan's post-war economy couldn't even let him complete a phone call. The infrastructure kept falling apart and nobody knew what to do to help rebuild the infrastructure and get their economy back rolling again. So General MacArthur called him over and he started leading workshops with Japanese industrialists including the co-founder of Sony using what's called statistical process control. And that's all he knew about business or statistics. But he was teaching all these Japanese industrialists. This is what you need to do to be successful using these processes. So it was nice to get somebody with no business textbook theory experience to be able to come in and say here's what we can kind of do. So one of the things that I wanted to go over, he developed this experiment and I don't know, has anyone heard of the red bead experiment? One lone person, I were both crazy. So the red bead experiment from being a statistician is he wanted to show that the majority of people have no control over their own success in their careers. Have you ever been in a job where you felt like I'm working, I'm putting in all these hours, I'm doing everything that's asked of me and yet I'm still not meeting the expectations that are being put on me? That was his argument, is that most employees have absolutely no control over their own success. So we're going to actually do the red bead experiment, an abbreviated version of it. If anyone's brave, I need five volunteers. Come on up. Perfect. Who is the bossiest one of you? You are going to be my manager. I brought you a clipboard and everything. This is your spreadsheet that I made of my analog spreadsheet for him here. And we are going to put these workers to work and you're going to be their manager recording the metrics that say how they're doing their job. Can they get numbers so I can identify them? You're the manager, you can assign them whatever you want. What we have here are our beads and they can represent anything really. So if we're building websites, let's just say these are our pixels that are building the website, but it could be anything and this is a highly simplified project so I know it doesn't go across the board, but he developed this to kind of show very simply and quickly how kind of luck and happenstance determines how you do. So we're going to have a typical day with our workers. Now at the end of what is it? Three days? Four days. At the end of four days, we're going to fire the twoest lowest performing of you guys. So in your typical day, you're going to take a scoop of whatever you're working with, pour it in the next container. Red is anything that is unacceptable to the customer. Now you can't touch the beads so you can't sit there and go, oh, I got some on there. I'm going to take a few out. You're just going to go in there, scoop, level it off, pour it in. You're going to write down how many red beads they have and those are the ones that don't count toward their productivity. So we've got day one. After day one, I have to say working one was really good. Then we have worker three and worker four on the second place, and I'll find it better next time. Day two, guys, you're full of words during the day. This is maybe still a little more harder. It's working harder, but yeah. I think moving a little bit because I know this is tough for you guys out there. We'll just do two days where it's going to go. It's going to go, so I would say worker two, I'm sorry. This is so unfair. It is, I know, and then worker four. I'll be hearing my third. Well, here's the thing. Let's just say you guys heard of holocracy or any of those management systems. So in holocracy, there's no manager, so to save money, you're fired. We're going to keep our workers because we still need to do output, but we're not going to manage you. Remember how there were rules before? We're not going to give them to you. So if you guys want to come, let's see where's a good place to do this. Over here, I get to manage yourself and tell me at the end of two days, how many you've got? I won't even listen to it. I'll go on to the next slide. These are how many employees. How many have read me? I'm not sure. You're managing yourself. So what Deming was trying to show with this experiment, again, just very simplified, that it could be anything in an employee's day that can cause the numbers to come out differently. So it's not just how much you're putting in or were you doing the full scoop. Are you guys, you're not going to do it? No. For example, I was working with a team once and we were going through our daily standup and I, you know, saying what barriers are keeping you from getting your job done today. And my one employee said it has nothing to do with work or anything that's getting back to me, but I haven't had time to the grocery store. I have food I have to go get. By the time I get off work, I have to go pick up the baby and then I have to get home. And I was just like, why don't you just leave an hour early and remove those barriers? At the end of the day, she came to me an hour earlier and said, I got so much more done today, not thinking about those issues. But it's kind of this balance of, you know, you've got all these red beads that are things in your life that come up, that are problems, kinks in the system, that client didn't get back to you, that piece that you really need to move on, those are all those red beads. Those are all those problems that come up that keep you from doing being as productive as you want to be. Got it? You know what? I would love an explanation. So day one, so they went from like 10, 30, 26, 26 red beads to 12, 12, 12, 12. And then next day, 12, 12, 12, 12, 10, 10, 10 and 10 and 8, 8, 8 and 8. And I'd love to hear your reason. All right, nobody's watching us. So we figured we'll have nobody finish. And by the way, since we're making up the nobody's as we go, because nobody's watching us, we might as well show improvement. That is actually perfect. So on the next slide, it actually says, there are three things that Deming noticed. You either improve the system, distort the system or distort the data. So you guys were the best helpers I could ever ask for a big round of applause. Because across the board, that is exactly what Deming found happened in the two different systems, where you had workers and the management was over them and watching everything they were doing and applying the metrics for them. The workers were having trouble getting ahead, having trouble making those metrics stick, having trouble getting through that. And yet then the opposite, when you turned it completely over to the employees, we've all covered for a co-worker before. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it does distort the system and from a business management standpoint, is that really what you want? Do you really want your employees to distort the system or distort the data? So think about it, if you own your own agency and you're trying to price out what these services cost and they're distorting the data of how long something is taking them to do, you're not being able to price that out very effectively. So that's kind of what the red bead experiment was for Deming and showing how that all worked. So what can we do? So Deming came up with these 14 points of management. And I'm not going to go too deeply into all 14 because that's a lot of stuff. There are a few that I think make way more sense than others and are easier to implement. So what I've done is kind of taken these 14 points. We'll just kind of bring them up. And then for some of them I have some real life examples that I can share of how companies have implemented them. If you've ever seen the movie Tora, Tora, Tora, which is about World War II and from the Japanese standpoint of coming over bombing Pearl Harbor, we actually watched that movie in class with a list of the 14 points of management and showed where Pearl Harbor and our government fell apart by not following these 14 points of management. So that's kind of a fun activity. If you've got a couple hours and like historical war movies, it's a really good movie. So the first one is create constancy of purpose for improving products and services. Simply make improving the process always something that you do and ingrain it to every part. Don't have quarterly reviews. Have daily reviews. Have those daily stand-ups where you go over what are those barriers. And put it into every piece of your organization. That's the reason I chose Worthington Industries there. You may not have heard of this smaller company. It's about 300 employees in Worthington, Ohio, and they are a steel company. But one of the programs they have that I found to be really interesting that they use to promote this is anytime an employee comes up with an idea that saves the organization money, that employee gets the money that was saved by the company in their paycheck. Not once, forever. So if they can save the company $10 a week, they get an extra $10 a week. If they can save the company an extra $1000 a week, they get an extra $1000 a week. And they've said that it doesn't always work. The ideas don't always work, but it creates a steady stream of ideas for their employees to come up with things of, well, maybe we should try this. Now they don't get penalized if it doesn't work. So there's only benefit for the employees to be up and open and speaking about things that they can do to help improve the organization. Adopting a new philosophy. So for a lot of companies, the philosophy is, all right, we are going to make growth. We're going to grow by 10% over the next three quarters. Or we're going to bring in this many numbers of new customers. Well, this one is the new philosophy is all about just being the best. If you are the best, the money will come, the clients will come. The example here, Jenny's blended ice cream. Who here has eaten Jenny's ice cream? There is a Jenny's here in Nashville. If you get to go, it is the most amazing ice cream you will ever have in your entire life. I have waited for an hour in December in the snow outside to get ice cream. But that's part of it. Jenny's whole idea behind her ice cream. She's like, I don't care if we make money. I want to make the best ice cream that exists. Now she charges $10 a pint and I buy it every single time. So if you have that philosophy, we're going to be the best. We're going to have the best that's out there. People will buy it and it will be the people who really love your product and evangelize for your product. People love her ice cream so much that when there was an illustrious outbreak in her plant and they shut down operations for three months and recalled every single pint of ice cream that there was in the U.S., people were going to her stores, putting post-it notes on them and covering them with, we will be back. When you come back, we will be back. And she has built this kind of ice cream empire. She recently was on How I Made This with Guy Raaz if you like podcasts and you can listen to her talk about how her company essentially died, but because she had built this quality of we're going to be the best and do the best things, she was able to bring it back. So this one I don't have a concrete example for, but cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality because this is one I didn't feel was as important for this crowd because I think most of us here are used to doing as we go iterative process rather than waiting until the end. So I figured this one you guys didn't need as much information on, but it is up there in his 14 points. There are several different ways that you can look at it. Deming was really into figuring out what your backwards process kind of is rather than just keeping data for data's sake and thinking about, oh, I'm going to have this list of all these things that I'm measuring, all these outputs that I'm measuring. And instead looking and saying what's the question we're really trying to answer and working that way backwards. And so there's several different statistical processes you can use to find those. He was a big proponent of using normal distribution graphs to see even if you do fail because failure is a valid outcome, are you still within that range of sometimes you get really good results, sometimes you don't. Did that answer that? And the practice of awarding business on price alone. So again, not one that I was going to spend too much time on because I think we've all worked with those suppliers that we know. Sometimes we have a supplier over here who's more expensive, but we can get five different things from them rather than five different vendors over here that we're getting things from. Kind of my example on this one, because I like statistics and because spreadsheets are amazing. When I was looking at what grad school I wanted to go to, I made a spreadsheet and I quantified everything. And I looked at what's the price? How prestigious is it? How long is this degree going to take me? And then I threw it all out the window and went to the school that I wanted to go to anyway. So that's kind of the example there is, you know, you can put all these things into statistical processes, but sometimes it's not always the price, that's the thing that you should be following. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production, and service. When I work with companies, most of the time they are so focused on what service they are giving their customers that they forget about how the customer is finding them. How many emails did it take to get somebody to contact them back? Is a phone call. What's that process when they call and don't get somebody? So looking at every step of your process and seeing how that fits in with what type of service you're trying to offer, because it's not just that product that you're building for them and giving them. So example here is Zappos. And I don't know how many of you are familiar with their new employee program. When they come in as a new employee, you get two weeks of paid training. At the end of the two weeks, they offer them cash, money, $4,000 to go home. No longer work for Zappos. Because their belief is if you're not really invested in our cause and for being a good customer service advocate, take the $4,000 and walk away. So they're really trying to instill that belief in their organization. We want people who are forever going to be trying to do just a little bit better. In their example where they were showing improvement in their red beads that they were getting, if you have a culture that encourages that, that will happen organically. Institute training on the job. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so in the Zappos program, the employee gets to choose whether they want to leave or stay. Zappos is not making a determination on them at that moment. They are basically saying if, here, in the last two weeks during your employee orientation, we have laid out our philosophy of how we want our company to work and how we want our company to be. If you're not down with it, that's okay. But walk away now before you get entrenched in our company and don't contribute to that mission. And they can walk away with that money, no strings attached. And they said that some people do, that they do have high percent walks out, but some people, once they make it through that training, just decide this isn't the company culture, this isn't what I want from me, and they do take that money and walk out. Yeah. So the Institute training on the job. In the last session that was in here before, we were talking about project management and how important certifications are for certain things. And the argument that W.Edward Stemming had is certifications and education are important, but make them very day things. So in one of the teams I worked with, I had an employee who started as an intern and then came on to my team full time as my digital marketing specialist. And she was also our half digital marketing specialist, half frontend developer. So she was kind of trying to mesh those all together. And what we did to kind of institute training on the job is we went to Coursera, free courses, and we all, as a department, all five of us signed up for a course together and challenged to see who could come up with the best grade by the end. And so every day we would have our stand-up and we would talk about what we were doing, what was our homework assignment in Coursera, what were we going through. It didn't take any time, it didn't cost our company any money, but it was a good way for us to say what are we interested in learning? Do we really want to learn more about Google AdWords and how that fits in with our SEO and how that fits in with this piece? And we were able to take advantage of some of those tools to say we're going to make continuous learning a part of our whole department. So we included everyone in our department and made an offer to anyone else in the company who wanted to come into it as well. And then at the end of the course whoever got the highest grade got an extra hundred dollars on their paycheck. That was just me putting it in there. The example on here, Boring or Ingelheim. Boring or Ingelheim is a pharmaceuticals company and they offer when they look at their long-term planning forecasts and notice that layoffs are coming on the horizon which is never a great thing. They try to plan it in such a way that those employees who are going to be getting layoffs are given stipends to go back to school, receive training to update their skills and bring in things to the office so that those employees know layoffs might be coming up down the pike but we're going to do whatever we can to make sure that you are still engaged and still employable in this industry. Adopt and Institute Leadership. This is where Deming was talking about that manager who was hovering over you writing down all the numbers of your matrix and he said that just doesn't work. You saw what happened when they worked all together and we're trying to figure out a system to get better but the manager over them also doesn't really work because then all you're trying to do is make sure that that manager writes down the right metrics for what you want. So he said instead adopt leadership in the organization. Actually I have two examples on this one. The first one is National 4-H Council which was one of my old employers and the favorite CEO I have ever worked with. That CEO we had a on-campus cafeteria and he ate lunch with his employees almost every single day. Not planned to head lunches where we would have time to figure out what we were going to say to him. He would just walk down to the cafeteria and say hey can I eat lunch with you today? Tell me all the gossip that's going on in the company. What is keeping you from doing your job? And he would follow up on it. I don't know how many times I would go to him and say well yeah we're doing okay but we're struggling with this and the next thing I know you mentioned you were having a problem with this here's how we're going to solve it we're going to get it through. We had that anonymous employee suggestion box hanging on the wall that everyone's like whatever I'm going to put anything in there but every all hands meeting he read every single comment. Good, bad, complimentary really bad and then figured out a way that he could address those issues. Some of them were as simple as coffee sucks so he bought curigs for all of the floors at 4-H Council and said we will provide a monthly amount of coffee you want to bring in if you don't like any of the coffee we have here just let us know and we'll buy you that kind so you can have your curig rather than us brewing the awful coffee that you hate. So the second example I have on this one let me collect my thoughts here for one minute oh, Honda Honda is one of the major employees in Columbus where I'm from and they have many of their Japanese and Korean and Asian counterparts come over who have worked the plants over there so they really follow this Deming philosophy and every year all management is required to work one week on the floor with the departments that they manage they have to wear the same uniform every day so there's no management in suits and factory workers in another one everyone wears the same outfit and management is required to go out onto the floor and work so they can see first hand oh, so that's what you mean that you need this piece of information oh, I see so that tool over there is a little bit more expensive but I can see how it would save you so much more time and they stagger that process so it's not like management kind of all leaves and goes down there but they have it so that the management can basically get their hands wet again having gone from somebody who worked in digital design to being a manager I understand that that sometimes is really important to be able to step back in and see what your employees are doing because it's really easy to lose track when you're sitting there again dealing with spreadsheets and looking at all that stuff there drive out fear and again this comes back to that manager and I know we probably all worked for a manager they were like we can't say that I'm afraid to say that if I say that I'm going to get fired or I'm going to get in trouble and I'm going to get called out and his idea was if you drive out fear and you have an organization where you can talk and say whatever you want and again the Worthington Industries one the idea doesn't have to work you just want your employees to keep coming up with those good ideas so if you institute a culture where there's no fear to talk out and you're able to say what you're thinking and what you think might be a good idea your employees are going to want to do better and keep coming up with those good ideas break down barriers between staff areas and this is one that I see all the time and how many of you have noticed there are some departments that work in these silos and you don't know what's going on and trying to figure it out the example I have for this one is the logo because they went out of business I worked for an advertising agency in St. Louis called Copper Parker Communications we had some really nice accounts like Anheuser-Busch that was always a fun one to go visit we actually handled the publicity for the rapper Nelly so really kind of fun stuff there but what they did to break out these barriers because you have your copywriter you have your artist you have your graphic designer and the people who work in their own skill sets is they removed all of the offices in the building all of the offices they termed into the theme rooms so they had a nap room you could go and take a nap they had a bar, they had a game room but everyone's offices from the lowest intern to the CEO were in the floor with desks they had wheels you had no cubicle walls and you basically moved your desk for that project that was going on and it was fun because whatever part of the office you could go to was kind of considered yours and again there's no walls so you can't really decorate your cubicle they had buckets of paint you could actually paint the walls of the office make your own little section there but whatever team was working on Anheuser-Busch they had each person on that team sitting together from account management to the designer to the art director all sitting there sitting there and talking no emails, no walking over to any place else but having kind of a nice cohesive team and I've always kind of liked that and kind of missed it when I've worked at places where I'm like okay I know they're just down the hall but it'd be really nice if they could see what I was doing so eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce how many of you have nice motivational posters hanging up in your office that you get to see as you walk by and you think oh yeah that's kind of great well what those tend to do is just kind of muddy the water they're kind of nice things to say nobody really listens to them and you're like okay what are we really trying to do to motivate each other with the kitten hanging off the branch so my example here is with ADEPT marketing I just started working on a project with ADEPT and I was really blown away by their philosophy of slogans and kind of taglines and stuff and they kind of have one when growth is the goal but then when you dig down into it their basic philosophy is and when we've met with them this is the first thing they start out with is if we can't measure it and we can't show that it's leading toward growth we don't do it and that's it so Deming says that something clear and to the point like that is much better than those motivational posters that mean anything to your employees the employees at ADEPT know exactly what they need to do they need to show that they are creating growth for their clients and if they can't show that they're showing growth it's not on them it's the process again it's what they're doing we need to be pivoting and doing something else eliminate numerical quotas for the work source and numerical goals for management now I blocked out this one a little bit it's a little hard to see on there but I can go over and it kind of comes back to your question and I know what everyone always says when they say this is you can't manage what you don't measure so how can you do this it really is just as simple as you apply the metrics to the process not the people so yes you still have metrics you still measure things and that's the key behind the statistical process control you measure the statistics of the process instead of applying them to the people so instead of a person saying we want you to bring in two leads per week you're looking at what's our sales pipeline how are we bringing in these leads is there something that needs to be tweaked along the way rather than applying them to that one person because that's what the red bead experiment was showing is that it's the process told me he had to take a full scoop of that that was in the rules you have to work your eight hour day that's in the rules but this one is saying let's apply those metrics to the process so kind of go over what's in that little thing there I just have a screenshot of it so what I do with my clients is we look at what goals they have and work backwards to find what metrics they have and they need to go over so that first question that up there actually just says what do we want to know because when you're dealing with metrics and you're dealing with statistics there's a tendency to see spreadsheet after spreadsheet after spreadsheet I use Google data studio and I just put everything on one page if the metrics are on one page I can look at them every day and know is what I'm working on going in the right direction so we start with what do we want to know and for this particular client was how are people finding our website pretty standard question and then we say well how are we going to find that so in most mindsets you go into Google analytics and you pull out one of the metrics and you look at it and you create a spreadsheet and you track it over time for this one we actually looked at three or four different pieces of information in Google analytics and combined them within data studio which is why data studio is really nice because then we could see this kind of aggregate number that was on there and then the next one is what will we do with the answers so you've got your question you've got your metric now what do you do with it Deming believed that you could have all the data you could have all the statistics you wanted but if it ended there did you know good so what are your next steps you're looking at all this information you're saying okay here's how they're finding our website great now what and you keep doing that iteratively every week, every month, every quarter remove the barriers that rob people of the joy behind their jobs people get into careers because they love what they're doing and they want to go to work I have never met an employee who did not want to do an amazing job ever some of them were not doing amazing job but they all wanted to do amazing jobs and most of the things that kept them from having an amazing time doing their job were things that were set up by the company so the example I have here is Coach Leatherware and when you're dealing with retail you're dealing with commission and how many of you have gone to a store and hard sales tactics you're like that person just wants their commission they're not even listening to me Coach where the average handbag is going to be around $400 for a purse their sales people do not get commission when you walk into a coach store each employee in that store has a specialty that they are assigned to the greeter is there to find out what are you looking for so they can direct you to that specialist and they do not get a commission if you sell, if that you buy that bag from them what ends up happening is there are store goals and you want to get those goals you want to encourage your sales people to do good things but what happens is if the store meets its goal everyone gets the commission so you can have an employee that had a bad month that month because their mother got sick and they had to take time to take care of them and they weren't really all in their head when they were there but as a team they get to work together and pull that up and say okay we're going to get our store bonus this month and we're going to get it through and that's one of the examples of they get to really do a good job at what they're doing and sell a lot of good stuff and have fun going in and doing something that's a greater goal institute a rigorous program of education and self-improvement so I'm back to Jenny's ice cream because I really really like their ice cream but I also really really like that she is not a business person and she's running this hugely successful business she was an art major and then she wanted to be a perfumer and then she discovered ice cream because she also really really likes ice cream but one of the things her company does is they have weekly lunch and learn sessions all their employees take part and they don't have to do it on anything work related they can come in and teach whatever they want whatever they're passionate about they could come in and teach something on rock climbing but they all sit down as a company and learn something new and I always thought that was kind of neat because you know you start talking to your co-workers and you're like you know about this oh that's really cool we're gonna have to get together over drinks sometime and hear more about it and then you never do this is that perfect way to start getting your organization to be able to learn and just get in the mindset of never stop learning put everyone in the company to work accomplishing the transformation so often management comes in and says we have a new thing that we're doing a new initiative and then it's up to the employees to keep it going this has got to be through everyone if the management doesn't buy into what they're telling the employees to do it's not going to work so again no example on this one because I figured it was pretty self-explanatory we're at 5.45 so we've got 15 minutes if you have any questions be glad to answer any of them for you it's more comments and questions one is that the whole practice of continuous delivery and software that we know of today before anybody in IT thought of continuous delivery it was really Deming's work was really at the foundation of that the people that started doing CD that we know as CD they were like had Deming's at the root so there's kind of a context the other comment is I don't think Deming's is necessarily directly mentioned but in there's a This American Life episode on Numie in the MMI the Fremont auto plant that was taken over by Toyota in the 1970s and it's a super cool validation of a lot of the stuff that you talked about is that the one where you could see the difference they found the difference in the manufacture between the Japanese plant and the one here they were shutting down the Numie plant was the worst performing GM plant in North America and it was being closed down because of that and the Japanese took over because the Congress imposed import quotas and they had to start manufacturing in the United States and so they took this deal and GM gave them their worst plant and they said here's the plant you can fire all the workers now that you're coming in and Toyota said we want your workers and GM was like you don't want these people right these are the worst terrible anywhere and Toyota just said no we'll take everybody and you go from there it's an awesome episode it's really really cool and that's kind of what I noticed when I said I've never met an employee who did not want to do an amazing job and that's just it it's usually employees that are trapped in some sort of system that they may not even know how to articulate to their management this is a problem and I'm really struggling and sometimes it has nothing to do with work like I said you know one employee just needed an extra hour to be able to go out and take care of some personal things that's a little low I know I can fix that it seems like inherent in the system is this idea that every you don't really think about firing workers are evaluating like everyone you just try to find the way that they can be successful I mean is evaluating firing people is that ever part of the system or not really? It is I think the first step is acknowledging some of these other things in situations that I have seen there's often this kind of jump to we have a low performing employee and they're just not doing very well and we've tried to put them on employee improvement plans and it's just not working but we've never looked at how can we kind of tweak their work environment to make sure that they are doing what they can do in the best way that they can do it so yes people are still going to get fired people still have to be managed in a certain way and put on performance improvement plans but I think sometimes as managers we have to just step back and shift our perspective a little bit and say before we go straight to that disciplinary part are we putting the wrong measures on them can we tweak what they're working on a little bit and measure that a little bit better so that they can feel that they are doing a little bit better job because honestly it is demoralizing if you've ever been a job and you can't seem to keep getting ahead and you reach the point where you're just like well why am I even doing this so yeah there's still going to be people fired and still employee improvement plans but kind of shifting that a little bit to kind of say how can we make this go in a little different direction especially so they can leave with dignity as well because there's a perfect fit to get them out there somewhere and it just wasn't us this might be a tangential question but is there a limit to how much process you can impose on a team probably anything to say about that probably because then you get down into micro-management I would think when I've worked with it I usually try to identify key because I'm usually working with customers those touch points that I have with my customers for other departments or places it might be different places in the process but I would say you run the risk of getting a little micro-managing if you say alright we need to measure every single part of that in there that would get a little too much anyone else for that one I'd probably say Toyota is probably the best example of where this is implemented really highly at Toyota I would assume that it's across the board but just in different ways he was saying when they came over to take over that plant here they brought that entire system and kind of spread it out there but Toyota is probably the best example of how they do it yeah if anyone else comes up with any more questions feel free to talk to me I'll also be here tomorrow I think we're going to go out and have a few drinks so maybe we'll see you guys out there if you guys have any ideas or comments I'd love to hear them thank you so much it was an organization they did it it's all great everything and one of the reasons it failed it was an organization they showed me the rest of this they did it's a weak point yeah yeah yeah cool this by the way it's a short engineering organization it's a big project I'm glad I'm telling you my homework I agree I agree I agree I agree I agree yeah are you from DC area are you willing to travel in okay let me give you my card yes email me and I will the person who's doing session selection should fill you in on the process and everything okay okay giant yeah it always frustrates me some of those I love this topic but it's also something with some things that we can think about at any time we don't want to do that well if we're not sharing information between us absolutely thank you for volunteering to be some of my workers there is a special TV a special TV that you'll bring to our company just to make sure that they don't burn but if you want to that's good but on the screen they go out there so