How to  win the War on Waste in 90 days?

Having read the book, you can now ask me again: “How can I win the War on Waste in 90 Days?”

First of all, you sign up with me.[1]  Or do it on your own with a consulting phone support from me.  Or you just do it and if you get in trouble, call me.

It really is pretty easy to do.

I also have training manuals that you can buy to follow the program.

Calendar    Action to be Accomplished.

Day 1         Just get started on an 8 week program (4 days a week)
Class Day 1 - During these  first 16 workdays each team goes thru the War on Waste 6 steps.  It isn’t a lot of time but it is enough time.  It isn’t about being precise; it is totally about making your point.

Day 29       Presentations to management:
Class Day 17 (Note that the Calendar day is a running clock, while class day is only while an employee is in class)  - All participating employees make their presentations to the CEO or local managing director.

Just listen to the rest of the process and you will appreciate how direct and simple this whole process is.  Just focus.  Best, Len

[1] Len Bertain, Bertain Consulting Group, len@bertain.com, Cell: 510-520-8011.

1. Begin the 6 Steps of the War on Waste! Of course, that is what this whole process is about.   Start it up and stand back.  This is really a fun process.
2. Use the tools of the War on Waste. Tools of the War on Waste were explained throughout the book. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 describe a number of tools that we use extensively as we deliver the War on Waste. 
3. Check in often with each team personally. Do this before they do their presentations. You need time to digest their suggestion and maybe even to think of things to make their project work better and more cost effectively.d
4. Push the teams. People who have done the War on Waste with my remote support have all said that they didn’t push the teams hard enough to get their projects ready for the presentation day. 
5. Integrate your Mission Statement. You want to follow the guide defined in the process. Each idea needs to be weighed against the Mission Statement. 
6. Integrate 5/67 tThinking into your daily routine. We absolutely believe that the 5/67 Rule is an important tool to be used in key management decisions. Understand what I wrote about it earlier and take it seriously. 
7. Set up the TKC. As I noted earlier, I don’t care what you call it but set up a center where ideas can be collected. The concepts that are described in Chapter 9 may help you set it up. Just do it. 

I hope you find this book of value, but I still have one more task to do, and that is to show you the time line of How You Win the War on Waste in 90 Days.

Have you ever done a company like ours?

This is one of the most interesting questions that I get asked.  The answer is pretty easy.  Probably not or if I did one like yours, it still wasn’t yours.  And that doesn’t matter a bit.

The War on Waste is about fixing a company’s processes.  It doesn’t make any difference what business you are in, the first question that we ask in the program is, “What do you do here to make money?”

That is what determines waste in the company.  If for instance you are a bank or finance company, this is not an easy answer.  Do you make it only when you take in savings of your customers and invest them?  Or are there other things that you do?  

So getting clear on this is the very first thing you do in the War on Waste.  Once you know how the company makes money, then the whole process flows from there.

Other questions: 

When can I ever do the War on Waste?

How much does it cost?

Of course there are a hundred questions that we get asked but the bottom line is the target of 50 to 1 for small companies and 100 to 1 for large companies worth it.  If we can do that all day long, the War on Waste is a good deal.

The War on Waste creates the ideas and a process to get ideas into play.  But it still requires a formal process to get new ideas into the system.  Once the War on Waste is completed, the company still wants new ideas to continue.  When the War on Waste is over, the implemented ideas need to be tracked.  That is achieved with the Tribal Knowledge Council, the subject of this chapter.

The TKC is the control point for the input of all ideas.  Its purpose is to be the clearing-house for change and new ideas.  It serves as a touchstone for the CEO and his Executive team.  They use it to keep track of ideas as they move through the system. 

It is not managed as much as it is a monitor.  It is an automated function with a dashboard.  The dashboard tracks the progress of results.

A word of caution here: this council has no direct authority.  Nor should it.  It merely facilitates the process of putting ideas into play.  If authority is given, it will create two problems.  One, it will conflict with line management authority.  And two, it will create an artificial elite status.  This will dampen participation.

Just a note: I wrote this book 10 years ago and had not gotten my on-line business going.  With the on-line business, there is a demand for an opportunity to participate in the program and so the management of the ideas using the TKC is no longer required.  The system morphs in response to new ideas and continuously does so.  It has been an amazing process.  Try it out: email me at len@copsolvers.com.  Best, Len

 
This is not a chapter to compete with other treatises on strategy.  There are a number of great tomes on the subject.  This chapter is merely to place it in context within the War on Waste.  

The War on Waste led to the idea that strategy became aligned with process in the program.  We referenced Michael Porter,[1] who is the pre-eminent strategy scholar in the United States.  But this observation is not Porter’s.  It is ours.  

 This came out of our field research.  It was a remarkable outcome.  And we didn’t see it coming.  But it happened with all of our clients.  Now, it serves as one of the anchor tenets of the paradigm.  We would like to explore that a bit.  

Who cares about this?  Why is this important?  To answer these questions let us get back to basics.

[1] Op. Cit., Porter, p 11 

Over the years, we used tools of the trade in unique ways.  We borrowed tools from friends.  And we made up our own tools.  Some of these are worth noting. 

120/20 Rule of Profits.

There is a corollary to the 80/20 Rule.  A business “turn around” consulting friend showed us this rule.  We have all seen it.  It is the 120/20 Rule of Profits. 

·      120% of a company’s profits come from 20% of the customers.  

·      120% of profits from 20% of the salesmen.

·      120% of the profits from 20% of the products or services.   

We call it the Bibeault 120/20 Rule of Profits, in honor of our consultant friend who pointed it out to us.[1]  This rule is a good tool to develop an effective customer-driven strategy.  It allows us to focus attention on those customers, salesmen or products that deliver the most profit.  It may also help understand why.  Why are some more profitable?

The 5/67 Rule ­(1 Sigma)

The 5/67 Rule is a subset of the 20/80 Rule or 80/20 Rule.  We discovered it during the War on Waste.  We were always in a hurry to get projects completed and we didn’t have time to look at 20% of the problem demanded by the 20/80 Rule.  But we did have time to look at 5% of the problem.  When we did that we kept seeing that we were getting about 60 to 70% of the targeted benefit.  We called it the 5/67 Rule without really knowing much about it.  It just seemed to work but it didn’t make sense.  

Yes/No Charts
Our unique tool to measure and guide problem behavior (like things happening late).

World Record Reports
A unique way to achieve continuous improvement.

[1] Don Bibeault is a venture capital investor now.  In his former life, he was management consultant. He specialized in turning around distressed companies.  

 
There are a number of ways to define this term.  We define it simply as “what customers are willing to pay for.”  In any business, everyone needs to understand why the business exists and how it makes money.  As we do the War on Waste, we ask a very simple question, “What does this company do to add value?”  The answer to this simple question serves as the basis for the War on Waste.

So the question “what is waste” is intimately tied to the company’s value-added activity.  There is an interesting thing that happens in the War on Waste.  As employees start to identify waste, they are reflecting the effectiveness of a company’s ability to deliver value.  All those things that occur in a company that keep the value from being added efficiently are wastes.  During the War on Waste, we look at a company’s value-added proposition very closely.  And the process for doing that is very thorough.

What we have found out is that very few employees of companies have any clue as to what the company does to add value.  When we ask a typical employee of a machine shop, “What does this company do to add-value?” it is amazing that most of them have never thought about it.  After a few minutes of discussion, someone notes that it is obvious that a machine shop makes money only one-way: when chips are being produced.  But then some wise guy asks if they are adding value when they do assemblies for their customers.  Of course, they do.  Customers are paying a small fee for the assembly.  And then one of the ladies in the quality department asks “what about our military customers that also pay to inspect their parts?”  Best, Len Bertain

We made an observation early on.  It wasn’t a life changing experience but it was part of many of our conversations.  We noted that the Mission Statement is rarely involved in decision-making.  Once a few bright MBAs put a Mission Statement together, it goes somewhere to die.  It just isn’t involved in the daily routine.

So we wondered why?  Why is so much time spent on developing a “Mission Statement” and it isn’t actively used in running the business?  It is almost as if it were part of a checklist for executives.  It is the third thing on the list every CEO must do: Do we have a Mission Statement?  If so, “go to the next item.  If not, make one.”

We actually thought that many of the Mission Statements that we had seen were pretty good.  They weren’t perfect but they were good starting points.  So why weren’t they used to guide business decisions.  They could somehow be part of a touchstone that related a decision to the Mission of the company.    Enjoy.  Len

The No Blame motto was developed to encourage employees to come up with ideas.  It serves as their protection from the Black Knights that fight change in the organization.  But there is a downside.  When an employee invokes “No Blame” there is no accountability and that’s why we came up with the idea of “No Excuses”.  

 When an employee team fails to measure up to its capabilities, they accept the consequences and report the data honestly.  They do so with the understanding that “No Blame” is the operating philosophy of the company.  And that is what we want.  However, a manager has the right to investigate the reason for the low performance under the banner of “No Excuses.”  In other words, the workers use “No Blame” and the managers invoke “No Excuses.”  We call this “accountability.”  Enjoy the read.  Best, Len

The War on Waste (waste is anything in the company that keeps money from being made) begins with an idea. 

It doesn’t matter the size of the company, if you want to find out what’s wrong with the company, listen to an employee’s idea.  The idea is not just any idea; it is an idea that identifies a waste in one of the business processes.   

In our definition, the War on Waste is a company-wide affair.  Everyone participates.  And all parts of the company are open to review.  No part is spared.  It is one of those times that it is OK to pass judgment on the inefficiencies of a neighboring department.  The War on Waste methodology brings teams together of different work groups to look for waste.  It guides these project teams on how to analyze a waste by finding out how much inefficiency it contributes to the company in actual dollars.  In fact, we believe so strongly in this concept that we trademarked “No Blame.”  The trademark symbol is intended to symbolize to our clients and their employees that we are going to drive change at their company and we do it by invoking “No Blame.”  It is change without reprisal.  Best, Len

The War on Waste consists of the 6 steps noted in the previous chapter.  We would like to expand on them a little bit here.

If the program is a company initiative, the CEO or top Exec needs to announce the campaign and require that everyone get on board. 

If it starts with a single team, working a project through the Internet eWOW program, the team can influence the company to follow suit and get others involved.

Engage – En Garde!

Phase 0:  House Cleaning/Fast Cash Generation.

It begins when all employees engage in an urgent house cleaning.  This is the War on Waste.  This program looks at hurdles to the delivery of value.  It looks for low hanging wastes that are easy to fix.  Employees learn to answer the question: “What is the value-added product or service that they sell?”  This question creates focus on the client and how to best deliver high value products or services.  Anything that is not creating value is waste.  The goal of this process is to find and get rid of waste.  This will create a great cash flow, focus on the core, and improve Know How.  And it creates a whole bunch of other benefits.  Listen in to find out what they are.  Best, Len

The story began twenty-nine years ago, as I stood in front of a group of employees who had been forced to attend a class I had been contracted to deliver.  It was a training program that introduced a small manufacturing company to the principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS).  The Toyota Production System is the basis of current Lean Manufacturing and 6-Sigma programs.  In essence, I was teaching a method for identifying and eliminating waste in business processes.  To illustrate my thoughts about how this system should be applied to American industry, I had prepared over 160 slides, including charts, graphs, illustrations, text and checklists. I was to show these slides in conjunction with a series of interactive lectures scheduled to run for ten weeks at the rate of three one-hour sessions per week. As with all of my projects, the entire company was required to attend—everyone from the custodial personnel to the CEO.  But about 15 minutes into the class, I hit a snag.  Listen in to find out what it was and how I charted a new course for my consulting business.  For you listening pleasure.  Best, Len

 
In the Toyota Production System, Taiichi Ohno, its developer, identified 7 major wastes:
·      Waste of over production (largest waste) – making too much of a product and not being able to sell it.  Idle inventory is a waste.
·      Waste of time on hand (waiting) – of course this would be waste because while a worker is not adding value, he or she is costing the company money.
·      Waste of transportation – while products are moving around the factory floor, no value is being added to them and that is a big waste.
·      Waste of processing itself – when Taiichi Ohno looked at many of Toyota processes, he found that they were not very efficient in delivering value.  They were wasteful processes.
·      Waste of stock at hand – if you have stock in inventory waiting for production.  That is a big waste.  It is the foundation of just in time to deliver material to a work process just before it is needed – “Just in Time – JIT.”
·      Waste of movement – whenever you look at a factory and see a worker or a pallet of materials moving around a factory, that is a waste.  People can’t add value walking around and material can’t have value added to it, if it is moving around the factory.
·      Waste of making defective products – this is almost obvious but it was the foundation of the thinking of Total Quality Management (TQM) a number of years ago.  Phil Crosby and a number of quality gurus became phenomenal successes by focusing their efforts on reducing quality defects.  This has, in turn, led to the current 6-Sigma craze.

These are all well and good but…they don’t cover all the areas of waste in a business.  They certainly can be guides for how a piece of paper moves through an office.  If it waits at any stage, it is a waste of movement.  If a worker has a pile of work at her desk and the others in the office have no pile of work, maybe there is an imbalance of work in the process.   Listen in to find out how we have broken the process down to make it an enjoyable and profitable process for all involved.  Enjoy.  Best, Len Bertain

The observation of the War on Waste Paradox has given me a chance to revisit the story that I originally wrote over 17 years ago.  I made several modifications but the story still stands up as a good example of what happens when we do the War on Waste.  I hope you have enjoyed it.

There is a funny comment by Mr. Grimes in this chapter.  He is complaining that he couldn’t get information out of the assemblers.  If you listen to that you think that he is stupid if he couldn’t get an answer to that question.  This is where secretive Tribal Knowledge is tricky.  You don’t need to know why but lots of stuff makes that happen: Mr. Grimes could ask out of curiosity and not have a sense of urgency and gets distracted each time he asks.  You could come up with a million reasons why he couldn’t get the answer.  But as you will find out after the War on Waste, those questions are a lot easier to answer.

I loved it because he really understood what WOW was about.  In our story, Mr. Grimes, the CEO, is the General in his company’s War on Waste.  He had to deal with Mike Cain who was his Black Knight from the beginning. His behavior in leaving an employee out in the cold was inexcusable and was a rebellious treasonous offense.  

Now Mr. Grimes is driving the train and everyone is getting on board.  Mr. Grimes is doing what we want leaders to do. He is respecting his people as partners in his business; he is giving them a sense of purpose; and he is driving the strategic direction of the company in response to the operational input from the workers.  And more important, he is there to witness the profound changes that are taking place in his company.

In this chapter, we also see 2 separate discussion sessions between Dr. Elbie and Mr. Grimes on the subject of the War on Waste Paradox.  Mr. Grimes is starting to see the presence of the paradox corollaries but he is getting impatient to get to the answer.

We’ll make some progress in the next chapter.

Think of the War on Waste as an Energy Initiative.  It will take about three or four years for the War on Waste energy to be sustained.  When it nears the end of its energy cycle, a new energy initiative needs to be found.  

This is precisely what Jack Welch did at GE.  First there was the Work Out Initiative and that was followed by a number of new initiatives every four years or so. 

We have observed over and over that those in staff positions with their Tribal Knowledge integrated into the value-added process are very often fair game for big wastes.  And in most cases, that information is exposed as waste but maybe not as dramatic as in the situation at Quality Pump.  As we usually do the process map, we expose many of the staff function Tribal Knowledge steps on the map.  As we work through the line positions where value-added operations are done, Tribal Knowledge gets into the details of how a job is done.  So we don’t have much success exposing wastes there until we dig into them with project teams.

 I wanted the listener to see how we have evolved our program and our view of how it really should work.  When we were doing the program earlier, we were running without a compass.  No one had ever done what we were doing.  Of course, that made it fun.  And we were interpreting the results that we were seeing with a limited scope of what was really happening.  When we started with the on-line system, it became very clear that we had to make the interface to the CEO much easier and useful.  And we did that with a few stabs and we finally got it right.  We think.  But our experiences are ephemeral in that we are learning all the time and our conclusions of what we are doing are both changing and improving the process.  So don't ever get comfortable with anything you see or experience in this program because it is almost magic.  Just go with it.  

Step 3: Manage Innovation. In order to ensure a continuous flow of ideas, the CEO must agree to implement a system of innovation to make sure that process improvement and new business ideas are encouraged.  The Quantum Leap Company establishes the CRB  and creates a Portfolio of Innovation as the storage location for ideas in the various stages of implementation.  The CRB will be responsible for supporting innovation ideas for new market or business opportunities.  In our new Internet system, if the CEO, continues to pay for the on-line implementation of Problem Solving and does so more than a year, the Quantum Leap Company will  then exist.

We have spent a lot of time trying to understand the company that evolves from this initial work of the War on Waste that we call the Quantum Leap Company.  As we have created over 20 Quantum Leap companies, we have observed the following characteristics of each.  And our Internet clients have all (100% of them) become Quantum Leap Companies and follow the following steps.  That they do, was an amazing discovery.

Step 1: Lead the WOW Program. The CEO agrees to participate, lead the War on Waste Program (you could elect to use any number of programs that encourage the input from employees in a change initiative) and follow the procedures of change defined by it. The CEO leads this change initiative, the Phase 0 initiative, and does not pass the responsibility to others.  Certainly others may be commissioned to help but the responsibility falls directly on the CEO.

Best, Len Bertain

We talked in the chapter about 5/67 Analysis.  In the real world of the War on Waste, 5/67 Analysis is what we call a “forcing function.” In the hands of an engineer, it serves as the forcing function to define the 5% of the features that give 67% of the benefit.  It forces rapid prototyping.  Today, the goal of the engineering of a technology company is time to market.   By designing to that goal, 5/67 Analysis drives the engineering organization to think thru the features to give maximum benefit to the expected users.  

We use the 5/67 Analysis as the way to do management training, strategy development, human resources optimization, etc.  It permeates all of our thinking about how to run a company.  In short, it is the most powerful tool that we have at our disposal.  My friend, George Sibbald, is writing a book about that and he has asked me to look over his shoulder.

As you read this chapter, you get a feeling that Quality Pumps is going to be OK.  Mr. Grimes is relaxing a bit and the employees are starting to see light at the end of the tunnel, and it isn’t a bear carrying a lantern.  However, the job isn’t done yet.  Mr. Grimes will have to see all these ideas through to completion and there will be some pain felt before that is accomplished.

We get a new take on Tribal Knowledge when Phil, a non-college educated consultant joins Dr. Elbie.  There is a prejudice against this in most companies.  It is the rare employee or person who can rise above that in our corporate world.  Only the super-educated rise to the top.  How can such an individual contribute to Tribal Knowledge.

The doctors, in their unique Tribal Knowledge system, wanted to be businessmen on top of being doctors.  After all, they were highly educated.  As a group they didn’t want to spend more than $10 per hour to have the room cleaned up. When I suggested that they put a surgery clean-up crew together, the doctors argued that it was too expensive.  

Then I asked them if they knew how much revenue was made from that room per hour.  When they thought through spending $50 for an hour’s worth of work from a team of cleanup personnel versus $2000 of revenue that could be generated, it was a “no brainer” to make the decision.  They followed the SMED process in detail.  And it worked.  Can you think of any applications of SMED in your business?

 Enjoy.  

Best,

Len Bertain

 The message here is that once secretive Tribal Knowledge is uncovered, unless there is a No Blame release of finger pointing, the path to a clean solution is difficult.  We got the scheduler and the shop foreman to become part of the solution by contributing ideas to the team.  The end result was getting to the root cause of the problem and a complete change in the scheduling of jobs.

I would like to make a comment here about the CEO who caused the creation of the problem in the first place.  When we dig into the source of many of these Tribal Knowledge wastes, they have their roots in casual comments of the CEO.  The CEO might say something like, “Gee that looks like an expensive way to do that.” Or “Why are all those hot jobs not making it to the floor?”   We saw the way the second comment created the problem discussed in this chapter.  The CEO was responsible for the hot jobs problem from a comment that he inadvertently made to the foreman and the scheduler.  

In a funny story that an associate of mine experienced, a CEO asked him to find out why the production process had slowed down so much.  Upon investigation, it took my friend about 15 minutes to find the problem.  It turns out that the CEO had made a casual comment about spending too much on something and so the CFO instituted a process to make sure he saw all PO’s and the Sales VP had to get a copy as well, etc and it took forever for an order to hit the floor from receipt in sales.

My advice to CEOs when they walk the floor: Be careful!  Best, Len Bertain

Similar situations in which discontent has led to significant change, even transformation, have happened throughout history.  In Peters’ view, and in mine, just about every major business improvement occurs for the same reason, because someone is angry about something.  What we’ve noticed during the War on Waste is that if someone is angry about a part of his/her job, then there is usually a waste associated with that.  

In one company, three teams in a particular class were rolling along nicely with good wastes that needed to be eliminated.  At the fourth table, the team was just sitting there not talking.  So I went over to them and asked what was going on. The informal spokesman said that no one wanted to contribute.  I asked him if he did?  He said sure, but he wasn’t going to go it alone.  I said I understood.  Out of the blue I asked him, “Does anything in your job, piss you off?”  “Of course,” he said.  “I get really mad when I have to change a setup to run a rush job (or hot job) that is still sitting around days later.”  Just at that time, the CEO came in.  He said they had solved the hot-job problem a couple of months ago.  I pointed out that it didn’t sound like it. I gave him a yellow, ruled pad and directed him to go out with the team and write down all jobs still sitting in the shop that were hot two weeks ago.  The hot jobs had red tags.  After 15 minutes, the CEO and the team came back with a page full of stalled hot jobs.  Apparently, the problem had not been solved.  The team now had their project and it turned out to be a good one because the CEO was now firmly engaged and committed to make it work.

The story of Sully, the plater, is again one of those real situations that cropped up at one of our clients.  In fact, it was the inability to get the truck to leave on time that created the first Yes/No chart.  The owner’s son couldn’t get up in time to inspect the parts going to the plater.  The employees knew the problem and who was guilty but I didn’t.  So when we posted the Yes/No chart and the president asked for an explanation, there was never a red X on the chart again.

So don't lose faith that Dr. Elbie doesn't know what he is doing.  He does and he is a master at this program.  And so you will see.  Best, Len B

I happened to be at the table when this happened and the look on the faces of the two machinists was priceless.  It turns out that the receptionist had grown up in a family of five boys.  Their family had a machine shop and she learned how to operate machine shop equipment at an early age.  But she wanted to raise a family and she had.  She was now in her mid-forties and took the job in an environment that she knew.  From that point forward, her life at the company changed.  She moved into operations and became an instant success.  My message is this: listen to anyone who has an idea.  It just may surprise you.  Best, Len

In this chapter, we delve into the Process Map and it is a mind blower.  An interesting thing about doing a process map is that all the hidden components of the Tribal Knowledge get exposed.  And because the people manning the process are not stupid, we get great ideas to address the solutions of these undocumented processes.  The reason that there are over 60 steps in the process map (undocumented until the class began looking into it) is that no one was controlling and measuring the process to see all this stuff.  When you go through any Process Map you expose a lot of the secretive Tribal Knowledge.  And so as the company goes forward, employees will see problems in the process and document the appropriate steps to improve these problems. 

In the War on Waste, Mr. Grimes is making Roland uncomfortable because he has his own personal agenda that he is protecting and it is gradually getting exposed as keeping sales from rolling in to the company.  In most cases of people trying to protect their Tribal Knowledge, when you begin to post measurements of productivity or sales results or any metric for all to see, the underlying secrets of Tribal Knowledge get exposed and become vetted.  Employees don’t mind giving up their undocumented processes to the company, in exchange for recognition of their contribution to an idea that eliminates a waste of $100,000.  When they stand up before the CEO while delivering their proposal, they do so with great pride as a member of a team that is helping the company survive.  Enjoy.  Len Bertain

But in the War on Waste, the common cause is defining and solving a waste that keeps value from being created. In every War on Waste project, each team is looking for $100,000 of annual waste that can be fixed for less than $2,000. That is a significant common cause.  
Best, Len Bertain

Creativity is making the complicated simple.

The reason that we developed “No Blame” is that it is easier for the change process to proceed if everyone is able to save face with no reprisal.  People are hard to replace so we give them an out with No Blame. No Blame allows employees to save face.  At some point, we find that these obstinate resistors can and often will get in the way of the overall objective of the change program: eliminating waste to improve profits. 

So they need to see that the process is good for the company and that overrides any personal issue that person might have to change.  Get on or get out.

In addition, the reason we focus on high ROI (50 to 1) projects with less than $2,000 cost is that they are small and fast.  Employees learn by doing.  They experience success and as such earn the respect of their leader. 

In the case of doing a train the trainer to do a change program, we will see how the Black Knights of the organization rise up to resist.  It just doesn’t work for a number of reasons that we will see over the course of the book.  The simplest example is seen here in Chapter 3.  Can you imagine a group of supervisors making the radical changes that we will encounter in this book.

The term “Black Knights” comes from a scenario in the Monty Python film, “Search for the Holy Grail.” In the movie, there is a scene in which a Black Knight is defending a bridge.  As King Arthur approaches, the Black Knight is engaged in battle with another knight.  Of course, the Black Knight wins, (he always wins!)  After the defeated knight is dispatched (killed), King Arthur approaches and beseeches the Black Knight to join him at Camelot.  Instead, the Black Knight challenges King Arthur to a duel when the king tries to cross the bridge. 

The Black Knight is a worthy title to the resistors of change.  And they will rise up throughout this book.

Enjoy,  Best, Len Bertain

I mention this because it has provided me a slick way to help clients get a better handle on both sales and change.  The Heath's point out that change is controlled by two parts of the brain: the logical part and the emotional part.  (Bear with me here, of course change is a lot more complicated than this but these thoughts are very useful in thinking through what is going on in both sales and change.)  We all know the situation.  We make a logical presentation to a client, cover all the issues and no deal.  On the other hand, the person that you are trying to move to change or to make a sale has a million reasons why not to buy: "it's not a good time of year," "I don't feel comfortable," etc.  You hear these arguments all the time and you can't see what to do.  

But the Heath's bring up a third part of the change or sales process and that is the path that the buyer or change target has to take.  It has to be an easy path to change.  There can be no uncertainty in what the person is buying into.

Here is the great insight that I got from the book.  The Heath's go on to give us an analogy that is very useful.  They look at the logical part of the brain as the rider with the reins of the elephant, the emotional part of the brain.  So if you want to change you have to control the elephant.  And you design the path to change as being easy for the elephant to follow.  It's that simple.   Create an environment to incubate ideas, action and change.

If you got nothing else from the blurb, that is a goldmine to help think thru how you change an organization.  Once you get the employees moving so that they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, the change process is amazing.

Listen on.  Best,  Len Bertain.

John Steinbeck

East of Eden*

 The phone rang abruptly at 2:30 in the morning. I bolted up and grabbed it.  My wife was alarmed by this disturbance and sat up in a daze. She brushed the sand from her eyes and watched me answer the phone. It was my father and he had bad news. Across the hall, in his room, the baby stirred and then whimpered with the interruption of his sleep

My friend Charlie had just been killed in an automobile crash after a heavy bout with the bottle. According to the Highway Patrol he had hit a tree near our old drinking establishment. He died shortly after arriving at the hospital.

Charlie and I had worked at Osgood’s—a local manufacturing company—as machinists, and life had been pretty good. We hunted together and fished every lake and stream within 300 miles of our homes. Although he was closer to my father’s age, he had become my friend at work and at play.

Our lives changed when Osgood’s closed.  We were suddenly out of work and that was a miserable experience. My wife Sandy was pregnant, and having a baby while your husband is unemployed is not a prospect for happiness. We were barely surviving.........

That's the beginning of the book.  Enjoy and best, Len Bertain

* Steinbeck, John East of Eden Penguin Books, 1986 p. 171

But why call it “The War on Waste Paradox?”  What does Tribal Knowledge have to do with The War on Waste?  It turns out that effective change requires an honest engagement of all people and a consequent understanding of the company Tribal Knowledge.  And that observation is one of the major discoveries of this process.

Tribal Knowledge is the collective wisdom of the organization.  It is the sum of all the knowledge.  It is the knowledge used to deliver, to support, or to develop value for customers.  But it is also all the knowledge that is wrong, imprecise, and useless. It is knowledge of the informal power structure and process or how things really work and how they ought to.  It is knowledge of who constrains the process and who facilitates it.  It is the knowledge that is squirreled away by employees who feel a need to protect their jobs by not sharing the information needed to do a job.  This is part of the totality of the Tribal Knowledge.  For example, it is the knowledge and the experience of the assembler who won’t tell others how he can put those two casings together (when no one else can).  That knowledge is his job security.  But more importantly, it is the untapped knowledge that remains unused or abused.  This thought serves as one of the themes of this book.  

We call this book “The War on Waste Paradox” because effectively engaging the rank and file is contrary to most corporate organizations and structures as well as outside the skill set of most managers.  It is the actions of the executives and managers that create the various paradoxes noted in the book.  And it is these same actions that create the grand paradox. 

As employees become engrossed in solving their problems during the War on Waste, all aspects of the company are examined.  When Tribal Knowledge is challenged, it is done so under the protection of No Blame, a safe haven for generating ideas.  We trademarked the “No Blame” logo seen in the book, to illustrate to employees just how important the ideas generated during the War on Waste are to the company.  They are so important that we want to generate “change without reprisal.”

As a tribute to the fact that the book comes pretty close to reflecting reality, I’ll share this story.  I sent copies of the book’s final draft to some of my client CEOs.  I scheduled lunch with three of them to discuss

• The Hubris Meter (don't ever put on the Hubris Hat or be the Strutting Rooster)
• Trade Show Rationale (unintended consequence)
• A final thought (simplicity but most of all clarity)

Best, Len Bertain 
510-520-8011 
len@Bertain

• The Scientific Paradigm
• Energy
• Entropy
• Non-linear thinking
• A Scientific Attitude

Enjoy,

Len Bertain
510-520-8011

• Simplification as a Strategy - this is a new way to look at creating strategy
• Sense of Urgency - why things get done
• Urgency Switch - pushing this switch activates an emergency situation, that everyone is prepared to respond to 
• Work (Definition) - this helps set the stage for identifying problems
• Creating the Quantum Leap Company - we don't define it like anyone else because as a physicist the quantum leap is something special
• The Quantum Nudge - to make the leap, a special condition has to be met.