Welcome, everybody, to podcast number 261. Are you implementing lean when you should be creating it? Stay with us. This is the Elevate Construction Podcast, delivering remarkable content for workers, leaders, and companies in construction, wanting to take their next step.

Get ready to step out of your comfort zone with Jason Schroeder, as he encourages you to do better, live a remarkable life, and expect more. Let's go! Welcome, everybody. Tonight, we've got Dean Reed with us.

He's famous. We call him Lean Dean. Dean, will you say hi to everybody for me? Sorry, I interrupted you.

I got so excited that you're on. I interrupted you. You were going to say something, Dean.

Sorry. No, I want to thank you for inviting me into your blog, into your world, Jason. I'm a, as you know, I'm a big Jason Schroeder fan.

And just in disbelief about your tremendous knowledge, experience, feel for the business, especially for actually building. And so I am honored to be here today. Well, thank you very much.

That means a lot. And I'll ask Dean, I'll ask you to do a little bit of an intro, but just a point of fact, when I was at DPR, Dean introduced me to a number of topics. I was doing what I called one-piece flow scheduling, and then Dean taught me tact planning, and it's what I would consider the fullest form, introduced me to advanced last planner techniques, a number of other things, and it's just been fantastic.

And the other thing is, and this might sound like false praise, but it isn't, any of the, or a couple of the purchases that you have for integrating project delivery, I guarantee you at least 10 or 15 of those are mine sharing those books. I've used that for project startup and for outlines over and over, you and your co-authors. So real quick for the audience, Dean, for anybody that may not know you, I don't think that there's probably a lot that don't, but Dean, would you give us a quick intro background to yourself, please? Well, I'll just run through it really quickly and then we can unpack if we need to.

So Dean Reed, UC Santa Cruz bachelor's degree in psychology, Peace Corps volunteer, journeyman, carpenter, welder, millwright, metal fabrication contractor, construction planner, scheduler, early adopter of lean, construction and virtual design and construction, leader of DPR's lean and IPD practices for nearly 24 years. And the last planner system planning software patent holder, co-author of the book, Integrating Project Delivery, which you just mentioned. And I was really incredibly fortunate to be a recipient of the LCI 2020 Pioneer Award.

So that's me in a nutshell. Yeah. And you were the, I know you get asked to speak and to present and talk a lot.

You were on the last planner conference. You were the keynote speaker this last time for the lean construction blog, weren't you? Yeah. Yes, I was.

I think that was just because they ran out of really good people and, you know, they had one slot left to fill. Well, that's super humble there. Well, thank you for all that you do.

I know that you know that I'm not being trite and insincere when I say that. You know that I attach a lot of ethics and morals to what we do. I feel like projects that are successful bless people's lives.

I mean, that's what it is to me. And when projects fail, it hurts people. So it's a big deal to me.

I've got a couple of things as we enter into this podcast and go through it. One of them, I'd like to ask you, Dean, what are you excited about in life right now? Let's hear that. Well, you know, honestly, I am very, I'm like you.

I am absolutely passionate about building for the same reason you are. I think it's an incredible opportunity that we've had to be part of building the physical world that people live in, work in, enjoy sports in. Not that I don't appreciate nature, but, you know, nature is there for us.

And I think we have to just learn to honor nature and nurture nature. We don't get to build nature. We can do things that really help nature.

But, you know, we are the only species that we know of in the whole entire universe that can actually build our environment, create it. And that's just an incredible experience. And I want us to be better at it.

That's, I think, why I'm here on this earth, honestly, Jason. So I think we are very similar in that way. And I think that's maybe why we get along pretty well and appreciate what each of us does.

And of course, we don't all do the same thing. There's lots of opportunity in this business. So, you know, I love to travel with my wife.

I love to see the world. I love to see just different places. When I drive around my hometown, I'm always looking at the houses and the buildings every time I go on a new street.

So I'm a very curious person. So traveling makes a lot of sense. Basically being in places where I haven't been before.

I love people. And we're just all of us collectively and individually are very just fascinating. So I'm excited about a lot.

And I'm glad that I am. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, I like that.

I heard a quote really young that said, You don't become old until your regrets take the place of your dreams. And if you keep that outlook, you'll be 120 years old and never even be old. It's 120 years young.

I think that's a really good outlook on life, and it's sincere. At the end of the day, and just a little bit of insight, I sometimes wonder if people think on this podcast that I am over the top or faking it or whatever. And the answer is, no, this is what we love.

This is what we do. We're all people and teams. So I appreciate you sharing that.

So two more little bits of scaffolding before we start the podcast. At Elevate Construction, our focus is when it comes to, from a business standpoint, is project recovery, training in boot camps, and then a business and construction operations consulting. So that's how we pay the bills.

But just like Dean, we're passionate about doing anything to improve construction. So if you have a question you want us to answer or you want to attend a boot camp, any of you out there listening to this podcast, please let us know. One quick question for you, Dean, in addition, do you want to introduce some of the things that you provide now that you're full-time with your business or you want to wait? I really am not interested in that now.

I think what I provide is what we're talking about now. I think my value at this point in my career is to share insights and advice. My focus, Jason, is helping the next generation of lean thinkers and builders, which includes designers.

When I talk about building, I'm not just talking about contractors. I'm talking about everybody who's involved in this process and certainly our customers. So that's, I think, what I'm going to be doing for as long as I'm healthy enough to do that.

And that will take different forms. It'll be similar to, I mean, the business model will be very much consulting. And I'm just sort of painting my shingle now because I have been inside of a large organization for a long time, almost 24 years, and prior to that, too.

So that's where I'm at. Well, thank you for that. If anybody, obviously anyone listening to this podcast is going to connect with you.

So if anybody has specific questions for Dean, I'll route him his way. I absolutely love that. So I always promise to talk about, this is the last bit of scaffolding before we go on, I talk about listeners' feedback.

Here's feedback from one of our listeners. Thanks for your message. I responded to this individual, and he said, I purchased the tact and superintendent books when you release them.

I've been a sponge with all the material you've been putting out. I'm interested in some training and boot camps that will reach out once I settle into a role with a new company in the next couple of months. And so I get lots of messages like this.

I catalog them, and I release one each time we do a podcast, and that's every day. So let's get into it. We are going to talk about... And you're a topic I've never, ever, ever, ever heard this.

You had introduced me to the concept of possibly creating lean and not implementing it. So we're going to kick off a series of four questions here. And the first one is, what should listeners know about you? Well, I went through that quickly.

I think the thing that I'm proudest of is that I've actually been out there in the mud, out there with the tools in my hand, out there trying to, you know, meet the schedule, be safe, deliver a quality product. I've done quite a bit of concrete form work. That was what was available to me when I came into the Carpenters' Union in terms of work.

And I also taught myself... Well, I didn't teach myself. I learned welding. I actually transferred over into the mill rights, which is... Most people don't even know what a mill right is, but they're people who've set heavy machinery, you know, when you build an automobile plant.

I've worked on concrete cement plants. I've worked on wind tunnels as a mill right. There's the building itself, and then there's all the equipment that goes into it to actually make it what it is.

I've done that work too. So that's what I'm proudest of. So my experience spans single family home, multi-residential, lots and lots of commercial, even some industrial back in my mill right days.

So it's working with the tools, I think has really given me a perspective that I think is actually missing from a lot of construction management. Well, I totally agree. I was thinking... The comment that I was going to make, you said it so beautifully, I shouldn't repeat it, but that additional perspective, I think, helps.

I've noticed that the filter that we use when we try to understand project delivery, integration, lean, things like that, it has a big bearing on that, and so I think that's a valid point. I'll give you a quick little example. I used to come at Last Planner from a CPM perspective, and then I started to learn lean techniques and learn Scrum and learn some of these other methods, and so I come at Last Planner now from a different filter.

I absolutely feel like that's a valid point, and so with that experience, let me ask you a second question. What did you learn about lean construction, and you wrote the book, integrated, or you wrote with your co-authors, integrating project delivery. What did you learn about lean construction and integrated project delivery while you carried that banner at DPR? Well, I learned some important things, I think.

I learned that starting out by teaching tools and focusing on the how, which is what tools are about, is a dead end. Now, not to mean that it isn't valuable, but starting there, it would get you to a dead end fairly quickly. So what I learned is that people must know why they're using it.

They don't have to write a book, but in their mind, they have to know why they're using this tool. Think about that. Just think about any experience you've had working with tools.

You really have to know what this tool is good for and how to use that tool, yes. But why are you using that tool? So I learned that, and I learned that, I guess, the hard way, because when we started out on lean construction, I was an early adopter on the bleeding, I would say on the bleeding edge back in 1997. We only really had a tool, the last planner.

We didn't understand all that went into creating that. Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell were working from the late 1970s, all the way through the 80s, into the 90s. The last planner wasn't really described, it emerged.

I mean, it emerged and was described in 1993, and many of us were not paying attention at that time. But it had a long history before that. And so we didn't know that, we just focused on the tools and started teaching tools.

So I've also learned that lean construction, BIM, building information modeling, and IPD work, they are really awesome. Okay, they work, proven fact. We've got some statistics in our book about that and more are coming out all the time.

But projects where people have done that really are more successful. I've experienced it directly. Okay, so these things together are almost, if you use them seriously, you will get better outcomes.

If you use them individually, if you say, I'm just focusing on BIM, the project will be better. If you can't really focus on IPD without BIM, and if you try to do it without lean thinking, you won't go very far. So you really have to, you have three hills to climb.

I think you really have to start with lean thinking. It's a mindset to view the world. BIM is a tool, it's a method, tool of method.

It's a technology, tremendously powerful. And IPD is a whole approach to working together, partnering, sharing the risk and reward. And I've learned that managers and craft workers, the whole spectrum, young and old, particularly young, can learn and use the tools, the methods, the technologies.

There's nobody who can't learn this. I've learned that the greater the high-level support in the organization, the more can be done. That young people by themselves can't make much difference on their own.

They can improve within their span of control, and their life can be better. So I encourage everyone, even if they're all alone, to go after this, to listen, to tune into your blog. This blog is an amazing resource, just because of your own reflections.

Forget people like me, just Jason Schroeder. So I encourage, there's no reason not to do it. As far as, if you ask me, well, okay, how about you were there at DPR? It's DPR, did you make it into a lean organization? I would say that's not a good question, because lean is created locally each time out.

It's like if you played sports, any sport, when you went into the gym, you went out onto the diamond, you went out on the football or soccer field, or if you were a musician, every concert, every performance required that you bring your best to it, and that you had to play together with your other teammates. You couldn't play these games by yourself. So the idea that DPR or any organization is lean or is not, that's just really not a very good, it's not a very good way of thinking.

It's not a good question. And so, well, if you said, hey Dean, that's really, I would say, look, for starters, the Toyota production system was not designed. There was nobody, no architect for the Toyota production system.

Now, there were some very key, very important and key people who played big roles. Yes, but did they design it? No, it emerged within Toyota and was only described after they'd been working on it for more than 25 years. 25 years, think about it.

Now, we're approaching that in lean construction, but we're talking about inside one organization. So I can say this, the people in the Phoenix office where you actually worked in that office, even though I know you spent a lot of time in Tucson, Jason, when you worked for DPR, have created a strong lean construction culture. I believe that.

I would agree that. But there's never a guarantee of permanence for Toyota or any organization, including the DPR Phoenix office. This is because, not because of people, failings or anything like that.

It's because all of our organizations and certainly our projects exist in a world that you can only call dynamically complex, okay? There's lots of variables intersecting all the same time, unpredictably. Just think about getting the right stuff to your project at the right time and in the hands of the right people. That is not easy to do because of this dynamic complexity.

That's a conversation for a whole other day. We could spend the rest of the day and night talking about that. But that's what I would, just to answer that question, of what did I learn about lean construction and integrating project delivery in those 24 years.

There's lots of stories, but we just don't have time for them right now. Well, okay, so two thoughts on that. Well, first of all, so that was so much better than I had even expected, and I was expecting a lot.

So this being a long game, what I'm hearing you say is, when you tell me, I think you said 1997? Yeah. 1997, you were in it, and that last planner started to emerge in 93. Now we're in 2021, right? And so this takes time.

I do hear of a lot, and I'm sure you do too Dean, there's a lot of companies out there that, hey, I want to be a lean company. I want to roll this out in six months. This is a long game is what I'm hearing you say.

Yes. And it is very dependent on the aptitude, the hunger, the drive, and the willingness to be open and learn concepts, not tools, by the local people on the project. So I think those were really good reflections.

And so that leads me to another kind of a question. Since this is a long game, right, and since lean is something earned, and it's something that develops, and it's something that we really have to be focused on, what advice do you give or would you have to give for top-level managers of construction companies? You know, you made a comment, let me just go back for a minute, is that, I wrote it down, but you said management has to support it. I think that's what you, in one way or another, what advice would you give to those top-level managers? Well, I thought about it a lot.

I thought about it a lot, of course, when I was working with those top-level managers. And I always appreciated the work that they do. It's a tough job.

It looks good. You know, maybe they get a corner office. They're well paid, but they have many, many, many sleepless nights.

Back to dynamic complexity, okay? So this is the advice. I would say first, realize that you have three choices, not more and not less. No support for lean.

Some support for lean or real support. There's only three options. So then I would say this, not choosing is choosing.

That will put you in the some category. And that is where most top leaders end up. Sort of, they don't choose, and they may not realize that they did choose.

And that was to offer some support. And that's, they should say, well, why? What? That doesn't make sense. I'll just say this.

There's a significant pressure from our customers. It would be like, you know, and this fact in fact happened to Toyota when they started to try to sell cars in the United States. That first car was the Toyo Pet.

And the customers did not like their cars. For one thing, the only way the first Toyo Pet could go get up a hill was if you put it in reverse and backed up the hill. So the customers didn't like the cars and they didn't succeed and they pulled them off the market.

That was Toyota's first attempt. So there's huge customer demand for people who designed to build buildings to do it better in every, do it better and faster and for less money. I mean, it's just, everybody who's in this business knows that, feels that.

And those at the top hear that. From their customers, relentlessly. So then there's the new generation who I bet are listening to this podcast of talented young people that are coming to work for you top executives.

And they really are, they reflect the society and that demand for being better. They want to be treated with respect. They want to be listened to.

They want to be respected. So there's, it's irresistible. That pull.

So most large and small construction companies start out in the sum category. So you're there. But I would say this to you executives, that lean emerges from an organizational culture of highly engaged people solving problems continuously.

That's where lean comes from. That's not my quote. That actually comes from a leader of an organization called the Toyota Production System Support Center.

It was the first organization created by Toyota when they came to the United States to train their suppliers. Because without suppliers who understood Toyota and what they needed, Toyota knew they could not succeed. They had learned that lesson the hard way.

But this was, their first cars they imported, they didn't worry about suppliers. But when they knew they couldn't succeed in the United States without building cars here for many reasons. And so that's, they established this organization.

And they just appeared at a Lean LCI conference a few years ago and just said that. So lean emerges from an organizational culture of highly engaged people solving problems continuously. That's essentially what lean is.

As I said before, it cannot be designed or organized top down. You'll fail every time you try that, guaranteed. You'll spend a lot of money, waste a lot of time.

Time is money. Lean cannot be implemented by using lean tools. I've already said that.

Just a couple of more points, Jason. Lean requires awareness of what's really happening and where you want to go. So one eye is on what's really happening now.

Not what you want to happen, but what is really happening. And the other eye is on where you want to go. And that's where my experience working with the tools.

Being called out of the Union Hall because a contractor was behind schedule for form work and being one of seven carpenters sharing one skill saw. That is what we're talking about. That's what was really happening too many times.

That we would get called out of the Union Hall to help bring a project back online that wouldn't be prepared for us. So last point is that lean tools, the methods, the processes, the technology are necessary, but they're not sufficient. So I know you want to say something.

I just want to finish those points. I have a few more that I can make or we can move on. No, I would love for you to make them.

When you made the point that lean is an outcome of a culture of highly engaged people, that anchored me back to the podcast title, Creating Lean, Not Implementing It. What I just heard, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that if you have a culture of not highly... And cultures get stagnant, right? Companies get stagnant, they get bureaucratic, right? That goes for anybody. So I think the assumption is, okay, even if my organization stops solving problems, my organization has low engagement, we're on a decline from what Jim Collins talks about, how the mighty fall from that hubris and that complacency.

That our lean tools are still going to save us somehow and the answer I'm hearing from you is no. That lean is an outcome of that high engagement. And so first of all, I just want to say thank you for anchoring us back to the title.

And that really kind of sums it up. Please tell me your other points, but I wanted to say this one thing. This is a timely podcast.

I started working with a company out here in Illinois, O'Shea Builders. I won't tell you... I don't even know if I should say they're total revenue, but they're a great company. I'm walking around, Dean, and their projects are clean, safe, organized.

They've implemented Last Planner beautifully. I go around and I see visuals that have aligned the tax plan with the Last Planner system. Very simple.

They have flow. And I'm looking at it and saying, here I am, Jason, during this project. And I asked the vice president, I said, why'd you call me out here? You don't seem to have some overarching problem or thing that you're attempting to fix.

What's going on? And he said, well, you know, we're constantly competing with ourselves and we want to get better for the sake of being better and being all we can be for our customers. And what you just said resonates. That's what makes them great.

That's why they're there. They have a lot of highly engaged people right now that want to be better, want to solve problems. And even if they don't have all the tools, I don't dare... Maybe I shouldn't say lean culture.

Maybe I should. But they at least have a culture that is ready for the concepts. And I'm glad you pieced that together in my mind because it was one of the first times where without any history with it, I saw a company striving for excellence that way without a lot of outside input.

And I just thought that was fantastic. And so if anybody's listening, I hope you got the same thing that I just got from Dean is that we need to focus... And that's why I love Patrick Lancione. I don't know if you feel the same way, Dean.

No, I'm a big fan. Yeah, so I even joined his Kappa Pro program. He provides tools on engagement, how to organize the culture.

I mean, I just have a higher vision of where we need to go. So Dean, I'm sorry for the interruption. What were a couple of the other things you wanted to cover? Well, I'm still talking to the construction of executives, the one in the really tough spot.

And I should say that you have to go beyond some. That won't get you anywhere. And now we're talking about real support here.

You can give real support when you abandon the idea that you can push Lean down into the organization because you're a vice president. That it can be designed, that all you have to do is implement the last planner, both planning, target value design, and in other words, grab that Lean tool, Lean construction toolbox, and one after another deploy these tools and coach them. I'm saying, sorry, that is not going to work.

That will, you will fail at that. That's not the way it happens. And your customer, Jason, they understand that.

And that is not that common, honestly. I agree. I told them that too.

It's not. But many others don't, and we're talking to them right now, or we're talking mostly to people in those organizations of whether there's some support or whether there's a mistaken idea that Lean is a set of tools that just need to be deployed one after another without doing the work that Patrick Lencioni teaches about engaging people and creating organizations where people have enough trust in each other that they can disagree, that they can even argue with each other, or cultures where people are passionate and really coming to work to really make it better every day. Whether there's a possibility that every day the organization, that organization, will be better than it was the day before.

It doesn't have to be, like if you play baseball, it's about getting on base. For those of you who have read Moneyball, it's all about those statistics. It's not about hitting the home run.

It's about just getting on base, and the rest will follow. A couple more points. But real support is critical.

We set that up at the outset. This Toyota organization I mentioned, they call it the TSSC, just thinking of Toyota. Their advice is to go one inch wide and one mile deep.

They will work with organizations, particularly community nonprofit organizations or large organizations that are struggling, that if they fail would have a devastating impact on their community. For instance, they've worked with, I believe, one or more of the biggest office furniture manufacturers in the country that are all located in the upper Michigan peninsula. So, steel case and the like.

But they do it only on the condition, with the understanding that we are going to go one inch wide. We're not going to try to transform your whole organization, but we're going to go very deep with one big problem. And what they require is top management engagement and support.

Not just support, but engagement. They want a vice president to be teamed with a dedicated improvement manager or what they would call a Kaizen manager. That's the word for continuous improvement.

So, those are their conditions. Make that your conditions, okay? So, the top manager, a vice president, doesn't have time to teach lean. And there is a lot of tool work that you need to do along the way of creating lean.

So, that's why you need a dedicated Kaizen resource. And you need people like Jason Schroeder to come in with fresh ideas and great experience to work with that Kaizen manager. Toyota would be all for that.

So, and I would say this, the initial focus should be what it is for Toyota, a single problem. The effort should be to win over and engage the frontline workers and then recruitment and training of additional people along the way to increase the number of resources. That's the right approach.

That's how you create lean. So, right now within construction, especially large construction, most of the companies have moved, have shifted from a real traditional top-down management approach to one of empowerment. You've heard the expression, let a thousand flowers bloom.

That's that approach. But I'll say this, that is not what we're talking about here. That's because frontline people need to know they're safe to speak honestly about how things really get done.

So it's not just a sort of marketplace of ideas for the managers and tolerance of different approaches to management. That's not what lean is about. That's not what I'm talking about.

That's engaging the people with the tools, the young Dean Reeds, the young Jason Schroeder. The people actually creating value. The only ones who create value in construction, direct value for the customer, are the people working with the tools.

Everybody else is in a support role. And just like in automobile, the only people creating value are the people on the line and in the fabrication shops and delivering the parts and the pieces and stocking, that's all necessary. But it's the people actually assembling the car, the truck, that are creating that value.

So still last points for the top managers. Organizational change, that's what we're talking about, is organizational change. It requires grit.

Grit, that means sticking power. That means staying with it. That means commitment.

It requires active listening, creating feedback loops, measurement, and measure what you do. Remember, one eye is on what's really happening right now. And a lot of that is not what you necessarily want to hear, but you have to hear it, especially the top level managers.

The other eye is on the future. Just those two things require true leadership. So you start with making things better for the people producing the product day after day after day.

That's called continuous approval. This is how you affect the culture of your organization. This is how you will become a lean organization.

There was so much value in there. I really appreciate that. One little thing I was going to say, which I'll try to do this justice, but I used to think, and everyone has their own definition of lean, and what you've taught us today is it's definitely not tools and it's probably not our simple definitions, but I used to think of lean in my world as a pattern, respect for people and resources, stable environments that bring problems to the surface and then continuous improvement.

I was doing an interview with Paul Akers, and he reminded me, or maybe taught me something I didn't know before about total participation, and I just love that. I know that's a target. We don't always get that.

Patrick Lencioni talks about how there's a third that are initially not bought in and eventually maybe even 10% that aren't bought in. I have been focused on that concept of total participation of people all rolling in the same direction for probably the last year, and I'm seeing the wisdom of it. When you talk about providing that support, engaging the frontline workers and making sure that you're making work better, life better for the people on the front lines, I feel like that advice is so valuable, and even if this podcast was just about that, we would get somewhere.

And so that gives an actionable start. If you tell people what you did, it's not pushing it down. You've just given them the answer of what it actually is.

It's working through those folks, total participation, engagement. I appreciate it. So we're going through so much content.

Probably only have one time for one more question, and I'm going to try and talk you into a future podcast. So let's do the same question for people working inside these companies, helping frontline people understand, lean thinking, what closing advice would you give for them? When you've talked to the executives, what advice would you give to them? Well, I hope that you listened to the advice that I gave your executives, because you're going to work within that framework. I would say this.

You can make your life and your teammates lives better, even if top management isn't committed, even if they're in the sum category, some support. All the above applies. So I would say this to you.

Become a really good problem solver and help your team become really good at solving problems. Now, most people, Jason, think they are really good problem solvers, even though they actually have never had any training in it. But we solve problems every day, so we have a lot of experience problem solving.

But there's better ways to do it, and training or especially self-learning really helps. So, for example, most of us, me included, want to jump to the solution. My wife is telling me this all the time.

And that's not the right way. You should spend nine tenths of your time right at the top of the funnel. Toyota draws, uses the metaphor of the funnel for problem solving.

So if you, you know, funnel is very wide at the top to catch all the fluid. And that's where you want to spend your most time, because you want to actually understand the problem. And for starters, you want to solve the right problem, not the wrong problem.

A lot of, I mean, what I've done and seen others do is actually solve the wrong problem. That's because we, you know, we always think we have the, you know, the solution. And, you know, we've been trained that way, especially the more education you have, the more likely you're going to think that way.

So, and that's just another reason why you really have to listen to the people on the front line doing the work, because they're in the problem. They're closest to the problem. They're part of the problem.

And you have to start there. Jim Womack has a great, a couple of great books about Gembo Walks. I highly recommend Gembo Walks.

I think it might be, there's one book, I think it may be to revise it, Gembo Walks. So must read. That's about that.

So, start with problem solving. Start with solving the real problems, the most pressing problems in key areas. I don't advocate starting far away from the real work and practicing.

That doesn't get you very far. You want to tackle real problems that will make a difference and are worth the effort. So pick your problems carefully, but they should be important.

They should be meaningful. And most of all, they should make the lives of the people who do the work better, okay? Lean is not for Toyota about working faster. That's a very big misunderstanding.

That's not Toyota's strategy. It's not about speeding up the work. They don't, that's not their focus.

That's a whole other talk we could, once I note that down, we could talk about that. What? They don't know. That's why you can't think about lean as efficiency.

It's often, most of the time, executives want lean because they think it's about efficiency. It's doing things faster. No, wrong.

So anyway, we could leave it there, Jason, because I could go on too long here. And I think we'll run out of time. So it might be a good place just to call it, even though I have a lot more to say.

On this, it deserves a lot more conversation. I don't know. No, that's perfect.

The only thing I'd like to ask you, I'm assuming that Toyota does it out of respect for people. Maybe you're going to answer that question next time. But I really appreciate that perspective, that it's not about efficiency.

If somebody was doing it for that reason, I doubt they would get the same results. Yes, I think that, yes, it is about respect for people. I think that's, for Toyota, we are all trained to have a different way of thinking than the Eastern thinkers.

And I think we have concepts for things that come naturally to Eastern thinkers, because they have a more holistic view of the world. So for Toyota, it's not even a question respect for people. It's not even, you know, it's not, they wouldn't talk, they don't talk about, they don't answer, they don't know how to answer the questions that they've been asked by so many people about what they do because they just, they don't even have to think about it.

That's what respect for people is for them. Well, I think that's a perfect place to start, to stop, well, no, start. This podcast is going to help you start your lean journey if you're listening.

You know, and I think that's a good challenge. I'll say this in closing, Dean, if you'll allow me a couple of minutes, or a minute here. I was on a podcast with Paul Akers, and I had a fun time with him.

And we came up with this concept of lean heaven. And I caught it again, this vision in talking to you, that, you know, you're excited about improvement and watching buildings and how people build and making the build environment better. I know that's cliche, but, you know, you're excited about these things.

And if you ever stopped doing that, maybe you wouldn't be miserable, but you wouldn't be fulfilling your purpose, right? And so, you know, I'm looking at a person like you and your journey of continuous improvement and making the lives of people better is kind of like your heaven on earth. And we, he and I talked about this lean heaven concept that, you know, if there is a heaven when we get to heaven, if all that exists, it will be a place of continual progress and improvement. And so, we should love these things.

We can love these things. We have the opportunity to enjoy a continual, an environment where we improve our lives and make other people's lives better. And I just want you to know that I heard that in your voice again today, is that this is, in my mind, a higher way of living because you're able to give, you're able to serve, you're able to elevate, and to your point, the human race to our knowledge in the universe is the only group that can build, but not just build, build and make it better and better the lives of people along the way.

And so I'm, frankly, a little bit inspired as we're finishing this. So Dean, let me say thank you. I know that this has 10 times the value that I thought we would have in it.

And any last sentences or challenges for the audience before we close this out and just say goodbye? No, I think you just, you summed it up very well. It's about just what you said. It's about that feeling and that commitment.

And you either, I think you can, I'm an optimist, Jason, and I think that everybody's capable of this. I think it's very hard for people who are overwhelmed by problems and not in a position to really help others solve them. And those are the people trying to manage design and construction companies.

And also, there are customers who just really want that facility built so they can use it. So we need to, each of us needs to work together and become problem solvers. Let's leave it at that.

And we'll create Lean. And I hope you do invite me back because I think we can talk more about this stuff. I agree.

And if you're willing, we have a tradition on this podcast. At the end, at the count of three, we say on we go. Are you willing to do that with me? Okay, one, two, three.

On we go. On we go. I love it.

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