Lean Catalyst: A Lean Focused Interview Series Joe Vorih, CEO, Genuit Group

Damon, how you doing?

That's about right.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Well, you know, I mean, we're all, it's easy to be self-impressed with what makes you unique, but probably the people who don't know me would be probably surprised to know that I actually grew up in Italy and moved there when I was eight, stayed there till I was 18, so I'm really almost as much Italian as I am American in a lot of ways. And it was pretty formative because this might not be logical, but anyone who speaks fluent Italian always draws the crazy international assignments. Like you speak Italian, why don't you go start up a plant in China? Logical, I know. But it really did set me up well for a great global career, so it was a lot of fun. Growing up outside Rome was fantastic. So yeah.

Yeah, so Genuit, we're as you said, we're a FTSE 250 business, so that's sort of a mid-cap company. And what we do, our purpose statement is that together we create sustainable living. And I joined because this is a company where we are really fundamentally building solutions for the built environment, that's housing, offices, any kind of construction, but addressing the issues of the energy transition, of climate change, of climate adaptation. So we've got a stormwater management business, blue-green roof business, we help the transition of houses to better ventilation and carbon-free heating, low-carbon solutions, and we have a more traditional which you think of as sort of a plastic plumbing business, but we're actually switching that over to increasing the recycled content. So everything we do is fundamentally about driving growth through fixing climate problems that are essentially key to what we do. It's the one thing that's not changing is climate change. Yeah, for sure.

One hundred percent.

No, definitely not. I was thinking about this as I was getting ready for this and I thought, you know what was it? And actually the answer is even before I started work, I was in a graduate class, I don't remember the name of it, but myself and another guy, Ed Constantine, he and I were actually graduate student buddies and we were sitting in this class and it was about JIT, because that's what people were calling it back then, Just-in-Time Manufacturing. We studied a bit about Toyota and we both thought that was really, really cool. And when we graduated, we both ended up going to work for this pretty unheard-of company called Jake Brake at the time. This was in March of 1990. And Danaher was really unheard of, it was a about three or four year old company at the time, all industrial, well before life sciences came along for Danaher. And I joined Jake Brake primarily because I thought it'd be really cool to learn lean and I met this guy George Koenigsaecker, who was the CEO, and he was actually interviewing fresh out of school engineers like me. And he said he wanted to hire monolithic engineers. I'm not joking, that was actually monolithic engineer. He actually gave you a card, I want to hire. What he really meant was, and this was I think incredibly thoughtful, was he wanted engineers and people that join the company who would be comfortable in design engineering and supply chain and lean thinking and manufacturing engineering, so it was kind of a rotation program, if you will, except Jake was a little company, it was a $50 million business at the time with a few hundred people in Connecticut. And a lot of foresight. And you know, some of your other guests have mentioned, I think George's role and know Stan, Stan knows George, and it was important because George was of course the guy who really got the lean journey started at Jake Brake, and then that was the nexus for Danaher. So I joined and became one of these monolithic engineers. And the first thing I did was actually go and work in the caterpillar cell, which was the very first one-piece flow cell we put together at Jake Brake. Now it had been put together shortly before I got there, but here I am a young, wet behind the ears, new out of college engineer, really focusing on trying to improve and make run a lean cell. So then again, if we're calling it one-piece flow, we're calling it Just-in-Time Manufacturing, but it was a great experience. And I got to learn how to work with the guys in the union, and how to get people to make change, and how we could improve and measure those improvements. So quite literally, I've been doing this from before Day Zero of my career. And that was really important. So a few years later, I actually became, as far as I know, perhaps even the first full-time, we called them Kaizen coordinators, now we call them DBSL, right, in Danaher. And so I actually for two years facilitated Kaizen with Shingijutsu, taught lean myself, did 5S classes, translated with another engineer the 5S manual that we got from Toyota, and created the Danaher 5S manual. So it was great fun. And we made a lot of progress because during that first four or five years of Jake Brake, from 1990 until sort of 96 or so, Jake went from about $50 million business to about a $200 million business. The average selling price of the product went down by about half because they switched from aftermarket to OEM. They cleared out the factory half the factory and then filled it back up twice. It was just an incredibly challenging period. And of course, as I think it was mentioned in one of your panels before, this was a UAW shop in a time when the United Auto Workers still had a fair amount of sway. So we had to do a lot. And even though I was an engineer and then Ops manager and then an engineering manager, it was really great experience. That was my beginning in lean.

It probably was. As far as I know, that was a long time ago, but it was the year that most of that happened in sort of '88, '89. So it was literally within that first 12 months or so. It was exciting, and there was still a whole lot of the business that we hadn't switched over to one-piece flow in U-shape at the time, so for sure more to do.

No, before I went in, no. I was a young engineer and the job was a good fit for me, and George was incredibly charismatic leader, and he did a great job of selling me on the upside of the journey. But the good thing too is that he and his successor Greg Davies were pretty transparent, and Bob Plon was during that time too, so the early leaders were in the spirit that really became a hallmark of the lean culture. They were quite transparent about what our challenges were, what we need to do to disrupt competition, and all. So everybody did become aware pretty quickly, and that was very motivating for everybody because we just knew we had to fix it. So for sure.

About eight years at Jake Brake, and interestingly the last three or four years I went into R&D and worked on accelerated product development and tollgate systems. It was when we were at that time lean was really the tool set, it was actually the Danaher Production System initially, then it became the Danaher Business System, and we started to recognize that other things mattered. About three or four years in we started doing value stream mapping, and then a couple years in, probably mid 90s, we started doing Hoshin Kanri and policy deployment. And that was actually in the engineering role that I started using policy deployment. So that was helpful. Then I went into Veeder-Root and I was in a marketing role in Veeder-Root but still stayed involved and went to Altoona and did Kaizen, used some of the lean tools as we were thinking about how to release new products and services in Veeder-Root. From there I went to the Danaher Motion business, which was a new platform, did M&A for a bit. That was probably two years where I didn't do too much with lean except that as we were thinking, this is right about the same time that Danaher switched from a bunch of different businesses to platforms, and Danaher Motion was one of the first platforms. And the idea of a growth platform became very much let's build up a really good standard work on how to buy companies. We had a really good funnel process, and looking back, I think it was really significant. But now we talk all the time about using lean much beyond just the shop floor and using it in everything we do. So the idea that you could actually use the lean principles to apply to how to cultivate a big funnel, have stage gates in your M&A process, probably pretty bold thinking back at the time, although we were just doing the job. We acquired several companies. Then I went to run part of one of the businesses that we acquired, Thompson Industries, that had done nothing lean, so we got that started in the journey, did that for two years. Then I ran Dover, which was a really interesting experience. It was a capital equipment business, and the whole premise of that job was to come in and help not to lose the number one customer that was angry with us because we were late, and by the way they were three quarters of the business, so yeah, no pressure there. So this was about 14 years in, and literally in the space of about eight months we went from several months past due and having this small public company on the ropes because just about everything they shipped, they made large semiconductor capital equipment on these motion platforms that we created. These motion platforms were a couple hundred thousand dollars a piece, so these were big 25-ton pieces of equipment. We needed to ship several a month, and we were several months behind. This was not good. So we got help from some other Danaher companies as we often did, and we did a value stream map on that and we said we got to get this product line over. Within eight months we cleared the backlog. We actually put in one-piece flow for this capital equipment assembly. And once we built a machine, we figured out that we could move it around on air pads, so we could build a machine, move it into the assembly station, move it into the test station, then move it into the pack station. Sounds crazy, but we cleared the backlog and got one of those great compliments you get from customers. This was a very prickly customer, but eight months later the CEO of the company, who had spent a lot of time going up one side and down the other earlier when I first joined about how terrible a supplier we were, he came up to me and quite simply says, 'Joe, I have to tell you, you guys no longer suck.' So yeah, you'd have to know the guy at the time, but it was a hell of a compliment. So it just goes to show, it was one of the first times I really realized the power of using lean and those lean principles and one-piece flow and that simple value stream mapping thinking could apply to anything.

No, that was the time. Because the thing is, you know, and you've had a few guests on who grew up in Danaher, at least certainly this was the case for me: when you grow up in the middle of something, you don't really fully appreciate it until you then try to recreate it in a place where it didn't happen. And Dover was a pretty new acquisition, only been in the company about a year and a half, and there was a massive challenge. And we said, let's get the playbook out. And seeing that breakthrough to me was when I realized that everything I'd learned for the last 10 or 12 years was just never going to leave me. And it was probably after that that I started every time I would teach new leaders lean, which I still do, I often start by saying, 'Look, I apologize, I'm going to mess up the rest of your life because you're never going to look at airport security the same again, you're never going to watch a car wash and think, or order a sandwich the same way. You're going to be frustrated for life now. But on the other hand, you're going to be a better leader, so let's go.' That was a key moment for me certainly in a leadership role.

Yeah, I think the other thing I kind of alluded to this too is that certainly in my experience, and if I think back to the Danaher journey, which now in retrospect looks just incredibly brilliant, but we messed up a lot of things along the way. There were plenty of early Kaizen in Danaher that weren't aligned right, those case studies. There were a lot of mistakes. And there were companies, as some of your other guests have mentioned, that slipped backwards, maybe the leadership changed and had to come up. So man, we made so many mistakes along the way. But I would say that by that early 2000s time frame, we had strategy deployment, we realized what it was. This was right about the same time that Larry took over from George Sherman, and I think he was instrumental in really driving that hard. And Danaher started to really train incoming leaders, which was another really critical piece. And something that I realized at that time too is that if you didn't make sure that your leadership team, whatever you're leading, whether it's an opco, whether it's a platform, or whether it's a public company, if you didn't get your leadership team, that extended leadership team, aligned, you just can't do it yourself. So I think it's important to be purposeful about creating those formative career experiences, especially for new people coming into the organization from the outside at senior levels, because they have baggage. They have a lot of things that have to be unlearned, not only technically, but I think more on the soft side, like how you manage people, how you engage with the customer, going and seeing for yourself. A lot of those things are just not natural to humans in general, let alone in business. So those learned behaviors, unless you create those experiences and systems to do that, you risk culture dilution over time. And since Danaher is such a highly acquisitive company, every time they buy a new business and you add 10,000 people to the mix, how do you onboard and immerse them into this way of thinking? Because if you don't do that, the acquisition won't pay off.

Yeah, it doesn't do a whole lot of good if it resides in the heads and in the hands of only a handful of people in the organization. So you really need to democratize lean in order to be successful.

Yeah, so how many years were you at Danaher total? 16 years at Danaher.

Well, the first thing is, when you're running a part of a business, and then running the business, and then you're running a platform of businesses and a group, your scope is a bit different. I was actually running part of the business, all the international operations. So I had a plant in Italy that had lost money for 10 years and they used to send cash, and had a plant in India that had caused a $10 million warranty at the time and was losing money. And then my CEO had called me up and said, 'Hey, listen, it's really great you're joining. By the way, you got to go over there and fix that problem.' Then he called me three weeks later says, 'Oh yeah, you got to go there, I think that might be your bigger priority.' Then three weeks after that he called up and said, 'Yeah, and Cummins, one of our biggest customers, decided they want to start a plant in China and they'd like us to start a plant in China, so that'll be yours too.' So for me, because that was my scope, I went and looked at these two particular plants that already existed were having a ton of trouble, and that was okay. We need to fix the problem. So what do you do? You use the tools you have. And I remember really clearly when I got to Italy the first time and walked around, the plant was not a great plant, but there were good people, they had good products, they were trying to do a good job, but it had been underinvested, neglected, and there wasn't any kind of lean thinking there. And they wanted to invest $2 million in a brand new cell to increase the capacity for their key customer. Let's go take a look, let's go to gemba, let's go look at the cell. So we walked around the cell and there were a couple of machines sitting in the middle of the cell not running. 'What's with these machines?' 'Oh, those are dead.' But they're in the cell, the operators are walking around. We did a little bit of analysis, what do you need? We tried to get the basics of takt time. They needed to have a 25% increase in capacity. We just sat there and watched the cell for about an hour, and it was pretty clear right up front that the actual cycle times and the work that was being done could accommodate that. So I said, 'Tell you what, I'm going to come back in two weeks and I'm going to bring a lean person.' I found a lean sensei, and he came over and I kind of kicked off with him. The managing director at the time wasn't really interested, didn't understand. But we just got to fix this. 'Tell you what, at the end of this week, if we can't fix this problem, I'll sign off the capital request for the $2 million. But if we fix this problem, then we're going to do it this way instead.' By the end of the week, they had relaid out the cell, gotten the dead machines out, balanced the workload in the cell, figured out they could get it done with three operators instead of four, and they didn't need any capital except they needed about $100,000 to redo one or two machines just to make the operations all simpler. So that sounds good. They simulated it, they had actually gotten the first and the third operator kind of job working in the work balance, but the one in the middle was tough. There was a transition in there and it was difficult. The sensei said, 'I really think it'd be great if one of you could run that operation.' I'm the VP of Global Operations. 'If one of you could run the operation, I think it'd go a long way towards showing the operators that you guys care and it'll work.' The operations director didn't want to do it, the managing director didn't want to do it, so I did it. I said, 'Well, take me.' We went down to the tool crib, I got a standard t-shirt from the operators, put my jeans on, and I ran that cell. I ran the middle job of that cell for about three hours until I hit the takt time. And for the next six years that I had that responsibility at that plant, the guy who did that operation used to come out beaming to me every single time I walked by that cell and show me the progress they had made. It was one of those things where you just have to be willing as a leader to get your hands dirty and show how it works. So for me, that was a real key.

Breakthrough because this is, you know, Italy's not an easy place to make these kinds of changes. I had the advantage of speaking Italian, of course, but still we made progress pretty quickly.

Good, the good news is, look, it is a learned behavior. You know, I mean, honestly, that's not the kind of things they teach you at grade schools. If anything, they almost teach you the opposite. Right, right, look at the spreadsheet. But for me, there was always a curiosity, and I was always kind of as a kid pretty outdoorsy and happy to be hands on. And you know, my dad was an engineer, so we were always tinkering with things. I mean, I was always comfortable putting my hands on things. But that willingness to go out and do, I actually think comes from seeing things. You have to fail to appreciate that, and then you see the value of making that connection with people. And once you've done that and you've been hands-on, I think that came through some of the hands-on work at Danaher, you know, being in kaizens and seeing, whether it's a president's kaizen or whatever, but seeing people at all levels in the organization, all be you kind of shoulder to shoulder working together. Once you've seen that, you kind of realize just how powerful that is. So to me, that's probably where it came from. I do think it is an important trait, but it's a learned trait, and it's something you can learn. Well, to me, there's a humility aspect ingredient in there as well, because as you told the story, you talked about two levels of leadership that were unwilling to step into that. And often that unwillingness is rooted in like, this is below my job title or a grade kind of thing. It's like a class system: I'm better and more important than you, so you won't see me out there, that's somebody else's job. Right? And it skipped two levels to the guy who, you know, they're looking up at and going, 'Geez, wow, like oh my gosh.' And to me, that's a moment in time that really crystallizes the culture that you're trying to build. When they see that, one of two things is going to happen: they're going to think, 'Wow, if Joe does it, I can do it,' or they're going to think, 'Well, that's never going to be me.' And over time, you're probably going to root those people out of your organization, would be what typically happens. So yeah, I mean, you know, those other two guys didn't work there that much longer, but I sat down and talked to them and had a good chance, but some people just grow up in a culture where that sort of hierarchy, and I have to be honest with you, I don't see much of that anymore. I mean, it used to be a bigger issue, but whether it's the types of cultures and the people I like to surround myself with, or a bit of an improvement, and perhaps a less hierarchical approach to management than was probably the case 30 or 40 years ago.

Well, it's interesting. I actually think in terms of sort of the personality side, I've seen everything from highly energetic people. I'm, you know, a lot of people know me, I'm kind of high on the energy side, but I've met some very quiet and effective CEOs. So it's not that. But you definitely have to be willing to bring people along. You've got to be willing to be a... something you've said many times, Damon, and you got to be willing to teach yourself. And we just talked about, you gotta be willing to do yourself, because that is part of leading. And if you think about the CEO's job, I like to think about simply as sort of strategy, people, and performance. Right? And your job is to make sure that the strategy of the company is right. And one of the things I've always tried to do is kind of embed creating a lean operating system, building a really good culture for the company as part of the strategy, because that is really the 'how' of the strategy. And on the people side, you know, the more you invest in people, the more you realize you've got to bring them along. And you give people the opportunity. And depending on where you're operating, whether it's 15 years ago in China where it was very hard to find many people with lean experience, or in some countries in Europe I found it a lot harder to find people already coming in with that experience, you got to give the chance for people. You got to create that environment, that learning environment, where everybody from the shop floor to your executive team gets a chance to learn. And then on the performance side, you start putting in place the measurements, right? The focus, which is really important on the vital few, you know, through strategy deployment, through your operating review system, and that leadership standard work. And so when you have those three things, you've got a real clear vision of what you're trying to do. And somehow you've made sure that having a lean culture and the kind of culture that actually facilitates lean thinking, so the transparency, the safe place, it's okay to fail, we're going to win or learn, right? That kind of culture. And then you've got the people that sort of relentless, you know, everybody we can help everybody become better, but we also try to get that critical mass of people who either came in with that experience or get that experience there, so that you're not doing it alone. And then you put the systems in place to keep you focused, so that when you do make mistakes, which you inevitably will, you realize them quickly, data brings you back, you solve problems at the root cause, you improve your leadership standard work at every level. And that's sort of that trifecta that I think you've got to have. I don't think you have to be necessarily super energetic, like I said, I've seen quiet people do it, but you got to have those three pieces to make this work, in my view.

Yeah, look, I actually had that exact experience. It worked not that long ago. A CEO said to me, he said, 'Look, you know, I've seen some great examples of lean businesses, I've seen them in other places. I personally don't really have that experience, but I believe that it's important. So tell me what to do.' And he had the humility to say, 'Look, I want to make this part of my legacy, but I need people like you to help us guide there.' And so we started down that path. We found, actually, we started with you guys actually, but we found a critical mass of people who had the deep experience outside that we could get started with, because you need that, right? Because if you're starting from a standing stop, you just by definition don't have enough people inside to do it. So you're going to have to find some outside help. And whether it's Shingijutsu or Lean Focus or whoever, I mean there are plenty of people out there who can help you get started. In my case, I was one to make sure that I know that the people who are going to help us know what good looks like. In my mind, this is really important. I've also seen that not work. The second thing you got to do is you got to go build the coalition of the willing inside the company. And for me, that's usually about not just the executive team, but it's about that extended leadership team. And it's a concept that I've used five times now, where rather than just take my direct reports, take their direct reports and say, 'Look, this is going to be the extended leadership team.' And it could be 30 people or so for a smaller company like Omega, to 75 people for a corporation like Genuit with 3,500 people. And it's really powerful because you get that group together, you say, 'Okay guys, we're going on this journey together.' You start training them, teaching them, giving them exposure to the lighthouses, bring them through an executive champion kind of orientation, and then follow it up with kaizen commitments. And what's really important is that one CEO can't really touch 3,500 people, and seven executive members can't, but 75 leaders, you're pretty close. I mean, you're down to probably two levels or so to everybody in the organization. And that's the force multiplier. So that's the coalition of the willing. So when you get that kind of going, and you build the capabilities inside, you get some outside help, and you build this kind of extended leadership team, to me those are really critical. And then the CEO has got to learn on that journey. If the CEO doesn't know, he or she's got to commit to being part of this and being hands-on and going to the kaizen, be willing to be a bit vulnerable, make some mistakes along the way, and be seen to be absolutely at the front of this journey too. So you can do it, but yeah, easy.

I think about that a lot actually, because to me, and you'll probably relate to this, for us it's probably hard to imagine a world where you wouldn't do that. But there's a lot of people who have never had this experience, who've never actually seen the penny drop in their business. You know, I had that moment that we talked about at Danaher, for me where I was like, 'Wow, this actually solved a massive problem that was threatening to take down the company.' Right? And they got everybody fired up and involved. So I think that's part of the problem. And if you go get an MBA, they're not going to tell you that this is key to transforming the business. They're going to give you all kinds of other great things, and now it's going to be about AI and all the... I mean, it's all interesting and it's good, but somehow... yeah, this is the... I think it's the most underappreciated thing you can do to really mark your time as a successful CEO. But every time I start this journey in a company, I've got to convince people that work for me who have never done it, don't know how that works. So you know, it's out there. I mean, there's a lot of people still today who don't really get it. And the people who have read about it think, 'Well, this is something you do in automotive businesses, and it works for cars, right?' But you know, between us and others, I mean, I've done it for building materials now, I've done it on data acquisition systems that are thousands of channels, we've done it on aircraft engine parts, we've done it in automotive, we've done it in leak detection systems for tanks. I mean, it's being done in healthcare. If you can do lean in an emergency room, you can probably do it anywhere, right? So it's... I do think that there still aren't enough people who have actually seen it themselves. And that's what we've got to do. We just got to keep spreading the word and give people a chance to learn hands on.

You do, you do. So well, all I can tell you is what we are doing at Genuit. That is, when we set out, we studied, we did a big piece of analysis. We took a good look at what the company was good at and what we thought the opportunity was in front of us. We laid out a new strategy, and we tried to simplify that strategy to communicate internally and externally. By the way, because often the most complicated strategy is what you sit around and talk about as a management team with tons of PowerPoint, and then you show to the board a bit of a simpler version. But when you go outside to investors and you go inside to the people who work in the company, you want to get it really as clear and as repeatable and as focused as possible. And so for us, it was really these four things. And I mention not because it's necessarily right and it's not formulaic, but because you have to keep educating people internally and externally about what you're doing and the time frames for that. In our case, we did have a bit of a burning platform that got created with a bit of a downturn in the industry. So look, we had to take some tough decisions, but we were quite clear that we had to get rid of some extra sites, we had to do a few things like that which were clear quick responses to the market. But then we were very clear that we were going to build a culture and a business and a continuous improvement system with this lean journey that was going to make it so that we would continually improve in the future. So we had to kind of separate quick reaction from then beginning the journey. Right? And then we also talked about what those long-term growth drivers would be for the business and how those would actually start to go forward. So when you talk to investors, they clearly want to see results every quarter, in our case a UK company every half year, but they also, most of them are actually here to make money over multiple years. And so the more you can explain to them and show them examples, you'd say, 'Look, we're taking on this lean journey because...' I remember you and I actually talked about a slide that I used and said, 'Look, typical lean companies see these kinds of productivity improvements, they see these kinds of improvements in return on capital employed, they do this and so.' People listen a little bit and they're like, 'Okay, fine, great, I see your strategy, I see this, now tell me a little more about this because I don't understand that.' So then we offered to bring investors to some of our sites to see how it works. Right? And that's why we do lighthouse sites, not for the investors, we actually do it for our people. But the beautiful thing is when you have a lighthouse site and you can start to show people improvement, you can say, 'Look, in this site, it's an actual example. This site was able to get about a 50% productivity improvement on four or five of the cells. Imagine if we could get that productivity improvement across the entire Genuit business.' And all of a sudden they start going, 'Bing!' The analysts and the investors start realizing that over time this is actually going to be the gift that keeps on giving. So we're able to show them pretty clearly, 'Look, there's some stuff we just had to do. We had to get rid of some cost that was kind of holding us back. Probably honestly, my view, and I explained this internally and externally, that's probably stuff that should have been done a long time ago. So we just get to get it done. Fine, okay, one time. That's kind of okay. But now this is the piece that's actually going to make us better every single year going forward and support our ability to execute our long-term growth strategy.' So when you as a CEO, one of the things you got to do is you've got to be really good at telling that story and weaving that lean continuous improvement into that story. It's something I've been doing from the day literally the day I started at Genuit. And now people, investors, analysts want to come and see.

Yeah, well, I had two thoughts. One is, it's really crucial because a mistake that some people make is they have whoever's CEO may decide they're going to do this and they've got somebody doing this lean journey, but it's delegated like two or three levels down. Yeah, and they just... you know, you said this, I think many of your guests have said this, this isn't something you can delegate. This is something that you have to actually build as part of the company, part of the culture, part of the leadership systems and all. So you do have to have that person close to you, and they've got to be able to tell you, and you got to have that relationship where they can be honest with you. But my second thought was, honestly, good CEOs will surround themselves with that kind of person on their team anyway. Yeah, whether it's their HR person, their CFO, I mean, you need... a CFO is going to be successful needs to have that kind of person period on their team. So that characteristic, I think you see in a good lean business where it's absolutely okay to talk about what's wrong and to give each other constructive feedback and to talk about the problems. You know, we joke about how red is the new green, right? But it is about building a culture where you don't shy away from that. The politics and niceties don't get in the way of having an honest conversation. 'Look, I want you to be successful, and that meeting wasn't good. So let's talk about this, how can we make the next one better?' Yeah, so.

Well look, I agree. I think it's really important. And we've got, I've actually got a couple of half-day reviews of our lighthouses that we've been working on here at Genuit coming up in about a month, and somebody you know well is going to be there and he's going to help me understand all things we didn't get quite right the first time around. And I'm going to be there myself for those two half days because, you know, there's things we didn't support, get right, whatever, but that's the learning experience, that's what you got to do, right? And I have no doubt that this guy's going to do a good job of letting me know exactly what I could have done better from a good place, and I'm going to be listening and taking notes. So I think that's right, that's really important.

Well, I think we touched on some of this. I mean, I think the first thing is, look, you definitely can do it, but it's going to require you to change an awful lot about the way you lead. And so if you're willing to make that change, then that's the first step. And then the second thing is, you got this right: don't assume that what got you there is going to get you to the next level. The second thing is, you got to find some people who actually have been through it before, who know what good looks like, who can help you see what good looks like, who can teach you and teach your team. And I think the third thing gets back to this piece I was saying about earlier: you got to find a way to get that critical leadership mass. Because a couple of leaders at the top of the company aren't going to make a successful lean transformation. All the leaders together will make it successful. And you get to a point where if you've got your executive team on board, committed, and they don't have to have the experience but they all have to be learning and willing and agree that this is going to be part of what that company is going to be in the future, and then they get their team, and you start getting that critical mass. You actually get to the point where you quit hiring people and quit promoting people who aren't aligned with that culture. And that's when you get to that critical mass. So look, I mean, we could talk till the cows come home about the tools, but the tools aren't what's going to make it successful. It's the people's commitment to learning, to using, to screwing it up, to then going back and continuously improving. Because strategy deployment, it'll be a couple of years until you really get it great. So you have to have that commitment. So I think if you could do those couple things, then surround yourself by some people who really know the tools, know the system, know what good looks like, who've actually been in there and done it themselves, I think you'd be all right.