Tag: Lean Manufacturing

The Covid Attack to Impose Marxism: Pull and Push systems imposed through health policy instead of politics

I’ve argued against it for over 30 years, this whole dumb idea of push/pull systems.  People in the world need to be pushed.  When you go to Europe and ask the waiter to hurry up, and they say, “Why, don’t be in such a hurry, take your time.  Make love not war, enjoy the smell of the roses, and drink some fine wine,” you are listening to the effects of a socialist from a country infused with Marxism.  Not someone trying to be their most productive self, and that is the heart of the argument between push systems of manufacturing and pull.  Pushing is where product flow goes downstream and puts pressure on the weakest links to pick up the pace.  Pull is where the lowest links send the demand signal upstream, and everything gets built around the identity of the constraints.  Push systems force your most honest understanding of what a true constraint is.  Pull systems yield to the weakest interpretation and build around that false assumption.  Pull systems work pretty well in places like Japan because they have a society that genuinely tries to do an excellent job at all levels.  But in Western cultures, for many reasons, people need to be motivated to do good things, and they certainly need to be pushed.  Because their default personality is to be lazy and do as little as possible, any culture that does not enjoy hard work is prone to this condition, so trusting them to define their constraints is a fool’s game.  It’s also why we know that Covid was a fake plot created by radical elements of the world’s economic manipulations to convert the world to Marxism hidden behind a health crisis manufactured in a Wuhan lab in China during a critical election year.  How do we know, well, by economic measures. 

I’ve been talking about a recent trip I took my family on to Disney World, which was a long time in the planning phase.  In 2019, my wife and I took a scouting trip there to plan for the larger group: our kids, grandkids, husbands, dogs, lodging, and various factors.   Of course, as soon as we returned, COVID-19 hit, and it has been nearly four years to get everything back on schedule.  Due to Covid rules at Disney, such as social distancing and mask mandates, they were very slow to return to normal, and we weren’t going to go until that happened.  Some of my kids are so anti-mask and anti-vaccine that anything close to those regulations at Disney World was a hard pass, no.  So we had to wait a while for Disney to get its act together, and this year of 2023 was the first year of that normalcy.  Disney is an excellent example because it’s a uniquely American economic experience, so it’s a good barometer for general economic behavior, and measuring from 2019 to 2023 was an excellent way to compare before-COVID and after-COVID realities.  And what I was able to see easily was obvious in supply chains across the world.  Hidden in the health policies of COVID was outright Marxism that is still permeating the employee marketplace.  What we ended up with in 2023 was a lot of the Democrat policies that were only talked about in 2019, such as wage rates.  After COVID-19, employers had to throw money at employees to get them to come to work because COVID-19 had destroyed the value system entirely for all employees.  Why go to work when the government would pay you to stay home?  And why work harder if the wage rates were artificially propped up for everyone?  Even now, too many employees still want to work from home because they fear they have Covid, leaving employers stuck trying to fill production gaps with new weak links in the supply chain, not knowing if people are going to show up for work, and what they could do about it.

It was clear Disney was suffering from this very problem: their lines were less productive, their employees were much less engaged, and many things were broken that wouldn’t have been damaged or long in 2019.  I went to several restaurants selling souvenir glasses, expecting to buy them, only to be told they were out of stock and they had no idea when they would be.  In 2019, that wouldn’t have been the answer.  Even for Disney they were having difficulty getting parts of their supply chain to perform reliably.  And, of course, they were dealing with the same staffing shortages the rest of the world was: people who didn’t show up for work, believing that COVID recommendations would still get them out of work as good as a doctor’s note.  And there was nothing they could say about it.  The new message from Disney, which wasn’t the case in 2019, was that it would be expensive to vacation there.  And we will do our best.  Instead of expecting the best, they’d at least try.  It was that old Marxism acceptance of yielding to constraints instead of pushing them through competition to solve those problems.  And Covid was the means of forcing mass society to accept those constraints.  Previously, the supply chain would be pushed to ensure the market’s satisfaction.  Now, the market would have to wait and be happy with it.

People have been slow to admit to themselves that COVID was a weapon of global Marxism to do what they couldn’t do politically through health policy.  Yet the proof is everywhere, and behind some blatant lies of Bidenomics trying to hide horrendous economic news is the imposed Marxism that has slid under the door to just about every part of the global economy.  I see it everywhere. I just traveled through the Toronto International Airport, where they were trying to rid themselves of any memory of Covid policy, yet their employees were still functioning from the call-off effects, the unstable management of their workforce, and knowing who was going to be at work, how long they’d be there, and whether or not they could even hire enough people to staff their positions.  The holes were evident, and everyone was supposed to look the other way and pretend everything was fine, just like at Disney, and not even ask the question.  The world had imposed on it during COVID this Marxist pull system where the constraints were artificially created to serve that radical economic theory.  It wasn’t voted for; it was built into the COVID policy from the beginning and was undoubtedly one of its goals, which nobody saw coming.  But because of that aspect alone, there should be massive prosecutions of everyone who played their part in this global insurrection.  The evidence has been left behind and is evident to those with the eyes to see it.  And it was never about health.  Marxism was always the motivation for COVID-19, and it still lingers economically until people wise up to it and scrap the entire footprint it has left behind.  That’s a hard admission for many, but the reality is that for a proper economy to work genuinely, Marxism must be pushed out of it.  And until that happens, we will be left with a less-than-optimal economy and a general state of unhappiness always associated with Marxism.

Rich Hoffman

The Root Cause of all Political Problems: Playing the cards to win, not letting the cards play you

One of the reasons I had to talk about superstition in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, is because one of the failures of Lean manufacturing, which has become the industry standard in process improvement across the world, is that it fails to recognize the most important detriment to all process failures, human behavior. Rather than deal with the detriments of human behavior, Lean seeks to create processes that remove human variables and build group consensus around those resolutions. Because the main problem with human behavior is that in the East, and even in Europe, workforces are much more compliant naturally due to their long histories with kings and overbearing governments. But in America, a different kind of human being emerged. And we can easily see those differences in the type of card games that we play. I specifically use the differences between Tarot cards and poker cards to accentuate the point often to clarify the differences in thought. And this is spectacularly important in our present time specifically because globalists have assumed, as many have with Lean manufacturing, that all people are the same. If the same rules were imposed upon them, then a universal kind of sameness could emerge and could then be easily controlled. But that has turned out to be vastly untrue, and the failure which follows is what we are seeing playing out in our present time. 

Lean manufacturing, as it turns out, which is a problem I have always had with it, is that it was a kind of pre-ESG score way to bring eastern thoughts to western cultures and then launch a global approach of sameness to all industries. I have taught Lean for over 30 years and have always run into the same problem; American cultures tend to push back on it while those in Europe and Asia tend to be much more accommodating. This has been a mystery to all involved because they failed to consider the most important aspect of human behavior and how they transact with their peers. So in my book, I break it down in ways that people can understand, which essentially comes down to tolerance for superstition in a culture and how those beliefs manifest into a business climate or a political one. In the book, I give a history of superstition across the world and talk about the use of horoscopes and Tarot cards to predict the future as some fortune teller might professionally do around a crystal ball. The thought was that people were helpless to the greater scheme of things and could seek help in the stars or in the spirit world of card reading to better navigate through the complexities of everyday life. When a string of luck occurs in business, even the most resolute executive might say, “knock on wood,” hoping not to jinx a project into failure when all has been going well. Behind such thoughts is the fear that humans are not in control of their destiny and that they must subjugate themselves to some “greater good” to function at even basic tasks in life. 

But in New Orleans, during western expansion, the card games of Europe evolved into something much more conducive to the lifestyles of Americans. Poker was invented, and over the next hundred years, the very American game of Texas Hold Em’ emerged and is extremely popular presently. Poker tournaments are common on sports programming such as ESPN, and every casino runs a Texas Hold Em’ game. Likely, they are running dozens of them. Meanwhile, the fortune-tellers are always on the outskirts of such activity at the fairgrounds and sidewalk attractions which offer a different kind of game for the more faint at heart, Tarot card readings. It is often interesting to go to a casino and witness the types of people who play poker and the kind who line up to have their fortunes told to them by someone else. The point of the matter is that the poker players can win the game even if they have a bad hand. The poker players play the cards, whereas the Tarot card reader allows the cards to play them. The fortune is in the cards, but the game is played to win in poker even if the cards are bad. Both are card games, but their rules of conduct are magnificently different to reflect the cultures that play them. 

In the movie Titanic, still one of the most successful movies ever made, this idea of making one’s own luck was a centerpiece of the story. Many women loved the love story between Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet; they could relate to the overbearing mother, the “too perfect” fiancée who was projected to be a great and wealthy business leader. It was, in essence, an East meets West story, where the business leader was a person who made their “own luck,” which he actually says at the end of the movie as his projected wife leaves him for the unfocused exploits of the hero played by DeCaprio.  Only to find herself floating on a door in the freezing north Atlantic after the Titanic sank and her lover sacrificed himself so that she could live. The story’s villain was one who self-determined his reality while the heroes surrendered themselves to circumstance. We see those same politics playing out daily in our news cycles, in our business process improvements, and certainly within our own families. But what the American poker players figured out was critical to the truth of the universe.

Even when you are losing, you can still win, and poker was invented to reflect that new way of looking at things from the perspective of an American, which much of the world admires, but secretly resents because they don’t have the courage for it. It is much safer to have the cards tell them how to live, consult a horoscope, and look to the stars for guidance. But to the American, not all of them, but to the bold ones who figure it out, every moment of every day is an opportunity. Even bad luck can be turned into fortune if you know how to play the cards right. But failure often happens because people let the cards play them. They don’t live their lives in a way where they play the cards. That is why Lean manufacturing always falls short, and companies end up throwing vast amounts of money at process improvements when they should be dealing with the psychology of interpersonal relationship failures. This is why Republicans and Democrats essentially can never work together because they have entirely different ways of dealing with the same problem. One is passive, and one is very active. And this is also why the MAGA movement is growing, why people elected a casino owner with a supermodel wife to the White House twice, and why much of the swamp hated them for it. Politics wants to read the Tarot cards. Trump supporters want to play to win. And those approaches will never go together. The problem was never one of simply political belief. Instead, it all comes down to superstitions and how to manage them. Do we let the cards play us, or do we play the cards? In America, we play the cards. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How to Defeat the Administrative State: Why being free is profitable

How to Defeat the Administrative State

I wrote my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because of the necessity in business and life in general to defeat the administrative state.  One of the most significant objectives in business cultures is to decentralize their operations and break down the silos that various departments often isolate themselves with tall walls of bureaucracy.  Most of the world is suffering under some form of administrative state.  When governments want communism, for instance, they want an expansion of the administrative state.   When people say they want to be freer, they want to have less restriction in their lives of an administrative state.  So it was my goal in that book to teach people to break down their limitations without destroying their organization by learning how to deal with decentralized administration and value the input of individual effort.  It will remain for quite a long time; the most significant problem humans have is their desire to create administrative states. Yet, their personal needs to function without them is what all life strives for.  The defining problem of Lean Manufacturing is to decentralize business operations with de-siloed methods.  But it never works well in America because, in Asia, people need less of an administrative state due to the nature of the people to submit to an authority figure, since they have always been accustomed to worshiping a king or emporer throughout their societal development.  That is why communism might appear to work in China, whereas it would never work in America because people will not follow directions from a centralized planner.  They might pay lip service to such instructional flow down. Still, Americans will always sabotage their central planners where in Asia, they individually accept their place in the scheme of things and follow directions in a decentralized way.

Decentralization, therefore, is the goal and the trend of all future societies.  How successful can an organization be if the administrative state is small and without teeth of authority?  I explain in my book why embracing decentralization of authority, there are more opportunities for success than in the slow, terrestrial administrative state filled with mind-numbing bureaucrats.  For instance, I like to use football metaphors, and the best teams on the field are those most decentralized.  If players have to look to the sideline for instruction from their coaches after each play, then coordinating all that activity in the face of constantly changing circumstances moment to moment while confronting the variables of an opponent, the chances for error are much greater. Instead, what the coaches should do is prepare each player between games for every circumstance, then once on the field, they can adapt through their onfield leadership on how to deal with the challenges they are dealing with.  For instance, coaching becomes much easier when a team has a great quarterback because you have leadership representation in the huddle, and audibles can be made much faster depending on the kind of defense presented.  That is the same in all things in life; if we wait for a centralized planner to tell us what to do, the opportunities for success in life, whether for the individual or a social group, are minimized and perhaps lost altogether.  When innovation and productivity are significantly reduced, people tend to be much unhappier, including people who function as members of the administrative state. 

One of my most common sayings is that I’ll trade my Black Belt for a gunbelt all the time.  In Lean Manufacturing, which uses terminology from oriental martial arts, the American perception of gunfighting is much more effective.  Where the martial arts of Asia are mostly a defensive fighting mode, not usually displayed for an attack on an opponent, such as a centralized authority, the American gunfighter showed traits where they could function as agents of justice even when the legal system was decentralized from the backing of a big government.  The frontier sheriffs such as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp were able to bring a sense of justice to developing towns in the Wild West through gunfighting that was unique in the world.  Never before in modern history, modern being the city-state’s development, did a nation form under the blank slate of natural human autonomy.  This is why to this very day, the political left, communists, socialists, even major corporations tend to seek sympathy for the American Indian, as they were soundly defeated during Westward Expansion.  They like the tribal Indian with all their administrative state, adherence to the gods of nature, the village chief, and social hierarchy formed in communal life.  When really, what we learned during Westward Expansion was the alignment of individual goals to the task of necessity.  For instance, President Grant made it known that there was personal wealth to be obtained in the Black Hills, which inspired many hungry individuals to risk it all in pursuit of opportunity.  When a great leader can align the needs of a business, or a nation toward an objective without imposing an administrative state in the way to slow everything down, great things can happen and did.  The centralized administrative state, the Indians, could not fight the decentralized frontier settler.  One was motivated by preserving a centralized authority. The other was driven by individual gain.  This is precisely the problem of our modern times with centralized authority for all kinds of reasons trying to pin down a society with the fear porn of Covid.  Americans pay lip service to authority but do what they want.  Other cultures where Covid was designed are quick to adhere to centralized planning, which ultimately fails because the administrative state is too insulated from reality to make the proper decisions in crisis management. 

When people look at the events happening to them right now and fear a global takeover of the “elite” of the “Davos Crowd,” I tell them not to worry.  The fight is not about force or even intelligence.  The administrative state will always have the same problems; they will always be too slow to solve issues in real-time as problems arise.  Yet, due to their desire for the safety of group affiliation, most human society seeks to create an administrative state as their first primal instinct. We’ve built our entire education system, our political system, our businesses, just about everything we do around the maintenance of an administrative state.  America was formed by people trying to get away from the overregulation of an administrative state. At the same time, the rest of the world suffers under much less personal wealth because they have been slowed down too much by an administrative state and its massive, slow-moving bureaucracy.  When centralizing order, such as visiting the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, regulation gains are at the expense of freedom and innovation.  That is why we all hate going to the BMV.  They are slow and uncompetitive.  Yet to drive, we all have to go to them and wait in the long lines because the government does what government does to their time frame.  That is always why our public education system designed by people like John Dewey doesn’t work, and it will never work.  We are teaching people to be members of the administrative state when the trend of the world is to be more decentralized.  So what people most crave in the world, even if they aren’t consciously aware of it, is to function successfully in a decentralized state, whether in their places of business, their neighborhoods or even within their families.  And it is our modern task to teach them how to let go of the burdens of the administrative state and function more as individuals, making nations great, businesses profitable, and lives much, much better off.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why Lean Manufacturing is Dead: The Trump tax cuts change everything

Before moving on to more positive topics there need to be some additional information as to why Lean manufacturing is dead, and why it is more cult than fact.  Every company I’ve been associated with for the last twenty years has bought into the nonsense James Womack articulated in The Machine that Changed the World—which is an incredibly negative book about western manufacturing techniques.  While there is a lot to Lean manufacturing that is very worthwhile and should be looked at as the next generation of improved thought over mass production roots imitated in America—it certainly isn’t a silver bullet in solving everything as it was sold to American management.  It really comes down to a battle between two cultures where the obvious favoritism goes toward the Japanese market.

Nearly every fifth page of The Machine that Changed the World Womack and his pals criticize as inferior Western methods with an obvious academic lens of hatred.  The real purpose for the book wasn’t to make American business more profitable on an individual bases—but to make them more global—as the authors played their part in the grand scheme of wealth redistribution that was so common at the time. And for their part, they were very successful, large companies like Boeing, GE, Ford and so many others looked at their competition, the Japanese, and sought to beat them—but honestly it was too late.  I knew that when I worked at Cincinnati Milacron as one of their crack staff of Lean advisors.  They took me to their South Lebanon facility late in 1999 to study these methods by Womack and the gang so to save them from closure.  But before I had a chance to read all the materials they had dumped in my lap, the Oakley plant had almost completely closed down and they refocused their business to just delivery of CNC units as opposed to actually building machining centers. The South Lebanon facility closed in the early 2000s just a few years later. When our crack team of Lean manufacturing surgeons were gathered to save Milacron it was already too late—like the Titanic had already hit the iceberg.  Only it hadn’t sunk yet but those of us smart enough to look at the damage below decks knew it was going down.  A wound like that couldn’t be repaired at sea just as the culture at Milacron couldn’t be fixed by reading a few books too late in the process.

I currently work with a very smart engineer from Wichita, Kansas who could nearly tell the same story of the Boeing plant that closed down there.  While they were sinking they made him a Six Sigma Black Belt hoping to save their own fate from such a tragic end, but it didn’t work.  The employees just couldn’t make the change, they weren’t Japanese—the cultures were just too radically different.  And to Womack’s credit he is correct about most of his observations regarding Western approaches—we all saw what happened to General Motors.  The writing was on the wall way back in 1990 when The Machine that Changed the World was first published.  One of my daughters was born that year and it shocks me that she isn’t yet thirty years old, yet this Lean manufacturing stuff has been sold to the manufacturing world as some voodoo remedy that could stop all these plant closures when in reality it was just one culture dominating another.  I watched before my eyes the economy of southern Ohio cities like Norwood and Hamilton, Ohio evaporate.  The shopping mall I visited most as a child, the Middletown Mall turned into a ghost town within a few years and nearly every major industry died except for AK Steel which still operated as a traditional mass producer with heavily leveraged unionized labor holding it back from being better than it was.  Middletown, Ohio died and so did the people who lived within it. To the west all Trenton had going for it was the Miller Brewery plant which made the safe product of beer.  The tradeoff was again high cost employees protected by a union.  Many companies adopted Lean manufacturing to help get their labor unions under control but the bottom line was that American workers expected too much money for their productive output while Japanese based employees were willing to work for less in exchange for job security for a lifetime.

When you visit a Japanese plant you find that everyone dresses the same, in most cases.  When Westerners visit in their suits and ties they are given hats to wear to show all the other employees that these visitors are equal to the people on the shop floor.  They refer to their upper management as seniors because literally they are the people who have been at the company the longest.  The floor workers in Japan know that if they stay with the company, they will move up the latter so they are content with this reality.  While this solves problems that unions typically are concerned with, the security and income trajectory of their workforce makes a stable investment understandable, while in the West literally labor costs can fluctuate all over the place depending on the type of people who are running those organizations at any given time.  It is possible in America for instance for a sharp tack in the box to become a high level manager in their mid thirties if they worked hard and climbed the ladder at a fortunate company—while this would be very unlikely in Japan.  There, due to Lean manufacturing, that employee would have started on the shop floor as an assembler and might still be working their way into a management job due to their years of service and experience garnered.  This is the primary reason American companies have failed in their Lean offerings—they go through the motions, but they aren’t willing to go all the way and become like the Japanese.  There is more to Lean manufacturing than just a bunch of charts and Japanese words for things—it’s a philosophical approach to manufacturing that is part of the workplace culture.

Obviously in The Machine that Changed the World Womach and his buddies Jones and Roos were a bunch of statistical academics who bought into this global economy garbage and they thought the Japanese were going to dominate that push—which isn’t what happened.  While the Asian work ethic is something that is to be admired compared to the beaten down lethargicism that we find in the West these days—even the Japanese had their problems with just in time delivery when they became the global leaders at the front of the train.  They’ve had their own troubles leading from the top so as the smoke cleared it was obvious that the biggest difference between East and Western practices in manufacturing was cultural and that assumption was that if America wanted to play ball, they needed to become like the rest of the world.  Well, that too is a shifting dynamic that will change as early as 2018.

To act as a companion to The Machine that Changed the World coming straight out of academic circles and into politics was the notion of wealth redistribution.  America raised its corporate tax rate to up over 30% which pushed many American companies into foreign markets.  To the lesser educated minds the work of Womach appear to be genius.  We were led to believe that these companies were leaving because America was so inefficient when in reality it was really due to high taxes.  Politicians were selling globalism to Americans while they skimmed off excess for the IRS to fund all their progressive causes in the process of destroying American manufacturing.  President Trump knew all too well what was going on and before the close of the year in 2017 had the tax rates changed for corporations down to 21% and now we will see the truth that was there all along.  Jobs were mostly inventions of America and the high costs associated with them were due to American labor being higher than in places around the rest of the world.  But the reason for their leaving the United States was artificial due to high taxation.  Where Womach was pushing for a new global economy lead by the Japanese Lean manufacturing system that kept prices down and expectations for employee advancement low—and manageable—everything changed in December of 2017 when Trump signed the tax reform package which lowered corporate rates.

The nationalism Womach criticized so heavily in The Machine that Changed the World is now the economical method of our time.  With the tax rates lowered we find that Lean manufacturing was really just a scam designed to move wealth from one place to another using common sense improvements of traditional mass production utilizing a very competitive workforce by people who think differently than Americans.  Part of the American lifestyle is the assumption that everyone can have a piece of the dream, a house, a yard—a few cars and money in the bank where in other places they hope to have a bed to sleep in and a job to go to—because the rest of their lives aren’t very good.  There is a lifestyle expectation in America that is part of the consideration factor for which Womach completely ignores.  Even the Japanese who transplant to America formulate their lives around it so new methods of manufacturing improvement are due to be revolutionized to meet these market demands.  And Lean isn’t it.

For so many years we’ve all been told that the Decline in the West is inevitable and that it was they who had to change—but nothing could be further from the truth.  The decline of the west was manipulated by people like Womach to sell globalism to everyone as capitalism was the hidden driver of invention within The United States that made the jobs and created the markets to begin with—a little fact ignored by nearly everyone in every sector of academia—from anthropologists to the most astute economists.  America made the necessity for jobs and the markets for income flow—and the spillover effect is why they even have cell phones in places like Vietnam.  Without America nobody would have anything and that is the key to the next generation of manufacturing thinking.  It’s not to elsewhere that the keys reside—it is right in the homeland of America that we must look—and it is there where the great next movements of manufacturing will emerge.

Rich Hoffman

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The Death of Lean Manufacturing: Self confidence and experience can’t be tracked on a graph–but they make everything possible

I normally don’t cross the streams of my projects but I had an experience recently that was worth sharing, and well heck, it’s Christmas and if I can help a few people today—then why not.  For professional reasons I had to re-read The Machine that Changed the World which was written by three college academics, Don Jones, Dan Ross, and Jim Womack.  I never liked the book even though there are some very good things about business within it.  Instinctively I hated the message of Lean manufacturing—to me it was like a cult—but being in manufacturing in a leadership capacity I obviously had to know as much about Lean manufacturing techniques as possible to talk the language with everyone else.  I needed to re-read the aforementioned book because the project I’m working on requires it heavily so I had to pull the baby out of it while disposing of the bathwater you might say.  To me the elements of that book that are good are guided largely by Mr. Womack and are things I learned instinctively by working really hard for a very long time.  I didn’t need Womack to tell me to decentralize my processes, or to have horizontal management systems.  Or to build as much of a product as close to the same room as every other process to maximize efficiency—or countless other similar things.  I’ve understood those concepts since before that book was written for a 1990s audience.  Rather I am quite certain that Womack and his friends sought to use academia to become part of the manufacturing world for their own self relevance in the late 1980s and that they’ve scammed many businesses into buying in to this Lean concept which was essentially to use common sense techniques sharpened after several decades of mass production methods as a base point, and to unite the world and its governments under a common manufacturing technique which would unleash globalism to the masses.  However, Womack and his academic buddies were wrong—and I’m here to declare that Lean manufacturing is dead—if it were ever alive really in the first place other than selling itself as a Frankenstein monster of copied techniques not really understood for why they worked, but only that they did.  The next method of global manufacturing technique is likely somewhere along the lines of what I presented to my manufacturing team as a Christmas present witnessed below.  It’s a radical idea which I think was always the essence of Lean manufacturing but will be further drawn out by necessity in the future—the role the individual plays in utilizing minimal force for maximum results as a cascading effect of influence which comes from The Power of Positive Thinking. It’s a major metaphysical shift in thought which takes the globalism out of manufacturing and instead recognizes the immense power that an individual plays in the utterances of productive output.  I provided a demonstration using my bullwhip as a metaphor for daily action.

Once I cleared childhood and the natural fears that come from being little in a big world—like loud noises, water, falling and speaking in front of people, I have been fear free most of my conscious life.  I have never been a person who functioned from fear; I never feared authority figures, bullies, or circumstances beyond the horizon of the living world.  And no matter how harsh the world was, I never backed down from it.  In spite of living a very aggressive life I’ve never had a moment of crises where I gave up and turned away.  I’ve certainly wanted to, but I never have had that experience of defeat in the face of a challenge.  I never thought to because nowhere in my mind was anything ever supposed to be easy. I never had that contamination of thought.  Even as I read more books than any contemporary I know, I also understood that such a practice was quite common in the year’s past.  As a young man not yet out of my twenties I took my family to Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello because I thought it was important for them to have that experience in life.  Privately when our guide explained to me that Jefferson’s library started the Library of Congress, and that the former president had read voraciously over 1000 books—I silently endeavored to outdo him.  It was a goal I set for myself, and a lofty one.  In that regard my formal education has never stopped as I now read books like Womack’s for lunch.  I am currently re-reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations just because I am sure the message of 2018 will be all about capitalism as the Trump presidency turns it loose once again—and my role in all this is to explain it to people.   I enjoy my role and I love my books—but most of what I know came from the unique circumstances for which I learned to live in the world—and the many hard jobs I have had while being completely fearless about the actions that would come at me from day to day.  Over a twenty year period of my life I did every kind of job imaginable, from cleaning toilets to being a great sales closer.  I worked in every kind of assembly environment and at every level.  And while I was doing all that I became a very respectable bullwhip artist—and in my head all those things do go together.

Having no fear means that I approach things without restrictions of thought.  For instance, the little presentation I did professionally was unique because most in my position would never risk the credibility to their reputation to start with.  What if I had missed that candle, or not delivered my speech correctly?  I could have done more damage than good.  But the most important element to my life that makes me unique and good at what I do is my self confidence.  I never worry about not achieving something because I have enough personal love for what I do and know to trust it.  I have been tested in every way that a human being can be, and fear has tried to work its way into my life for decades, but it has never found an unlocked door for which to color my thoughts with even a single self doubt.  Part of my presentation to those very nice people was to show them that part of what makes people good is that practice and confidence which can deliver them to the promise land of prosperity.  And that it doesn’t always take force, it just takes focus.

What made the Toyota method work in Womack’s analysis which launched the Lean approach to most things business these days, was that the Japanese had a samurai culture which bred this kind of self-confidence, but additionally as people from Asia naturally worked well together in a team setting.  After World War II they were an occupied country dominated by their former enemy, the United States.  So with the same vigor that they kamikazed American ships at sea with a never say die attitude toward conflict, they sought to exploit the weaknesses of American manufacturing’s mass production techniques and applied their own spin built from their ancient warrior codes.  Using the American Deming as a foundation they invented Lean manufacturing as a way to put themselves back on top of the world and recover their losses after the war—and college academics like Womack and his friends saw a vehicle toward globalism for which they could hang their star.  But they all missed the point.   Europe as well never quite understood Lean manufacturing.  They certainly understood the team concept of brothers before stars and all that—but they could not get the idea introduced by the Japanese of lifelong employment starting at the bottom and working your way to the very top—always staying at the same company to preserve the assets in training for which each individual brings to the table.

The next wave of manufacturing philosophy will embody some formal core element for which I shared with my business partners above—and which I share with you today.  It doesn’t matter to me whether or not I am talking to only 150 employees or 30,000, the message of concentrated individual effort is the same—and the trust in themselves to do whatever task is needed.  For my demonstration, putting out the candle in front of a crowd when I have everything to lose and very little to gain was more than a stunt for some Holiday cheer, it was a demonstration in self-confidence that I wished to share for a more profitable 2018.  Nobody who works for me is the type of people I want to be scared when I walk into a room.  I wish for every human being on planet earth the same reality I have—a no fear approach to everything, and if I can get them there with some instruction, I’ll do it every time there is an opportunity. However, the keys to good business is not from formalized education or in methods of team building that ignore that there is no I in team, but there is in win—but that victories large and small come from the individual focused on what they are doing and sprinkle into their productivity a self assuredness that was always in the underbelly of Lean manufacturing.  That confidence never came from a European style chain of command, but from living and being confident in what you do in a microcosm so that the macrocosm was better off for it—and that is the real trick.

Just as I explained that to put a candle out with a bullwhip requires placing the small sonic boom right in front of the flame—a good productive life is just as delicate.  In putting out candles to do it successfully requires many thousands of possible trajectories of movement to get that sonic boom to occur in just the right place. My experience and practice allow me to find that spot quickly and within a few attempts.  When I did my demonstration the way to assure more accuracy would have been to mark on the floor the exact distance from the candle.  But I didn’t do that, nor did I use a targeting fixture for which I was accustomed.  While those things might have given more closer to 100% accuracy, they would have been meaningless for my demonstration.  I simply went down to IKEA for lunch and picked up whatever candle arrangement they had for the Holiday season.  Everything was very spontaneous which forced me to react to those changing circumstances and illicit to my audience the self-confidence it takes to pull off something like that.  Once they had seen me do it, then in their own minds it unlocked the possibilities they likely all thought about—and it was my hope that it didn’t just make them better employees for me, but in every aspect of their lives.  And in that statement is the key to the next generation of manufacturing and all things related to production.

Rich Hoffman

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