Lean Construction Leaders | 4 questions

nopal acres off of two second lien you know there's a new book coming out the lean construction leaders book George teach Ilyas and a couple other leaders are working on that and they ask me a couple questions on my experience in the construction industry so I'm going to answer those four questions right now and the first question is how far along do you think the building or construction industry is in lean well the way I want to answer that question is first by saying what is lean in my definition it means total participation of everyone in the organization to be able to see waste and make small incremental improvements on a daily basis this is my definition when you have an entire team pulling together in the exact same direction it is it to have a Kaizen team or it doesn't have specialists to come in and help you it's when everybody understands what the goal is to provide continuous improvement increasing value driving cost down efficiency up work should be getting better everything should be getting better when everyone understands that objective and everyone's pulling together in that same direction as an entire team that is the definition of lean in my mind so now how is the construction industry doing that I would say on a scale of one to a hundred maybe five percent not very good now I say that because I travel all over the world and I work with a lot of large construction companies and there's a lot of traction there's a lot of smoke there's a lot of stuff that looks like lean or has the nomenclature of lean but the big defining issue is is the top management the top leaders are they doing Lee and oftentimes they're too busy making millions and billions of dollars according to the organizations that I work to be bothered with that they have big deals to put together they don't think the fundamentals necessarily the fundamental disciplines and principles that allow for lien to develop in an organization are what they need to be a part of and supported on a daily basis they got to do the big deals so this is the big rough big money big deals they don't think process is the Holy Grail the cornerstone of organizational health that's my opinion whenever I do see the top leaders totally engage and understand this is the Holy Grail this is the cornerstone this is the secret weapon then I see amazing things happen and I see that happen about 5% of the time but most of the time it's all just smoke and mirrors that's my opinion so question number two why is it so important to embrace lean principles and ideas in order for us to be a competitive and productive organization well two reasons joy and survival when you embrace lean and you're continuously improving and your life is getting better your work is getting better your customers are more satisfied you have more joy in your life that's all there is to it there's more joy in the organization everything's improving this is the again the cornerstone of how we were wired as human beings we were wired to think and solve problems that's what our brain is so capable of doing that's why we have this powerful tool up here now if you take an entire organization and they do that consistently and deliberately then you're gonna have more joy you're gonna have more satisfaction in your life so that's the first reason just joy the second reason is survival the world is changing so fast and it is essential that you are constantly on the cutting edge of every possible idea and concept that could undercut your organization and if you haven't already Jason's constantly thinking about this thinking about improving not doing the work not thinking about doing the work thinking about how they do the work then your survival rate is infinitely greater that's why I do it joy and survival question number three so one industry specialist said that large construction sites are competing with many different contractors all with different primary objectives and can I make a recommendation on how to maybe solve that problem what's the countermeasure well the best thing I could do is give you a real-life experience on how it happened and how you change that so I've worked extensively with the BI group in Kazakhstan they have about you know seven thousand employees forty thousand subcontractors that work for them they do business in the oil and gas industry road construction large commercial developments condominium projects you know just a whole vast array of different avenues that they're working in and as you can imagine they have all different kinds of subcontractors and contractors that they work with and everybody's coming at it from a different standpoint so what they did there which was quite remarkable is they set out to train all of their subcontractors and I said forty thousand people that's pretty staggering so they did a couple different things the first thing they did when I was there as they brought everyone together at a huge theater multiple times the theater had thousands of people in it and I spoke to all the lead people of all their subcontractors the owners general managers and so forth and gave them a very long presentation you know two or three hours I had a couple of them more on what is lean and what the BI group is trying to achieve and so first they got everybody on the same page they understood what the BI group was trying to accomplish the next thing they did is they sent a lot of those leaders have made available to them to go to Japan with me where I trained over 150 of those leaders in Japan so they understood what really Lean Thinking was all about understanding the Japanese culture and specifically TPS then the next thing I did is they establish a dojo an actual bi University for lean where they could train those subcontractors and then the next thing they did is they set out to let them know that this is the direction we're going if you want our money if you want our contracts you need to learn lean and you need to start implementing and teaching and training their people and I know that when I was in Kazakhstan so many times I went around to different subcontractors whether their window contractors glazing contractors siding contractors concrete contractors and I'd go around with the general managers and the owners and they would show me all the cool improvements they were doing they'd show me all the videos they're making and it was really quite remarkable that this organization of the bi group was able to turn everybody towards lean so the answer is you have to get everybody aligned and you have to put tons of money and time and effort into making sure everybody's on the same page you can't just talk about it you got to go out and support it in real world effort there you go question number four do I have one or two ideas or suggestions how owners supervisors specialty contractors can succeed in their business well the first thing is the understanding that most of what you do every day and what I do every day is waste our processes are clunky the things we do every day are riddled with waste inefficiency and once you come to grips with the idea that most of what you do and I do every day is waste then only at that point where you start to see the waste and start eliminating so number one you must understand that you're very inefficient be honest with yourself number two then begin the journey of continuous improvement you personally as the leader needs to begin the journey you need to improve your processes not going to your workshop not going to your construction site it's a guy you gotta do mean up you've got to do lead when you start doing lean and you start experience the joy and the satisfaction of doing lean in your processes then you'll be able to speak with authority to the people you work with and the people you work alongside so it's very important that you first become proficient the second thing I would say is set a seemingly impossible target so what I mean by that is I'm gonna give a couple examples here the Japanese said a seemingly impossible target to develop the Shinkansen high-speed train system in 1980 1964 for the Olympics that were in Japan and they wanted to go like from Tokyo to Osaka like in three hours it was seemingly impossible first of all nobody developed a train system at that point and that went fast the high-speed train system and first of all they had all these difficulties bad weather earthquakes or you know tectonic in nature and they had to overcome a lot of difficulties the only had like three or four years to do it but they set this target everybody came together pulling together and they achieved that objective so I think most people's targets and organizations are always based on monetary outcomes which is total joke it's the wrong return on investment it's wrong it's the wrong qualifier you want it to be something lofty and amazing so Kennedy said we want to put someone on the moon this is a seemingly impossible target this is the kind of vision or target that instills passion in people to achieve something and where people can come together money and I mean come on it's it's not what motivates people people think it does but it does it so a seemingly impossible target and the last one you know I think of Winston Churchill you know when he was faced with the threat of Nazis invading England he said we will fight in the sea we will fight on the land we will fight in the Hills we will fight in the fields we will fight in the cities but we will never surrender this idea of having this seemingly impossible target that brings everyone together you need that for me my company is vast cap is striving to be the best lean organization in the world and if we can do that we can change the world already indeed thousands of people have come to our company thousands of people read my book hundreds of thousands of people read my book and are changing their organization based on simple principles and concepts so what we want to do is make a ding in the universe we want to make an impact we want to be significant in our community our society and the world and we do that by setting seemingly impossible targets like becoming the best lean organization in the world so there you go those are the things that I would do if I was a leader in a construction company and I would have a lot of fun doing it so thanks a lot hopefully all this has helped [Music]

Channel: Paul Akers

Views: 6,053

Keywords: Lean Construction Leaders, George Trachilis, Paul Akers, 2 Second Lean, Lean, Kaizen

Id: 1KkQz_yGlHE

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 14 2018