Insider Secrets Behind the Toyota Production System & Boyd's OODA Loop with Charlie Protzman | Ep 22

Charlie Protzman is an international business consultant, multiple Shingo Prize-winning author, speaker, trainer, leadership coach and Implementer in Lean Business Delivery systems. Charlie has over 36 years of experience in Materials and Operations Management and has saved his clients millions of dollars. 

Specialties include training and implementing Lean Thinking / CI for manufacturing, healthcare, government, and service industries. Charlie is particularly experienced working with all types of process variation in assembly processes and is an expert at baton zone (bumping) line balancing.

Charlie has participated in train the trainer for Scrum The Toyota Way, Agile, The Flow System, and advanced training for the Cynefin Framework.

Be sure to use the Chapters Feature on Apple and Spotify to quickly browse and navigate to segments of this episode.

Lean Leadership Basics
Charlie Protzman on LinkedIn
Business Improvement Group (BIG) Lean Consulting

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

A promotional message for Ember Health.  Safe and effective IV ketamine care for individuals seeking relief from depression. Ember Health's evidence-based, partner-oriented, and patient-centered care model, boasting an 84% treatment success rate with 44% of patients reaching depression remission. It also mentions their extensive experience with over 40,000 infusions and treatment of more than 2,500 patients, including veterans, first responders, and individuals with anxiety and PTSD

Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

X: @NoWayOutcast · @PonchAGLX · @NoWayOutMoose

Substack: The Whirl Of ReOrientation - www.thewhirl.substack.com

Transcript

Transcripts are machine generated and are NOT edited for grammar or spelling.

00:00:03:01 - 00:00:24:05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
All right. Hey, let's go ahead and get it airborne. Today, we have a guest who is an international business consultant, a multiple Chicago prize winning author. We'll talk about that. Speaker, trainer, leadership coach and implementer in lean business delivery system. He has over 36 years of experience in materials and operations management and has saved his clients millions of dollars.

00:00:24:17 - 00:00:57:07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
More on that. This person on our show today is one of my mentors we met about four or five years ago down in Plano, Texas, during a little five day session on the floor system. We had some pretty interesting conversations and I was able to get him to go to Whistler, Canada, with me. It sounds a little weird, I know, but we went up there and engaged with Gary Klein, Dave Stone and some brilliant people who understand complexity theory, business theory, the theory of constraints and you name it, they were up there with us.

00:00:57:07 - 00:01:02:16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So it's our pleasure to have Charlie Pressman on the show today. Good morning, sir. How are you doing today?

00:01:03:18 - 00:01:18:02
Charlie Protzman
Doing great. It's great to be here with you and Mark. It's really an honor. I think you've been more my mentor than anything else as far as all the learnings that I got from you during that class.

00:01:19:06 - 00:01:38:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And I appreciate that, Charlie, but the the truth is understanding the Toyota production system has been part of my journey as well. And you and Nigel have helped guide that. And I think there's an interesting connection in your family that we'll probably talk about in a moment. But can you help us understand something? What is it showing your prize winner?

00:01:38:18 - 00:01:42:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
What does that mean?

00:01:42:04 - 00:02:28:01
Charlie Protzman
So the Shingo prizes are offered by a group Out of Youth, out of University of Utah, I believe. And it's the highest level award that an author can get in the lean realm, if you will. So it's a very selective process. Not everybody that applies wins. And it was really an honor for me to win those two awards from the Shingo Prize group, and the first award that I received was actually handed to me along with Richard Shingo, who was Shigeo Shingo son.

00:02:29:00 - 00:02:40:00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Very nice. And we'll talk about the Shingo is here in a minute. And you also released a book recently called Lean Leadership Basics and how well is that book doing right now? I think it came out in the last two years in the correct.

00:02:41:13 - 00:02:54:22
Charlie Protzman
Yes. It's actually been out for a year or so. And it's I think it's actually one of the best books we've written to date. And we were actually honored to have research and go write the forward for us for that book.

00:02:55:12 - 00:03:19:21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And congratulations on that. I'm looking right at it right here. I have a copy signed by you, sir, so thank you very much for that. Next question Why would a Shingo prize winning author, a lean enthusiast, somebody who understands operational excellence and how to get teams and leaders to really deliver value to their customers? Want to be on a show or have any interest in John Boyd's work on the utility?

00:03:19:22 - 00:03:22:17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Why? Why would you want to be here? What's the connection for you?

00:03:24:06 - 00:03:56:21
Charlie Protzman
So ever since you introduced me to the loop, my world has changed as well as Canadian and it just opened up a whole realm of new possibilities and new learnings. So I think the one thing I have learned in life is that the more you learn, the more you still learn, how much still has to be learned or there's still so much to be learned out there.

00:03:57:15 - 00:04:21:22
Charlie Protzman
So the only it was very intriguing to me and, you know, we got into some very interesting discussions about that. And PDC and our initial thoughts on PDC versus the Loop. And since then they have evolved to, to, to many degrees.

00:04:23:07 - 00:04:52:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. And that's really helped me understand Peter's the PDSA and PDC and learning more about your family's history, which kind of overlaps with John Boyd's journey. And I think we would be remiss if we didn't go back and look at who your grandfather is and maybe some possible connections through the timeline. Going back to the first reconstruction in Japan to how the sort production system evolved.

00:04:52:12 - 00:05:08:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
When John Boyd started looking at that and maybe where we are today with you and I having these conversations, can you take us back to Japan after the war and what was happening then and how your family's connected to some of that work?

00:05:10:09 - 00:05:52:05
Charlie Protzman
Sure. So it's kind of it's actually a really interesting journey. My grandfather was selected out of 26 potential candidates to go to Japan to help during the occupation. And he arrived there on November 13th, and he was working with a gentleman named Homer Sarasin. Sarasin had gotten there in 1946, just after the war ended, and had been working on repairing the communication systems in Japan.

00:05:52:05 - 00:06:21:00
Charlie Protzman
So, you know, back then everything had been bombed. So there was just destruction everywhere. And one of the first things MacArthur needed was the ability to communicate to the people and to his troops. So Sarasin had spent a couple of years working on the infrastructure with a lot of the manufacturers trying to get things up and running. And keep in mind, this is in the days of vacuum tubes, if you will.

00:06:21:20 - 00:06:58:02
Mark McGrath
So there were a couple of guys there before my grandfather. And I don't know all the ins and outs of of what happened there. But basically, those gentlemen left and my grandfather was brought in and during that time, my grandfather went out and surveyed 70 Japanese companies. And as he was surveying the companies, the things that he was finding was more about management than quality.

00:06:58:23 - 00:07:24:00
Charlie Protzman
And at the time, the person he was working for was a gentleman named Combs and Mr. Combs was basically very command and control, if you will, and that he told my grandfather he was just there to look at quality and that was it. And every time my grandfather came back and said, I've looked at quality, but the problem isn't the quality.

00:07:24:00 - 00:08:09:05
Charlie Protzman
The problem is the management. Because if we don't get the management right, the quality will never sustain. So they went. The reason he did so many surveys was because Combs kept sending him out to do more surveys and basically told them he didn't want them to get involved in the management piece at all. So as things progressed, he ran his findings based by Hunter Sarasin and my grandfather was pushing for a training course that they deliver a training course to the to these communications companies and Sarasin agreed and they presented it to Combs.

00:08:09:13 - 00:08:54:05
Charlie Protzman
And Combs was consistently fighting them. So the the reason turns out that in the end, they were really concerned that if they gave the Japanese this course or this class, that they wanted to give them an American management, that they would become too competitive against the US. They didn't want to give them that leg up. So the decision actually went to MacArthur and Sarasin was given 20 minutes to speak and I don't know if it was Combs that spoke to MacArthur or someone else, but they were given 20 minutes to speak and there's lots of articles on this.

00:08:54:05 - 00:09:33:23
Charlie Protzman
But basically Sarasin said that he had no idea how it went. He he wasn't sure, based on MacArthur's expression, because basically he had a poker face. Excuse me. So as Saracen was leaving the room, MacArthur said, Go do it, give them a course. So between the two of them, they parked themselves in the Daiichi Hotel building over there, or headquarters, which was for a scout, and built this training course, this manual.

00:09:33:23 - 00:10:12:18
Charlie Protzman
I sent you a copy of it, and they delivered it in two classes. One in Tokyo and one in Osaka, and the course covered quality. But also covered American management. So the course was designed as per over was given over eight weeks and four days a week and half day sessions. And then they were given homework each day to come back and bring back to the to the class.

00:10:12:18 - 00:10:52:11
Charlie Protzman
And the course was given to all the major communications companies at the time in Japan. So the course was given to the likes of today what we would know as sharp pioneer, Sony, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, you know, all the big names. And in fact, when they when they surveyed Sony, which had a different name in its time, they were actually building these electronics and with dirt floors, you know, and huts, because that's all they basically had available.

00:10:52:11 - 00:11:27:15
Charlie Protzman
So so it's kind of an interesting story. After that, they needed somebody to continue on because in 1950, the Korean War was starting serious and went with MacArthur to Korea and my grandfather came back home. But they were asked by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers to see for someone to help keep, keep things going from the quality side.

00:11:27:15 - 00:11:57:15
Charlie Protzman
And they wanted to send sure, but sure it was sickly at the time, so they ended up recommending Deming, and that's how Deming got his start over there. As far as the quality portion, Deming had been over there doing statistics, work for MacArthur with the census census that they held in Japan but hadn't been doing anything down. But the quality front per say.

00:11:58:13 - 00:12:30:18
Charlie Protzman
So that's that's really what led to Deming, who got all the credit for this. The thesis was relatively unknown until a gentleman named Ken Hopper, who was good friends with Drucker and a guy named Tokio Kato, found out about the course and then he basically brought everything with the case to light and wrote an article called A Lesson Learned and Forgotten.

00:12:30:18 - 00:12:32:14
Charlie Protzman
That was in Forbes.

00:12:33:02 - 00:12:37:01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And Charlie Cass is the name of the program. Help me out again. It was.

00:12:37:01 - 00:12:56:13
Charlie Protzman
And so CCF stands for the Civil Communications section and that was one of the groups in occupation that MacArthur had set up. And it was made up of a vast number of people that were there to reconstruct all the communication systems.

00:12:57:00 - 00:13:21:12
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And what's what's interesting about this, Mark, is the overlap between what John Boyd wrote when he was in occupied Japan and how he was upset about how military leadership was managing folks and I think you tore down a what was it, a hangar back then. So, I mean, we're going back to something that has a nice connection that many people don't know about these stories that people don't know about.

00:13:21:12 - 00:13:51:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And this with Charlie just highlighted for us is a different, I guess, an unknown view of the origins of how American management was brought into American style, management was brought into Japan, or actually almost paused in fear of the Japanese having a better capability in the future. So, Charlie, we appreciate the story and we appreciate your for your grandfather's work.

00:13:51:18 - 00:14:12:06
Mark McGrath
Are Charlie, would you speak a little more about the mutual learning that took place when, you know, they're surveying these companies and they're bringing in American SAS stations, etc.? Can you talk about sort of the give and take in the quid pro quo and what they what they found interesting and maybe what got fuzed together?

00:14:12:06 - 00:14:55:13
Charlie Protzman
So the there's a there's a lot to answer to that question. The the reason that the course became so important was that there was a purge in Japan after the war of any leaders that were sympathetic with the emperor. So that left a void. And many of the companies in their top one or two or three levels. So you they were in a situation where they were faced with leadership that all of a sudden lost, you know, the top level and in many cases didn't just didn't know how to proceed.

00:14:56:08 - 00:15:25:19
Charlie Protzman
So that kind of set the stage for this and also set the stage for very willing participants because they really wanted to learn. There's a story about one one company that they went into and I could get the name for you. But typically in the Japanese culture, back then you didn't. You would only share the results of an assessment like that or a survey like that with the president of the company.

00:15:26:14 - 00:15:59:08
Charlie Protzman
And this president actually had all of his leadership team come in during the assessment and ask them to speak candidly. So that that was a very unusual type of situation back then. But the the the learnings went back and forth in the class, as I said, and my grandfather just loved the Japanese people and would do anything for the Japanese people.

00:15:59:08 - 00:16:16:20
Charlie Protzman
He actually had four trips after that to follow up on on those visits. He also supervised the laying of the undersea cable back in 1956 between the US and Japan. As part of that.

00:16:18:10 - 00:16:45:13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Fascinating background story. Charlie Yeah, the connection to too. Sure. And Demi is I'm kind of interested in if there is any. So 1950s Korean War John Boyd's flying F-86 as many people attribute the U2 loop to that time of his life, and that's not necessarily true. He doesn't come up with U2 loop until about 40 years later, but he does reflect back on that time.

00:16:45:13 - 00:17:03:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So speaking about reflection in the 1950s, I believe that's when we see the development of the is it the short cycle and Deming's PDK is that correct? And is there any connection to what your grandfather was doing in Japan at the time?

00:17:04:07 - 00:17:41:09
Charlie Protzman
So sure. I'm going to go back to my timeline here. Sure. Got his doctorate from Berkeley in 1917 and then in 1980, he joined Western Electric and he worked at the Hawthorne plant. His first control chart came out May 16th, 1924, and then he moved to and that was while he was a Westerner Electric. Then he moved to Bell Labs.

00:17:41:09 - 00:18:27:04
Charlie Protzman
So his statistical work goes back goes back into the 1920s. My grandfather joined Western Electric in 1922, moved to the Hawthorne plant in 1926, and then moved to Baltimore in 1930. And in 1925, Deming spent two summers in 25 and 26 interning at Western Electric, and that's where he met. Sure. And then they developed a relationship after that where Deming visited Shaw quite a bit at his mountain lakes, New Jersey home.

00:18:27:04 - 00:18:56:19
Charlie Protzman
So that's that that was the connection between them. Another name here is Duran Duran, also work for Western Electric. So and also went over and taught the Japanese quality. And you don't hear a lot about him, but he did a lot of work over there as well. As far as the PDK, PDSA cycles go, that's, that's a longer topic.

00:18:57:23 - 00:19:01:21
Charlie Protzman
So I can jump into that now if you want or we can have it later.

00:19:02:21 - 00:19:25:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Well I imagine it's going to come up so this to me this is a very important component of Boyd's journey and understanding not just TPS and lean, but management. So and I think PDSA and PDK have a lot of, I hate to say confusion, but I think we needed to kind of set the record straight. So Charlie, please go ahead and help us out.

00:19:26:14 - 00:20:06:02
Charlie Protzman
So sure, it came up with what's known as the the PD assay cycle and Deming elaborated on it and PDSA was more around the product development piece where they would manufacturer the product, inspect the product. They would have, they would send it to the customer, get feedback from the customer, and then work on improving the product after that.

00:20:06:02 - 00:21:08:15
Charlie Protzman
So PDSA was planned to study act, so it was more along the lines of product development or Scrum, that type thing that you would see today. It didn't really cross over into the manufacturing world per se as PDSA. The when my grandfather taught the class with Saracen, they went through what they called the scientific method and the six steps of the scientific method, and I don't have that at my fingertips, but basically the six steps that they came up with are eventually what became known as PDC II or Plan Do Check Act that for whatever reason, when the when the term PDC came along.

00:21:09:02 - 00:21:41:22
Charlie Protzman
And I don't I still don't know exactly who came up with the term, but it could have from what I'm starting to get into now, it could have been Ishikawa or Doran, but I'm not sure which one of those. But Deming started using that term over there as, as being interchangeable with his assay, but he never really used PDSA over there.

00:21:41:22 - 00:22:09:14
Charlie Protzman
So for whatever reason he went along with PDC over there and that's what created all the confusion. There's several papers out now, one written by a guy named Mo and who had since passed away. And the one that I sent you is the one that actually talks about that. Deming actually stated that he he didn't know PDC. He didn't agree with PDC.

00:22:09:14 - 00:22:48:18
Charlie Protzman
He didn't know where PDC eight came from, and that was in the eighties. And that it should be you know, it should be PDC before Plan to Study Act. So we believe that PDC actually emanated from the CAS teachings and that course and I have a Japanese professor by the name of Toshio Gato who published the book, and he he says as much in his book that, that it's that section of the CAS class that PDC came from.

00:22:49:18 - 00:23:38:13
Charlie Protzman
And then I just stumbled on to another article yesterday that's also said that the teachings were the foundation for PDC. So now I've got two sources that kind of backed that up, and it was interesting. There's a lot of synergy between that course and Toyota as well. So as you get into as you start to read the manual, one of the things they they talk about is there's some famous equations and all the Japanese books that talk about cost, it's the first equation is cost plus profit equals selling price.

00:23:39:15 - 00:24:09:14
Charlie Protzman
So the idea behind that is as your costs go up, your selling price goes up. If you want to increase your profit, you have to increase your your selling price. The other equation is selling price minus cost equals profit. So it's so it's a different view of of what it's all about. So in today's world, who sets the selling price of the market?

00:24:10:22 - 00:24:35:18
Charlie Protzman
So the idea is if that if you want to raise your profit, you have to reduce your costs. Both of those equations come directly from the case manual. Okay? They're not written in equation form. They're written out. Okay. But basically both of those come from the manual and both of those appear in many of the Japanese texts later on that are tied into lean.

00:24:35:21 - 00:24:40:07
Charlie Protzman
So including Ono, including Shingo and other books.

00:24:40:18 - 00:25:06:00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Wow. So to me, this is not rewriting history. This is revealing that what happened, you know, this is important in the art of debriefing is looking back at what happened. And I believe, Charly, you're presenting us with facts about what happened in the fifties going forward and the connections and the TTPs that we didn't normally that we don't normally hear about in pop books or books by lean professionals.

00:25:06:23 - 00:25:29:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
To me, this sounds foundational to some of the work that Boyd would look back at later to help him construct the you and your family heritage. Your connection to this is one of the reasons we have you on here is we want to help set the record straight. Mark, any thoughts on on what you're hearing about this?

00:25:29:18 - 00:26:08:19
Mark McGrath
Well, having lived in Japan a significant time, I think I've seen the end results of all the work because it was astonishing to live there, to see the just the you know, just the amazing everything there. And that was, you know, 20 some years ago, I feel like going back and learning all this, I feel like what was done in the time that you're talking about produced the the marvelous place that I lived in and saw with my own eyes and have never forgotten that was found it crazy that there was stuff that we had back in 1999 and 2000 in Japan that didn't come here until ten, 15 years later.

00:26:08:19 - 00:26:09:04
Charlie Protzman
Right.

00:26:09:05 - 00:26:19:10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Charlie, can you clarify a couple of points? The KAZ program, it was a was it a D or D program or how was that set up? Was it served through a military?

00:26:20:15 - 00:26:40:05
Charlie Protzman
Yeah. Know was served through the military to the the supreme commander of allied powers known as Schapper. Yeah. So it was set up by, by McCourt and the case was set up by MacArthur and the military, as was this as was the whole course program was all under the guise of the military at the time.

00:26:40:05 - 00:26:50:22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And so wait a minute. The military influenced what or potentially influenced what is known as TTPs today. Is it possible can we make that connection or how?

00:26:50:22 - 00:27:18:15
Charlie Protzman
I think I think you can definitely make that connection. And it was interesting because MacArthur's approach to the occupation was way different than any occupations I've seen since then, and it didn't start out that way. There was a kind of an evolution and political thought as things were going, and it was Truman that eventually turned the tide and said, Hey, we want to we want the Japanese, we want to turn them around and make them successful.

00:27:19:16 - 00:27:48:12
Charlie Protzman
So that that was part of this. The other interesting part was that it wasn't until I met Professor Kato in Japan and that was back in, I think 2017, that he started telling me the Japanese side of the case, which we never knew. And we're working on a book right now and working on getting his his involvement in the book.

00:27:48:12 - 00:28:10:22
Charlie Protzman
The book was actually written by Ken Harper and his brother Will, and they can passed away a couple of years ago. And and his brother has Alzheimer's. But so I'm trying to carry that book forward. But one of the things we learned from Gato was that the sex teachings were going on the same time as the Deming teachings.

00:28:11:21 - 00:28:36:12
Charlie Protzman
And Harper told me that anybody that went to the Demings class after the sex class didn't really learn anything new. It was kind of interesting because there was a big piece of the quality part in the sex teaching since obviously sure. You know, had an influence, you know, with on my grandfather as well since he worked at Western Electric.

00:28:36:12 - 00:29:09:07
Charlie Protzman
So he he was familiar with all those teachings and knew statistics inside and out. But I found that Frank Caro, that that class was actually continued on by USC through 1976. And then at some companies it was taught until 1993. So so we were really surprised to find out that that that those teachings had gone on that long way beyond, you know, Demings time there.

00:29:09:07 - 00:29:14:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So we have a on the screen right now some photos and I don't know if this your grandfather he's.

00:29:14:11 - 00:29:20:06
Charlie Protzman
In school so my on the top photo my grandfather is the one sitting down.

00:29:20:16 - 00:29:21:00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Again.

00:29:22:12 - 00:29:34:11
Charlie Protzman
And then the top right photo. He's the one on the left. All right, the left side. So that that is that is a picture of them during the sex training classes.

00:29:35:13 - 00:29:36:22
Mark McGrath
And then what.

00:29:36:22 - 00:29:44:09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Were they teaching? What can you walk us through? Just some of the what was the what were the Japanese learning three course courses.

00:29:46:01 - 00:30:29:17
Charlie Protzman
So I'm I'm doing this from memory. I should go back and pull out the manual. But they taught all aspects of American management with with organization policies and procedures. They taught they actually taught participative management as part of the training. So that's where some of the bottom up stuff came from, but also tied into boyhood. So it was literally all aspects of of American management that they taught him in the class.

00:30:29:17 - 00:30:59:20
Mark McGrath
And then as time went on and I guess it evolved to the point where there's a quid pro quo or a fusion we were talking about earlier, you know, the sort of the mutual learning of some of the Japanese influence ideas or, you know, Eastern influence. The only reason I ask is it seems very radical from what when you look at the evolution of things from that time in both countries, having been the both, it seems very different in Japan.

00:30:59:20 - 00:31:02:06
Mark McGrath
Sometimes.

00:31:02:06 - 00:31:49:07
Charlie Protzman
So so Japan always had a different culture. Their their culture was more hierarchical. You basically did what the boss said. So introducing ideas around, you know, listening, listening to the to the people, those type of things were were more new. You know, at the time in Japan, my grandfather actually wrote a section on leadership that was delivered as part of the the course manuals training where he went into those, those type of things.

00:31:49:07 - 00:32:12:08
Mark McGrath
I was also I mean, just we don't want to go in a rabbit hole about Douglas MacArthur because we could talk about him for years. But it seems I wonder what were his ideas and his foresight informed by his many, many, many, many, many years living in Asia, not just in Japan and other places. It was the idea that he had to bring all these thinkers in and do this.

00:32:12:20 - 00:32:24:05
Mark McGrath
Was it was it unpopular? You know, was it it was I mean, it was a very radical, seems to me. It was a very radical move. You know, what were some of it? Was there a lot of opposition to it or acceptance out of that work?

00:32:25:08 - 00:32:52:11
Charlie Protzman
I don't know. I'm not an expert on MacArthur. I know that there was a secret directive that he was given, and I think it was by Truman. I don't I would say don't quote me on that. I'd have to go with it. I submit I just don't have it at my fingertips. But the secret directive basically outlines most of what MacArthur did while he was over there to get back.

00:32:52:11 - 00:33:18:11
Charlie Protzman
I pulled up the manual just to go back to the question you asked earlier. So the manual actually got in to I just pulled it up. Management policy. They talked about objectives of the enterprise and it was really interesting. There is a quote in there to me, it's kind of a famous quote to me, but it's it was by Newport News Shipbuilding Company.

00:33:18:19 - 00:33:19:07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Oh, no.

00:33:19:07 - 00:33:45:12
Charlie Protzman
And they they said they said we build good ships here at a profit, if we can, at a loss if we must. But we will always build good ships. Hmm. All right. And that was I remember this is back in the, you know, the four forties or fifties. And actually it had to be the forties. So that was one of the quotes in the manual.

00:33:45:20 - 00:34:07:08
Charlie Protzman
And I thought that was interesting to show the focus on quality that they had. Yeah, they also talked a lot about how companies had a duty to the social side or to the to the community as well. So that was also brought out in the course.

00:34:07:08 - 00:34:31:17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I find the irony in this because I believe Newport News, you know, the shipyards right up the road for me. Oh, not rather. It's about 30 miles away. You know, the USS Ford comes to mind and you talk about speaking a a quality control problem. So I think in I'm going to say this out loud here, being a naval officer at the moment, the Reserve Newport News is lost their way over the last 40 years.

00:34:31:17 - 00:35:02:10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. Something in our system has changed. So American style management is tied to the to the Japanese. They evolve it. In my opinion. The Americans don't learn from it. We don't embrace these lessons that sex was teaching over in Japan. At least that's that's my perspective, both as a as a military officer and as a consultant. It's very hard to to find these ideas still working well inside of U.S. organizations.

00:35:03:07 - 00:35:07:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Any thoughts on that, Charlie?

00:35:07:04 - 00:35:18:21
Charlie Protzman
Yeah, I think I think there's a good example that there's a training method known as TRW. Why have you heard of that training within industry?

00:35:19:13 - 00:35:23:20
Mark McGrath
Yeah, my dad. My dad did that for a year and he was in the Army.

00:35:24:18 - 00:35:56:16
Charlie Protzman
So so it's interesting. So it was it was developed during World War Two by a group known as the Four Horsemen. And they came up with this training process that is by far and away the best training process I've ever been exposed to. You can teach people significant amounts of information in a very short period time with a high level of retention using this method.

00:35:57:20 - 00:36:41:02
Charlie Protzman
And it was the idea is that you teach 2 hours a day for five days and through the course the people are practicing what they're learning as as they're taught the different methods. And you can see their their training presentations getting better each day throughout the week to where the end of the week they're they're just spot on and this it was actually funny I had actually run into CWI back in the eighties and I asked Hopper what you know, a question about something with training.

00:36:41:02 - 00:37:06:22
Charlie Protzman
And he said, Oh, that's T.W.. And I'm like, What's that? And he's like, Oh, that's training with an industry. He started, Explain it to me. And that was before the books came out on TWC in the U.S. So the the long kind of answer to the question is that the T.W. I was also taught parts of it were taught in the course course.

00:37:07:11 - 00:37:32:18
Charlie Protzman
They actually mentioned it in the course course. And I just found that link like I've read the CSS manual over several times and little by little I keep finding things that I didn't see before. But we taught TWB to the Japanese and it was taught separately the Japanese outside the six class, even though was mentioned in in the manual.

00:37:33:08 - 00:38:08:07
Charlie Protzman
But training with industry became the core foundation of j k k at Toyota. And don't ask me to pronounce the Japanese words, but the whole idea behind J. K k is that the employee or the team member takes the ownership of the job, is accountable for the job, and is accountable for improving the job. And that comes from that came from TWC.

00:38:08:07 - 00:38:38:14
Charlie Protzman
So TWC became the foundation for what's known as standard work in Japan or Toyota, not in Japan, because not all Japanese companies are lean. But at Toyota, Toyota took PWI and just built on it. And in the U.S. we forgot about it. Everybody came back after the war and all you see today left of PWI are remnants of work instructions and that's about it.

00:38:38:15 - 00:38:51:08
Charlie Protzman
It just had a resurgence here in the past ten years or so. But basically when they got back after war, we we just forgot about it. Stop teaching it. Wow. So now now we're teaching it back again.

00:38:52:04 - 00:39:15:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Unbelievable. So I'm going to I want to transition over to the archives and talking about Boyd here in a second. I also want to point out something about my experience with Toyota production system in lane, and that has to do with transitioning from the military into industry, where you have to be familiar with the Toyota production system, the Toyota way and other management concepts.

00:39:15:18 - 00:39:35:00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
The transition for me was simple or easy because a lot of the approaches that we learned in TPS or through the Toyota production system we already used inside the military. Right. We we're already using that. We don't call it that. You know, we went through TQM, I think it was total, total quality management, a long, long time ago.

00:39:35:00 - 00:39:54:22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. We've experienced these things, but they're part of our culture. They're part of our DNA. We don't talk about Kanban, we don't talk about these things. We just live it. We see it in our flight schedules. That's how we do work. It's just what we do. So when we transition over or guys like us transition over, we look around like, Why are you guys all excited this?

00:39:55:02 - 00:40:20:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Well, I can see why because you pointed out many American companies lost this maybe in the eighties or nineties. I don't know when exactly, but but they went away from that. So now we're asking them to do things like Agile or Scrum or be lean. And it's it goes against their what are what many people are learning in their MBAs and school, the Taylor Ristic view of the world and things like that.

00:40:20:18 - 00:40:49:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So it is very, like I say, simple or easy. It's, it's it's a nice transition to being veterans over to have them help coach organizations especially if those veterans had experience in in high performing aspects of the military special operations leaders. And in the Marine Corps, you know, fighter aviation, we find there. So transitioning everything you say with T2, why the connection to J, k k potentially?

00:40:50:01 - 00:41:15:20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I think having worked inside of Toyota several times, I've seen the connection. I'm like, Yeah, this is obvious to me. It may not be obvious to other folks. So it's fascinating that you're able to connect that for us today. I want to transition over to let's go into the I think early eighties, maybe nineties and talk about the Toyota production system and how that started to emerge in American pop management culture.

00:41:15:20 - 00:41:25:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Books, if possible, is a good way to phrase it. Can you walk us through when we started to see TPS emerge inside of the U.S.?

00:41:25:11 - 00:41:53:21
Charlie Protzman
So so it's interesting. I actually think going back to your earlier question and response, that this it was the MBA that was the undoing of a lot of American management, my opinion. And basically I got my MBA back in 86, 87 and as I started to learn that the Toyota system, I had to unlearn most of what I learned in my MBA class.

00:41:53:21 - 00:42:23:21
Charlie Protzman
Concur. Yeah. So it was in my operations management textbook, in my MBA training, which was why I kind of brought this up. We went through all the traditional management and cost accounting and that type of thing, how you run your organization and in the back of the book there was about seven or eight pages that talked about this other system that was out there, and it was called the Toyota Production System.

00:42:23:21 - 00:42:58:02
Charlie Protzman
And there were a couple of companies experimenting with it. One which was Hewlett-Packard. And they had started experimenting with it back in the early 1980s. It was so so that'll bring up another that brings up another topic later. But so here we are learning all about this class. And basically at the end of the book, it says they're doing this other type of thing in Japan, but it won't work here in the US.

00:42:58:02 - 00:43:02:18
Charlie Protzman
Yeah, so we didn't even cover that in the class. It was just there in the back of the book.

00:43:03:12 - 00:43:05:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you on this.

00:43:07:04 - 00:43:41:21
Charlie Protzman
So, so in this so after the oil crisis and the gas lines, which I actually remember back in 74, 75, is when the the Toyota system started to become prevalent because as all the American manufacturers were struggling, Toyota was just chugging along. And that led to a book by a guy named Womack and Jones, Dan Jones and Jim Womack wrote a book called Lean Thinking.

00:43:42:06 - 00:44:14:18
Charlie Protzman
And actually before that, they were there was a book that Womack was involved in that was called The Machine to Change the World. And I think that came out around 80 something, 85 or somewhere around there. And the machine that changed the world was a five year MIT study on the automotive industry, and that's where they really were able to bring out the difference between Toyota's production system and the American automotive production system at the time.

00:44:15:22 - 00:44:22:14
Charlie Protzman
Yeah, and it was actually one of the books that Boyd commented on that we saw at the archives.

00:44:22:20 - 00:44:42:10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of my favorite comments in there and this is remember, this is the book The Machine That Changed the World, the story of Lean production that Charlie is talking about. One of the first comments that we see in there is from John Boyd. These comments don't agree with Shingo or even owners accounts. They don't even mention Shingo.

00:44:42:10 - 00:45:04:01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. So here's John Boyd, potentially mid-eighties. Now reading this book and of course, you and I know that there's a huge connection between lean toward a production system and John Boyd's thinking. And based on the work that we've seen inside of his archives, of course, the work that Richards has done with not just the Wayne community, but in his book Certain to win.

00:45:05:21 - 00:45:26:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But these comments when you first saw them and remember we we had met, I think about a year prior or maybe six months prior. Then we went up to Quantico to look at the archives together. But can you walk us through what's going through your mind when you're in the archives, looking at the machine that changed the world and you see all of John Boyd's notes in the margins there.

00:45:26:21 - 00:45:28:08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
What are you thinking? Oh.

00:45:29:06 - 00:45:46:17
Charlie Protzman
So the so the archives. I could have stayed there forever reading over the stuff that he was writing. I mean, we had limited time, so. So we were just taking pictures as fast as we could of each of the books. We didn't have time to really read all that he was saying.

00:45:46:17 - 00:45:50:22
Mark McGrath
You hit the nail on the head, Charlie. I was just there and you could stay in there for months.

00:45:52:06 - 00:46:09:20
Charlie Protzman
It was absolutely fascinating and I was I was always kind of curious where he stood on, you know, with PDK because it's time we were we were going back and forth with PDK and the OODA loop and how did they all go together in Iraq or was PDK the same thing? Is there the loop and all those type things?

00:46:10:12 - 00:46:42:14
Charlie Protzman
And the archives just blew me away and and if you look at when he read the books and I don't know if you have a you want to flash up one of those pictures of the books. But he outlined he outlined every single sentence word, wrote comments in the corners and wrapped around the pages. It was just it was just fascinating to see that and to kind of see his his thought process around that.

00:46:43:07 - 00:47:00:07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. And further, our listeners, I'm sharing a screen right now that has the image of John Boyd's copy of The Machine that changed the World and a few pages that Charlie is describing here. And I'll scroll through this and we'll make this available for folks not necessarily the notes that Charlie gave us, but we'll make the the video.

00:47:00:07 - 00:47:03:21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Are these images available?

00:47:03:21 - 00:47:08:13
Mark McGrath
Yeah. This is astonishing to go through and read those.

00:47:08:13 - 00:47:37:01
Charlie Protzman
Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. And I, I, it was actually this podcast that forced me to kind of go back and put all that together, kind of refresh my memory since it had been a couple of years since we've been there. But it it gives you quite an insight into John Boyd's mind and the critical thinking that he possessed at the time and how he processed the information.

00:47:37:01 - 00:48:01:14
Charlie Protzman
And there are a lot of indirect and even one or two direct references to the Urdu loop in the books that that we went through it we're able to go through. I think I got through four or five of the different books that he had looked at. So it was interesting to see that the other comments were were in the books as well.

00:48:01:14 - 00:48:34:18
Charlie Protzman
And so anyway, it was, it was really interesting and I used a lot of of his comments to kind of tie together some of the thoughts with Toyota and how he linked to Toyota. Now, in all fairness to the guys that wrote The Machine that changed the world back then, we didn't have the Shingo books or the Mountain books or the Ohno books available.

00:48:36:07 - 00:48:58:23
Charlie Protzman
They didn't come until Norman Bodak brought them out, which was more in the eighties and nineties, and it was kind of the late eighties nineties that was really the hotbed for lean and lean starting. And I think it was an interesting comment that Boyd made in one of these books, and they took the name Lean from a guy named John Crosstrek.

00:48:59:00 - 00:49:27:18
Charlie Protzman
I think it's his name and Boyd said something to the effect of, I can't believe they're calling this lean. I don't remember the exact quote yet, but but I picked that up as I went as I went through this. So I thought that was interesting because that the actual word lean has created its own set of problems as we as we go through and try to implement it.

00:49:28:06 - 00:49:51:14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. And, you know, we, we've had conversations with John Boyd's daughter, Mary Ellen, and she was very clear that John Boyd selected words because meaning words mean things. And he's very everything in his briefs or every word in there was cautiously selected. Right. And I could see him commenting on something like this is lean now to the lean community.

00:49:51:14 - 00:50:07:22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You know, I get a lot of pushback from lean community that the duty loop is it's crazy. It's you know, it's ridiculous. It's for the military. It's it's only for killing other aircraft or whatever. They just there are folks that just will not open up their minds and pick up a book and read or listen to something. Right.

00:50:08:03 - 00:50:25:05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
The same people that are professing or that profess diversity of thought which signal detection, listening to those that are closest to the customer will not listen to people that are outside. Right. And that's the whole point of John Boyd, one of the whole points to jump Boyd's loop is you got to go outside. You got to look outside of what you know.

00:50:25:16 - 00:50:53:03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And I think that's the journey that I saw you and I go on because my journey was really trying to understand TTPs and your journey is really trying to understand you. But I do want to go back to the some of the comments in the books because I think this really drives home a lot of the foundation behind John Boyd's thinking when he eventually sketches the little, you know, about 20 years after 15 years after he starts studying TPS.

00:50:53:15 - 00:51:20:00
Mark McGrath
May I ask one question, Charlie, before we just unpack a little bit? You mentioned it at the beginning, but we unpack your the disruption that Ponch brought to you when he starts talking about Boyd in OODA, what was it that really disrupted your your your thinking to the point where you got interested in digging deeper on this? Like what was it about it that really caught you and brought you into Digging Deeper on Boyd?

00:51:20:00 - 00:51:55:18
Charlie Protzman
So Punch hit me with a lot in an eight hour session between Canevin and Huda, I was like, I'm in a different world, you know? All of a sudden, my world just opened up to the world of complexity and, and this, this thing. And, and Ponch has some great, great training slides on, on that material. And, and the earlier and then the ties into, you know, Sullenberger, what happened with Sullenberger and and some of those other things.

00:51:55:18 - 00:52:26:00
Charlie Protzman
So that to me was just just really opened up my mind. And then the first thing we started thinking, well, they know that's not really any different than PDK. And then we had a lot of discussions around that. And Ponch is like, You guys are crazy. It's not the same thing. And, and then the more we started to learn about it, the more we started to understand how the how that functioned and all the feedback loops.

00:52:26:00 - 00:52:56:00
Charlie Protzman
And I've been studying it ever since, ever since that class I literally went through and listened to every single video's John Boyd's eight hour briefing. And I actually want to go back and listen to it again. But I took copious notes on it as we went through and started identifying the linkages between tapes and also between Canavan and the guy was really just a brilliant thinker and way ahead of his time on.

00:52:56:00 - 00:53:23:06
Charlie Protzman
And I've even, you know, the idea of entropy and closed systems and how our companies can end up in that situation, you know, that when companies get complacent, they basically become a closed system. They start getting information from the outside and one of the the biggest thing I picked up from from going through the books was Boyd's comments around, you have to get outside the system.

00:53:23:06 - 00:53:44:15
Charlie Protzman
You can't change it from inside the system. You've got to get outside. And we now use the loop in all our training sessions, but we use it a different way and because we're most of the stuff I do is in the complicated domain, which took me a while to understand the differences between the complicated and the complex side of things.

00:53:44:21 - 00:54:49:14
Charlie Protzman
But in a complicated domain, you know, PDK works. But what I have found over the years implementing the Toyota system is that the OODA loop actually explains a big part of why a lot of lean implementations fail and there's the feedback that's known as implicit guidance and control from the Orient block directly to act and that is the the loop that Gary, I think that Gary Klein talks about with his rapid prime decision making and what I have found when it comes to change management is that's where I use the loop to actually explain why we have problems with companies today, why we have all this firefighting and all this reactive management.

00:54:50:15 - 00:55:16:06
Charlie Protzman
And one of the things I've noticed from or learned from tacit knowledge over the 30 or so years that I've been doing this is that when there is a problem, people just want to throw a solution at. It they don't want to take the time to study it. They just want to throw a solution at it. And then some in some cases, you know, and Gary, clients work with first responders and those type of things.

00:55:18:00 - 00:55:47:10
Charlie Protzman
It's extremely valuable. But they have the orientation and the training behind it to support the decisions that they make and where they don't. That's a lot of the work Don Vander Chrisman doing with an object based learning project is based. Learning is actually teaching people how to work rapidly without knowing the solution to come up with the solutions, that type thing, but just teaching people that, that process.

00:55:49:08 - 00:56:14:13
Charlie Protzman
But the example I use in my training classes, if you have a fire, what's the first thing people do? And the answer is I get back or either run or throw water on it. So we all know, you know, if there's a fire, you throw water on it. So then I ask people, okay, what if it's a grease fire and now I've just thrown water on it?

00:56:15:02 - 00:56:17:13
Charlie Protzman
What happens to you? And it's a.

00:56:17:13 - 00:56:19:08
Mark McGrath
Mess like throwing gas on it. Yeah.

00:56:20:04 - 00:56:54:13
Charlie Protzman
So my experience in working with companies is 80 to 90% of the time people when they run into a problem are going down. That implicit guidance and control path. And if they have the right answer, they'll fix it. If they have the wrong answer, it gets worse or it just stays the same and what I've been looking for all this time is kind of the linkage to prove that that that 80 to 90% of what I see is actually true, that that's what, you know, that's what people do.

00:56:54:13 - 00:56:59:21
Charlie Protzman
So I don't know, you know, the brain science is there to support that or not. But I think.

00:56:59:21 - 00:57:15:03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It is because the the the efficiency of the brain. Right. We're looking for shortcuts, which are mistakes implicit guys control. If we if it's an autonomic response or automatic response, that's the pathway we're going to go on in. The way we look at it's not something.

00:57:15:05 - 00:57:16:10
Charlie Protzman
That's so low energy.

00:57:16:21 - 00:57:31:19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, it's lower energy. It doesn't defy human nature. Right. You don't have to really try that hard. You just have to execute what you already know. So that's the tendency. That's where we're going to gravitate towards when we see problems in the complicated domain.

00:57:32:06 - 00:57:38:13
Mark McGrath
And as you say, there's a lot of there's a lot of water being thrown around Greece. Fires more often than not.

00:57:39:00 - 00:57:43:12
Charlie Protzman
Yes, yes. And then what I so to me, the go ahead function.

00:57:44:03 - 00:58:06:10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Now, I think the other connection is remember when we look at Canavan, if we use the wrong approach that puts us in, could put us in disorder, we can't make the connection. So that's what's happening is sometimes are the lessons that we understand to be true. And remember the complicated domain of the can have a framework of subject matter experts but make sure you protect your mavericks.

00:58:06:10 - 00:58:30:07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
There's always a it's the land of good practices, right means there's always something better out there. If you apply those approaches, you're going to run into disorder and potentially run yourself into chaos. And that's what I believe you're trying to how you're connecting this with me right now is that's the pathway we're going on between the little loop can happen and applying rain in organizations.

00:58:31:14 - 00:59:06:16
Charlie Protzman
Yeah and when you're in when you're in simple and, and, and you throw a solution at a problem, it can easily, like you're saying, take you into chaos, you know, and that's that big question. So so the to me, this is kind of when you get into the Toyota connection to this and and the point piece of it, I think PDK is that is a center path, right where you're going, you're going from observe to orient to hypothesis to act or decision to act.

00:59:07:16 - 01:00:00:23
Charlie Protzman
That's the PDK route. If it works, you get, you know, a feedback loop back to observe. And if it doesn't work, you also get a feedback loop back to observe. But if it doesn't work, you're going to go back through the path again. So the, the, the PDK loop takes energy to go down that path. And to me what Toyota's done is through their application of CWI and I think a lot of things that actually came from the KCS class and then Deming and Duran and others, what they have done is taken through standard work or basically made standard work kind of like implicit guidance and control.

01:00:01:17 - 01:00:27:06
Charlie Protzman
So so at Toyota, if there is a problem, you follow PDK That's the, the kind of the standard work for it. So when you have a problem it's it's implicit guidance and control to use the PDK loop if that makes sense. Right. Whereas most companies it's not there that, that they just jump to a solution they don't go through to try to fix it.

01:00:27:06 - 01:00:54:05
Charlie Protzman
So we all have standardized on PDK and ingrained it and it's muscle memory in the company also known as A3. You know, the A3 approach you're using A3 is where they told the the problem solving story on a three size piece of paper. But to me, that's what Toyota's been able to do, that most other companies haven't. And that's to get people to constantly go down that path.

01:00:54:05 - 01:01:08:06
Charlie Protzman
Now, my guess is, you know, Toyota still probably has instances where people don't do that like every company. But for the most part, through all the training that they do, that's that's the path that the people go down.

01:01:09:09 - 01:01:28:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So I want to point out something else that we can pull from the archives and talk about Toyota and what's important to today's businesses. And I'm going to share a screen here so we could take a look at this collectively, and we'll share this with our our our viewers, our listeners as well. So control John Boyd as he's looking at the book.

01:01:28:04 - 01:01:49:22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Kaizen I don't remember the author of this, and he says as many times throughout his journey of looking at the Toyota production system, and you could see it in zero two, but control is exerted from the bottom up, not the top down, right? So The way I read this and the way we coach this is control of your organization is outside and bottom up.

01:01:49:22 - 01:02:24:02
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Your customer, if you have one, will control you rate. And so we see this a few times throughout Boyd's notes there. And he also points out that quality control, I believe, is outside and bottom up. It's from the customer's perspective. Yeah. Upstream again for Toyota quality or total quality control, they're connected to their environment, their customer. Right? So he keeps coming back to this idea that control is outside and bottom up from the environment.

01:02:24:07 - 01:02:32:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Is that consistent with what you're coaching organizations and consistent with what you understand from?

01:02:32:11 - 01:03:07:17
Charlie Protzman
Yes. And the environment that he talks about is another reference back to the earlier. So the the idea of organizational planning and some of this came from the case manual as well is that the the direction of the company is set at the top. And Toyota, for instance, when they're doing their planning, they use something called motion planning, which I think was was really formally developed by Goodrich.

01:03:07:17 - 01:03:36:12
Charlie Protzman
And the idea behind in planning is the company sets the initial targets and then as it goes down the organization, they play something called catch ball where the targets kind of go back and forth. So from bottom up, they say, here's what we think we can do top down to saying, here's what we would like to do. And then they agree on somewhere in between where they end up.

01:03:36:12 - 01:04:10:21
Charlie Protzman
And then at the end, if you're doing motion planning, right, the employee on the floor actually knows how what they're doing is contributing to the overall company and to the company's goals or targets that they've set. So there's this linkage literally from bottom up. The other idea that Boyd points out as he's reading through some of these books where the authors got it wrong, is that the standard that are developed at Toyota are really develop.

01:04:10:21 - 01:04:38:03
Charlie Protzman
It's that Ohno talked about this. It's the employees that develop the standards. They're the ones doing the job. So you work with them to develop the standards. And and again and Jake, it's the employee's job to improve the standards. So the standards aren't coming from top down command and control. And this ties into the whole idea of leaders intent, you know, in those those type things.

01:04:38:03 - 01:04:45:09
Charlie Protzman
So it's how do you get your organization can be much more agile with leaders intent versus command and control.

01:04:45:21 - 01:05:00:05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And the comment that I'd put up there is management may monitor standards, but in the end, workers set standards and carve up new ones. Unless we treat the workers as robots who only take orders and have no ideas. That's from John Boyd. And that's a comment I think you were just talking about.

01:05:00:14 - 01:05:02:11
Charlie Protzman
VITALE Right. Yeah. Yeah.

01:05:02:22 - 01:05:11:19
Mark McGrath
It seems like you're talking an environment that is learning constantly learning.

01:05:11:19 - 01:05:52:03
Charlie Protzman
And it is you're you're always constantly learning. And Toyota has Steve Speirs, who is now MIT, who's an MIT professor, said this in a video a while back. He said, Toyota always has this like healthy paranoia. And they say when they actually became the number one car maker, they were actually panicked because they were afraid that they were going to lose, that they were going to lose that drive to overcome complacency.

01:05:52:22 - 01:06:25:04
Charlie Protzman
And they are the leadership is always coming up. Ways to keep the company fearful of the competition and always looking for ways to keep driving improvements through the organization. And to me, that ties in with all of Boyd's work, where he talks about the healthy tension that's required, because if you don't have that tension, you're not going to drive the change, which is all tied into the conceptual spiral.

01:06:26:00 - 01:06:51:07
Charlie Protzman
So that, that, that healthy paranoia is about always looking at destroy and create, you know, the snowmobile idea, right? How do we keep how do we keep a company? Just always looking for mismatches and looking for ways to keep improving. And I think that's what you saw with the Prius when the hybrid came out. That was kind of their snowmobile.

01:06:51:18 - 01:07:22:13
Charlie Protzman
Now they're doing it with the hydrogen car. You saw it with kind of the helicopter, with Uber. You know that when Toyota invested in Uber, so you see these these it's it's just always looking for trying to drive the mismatches and the opportunities to improve. And I think that's one of the things that Boyd really identify with. Ohno and that owner was the guys on the floor, friend.

01:07:22:13 - 01:07:53:13
Charlie Protzman
He loved the guys on the floor management. Not that he didn't love them, but but he drove management. I mean, he drove those guys would make them stand in a circle for up to 8 hours or more until they saw the waste and saw the things that he wanted them to see. It was really fascinating. So he was relentless with the management team and it was all about what can you do to support the worker and make their job easier and make good quality cars?

01:07:54:06 - 01:08:22:05
Mark McGrath
What are some what are some good examples? Charlie Just to paint contrast for people that are listening, what are some companies that didn't do those things that were extremely vulnerable because they they didn't have that state of alertness or state of healthy paranoia. Where they're always trying to get better. Are there any examples that you could think of that people could relate to where, you know, they open themselves up to, you know, presenting themselves as a massive target to competitors because they weren't doing these things.

01:08:22:05 - 01:09:05:03
Charlie Protzman
While there's there's a bunch and a lot of them are profiled by a guy named Joel Barker who had a lot of videos back in the day on paradigms and paradigm pioneers and those type things. And one of the things he profiles there is a Swiss watch industry and how during their heyday they had 80 to 90% of the market and, you know, then then at that time, all the watches were made with gears and were very precision oriented and and the Swiss had all this infrastructure around that paradigm.

01:09:06:05 - 01:09:33:05
Charlie Protzman
And then the digital Quartz Watch came out and all of a sudden that became the new paradigm. And the Swiss watch manufacturers, for most intents and purposes, lost that 80% of the market to Japan and Texas Instruments. The interesting part about that story is, do you know who who invented the digital quartz or the the movement watch?

01:09:33:19 - 01:09:34:22
Mark McGrath
Was it the Swiss?

01:09:35:21 - 01:09:37:07
Charlie Protzman
It was the Swiss themselves.

01:09:37:14 - 01:09:42:13
Mark McGrath
Yeah. So it's like a country discovering digital photography story.

01:09:42:13 - 01:09:59:04
Charlie Protzman
Yeah. They introduced it to the Swiss Watch Congress. Congress and didn't even protect it and basically gave it away to the competition because. That could never be the future of watches, huh? That's so. And it goes on. It's good.

01:09:59:12 - 01:10:23:03
Mark McGrath
That's that's relatable. I mean, you see, I'm wearing a one at the moment, but I have to tell you that this one, compared to the the Orient Watch company, which is owned by, I think, Seiko that I bought when I was living over there, it's an automatic movement and it's never been serviced and it keeps perfect time. Whereas, you know, Swiss watches are the gift that keeps on giving.

01:10:23:03 - 01:10:28:09
Mark McGrath
Sometimes you got to go send it back. It serves. But that is fascinating and very relatable.

01:10:29:15 - 01:10:34:08
Charlie Protzman
Yeah. And Seiko is the company that took it. Yeah. Wow, that's awesome.

01:10:34:14 - 01:10:56:16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's amazing. Oh, he's a competency induced failure, right? I want to head back to the outside in bottom up control and leadership moment. So John Boyd, while he's looking at these books and there's several books that are in the archives, he starts talking about leadership is excuse me command it's leadership and appreciation and I think that's what you're pointing out this year.

01:10:56:16 - 01:11:19:14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
There's 30 stories you told about 8 hours out from Ohno. The the idea here is that leaders need to attend to like a garden. And we know this from the book of Five Rings that the leadership is leading like a gardener. Right. You set the conditions. But in the Toyota production system, we also have Kaizen and we have gone by Sarkeesian.

01:11:19:14 - 01:11:30:14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
From what I read when John Boice looking at these books, he says that Kaizen. Kaizen is first bottom up and then top down. Your thoughts on that?

01:11:30:14 - 01:12:08:00
Charlie Protzman
Well, it actually, it absolutely is. There's there is a distinction, though, in the word kaizen, because the word kaizen means different things. And in the US, Kaizen is most often associated with something called Kaizen events, and kaizen events are typically a five day event where there's a day or half day of training, three days of go do on the floor, make improvements, then a management report out with a pizza lunch at the end.

01:12:09:01 - 01:12:49:08
Charlie Protzman
And that's what most Americans associate with Kaizen. And that's how most lean, whatever you want to call them, masters, practitioners, practice is that type of event excuse me, but somewhere along the line that got lost because Toyota doesn't do Kaizen events per se and. If they do, it's a very minimal percentage. So Toyota at Toyota, Kaizen is changed for the better and it's basically gradual.

01:12:50:04 - 01:13:22:10
Charlie Protzman
It's a gradual change. It's incremental change. So it's it's every day looking for something to improve. So it's it's building a of continuous and daily improvement where you're engaging and challenging the people 100% of the time. And it's always challenging to come up with new ideas, new ways to do things and ways to improve the process.

01:13:22:10 - 01:13:23:02
Mark McGrath
Which is very.

01:13:23:02 - 01:13:58:12
Charlie Protzman
Boyages Yeah, which is very different from that, that Kaizen event process. So it's when I go into companies and explain kind of what that difference means, most companies are surprised to find that out and that when I ask them, you know, what would it take you to develop a culture where every day you're getting ideas from people on the floor and you're challenging them for ideas and and they own the ideas and they own the improvement, you know, what does it take to put that kind of culture in place?

01:14:00:12 - 01:14:01:04
Charlie Protzman
And to me, it's.

01:14:01:10 - 01:14:25:14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
To me that's a debriefing culture, right? That's the the if you look at the usually separating your decisions from your outcomes, looking back at what happened, that situational awareness and you put this in your new book, some debriefing tips that can help companies build this continuous improvement mindset is a 1% Kaizen mindset inside their organization, but I'm seeing the same thing that you are in the safety world.

01:14:25:20 - 01:14:51:03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
They borrowed from the Kaizen events that you talk about, and they have these learning teams that these folks come in and they know how to look at something and really understand what's going on to me. That's okay. That's okay. But that's not the fundamental way you coach accountability, the ability to recount what happens, how do we look back from multiple perspectives and figure out what's happening or what happened, what's happening now and improve our performance in the future?

01:14:51:03 - 01:15:13:09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And this goes back to the point about transitioning veterans over from the military into the civilian world. We're pretty good at most of us are pretty good at the art of debriefing, looking back, understanding what happened, looking for potential causal factors or root cause, depending on the context we're in and then improving that this is not happening inside of organizations.

01:15:13:14 - 01:15:35:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. And I think that's what you and I talked about a few years ago is we have to coach these human factors, these social skills, so we can empower or help those closest to the customer improve performance and deliver value rapidly. And not only not only at that level closest to the customer, but throughout the organization, they have to learn how to do this.

01:15:35:19 - 01:16:02:09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Kaizen Which I believe you're saying it's continuous. And if you think back to things like Scrum, where every two weeks you reflect back on or every week you look back, what happened to improve the future? Continuous improvement means continuous improvement. It's not every two or three weeks, right? So I'm just sharing my little bit of my venting some of my frustration of what's going on around the world right now with you.

01:16:03:16 - 01:16:10:21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Is this what you're seeing as well when it comes to Kaizen events that there's another aspect of this that we need to coach organizations on?

01:16:12:18 - 01:16:42:17
Charlie Protzman
Yeah, for sure. And to unpack a couple of things that that you went through, one of the things that were to our Shingo taught us when we were over on our trip to Japan was first. The first thing that American management wants to do is find out who's to blame, whose fault was it? And the first thing Rizzuto teaches is Don't blame the worker, because once you blame someone, you never get to the root cause.

01:16:44:03 - 01:17:12:03
Charlie Protzman
So the idea is it's about process, not people. And to really do, you know, lean or TPS and they should be the same thing is you have to win the hearts and minds of the people in addition to the processes, which also ties in with Boyd. So if you think about what Toyota has done, if you talk to anybody anywhere that's work for Toyota, you know, they love the company.

01:17:12:22 - 01:17:38:07
Charlie Protzman
They just love working there. They love being there. And think that ties into what Boyd said. If you get the people, you don't need the terrain or the tanks, right? You have to win the people. And I think that's part of the success of their system. They also look at the next process as the customer. So, you know, I don't I don't want to deliver something to that next step in the assembly process that's wrong.

01:17:38:16 - 01:18:15:06
Charlie Protzman
So the idea is you never pass on a bad part to your customer or to the next process. And that's that's ingrained in the organization. And to go go back to your point about TQM and this is something that my grandfather talked talk a lot about TQM was Toto quality management. But in Japan they didn't roll out to where they rolled out TCW QM, which was total company wide quality control.

01:18:16:08 - 01:18:41:16
Charlie Protzman
And there's a book, a guy named Professor Kondo, who I actually met with in Tokyo when I was in Japan, and he was telling me about some of my grandfather's work over there. But he was explaining to me the difference that in Japan, what we call TQM was applied. Applied to the entire company, whereas in the US it was basically just applied to the shop floor.

01:18:42:23 - 01:18:49:06
Charlie Protzman
And in American management it's, it's, it's okay if we do it to them as long as they don't do it to us.

01:18:49:18 - 01:18:50:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yes.

01:18:50:13 - 01:19:11:06
Charlie Protzman
You know, and, and lien is great as long as, as long as they don't come to our, our process. Huh. And it's kind of interesting. So that was a big difference in the application of TQM. And I think why TQM for the most part in the US was it wasn't looked at as a company wide system.

01:19:12:20 - 01:19:14:21
Mark McGrath
So do as I say, not as I do.

01:19:15:00 - 01:19:38:17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, I with you, we've seen this in the past in the in sports teams when they don't take on social marketing, soft skills training throughout the organization. Today's movement you always hear even agile. This will talk about at the team level. At the team level, I'm like, what does that mean? And by the way, the people that have the highest level of task interdependence are up at the top of the organization, right?

01:19:38:17 - 01:19:57:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So when you need team training skills, your C-suite needs it more than anybody else. But yet, to your point, Charlie seems to be that everybody looks at these silver bullets, these frameworks that are out there, these approaches from from a management standpoint, this is what we need to train our people on so they do it. And that's not true.

01:19:57:05 - 01:20:00:01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. What you're saying is the whole organization.

01:20:00:18 - 01:20:13:01
Charlie Protzman
Right. And if the leaders fight to your point, punch, if the leaders fight, you see it in the people underneath them because they're fighting against the idea. And you see it all the time in companies.

01:20:14:06 - 01:20:38:06
Mark McGrath
You see it, you know, there's almost like a there's like a management firewall between, you know, a lot of the things that you're talking about, like a Kaizen event, it sounds like really it's just an ornament on a tree, really. Just Taylor ism. Hiding behind some of these punches is the term pop pop business. It's like they they hide the sort of the reductionist Taylor stick approach behind some of these things.

01:20:39:10 - 01:21:10:00
Charlie Protzman
Yeah. And Taylor Taylor wasn't a bad guy, you know, Taylor basically came up with the idea of scientific management, scientific method. It was actually good because Taylor and Gilbert are the foundation for TPS, you know, and and the Japanese learned about Taylor, you know, way back back in the early 1900s when when when he was publishing stuff, they were translating it.

01:21:10:00 - 01:21:33:01
Charlie Protzman
And same with Gilbreth. But the interesting thing to me, though, is that to me, Taylor was the father of time study. Gilbreth was the father of motion study. And interesting today in industrial engineering classes, I don't think they teach Taylor and Gilbreth much because when I ask people that come out of industrial engineering school, a lot of times they don't remember.

01:21:33:01 - 01:21:57:00
Charlie Protzman
Those people were. But but that was really the foundation for all of this. Taylor. Taylor came up with what a shovel should look like, what a mop should look like. He came up, he actually patented the grass on the putting green. He came up with high speed steel. The guy was a genius. I mean, he came up with all different kinds of things.

01:21:57:12 - 01:22:22:20
Charlie Protzman
The the problem is his approach with the worker was, you know, I'll watch you and I'll figure out what you need to do, and then you do it and I'll pay you more. Yeah. Gilbreth came at it from a different tack. So Gilbert. Gilbert had a brick building business and built, you know, houses or whatever or places out of bricks.

01:22:23:08 - 01:22:51:14
Charlie Protzman
And he did a motion study with bricklayers. So if you think about construction, that's probably one of the hardest places to do this. But it's all the stuff that we call lean. Today he came up with adjustable scaffolding where the workers could always stay at the same level as the wall was being built and reduce the motions literally to exactly how you pick up a brick, how you put on the concrete and then build wall.

01:22:52:06 - 01:23:06:07
Charlie Protzman
And it's interesting in that with if you reduce the motions, you actually it's a win win for the worker and for management. You're making their job easier and you're getting things done quicker.

01:23:07:07 - 01:23:08:21
Mark McGrath
So I would say that energy.

01:23:09:18 - 01:23:46:00
Charlie Protzman
Yeah, lean is more it's about 80%, 90% motion study and 10% time study. It's like 10%. TAYLOR 90, 80, 90%. GILBRETH An interesting part is Gilbert and Taylor lived at the same time and Taylor would teach classes every Sunday on on the scientific method scientific management. And Gilbreth actually did a lot of the trainings for him on those Sundays of Taylor wasn't around and then eventually they had a falling out on their approaches and they split.

01:23:47:02 - 01:24:07:19
Charlie Protzman
But Gilbreth also used video and pictures and that type thing with his workers, which is what we do today. So a lot of the things that Gilbert did ended up in the Chicago books and then became the foundation for how we're implementing it today.

01:24:09:02 - 01:24:25:14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So Motion versus time reminds me of tempo versus speed, right tempo. We favor tempo over speed effect. In this case, we favor inside looking at and looking at motion over time. Is is there a parallel there?

01:24:25:14 - 01:24:53:08
Charlie Protzman
Oh, I would think so, because one of the things we say is, is quality first is quality first. The speed will come in. And if you go after speed first, it's a mess. So it's it's it's all about it comes in with when you're training people in standard work or really when you're implementing anything, there's, there's always that learning curve.

01:24:53:08 - 01:25:23:20
Charlie Protzman
You have to give people the ability or the time to learn. And as you do, your your quality will get better. So quality, quality, safety, all are all integrated with lean. You can't it doesn't do any good to get to increase your production volume 50 to 80% because you can build a lot of bad parts really fast. So it's you got a lot of the room.

01:25:23:20 - 01:25:55:07
Charlie Protzman
You have to you have to build the quality into the system and that that was the judoka part of the house which which really ritual said he was really upset that they changed it from built in quality to judoka because it's built in quality is really what it's all about. Judoka was a way to do that, so he thought he thought Judoka was more even though was really important, it was more of a misnomer that it really should have stayed built in quality.

01:25:56:11 - 01:26:03:16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So so the two pillars that you're talking about, judoka and the second, you know, we're talking about types are the two. In a way. I get confused all the time.

01:26:04:04 - 01:26:23:06
Charlie Protzman
This is well, it's TPS, which is which is the Toyota way but it's the the while Toyota way. I know what you're talking about. So Toyota way was you know, respect for people the TPS house was just in time energy dojo. Okay. And then we had.

01:26:24:06 - 01:26:35:03
Mark McGrath
Is that the critical difference? It was yeah. What would be the critical differences between Toyota production and Toyota way that you'd want people to know?

01:26:35:03 - 01:27:02:08
Charlie Protzman
The Toyota way, I think, was more of the was more of the people based versus the tools based. So the Toyota production system, I mean, this is just I'm just thinking about this out loud. But the Toyota production system, how had the foundation of standard were a jungle, which is level loading, TPN, total productivity, maintenance, all those type things.

01:27:02:08 - 01:27:11:02
Charlie Protzman
And then you had the two pillars, and then at the top was respect for people. And the Toyota Way expounded on the respect for people piece.

01:27:12:21 - 01:27:33:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So I want to expand on the the two pillars and for on just in time in Judoka make a connection back to potentially combine and what Boyd pointed out in some of these notes we have so bon would you mind walking us through that real fast. So, you know, I know that a lot of listeners are lean listeners, but there may be some folks that are new to this type of thinking.

01:27:35:08 - 01:28:25:03
Charlie Protzman
Sure. So so combine basically is an information signal or a trigger. So the again, combine has the word combine has is used in different ways, even though it's the same word. So within a system you can within a combined system, you also have combined so basically the idea behind combine is that the as the later process uses the parts from the earlier process, the earlier process then produces what the later process took in the amount that the later process took it.

01:28:26:04 - 01:28:56:08
Charlie Protzman
So it's it's inventory or whip or work and process that between two lines, if you will. And this this can be this can be physical processes or informational processes. Well, but it's it's it's it's in between two processes. And it's it's a way of connecting processes that aren't interconnected. So they use the inventory as a way to connect the processes.

01:28:57:12 - 01:29:22:19
Charlie Protzman
So the simplest example of a combined system is something called the two bin system and then a two bin system. I have two bins on Iraq and as the bin empties out, the second bin comes down the empty bin. Now the first bin that became empty is now my combine or my trigger that I need to replenish that bin.

01:29:23:23 - 01:29:50:21
Charlie Protzman
That trigger then goes back to either a shelf where they pick up another bin that already has parts. That's called a withdrawal compartment, or it goes back to the actual production process and triggers them to fill the bin with the parts that they're making in that. So that's called a production ordering combine. And then there's there are six or eight other types of combines and there's a good book on that.

01:29:50:21 - 01:30:16:01
Charlie Protzman
It's called Toyota Productions Production System by Mind. And he goes through a very in-depth explanation of all those types of commands. There's also the combined system, rehab and Scrum. Yeah, which is the same idea. Only the weapons or yellow stickies on the on the on the wall. So so in essence, that's, that's what combined is it's a way to link processes.

01:30:16:01 - 01:30:38:08
Charlie Protzman
But the goal that the real goal is to eliminate the need for the combined by connecting the processes directly so that I don't need the web. Because one thing about excess material is it's always hiding a problem, right? So the challenge is to find the problem. So in that case, it's hiding the problem that the two lines aren't connected directly.

01:30:38:08 - 01:30:42:10
Charlie Protzman
So I have to connect them with this inventory.

01:30:42:10 - 01:30:59:12
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So we use combine quite a bit. And in fact let me just show you this real fast. You might get a kick out of it. You can see this is our basic board for the show. No way out. You can see. I mean, just tell me real fast. What do you see? What tell me what the big problem is.

01:30:59:12 - 01:31:05:19
Charlie Protzman
I, I can't read it. It's too small. But my guess is you probably have a lot of zoom at the same time.

01:31:06:12 - 01:31:33:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, we have a lot we're batching right now. We're doing a lot of recordings at the moment, and then we have this space that's empty. There's like a bottleneck there between editing and assets, right? So we're working on our process still. We're still trying to evolve and improve. And eventually, going back to your point that I believe you said this, the purpose of conversation to basically eliminate, eliminate itself, go single piece flow, which we don't have at the moment.

01:31:33:15 - 01:31:54:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. Okay. So we're using that here for show. And you're right, a lot of folks do use it for using things in quote unquote, the Agile project management. I'll call it that for now. Even though it's not supposed to be that. But John Boyd talked about combine. He looked at that several times. He also looked at it on the screen.

01:31:54:16 - 01:32:07:03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I JT But you said, okay and the way I was taught chidoka was it's automation with the human touch, right? Can you is that is that still you might you might wrong in that or.

01:32:07:03 - 01:32:38:20
Charlie Protzman
No, no, the there's no English word for it. So they call it automation. But that's basically what it is. So it's it's, it can be applied to machines or people. So with people it's the and word that people pull or today it may push Toyota and with machines it's how do I make smart machines that can stop preferably before they make a mistake or worst case after they make a mistake like an expensive machine.

01:32:38:20 - 01:33:20:05
Charlie Protzman
If a tool breaks, the machine stops. It doesn't just crash and or or continue to produce bad parts. And Toyota spent 60, 70 years working on that. The idea of Chidoka came from Toyota. The Toyota toy0 day loom works where he developed the the what is it the press, you know, the for the the sewing sewing machines where if a thread broke a metal clip would drop down and stop the machine.

01:33:20:21 - 01:33:48:15
Charlie Protzman
Right. So was that an invention that really led to Chidoka and? They actually got to a point where one person could run 40 of those looms by themselves. So it's it's whenever you see a worker watching a machine in a factory and you ask them, why are you why are you standing there watching the machine? And they saw the machine might break or there might be a problem with the machine, and I need to listen to them.

01:33:48:15 - 01:33:51:12
Charlie Protzman
All this other stuff, basically, they don't have to do a place.

01:33:53:15 - 01:34:28:10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
That makes sense. Charlie I got a couple of loaded questions for you, and this connects back to my working time with the creator of Scrum, and that's Jeff Solon, former fighter pilot. And he talks about wrote about his book, several his books that Scrum came from the Toyota production system and the OODA loop of Fighter. Now, after today's conversation, I can just I'll say this scrum came from the early because I believe the loop is informed by Lean and a lot of the work that your grandfather has done with you.

01:34:28:19 - 01:34:36:13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Any thoughts on that statement?

01:34:36:13 - 01:35:12:12
Charlie Protzman
So as you know, I'm not a scrum. I'm a scrum master, but I'm not a scrum expert. I think I think I know. I think I don't know all about that. But I've read Solomon's books don't but I don't know all about I know the origin of Scrum came from the Japanese professors and those type things. Yeah So I don't know.

01:35:12:20 - 01:35:17:17
Charlie Protzman
I don't know if I can answer that question directly. Can you ask another way? Yeah.

01:35:18:02 - 01:35:37:16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay. So let me ask you another question after you know, our discussion today and what we've talked about over the last couple of years, the way I look at it is the Toyota production system and even lessons from. Your grandfather and cars have informed John Boyd's view on the utility before he sketched it. Right. So they're not to me, they're not separate anymore.

01:35:37:21 - 01:36:03:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's if look at the utility as a whole and you want to learn a lot, you're going to learn TPS. You have to learn to understand the utility. That's that's another way to or another way to state that. Would you agree with that now that, you know, after this journey of looking at the utility and living TPS and cars and laying, why would any lean practitioner need to look at the utility now?

01:36:03:15 - 01:36:08:13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Or even if you're not a lean practitioner?

01:36:08:13 - 01:36:39:11
Charlie Protzman
So I don't know. I don't know that I would agree that you have to learn TPS. I have to think about that one to understand the utility. I think you would have to I think to really understand the OODA loop and how it applies to TPS or lean, you would have to know that and you would have to be familiar with PDK.

01:36:39:11 - 01:37:06:18
Charlie Protzman
Make all those connections. It's kind of like I think it goes back to that orientation block and like when we were talking in Quantico about can happen if if Canavan is an even part of your orientation. There is no real connection, at least with the individual, because they don't even know it exists. But once you know it exists now, now it's a whole different story.

01:37:06:18 - 01:37:34:12
Charlie Protzman
And I think the group is the same way. I think once it becomes part of your orientation and the the connections and the interplay and the interrelationships that come out of it become very apparent. At least they have to me the because I was career with TPS and when you first went through the loop, I immediately went to PDK.

01:37:34:20 - 01:37:52:13
Charlie Protzman
Right. And I was, I was struggling, trying to figure out, okay, what's different between this and PDK. And then it became really apparent that that was way bigger than just PDK and the Boyd was really kind of ahead of its time when it came to complexity, thinking, you know.

01:37:52:14 - 01:37:53:10
Mark McGrath
You're bigger than.

01:37:54:02 - 01:38:18:13
Charlie Protzman
In the complex domain. There's a lot of things that he brings up that that Dave talks about, you know, even even his his whole destroying create isn't all that far off apex predator theory that Dave has right it to me. And the conceptual spiral. It's the conceptual spiral. It's just you're constantly doing apex predator where you're constantly doing destroy and create.

01:38:20:07 - 01:38:31:10
Charlie Protzman
So I, I don't know that you would have to be I don't know that you would have to know TTPs to get you to. But I do think once you got to, TPS makes a whole lot of sense.

01:38:33:05 - 01:39:07:18
Mark McGrath
It isn't it isn't an amazing how the widespread thought on Boyd is a reductionist to just look at OODA loop as if it were some process that you would use in a tactical situation and they completely don't understand the depth and the scope and the pioneering approach that you're mentioning. A complexity science, you know, for people like the three of us that have been in the archives and have seen where this guy's mind was, it's so far beyond even what I learned about him when I was an officer in the Marines.

01:39:07:18 - 01:39:28:13
Mark McGrath
And my, my, my world completely opened up when I started seeing the practical applications and capital markets in the fluctuates lines of things and just the the constant flow of things. And when I got into the, you know, my master's in economics, when I got into that and I started piecing back, I'm like, wait a minute, this sounds like what John Boyd was talking about.

01:39:28:14 - 01:39:46:04
Mark McGrath
This sounds like we're fighting. And then it's so much more than it's due to loop. I'm going to use it in this situation and I'm not going to use you to here. Boyd was not an academic. He's a moron. And you get into it and you just see that this guy is so misunderstood by so many.

01:39:46:04 - 01:40:03:12
Charlie Protzman
Well, the other part. So we so I mean, you're used to the loop all the time, whether you know it or not. Yeah, that's I think the first section. And then we use that. We use the era loop with lean sales when we're teaching Lean and sales. I've actually been working with.

01:40:03:13 - 01:40:05:18
Mark McGrath
Tell us more about that. Yeah, and unpack that.

01:40:06:15 - 01:40:34:12
Charlie Protzman
So there's a company that we've been working with called Chutes International. They make they make chutes for for laundry systems like in buildings or trash chutes and buildings. And they're a local company in Baltimore that we've been working now for, I guess, four or five years going on. And the sales manager there is a guy named Doug Leone and very thinker.

01:40:35:06 - 01:40:55:05
Charlie Protzman
And you know, me, Ponch is I learned stuff. I look for ways to go apply it right away. Right. So this this was a company that I could go kind of experiment with, practice with. And and they knew that when I went in, I told Doug, Hey, I'm learning this stuff. Let's look at ways that maybe we can make this work for you guys.

01:40:55:18 - 01:41:23:20
Charlie Protzman
And I was also at the same time learning about lean design and and R&D and those type. So, so I started teaching him about the earlier and I said, you know, you need to look for ways to find mismatches with your competition and where can you get inside their loop and come up with products and services that they can't respond to right away?

01:41:23:22 - 01:41:55:19
Charlie Protzman
Kind of that Ashby's law for the reversal of Ashby's law principle kind of thing and and I don't want to go too far down that path because I'll give away some things that I don't want to give away. But we started looking at ways that they could introduce things that maybe their competitors could respond to right away. And, and as a proof, you know, as opposed to even doing it all in one shot, why don't you do it just, you know, this year you do this next year you do this, next year you do this and you just keep hitting them with things that they can't respond to.

01:41:56:17 - 01:42:23:08
Charlie Protzman
So we we started going through that kind of training. We also went through at Toyota, they do something called tradeoff curves, where they'll actually study a component and they'll test it over the entire spectrum of whatever that characteristic is for that component. So they know exactly where and when that component will fail. In the U.S., we just test based on what the customer says, they want it to pass.

01:42:23:08 - 01:42:49:21
Charlie Protzman
We don't test the whole thing. But this idea of tradeoffs occurs. We were able to actually also apply to sales. So if you have a sales team that that's doing estimating, for instance, and they're overwhelmed with estimating work, you can go back, study all the things, the things that they've lost, the proposals that they've lost, and start to look for patterns or things that are in common and.

01:42:49:21 - 01:43:06:03
Charlie Protzman
Then you can do a tradeoff curve. And on the right side are the things that I don't want to bid those, you know, I always lose them. You know, eventually if I have the people in time, we could go after those. But for right now, I need to work on the things on this side of the curve, the things I know we can win.

01:43:07:02 - 01:43:42:14
Charlie Protzman
And that freed up like 50, 60% of their time, the estimated hours time by not having to work on things that you're potentially going to lose. I've done this in other businesses as well. So it's it's there are a lot of even scrum the first time that I that I learned from the first thing we did was we looked at we could apply it in business and we immediately started working with R&D and engineers and using the the combined boards in order to make all their work visible.

01:43:43:15 - 01:44:07:20
Charlie Protzman
And then it's really funny because when you first set the board up the process has about ten stickies on it where they're all working on the trying to work on the same things at the same time. Kind of like the board you put up. Yeah. And then with is comes, comes the waste. I forget the, the name of the curve that Nigel says, but you know, if you're doing two things at once, 20% is waste.

01:44:08:00 - 01:44:29:19
Charlie Protzman
You know, the example is texting and driving, right? That none of us do that. But you know that if you're if you're texting and driving either 20% of the time, your eyes aren't on your phone or they're not on the road. So so that's that's what the examples talking about is literally when they're trying to work on two things with exactly the same time.

01:44:30:06 - 01:44:45:07
Charlie Protzman
So we teach that to companies, you know, so but the lean sales is, is fascinating. And we were able to apply all the lean principles to sales. And it's it's made a big difference for them.

01:44:46:04 - 01:45:03:16
Mark McGrath
You've had your you know, when when Ponch introduced you to boy to new to in you've exploited deeper. Do you have any anecdotes of story. You know we're really where you brought somebody to an awakening in or awareness of Boyd which completely blew the doors off their thinking too.

01:45:04:19 - 01:45:27:18
Charlie Protzman
Or, Oh, whenever I bring it up in Lean Training class and we start talking about it, there are always some people that just the light bulb goes off and they want more information right away. So it's it's it is fascinating. And people do do do want to know more because I don't have time to get into all the other loop with them.

01:45:28:09 - 01:45:44:20
Charlie Protzman
I mainly talk about that implicit guidance and control path versus PDK and then the relationships with the feedback. But it's the same with Canavan. I introduced Canavan in all the classes to but there's not time to go through it and much just making know it exists.

01:45:45:18 - 01:46:10:21
Mark McGrath
Just when it clicks. It's so amazing to see when it when it clicks and people that they just get it and then, you know, their, their ability to compete and collaborate and cooperate and create it just it skyrockets and they don't even think, why didn't I think of this before, you know, or I'm doing it now. I have an awareness of how it's actually functioning and now I can get better at it.

01:46:10:21 - 01:46:23:21
Charlie Protzman
And the more you learn about it, the more the more you just keep learning, the more you just keep climbing. You just keep finding connections out there. I mean, with these type things.

01:46:24:08 - 01:46:40:14
Mark McGrath
Yeah, we've said on the episodes before, I mean 1995 at Marquette University, the Naval ROTC program, they taught us to avoid cycles and it and ever since then, it's just it's just a deeper exploration all the time. It's amazing that he was still alive then.

01:46:41:18 - 01:46:49:07
Charlie Protzman
But so the Loop was profiled in that book by competing Against Time, which is one of the books that he had there. Yeah.

01:46:49:15 - 01:46:51:01
Mark McGrath
And comments on that.

01:46:51:02 - 01:47:00:09
Charlie Protzman
Yeah. Yeah. He so the authors now forget oh you have got it or something.

01:47:02:17 - 01:47:06:02
Mark McGrath
Anyway it's all in the pdf that you sent.

01:47:06:02 - 01:47:13:16
Charlie Protzman
Yeah. Stout comes out and, and I forget their names but I'm yeah.

01:47:14:00 - 01:47:15:15
Mark McGrath
Stalking out.

01:47:15:15 - 01:47:46:09
Charlie Protzman
That's a stalking. How stalking. So they actually talk about the loop in the book which I think is, is really interesting back then though it's not the only picture that we see today, it's just the the circular one. But that that showed the immediate linkage between lean thinking and the Urdu loop. And that book was actually profiled in a Tom Peters video back then called Speed is Life.

01:47:47:18 - 01:47:50:15
Charlie Protzman
And he talked about that, that book. A lot of.

01:47:51:04 - 01:48:05:13
Mark McGrath
Time based competitors are offering greater varieties of products and at lower cost and less time, and they're more pedestrian competitors. In doing so, they are literally running circles around their slower competition.

01:48:05:13 - 01:48:16:23
Charlie Protzman
And that book even got into the notion of fast transients. So did I mention the word? Yeah.

01:48:18:16 - 01:48:42:21
Mark McGrath
We just had in it right ahead of, the Super Bowl, we put up a video of Major General Brook Leonard from he's a F-16 pilot and F-35 pilot, and he gave a description of fast transients. And their discussion was, you know, if you're coaching a game this Sunday, you might want to pay attention to this to the. Oh, yeah, for sure.

01:48:42:21 - 01:48:45:10
Charlie Protzman
You definitely want to get the other guys in the loop for the Super Bowl.

01:48:46:05 - 01:49:20:13
Mark McGrath
Yeah. I mean, I think that that's where a lot of people come into the loop. You know, they understand, you know, how we were taught at back in ROTC. You know, you get inside somebody's time cycle or, you know, you compress time. And then as the more you get into it, you explore and expand on it, you realize that that's a very narrow piece of the scope of this guy's work around complexity sciences and what was coming in when we had Dave started on it was fascinating to hear him say it would have been interesting to see had John lived a little longer than than age 70, 72, I think he would be passed if

01:49:20:13 - 01:49:40:09
Mark McGrath
he had just lived a little longer to see how what we know is you to loop through the final sketch that he made before he passed. What would it have evolved to like? What was he because he was not one to set things in stone and he hated writing things down and he was always was changing would be really interesting to see and that's where we're picking up trying to pick up the work and as best we understand it.

01:49:42:02 - 01:50:02:06
Charlie Protzman
Yeah we've been we've been trying to evolve that as well. I know Pancho's too, and we did that in the Quantico training as well we were. We were looking at do some of that, but it'd be interesting to have another one of those because I think we've all learned so much since then. We'd have some really even more interesting discussions around that because we definitely have some new thoughts on especially the orientation.

01:50:02:06 - 01:50:41:03
Mark McGrath
BLOCK May I ask you a biographical question that ties into this tour? Yeah, like like I'm a product of Jesuit schools, too. And I know that you went to Loyola and their system of total formation, their system of creating a broader, broader worldview, but curious your respective perspectives on that, because I've always felt that how they taught us to think matched well with what I've learned in exploring with on board, you know, the total formation of the person to engage the, the world and, and in a wide variety of things.

01:50:41:03 - 01:51:11:10
Charlie Protzman
So, so I totally agree. So my most of my college experience, all my college experience at Loyola was my school. And to me, I was really fortunate to have to go to my school because there people really want to learn. And you have people in the class that already have a bunch of really varied experience that are now contributing to conversations that you don't necessarily get back.

01:51:11:10 - 01:52:07:07
Charlie Protzman
When I was, you know, in college during the days, but I'd say there's a big contrast to Loyola and the other colleges that I went to from that from that regard is it's it's more about it's developing the whole person and really teaching you to think. And I had a teacher, Richard Frankie, who was like one of the best teachers I ever came across who actually started teaching how to apply statistics to business and how to look at correlations and to be critical of everything, literally everything that you read similar to Boyd and his policy on grades was that basically it wasn't it wasn't based on tests like he didn't give tests.

01:52:07:09 - 01:52:31:03
Charlie Protzman
He just gave you a grade at the end of the class and it drove people nuts because the people that want to get the straight A's couldn't handle that. They didn't know how to handle it. But to him, it it goes back to the KPI discussions, right? To him, he didn't want people to focus on the grade. He wanted people to focus on the learning.

01:52:31:14 - 01:52:49:05
Charlie Protzman
The learning. Yeah. And coming up and coming up with their own ideas and not have the pressure of the grade, you know, driving you toward what you thought he wanted you to come up with. So it was it was kind of interesting from that perspective.

01:52:49:14 - 01:53:16:14
Mark McGrath
It's how that system works and really correlates to everything we're talking about because it drives my wife nuts. When I do this, I can literally name single professor in every subject, in every class, because regardless if you're learning physics or history or literature or whatever, they all took that of of learning and inquiry to the point where, again, it becomes unforgettable.

01:53:18:01 - 01:53:34:12
Mark McGrath
And then you're drawn to things like Kaizen and Toyota production and Boyd because you're constantly trying to get better. I mean, that was another thing that I took from my Jesuit education, is that not finished? You have to keep you have to keep going and improving.

01:53:35:08 - 01:53:38:10
Charlie Protzman
And I totally agree. Yeah.

01:53:40:01 - 01:53:57:20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So, Charlie, we've taken up quite a bit of your time today. I just want to make sure our listeners know where to find you, what's the best way to contact you? And if you're coaching and training folks on the OODA loop and Lean, I think your clients are going to be able to kick butt and take names later.

01:53:57:20 - 01:53:59:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So how do they get in touch with you?

01:54:01:04 - 01:54:18:05
Charlie Protzman
So our website is a big lean back. Com and that's probably the best way to get in touch with us. I can give you my email or find information that you want later on, but that's probably the best way to get to get a hold of us.

01:54:19:12 - 01:54:28:01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
All right. And then business this year coming out of COVID. Walk us through what's happening in in the world. What what are you seeing?

01:54:28:01 - 01:55:18:23
Charlie Protzman
So COVID was rough, I mean, for us. So I think if things are going on the way they went on for another to nine months, I probably would have been working for a company versus having my own company. But this year, last year was probably the best year we ever had. The there's an interesting thing going on in the US right now that I've never and it's not just the US probably, you know, worldwide at least the European countries where all of a sudden there's this drastic shortage of labor and qualified labor, and that in conjunction with the fact that all the baby boomers are retiring.

01:55:20:02 - 01:55:52:17
Charlie Protzman
So companies that haven't standard work, that don't have policy and procedures and muscle memory are now finding themselves faced in situations where people are leaving and they're losing the recipe. And there are a lot of companies now looking bring back people that have retired to train and coach the people that are there because there's no one else to do it.

01:55:52:17 - 01:55:54:01
Charlie Protzman
We're so out of the job.

01:55:54:01 - 01:56:03:00
Mark McGrath
So what are the what are the big deficiency gaps that they're bringing? They're bringing these people back that the coaching teach.

01:56:03:00 - 01:56:33:01
Charlie Protzman
It's in a lot of areas. It can be technical knowledge, it can be machinists, running machines, people to assemble it. It's it's all over. I've never seen anything it. So there is this we're in an era all of a sudden where you just can't find people or you can't find qualified people that you need to do things and and it's a real struggle.

01:56:33:16 - 01:56:57:20
Charlie Protzman
It's a real struggle for companies. Now, you know, how do you deal with that? So you're in a situation where you have to be do more with less. And I think it's also going to drive it's going to start to really drive automation, because if I can't get the workers, I got to have robots, you know, to to replace them.

01:56:57:20 - 01:57:26:22
Charlie Protzman
So I think it'll be interesting to see see what happens as we keep going down that down that path to see where it leads, because it's a very the other issue is the supply chain shortages. We've had supply chain shortages within electronics or within specific areas in the past. I can remember when, you know, Motorola would put us on an allocation for chips and those kind of things.

01:57:27:15 - 01:57:54:20
Charlie Protzman
But now it's like worldwide, like you just can't get stuff. And most companies have a huge they still have a backlog, but they can't get the products out because they don't have the people or they don't have the knowledge. So I actually know an example of a company where, you know, you hate to say this, but literally the guy got hit by a bus and died and they couldn't build the product anymore.

01:57:54:20 - 01:57:57:15
Charlie Protzman
They had to discontinue it. Well.

01:57:58:00 - 01:57:59:11
Mark McGrath
It's all a single point of failure.

01:58:00:05 - 01:58:26:19
Charlie Protzman
Yeah. Nobody. Nobody else knew how to do it. Do it. So between the labor shortage and the supply chain shortage, it's created a very challenging environment for CEOs today. And I don't I don't necessarily see light at the end of the tunnel right away. So I don't I don't know where it's going go. I you know, I think the supply chain shortage is easing a little bit.

01:58:27:15 - 01:58:45:18
Charlie Protzman
And and it's strange that, you know, we're on the heels of a possible recession when companies have backlogs of stuff that they can't deliver on. So you'd have to tell me, Mark, how that ties into economics class. But it's kind of a strange situation.

01:58:46:20 - 01:59:17:17
Mark McGrath
Yeah, you certainly hear yeah, you hear all kinds from depending on on on the economists most predictions, as you know, are usually wrong. But the principles that you're talking about, you know, there's, you know, between that and there's also, too, a lot where where the source of these manufacturing is. There's there's tremendous demographic crises looming, which we hear, you know, a lot of things people say, well, we're going to go local again or we're going to things are going to break apart.

01:59:17:17 - 01:59:38:07
Mark McGrath
They're too big, but, you know, just too hard to predict. I guess in the anticipatory nature of OODA, you can certainly see those things. And I guess the one thing that does come to my mind that we've talked about with other guests is artificial intelligence going to become more more pervasive and and take a bigger place and in the world, I guess.

01:59:38:07 - 01:59:44:06
Mark McGrath
I don't know. What do you think about artificial intelligence in that respect?

01:59:44:06 - 01:59:57:05
Charlie Protzman
I think we have to be really careful with it. Yeah, because I know my phone already does things so that, you know, all of a sudden cereal just show up. Oh, yeah. So, so they're always given a yeah.

01:59:57:06 - 02:00:22:09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Given the context that we talked about with the, you know, with what you just pointed out, what you're seeing, how could leaders benefit? What are the key points that leaders can pull from not just the Toyota production system lean, but the throughput? What are the key messages that leaders can pull from them and apply it to today's environment?

02:00:22:09 - 02:00:42:20
Charlie Protzman
Again, just thinking out loud, I would say the first thing is situational awareness, right? Is even knowing you're in the so you know, a lot of companies, you go in and you assess where they are and they they have no idea where they are, how bad it is.

02:00:42:20 - 02:00:46:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
They don't even know they have a customer. They couldn't tell you their customer. Have you seen that?

02:00:47:11 - 02:00:54:07
Charlie Protzman
Yeah, I haven't. I mean, it depends at what level you're at. Certainly on the shopfloor level. Yes, I've seen that.

02:00:54:22 - 02:01:02:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. Well, in the world I'm coaching in right now, it's very every day it's the same question. Who's your customer? We don't know.

02:01:03:20 - 02:01:21:16
Mark McGrath
Charlie. Charlie, do you think that I was going to just I just wanted to ask you, when you bring up situational awareness, do you think that's due in part to a lack of self-awareness in for leaders and teams that leads to a lack of situational awareness?

02:01:21:16 - 02:01:40:14
Charlie Protzman
I would say, yes, I was actually I was I was I was figuring that was kind of where you were going. And I would say, yeah, there's definitely a lack of self-awareness. Yes. And there are things I want to say, but I can't really say. But that's fine. But I can say that's a.

02:01:40:14 - 02:01:42:17
Mark McGrath
Family where there.

02:01:42:17 - 02:02:12:00
Charlie Protzman
Are people that I have asked them to kind of grade themselves on on certain, you know, characteristics, leadership characteristics or their knowledge or whatever. And they grade themselves, you know, as fours and fives with five being the top, you know, that, that in their minds they're like perfect or close to perfect. So they, they don't, they don't have the self-awareness to know what they don't know.

02:02:12:00 - 02:02:41:19
Charlie Protzman
And I think, you know, there's there's kind of three things we have two of them come from a good friend of mine, Danilo Bruno Franco, who I worked with in China. And one of his sayings was, Do you know what you don't know? And the other one is, do you know how to check? And the third one is, are you managing the problem or are you fixing the problem?

02:02:43:12 - 02:02:48:05
Charlie Protzman
And I carry those three things with me to every company that I go to.

02:02:48:18 - 02:02:53:06
Mark McGrath
So saying those again. So do you know what you don't know? How do you check?

02:02:53:15 - 02:02:54:22
Charlie Protzman
Do you know how to check?

02:02:55:07 - 02:02:56:05
Mark McGrath
Do you know how to check?

02:02:56:07 - 02:03:17:09
Charlie Protzman
Because you'd be surprised. People don't know how to check and the people that are checking don't even really know what they're checking or how they're checking. I can give you lots of examples of that. And then the other one is, are you managing the problem or fixing the problem? And that gets into your drive through parking at McDonald's, which is a book I'm working on.

02:03:17:09 - 02:03:41:02
Charlie Protzman
But the the, the, the, when, when all your baby boomers are retiring, what ends up happening is you don't know what you don't know. You bring somebody new in to a situation that somebody has been managing for 30 years and then they take over and then first thing they want to do is start changing everything. But they don't even know what don't know.

02:03:41:06 - 02:03:52:22
Charlie Protzman
And the next thing you know, they're just creating a mess. So that self-awareness to me is really important. Do you know what you don't know is a big piece of us?

02:03:53:14 - 02:04:13:04
Mark McGrath
It comes up all the time. We've brought it. I bring it up a lot and I've certainly said it on these episodes. It's not it's that quote from either Twain or Will Rogers, but it's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you're absolutely certain of that turns out not to be true. You know, back to back to.

02:04:13:06 - 02:04:14:12
Charlie Protzman
Back to your orientation.

02:04:15:04 - 02:04:36:18
Mark McGrath
Right? Right. No, right on. I mean, you know, the back sort of tying it back to are back to our mutual background Jesuit schools. One of the classes I did take was Eastern Philosophy by Father John Nelson. It seemed to me that when I was exploring that a lot of the things that he was teaching us of Eastern religions, of Eastern thinkings all did involve self-awareness.

02:04:37:04 - 02:04:57:12
Mark McGrath
And I know that when that when Chet Richard says, that beautiful epistemology of the idea of Eastern thinking was a massive input to Boyd that informed his thinking of what we know as you to today, which included Toyota production system and the book offerings and everything. So I just go back to that sort of self awareness picture. How much of that?

02:04:58:22 - 02:05:22:23
Mark McGrath
It seems to me that a lot of the things like Toyota production system and things have come from the, you know, vol from the east. There's a lot more self-awareness that creates the understanding where. Companies become an organic whole and work together as teams, and they can function through complexity better than the rigidity of top down, dictatorial data driven.

02:05:22:23 - 02:05:26:17
Mark McGrath
Get rid of the bottom 10% attrition mindset.

02:05:27:19 - 02:05:43:13
Charlie Protzman
It's funny, one of the things my grandfather always told me was in Japan, the workers and management and government work together, you know, is Japan Inc.. And in the US they all fight each other.

02:05:44:11 - 02:06:00:23
Mark McGrath
Yeah, I'd go back in a heartbeat. I absolutely love living there. It was it was an experience that just if you haven't gone if people haven't gone, they should go and just see how it operates in a completely different rhythm.

02:06:02:08 - 02:06:04:14
Charlie Protzman
It's fascinating. Yeah. Just the bullet train.

02:06:05:14 - 02:06:07:19
Mark McGrath
Yeah, well Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Yeah.

02:06:08:19 - 02:06:10:00
Charlie Protzman
Just set your watch by it.

02:06:10:21 - 02:06:28:01
Mark McGrath
I don't know about you talking about complexity. I mean, when you're walking down Tokyo and these back alleys and there's just thousands and thousands of businesses in bars and restaurants that are so tiny and still still moving, it's almost like you never can run out of things to do in Tokyo or places to see.

02:06:29:07 - 02:06:29:16
Charlie Protzman
You.

02:06:30:10 - 02:06:49:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So complex. Really? Hey, we've taken a lot of your time. We're going to keep you on here for a minute. The we should have an episode on the bullet train in California and how awful that thing is going. That's an insane problem right there. Speaking of government and business businesses fighting each other, that's and all the line problems with that that that's an amazing story.

02:06:50:07 - 02:06:53:21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But thank you for your time today. Charlie Brotman should go prize winner.

02:06:53:21 - 02:06:55:06
Mark McGrath
Yeah. Thank you very much Shirley.

02:06:55:10 - 02:07:00:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Friend of the show. Any parting shots from your thoughts?

02:07:00:11 - 02:07:24:16
Charlie Protzman
No, it's just been an honor and a privilege to be on your on your podcast. Thank you for inviting me. It's been really special. And just even just trying to prepare for this has actually forced me into, you know, quite a bit of learning as well. Just putting putting all this together, going with going back to the archives and refreshing myself on all that.

02:07:25:01 - 02:07:30:23
Charlie Protzman
It's been an interesting learning journey, so I really appreciate it.

02:07:30:23 - 02:07:40:01
Mark McGrath
Well, we're honored to be on it with you. And that's the that's the intent is a learning conversation. You've certainly provided that. So we're very grateful. Charlie, thank you.

02:07:40:01 - 02:07:42:10
Charlie Protzman
Thank you.