Michael Webb: Good morning, everyone. I am pleased to bring you my guest today, Bruce Hamilton. I met Bruce several years ago at a Shingo conference and Bruce has... Well, Bruce, let me just give you a chance to explain your background to my audience. It's largely sales managers and company presidents. Many of whom may not be familiar with the kind of work you do and much less the Shingo Institute. So take a couple of minutes and describe your background.

Bruce Hamilton: Thank you. And good morning, everyone. I appreciate whoever is joining in. Appreciate you being out there. I've been in a number of different careers in business, started out actually in sales promotion and spent seven years there. And I loved that position actually. And oddly, my interest in problem-solving led me to IT. So I spent seven more years in IT thinking that some of the issues we had in sales and marketing would be solved through IT.

Bruce Hamilton: And so the bad news is it's not really a panacea. I learned a lot about IT, however, and those kinds of problems. While information technology has changed remarkably since I was in that position, a lot of the thoughts behind computer systems have not so much. It's more or less has to do with the speed and scale that we have today, but the basic algorithms, as we say, not remarkably different. But systems led me into materials management. I worked in a manufacturing company and at the time we were implementing MRP and it was not actually doing much for us. And so I ended up transitioning from a computer systems to manufacturing. Never spent any time in manufacturing, not even in the manufacturing building. So this was an eyeopener for me, definitely. It was a world of pain with many problems. Some of them actually caused by the computer systems that I was involved with. And that brought me to the Shingo prize incidentally.

Bruce Hamilton: We were a company that had a lot of issues. We couldn't deliver on time. Like many companies back in the '70s and early '80s, our profits were flagging and we were trying to find ways to get around that. When I was in sales and marketing, we raised prices twice a year. And we Pat ourselves on the back about how our sales were increasing, but they actually weren't, we were just printing prices. So now I suddenly found myself on a different side of the coin, still with that thinking in mind from sales and marketing and focused on the customer. But I noticed I joined an organization that actually was shielded from the customer. We had very little to do with the customer. And this created its own set of headaches. But Shingo prize and particularly the ideas of, shingo and some of the others...

Bruce Hamilton: And they're not all Japanese. A lot of them came out of the US, but a lot of that thinking was critical for me? And it was just my good luck that since I had no background in manufacturing, I had no biases. And therefore I started to study this and that led to award of a prize for our company in 1990. And there were some remarkable improvements. We were still awful, but we'd made an awful lot of improvement. That in fact, led to some attention back in 1990 from Toyota, who at the time was for purposes of trying to be a good corporate citizen and trying to overcome an image of taking jobs, which killing American auto manufacturing, which they didn't really need any help. They were kind of hurting themselves.

Bruce Hamilton: They helped us out for or five years. And it was exciting, very exciting. They felt like as they like to put it, being dragged through a keyhole. So there was this technical knowledge from Shingo and some lot about behaviors of people. And then dealing with the folks from Toyota, understanding what management's role was in this. because I was not totally clear about that, about how the whole thing fit together. It's a whole system. It's not just one thing or another. One piece. We often talk about lean is a bunch of pieces and that can create a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. Because unless you're looking at it as a whole, you don't really get a decent understanding. That finally led me into general management. And at that point I was back actually working with sales.

Bruce Hamilton: So I started out in sales and I ended up in sales. Then 20 years ago, hard to believe, 20 years ago I quit my job. Loved the company, it was doing okay, but I got so excited about continuous improvement. And actually I think it was my interaction with the Shingo prize and the Shingo Institute and getting to go out and visit other companies, not just in manufacturing, but in lots of kinds of different businesses. It was exciting to do that. So I became a consultant and that's where I am today. I worked for a, not for profit organization that's been around since 1994 and it's our mission to keep good jobs, predominantly here in the US. We're parochial that way. Don't begrudge anyone else but we liked the idea of overcoming challenges that we have and particularly in our own region. So that's me and happy to be with you today.

Michael Webb: Looking back on that, a couple of points, I guess, to ask about, because I'm similar age to you, right? And so I went through different... Coming from the sales background, but during this period of time when first mainframe computers and then mini computers and then microcomputers were upending the way businesses managed themselves. And I remember observing, and I wondered if you did this to back in your days of IT, the IT department... I remember realizing, wait a second, if you're going to have a computer, that's going to be able to do all these real fast calculations and make reports. And people from all over the company are putting information in them. That means everybody has to define their terms exactly the same way. And that's not the way it works right now. That's a revolution to help over smplify things. Because that's one of the reasons that computer systems didn't work.

Bruce Hamilton: That was true back then and it's still true today. Different parts of an organization. We talk about language barriers, sort of the English versus Spanish or Vietnamese, but there are huge language barriers between engineering and sales. And when I was in sales that released. We would say it was released in sales promotion, that meant that there was a concept on paper and we were going to take it to a trade show. Whereas released in purchasing meant we purchased all the parts. Released in engineering meant we've finished the prototype. So every part of the organization had a different definition. They were all wrong. The computer system then tries to codify this, but the codes are all messed up. One of the better parts of MRP that I participated in was that it actually forced us to ask the questions. Ali White , who was an early leader, liked to say that it's a people system which utilizes a computer and he emphasized all people. This is probably the first time I think in my company where sales felt they had any connection to what was happening in operations.

Bruce Hamilton: And that was pretty reluctant too, it was like, they felt that you're putting us on the spot. Forecasts are very difficult because of the, let's say, less than friendly relationship between sales and operations. They're immediately on the defensive. So a lot of those conditions persist today. Organizations are, siloed, is a popular word. I used to say compartmentalized. We're all in our own little cubbies and we don't get out much. Even if there aren't physical walls, we just don't go to certain areas.

Bruce Hamilton: So the language is kind of messed up. Computer systems take that language and they make it look official. And once it comes out of computer, it must be right. I honestly did not have a conc...