Hello everyone, this is Michael Webb, and this is the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. Today I have a guest that I've been looking to for quite a while. My guest is Drew Locher, a management consultant par excellence. And I've been following Drew for quite a while. Drew, could you tell us about your background, introduce yourself and how you got into what you're doing today.

Drew Locher:                     Thank you Michael. And thank you for having me on your podcast. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak to your colleagues and constituents. So a little bit of background. Basically I grew up in the 1980s in a corporate management development program at the General Electric company. And it was there that I got introduced to, what we called at the time, world-class enterprise and quality management concepts. And we were expected to apply those concepts in whatever management role that we had.

 I was with GE for seven years. I left in 1990, went back to school for organizational behavioral science. Up to that point my background was in engineering, several engineering fields. And at the same time I went out and started working with different organizations in different industries trying to see how these world-class and quality management concepts applied in different environments. And that's what I did throughout the 90s, working with typically smaller and medium size organizations. That kind of grew into working with larger organizations by the end of that decade.

So I've been working with all kinds of different industries over the last nearly 30 years on my own, including healthcare as well as manufacturing, financial service companies, even higher education. They're currently trying to apply these concepts to their operations. And I've been kind of doing that for 29 years, 30 years. And wrote a few books, which kind of gets you some notoriety as you know, in the field. Mainly focusing on the application of the concepts, what we would now call lean concepts to non-production environments. Three out of my four books are on that topic. So how do we apply the concepts to finance and accounting, sales and marketing, designing, product development or any development really. And that's what I've been doing for a long time now.

Michael Webb:                 Excellent. Excellent. Unlike me, you sort of started off in management and got introduced to this and have been in the quality and productivity sciences of management for almost your entire career. I started out in sales and I had to go to three different industries. So very interesting and a really deep background. And maybe that's why you write such a good newsletter. I love following you.

Drew Locher:                     Oh, thank you.

Michael Webb:                 I've been following it for a while now. And in April you wrote about a topic, it caught my eye, The Science of Management. And you reflected on your training as an engineer and you observed that there's principles or laws that explain how reality behaved, and that some of them also apply to management of organizations. I thought it was really insightful. So before we drill into them, I thought maybe I would just cover an overview of the ones that you introduced and then we'll kind of dive into them.

 The first one you used as the example was a Newton's first law of motion, right? An object at rest stays at rest, an object in motion stays in motion. The second one was the second law of thermodynamics, right? That energy or order decreases without effort or work. And third, you introduced the idea of a system, that feedback is necessary to keep results in the desired range. And then fourth was a reference about learning in organizations, and that seemed to be more about the human mind than about a principle of physics. But we'll get into that.

So these are fascinating topics. I promise you there are people in the audience who might think, "Oh my God, you're talking about physical properties, this isn't going to apply. How could this possibly apply?" But it really, really does in a fascinating way. So Drew, let's start at the beginning. This first law of motion, an object at rest stays at rest. Tell us how that applies in the science of management.

Drew Locher:                     So I only chose four, I'm sure there's more. But those are the four that came to mind when I wrote the piece. But that particular one, it dawned on me as soon as I went back to school in 1990 for organizational behavioral science because there was an expression they used, organizational inertia. And I'm like, "Oh, I know a little bit about inertia." And so it caught my attention early on that one. And as organizational behavioral science folks have recognized, the application of that theory for a long time now, at least decades.

The second one, the second law of thermodynamics, that was something that sort of dawned on me as I was studying organizational behavioral sciences. And I've seen subsequently people also referring to it, entropy in particular, and not always applying it or citing it or referring to it properly. So that for the last few years has been in my mind thinking I need to write a little bit about this at some point just to kind of clarify things because I've seen people refer to it and not always correctly.

Michael Webb:                 So let's take those two, right there. As it applies to management, what does management have to do as a result of the law of inertia?

Drew Locher:                     Well, they just can't leave things be. They've got to inject energy into any system. And an organization is a system. A closed system. And we've seen evidence of that in any... pick a topic. I think in the newsletter, I refer to Five S. I often hear organizations or leaders of organizations kind of complain that it can't sustain Five S. And I'll talk to them about, "What is your sustain model?" And they kind of look at me puzzled and maybe they do periodic audits or maybe they used to and they got away from them, or maybe they did them, but they didn't really do them properly. They didn't engage people in participating in them, so it became like a police action when people did the Five S audits.

 And it's true really of any organizational change. You have to continue to follow up for various reasons, not just injecting energy but really making sure new habits are formed. One of the other things I studied in the early 90s was habit forming. What does it take to create habits or overwrite existing habits? And that all takes effort. It takes energy really on the part of leaders in particular.

Michael Webb:                 So you're saying that management needs to recognize that in order for things to change, they can't just issue an order or tell people what to do, they have to plan that people aren't going to be able to keep it at that level or keep that change in place unless they have a plan that keeps it in place. What would be an example of something that managers and executives would need to put in place to keep a change in motion?

Drew Locher:                     Well, in lean terminology, it's just go see. We always say go to the gumbos, as Toyota calls it. But you need to have a focus when you go see. So...