Michael Webb:     You're listening to the Sales Process Excellence podcast with Michael Webb. B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste.

Michael Webb:     My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:     Hello everyone. This is Michael Webb, and I'm pleased today to bring to you a guest that I have not spoken with before, but because of his background, as you'll see, I'm very excited to have this discussion, and I think there's going to be some pretty interesting discoveries that come out of our conversation. I'm on today with Tripp Babbitt. Tripp is the president of a firm called the 95 Method. Tripp, welcome here.

Tripp Babbitt:         Thank you Michael. Thank you for having me on.

Michael Webb:     Now you're also... Have been involved with the Deming Institute, and remember my audience is mostly executives who are focused in on sales and marketing. Most of them have heard of Deming, but could you just kind of share your background, because as I understand you came from a place very different than people who come into a sales and marketing career typically come from. So tell us where you've been and what's the journey you've been on.

Tripp Babbitt:         Interestingly, I actually started in sales, but-

Michael Webb:     Really? I didn't know that.

Tripp Babbitt:         Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I worked for an industrial distributor in the midwest. Then I got my MBA. I was a manager for an industrial distributor, and I got invited once I became a manager to a seminar by W. Edwards Deming from Allison Transmission, one of his original four-day seminars that he did across the US.

Tripp Babbitt:         I had just completed my MBA and I was expecting kind of more of the same types of stuff with the education I get out of the seminar, and what I got instead was a big smack in the face. Dr. Deming's seminar was pretty much the opposite of everything that I had been taught in my MBA program and is still being taught today in MBA programs throughout the US.

Michael Webb:     Parenthetically, my son just signed up for a very expensive, very prestigious MBA program. I tried to talk him out of it and I couldn't, so we'll make the most of it that we can.

Tripp Babbitt:         Very good. We could talk about that too if you like. But I was really intrigued by the Deming philosophy, so I eventually started my own consulting business and I used the Deming philosophy. It's based off of his system of profound knowledge, which is systems thinking, which I know is near and dear to your heart, theory variation, which is the data, theory of knowledge and psychology.

Tripp Babbitt:         I use that as kind of the basis of what I call, and you mentioned, the 95 Method. That's kind of the short and long of it I guess so to speak, of kind of my story and how I got into this.

Michael Webb:     Many of the people who are in my audience, they've learned about process improvement or process excellence and the Deming philosophy. They got to it through being trained in Six Sigma or in Lean. So it would be great to get your perspective on this I don't know what you would call it, this operational excellence marketplace, because there's several different flavors, and I'd love to understand your perspective of where you sit compared to, for example, people who go at it from a Six Sigma orientation or a Lean orientation or the Shingo Institute.

Tripp Babbitt:         I think you have to have a little bit of history in order to kind of understand. The Deming philosophy in Japan... When Dr. Deming went to Japan in 1950, he basically started a whole new program, and some of the things in his system are profound knowledge. It was the beginning of what would be later called Lean, and I would even say an offshoot of that would be Six Sigma too, because he used Walter Shewhart's control charts.

Tripp Babbitt:         So the base philosophy of Deming to me is what is exactly missing from Lean and Six Sigma. I am a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, so I went and did that under a lady by the name of Dr. Frony Ward, and I also worked with Dr. Don Wheeler for a little bit in order to get my data smack.

Tripp Babbitt:         So I believe these are Lean, being the Toyota production system in essence is what it's based off of. You got to remember, in Japan Dr. Deming worked in a number of industries, not just the auto industry, and just within the auto industry he not only worked with Toyota, but he also worked with Nissan and... Well, it was Datsun at the time, and then Honda, and then a number of of other companies throughout.

Tripp Babbitt:         So to me Lean got off I think for a long time focused on tools, and the Deming philosophy is just that. It's a philosophy. It's not a method. It's a way of learning, and one of the things I always challenge Lean folks to is so what new tools have you developed, because I always hear about the same old ones.

Tripp Babbitt:         Deming's philosophy was set up for us to continually update and innovate the way that we think about work and product and everything else, and management for that matter.

Michael Webb:     Let's dig into that a little bit, because I agree with you the Deming philosophy, the four fundamental principles, seem to me to be at the root of the tools of Lean, the method of Lean, right, focusing on flow and distinguishing value from waste, and using that as sort of your North Star.

Michael Webb:     But they're also unpinning the tools of Six Sigma, which is much more measurement oriented and statistically oriented, and it also is underpinning the ideas of the Shingo Institute, which is way more management focused. Would you agree with that?

Tripp Babbitt:         I don't know much about the Shingo Institute. I know a little bit more about Six Sigma. I think there are some tools in there that they use, statistical tools, that are unnecessary, matter of fact most of them. But the one tool that I often find even new Green Belts and even Black Belts on occasion, they aren't with Shewhart's control charts, and that's a shame, because that's a very primary tool.

Tripp Babbitt:         As a matter of fact, any organization not using Shewhart's control charts that Dr. Deming made famous are really missing out on an opportunity to look at their data in a refreshing way, and gets to some of the things that you talked about in this podcast about using systems thinking so you can understand what's attributable to a system versus attributable to social causes or the individual.

Michael Webb:     Yes. Absolutely right. What I understand about the Shingo Institute, it's very interesting and it's very compatible with what you're doing, as I understand it, and we'll get to i...