John Chacon on Continuous Improvement and the Dangers of Paying People to Think
Lean Blog Interviews: Real-World Lean Leadership Conversations in Healthcare and Beyond
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Show Notes
Show notes: https://www.leanblog.org/429
My guest for Episode #429 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is John Chacon, the Director of Construction Excellence at Black & Veatch. We've been connected on social media for a while and John's reply to a tweet led to this podcast conversation, where he said:
“If you have read this blog post and are still thinking about incentivizing folks for ideas…stop…give me a call and I will tell you some stories about paying your folks to think.”
Today, we discuss topics and questions including:
- John's Lean origin story? In the Marine Corps.
- Deployed to Japan – painted a different picture – in what way?
- Cultural differences? A different level of respect?
- Why didn't you like it at first?
- How do you define Kaizen?
- Not just the process, it's the people
- Continuously improving the people
- Later company — “The work was to improve the work”
- How do you foster that culture?
- Curiosity and genuine wonderment
- What does Kaizen (what does John) suggest about how to incentivize people to submit ideas?
- DO we need to incentivize?
- What happens when you run out of rewards funding? Improvement stops
- How do you tap into in intrinsic motivation?
- Kaizen and Kata?
- Putting things into plain English?
- Working in other countries – Thailand, India, China — how does the Lean/Kaizen message get delivered differently?
- Marine Corps like Kaizen — the way you are vs something you do
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