John Willis

All right. The next speaker is John Willis.

You may know him as one of the two people who brought DevOpsDays to the U.S., bringing Patrick Debois in 2010, which is where I met this gang and got sucked into the DevOps movement. So that was 13 years ago.

Over the decade, John and I have been on so many amazing adventures together. He was a driving force behind Beyond the Phoenix Project. He was a driving force behind the safety panel where we congregated Dr. Steve Spear, Dr. Sidney Dekker, and the late Dr. Richard Cook. He was a co-author on The DevOps Handbook.

And I have to tell you, he's consistently given me such valuable feedback on everything I've ever written, including Wiring the Winning Organization. He actually looked up, I think, almost every citation and footnote and caught some inaccuracies.

And he recently published his amazing book, Profound, a biography of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. It is such a beautiful and fun-to-read book that tells a story of not just him as a person, but his amazing contributions.

So John will share what he learned in the process and tell us what the process was like itself. Here's John.

It's been a journey, my friend.

Let me start off: no LLMs were harmed in this presentation.

For something completely different, early this year, I went ahead and did this Japan study trip. I gave a night on it back in Amsterdam, and Gene was like, "Why don't you do this presentation? I know you want to do AI stuff, but I'd really like you to do..." You know how Gene has this thing where he says, "You can do whatever you want, but I'd really like you to do this presentation." It's cool.

And that's my new book. I'll be signing that later today.

This started with this book by Katie Anderson. If you haven't read it, it's just an amazing book. I would say there are three books that you need to know if you just want to understand lean. One is Mike Rother's Toyota Kata, and then read Steven Spear's The High-Velocity Edge. And now I think I've added a third one to the list to really understand lean.

So Katie met this gentleman, Isao Yoshino, who hired in at Toyota in 1966. He worked directly with Taiichi Ohno and Shingo. He was there at the birth of what was really going on. And she wrote a book about his four decades at Toyota.

One of his most famous stories is he was the Toyota side of the NUMMI. So he was John Shook's counterpart. It's an incredible book.

So part of the study trip, in fact, they're actually doing a study trip this week. So if you want to just have some fun and see what they do, the Japan study trip on LinkedIn will show you.

But here's the thing. We can read about lean. I just did an Alaska cruise, and I saw the glaciers for the first time in my life. There's no picture, there's no image, no video that can describe what they look like when you're 200 yards away from them. It was the same experience when I stood at the Taj Mahal. You can't experience it.

And I know this is going to sound hokey, but until you see the immersification in the water, how it's in the DNA of how these companies in Japan think about community, collaboration, visualization, and trust, it's just natural.

In some ways, I think we have this square peg, round hole problem. We come from a Tayloristic, very structured, hierarchical structure. And there, you're going to see some of the stories here, but it was all over the place.

I tried to make certain sort of day one, day two. My graphics are terrible, so I'm the worst. I told those guys back there, "Don't worry about my graphics. I'm not good at this."

But the other thing I love is you don't hear things like "great" or "best." There are no platitudes. You hear the CEOs or the presidents say things like, "We want to make good products. We want to be a useful company. We want to be useful to our community." They're not platitudes. They're real stuff.

One of the first things that Katie does on day one is she has this triangle. It's about 15 of us, and she does like two a year. I'm going to try to get a DevOps crowd. So if you're interested, I'd love to do a DevOps-only crowd next year to this.

And she asks you the question, "What do you think most influences lean? Is it the human condition? Is it the Japanese culture? Or is it Toyota?"

So you start off, and I'll give you a hint: mine was a little bit to the lower left, Toyota, and you'll see where it was at the end. It was different.

The first thing you do, you get to meet this Yoshino guy, and he's great. Seventy, and he could outrun me. I'm in terrible health. This guy could outrun me.

And bonus to me, if you know me, I'm a Deming freak. And Katie didn't tell me. I think it was a surprise for me. She didn't tell me that the first slide he throws up is a whole thing about Deming's influence at Toyota. And I got to interview him later about his discussions about what it was like in 1966, about what they thought about Deming. I've got some of that in blogs.

But he's talking about how Deming hated MBOs, and it was almost scripted for me. I felt the whole trip was scripted for me. It wasn't.

And then there he goes again about how Deming, this is like his first three slides, how Toyota learned how to focus on the problem, not the person.

This guy Jordan Moke, who was an early DevOps guy, used to say he was at Shopzilla. He said, "When we go into the war room, the problem is the enemy."

And then we did our first visit to a tier-two supplier. This is where you start hearing that common community, collaboration, trust, and visualization.

Everything's sort of animated. You always know where everything is. The right things are in the right place. The right thing is the easy thing to do.

Even though you don't speak the language, and for me, I didn't read Japanese, you can see how everything is centered. Even their standups and how they collaborate, how they do their kaizen events, how they do, you know, everything is kaizen. It's all about dynamic learning.

Even the compliment cycles of how to give other teams compliments, it's all learning. And so you saw this over and over.

And the president here again says, "We always pursue to manufacture good products, and we try to be a useful company in society." We don't hear that kind of wording in Western.

The second day, I called the Jidoka, Kaizen, SMED, the single-minute exchange of die.

The first time I went to Japan, I did all the museums except this one. And this is the one you have to go to. It's the Commemorative Museum. This is the original location of the Toyota Loom Company.

Steve Spear talks about this in some of his presentations, that they celebrate the loom that didn't work, not the one that did work. That just shows you their culture. They had pride in the first one. It was the automatic. It was the jidoka. If the needle broke, the thread would stop. You get to see that. You get to see it run.

And then this is the simulation of the original Model AA line, their first car.

And if you ever heard Dr. Spear, I'm a big fan of Dr. Spear, but he used to talk about the Toyopet, which was first introduced in America in the sixties, I think. And it was a disaster.

Steven Spear said that if you wanted to go uphill with this car, you were better going in reverse. And this car was so terrible. It was introduced in Southern California, and the horn was basically in the middle of the steering wheel. So if you went to a burger and shake place and they put your tray on it, the horn would go off. It was every disaster.

And to Toyota's credit, they retooled, took it off the market, and came back with the Corolla. And then you know what that success is.

This is one of the three incredible stories, if I run out of time.

We visited an elementary school. It wasn't just factories. Here's the thing about the elementary school, and this is why my square peg, round hole, which is there are no janitors in their elementary schools. They don't really do grading the way we do. The kids clean. And no kids are complaining, and there are no parents complaining about, "My son doesn't do bathrooms."

The kids clean. At like two o'clock, the whistle goes off, and it's a celebration. They serve lunch. They rotate serving lunch to the other students. That's actually a standard work layout of how they're going to place the food.

We interviewed these kids, these middle schoolers. They understood the concept of kaizen. In some ways, we're doomed. How do we compete with that? They're coming out of school with this way of thinking.

And then we went to another factory. Have you ever heard about SMED? For us automation geeks, it is the most phenomenal thing to watch. It is the ultimate humankind manufacturing automation, in my opinion.

It's like the big sheet metals, and it's these automatic robots, and those are the dies. They basically pull the dies and just dynamically change the cutting surfaces of the metals. And you're just watching these machines go.

And if you've heard of jidoka, we use that in DevOps nomenclature. It comes from this sort of notion.

Day three, this was my second-best story: a company that does foods. They turn seaweed into gel and all that stuff.

This is an incredible book. It's hard to find, but the chairman wrote it. It's called Tree-Ring Management. The way he described it, they think of their company as a hundred-year company. They think of the idea like if you cut a tree open, you see the rings. Some years are thin. Some years are wide. That's the way you think about when you think about a hundred years.

And that plaque is in the boardroom. It says, "Let's be a good company."

And this is in his book. By the way, it's actually in the R&D lab in English: "serendipity." So again, I think about our culture. Do we celebrate the idea of being serendipitous for growth, and this idea that they cherish, the idea that there's something magical about their embracement of the serendipity of how they wait and they do all the right things, great things will happen?

And it's in the lab, and it's in English. I even asked, "Do the employees actually know what that word means?" Of course they do.

This is, I think, the reason Gene wanted me to give this presentation. In one of the boardrooms, there's a hundred-year calendar. And the chairman, this guy's like 80 years old, still does this. Every new employee, he sits down with the employee, and they look at the hundred-year calendar, and he says, "One of these days will be the best day of your life."

And then he says, "Let's have a great life together."

I'll leave the stage now if you didn't just get chills on that. We talk about leadership. That's leadership.

Again, visualization. You start going places, and you actually know where you could find stuff if you needed to find it. The notion of Kanban being ubiquitous everywhere and in all different forms.

Day four. This is another really interesting company. And this is Roan, I guess. It's very rare for a manufacturing plant to have a woman as a CEO, and she was incredible. That's her. We went to dinner with her, and unbeknownst to us, she wrote us each individual notes. She looked up our backgrounds, and on the bus ride back, they gave us the notes.

The other thing: when we were in her office, she had a coffee-stained version of The Goal. And she had no idea what the impact was. She was showing us. I screwed up. I promised to send her a Phoenix Project. I still owe it to her. But maybe if I go back next year. I told her about your book, Gene. I was like, "You gotta read this book. It's unbelievable."

She was introducing the book as if we had never heard it.

And then here again, the way they do things, it's a museum. They call it the Back to the Future Museum. This is really, really cool.

Each team, their notion of kaizen is either improvements, compliments, and maybe it's all the same thing. A compliment is an improvement, if you think about it.

And so each team creates their own sort of folky thing. One was a Japanese folklore. Another was coffee mugs. Another was Ferris wheels. And they make it fun.

So the idea is that if normally we're thinking about our work, like, "I wish that team would have put these things in that order instead of in that closet," they just make it natural so that when you're there, it's fun to go fill out the card and put it in there. You don't have to think about it. It's like, "Yes, of course. I was just thinking they should do this. Let me put it."

And the Ferris wheel was really cool, because when it gets real heavy, whoever's got the most compliments, it catches a fish, it falls down. It's just...

And this was, we went to a sake brewery. Katie mixes it up. And Katie is just amazing. In fact, she reminds me of Courtney. I love Courtney, just to get it out of the way. Sorry.

She's just that kind of thinker, leader.

But she takes you to an onsen. Just look it up. I was very uncomfortable in an onsen. So if you know what that is...

Last, this is the best story of all. It's known as the Seven-Minute Miracle.

On the last day, you meet the president. So basically the bullet train, right? The Shinkansen bullet train. They're known for being on time.

For years, the cleaning company associated with the JR East bullet train was just terrible. Terrible.

Andrew Clay Shafer says this thing. I love this thing about you ask three people what they do for a living. You ask the first one, and she says, "I lay bricks." You ask the second person, and she says, "I build columns." You ask the third person, and they say, "I build cathedrals."

What he did is he convinced them that they were building cathedrals. He told them, "You're not just cleaning people. Basically, you work for an industrial engineering marvel known around the world, and you are part..."

So the Seven-Minute Miracle is they have 12 minutes when a train gets into the station to turn it around. Three minutes to get the passengers off, two minutes to get the passengers on, and seven minutes to clean it.

And he convinced everybody in that company that they were part of this incredible miracle of engineering feat, because without them, you couldn't.

And it became what they called Shinkansen Theater. Instead of people getting upset, waiting to board, they would literally just watch the show. And we did it. That was the president. We literally were standing there watching the seven minutes as they go through and clean.

When they come off the train, the customers clap. They bow to the engineers.

There's one great story. It's a CNN story where this one woman said that, "I worked for the cleaning company, and I was embarrassed to tell my family that I was a cleaning person."

And then her grandson saw her company on CNN and said, "Grandma, you are famous." And they interview her, and she said, "I felt so awesome." She went from being embarrassed to her grandson thinking she was some hero.

There are some more interviews, and it's just an incredible thing to watch.

Here at the end, I felt more like the influence was the culture. The grammar school. We think about Toyota, but look what this guy did at JR East and the cleaning company. It just constantly iterates the community, the collaboration, the sharing.

This is Katie. She's sort of a nut on these Darumas. Everybody gets assigned a Daruma, and it's a pretty cool thing. If you go back, you bring the Daruma to a temple, and it's just part of her... cuteness is a terrible word, but the thing I admire so much about her is the way she thinks about it, the way she wrote this beautiful book, and the way she engages with you finally at the end to give you your own signed copy of a Daruma.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Come later, I'll sign my book. Or I'll sign my book. You can't sign my book. I gotta sign.