Start With A Win - Kaizen

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

On this episode of the Start with a Win podcast, Adam discusses the concept of becoming incrementally better every day. The Japanese idea of kaizen means “continuous improvement,” and car companies like Toyota and Honda are excellent examples of this ideology. They are committed to continually improving their quality, even stopping an entire assembly line in order to fix an issue on the spot, rather than allowing defective parts to go through the complete process and being dealt with at the end. By practicing this concept day-in and day-out, they achieve drastic quality improvements over time which sets them apart from companies who do not follow this philosophy.Sir David Brailsford has been honing his craft, which he calls “the aggregation of marginal gains,” since 2002. He was asked to coach the British cycling team in 2003, and he led the team through a series of very small changes such as new seats, adjusted tire pressure, a lighter paint color, new pillows to sleep on, and a commitment to maintaining healthy living, which created a culture of collaboration and collective improvement. The team won 8 gold medals at both the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, and he was then asked to coach Team Sky at the Tour de France in 2012. Following the same model of the aggregation of marginal gain, Team Sky won the Tour in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2017.Following these mindsets, consider what small changes you can make to live a fuller and more fulfilling life. Try getting up earlier, exchanging a starch for a vegetable at a meal, smoking one less cigarette, drinking one less cocktail, watching 1 less television show so you can read 1 more chapter of a book, or telling your family that you love them one more time. You will likely be amazed with the results over time from making these small consistent choices.Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/adamcontosREMAXCEO/https://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/

At top of the 12th floor of the Remax World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With a Win with CEO Adam Kantos. Hello from the top of the 12th floor of Remax World Headquarters here in Denver, Colorado. Adam Kantos coming at you with Start With a Win. Good morning, Producer Mark. Hey, Adam. How are you doing? Fantastic. How are you? I am always wonderful. Hey, Adam. How are you doing? Fantastic. How are you?

I am always wonderful. Oh, awesome. It's Monday morning. I love Mondays. Monday. I love them. Yeah. It's like the beginning of the week, like the slingshot, you know, the rest of the... Bam. Start with a win, right?

That's right. Yeah. I mean, people go, I hate Mondays. You know, you should love getting up on Monday and going and doing what you love to do, right? Exactly. And getting better at it all the time. Getting better at it. Incrementally better. Oh, that sounds like a podcast episode.

I think so. Should we talk about that today? I think we should. Pre-show, we were talking about Apple, right? You know, they're incrementally getting better with all their devices. Strangely enough, it gets us to buy new ones every time, right? That's right. Isn't that weird?

It is weird. Smart. Steve Jobs, wherever you are. That's right. Smart man. Smart man. Keep buying those Apple devices. That's right.

Well, I mean, yeah, and everybody else came out with the same thing like three years ago, right? Right. It's weird. So are you going to get a new iPad? You know, I've been thinking about it. Just that new one that got released is pretty sweet. You're supposed to be able to. iPad Pro.

Yeah, you're supposed to be able to replace your laptop with it or something. It looks like it. I mean, the fact that you can connect an external monitor and an external hard drive to it is pretty legit. It's funny because my son with his little Microsoft Surface or whatever walks around the house. He's a Microsoft guy? He is.

Come on. I think that's the only Microsoft product in the house. But he walks up. He's like, yeah, my service can do that. He's like, I've been able to do that for like three years. Right. I don't care. It doesn't have this cool little apple. It's pretty. No, it's there's no Apple etched on the back of it. That's right. Sorry. Oh, well. So a little bit at a time, right? Improvements. That's right. Okay. What are we talking about today? I've been kind of reflecting a little bit at a time, right? Improvements? That's right. What are we talking about today? I've been kind of reflecting a little bit. I do a lot of reflection. It's kind of blinding sometimes. A little bit of reflection. And I keep running across this same theme that Dave and I gave in a speaking tour last year. Dave Linegar?

Yes. The one and only. I'm like, Dave Chappelle? Yeah, exactly. He couldn't make it. So we were talking about that. I'm like Dave Chappelle. Yeah, exactly. He couldn't make it. So we were talking about that. And then you kind of look at stuff that Darren Hardy does. His saying is better every day. But Dave and I were talking about incremental improvement. And there are all these different concepts.

Two in particular I want to kind of touch on today. First one is called Kaizen, which it's not an English word. What is that? It sounds like a samurai word. It kind of is. It's Japanese. Yeah. For continuous improvement.

I don't even know if that's really true, but it says Kaizen is Japanese for continuous improvement. I think it's correct. Yeah. The book says it is. But just the concept in and of itself is amazing. After World War II, the US realized that pretty much just fighting a country and then abandoning them without trying to go in and fix things up didn't work for us. So we had this fella who had this huge influence over business systems. Dr. W. Edwards

Deming came in after World War II and helped rebuild Japan and different parts of the world that were affected by World War II. And they looked at how can we continuously and in very small amounts improve different processes. And this really took on in particularly a couple different companies like Toyota being one of them. And if you look at how Toyota manages change, there are a lot of different studies about Toyota always looking for a better way to do things. In fact, they will literally shut down an assembly line. They'll stop an entire assembly line if somebody sees something that needs to be fixed and can fix it right there, as opposed to kind of the old way that the US used to do things where we would allow defects to go through an assembly line and go into the defect pile and

then go back and either try and fix them or scrap them. So these guys would fix them right then and there. Wow. Are they also responsible for like the lean or Six Sigma or something like that as well? Yes. Toyota is like on top of it. They are, yeah. And it's translated across advanced business all over the world now. So it's not just Toyota at this point, but it's about little bitty improvements. Honda's another one of those. Honda's another example of it.

And you look at the quality of workmanship that's come out of that and how that's... Chevy picked up a lot of the concepts, and I think a lot of the different US automakers have jumped into that. And you've just seen since production after World War II, this massive improvement in quality of different items. So kind of cool. Because they're trying to improve constantly. They are. They are. And really, it's interesting when you look at it, people don't like change, right? Right? Change is bad. I hate change. Change is good, but we see it as bad. That type of thing. Yeah, we see it as bad. But the reality is little bitty steps of change,

once people get used to it, it's fantastic. It's like a diet plan or something like that. You don't want to go in and massively make changes in yourself, in your routines, in your day, in your life, your business, your body, your health, what you eat. If you eat pizza like every day and then you go in and just eat broccoli, you're going to hate yourself, right? But you kind of work yourself that way. A little broccoli pizza, a little less pizza, more broccoli, whatever it is, but it's about marginal change and working your way towards improvement, which is just a small idea, small implementation every single day that creates a habit, a habit of that improvement. And that's how we continuously grow. Does that

make sense? Yeah, totally. I mean, I think also it seems way more tangible or achievable, right? Opposed to saying you're going to cut out all diet soda and fast food from your diet completely if that's what you're used to eating. Opposed to just saying, all right, today I'm going to get a chicken sandwich and not get the burger. And then tomorrow I'm going to just make a lunch and, you know, slowly only go out to eat maybe once a week and then, you know, make those incremental changes. So here's a good example of that. I went in and worked out today. It was leg day. Yuck, right? Leg day. Leg day. It's like this monster. You get out of bed and you're like, leg day, leg day, standing in my corner of my room i went into the gym and i i added like five pounds of weight to the bar doing squats doing

like sled things like that just five pounds right that's not that much no you don't even notice it but next time i can add another five pounds and then another five pounds and another five pounds and it's just marginal gain but if i just went in there and i threw like another five pounds and then another five pounds and another five pounds. And it's just marginal gain. But if I just went in there and I threw it like another 50 pounds on there and you're going, oh, you'd kill yourself. Yeah. So you can't rush into change. You have to just kind of adapt your way towards it.

Nice. Yeah. Work your way towards getting better. And there's another great example of this. There's this fella named Sir David Brailsford, who became the head of British cycling in 2002. And they were working their way towards the Olympics in Beijing. I think it was like 2008. Okay.

They said, hey, Sir David, we haven't won anything since like 1908. So it's going to be a hundred years. You got to do something. So this guy came in to the British Olympic cycling team and said, I have a concept folks. And that concept is called the aggregation of marginal gain, small changes. All right. So what they did was he started building a culture on the cycling team of looking for small improvements. Now, think about this. What if you could have a team of people that were doing in your business that would look at everything you do and look for teeny tiny changes to create more efficiencies, to increase morale, increase culture, increase health, stuff like that, all of those little

tiny changes would add up to really big results, right? So he took a look at it and he said, all right, let's explore everything we do and I need everybody's help. So they got to the point where they repainted things so that they could see dirt. They changed their hand-washing habits to reduce infection, reduce illness. They changed their pillows to have better sleep, changed seats, changed tire pressure, all these little bitty changes. And you don't notice one change. You think about it when you're changing it and when you go all right this is i just changed my pillow i had a better night's sleep last night but is it one night's sleep or is it reflective in the days and days and days of training and it became reflective in the days and days of days of training you know over the period of time that this guy had come in and they saw

some amazing results after all these changes in fact fact, they won seven gold medals in the Beijing Olympics. That year? Seven. Wow. Isn't that wild? That is, because you think, oh, if I change the spandex I'm wearing, how is that going to help me win? Right.

Well, in fact, they did change the spandex that they were wearing, Mark. Glad you mentioned that. They looked at different suits and the aerodynamics and stuff like that. I mean, it was just all sorts of little stuff. And does aerodynamics make that big of a difference? Apparently, it does. Yeah, when you're talking about like tenths or hundredths of a second massive distance, those little bitty changes have a great deal of impact.

So, yeah, I mean, but they did take a look at every every single little thing and it was up to everybody that's involved in it. You know, the riders, the coaches, the, you know, the bottle washers, whatever you call them, different people on the team to go, we can do this better. There's a better way. That's cool. Cause when you start looking at different businesses, different concepts and business, and you look for these teeny tiny changes, they add up. In fact, I was on a, and we'll get back to Sir David here in a second, but I was on a tour of Disney World. I went to this thing called the Disney Institute, which is like a business mastermind group at Disney World. And we went to their laundry plant and we're walking through the laundry plant and they showed us these giant things that are like

cement mixers, only they wash sheets and towels and stuff in them. It's just huge laundry machines. And there's this guy there that had to pull out all of the sheets after they washed and move them down the line to the dryer. And when he opens the door up to pull out the sheets, there were always some that were kind of hung up on the little flaps inside of the drum up at the top and so they he invented this little stick he could reach up there with a hook on it and pull it down and it would always tear a sheet

he would always tear one doing that but you think about, how many sheets does he tear over a year? That adds up. Yeah. 365. Well, I mean, yeah. How many drums of those things are they doing a day? They're doing dozens and dozens a day. And they're getting most of the sheets, but they're killing one of them. And that added up to a lot of money being lost in torn sheets. So he came up with this other new idea and he took that forward and said, I have this little bitty idea for changing this. And he saved the company a ton of money for just not tearing a sheet. It was weird.

I mean, just this little bitty idea that some guy on the line who thought he wasn't necessarily significant made a significant change in there and it affected their budget in a pretty grand way. Yeah. I heard the same thing. Isn't it like Delta or somebody removed napkins or a snack or something? And it was like, by just taking off one napkin, it was like a million dollars a year of... Is it magazines? Are you thinking about magazines?

Yeah. Maybe it's something like that, but it was like something so small where I'm like, they stopped, like, they just stopped putting a magazine in their thing and they saved $10 million. Yeah. They saved money on gas because it was less weight. Yeah. Because you've got like this, when you add up all the seats in the airplane, I read that too.

Yeah. They took like one or two, used to be all these different catalogs and magazines. Skymon. Right. Yeah. They took all those out of the back seat pocket on the airplane and they figured out it weighed the same as so many people yeah you know you what is it 200 seats in an airplane times two magazines that's kind of hefty and you're saving gas when you fly from one coast to the other times how many flights a day

there you go yeah and what's a gallon of gas cost for jet i don't know what like five bucks six bucks something like that and those things get like 25 gallons per mile i guess it's what i had one of the pilots tell me that one day he's like it's 25 gallons per mile like okay is that efficient he goes when you add 200 people into it and figure out how much it costs to drive that far. Yes, indeed. I said, okay, touche. There you go. You are correct, sir. So anyhow, back to Sir David Brailsford. So you look at it and you go, all right, was this guy like a fluke? Was this a one-off where this guy just became a good leader or something like that? Well, here's the thing. So Team Sky, who's the British cycling team for Tour de France races, they grabbed onto

Sir David after he won the seven gold medals at the Beijing Olympics. Well, actually, it's Team One, seven gold medals. He was the coach of the team. They grabbed him in 2010 and said, hey, Sir David, we want to win Tour de France in five years. He goes, all right. Guess what he did? He came in in two years and won the Tour de France

doing these same concepts. Now, probably a lot of the same riders, so they were kind of used to it, but ultimately to go from not winning that to come in and just sweeping and being an incredible powerhouse in something because you spent, keep in mind, he spent six years, and in this case, from 2002 to 2012. So 10 years perfecting his craft of the aggregation of marginal gains. So ultimately, this doesn't happen overnight. This is over time that these things happen, these little bitty gains. So not only did he win Tour de France 2012, they won in 2013 as well. And then they gave it to somebody else in 2014. And in 15, 16, and 17, they won it also.

That's nuts. It totally is. Do you remember, was it like a couple episodes ago, I said, when's the best time to plant a tree? Yeah, when is the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago, right? Yeah. What's the next best time? Right now.

Right now, baby. So, I mean, it's about these little bitty things. How hard is it to plant a tree? 20 years ago, right? What's the next best time? Right now. Right now, baby. So, I mean, it's about these little bitty things. How hard is it to plant a tree? It's easy. Yeah. You dig a little hole, put the seed in there, cover it up, water it, keep watering it, keep watering it, keep watering it, and voila, right? You got a tree. You got it. So, the big question here is, for everybody listening, what can you change in how you adjust your day? What little 1% change can you make? Is it that you get up five minutes earlier? Is it that you eat one more piece of celery or broccoli or asparagus or whatever? Is it that you have one less cigarette in your life, one less cocktail during the week? I don't know what it is. You spend time watching one less program on the TV or on Netflix or whatever and read one more chapter in a book. Who knows what it is? But when

you start thinking about it, when you break it down to 1% improvement over and over and over again, it's not hard. It's not hard. If you're at the gym, okay, do one more pushup, do five more pushups, do one more squat, run one more mile, something like that. I mean, just push yourself to make one more small change in your life. And here's one, go tell your loved ones you love them one more time. Would that make your day better? Yeah. It's pretty cool, huh? And make their day better too. It totally would. So that's incremental improvement. Kaizen, aggregation, marginal gain. It's just getting better a little bit at a time. And it's something we all got to work on every day and it will add up.

That's awesome. Right on, Mark. Get a little bit better today, my friend. Thank you so much for joining us today. Make sure to head over to startwithawin.com to get more great content. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Adam on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And remember, start with a win.