Q. How do you get managers
to contribute new ideas?
There’s an old phrase: If you
always do what you always did,
you always get what you always
got. The question is, what’s new
out there? Find out what’s going
on in the outside world. What
are the techniques to help a
manager grow? My managers
can’t manage the same way
today that they did back when
we were small.
We have in our budget a specific amount of money set
aside every year to educate all
the employees. Every single
employee should go through
some kind of education.
Education is one of the most
overlooked things in the United
States. You could say, ‘I’ve got
this great employee. He knows
how to run his department. He’s
got 25 years’ experience.’ No,
he’s got 25 years of doing the
same thing every year.
Q. How would you respond to
leaders who say it’s too expensive to do that?
It’s too expensive not to do
it. If you’re not going educate your employees, how are they
going to make your company
any better? Most of education
is time; it’s not money. If you
get one person who’s really
good at something, you can
teach the rest of the people.
Two years ago, I studied lean
enterprise and read books on
it. I got an outside expert to
help me to understand a little
bit more about it, and then I
spent 2007 training every single employee on lean.
We put seminars together,
and I trained 100 employees
over a five-month window in
multiple sessions. They went
through a class just as if I was a
professor, and every employee
had to take a test at the end of
the program and pass the test
of multiple-choice questions.
A lot of them freaked. They
said, ‘Oh my God, I haven’t
taken a test since high school,’
and I said, ‘It’s an open-book
test. Bring your notes in, and
take it as many times as you
need to pass the test. If you’re
struggling after your second
time, we’ll help you with the
questions.’ It wasn’t there to
scare them; it was there to
educate them. Now, I’ve got a
lean organization with employees who are looking every day
at ways to eliminate waste and
nonvalue-added time and
material in our company, and
they find it.
Q. What advice would you
share with other business
leaders who are trying to grow
their company?
Hire smart people with the
right attitude, not necessarily
the right skills. If they’ve got that
attitude and they’re open-minded, they’ll learn the skills.
HOW TO REACH: Visual Marking Systems Inc., (800) 321-1496 or www.vmsinc.com