S2 E8 - Domenico Lepore - Deming and Goldratt

Domenico Lepore developed the Decalogue™ management methodology together with Oded Cohen, a leading, world-renowned expert in The Theory of Constraints. One of the first books I read about Dr. Deming is his "Deming and Goldratt: The Theory of Constraints and the System of Profound Knowledge." In this episode, we cover everything from Dr. Deming's empathy to how the Talmud explains of Theory of Constraints. If you stick around long enough we discuss Umberto Eco. 

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Transcript:

John Willis: 0:08

Hey, this is John Willis again with another Deming, profound Deming podcast got a great, great guest today, I got to give a little bit of backstory. Most of you've heard me say this over and over, I got into Goldratt first primarily because Jean Jean Kim, and, and so it was sort of learning more about Dr. Deming, you know, I'd go around and people see me speak and it's Dave manga was, I guess, one of the early DevOps guys, he sent me, this gentleman's book, The Deming goal rat. So it was really the first book that I actually read the Tagalog on, on anything about Deming, so it was before I read out of Christ out of the crisis, or so I like so specially, like, like, sort of honored and really sort of geeking out here that like, you know, so you're sort of a, you know, a, you know, a big time do you like me? So, do you wanna introduce yourself?

Dominico Lepore: 1:04

Hey, hi, this is Chow, this is Domenico. I mean, I am calling from Victoria BC. I'm Italian as you might probably detect from my accent. But I moved to North America 16 years ago, first to New York. And then, in the last 10 years, I lived first in, in in Toronto, and then in Victoria BC, the sunny Victoria BC. And, as far as the everything that there is to know about me is, is in the books that I've written. And just just quickly to summarize, you know, I started my Deming journey, as a as an experimental physicist after having completed my research work in experimental physics. About 30 years ago, I was working for the School of entrepreneurship of the Ministry of Industry in Milan, and they, they will try to organize courses, but something that nobody knew anything about gold quality, they gave me the standard, ISO 9000 I found it very spiritually debasing and, and fundamentally self limiting. So, I started to research and, and I found the work of Dr. Deming that opened up a whole a whole new landscape and, you know, and everything is history, with history, I mean, you know, I started my journey with Deming there after 30 years remains the most fundamental source of inspiration for everything I do, starting from there, I when I left government a few years later, I set up a little company with a bunch of young graduates and we started to practice the implementation of them in principles in small companies, frankly, I mean a few dozen, sometimes a few 100 people and try to help them overcome the mental blockages that would come from having to get registered quote unquote, with the ISO standard, you know, administrators to run a course called How to protect yourself from the ISO 9000 people flocking to this course and, and, and that was a wonderful playground to to start building all the links that exists between the fundamental knowledge that Deming developed and a sound entrepreneurial driven business practices. So and what I realized over the years, their company, which are essentially driven in their success by the operation, so they are no nonsense, kind of, you know, setups that do not play with the shareholders, they do not have to go through the rigmarole of you know, the, the SEC requirements, those are the ones that can benefit the most, from the work of Dr. Deming, that is a complete, completely whole way of looking at organizations and, you know, I hope I'll be able to explain that in a little bit of detail. Then, you know, proceeding with companies of a, you know, just relatively bigger size, I came across this ailing, very famous American multinational that name was Union Carbide. But when I met them, they had the, you know, the last piece of it was called the Yukon and then Graphtec it was a 5000 people Company, which was running with, you know, $1.2 billion of debt and $560 million in sale and in for the in four years, we accomplish a complete transformation of that company, bring it to profitability and all the good stuff the share went for $2 to 16. It was a great success largely inspired by the work of Deming and some algorithms of theory of constraints by Dr. Goldratt. So that was the battleground where I tested in early 2000. You know, most of the spectrum of the things that are possible to do if you leave superstition and embrace knowledge just scored them.

John Willis: 5:38

Yeah, that's, that's brilliant. I was thinking, as you were talking about that, we talked about this last time we spoke and there's like three types of people. When it comes to Deming, there's a people like you to fall in love with and like myself, right? And like, you know, we don't even have to sort of debate why, right, we just move forward and talk about all the sort of things that we know work instinctively. I mean, I don't want to go off too far. But I think the thing about like, hit me about Deming and everybody I've ever interviewed, is that it just made sense. And then there's the group of people that tend to try to debate that he's not relevant. And then as people just don't know, which is fine. But I guess the question I have is like, Why do you think that like, there's something about Dr. Deming that certain people get that aha moment? Not, you know, I mean, you know, and say, I mean, I've seen people say, Well, it took a little while this is, but at some point, they're like, like, this is the right way to do things. And I'm just not sure why, like, what, what is the thing about him? That sort of, like turns that light bulb on? Well, certainly for you? And what do you think the other people that you've known?

Dominico Lepore: 6:51

Yeah, you mentioned falling in love, any of them there, if I may, there are two ways of falling in love, meet somebody, you fall in love, and then it may last forever. But it becomes, you know, sometimes it can be tumultuous. And there could be, you know, a lot of hurdles to overcome in this, you know, passion, iron relationship, or there could be a quiet way of getting to know somebody, and let that person grow in you, for me, has been a little bit of a combination, because clearly, I could not, you know, you certainly remember, in early 90s, the discourse on management was still largely dominated by cost accounting type of consideration, you know, management that was considered like, you know, the, the little child, the little child, the minor child of economics, and the entire management structure, starting from the business school was essentially designed to help people learn how to raise a company rather than the manager. Also, the discourse was largely dominated by people with with a background in economics, or politics or other subjects. And instead, the first thing that I noticed is that Dr. Deming was a physicist. And by probing a little bit, you know, by snooping around a little bit, you discover the Deming did nothing but physics until his later years. And then he switched to statistics in a sort of very, very theoretical way. So he developed major work in theory of sampling, as applied to the production of crop for the Minister of Agriculture, but also to marketing research. So in his two fundamental books, on theory of sampling and sampling, designing businesses search written in the 50s. And in the 60s, he lays the foundation for what people should really learn in business school about marketing, instead of all the Kotler stuff and, you know, and so, for me, it was, you know, I, I realized that right away the magnitude of what he was saying, but at the same time, allowed me to get onto a path of discovery and go as deep as I could, in the reasons why I was right when when you were saying it just makes sense for me, that would not have been enough. So I, you know, I had to go and dig as deep as I could, in the foundational elements of Deming. So train, which may be many people may not know You know, is the whole edifice of quality rests on understanding why the coefficients for the building of the control charts are derived in that way. And so everything else comes from there. Everybody, everybody or many people have been drawn to them in because of his humanitarian approach to management. But Deming certainly was a wonderful man. But most importantly, Deming was a scientist that saw, you know, the need for eliminating barriers, the need for driving our fear. And these needs stemmed from a statistical understanding of the world. So you don't want to eliminate fear in the workplace because you're a good man. Or you want to keep it because you're a bad man. You want to eliminate fear, because fear increases variation in the way you execute your process. We want to eliminate barriers among staff and people, not because you want everybody to love each other that yes, you do, but you want it because that increases variation. So the whole lens of understanding variation within a systemic context was the thing that drew my attention, and enabled me to continue my path of deeper and deeper understanding Dr. Deming, and how to bring Dr. Demmings work to fruition in as many situations as possible.

John Willis: 11:36

Now, you know, you it's funny, because I said, I fell in love with him. But I think my journey has been a little over 10 years of my fascination with Deming. And he does. There is this sort of thing about like, you just keep going deeper and deeper. So he, he, he like, it isn't just that I love them it is that he is sparked this constant sort of idea to learn more, and it just something about the way even the way he sort of expresses himself in his very sort Curt way. He sort of like, like, that's a mystery. Why did he say that word, you know? And yeah, so no, I think you're right. I mean, even like, even for myself, like, it's not fair to say I fell in love with him just had an instinct, it was basically the journey. Yeah, of trying to find out this sort of, you know, these true notes of how things should work. But right,

Dominico Lepore: 12:32

yeah. And true to his academic and cultural background, timing. He tried that, every day of his professional life to identify the foundational principles on which competitiveness and the Wealth of Nations as well, obviously, organizations and larger systems can be built. So the theory of profound knowledge is what he developed not long before dying in 93, which, which is the way to summarize the 14 points, or in his words, that the 14 points come naturally from understanding of the elements of the theory of profound knowledge, which, still today, still today, they appear as kind of alien to any major organization, I don't think that there is in mid in 20 22,007. You know, the reason why I came to America was, you know, to follow a large project, I was part of when we made them 137 presentations to raise $600 million to buy, you know, a company and start the transformation. And in this 137 presentation, we talked to funds and money manager, we're representing, you know, the equivalent of a mid size African country, right dimension, and only three of them are the 137 had heard about them. Yeah, none of them had heard about Goldratt. So in 2007, the capital, you know, the people that have the people that have the obligation to deploy capital into organization, they knew nothing about them.

John Willis: 14:35

Yeah, not crazy. It's yeah, so that sort of begs the other question that that sort of noise that me and it's really two part like first part is, it seems to me a lot of people take the easy route out and say, you know, Deming doesn't make any sense because all he wants to do is reduce variation. And I you know, that sort of gets me sort of angry on so many different levels. So I want and here's the thing. These are smart people. I mean, like we could say, maybe they're not smart because they say that, but I mean, they're published works and, and people who are well respected and have created like great bodies of work will say that. So that's sort of first question like, Why do you think that's the case, but hold on to the second one, too, which is when I first you know, when I finally understood system around knowledge, I thought, wait a minute, why isn't everybody jumping all over this? Because it has those four lenses. It's the first sort of any of the things I've seen in my now, what 40 years of doing this stuff, where they took, you know, so the technical stuff, you know, the psychology pistol, I mean, like, why did why is it so but I want to go back to the first one. Why do you think people sort of pigeon hole? I mean, I even read that you ran said, you know, I said, Deming focused on statistics, I focused on management. I'm like, why? Click in but it's a common thing that you see is the sort of people that just say, oh, yeah, yeah, he did good, but only focused on variation.

Dominico Lepore: 16:18

Well, you know, it's, this is a you asking me why, and, frankly, I do not have an answer for that other than ignorance. But fundamentally, what Deming did was to essentially tell the world that unless Okay, so let me let me step back a second. In 1980. Van Nostrand republished the original short book, called the economics of quality manufacturing product, and then wrote the preface to the book. And he said, is going to take 50 years to understand and another 50, to see the whole spectrum of implications. So I can say that very, very few people understand the ramification of understanding and managing variation, very, very few. And I'm not talking about just the mathematical aspect of it, which is fundamental, obviously, one needs to understand, but what is more important is the line that he draws between a management that takes place in a statistically predictable environment versus the kind of management there has to take place in a in an environment, which is not statistically unpredictable. So when you when you start asking yourself questions concerning variation, and how it impacts the life of individual as well as organization, you begin to have a glimpse of the magnitude of the scope of the work of Dr. Demick.

John Willis: 18:11

It is awesome. Go ahead. Keuka. So no,

Dominico Lepore: 18:13

just when I, for several years, to be honest, not too many, four or five, I use all the energies I had, at the time I was much younger, so I can to try and bring the two camps, the damming camp, which was essentially made by middle age academics, and that the Goldratt camp, which was way the century of practitioners very hands on kind of people, to see how the two things to come together. And what was the the mental shift that was necessary to see how these two things could come together. And to no avail. People were in both camps, they were sort of blinded by almost dogmatically by things that I have to say, they did not fully understand, even academics of a certain caliber that I had the possibility to talk to in the Deming camp and high level practitioner that they were commanding ridiculous fees to bring non negligible improvements in companies. They had a really, really hard time to understand the foundational elements of Deming doctrine, because what are them he did was to open up a new realm of systemic knowledge that is made by the interactions of the elements of profound knowledge. So if you look at the profound knowledge, you say, okay, psychology, what does it got to do with the with the statistics and epistemology which is a very abstruse you know, Body of philosophical knowledge, what is he got to do with variation in systems theory, you know, the foresters of the world? What do they have to do with with statistics, Deming lay the foundation for us and prompted us to look at the interdependencies which, after nearly 30 years of work, I can say, I'm beginning to have some understanding of it. But I'm not sure I have explored every single avenue because it's a ever growing and very, very difficult to handle when we say complex, difficult to handle network of interdependencies. And people don't like that people like to think in linear terms, okay. So in spite of all the research that has been done in the last 30 years, about the non linearity of our thinking, you know, you look at Wall Street and how they do it, they think linearly, you know, you think of how people make investments, they do it linearly, you think about how people evaluate their human capital, they do it linearly. And because by fragmenting and putting in silos, things and looking at them individually, and thinking of them linearly, our mind can make sense of it. When you move on to a more complex realm, that becomes a lot more complicated. And people don't want to take that challenge. It's like flying, visual and flying with with instrumentation. So when you fly visual, you only have to do it just to rely on your senses, and enjoy and enjoy the ride. When you fly that night, you have to you can't rely on that you have to rely on on the on the instruments, and and embracing them, it means to fly instrumental. And the instruments are essentially very abstract mathematical concepts. They need to be understood and morphed into a coherent practice. The 14 points are a clear example of that, though, as I was saying before, eliminate barriers is it doesn't have well, the implication is that people work better. But the reason why Deming said it was profoundly was profoundly scientific. So that's, that's why you want to eliminate barriers.

John Willis: 22:29

Well, you know, that the I guess the one thing I was thinking when she was going through that is, there are other industries that you know, and again, I like if I, I took an operations research course, because I really, it was how I finally understood statistical aspects, right, right. Like I, I kept trying to read everything from a soft science of how it works. And at some point, a friend of mine said, you know, you should take an operation research course and then like they explained, you know, the patterns a common cause specificly in those industries, as far as I can tell, live and die by this. So they're not like questioning luggage, instrument control systems and stuff like that, like a lot of that stuff. Like they, they don't sort of question how these things work, but for some reason,

Dominico Lepore: 23:12

they don't question it in sort of the dogmatic way. So,

John Willis: 23:18

yeah.

Dominico Lepore: 23:19

When Okay, engineers are very good at finding good solution to practical problems. God bless them, but they are less capable of the conceptual abstract jam, jam jump that is needed in order to embrace the more mathematical aspects of it. You know, the greatest disciple of Deming, the man who has laid the foundation for everybody to understand me is a actually he was a physicist is officially himself, Dr. Don Wheeler, in Knoxville, Tennessee, he has written the ultimate guide of understanding the Demings thinking through the lens of variation, and if you study those books, which are eminently enjoyable, you you see in every page that he writes, why for the majority of people, bringing those concepts to the boardroom is practically impossible. Because what they mean one of the things if I may, that has completely spaced out 99% of the financial world is the fact that an Excel spreadsheet would lead you astray very easily, because it forces you into a linear partner. And instead them in pointed out that nature, and in general phenomenon happens within a natural realm of isolation. Now, this simple fact, branches out has ramification in every aspect of management which is largely misunderstood. So you may remember that in the 80s, the dean of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, was a Lithuanian gentleman called Myron tribers, who was also the Vice President for r&d at Xerox. When he invited them in to Xerox, anyone at length saying all the things that they're doing and all the things that they're doing at MIT, Deming said to him, and this is what the tribe was told me in England in early 90s. He said, he said to him, he said, You don't know what you're doing, do you? And, and he said, I went home, and I cried all night, and then I left everything. And I decided to spend the rest of my life trying to promote these concepts, which is, you know, damning books have been published by The MIT Press, you know, the. But if you look at their MBA, there is no,

John Willis: 26:02

no, I, you know, I have this thing I asked you this, when we first talk that like, like, I don't want to call it a conspiracy, but like, it's sort of very convenient on all lean discussions that come out of like Boston, either Harvard or MIT. Instead of just like, act like the man never existed, I've even told you that there's a professor, very profound use of use the word who told me that Deming had nothing to do with Toyota success, right? Like, we don't even need to go there. But then in Michigan, I mean, they don't last sort of like, they don't have any statues of them. But they are clear to mention him when he should be mentioned. And I just always found that just as a person who was learning like, wow, you know, these people who've written some good stuff, even exist, and even to the point where a professor tells me, like, I must drop my jaw, like, did you just say, Yeah, don't do with Toyota?

Dominico Lepore: 27:01

Well, you know, it's, it's, you know, talk about MIT in 1990, Peter Sandy wrote this book called The fifth surprise, and I was profoundly disappointed when I read it. Yeah, because he was not mentioning them at all. Okay, in the 96, re, new 96th edition of the book. The first 10 pages of the book are dedicated to a long and heartfelt apology with a doctor. And saying everything that I've written, damning has said much better than me. So this is about to apologize for. But again, he had sold 10 million copies of his books, and he had influenced governments, like, you know, the Finnish government embrace, Peter saying is to a fault. Yeah. You know, and so it takes an incredible amount of intellectual humility. Understand the scope, the magnitude, the monumentality of damning message, and not feeling overwhelmed. So if you're an illustrious academic, and you realize that you've been saying the wrong things all along, he won't be difficult for you to sell an MBA, which is based on flawed teachings on leadership, and other, you know, fantasies, for $100,000. Then changing everything, we write everything through the lens of theory, profound knowledge, it doesn't make much economic sense. And if you're the MIT that lives off, essentially, what they do with these labs, where they create fantasies that an MIT, MIT is 5% Nobel Prize level of work, which we all worship, okay, physics in technology, fantastic. 5% 95% is the hallucination that they sell to the market to students that join because they want the alumni and they keep perpetuating that and you just you don't kill the goose that produces golden eggs.

John Willis: 29:22

You know, I love this because when we when I talk to you the first time you say you sure you want me to be on the podcast? I might exactly like Absolutely. I want you on my bike as you know, one of the things I was on my notes last time I thought you know, I think this is a big deal, which is, you know, which started maybe with your soda D'Amico, right and but you said that like that, like the thing you notice about them and I think what you've taken in your career storytelling, the importance of storytelling,

Dominico Lepore: 29:52

when, you know, one of my partner's wrote a beautiful novel that's been sold We can proudly say in for 30 countries, not many, many 1000s of countries called the human constraint. Okay, that was not a commercial

John Willis: 30:10

use commercials are the people who tell good stuff, like I said, there's no such thing as a shameless plug their plug. I mean,

Dominico Lepore: 30:19

I was just introduced storytelling, you know, we have a, we have written several books trying to tackle every angle, okay, so the, the, the academic stuff, the narrative stuff, the, the, you know, the, you know, every possible angle with which we could exemplify certain concepts. And we found that storytelling the way Goldratt wrote four of his books writing is effective, because it triggers in people, you know, some connections that are not normally activated through a more conventional academic study. So storytelling is important. However, I have to say, otherwise, I wouldn't be sincere, that storytelling can only take you so far. Let me explain. The goal has sold 10 million copies. Okay. Larry guard, who is the publisher, very good friend of mine, he published my first book, he became a multimillionaire, he made three times as much as Golden made. He was translated in 35 languages, and there is no top executive in the Fortune 500 That hasn't read that book. Have you seen application of TLC? A corporate level? None?

John Willis: 31:39

Very rare. I do see Delta but yeah.

Dominico Lepore: 31:43

Plant level as many as you like, but a corporate level? None. Okay. Why? Why? Because storytelling by its nature, has to hide every element that prevents the reader before falling in love with the narrative. Right? Right. So when, when we read the the Phoenix, the Phoenix Project,

John Willis: 32:10

no, be nice. Now, it was just one facet of how to protect Latinos.

Dominico Lepore: 32:16

Let's say that, we loved the passion. And we loved the love that, that the writers had, for Dr. Dog got Walters work, and we very appreciative of that. But obviously, the narrative was very, very, very poor. I mean, literature is something else you say. So you know, in order to write storytelling, you have to be able to do storytelling. So you have to like in some way verse in the way of telling the story. So and as we are very pedantic, right? When we approach that, the storytelling, you know, we took advice from very famous playwrights in America to make sure that their story was so so just to answer your question, storytelling is important. Let's try not to go overboard with

John Willis: 33:05

the trigger point, right? So even I mean, to be honest with you, like alright, so I love Gina has been incredible. For my career, he's a dear friend. And I think the Phoenix Project has changed the landscape, completely. If so, sort of the the new breed of IT people, he's done more for them understanding go rat, he doesn't really do a drum buffer rope story in that in that book, but be honest with you, even in the goal to your point of a storyteller. I mean, to really understand trc, you didn't get it from the goal. You had to then say, Okay, I need to learn more. And even Jean said that, what they did is they took a Master's class in University of Washington, to better understand how they needed the right to finish project, whether they were, again, I think your point is well made is that if you're writing storytelling, you have to capture the imagination of the people. And if you bogged down on all the particulars and technology bits and bytes, you don't really do that.

Dominico Lepore: 34:10

Well, yes. In America, you have you have this incredible ability to create a fascinating environment for people to learn. Let's talk about astronomy. Let's talk about cosmology. The planetariums in America are fantastic. Okay. And they done with a very noble educational intent to attract attract youngsters that can fall in love with astronomy, the stars and everything. What is the percentage of those kids can really understand will ever understand what's happening in the sky? Very few. Yeah, because in order to understand what's happening in the sky, you need the foundation of tensor calm killers that only very few people have the stamina, the determination, the ability to pursue. So let's not confuse inspiring people and teaching people.

John Willis: 35:14

No, I think I got your point I like I totally agree. And I get it. And yeah, and I think that is a good point of there's a line of which the storytelling here the other thing that we talked about that I think is such as incredibly fascinating, is, you said that you learned as much as you say, Deming, you found go rat. And then you learned as much as you could learn from go rat. And then you went to other sources for that's just fascinating stuff.

Dominico Lepore: 35:46

Okay, so this is going to be the most highly controversial podcast you've ever made. So yeah, so let me take a stab at it. Any normally intelligent, dedicated person can learn with the right guidance and the right study everything that has to do with the old fundamental algorithm of TSC because they live in around of Applied Maths that is accessible to everybody. Goldratt has made life very simple for anybody who's willing to understand that. But there is something which has been majestically misunderstood in the in the NTSC, which are the thinking processes. They first unveiled in a book called The necessary but not sufficient in 94. Now, that book, Ellie did not publish anything connected with the thinking processes since then, he left everybody else and the parents to write about it, creating, in my opinion, the most unbelievable confusion that there is concerning the tools. Let me let me clarify what I'm saying. I read. I mean, that maybe because you don't have to, but you know, I am aware of a plethora of snake oil charmers that go out peddling the thinking processes as the logical tools, something that the IT community can benefit from, to develop they software. I hear people saying that the logical tools of TLC have to be applied in a rigorous manner where every single step of the Lord

John Willis: 37:58

Jesus like the this is like the 27 steps to learn lean, right?

Dominico Lepore: 38:02

Yeah, that's exactly right. Okay, so. So when I decided to be serious about this particular body of knowledge, that I had to take a step out of the beaten path. So I had to come to terms that was the kind of logic that Goldratt was talking about, was, well, actually, he told me, he said to me, he said, If you want to learn and be really good at this, you have to go to your rabbi that will teach you Talmud, he assumed as I was very close to the coin, which is he was his, his wing man. So he assumed that I was Jewish. So I went to my wife's cousin who had converted to Judaism, as a young as a young woman, and I said, What is this and she laughed, and she took me to a bookstore. And she bought me a little book called The essential Talmud, written by Einstein sellers, who passed away last year, who is the the director of the Institute for Talmudic studies in Israel. And when I opened our book, which is the only thing I was able to afford, intellectually, at the time, the first 10 pages to see summarized so if you want to know what tear says, take this little booklet called the essential Talmud, and you will read in the first 10 pages, what tears is about and what TC is about is a way for you to absorb, accumulate and develop new knowledge. In order to do that, you have to leverage faculties that partially have to do with your rational side. But most importantly, with your more emotional side, they could save you a lot meaning the the, the, the attributes that we have, okay, only three of them are rational, the ability to have intuition, the ability to develop an analysis and the ability to deploy knowledge, but everything else has got to do with how you harness the power of your emotions. So, my journey, my real journey with trc started there. And, and all of a sudden that the way I came across Dr. Deming, that was, you know, the greatest, you know, the greatest gift I could have possibly received from from a professional standpoint and cultural standpoint. Then I came across all of a sudden, the best and the brightest in this kind of line of work, so to speak. So the people that within Judaism, they are concerned with explaining the Holy Scriptures, well, they call the Torah, you know, which means book of instruction. That they, they, they studied the best way of elucidating, and extracting meaning from the Torah. And in order to do that, they have to leverage the ability of the mind to conceive cause and effect relationships, what all that talks about in the tools in the thinking processes, they go way beyond what logician could conceive. When I asked Goldratt, if he had checked with logicians, the validity of what he was saying, he laughed at me. And he said, first of all, I'm a physicist, I don't need any logistician. The second one is that this kind of logic doesn't come from science, it comes from somewhere else. So that was my path, which has, for the last 16 years as open up a completely new realm of understanding, which prompted me to do something that I was very reluctant about, which was to try and take a step forward. Because in my nature, I would have been content to work with Deming and Goldratt. And to the best of it, yeah, in opening up this new realm of knowledge, I realized that it was falling on me that befalling me that an obligation to take these things a step forward. So

John Willis: 42:25

I definitely want you to go deeply. And I got one last question, because I do want to find out like you explained some of the work you're working on, I looked at some of it. Um, the, the thing is, you just you I think you implied or said that, and I think you sort of implied is that go right, in his later years actually started explaining some of this stuff where

Dominico Lepore: 42:44

he didn't Yes, and nobody understood them.

John Willis: 42:48

So nobody ever said he was trying to tell everybody working, especially in

Dominico Lepore: 42:51

the last year of his life, they were severely ill, he went back to his roots, we must never forget the daughter Goldratt comes from a very, very illustrious family of Talmudic scholars. His father was the inspirational force behind the the education system in the newly created state of Israel. The same goal that he studied physics, but he did it a Barry Lange, which is the religious University of Israel. So what I'm trying to say is that trc has 20% to do with the science and 80% to do with the thinking tradition, that if you don't have some level of grasp of you, you will you will be just an instructor, you will never truly understand what he was driving. And when, you know, you know, I've written a couple of books on the topic quoting drew barbiturate bear, which is the greatest spiritual mind of Judas Mo, certainly last century as a source of inspiration, but more than that, as the person who has framed for me, the, the, is framed for me, the area within which TLC can find application, which is not about job number three, which is an offspring. Critical chain is just an offspring, a very precise concept, which is constrained and constrained is not something negative constraint is the place where you generate the maximum value and the word constraint. Interior constraint comes from a concept of Egypt. Myths rhyme, which is where the Jews had to leverage what they had in order to get into the promised land. So when you start looking at the body of knowledge of trc, if you look at the tools, what is the transition tree, the transition tree is the way Goldratt as exemplified for everybody, what in Judah is Miss called shoot can rock, which is the instructions, how to do things. Okay? So the conflict cloud of TLC is a way on a superficial level to solve the dispute in reality is to dig deeper in the most fundamental assumptions you make about reality. And in gone through that pattern, you alter the way you perceive the world and the way you are in the world. And in that sense, trc scary, because he moves you constantly beyond your cognitive horizon.

John Willis: 45:50

It's the counterintuitive nature of things. I mean, even when DevOps first started, even, you know, sort of the early days is like, will never ever ever operate like that, you know, I mean, and, you know, because it's this, this initial, you know, like, the things that are like when, when you started described what people were doing, and DevOps or like, good friend of mine, created one of these early presentations of how they would do in 10 deploys a software at Flickr, Yahoo. A day. And I, you know, I sort of use it very licensed and sane people were throwing up in the back of the room, you can't do this, this will destroy humankind, you know, but so yeah, I think that's a part of, of this. So that the stuff you're working on now, I think, one of the best sort of Deming isms is there was a student in one of his classes that had taken a class maybe in like, 8070, I don't know what it was, but then a couple years later, took another class. And they sort of raised their hand and said, Dr. dammy, now, two years ago, you said this, and now you're saying that, you know, and I could imagine, in his deep voice going, I'll never apologize for learning. You know, like, so I think the point you made earlier is like, like, if you're looking to line in out of the crisis and say, tab, and I've had this people to look what he said here, like, yeah, that's not really what it's all about. So like, you've that this will you said, you've gotten to a place where you've understood like the goal, rather the level, I've never heard anybody describe it this way. And so for some number of years, you've been basically trying to expand that. So go ahead and tell everybody about that.

Dominico Lepore: 47:30

Right? Okay. One of the most common misconceptions is that TLC is kind of operation research in disguise, okay. It's not operation research, for a myriad of reasons. And I don't want to get into that, because if there's something boring to me is to talk to engineers, which I have to most of the time. To see and the concept of constraint, they stem from the idea of a limitation use as a leverage point. So that is the philosophical underpinning. Okay. Now, I want you to understand, and I am sure that you know, if people if you have people following this podcast, you will have a lot of questions about it. Is that the foundational paradigm of trc it's a it's a word that you find in Genesis, and it's called ferrata, which means continuously overcoming barriers, okay, continuously overcoming a situation that limits you. Now, you don't know anybody that wants to live a life that is predicated upon continuously break boundaries. And yet, I want to thank you for quoting them in when he says I never apologize for learning. Deming almost intuitively understood that the essence of life is learning that life is a learning process. There are some theory in biology that define life as a cognitive process, okay, a process of cognition, which may happen independently from the brain. And in fact, it happens in the gods, right? So, right, so this idea that for Deming, was intuitive, essentially, it's completely codified in Jewish culture completely codified. Okay, this idea that life exists as a continuous overcoming of the strictures that your mighty puts you in, okay, and that you have to overcome because those are the tests that he sends you. This is something that's permeated entirely the work of Dr. Goldratt. And has been understood by virtually nobody. He my, you know, you know, deny this. But if you interview law regard, which is by far and large, the most interesting person in the gold rock world, He came all the way from Boston, to here to Victoria, to tell me that the things that I've written out my things that Goldratt had in the back of his mind, but he had never been able to take them out from gold, that gold that has been reluctant to say these things all his life, because he didn't want his approach to be labeled too Jewish. In doing so, and God bless his soul, he has done an enormous disservice to trc because that's prevented trc to really show what can do and attract the right people. Because today, we have a slew of chipmunks around the world blubbering nonsense about to say, you know, I far from me the idea of presenting myself as a guru or anything, but I've done non negligible things in non entirely negligible things in management. And today, I am working actively in supply chains, which are extremely complex. And the starting point is to take different actors that come from different links in this chain, and make them understand that either the paying customer is happy, or nobody makes money. And you start from that by identifying what is the set of fundamental assumptions they make on how a flow of events through the change to go. Now, what is important about this is that training that you do to your synapses, to make them conceive, cause and effect relationships that you couldn't see before. And in order to do that, you have to embrace the paradigm. And if you don't come for religious, ethnic or personal convictions, to a paradigm of continuous learning, I will never apologize for learning, okay? If you don't come from that paradigm to see becomes impenetrable, or worse, it becomes you become mired in a series of techniques that sooner or later will get into conflict with a some accounting gimmick works

John Willis: 52:38

now is not going to work in the future. That's right. Yeah.

Dominico Lepore: 52:42

So it's a I'm not advocating for people necessarily, to study bodies of knowledge, that might not belong to their culture, they might not feel affinity. And I'm not saying that in order to be a good trc practitioner, you should be an expert on that. What people don't should understand is that the thinking processes of trc, they have virtually nothing, virtually nothing or very little to do with the logic of a computer program, which by the way, is incredibly flawed, as we look at the way computer program works. So the logic of the program is inherently flawed. And they, you know, I know that you talk into it people a lot. So it people should understand that they mental circuitry, it's very, very limited. And if they want to expand their ability to conceive, good functioning software, they should try and learn different ways of reasoning of cause and effect in a much more emotional way. Okay, geeks, I never produce anything only in the Big Bang Theory. Sheldon wins. Reality Reality, people that do major discoveries, they're not geeks. Okay, so, geek,

John Willis: 54:12

I have a good friend of mine. He's a he's a physicist, and he's one of the he sort of legendary for people. He basically invented something called infrastructures code genre, which, like, He's created a whole way for people to install infrastructure to sort of a code, it's a brilliant stuff. And like, at one time, we were just hanging out and he was sort of an I'll probably mangle this, but he said that, um, you know, probably the biggest problem with computer programming was the, the binary nature of it. Like, if you could do a redo, you'd be like, Why is it like if, you know, it's like, it's like, you know, so on or off, right? All your, all your programming constructs. And I thought, Well, how would never be and I'm probably mangling what he exactly said but the point I was like, what if you went back in time and said, like, let's create Well, you know, almost what, what quantum is trying do now but that we don't want to go there. But but if you could have thought about programming in a way that wasn't pigeonholed to sort of spy mode and start constant anyway. So, but you have a product or a solution and stuff that you're using

Dominico Lepore: 55:14

we Okay, so I'm following a more a more evolved way of putting together in a cohesive and coherent way, their main goal that if you look at the backlog, there is a step of the backlog which says create a suitable organizational structure. At the time needed or dead? No, I had an idea of how the structure should be, we knew that we had to eliminate barriers, we knew that we have to drive our fear, we knew that there was something inherently wrong with the conventional functional hierarchy. But we don't do not have an answer. That answer became clearer and clearer to my team and I over the years, and took the form of what we call the network of projects. So essentially, if you look at the Deming production view, there's a system. In order to make that operational, we have inserted a constraint in that in that diagram, where all the other arrows, they have to be built in a way they're subordinate to that constraint, with the buffer, and with the control charts that monitor the isolation. Now there is a costume, you can find it in all of our books. How do you how do we transform that cartoon into an operation in the Deming sense in an operational in an operational way? How do you transform that cash to into a company that can function day one. And we develop this concept starting from the foundational elements of what an organization is an organization is, you know, people that work in an organization, they do fundamentally two things. One is to operate repetitive processes, the cleaning, the closing of the books, preventive maintenance, whatever, or they work on projects, which is a marketing campaign, which is adopting new technology, whatever. So in order to overcome the barriers, okay, eliminate barriers, we need to have a practical operational way to tell people what to do when they come to work. Otherwise, if we don't create for people a path, a pattern of work and growth within an organization, people will never switch people will always refer to the boss, and they subordinate and they will never come out of that prison. So we developed the conceptual infrastructure for doing that the methodology to deploy blah, blah, blah, blah. But then, we had the problem of exemplifying that we had the problem of showing how that could actually work. And so very reluctantly, we tackle first the mathematical problem producing over 100 pages of beautiful romance, mathematical romance. And then we embedded that into a softer into a code, which is now available for everybody. And, you know, everybody was serious about taking a taking a shot, transforming their organization into a systemic one. And as is not the faint hearted, as Deming would say, can use our softer and God bless them. We we are not a software house, we just made it available for a fee. Well, for individually is essentially free. But for organizations that want to embrace it, it's a negligible expense, just to keep it running. They can have it in whichever form they like. The point is that unless they are serious about what they do, unless they don't want to pass around with it, and ask me questions is why doesn't he put the milestone? Or why doesn't allow me to do this? Or that that bothers me.

John Willis: 59:30

I mean, they're like, Damn, he would not tolerate that. Right? You're right, like exactly. You couldn't ask like why did you say it that way? They like move on, buddy. That's so

Dominico Lepore: 59:39

they can go to a website and go to a website. They can download a beautiful, a beautiful, it took us a long time to write a introduction to the software including the instructions, okay. They can start using with it. Enjoy and start bumping into the Cognitive constraint because, you know, we have more than 10,000 people following us. And they love us. We have a groupie slide the Rolling Stones, as I will be I said only. So

John Willis: 1:00:13

that's a major Keith Richards character.

Dominico Lepore: 1:00:17

Right. So we have lots of groupies, and these groupies, they all have intermediate positions in companies, some cases, also vice presidents, right? They, they profess their undying loyalty, attending and all that, but they don't move. So this is a, they should be looking at the software as a testament to their unwillingness to do something in the company. If so, this software is a punishment, their inability to move anything in their organization, or as we are in North America, now we need to be positive, they could see that as a gentle prompt, you know, to do something in that organization.

John Willis: 1:01:01

That's awesome. All right. So we'll put all the links in but what are the places that I got a bonus question for you, though, but what are the links that we should be putting in there and

Dominico Lepore: 1:01:11

we have a, we even went through the struggle of building a website, so people can download it and on pieces often is called essential.com. Okay, with the with three instead of E. So S is essential e Ws, three, and then essential with three in the middle.com. Or they can come go to it through our website intelligent management.ws.

John Willis: 1:01:38

This bonus questions may or may not make it in the final edit, because depending on your answer. I don't read much fiction just because I've got such a queue of all these other books. But the one person that I probably enjoyed the most of the 20 years is Umberto Eco. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So just I figured you're the intellectual that you are, you must have been a huge fan.

Dominico Lepore: 1:02:02

Oh, you know, Umberto Eco is one of the most eminent intellectuals that Italy has had last century. He has created ies builder. And frankly, thank you for this question. I hope he does make it

John Willis: 1:02:20

I love No, we will now yeah, if you would have said I don't always I took the risk knowing that you would have this Italian right. I know that that was part of it. But I didn't want to sue all Italians. No, you know,

Dominico Lepore: 1:02:32

Miko did something spectacular and subliminally in some way i He inspired me, because what Ambassador eco did was to connect fundamental philosophical knowledge, which he did not contribute to the way I did not contribute to fundamental science right, but he created the bridge to everyday use of it. So, he had the intellectual mind to understand deep, very deep philosophy, the deep philosophical discourse around the human being and in particular, in the field of philosophy called semiotics. Okay, so he had the intellectual mind to understand that any had the method and the thoroughness to translate that into something that people can actually understand. The first example was a book called The Name of the Rose. Yeah, Republic anyway, what

John Willis: 1:03:33

am I? I mean, I love focus pendulum, but naming the rose to me.

Dominico Lepore: 1:03:37

Yeah, it's the name of the rose is a little bit like, out of the crisis, because everybody alleged to have written it to have ready. But I don't think that that many people understood it, because there is a Latin language back. Yeah. There is an amount of history behind it, that is off. But again, that is miracle. So he was able to inspire people to become involved. And then in all the books that all the movies that he seen with Tom Hanks and, and

John Willis: 1:04:09

that's, that's how I found out about a burnout girlfriend. I was going on about how much I love The Da Vinci Code, and a friend of mine said, Do you want to read the grownup version? Do you need to read that book was Benjamin okay. And then I realized, oh my God, that's just not real book. So yeah, no, I, I'm, I'm a huge fan of

Dominico Lepore: 1:04:30

mystic in the Italian panorama.

John Willis: 1:04:32

I bet yeah, no, I've read three or four of his books, but I love I just I wish I had more time to sort of explore that the

Dominico Lepore: 1:04:40

maybe one one factoid that you might not know that Tyco was hired fresh out of university by Adriano Olivetti, the founder of Olivetti, and he remembers as one of the fondest memories that he worked at the production line for six months. Oh, wow, that's awesome. Yeah, Olivetti which was the single greatest industrialists that the Western world has had in the after war is the guy that promoted the the computer. You know, the first personal computer was produced by Olivetti Olivetti used to pick his bright students everywhere. So that's a good side philosophy. And he brought it to a company that was producing technology, because his idea was that knowledge is a systemic entity. So that is made of different parts that have to interact. So Umberto Eco was one of the the Olivetti boys. So he started to get involved in computers. And yeah, because

John Willis: 1:05:42

we are forever but I love that the whole focus pendulum is you can see like, now you if somebody if you read it, now you're saying like, like he thought, but at the time thinking the word processor was this magical new thing, that all you had to do is feed in some variables, and he created a book, and then somehow it took a life of its own. I mean, that is, I mean, I mean, somebody like take that work. Didn't you realize what process we're in that possible, but I was thought if I was ever going to write a book, I'd write a version like that. But using Google, you can use Google to say like, it sort of took on it. Anyway, I'm a big fan as well. This was great. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. A much. Thank

Dominico Lepore: 1:06:22

you so much for having me.

John Willis: 1:06:23

Yeah. And I thank you for coming. This is sort of my honor to sort of have you I'm honored to have you and we'll do it again. I'll ping you down the road, you know, and just see what you know. So move forward. But again, thank you so much, sir.