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Excellence Foresight with Nancy Nouaimeh
Welcome to Excellence Foresight, the podcast that guides you on the journey to building top-performing, sustainable, and future-ready teams and organizations. We explore how to plan for excellence, dive into the latest trends, and share practical insights for achieving success in today’s rapidly changing world.
Our mission? To fast-track your journey to excellence. It's a challenge, but with the right strategies and understanding of unique organizational cultures, it's achievable.
In each episode, I’ll share insights from my 24 years of experience in diverse, multicultural settings. Plus, we’ll have inspiring guests sharing their stories and the lessons they've learned in their own quests for excellence. Whether you’re a leader or a team member, this podcast is your roadmap to success, helping you and your organization thrive by embracing best practices and future-focused thinking.
Excellence Foresight with Nancy Nouaimeh
Seek Perfection: Kaizen, Kodawari, and Creative Excellence with Edwin Garro
Unlock the secrets of achieving excellence in business with Edwin Garro, president of PXS Group in Costa Rica. Edwin takes us on a journey through the Japanese principles of Kodawari and Kaizen—striving for perfection and continuous improvement. Discover how these timeless concepts, central to the Shingo Model's "Seek Perfection," can elevate your business, and why maintaining a mindset of being number two—just like Avis rental car—can push you to better results. Edwin shares personal anecdotes that highlight the importance of having a clear purpose to define what excellence means, setting a high bar for success while continuously aiming to improve.
In the latter half, we shift from traditional problem-solving methods like root cause analysis and Six Sigma to more innovative, creativity-driven approaches. Learn about Edwin's transformation into a creative thinker through methodologies such as lateral thinking and design thinking. Hear how the disconnect between structured tools and organic creativity inspired him and his co-authors to create "Your Creativity Sprint." Blending continuous improvement with creativity and continuously seeking perfection can drive exceptional results in any field.
Hello and welcome to the Excellence Foresight the podcast where we dive deep into the world of culture, excellence and leadership and how to prepare for a bright future. I'm your host, nancy Noemi, and I'm thrilled to bring you the second episode of our second season. In this second season, we'll explore the journey of achieving excellence, learning from the best and understanding the nuances of leadership that drive outstanding results. In the next few months, I will be joined by truly remarkable guests who have redefined what it means to excel in their field. Whether you're looking to improve your own practices or gain insights into top tier strategies, you're in the right place, and today's episode is about perfection.
Speaker 1:And what does this mean in the business world? While it can be inviting and inviting concept for some of us, it could be intimidating for others. So which side is your business on? Our special guest today is a dear friend. Our roads have intertwined on several locations as we serve together at the board of the American Society for Quality and we're both strong advocates of the principal Bayes-Tringo model for organizational excellence. He is the president of PXS Group in Costa Rica. Welcome, edwin Garou.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Nancy. I'm honored to be here and congratulations on the second season of your podcast.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much, Edwin. I'm so pleased to have you here with us today. So let's get ready to be inspired as we delve into the extraordinary world of excellence with our special guest. Let's jump right in into our episode today Seeking Perfection and the Power of Believing we are number two. So, Edwin, this is my first question to you here today what does seeking perfection mean to you personally?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's so beautiful. There's a word in Japanese, and when I say that's so beautiful, I mean the concept of seeking perfection. And there is a word in Japanese, and the word is kodawari, and. And Kodawari means that commitment to get to something that is perfect, ok, and knowing that you will never get there. So examples of Kodawari are the musician that practices six hours a day, the athlete, the world-class athlete preparing for the Olympics in France in a few months, practicing and training at 4 am in the morning. So it's that constant sense that you have to perfect what you are doing, but knowing that it's not going to happen at the end. And you have to contrast kodawari with another Japanese word that we use all the time, which is kaizen. Okay, so kodawari at the end means trying to be the best right, while kaizen means being better every single day. Yeah, so to give you an example, here in my home office I have a goal, a Kaizen goal, and that Kaizen goal in my office is to improve one thing in my office every week.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:So I have to say 52 improvements a year in my little office. That's the goal. But my goal at Wari is as a quality professional and especially in the analytics world. I strive to be better and better and better all the time in how to explain analysis. So here is the analysis mathematics, statistics, computers et cetera but here is the explanation. So many times we are very good in the analysis but we are not very good telling the stories about what happened in that analysis. So my core worry is to practice and practice and practice how to explain with a story what happened in an analysis.
Speaker 1:Well, this is a great analogy, I think, and you know, my son is a cyclist and he practices a lot. Like 4 am in the morning, they used to go ride in the desert. So there's a lot of commitment absolutely to seek perfection. There is a lot of commitment, yes, exactly, that's really great. So, etan, I read once about a company following this kind of this concept that to keep improving and to maintain a top position, they believe that they are number two, not number one, because once you reach number one, you might be stopping to improve. So what do you think about the strategy of keeping in mind that you're not yet there, right, you are still number two, even if you are the best in your field. What does this strategy help organization achieve?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I love it, I love it. So the goal, the goal is to be the best. Okay, but in practice, you know that you have to improve and you have to improve. And I think you referred to Avis rental car. Yeah, okay. So for many years they had the motto we are number two, so we strive to be number one. I think we all should do that. There always be situations in which we are not the best. Someone else or another company is the best. That is great. That is great. That is great. That means that we have someone or some company or some entity to follow. Yeah, so we have examples, there are behaviors that we don't have, there are results that we don't have, excellent, excellent, because in practice, then, that will make us improve all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I totally agree. I like the strategy and I think everyone needs to keep in mind that this is a really powerful way to seek perfection and to keep believing. We're number two to keep improving. Edwin, for you, I think you have a blended background and you have a lot of different interests, right? I'm not going to share some of them, I'll leave it to you. But for you, how do you define excellence and how does it differ from perfection? And we say the chicken and egg, right. So which one comes first, excellence or perfection? Or what's the correlation between both of them?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, so my definition of excellence, by the way, is a very bad definition because I have to use the word excellent to define excellence. So it's a definition that calls itself. So first we have to have a purpose. So we need to understand in order to be excellent, excellent for what? Excellent in what? Okay. So we need to understand our purpose. Is it to serve our clients or customers in a certain way? Okay, boom, we got it. We have a purpose in a certain way. Okay, boom, we got it. We have a purpose Now that we have a purpose.
Speaker 2:So I know you asked for a definition and I'm giving you the long definition. Okay, so you have a purpose. Now you need to get to excellent results for that purpose. Get to excellent results for that purpose. And you know the usual world-class results, best possible results, the best for your client, for your customer, okay. So excellence is excellence, excellent results but that is not all that are sustainable over time and that keep improving over time. And there's one last element of my definition of excellence and everybody in an organization participates in getting the organization to that excellent purpose. So it's a complicated definition. I know it's a bad definition because I need to use the word excellent to define excellence. Okay, but I stick to it. That's my definition of excellence. That's that's my definition of, of excellence.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting definition and I think there's. I mean, everybody will put it in their own words and being excellent is really being the top of, I mean having a great performance, being outstanding, and it depends on what right and in what. This is what you exactly said, and I like the definition. I mean, aristotle said excellence is a habit, and I like to see it as a habit. It's when we really seek perfection and strive to do better and better, and we do that on on regular basis. Right, so it becomes part of our dna, part of our daily operating models. So I think that's what what excellence is.
Speaker 2:So I like what you said, edwin and for the second part of your question, how that correlates to seeking perfection. Ok, all right. So that's the purpose. That's the purpose. So what is the purpose? What is your true north? Right, so I was in a company two weeks ago.
Speaker 2:So I was in a company two weeks ago. They requested an internal assessment on how they are doing with the Shingo model. Right, so I'm not exaggerating. I asked 25 people what the purpose of the company was and I got 25 different answers. Right, interesting. So there's no way. I mean, it's a good company, good product, certified in as many quality management systems as you could think of, but they could be way better than they are right now, because they don't have that. They don't have the two ends of my definition. They don't have a clear purpose and their people are not participating in making the company excellent. So is it a good company? Yes, it is. Do they have a good product? Yes, they do. Okay. Are they excellent? No, they are not. They are not Okay, okay. So seeking perfection, excellence gets you there and the moment you think you're there, something moves Right and once again, you have to seek that new definition of perfection.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's a moving target, right. So we did something we want to make better and better, and then we keep improving and then we go towards that trajectory of the true north, right. So that's what. Where are we heading? I like, I like your analogies, ed, and I think, like you said a lot of companies if you don't engage your people, you will not be able really to do it right, and that's the start point point. So, in terms of seek perfection, this is really a nice principle and we teach that in the Shingo model, but how can leaders implement it? How can? What are the actions that they can focus on to inspire and cultivate a culture of excellence within their teams and organization? Because we said, it is about the people, finally. So how can they do that?
Speaker 2:do with that. Oh well, let me, let me start with a story. Uh, the uh. I mean this is, this is a position I don't see in every company. But the strategic manager, the strategy manager of a company, strategy manager of a company calls me and we said a meeting and he says we understand that there's a model that works with the behavior of people and by changing behaviors we get excellent results and excellence and all that Well, sort of yeah, yeah, okay, you are in the right direction. So what do you want? Well, we want your company to come here and change their behaviors. What was that again? Yeah, we want your company to change their behaviors. And who are them? The employees, the floor employees, of course they have awful behaviors. Okay, let's do one thing. The only reason why your employees have those awful behaviors is because of you. They are not the problem. You are, are the problem. You want me to leave now, or you, or you want to to uh, to follow this conversation? And the guy went like, like, really surprised, like wait a minute, what do you mean? I mean that we will start by checking, assessing still has parking spaces for managers and directors, and it's so funny because it's a huge company. So employees have to park about a kilometer away from the facilities, while directors and managers park right there next to the facility. Directors and managers never go to the cafeteria. So just to give you two very little examples on how behaviors affect this company. So there are two worlds. This is the world of the directors and managers they are of one class. And this is the world of employees, of the rest of the people.
Speaker 2:Seeking perfection starts with self-management, understanding and practicing, humility and respect. Or, to put it in the right order respect and humility. Right, and it's so hard, it's so hard. This is a company with 75 years of history and I like to tell them well, you are exactly the same age as Toyota. The problem is you went a completely different way. And once again, once again good company, good product. It's one of the largest companies in my country, in Costa Rica. They make billions of dollars every year. They will keep making billions of dollars every year, even if they stay as they are.
Speaker 2:Ok, but they are Okay. But they are not seeking perfection because it's not allowed. It's like saying top management is not allowing anyone else to seek perfection. Here I'm happy to say that things are changing. Things are changing fast. Things are changing. Things are changing fast and and you can see how top management is starting to change their behaviors, okay, and and just by that, then by by by example, right by example, then then the rest of the people is seeing that okay, so I can talk to you, I can give you my ideas. You're going to listen to me. Well, that's new, but I like it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, this is a great example where there's initially a disconnect right between leadership and their employees. And once you break that and you get closer to the employees, you can do miracles with them. I think, edwin, and changing the habits and changing the behavior takes time, but if there's attention to that and you want to see perfection, so that makes a big difference in organization. Uh, I, I like this, these approaches of seeking perfection. But I want to a little bit move to another topic of your I mean of interest to you, and where I think you're becoming an expert in is creativity, right. So you had co-authored the book your Creativity Sprint, and can you tell us a little bit more about it?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, thank you. Thank you for asking, and I think creativity is a very important aspect of seeking perfection. So you know I've been in continuous improvement for all my life, all my professional life. A post-graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Lowell a life ago, I made a commitment to stay in total quality and continuous improvement all my life. So I saw a pattern in root cause analysis and Six Sigma and continuous improvement in general.
Speaker 2:You define a problem, you analyze the problem, you get to the root cause. So far, so good. Right, just to go to the same old answers and solutions. And you know it was so disappointing to see that after a month, month and a half of analyzing a problem, the suggested solution was overtime, or another inspector, yeah, or a new machine. That's what we need, a new machine. That's what we need a new machine. We saw the new machine in a trade fair in the United States. It's only a million dollars, but if we had that new machine, everything would change. So I started to call those solutions arroz con pollo in Spanish, okay, rice with chicken. Because in most Latin American countries, for every special event you have, you know that the main meal is going to be rice and chicken, right. So I start telling people oh no, okay, so wait, no more rice and chicken solutions.
Speaker 2:But then I started studying how to get your brain out of those same solutions. So I found the theory of creativity. I started studying creativity and I became somewhat of a student of creativity. Tools, okay, which is part of the answer, but it's not the whole answer. As an engineer, as a quality professional, having more tools made sense, right. So I became a master trainer in lateral thinking six thinking hats, design thinking, a certified trainer in strategic thinking okay, sounds good, right, not necessarily. Because I realized that my own engineering crowd, my own technical crowd, liked the idea of tools for creativity, but the rest of the world didn't get it for creativity. But the rest of the world didn't get it. So I started having complaints by artists, by graphic designers, advertising people, that kind of marketing people, that they didn't get that thing of using tools to get ideas, because there's a whole nother world in creativity and we're going to call it the anti-tool world, okay. So the end result is the same how to generate fresh and new ideas and using tools for that is one way and again, the technical and engineering and mathematics and physics crowd will love it to practice tools to get there, but it's not for everybody.
Speaker 2:So, right in the middle of the pandemic, three friends from Canada well, starting with Ruth Stanley, which is a common friend of ours and it's so naturally creative I mean, ruth is one of the most creative persons I know in the whole planet right? So after writing an article which was crazy, because we decided to write an article that you didn't have to read in order you could start in every paragraph, of course before it was accepted by the Innovation Division of the American Society for Quality, it was rejected by the Six Sigma magazine in the American Society for Quality. And they are completely right. It is, I mean, it goes against everything that the mic states, right?
Speaker 2:So we decided to write a book, ruth and I and she invited two wonderful Canadian professionals, tim Raggin and Dwight Paulus, and at the beginning we started. We didn't even know why, but we started with a creativity tools book. And then we realized that if we wrote a creativity tools book, we would be writing one of hundreds of books in the same subject. So we decided to change to an anti-tool approach. Just things to connect, to trigger your brain, go to take a walk, smell your environment. Call a friend, talk to an enemy, talk to someone who has the complete opposed view that you have for a problem, that kind of thing. We ended up with a combination of book diary that allows you, for five weeks, to go with one of those activities, after one of those activities, so you learn what triggers your creativity, you learn what triggers your new and fresh ideas, and it was a great experience, great, great experience, just the experience to write the book with them and we love it. We love the result your creativity sprint. We love it.
Speaker 1:That's very good, and I think I've read your book, ed, and there's a lot of, I think, learning from it and people, when they start practicing, they will get to know what works for them and what doesn't work, and I think this is where creativity and perfection could really, I think, support each other, where creativity and perfection could could really, I think, support each other. So by being more, more creative and you absolutely highlighted that right is that we lack creativity in what we're doing, right. So sometimes coming up with new things is important and it doesn't. We don't have to reinvent the wheel, but just looking at things differently. And at wcqi asq conference last month, someone from Disney I mean ex-Disney creative, I think he mentioned freshness and it's important to get that freshness, opinion freshness, look right, and that's why we talk to different people. We get different opinions, to widen our horizon and our thoughts around things, and this is where creativity slows. So thank you for this, ed. Do you have any last thoughts to share with our audience here today?
Speaker 2:Well, when you think about it, it is important that we all find reasons to improve every single day. Now, you know, there's a difference between a world-class musician or athlete and us, and it's that the world-class musician can practice for six hours a day to perform for one hour. But if you think about the way we perform, we perform all the time, so we have to combine practicing and performing and getting better at the same time.
Speaker 1:What a challenge huh, yeah.
Speaker 2:So my message to everybody here is practicing to be the best has to be your kodawari, and improving to be better has to be your kaisen. Okay, so, always strive to be the best and always improve Kodagari Kaizen. And I love Japanese. You know that I love the Japanese, yeah.
Speaker 1:This is a great message I had here today. I thank you so much for your insights and I'm sure our audience will enjoy what you've shared with them and the learning and I would like to thank will enjoy what you've shared with them and the learning and I would like to thank you again for being here today. So seeking perfection is a commitment and, as we wrap up this enlightening episode of Excellence Foresight, I want to really thank you again for being here with us, edwin. Today. Edwin is the president of PXS Group, costa Rica and he had shared invaluable insights and experiences to our listeners. We hope you found today's conversation as inspiring and thought-provoking as I did, and remember the pursuit of excellence is a continuous journey and by seeking perfection we can get closer to excellence. Please don't forget to subscribe to Excellence Foresight and stay tuned for more exciting episodes with remarkable guests who are setting new standards in their fields. Until next time, keep striving for excellence and pursue pushing the boundaries for what's possible. I'm Nancy Noemi, and this has been Excellence Foresight Podcast. Thank you.
