This YouTube video features Mike Morrill discussing the concept of Kaizen, a Japanese term meaning continuous improvement. Mike discusses his successful implementation of Kaizen in a workplace of five people that had 105 improvements in the course of a year, ranging from waste handling to quality of services. He stresses the importance of measuring improvements when applying Kaizen to a given project. Mike outlines the five elements critical to success in a business partnership, such as sequester and disciplining, by applying them in the context of his own partnership with his fiancé Barbara. Morrill proposes a four-day schedule for taking a business trip, including checking in at the hotel and touring local culture on the first day, as well as focusing on work on the second and third days, and checking off financials and personal matters on the fourth day. Finally, Morrill provides a successful strategy for setting and reaching financial goals in personal relationships, consisting of setting a goal, measuring progress, celebrating successes, and scheduling an accountability day. After noting that taking a journey together is an effective strategy for rewarding success, he encourages everyone to prioritize their relationship and make time to achieve positive momentum.
- 📊 Measure improvements regarding safety, quality, complexity and speed
- 📈 Make 105 improvements in one year
- 🔧 Improve anything from waste handling to product and service quality
- 💡 Achieving a common goal with Kaizen: using a 90-day improvement plan to remove the personal nature of improvements and reach a shared goal.
- 🗣 Openly discussing money: to succeed, it's important to have a talk about money in order to make sure that both goals get met.
- 🤝 Establishing rules of engagement: Barbara and the speaker implemented a set of rules to define what meaningful and quality time was for them.
- 🕰 Frequency: A financial approach with recurring 90 day cycles
- 🚗 Sequester: Space from external interruptions and a 5-hour travel perimeter
- 🦉 Discipline: Strategy should come before rewards and complete tasks
- 🤝 Respect: Mutual understanding and self-awareness to reach a common goal
- 📆 Wednesday is a travel day, followed by learning about the local culture in the evening
- 💰 Thursday is dedicated to work and finances, then date night
- 🏫 Friday is used to tie up loose ends, then spend the day on personal matters
- 🧒 For those with children, time is set aside to review college, sports, and travel plans
- 📆 Schedule an accountability day - dedicate time to review progress and plan for the future
- 🎉 Celebrate accomplishments - reward success by taking a break from planning
- 🎟 Plan a trip - book travel arrangements to use as a reward and motivation
- 🏆 Achieving success in relationships so that couples can start Monday like everyone else & stay on the same page
- 🤳 Following along with the speaker's journey on social media for those wanting to to delve deeper into the topic
- 🙌 Pressing the pause button on distractions, making time to regain momentum in relationships to get the most out of it
Evening everybody glad you made it out so in June 2015 I suffer a back injury that essentially presses pause on every aspect of my life so for those you know me that's not good but there I am in bed iPad in hand trying to recover surfing YouTube when I get an email from one of my employees, and it's got a link and I click that link, and it introduces me to a gentleman named Paul Makers now Paul deems himself to be a mean maniac and I will tell you that is exactly what he is but what was interesting was he and introduced me to a concept that is a tenet of lean called Kaiden so Kaiden literally means continuous improvement so that's struck with me a little I
Found that interesting, and before I go into that a little more I want to share with you my opinion of self-help and discipline so all my life I think we could take everything I've heard and put it into this auditorium tonight and say here's all the self-help we've ever had I think it all says the same thing and to prove my point I'd give you the idea that I've heard seize the day or live like there's no tomorrow and I can tell you that never not once changed the way I approached a problem change the strategy stop banging my head against the wall just an impact me, and it wasn't until someone said to me hey your life is like the minute sir of the grains of sand in an hourglass and when they run through that hourglass they're gone forever it gave me chills I had this sudden sense of urgency it just it
Made me almost terrified I said I just wasted so much time on petty things that don't matter they bring though value well those three things essentially mean the same thing but that one resonated with me so the first point I make is listen for your voice and whatever resonates with you follow that and try to master it so what Paul said resonated with me Kaiden, so I studied that and took that in during my recovery, and then I took it to work, so I came in and introduced it to my team of five people and said hey here's just continuous improvement idea and over one year we make a hundred and five improvements over five people, so some people are like well what constitutes an improvement, so it's simple it could be anything from the way we handle waste trash removal in our processes all the way up to how we
Deliver the service and the product to our customer most important however is what do you do to measure that, so it's important you take your goal, and you measure improvements in the following way safety quality complexity and speed and this is critical because each of those things Trump the one below it so very simply if it's not safe you're done talking about it so from that standpoint there's a key that comes out of that it removes the personal nature of those improvements they're no longer my idea or your idea they're whether they measure towards the goal that we agree we're trying to achieve if they do we put them in place and if they don't the conversations over it's very simple, so 150 improvements see my guys took
Through this thing like crazy it was awesome and every day I would come home, and I would share this with my fiancée Barbara, and she's awesome, so she'd sit there, and she'd be like listening to everything I had to say and ID look at this video of this improvement we made, or this customer called us today and shared this great idea with us, they thought how awesome it was we did this, and she was you know fantastic very attentive but over the course of that year I noticed something she was becoming frustrated, and I couldn't understand that until I realized Barbara works for a traditional employer someplace where she's not empowered to make any change that could impact her bit job in that way, and so I began to wonder about that and wonder how it was impacting our relationship so while having coffee with a friend one day I was sharing this idea and I said to Rob hey I'm leaving the best part of my life
Behind me, I can't share this with her other than tell her what's going on, and he comes up with a very simple concept he says why don't you set aside 90 days and share it with her take her for 90 days and make a goal plan my goal wow that's a really simple idea why not do that well the key was I want to Barbara to experience Lies end, so I set it beside thinking that through and realized that Kaiden every 90 days with barb would give us momentum and our relation we'd be on the same page and constantly working towards the same goals right, so I very simple so here's how we went about it the first thing as I mentioned before you need a goal what's your goal for us is very simple we want to spend more quality time together doing meaningful things for some people that's
Experiences it might be physical assets it might be other traveling goals things like that, but we defined what that was for us not before I go any further it's important that I warn you this is a very intimate process we've all seen marriages that are 2530 years old they don't even talk about money so if that's you that your first Kaiden improvement is to get that done get it out of the way because if you can't talk about that you're not going to not going to be successful with this, so we didn't have that problem we were to identify our goal, and we knew what we wanted to do, but we did realize to be successful we needed to have some rules of engagement and so those are very simple I'm going to walk you through them now the first one was frequency so we kind of covered that right 90 days, and we looked at it, but we couldn't find anything that really was
Better every plan or every financial planner fiscal calendars everything's 90 days so why reinvent the wheel is just this easy fit for what we were going to try to do the next one was sequester so as you can imagine I'm easily identified when we're out, so we knew that if we go to have a cup of coffee you're going to run into three people, and you're just not going to be able to talk, so we need to be able to give ourselves away from everybody, or we could both talk privately and share without interruption and get something done travel time, so again I'm the problem here I'm not coach friendly you're not going to put me in a small package it's just not gonna work, so we decided immediately we were going to drive well that limited our range right, so we don't want to be in the car all day, so we put a five-hour perimeter on it so five hours from Utica though is great there's a ton of adventures you
Can take within five hours of here so a really easy one for us next part of that is the destination has to be walkable, so we don't want to be stuck in cars and Uber and all that we want to be able to walk where we're going to go why is that key because you're going to share the entire time you know people try the walk-in text it doesn't usually work very well, so you're going to be talking to each other you'll be experiencing everything you see along the way you're not going to be catching each other up you're going to be on target together this one's key right discipline you got to do your work, and then you get rewarded we all know it, but we don't tend to do it so when we get to our destination we can't have a good time first we got a plan what's going on we got to get it together, and so I'm going to head there huh, so respect is the second for the next second is the last one and that is where
We talked about you've got to respect your partner you need to know that your partner, and you are on the same page that you can talk openly, and you're gonna because you're trying to how do we do this measure our goal it's not personal we're gonna work forward, so it's okay is that reach the goal we're after or doesn't it, so we know there's respect there and then as you see the next step for us is self-awareness what works for you, you need to know your hang-ups your issues because you have to learn how to overcome them, so you can be successful together what tools do you need do you work with a pencil you work with a tablet what do you need so you can go, and you can get it done so here's what it looks like for us, it's a three-day trip always at the end of the week, and we'll get back to that in just a minute but Wednesday through Friday, so I'm going to take you through each of those
Days very simply Wednesday it's travel day five hours that works out really nice if you're doing a five-hour trip it gets you in town two to 2:30 most places allow you to check in by three o'clock, so it's usually not an issue we get in we drop everything off, and then we hit the town grab our phones we're off we're going to go out we're going to see what's local what's the local culture what kind of shows are there what kind of is there a band playing is an open mic night somewhere's or a trivia night whatever all the time keeping our eyes open for a place that we can sequester ourselves right someplace that we can go and work privately tomorrow when we need to get some work done and be successful for why we're here on our trip in our first place we do that for a few hours, and we come back to the hotel we get cleaned up, and it's date night I don't know the last time you had a date night sometimes it's been a while, but you're going to go
Out it's just the two of you there's nobody to check in with you're going to go, and it's an adventure because you've never been any of these places before in most cases face time together walking spend the night have a good time you're not talking about your work, and I'm talking about your plan you're just there together so that Knights in the books everything's great you've gotten a good night's sleep it's Thursday morning it's time for the rubber to meet the road guys it's time to get it going, so now you're going to grab your tools you're going to go have a good breakfast you're going to go off to where you decided to stay for the day so that's really easy we've got a together agenda we're gonna work through, so the first piece is what's unfinished if we've done a trip before what did we not accomplish is it relevant I think you will find in most cases your life has changed so much in 90 days it no longer matters that pieces
Off and we don't worry about it the next piece is financials this is critical because this is what allows us to do what we do this is the thing that causes most people anxiety so let's just get it out of the way, so we're going to talk about the financials what's coming up did we have any unexpected expenditures do we have anything on the horizon that we didn't expect anything we need to plan for and did we hit our savings and retirement goals now for us, we have children so if you have children there next we talk about our kids whoare going to college who's got a dance who's got sports what's going to happen do we need to travel get all that stuff does it going to impact our calendar and our deliverables for what we're going to do later with everything that we serve out of the way we talk about us, so this is important right big deal, so we come with a 30-day and a 90-day goal for ourselves personally and then one that we want to
Share with our partner so when it's on a piece of paper there's ain't goals altogether eight of them for shared too personal you're sitting together we measure those do they reach the goals that we've defined if so you might adopt one too for all of them you're going to put those in place, and then you're going to proceed forward with those out of the way you've measured those you've measured your financial goals everything's together you're done for the day for us, it's four to six hours maybe with a coffee break in there now you get to go back out on the town it's yours clean up don't have an adventure you have date night 2.0 taking a show do something different whatever you want to do but the nice yours it's your reward for spending all this time in your relationship and sadly that's more than a lot of us dedicate to what we do so that's done we've had a great night
Friday comes this is a simple but critical day this is the accountability day we get up again grab our breakfast we somewhere quietly we open up the calendar is important because it's our accountability coach it's not my idea or Barbara's idea of being accountable we agree when do we want to hit that goal it goes on the calendar now no one needs to remind me I just looked at the calendar and I know when I'm due to have something finished that's what this is about to be successful, so we put it on the calendar we work our way through it if you get to something that doesn't make sense to you, it's simple cross it off and discard it because trust me you probably have more than you can get done in 90 days that's our usual finding so when you're done with that you're going to go one front one step further and that's plan your next trip now if you don't do this trust me
It will not be a 90-day trip it'll be a 120-day trip it'll be a 180-day trip it won't happen at all if you go home without planning your trip you will not get it done so take an hour make some phone calls inevitably you've looked at other destinations so look around call the hotels find out what's walkable is it feasible is that a good locale for you get that done book it and get it on the books you're done it's noon your day is yours you're only five hours from home now I think some people would choose to have a long weekend that's fine we always choose to come home on Friday and there's a reason for that, so I talked about this being at the end of the work week here's why you went in on Monday like everybody else you work through the Tuesday to wrap up your business you're gone for the week if you come in on Monday and you know if you're gone Monday Tuesday Wednesday and come in on
Thursday you're playing catch-up all everybody else is winding down their week and then also in your weekends, and you don't feel successful at all you've sat there and struggled through your work that it's no good, so now we've had this great success in our relationship it's noon on Friday we go shopping we walk around we know we take in some more sights if we want to, and then we travel home or home by 10 o'clock, and now we were able to start Monday like everybody else, but we're on the same page, so we've got this great thing called momentum again now we spend our weekends being successful working the things that we've put on our agenda so now not only we have a great trip but by Monday we've gotten all these other things checked off our list, or we're working towards our goals already, and we're in sync we are ready to rock and roll it's fantastic so that's that's what our travel trip looks like
So very simple, and then we wind up, and we do it again so what I'd like to do here is first I'd like to thank Barbara she's out there and without her none of this would be possible, and secondly I'd like to say if you'd like more about this if you want to follow along with us, we are on social media be happy to answer any questions that you have go into a little deeper dive for this the third piece of that is I would encourage you we're going into the weekend press pause on all those things that don't matter and make some time for you to get momentum in your relationship because it really is awesome right thank you very much [Applause]