KaiNexus Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Roussel joins host Mark Graban for the twenty-first episode of the Ask Us Anything series, filling in for Greg Jacobson. Jeff came to KaiNexus five years earlier from outside the Lean and continuous improvement world, which makes this episode useful in a particular way. Most of the questions get answered from the perspective of someone who learned continuous improvement on the job, which is exactly the position most of the people asking the questions are in. The conversation moves from Kaizen at home, to Kaizen applied to sales, to the relationship between structure and creativity, to what the most successful KaiNexus customers actually do differently from everyone else.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
The episode opened with a short exchange on the books each host turns to. Jeff named two that arrived at roughly the same time and have stayed with him. Carol Dweck's "Mindset," which makes the case that ability is learned rather than fixed, and Charles Duhigg's "The Power of Habit." The two reinforce each other: a growth mindset says you can develop the practice, and habit science says how. Together they form a useful frame for Kaizen, because continuous improvement is essentially a practice you build through habit and grow into through deliberate practice.
Mark added three. Donald Wheeler's "Understanding Variation," which is short, dense, and the source of much of the thinking in his own book "Measures of Success." A collection called "Toyota by Toyota," chapters written by American Toyota employees, which he thinks is underappreciated. And Robert Maurer's "The Spirit of Kaizen," which is one of the few American-authored books Toyota sells at its Visitor Center in Japan. Maurer is a psychologist at UCLA, and his work translates Kaizen into the language of personal habit change.
Mark connected back to growth mindset with a useful reframe. The fixed-vs-growth mindset distinction works just as well as know-it-all vs. learn-it-all. People new to Lean often say things like "I learned Lean by taking a week-long class and reading a book." Then a year or two in, they realize how much they don't know, and the practice changes character. Jeff added the word that makes the difference: yet. "I haven't done it" closes a door. "I haven't done it yet" leaves it open.
Mark gave the cookie example from Maurer's work, the one Maurer uses to explain how small, deliberate steps beat cold-turkey willpower. At a conference where pastries are always out, instead of swearing off them, you grab a cookie, tear off a bite, and throw the rest away. The bite satisfies the craving; the discarded cookie is a post-it note for the behavior change you're working on. Eventually you can take one bite without finishing the cookie. That is Kaizen at the personal level: small, deliberate, repeated, each step easier than the last.
Jeff's version is more current and more personal. His stepson plays competitive golf, and they have been applying Kaizen principles to his practice. They built a whiteboard with the parts of his game he wants to work on (short putting, long putting, chipping, full shots) and assigned days of the week to each. The next step is layering data into it, so the practice can be correlated with actual scoring. The deeper point is that practice without structure tends to reinforce the habits already in place, including the bad ones. Structure makes the practice productive, the same way it does at work.
A reader asked how Kaizen principles apply to sales, what processes exist there to improve. Jeff's answer was straightforward: sales has plenty of processes, and they are defined and measurable. Attracting people who care about what KaiNexus cares about, qualifying whether they're a fit, demoing the product, working through objections and procurement, all of it can be tracked and improved. The KaiNexus sales team thinks about customer value, respect for people (customers and employees both), and data: website visits, demo requests, opportunities, time to close. The cadence they aim for, when they're holding the discipline, is daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings with very specific agendas. Daily is obstacle-focused. Weekly is team business. The further out the cadence, the more strategic the agenda.
Mark pushed on a related instinct. In healthcare you hear "every patient is unique" used the same way salespeople sometimes say "every deal is unique," sometimes as a real description and sometimes as an excuse not to standardize anything. The healthy version recognizes that there are differences between cases without treating each as a snowflake that requires reinventing the wheel. Cookbook medicine is bad. Making it up every time is also bad. The work is to find the balance.
Jeff's analogy for the balance came from a talk he had heard about Navy SEAL teams. The team drills a mission hundreds of times in advance. As soon as they're on the ground, anything can happen, and a lot of what was planned no longer applies. But the planning and training are what allow the team to handle the unique situations effectively. The same logic shows up in basketball: a team runs plays, but when the defense doesn't cooperate, the players have to find a way to score anyway. The training gives them the foundation to improvise.
Mark added the version from trauma medicine. The strongest trauma teams standardize roles around the patient, who stands where, who does what. People sometimes assume that standardization removes creativity. The opposite is true here. Reducing the self-imposed chaos of "who is in charge of this part" lets the team focus on the patient, where the real judgment is needed. Structure absorbs the noise so attention can go where it matters. Jeff returned to golf: his stepson has a pre-shot routine that calms him down before each shot. It is not a script; it is a baseline that protects his focus when nerves want to take over.
A reader asked how Jeff teaches new KaiNexus employees about Kaizen, and what kind of culture they're trying to build. His first answer was about prerequisites. Before you can teach people Kaizen, you have to believe in it yourself, and the leadership and the rest of the organization have to believe in the long-term benefit. Once that's true, much of the teaching happens by osmosis, because new people read the unwritten rules of how the place works.
The explicit part is layered on top. New employees read Masaaki Imai's "Kaizen," the book that effectively prompted KaiNexus to exist. They read the KaiNexus blog. Articles and podcasts get shared internally. Kaizen comes up in the weekly meetings as a part of normal conversation, not as a topic that gets scheduled separately. Some of the teaching is intentional. Some of it is the natural consequence of the people around you behaving as if continuous improvement is what you do.
Mark added the resources he points people to: the short instructional videos he and Greg recorded (available on the KaiNexus YouTube channel and under the Learn section at kainexus.com), Gemba Academy's library, and, for people who want to read about Lean from the source, the Toyota Production System pages on Toyota's corporate site. He flagged a small but important caution about secondary sources. There is plenty of material online that says things like "Lean is for speed, Six Sigma is for quality," which is not how Toyota itself describes TPS. Toyota's framing has flow and quality as the two pillars. Sometimes the best way to clear up a misconception is to go back to the primary source.
A reader asked what the most successful customers do differently from the rest. Jeff named two things and called them the real differentiators.
The first is leadership engagement, all the way to the top of the organization. The most successful customers have leaders who care about the program's success, who can remove roadblocks, and who are part of the conversation. Most of what divides successful and struggling customers traces back to this.
The second is a regular open dialogue with the KaiNexus team. The customers who get the most value reach out on their own, every couple of weeks or once a month, with what's working and what could improve. KaiNexus does not have to chase them. The relationship is alive.
Mark made a useful distinction inside the leadership engagement point. There is a difference between sponsorship and involvement. Sponsorship is a leader who says continuous improvement matters and approves the budget. Involvement is a leader who is improving their own work and demonstrating to the layer below them what that looks like. That second pattern is what cascades. Telling executives to "have everyone do X improvements per year" doesn't. There is a saying Jeff picked up in graduate school: organizations take on the behavior of their highest leader over time. If the highest leader is doing continuous improvement, the organization eventually follows.
Jeff added a third pattern. Successful customers do not focus only on big projects. They believe in the power of incrementalism. They celebrate a small improvement because it is the first of a second and a third and a fourth. Big projects are familiar to most organizations. Getting a thousand employees doing small improvements is unfamiliar and more powerful.
The flip side of the same question is what mistakes Jeff sees when organizations come to KaiNexus interested in Kaizen. Mark named the most common one: treating improvement only as projects, or treating Kaizen only as Kaizen events. He pointed to the Allen Robinson 80/20 framing: roughly eighty percent of improvement potential lives at the base of the pyramid, in the small daily improvements driven by frontline staff. Events and big projects have their place, but if those are all an organization does, it leaves most of the value on the table.
Jeff added two practical mistakes he sees when teams try to do improvement. The first is a pattern of pulling two people from this team, three from that team, and four from another, into a single improvement effort. The participation gets spread too thin to build a culture, and the synergy of a whole team learning together is lost. He recommended starting smaller and doing a whole team rather than slicing across many.
The second is the impulse to put everyone through advanced training, the green-belt-or-bust approach. His view is that highly trained people are useful as support, but they are not realistic for the whole workforce. The better path is to teach people to identify waste, give them basic problem-solving capability, and bring in the deeper expertise when something genuinely needs it. People who can spot waste and solve their own small problems generate the momentum the program needs. Forcing everyone through extensive certification before they have done any improvement reverses the order in which the practice actually develops.
Ask Us Anything is a recurring series of short sessions answering questions from KaiNexus webinar attendees. It is hosted by Mark Graban, VP of Improvement and Innovation Services at KaiNexus, with Greg Jacobson, the company's CEO and co-founder, and occasional guest hosts from the KaiNexus team.
See every episode in the series on the Ask Us Anything main page. Earlier episodes are also available on the KaiNexus YouTube channel and in the KaiNexus podcast archive.
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