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My guest for Episode #326 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Dr. William Harvey, a manufacturing executive and university professor whose career is defined by developing people, strengthening systems, and driving organizational excellence. A proud U.S. Marine, William carries forward a deep tradition of service and leadership. He also serves as the chair for the 2026 AME International Conference in Milwaukee, hosted by the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME).
William shares a powerful early-career story about a mistake that taught him lasting lessons about trust, humility, and psychological safety. When he accidentally derailed a customer order by taking home the wrong document, he feared the worst. Instead, his manager’s calm and compassionate response—and a customer’s extraordinary effort to make things right—changed how William thought about leadership forever.
Over time, William applied those lessons to how he leads teams and builds culture. He believes that leaders go first—by admitting mistakes, showing vulnerability, and creating space for others to experiment, fail, and learn. Through daily coaching cycles and methods like Toyota Kata, he helps people develop confidence in problem solving and take ownership of improvement. His goal: to build a workplace culture rooted in trust, respect, and continuous learning, where every person feels safe enough to speak up and strong enough to lead.
Key Lessons & Themes:
- Why trusting your team is critical to avoiding unnecessary errors
- How supportive leadership responses turn mistakes into growth moments
- The connection between psychological safety, continuous improvement, and Toyota Kata
- How to “go first” as a leader—admitting your own mistakes to build trust
- The link between physical safety and psychological safety in world-class organizations
- What leaders can learn from Paul O’Neill and his “zero incidents” mindset at Alcoa
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- Full transcript
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Automated Transcript (May Contain Mistakes)
Mark Graban: Hi, welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I'm your host, Mark Graban. Our guest today is William Harvey. He is a manufacturing executive. He is also a university professor whose career is defined by developing people, strengthening systems, and driving organizational excellence. He's a US Marine celebrating recently the Corps' 250th birthday here in 2025, and he carries forward a tradition of service and leadership. William is also going to be serving as the chair for the AME Annual International Conference. The Association for Manufacturing Excellence is holding it in Milwaukee in 2026. That is an organization I've also been involved in. William is a friend of mine here from the Cincinnati area. So welcome to the podcast. How are you?
William Harvey: I am doing well, Mark, thank you for having me today. It's perhaps one of the most freeing things to share your mistakes publicly, to get them out and say, “Look at all the lessons I've learned since then.” So happy to join you today.
Mark Graban: Well, thank you. You've got this audience for doing that, and we're going to have a chance to talk about building a workplace culture, about learning from mistakes, and continuous improvement. I'm sure we'll hear more from you about mistakes and things that you do that work in terms of leading an organization and driving continuous improvement. So, as we always do here, and I know you're prepped for this, what's your favorite mistake?
William Harvey: I'll take you back to an early job out of the Marine Corps. I was working as a shipping supervisor for a third-party logistics company, and like any organization, you're trying to solve business problems. One of the specific business problems we had was related to damaged product being received at the customer site. These products would go through the mail to somebody's doorstep and arrive broken. You feel discouragement when you open a package and it's broken. So, a lot of our team was working on that problem.
During this first peak season, which is this time between November 1st and December 23rd, our volume has a massive increase—a 10 to 15x increase depending upon the day. So, it's quite a bit more work. And I was trying to protect the customer. In this instance, I said, “I'll put this package that needs to get some extra attention, because it was very fragile, away.” And I did something really silly. I took the pick slip, which is the part that would tell you what the package is and send it to the customer, home with me that evening. I thought, “I'll work on it tomorrow.” We were working 12-hour shifts. We're working extra hours before and after that as a supervisor, and the very next morning I come in only to find the package is missing. I scrambled really quick, thinking I could fix this, only to realize in this very moment that all of the products that I could put together were in that package, and there was no way within that warehouse to get our product to the customer.
That really opened up a wonderful conversation. At this point, I thought I was fired. I went to my manager and said, “Steve, I made a mistake.” Steve was kind. He didn't overreact to the situation. So that's that first bit that was really incredible for me. And then the second part that I would share with you is we had an onsite customer, and in this case, the onsite customer contact, more specifically, he shared with me, “Let's see what we can do.” And in this story, Jim went through these amazing hoops to try to honor what the customer was getting at.
So, I went from this point where I feel like I've made this major error and this is my last day at the company, to realizing how kind my manager was and this customer intimacy thing framed it in a much different way. This guy was willing to drive from Northern Kentucky to Minnesota on the 22nd or 23rd of December. He said, “Let's check all of the warehouses between here and there,” or more specifically, the stores for this brand all the way to Milwaukee and up through Minnesota. And I thought, “This is incredible. This guy's going to drive on a holiday.” That was really just a key takeaway for me for so many reasons. And as I think about the lessons learned from my manager's treatment of me all the way through to what it really means to be customer-intimate, it just framed the world a little bit differently after that day.
Mark Graban: Wow. I'm glad it didn't lead to you being fired. There’s absolutely a lot to unpack from the story there. I think it's important to be careful, and I say this to remind myself this as much as anything, about labeling a mistake as silly. What was the thought process at the time? You were trying to do something helpful. It seemed like a good thing to do. Can you talk through that thought process of taking that pick slip home? That was not part of the normal process, I'm guessing.
William Harvey: No, the normal process is it should have been left for the next group to take care of. And this really just showed my lack of trust in the process at the time. I thought, “Well, certainly I've been working with the people that have been talking about this problem, so I know how best to solve it. I'll work tomorrow with my team. I know exactly what we need to do to get this to the customer.” The intent was positive. I thought we could take care of it tomorrow. I said, “Nobody will go down here and get this thing.” So, in certain ways, I hid it away thinking nobody would dig this deep tonight to find what I've basically put away for myself for tomorrow. And in that night, the team that followed me cleared out the warehouse. There was not a package left the next morning. And that's when I was like, “Oh no, I've made this mistake.”
Mark Graban: I hear you saying it was a mistake to not trust the team. That was one of the takeaways.
William Harvey: Absolutely. Yes. And you'll see that I think in a lot of ways, that's why it became a favorite mistake. It was: what was missing in me with the team that I was partnered with? Why didn't I trust that second shift team? It really just highlighted the process gaps for me about what's going on between A and B. And as much as I could deflect, that story is really just a reflection of me. I said, “You know, I gotta figure out a different approach to this because this isn't the best answer.” The trust or the lack of trust in people really just led to that mistake being so valuable for me.
Mark Graban: What do you think happened to the package that was missing a pick slip? Did somebody else maybe try to do the right thing or deviate from the process? Did you ever confirm that?
William Harvey: What we believe happened was that when somebody found it without the pick slip, the individual parts were put back in the areas to be picked for a future order. In this case, one big order became maybe seven or eight small orders. At that point, that's where the inventory was likely to go, and the forensic analysis of the data would share that we added it to inventory, then we shipped it. So that's most likely what happened.
Mark Graban: Okay, and so then that's why that customer in particular became the search to try to find what they needed. You were worried that you would get fired or punished. Had that been demonstrated otherwise within the organization, or was it just a fear that even if you hadn't seen others get fired for a mistake, you thought it could happen to you? Did you think it was an outlier that your boss was kind, or did you learn that was part of a pattern?
William Harvey: I think this is where you carry some of the prior lessons with you. In the Marine Corps, I was regarded as a high performer. I didn't make a lot of mistakes, and if I did, I was able to pick up on them pretty quickly. So I think going to that next organization, what happened in the Marine Corps was probably weighing on me more than what was actually happening at the organization I was at at the time. It wasn't that my manager was unkind, it was just in my head, “Oh my God, I made this mistake.” And I'm carrying the weight of that lack of trust. I'm carrying the weight of deviating from the process in my head. At the grand scheme, it's probably not that big of a deal to one customer one time, but in my head, it was the most momentous failure ever that turned into that person, Jim, in this story saying, “Let's do everything we can.” I said, “Okay, so is this momentous? It's just the way I'm framing it.” At the time, I was really harsh on myself. And it probably wasn't until 20 years later that I realized that maybe I needed some grace for myself. Not to be so harsh on myself because when you look at it, you say, “This is absolutely a mistake. However, we can make this right. Unfortunately, we're just going to be late getting this order out to the customer.”
Mark Graban: I'll give you credit for, I don't know if honor is the right word, but there was a sense of honor to admit the mistake, even though you were afraid of repercussions. It might've been possible for it to have just been a mystery without you admitting your role in it. I imagine your boss appreciated, if not admired, that you did the right thing to speak up even if it put yourself at risk, right?
William Harvey: Yeah, I hope so. And I think, not because I say honor is the best word here, but because honor is one of the core values of the Marine Corps. So in a positive sense, that's really coming out, like, “I need to go say something because I did this. This wasn't somebody else, and there is a chance still to make it right.” I just didn't know how to solve the problem myself. So thanks to Steve, thanks to Jim, we ultimately ended up being late with what we were trying to achieve. But at the same time, the way they each treated me in that moment wasn't to blame. It was really just to say, “Let's figure out what we can do to solve it.” In that world, it was really nice because I was young at this time and didn't really have a lot of understanding of how the world works. And then it becomes one of those things that say, “Well, what's going to happen? This has never happened.” I've never really been in corporate America at this time, so I didn't really have a good understanding of what was going on.
Mark Graban: Maybe this is a good segue to the lessons that you took away from this. Being in leadership roles, your story reminds me of stories from two previous guests who made mistakes at Toyota: Isao Yoshino, who made a mistake in Japan in the 1960s, and David Meyer, a little closer to home in Georgetown, Kentucky, in the 1980s. They both had a similar story. They were both new to the company, they feared they would get punished, and they learned a valuable lesson about how the company and people there respond to situations like that. It taught them that lesson about being a leader. I'd be curious to hear some of your reflections on that opportunity to model that same behavior later. Do you remember one of the first times an employee admitted a mistake to you when the tables were turned?
William Harvey: Yeah, I think that was really where the story becomes super positive. For me, there was that sense of vulnerability, right? I'm walking into my manager's office saying, “I screwed up.” What I learned in that moment is that's where trust is built. For me, it was a lesson learned. Maybe simultaneous to reading your work, it came together in a different way, but really saying leaders admit mistakes first.
One of the things that's been really important for me in my work practice is a concept called Toyota Kata, which in so many ways comes out of the Toyota organization. That really helps mentors and mentees get together and view the experimentation process, not as a failure, but as just a lesson along the way to learning about the problem that we're trying to solve together. To me, that was really foundational because it shifted the way I viewed what was a failure and just saying, “Well, I can't know everything. It's okay.” But I can make an educated hypothesis. I can go experiment.
Where that turned for me was when people would come into the organization, and I'm fast-forwarding now about 20 years in this story, the folks that come in are mostly not experiencing the David Meyer or Isao Yoshino stories, but are coming from some really fear-based workplaces. And here's me saying, “It's okay to be wrong. Let's write down what we think is going to happen, and let's come back to this and have a coaching cycle.” Not because I was trying to get the person to be right, but because the reality was none of us knew.
One that really stands out for me is it's day one for a person in this new role, so you can't really blame him. But I can just imagine him going through and just saying, “We made this major mistake as an organization.” A really highly regarded person in this story comes to me and says, “We've got this major equipment breakdown.” And by major, this piece of equipment isn't going to run for the next month. There's no doubt that this is major to our customer. This is major to our business because it was really disruptive in lots of ways. But in that moment, there was that chance to show up in one of two ways. Do I show up like Steve from that story 20 years ago? Or do I show up in some of the horror stories that many people can probably reflect on? It was really modeling what Steve did for me, what some of those leaders, what David and Isao Yoshino shared. It was really just saying, “Show up in a different way when this is presented to me.” So I think it's not so much about the mistake, but what is the leader's response in that moment? And if it's one of judgment, then it's not helpful from my perspective.
If I really want to achieve what is my goal in life, it's this idea of psychological safety where people are coming all the way up, challenging the ideas and the ways that we work, challenging the ideas that maybe this isn't the most safe physically or psychologically. And that really has been the goal that I've been aiming for, rather than trying to deal with individual issues. But I could count many stories where people would say, “Hey, I made a mistake.” And it's really just been trying to reflect back on how Steve treated me that day. I have a lot of admiration for Steve, but I'm also hopefully inspiring generations in the future that create a more safe workspace and a more psychologically safe workspace at the same time.
Mark Graban: I think it's a real challenge when somebody is new to an organization; they bring their past experiences with them. We've run across this at KaiNexus, a software company where we have a reasonably high degree of psychological safety. People admit mistakes. It's been pretty well demonstrated people don't get punished for them. Like you're saying, William, we focus on learning and sharing and future prevention. Our CEO co-founder, Greg Jacobson, who's been on this podcast, readily admits mistakes, and that sets a good tone. But when we hire somebody from the outside, they've maybe left the previous company for many reasons, and one reason might be that there was a track record of not being treated as well. We've learned that even as much as we try to emphasize this is how we generally behave here, it's not like you can flip a switch and realize, “Oh, I'm safe now.” People learn through their own experiences of what they're observing or how they're being treated. That resonates with me. You can't just say you should feel safe. So to that point, other than admitting your mistakes yourself and encouraging others to speak up, what are some of the things you would do if somebody was new to your organization to at least help them feel safe enough to take a chance about speaking up on something?
William Harvey: There's a bunch of different ways, but I'd say the thing that comes to me is go first as the leader. It used to be like, “Hey, just share your stories and try to take a risk.” But people don't have that comfort for any number of reasons. Even if they came from a really good space, I believe people entering a second workplace are trying to figure out how to get along in this organization. Because in that first 90 days, 180 days, people want to make a good impression, and for good reason. So part of it for me is just being along with them for the journey. I don't think I could ever find a more valuable way than to just go to the workplace with people that we're engaged with, really just explore their thinking. And in that exploration of thinking, it's like, “You know, I see the same problem as you. Let's figure out what we could do together.”
And through that Toyota Kata coaching method, it's really designed to solicit that person's creativity, put their ideas out there, and in many ways, acting as the coach in those moments. I'm signing off, saying, “I'm accepting this risk for this person.” As I think about accepting that risk, that's probably the one that sticks out to me the most because I sense a lot of people worry about the what-ifs that go wrong. My life experience tells me that the time I've wasted my energy on thinking about “what if” doesn't get you to taking action. So in that experimenting phase, it's really just saying, “Let's get together, let's make sure it makes sense together, and then let's go try it and come back as soon as we can to learn what happened.”
I think it's through those repetitive cycles it helps. And thirdly, coming into the story where you have people that are talking about this problem, it's showing public support for that person, saying, “You know, I was there. I made that decision. I was the one that said this was a great experiment.” Even if that person came up with it and I didn't know, it's still the burden of the leader in my mind to say, “No, that was me. I let it happen. Not only that, I encouraged it in these coaching sessions.” So I think by accepting some of that stress in the beginning is really where you can get people to engage and perhaps feel more safe. I would just say that's a daily exercise. That's not something I can just do one coaching cycle on day 74; it's 75, 79, all the way through the nth degree and making sure people feel that way.
Mark Graban: I know one other viewpoint we share in common is the importance of focusing on physical safety in the workplace. I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about that mindset and that priority, and connections or even examples around psychological safety leading to improved physical safety.
William Harvey: I'll put it in the “lead with physical safety to get to psychological safety” category. An inspiration that came to me was learning about this story of a gentleman named Paul O'Neill. He was the CEO of an aluminum company.
Mark Graban: Oh, just as a minor mistake, sorry. Aluminum company.
William Harvey: Aluminum. Okay. Thank you for that correction. Yeah. Alcoa, not a steel company. Thank you. And in that story, the way that it's presented to me is he goes to the board and says, “This is my plan.” And at the very beginning, it was talking about safety. Most people that have ever been at a board meeting would say that's maybe not what they hear in a conversation, but this is where Paul led. In this story, I thought it was really impactful what he was doing. He wanted certain phone calls at certain hours, or within a certain number of hours, about major incidents happening. That changed the way in which his world perceived the work in worker safety.
What ended up being true in the story is not only did they get really incredible results from a safety perspective, they started getting more ideas. They started making more money. They started creating a different type of culture on the psychological side. I've been fortunate at two companies, supported by two really amazing different CEOs, one is Ian, one is Rick. At both places, I realized one of the metrics that was really broken was talking about how many people got hurt yesterday. I thought, “This just makes zero sense to me. What is a better answer?” In both my current company and a prior company, it became one of those conversations that we called proactive safety.
Within this, it's not monumental, but it's certainly a shift in the work. How do you go and educate the workforce about what does cause issues? And elevate their risk acceptance and understanding, or lower their risk acceptance but elevate the risk understanding. It became one of those things where year after year, we're getting better and better at it. In my current company, we have this specific challenge, not unique to companies, but we have people that work in factories, people that travel, people that work at home, and people that work in offices. Well, then it became, “How do you elevate risk awareness?” Partnering with a couple of my coworkers here, coming up with ideas to get that out in front of people, really just elevate everybody's game. Just the elevation isn't important. It's what is management's response immediately after that event.
We lead every meeting from our daily direction setting to say, “Do we have any immediate concern reports that need to be addressed today?” The day after, “Do we have any current problems?” And it gets into the situation of saying, “Okay, management is listening, they're fixing problems.” For me, the safety aspect of it leads to people challenging the status quo, offering new ideas, and leading to more and more improvements. To me, it's just a self-reinforcing cycle that just gives and gives and gives. I haven't seen a bad side of this story yet, other than maybe an overwhelmed maintenance team trying to respond to all the inquiries that come in when you first start this. But I think the shift is monumental and perhaps just like Paul saw, I've been able to see at this company and a previous company.
Mark Graban: The Paul O'Neill story is powerful. It's documented in places including Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit. There are a lot of videos of Paul O'Neill. He passed away a couple of years ago. I had the good fortune of meeting him a couple of times and hearing him speak and working with people that worked with him closely at Alcoa and after he retired from Alcoa and was doing a lot of advocacy work in healthcare around these issues. But as he told it, when Paul O'Neill was talking to his board and to the Wall Street analysts, he was pretty blunt. He said the Wall Street analysts thought he was bonkers for talking about safety before he was talking about growth and technologies and international markets and all the strategic things they expect a CEO to talk about.
But the one thing he was really poking at was a mistake that people make of assuming safety and efficiency are inherently opposed, or that there are tradeoffs. He demonstrated that's not true. He demonstrated that dramatic safety improvement at least correlated with huge increases in the stock price. It's not like he was killing the company by focusing on safety. It all went hand in hand. The other thing I'd invite you to comment on was, for all of your focus on problem solving and continuous improvement, Paul O'Neill made the argument that to develop the habits that we need to become world-class when it comes to physical safety, those are going to be the same skills that allow us to solve all of the other problems in the business, to allow us to become world-class, or as he dubbed it, “habitual excellence.” I'm curious about your thoughts on those connections of maybe saying this is the right or honorable thing to do, but there can also be huge business benefits.
William Harvey: I think it starts with a very fundamental idea that I value your life. I value your health. I value your safety. In organizations where you don't feel that way about your leaders, I don't think you can show up and do your best work because I genuinely want my manager to care about me as a human being. So I think that's where it starts. Structurally, in the places I've seen this work, you get really good at defining what you're trying to aim for. And I'll use this phrase, “run to target.” So what does it mean to be safe? You get people speaking in common language about what “safe” looks like with these actions. You get people to stop and think through problems. Is there a different way? I think those are universal in problem-solving. They'll come by different names, but ultimately, they really result in the same thing.
What I've seen is it translates directly to quality improvement. And I hold this basic idea that there's no less expensive way than to do it right the first time. So it's inherent that these two come together so well, because when I think about this improvement in quality that's based on the improvement in safety, you are naturally more consistent and deliver on time. Because of that, you're able to position your sales team, your finance team's in a much better position from a cost competitiveness perspective. Because we've reduced so many of those challenges with safety at the beginning, which is where we started, the thinking just permeates. So for me, my experiences mirror Paul's. You end up in this position saying it flows through all, and the same thinking that solves the safety problem, to me, is the same one that solves the cost competitiveness problem. We call it different words, different team members will be engaged, but there's an underlying pattern that seems to be consistent throughout.
Mark Graban: Unfortunately, early in my career, I worked in a couple of manufacturing settings where there probably were tradeoffs. If somebody was trying to be more efficient in a way that was maybe more a matter of cutting corners, that would lead to increased safety risk or injuries. I remember one time, it was not a factory I was an employee of, but walking through a factory that had relatively dangerous equipment, metal cutting machinery, and people had removed safety guarding from the equipment and circumvented different safety measures. Part of me, it's going to sound judgmental, I'll say it anyway, how do leaders let that happen? Obviously, the employees care about their own safety, but when they're pressured to hit productivity numbers above all else, and there's fear and blame and punishment, people will sadly do things that put themselves in jeopardy.
I think what we've experienced when it comes to continuous improvement methodologies is that when we can actually improve productivity and quality by making work easier and safer and improving the processes instead of just pressuring people, now we've eliminated those tradeoffs between, let's say, safety and efficiency. We challenge ourselves to find the better efficiency. What are your thoughts or experiences around trying to convince people those tradeoffs aren't inherent if we go about it a different way?
William Harvey: I don't know that I've ever had to deal with the conversation of should we do A or B. It just goes back to being in positions as a senior leader of these manufacturing sites where I can really set that expectation. A lot of it comes through that daily execution like you're talking about. But the one thing that I would say is at least highlighted for me is I start with a value that people are good. I've been teaching now for nine years, and I see this coming up through every student group that I get a chance to teach. What I see in the workplace is no different. When people feel safe and they are safe, they really focus on the quality of the work. I don't have to say anything other than, “This is what we're aiming for as a team.” What I've found is people will spend inordinate amounts of time trying to make the work. I think that just goes to some very root thing that we all want to have pride in our work and do well. So when I hear a leader espousing “pride in your work,” I'd say, “Well, what is missing? Do we even need to say that?” Because I think that's the natural state of humans. So then it becomes this conversation of saying, “Okay, well how do you remove the barriers physically and mentally that enable people to get there?” And if leadership focuses on that, I think you can create an environment at which people could be really successful.
Mark Graban: One other thing I wanted to pick your brain on. Paul O'Neill really emphasized the importance of, because we care about people and we don't want anybody getting hurt, he would say it's a mistake to have non-zero goals for the number of incidents or accidents or injuries or deaths. I slipped up, I used the correct word from his standpoint the first time. He said, “Don't call them accidents because that makes it sound like they were bound to happen.” He would say, “Call them incidents.” So I got that word correct the first time. But setting goals of zero for incidents, injuries, deaths… I try to pick up on that. I worked for a company where, you know, you mentioned non-factory settings. When I worked for Johnson & Johnson—I'll say the name because I've blogged about this—the most dangerous job for anybody working there was anybody driving a car on behalf of Johnson & Johnson. Not because they had dangerous drivers, it's just the factories had gotten very safe, and you can't control what other people do on the roads.
To their credit, they were proactive. They put us through driver training when we had a company vehicle. They did, I think in a good way, put the fear into us of like, “If you're in a collision, we are going to check your cell phone records.” This was before smartphones even. “But if you were on a call, you will be fired.” I didn't think that was the worst fear; that was like a principle to not drive in a distracted way kind of policy. But the things I appreciated when we had discussions sometimes when I was on the safe driving committee were like, why are we setting a goal of seven point something accidents per month? We really want zero, and we're aiming for zero. As long as we're not punishing people—I think that would be a bad fear of, “Well, if you reported an accident, now you're going to be fired.” Maybe you couldn't avoid reporting it because they would know the vehicle was damaged at some point. But if you know what I'm getting at in terms of his argument that zero is the only right goal, and as long as we're helping people work toward that, it's okay to have that goal. What are your thoughts on zero versus other goals?
William Harvey: Not because I just try to follow Paul's specific mission, but I'm definitely a zero person. The simple answer is, “Okay, then tell me who gets to get hurt this year? Who is going to be hurt this week?” One out of eight? That seems insane, or one out of 800 seems insane, whatever number you want to come up with. Because at some point, I am allowing and accepting that an unsafe condition could be present. One of the prevailing myths is that all accidents are preventable. In these conversations, people say maybe they're not. But if I say in certain ways that they are preventable, that it's just my mindset and approach, I say, “Well, how do I build a system?” Because some incidents will occur. There are things like lightning strikes, there are going to be certain things that are certainly outside of my experience. But at the same time, my mindset shifted to say, “Okay, if you say they're all preventable,” what I've seen is not that it's disagreeable to say something that you should be able to prevent them. It's that the response is people start to react a certain way, and they're less focused. It's this weird thing that I've seen in my 20-year manufacturing career where people say that and the actions don't line up.
One of the pieces I would share that may be controversial in the best of ways: I was interviewing years ago, and the person interviewing me said, “Can you rank safety, quality, delivery, cost, morale, and inventory in the order that is important to you?” I thought about it for a moment, and I shared with them, I would put quality followed by safety and whatever the trailing number was. He said, “That's really interesting. Nobody ever says quality first. Why did you say that we should lead with safety?” I said, “It's not that I say we shouldn't lead with safety. I said I've never seen a safety incident where poor quality wasn't at the root of something.” There was insufficient engineering. There was a bad assumption that went into design. There was something that we missed. I don't mean this to say that safety shouldn't be prioritized in our work and our thinking, but I've not found a safety incident that occurred just on its own. So there's this weird dichotomy where I go, “Well, you say all accidents are preventable, but are they, and are you doing anything about it?” It's a really weird phenomenon for me in my mind as I grapple with this “both-and” type of thinking. Can you have both of these, or are they all preventable? But I like the way of talking about them as incidents because it does reframe it. You go, “Well, what led up to that from a factual perspective?” more so than “Could William have done something different?” Like maybe, but this did happen, so let's focus on what did happen and focus on the prevention of it.
Mark Graban: I hear SQDC: safety, quality, delivery, cost. The one idea is that safety is, as Paul O'Neill would have said, a precondition as opposed to a priority. Safety, quality, delivery… you could almost think of those as a grouping. Better safety, better quality, better delivery leads to lower cost. So I think putting the C last is maybe the most important part of that dynamic because we all know companies that are primarily cost-focused. Paul O'Neill said, as CEO, “We will not let budget be an excuse for doing what we need to improve safety,” because it's probably just economically smart. It's cheaper to prevent the injury than it is to deal with the aftermath of an injury or, worse, a death. But he didn't want to hear people saying, “Oh, well, we've run out of budget for the year.” That wasn't giving people a blank check, but he was trying to eliminate some of the excuses that people might throw out when they were used to being pressured about budget first and foremost.
William Harvey: It is. And I think if you continue to expand that thinking, or at least my thinking on which order they come in, I agree with you. There's some foundational element of how you approach the work. So if you start with, “I value people,” rather than, “I prioritize people,” that changes my thinking. And then when I think about something that's been instrumental in my reframing of the world for all of my career, it's really understanding how do you define quality. There are many definitions, but the one that I really appreciate is “on target with minimum variance.” In that definition, that really puts safety in a different light for me. So I'm saying, “Okay, what does it mean to be safe at work today? What do we need to do?” Because we know through engineering, we know through the processes we've developed together, to get to the outcome that we're after, which is people going home.
I'll give a shout-out to a previous EHS manager that I worked with. He'd come to the same conclusion I did, which is we shouldn't send our people home necessarily like they came in. Our approach was, how do you send them home better informed, better equipped? The number of stories in my current organization where you've been able to take something where somebody's sharing a story very openly about a mistake that they've made, and you go, “You know what? I need to go change something about the way I'm doing something in my house.” It's just been incredible to translate that idea of “on target with minimum variance” to “we now have safety being improved, we now have delivery being improved,” and all the other systems and processes that happen in any organization.
Mark Graban: I appreciate your quality connection about systems, system design, and setting people up for success. I think that same idea applies to quality and to all of those factors, including safety. Unfortunately, there are some mindsets where people blame, so, “If we have defects, it's because the workers don't care.” “If we have people getting injured, it's because they're careless,” or a different way of saying they don't care. I think of situations where I've seen in hospitals a pharmacy robot, a big swinging arm robot inside of a cage enclosure. There were multiple warning signs saying basically, “Do not start the robot when people are inside the cage.” And I kind of flipped out. I'm like, “Why is that even possible?” Lockout/tagout in manufacturing, absolutely. Address that. You can control whether you have a lockout/tagout process. Gosh, that should be, if that's not required by law, there would be penalties for not doing that. But there are things you can control, like making PPE available and eliminating the excuse of why people aren't wearing PPE. There are a lot of things that we do have control over, if not as individuals, then there are system issues. Like if we're constantly running out of safety glasses, well, whose fault is it that the employees aren't wearing safety glasses? That's a systemic problem that somebody in management has to solve.
William Harvey: It is. I think you highlighted a really important part in your story there, Mark, where if you can go into the robot cage while it's operating, there's an engineering control that's lost that needs to be addressed well before you give somebody PPE. Because it'd be silly to say, “Well, just wrap some pillows around your arm, walk in, and a piece hits you.” I don't want PPE; I don't want you in a cage. The number of times that people will get to the PPE argument or “can you just tell people not to” with a sign misses the point that you still have the hazard present, and then you've got to go figure out why that's there and how do you protect people.
There's a really brief story I would just share with you. This goes back 15 years ago, working at a factory, and this company did printing work. One of the ways in which it would scrape the excess ink off of the printing cylinder was this giant razor blade. These giant razor blades would be stored on a specific cart that was in the back of the press area. It was only held up by two pins, and one of those two pins broke, and we ended up having a very serious injury that evening. Fortunately, that group was able to respond, but what it really highlighted for me, even that story, was we have something that didn't even appear dangerous to us that was out there lurking. After that, there became a lot more emphasis throughout the organization. So even if I said I made a mistake, I think the key takeaway in this is how do I share that broadly with people so you don't have that same situation repeating elsewhere?
I've been fortunate to partner with some engineers coming through a local university, not the one I work at, but even talking through that, just saying, “Okay, guys, look, you've got to look at all of these things.” The number of deaths that write these stories and share the statistics is just sad. To me, it's really just saying, “Okay, can every organization, when they learn this lesson, share this with people?” That to me is the second part of that. It's okay to make the mistake because we don't want to have deaths, but at the same time, once it happens, you need to do your best to get it out there. You've got stories like Volvo giving away their safety knowledge. You've got people out there saying, “Okay, this could be patentable, but we're going to give it away because we need to, because it's going to make the world a better place.” When you think about these mistakes, mine might be simple and small in the sense of a pick slip where we started, but as I think about the future generations that come, my hope is through these conversations, the leaders I've been able to hang out with are inspiring us and future generations because work is getting more safe, not just in the US but throughout the world. I think that is a testament to some of the people like Paul O'Neill who said, “Look, I'm going to go about this a different way and make the world the way that he wanted to see it come together.”
Mark Graban: That's a great point. So William, thank you for sharing your story and for having a really nice conversation about all of that. Before we wrap up, I do want to ask you to share a little bit about, almost a year away here, the AME International Conference 2026 up in Milwaukee. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization, the conference, and who typically attends?
William Harvey: The organization's just over four decades old. It's titled The Association for Manufacturing Excellence, which made complete sense in the early eighties. What we've seen over the last 40 years has been that this work that came out of manufacturing is in all organizations, and it's perhaps better titled a continuous improvement-focused conference more than just manufacturing excellence. So that's the first part I would share. People coming from healthcare, people coming from government, people coming from office-type work, and of course, people coming from manufacturing, service industries, et cetera.
What we see is throughout this week, people are engaged in different types of learning. The first day, there are roughly 15 to 20 different workshops that people can attend. Then on Tuesday through Thursday, the really cool part that I've experienced personally is it's a very practitioner-based approach to sharing what organizations are doing. So you don't get to hear a condensed or summarized version. You get to go out on tours with people to see their facilities. You, of course, get to hear from the presenters that are sharing their stories and their journey. One of the cool things that it seems like in every session I'm in, people are talking about their mistakes, what they learned, and how you can advance.
One of the common misconceptions I hear is, “I need to be advanced to be there.” The reality is some of these presenters are very early in their journey, and some are very mature. So you're going to find lessons in both of those stories. When you get into what I think is really at the heart of this work, it's the people. Next year's conference has a theme called “People First, Progress Together.” The tagline is “A Yes, And… Approach to Enterprise Excellence.” I think this really involves a lot of these discussions around how do you bring people together to solve really important problems and do work that matters?
Within the AME conference, we're led by an all-volunteer group for the conference committee that puts this event on, supported by this core group of six that always do AME events, not just that one, but many around the globe. It creates a sense of community, lets people find new ways, and being practitioner-based, it's just really insightful “take back and try at your workplace the very next day” type of activities.
Mark Graban: I encourage people to look for a link in the show notes. Ame.org is the general website, and you can find information about the conference. It's a conference I've attended, not every single year, but I've gone to it a lot. There are a great number of wonderful people there. The networking and the conversations outside of the formally scheduled program really make that a great place to be. So, highly recommended.
Our guest again today, William Harvey. He's a manufacturing executive and university professor. I've learned not to make the mistake of saying anything other than William is a Marine. You don't say “was” or “former.” You are a Marine?
William Harvey: Very much so. And November 10th is the official day that 250 years is celebrated throughout the entire Marine Corps and for everybody that's come before them. It's a really big event in their history. So a lot of exciting things are going on throughout the fall of 2025 and some stuff that came earlier this year with Marine Weeks throughout the US.
Mark Graban: I made a mistake earlier when I alluded to it already happening. I'll admit my mistake: I was thinking of the Army's 250th birthday.
William Harvey: Yeah, they did come first, so I'll give them all the credit for that. The Marine Corps every year has something called the Marine Corps Ball, so think like a Cinderella ball, and it is just an amazing event. I'm so excited to go with my wife, Amy, in a couple of weeks. So really excited to see that again and experience the camaraderie that exists from all of those folks that have served before me, serve now, and will serve in the future.
Mark Graban: Well, thank you, William. Thanks to all other Marines who are listening and people who have served in other branches. Thank you again for being a guest and for having a great chat here today.
William Harvey: Absolutely. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, everyone.