Lean Coffee Episode 8

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 05-15-26

GM Wrote It Down in 1987. They Still Didn’t Get It.

In Episode 8, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh settle in with single-origin coffees and circle back to a topic that’s been bouncing around the lean world for forty years: NUMMI. But first, the customary check-in. Jamie reports back from a busy stretch close to home, including a Center for Supply Chain Research symposium at Lehigh on AI in supply chain (with Penske, NFI, Crayola, and Sharp Services in the room) and Lehigh’s annual entrepreneurial awards, where this year he was actually working as a judge for the student pitch competition instead of just mingling. Mark counters with two weeks back-to-back at the LEI Lean Summit in Houston and Shingo Connect in San Diego, both heavy on AI. Along the way, Mark stumbles into a regional FIRST robotics competition, where teenagers in costume cheer for ball-scooping robots and remind us that the kids are, in fact, going to be alright.

The AI conversation lands on a thread Jamie keeps pulling on: if you want AI to help, you can’t hand it a bad process and call it a day. (Mark shares the Socratic Lean coach he’s been building, with a 48-hour free trial.) From there it’s on to coffee, specifically, why a single varietal from a known farm or village is to the average grocery-store blend what a single-barrel bourbon is to a mass-market pour. Jamie’s drinking a Peru from Huabal / San Pablo (small-holder farms, around 2,000m elevation, roasted at home from Sweet Maria’s green beans). Mark’s drinking a Burundi Cankuzo Province bourbon-variety bean (yes, that’s the bean name, no relation to the whiskey) from Elliott Coffee in Dayton, KY, sourced through JNP Coffee. The two of them get into the power dynamics of the coffee supply chain, why fair trade labels only get you so far, and tease a future episode on fermented coffee.

A short Lean Whiskey detour: Sazerac (parent of Buffalo Trace) is reportedly circling Brown-Forman, the Jack Daniel’s and Woodford Reserve maker, while Brown-Forman is also being courted by Pernod Ricard. That’s the cue for a riff on the bullwhip effect, from the consumer who buys one fewer bottle, all the way back to Mark’s uncle’s lumber mill in Kentucky that just shut down because nobody is making barrels right now. Then they go cautionary tale, with the old Heineken-book story about Stroh’s, where moving from recipe A to B to C to (eventually) K eroded the brand one imperceptible step at a time. Useful warning about consolidation, bean-counter math, and the slow loss of variety. (Stroh’s, mercifully, is back, brewed at Brew Detroit in Corktown.)

The main course is a deep look at NUMMI through a document Mark unearthed in the Don Ephlin papers at Wayne State’s Reuther Library: “NUMMI Management Practices: Executive Summary,” printed January 1987, stamped “GM Confidential.” Mark walks through the report’s five major management strategies (mutual trust and respect, quality in the process, developing people through teamwork and learning, problem solving as central to management, and designing systems to prevent errors) and the line that holds the whole thing together: “The key to NUMMI’s success is not its tools or techniques, but the management philosophy that gives meaning to them.” Jamie weaves in why copy and paste rarely works, from GM trying to redistribute the original “NUMMI commandos” one at a time, to Toyota deliberately not hiring auto people for Georgetown, to the supply-chain reality that finally sealed the joint venture’s fate. They’re honest about what NUMMI didn’t solve too: product design, activist investors, the UAW’s missed opening to demand the same management behaviors at the Big Three. Bob Lutz’s Car Guys vs. Bean Counters makes a cameo, and Mark notes wryly that the Toyota Way 2001 document still isn’t freely on the internet. Some lessons you have to go find.

They wrap with cultural shares. Mark and his wife found Big Mistakes on Netflix, Dan Levy’s post Schitt’s Creek comedy where small mistakes compound into very big ones. Mark recommends it. Jamie, in honor of the Artemis II launch, makes the case for two best-of-the-genre space movies, Apollo 13 and Hidden Figures, with the slightly horrifying observation that a lot of people in their generation watched Artemis II go up bracing for an explosion, because that’s what their formative space memory taught them. Jamie’s newsletter takes the Apollo 13 idea further into strategic problem-solving in flight. Until next time, maybe next episode they’ll get into fermented coffee.

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