In this episode, Tiffany Grant and Rick Yvanovich discuss the concept of kaizen, which translates to "change for good. " Kaizen emphasizes continuous improvement in processes and personal growth.

Rick explains how this Japanese philosophy, popularized by Toyota, can significantly enhance business operations and personal development. Tune in to learn how incorporating Kaizen can lead to lifelong learning, adaptability, and resilience.

Check out the full show notes: https://moneytalkwitht.com/podcast-show-notes/kaizen-for-business/

Takeaways

• Kaizen, which means constant improvement, emphasizes the importance of lifelong learning for personal and professional growth.
• Businesses should focus on empowering employees to embrace continuous skills acquisition and personal development every day.
• Utilizing technology effectively helps streamline processes, making it essential for modern businesses to adapt and improve.
• An infinite mindset encourages ongoing self-improvement and a commitment to learning new skills throughout life.
• Reflecting on our actions and knowledge allows us to adapt and enhance our understanding over time.
• Maintaining an open mind is crucial; we must be willing to let go of old beliefs when new information arises.

Resources Mentioned (Affiliate Links)

• Rick Yvanovich's book, Business as Unusual
• Simon Sinek's book, The Infinite Game
• Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Connect with Rick Yvanovich

• Website: rickyvanovich.com
• Twitter: @RickYvanovich

Connect with Tiffany Grant

• Website: Money Talk with Tiff
• Twitter: @MoneyTalkWithT
• Instagram: @MoneyTalkWithT
• Facebook: Money Talk with Tiff

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Money Talk With Tiff. Join us every Thursday for new insights and expert advice on financial and business growth. For more episodes, visit moneytalkwitht.com. Remember, spend wise by spending less than you make.

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Copyright 2025 Tiffany Grant

You know what it is? That's right. It's time to talk money with your money nerd and financial coach. Now tighten those purse strings and open those ears.

It's the Money Talk with Tiff podcast.

Hey, everyone.

I'm so excited because I have Rick Evanovich on the line, and Rick is here to talk to us about Kaizen, which I have heard before, but I don't know all the details. So I'm like, come on, let's talk about Kaizen for our business owner. So, hey, Rick, how are you?

I'm good, Tiffany. Thanks for having me on your show.

Thank you so much for being here. So let's just dive right in. What is kaizen? If this was like, beginner 101.

Okay, so for beginner 101, Kaizen is a Japanese word. I'm probably making a mess of pronouncing it, but I call it kaizen. And the literal translation is change for good.

It was originally popularized by Toyota, you know, the Toyota way and the. The change for good. What does that really mean? It's. My interpretation is that it's all about constant improvement.

So it could be the constant, you know, as far as Toyota was concerned, or. Or in a company, it's constant improvement of, say, a process. And that improvement can be teeny tiny. It doesn't matter how small it is.

But if you make lots and lots and lots of those constant improvements, you get a big improvement. I reinterpret Kaizen as lifelong learning. It's the constant improvement of ourselves. So it's constant growth.

You know, it's that growth mindset or that infinite mindset. And. And to embrace that, it really means learn something new every single day. So I advocate for learning something new every single day.

Doesn't matter how small it is, but learn something new.

Very, very interesting. And so if someone is like, okay, I feel like I'm a lifelong learner. This is, you know, how I love to live my personal life.

How can this translate into my business? So what are those Kaizen principles?

Well, the Kaizen principle is the we can always improve things, okay? Nothing is perfect, okay? So we can always improve processes.

And just because your business is running great today and you think the processes are perfect. Well, there are things like technology which sort of moves the goalpost, doesn't it?

So, you know, two years ago, we had generative AI hit the world, and we're all now very familiar with ChatGPT or whichever flavor of generative AI you wish to use. And that's really moved the goalposts. On some processes.

So we thought we had it all worked out and super efficient before, but now we have generative AI and you know, it's coming into things that we use every day. It's there in Google now, it's in Microsoft Office. You know, it's just in sort of everything. So how can we embrace that and improve our processes?

And that's just one little technology thing that's come out in the last few years. I'm sure there's going to be another one next month and the month after the month after. So we can continuously improve, right?

Yes, yes. And utilizing technology. I feel like for me, that is one of my biggest expenditures in my businesses, in my business is technology.

I use a ton and a lot of people are like, well, Tiffany, how do you get so much done? Like, how do you do everything? And that is my secret weapon because just like you said, Rick is constantly improving.

And so if there's technology that can be utilized to improve a process or improve what I'm doing, then I at least want to try it.

Absolutely.

So what is another way that our businesses can improve? You know, do the Kaizen philosophy in their business?

Well, okay, there was. The one aspect was, hey, let's just look at the business process and try and make it better. That's a sort of very typical thing to do.

But as I said, I. I reinterpret Kaizen as lifelong learning. This the constant improvement of self.

So within a business, not only are should we be focused on improving a process, it doesn't matter what the business process is, but the focus should also be to empower our people and inculcate into them that they really need to grow every day, they need to learn something new every day.

And so not only do you have a documented, you know, efficient process which you're constantly trying to get make better, is you're making your people better. In fact, your people are making themselves better.

And the fact that they're gaining new skills and improving behaviors and learning maybe better ways of doing things because they didn't know them before, they've just learned them. It opens up all sorts of new opportunities and gives them greater wisdom to improve the processes in your organization.

It's very much an upward spiral.

Yeah. And that makes complete sense. And what I hear you also saying is knowing where we're going to get this information from.

So is data a big thing when it comes to Kaizen?

No, it's not necessarily data when I'm talking about learning, it's really about skills acquisition. So it's acquiring more skills. We before, remember we were just talking about generative AI.

Well, generative AI was pretty much alien to most of us two years ago. Now we've had two years of generative AI and ChatGPT and Claude from Anthropic and others.

You know, one could argue, you know, in the workforce today the use of generative AI is a basic skill set. Okay. So that's a new piece of technology that's hit us that we're now expecting people to know. They should just know it's okay.

And there's going to be more and more technology and other stuff coming out. As time goes on, it's coming out faster and faster and faster. So these are all skills and tools that we need.

I mean I remember I went to a Talk given by LinkedIn and this was pre pandemic, it must have been seven or eight years ago.

And the message that LinkedIn was giving us at that point in time, they said that everything that we knew today, the skills we know today would be out of date in about 18 months time. Okay. Now if you read sort of World Economic Forum future work reports, they come out every year, or was it two years? Can't remember.

You know, they're looking at the skill sets that we need and it's been identified. We, you know, ever since we've had Industry 4 come along, uh, we've had the skills gap.

Well, the skills gap is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it's mainly because we're not learning fast enough, we're not acquiring the skills fast enough.

Um, and you know, the work that I do with, with students, you know, especially universities, I tend to work with them, is, is students, some of them still have this mindset. The, you know, you go to school, you might even get in.

The lack of getting to university, you studied this long, long time, acquiring this massive amount of knowledge and that's all you need. And when I talked to them I said, well, I'm sorry to tell you this, but everything you've learned is going to be out of date within the year.

You know, you need this Kaizen approach. It's all about lifelong learning, lifelong improvement. You could say that kaisen sort of comprises three components.

There's that lifelong improvement. So we've got to better our skills, improve our skills, not just learn them. You've got to apply them, you know, practice them.

We also have to reflect, you know, reflect on our actions, reflect on our knowledge, reflect on our growth and make the appropriate sort of fine tuned adjustments. And finally we I think we need more than a growth mindset. I think we need this infinite mindset.

That's. That's deep. So, okay, when we talk about.

Because I've talked about the growth mindset here on the podcast before, but when you speak of infinite mindset, how does that look differently?

Okay.

The, you know, the, the growth mindset was really stimulated, I guess, by, you know, Carol Dweck in, In her book Mindset the New Psychology of Success. The new twist on that is the Simon Sinek book, okay, which is about the infinite gain or infinite mindset.

And it's really looking at things being infinite. They're just never ending.

And I just like that this is not about, you know, playing the game or doing the project or a finite period of time, you know, you know, with a start and an end, it's just infinite. And that really, really plays to me for this lifelong improvement.

Lifelong improvement means we must work on improving ourselves every single day until, well, we're no longer on the planet, as it were, as in physically, I guess we could be on Mars or something. But apart from that, I mean, we. We passed. So, you know, what can we do, you know, to. To learn something new every day? It. And, And.

And that's really triggered by, I, I think curiosity, okay, because it's. It's linked to a desire to learn more. Okay? And this is important, Kaizen. This improvement is important.

But, you know, that's really sort of super fueled if you link curiosity to it. So with curiosity and Kaizen, we can exercise and train our ability, our abilities. You know, it makes us more adaptable.

It actually makes us more resilient, okay? Because it's easy to. Easier to recover from setbacks because we, you know, as I said, we need to reflect. We need to learn from the experience, okay?

You know, things go wrong. They're supposed to go wrong, right? And by. By doing things wrong, we learn how to do things a better way.

It's not about, you know, being right all the time. It's about tinkering, testing, stretching.

And as we know, I mean, you talked about, hey, you know, you focus on education, you know, learning and growing happens beyond our comfort zone, okay? So in order to learn, in order to grow, we've got to be adding. Adding more in. We need to be looking at things, things.

And we need that reflection because it. By learning more, by becoming more aware of things, we may end up changing our own perception, changing our own understanding of something.

And here, here comes the other tricky bit is we need to learn to let go of stuff, you know, we might have been taught something, you know, way back when, maybe back in school, and we're learning today that it's no longer true. You know, more research, more science has revealed that actually what we were taught wasn't quite right.

So not only do we need to acquire knowledge, we need to be open minded.

You know, not just open to other people's opinions and perceptions, but the key thing to open mindedness is being proportional, prepared to change our own mind, to change our own perception. And to do that, we need to let go on what we believe was maybe true because we may uncover that it was actually not so true.

Gotcha. Gotcha. And immediately when you said that, I thought about Pluto and how Pluto is no longer a planet.

Yes, I was about to say that. Yeah. That's a fantastic. A fantastic example. Okay. Wow. That was a bit mind blowing. That's one little tiny thing. What else is there?

Exactly?

There's a lot.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, Rick, we can't give it all away here.

So if people were interested in finding out more about you, learning more about your book or following you on social, where could they find the easiest thing.

Is, I mean, my book. Okay, for those who don't know, it's called Business as Unusual.

And one little unusual thing is, is go and Google my name, Rick Evanovich, because you'll find that I'm the only person on the planet with that name. Okay? So if you google me, anything you find will lead to me.

Failing that, just take my name and stick a dot com on the end and it'll take you to my website.

Gotcha, Gotcha. And I'll make sure I have all of those links in the show notes for the audience.

So just in case they're doing something they don't have their hands free. Don't worry, it's right there in the show notes. Thank you so much, Rick, for coming on the show today.

Thank you so much, Tiffany, for, for inviting me. It's been an absolute pleasure.

All right, bye.

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