Dan Jones: Creating a Kaizen Culture By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Monday, July 26, 2010

In my experience a Kaizen culture is set by example, is enabled using a common method and language and is nurtured by recognising achievements, telling stories and building upon the resulting learning. In 1993 I was fortunate to be involved in creating what is still one of the best examples of a Kaizen culture at the Unipart Group of companies in the UK, who make and distribute automotive components. From the beginning the initiative has been led by the Chief Executive, who teaches regularly in the company university, reviews progress on the shop floor of their many operations and attends ...

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Art Smalley: What type of Kaizen? By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Sunday, July 25, 2010

Kevin Meyer and his organization were kind enough to invite me to his company a couple of years ago to introduce the basic concepts of the TWI Job Methods (JM) program. JM is a very easy way to introduce some of the fundamental concepts of improvement to most any organization. JM falls short of capturing the entirety of Kaizen or the Toyota Production System (TPS) and that was never its intent. However as I like to tell people it is an easy first step for a lot of places looking to improve and develop internal resources. The exact date of the ...

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Michael Ballé: Pull creates an architecture for kaizen By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Wednesday, July 21, 2010

I visited three factories this week: one that is thinking about starting with lean, two that have been doing kaizen for three to four years: there is clearly a world of difference between doing kaizen and not. However, the two factories doing kaizen are interesting to compare. In both cases, senior management is driving the lean effort. In company A, the CEO himself is choosing problems and conducting the kaizen workshops. In company B, the group’s operations VP is driving the lean program. Both the CEO from company A and the ops VP from company B work with a sensei. Both ...

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Jim Huntzinger: Right-Designing: Freeing up Kaizen Capacity By Jim Huntzinger, Author of 'Lean Cost Management: Accounting for Lean by Establishing Flow' - Last updated: Wednesday, July 21, 2010

My response is not necessarily kaizen in complete context, but I will address a certain aspect which, unfortunately, consumes a significant amount of kaizen effort. I am assuming several assumptions – clear objectives already existing or are being processed – customer requirements in volume, features, and functions.  And that the process, as articulated by Mike Rother in Kata (current condition and target condition – reference Mike’s slideshare referenced in his post) is what is driving the overarching work of the manufacturing engineers I address below. While TWI is a great structure to develop kaizen and a daily and normal function structure, it ...

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Mike Rother: The Evolution of Lean, Part Deux By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Monday, July 19, 2010

Thank you for your question Kevin. Let me put forth a hypothesis in the interest of discussion. Just last week I got a nice euphoric email and Powerpoint presentation from a small plant that has successfully introduced its first assembly cell. Most of us know the excitement that comes with the positive change from first efforts to eliminate waste. Not only do the processes operate much better than before, our eyes also become more opened to the potential! But after a while, four or five years into a lean journey seems about right, those of us who are honest with ourselves begin ...

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Jeff Liker: There are no particular tools that are better than others to get to continuous improvement. By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Sunday, July 18, 2010

In my new book in progress we talk of three levels of lean (inspired by David Meier).  The outer level of the sphere is proliferation of tools by the experts which by itself is a "lean facade."  This level is not sustainable.  If the experts teach managers the tools and they embrace and apply them they can get to the next level of "management as lean implementers."    This level is sustainable, but typically managers tend to be sporadic in making improvements "when they have time."  The best companies then advance to "continuous improvement by the work group."  The final step ...

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Kevin Meyer: Any upsides/downsides to relying on JM/TWI process deconstruction as kaizen? Yes it works… but I can already see the limitation with non-documented processes By Kevin Meyer, President of Specialty Silicone Fabricators and Factory Strategie Group, co-author of 'Evolving Excellence: Thoughts on Lean Enterprise Leadership' - Last updated: Sunday, July 18, 2010

Mike Rother: The Evolution of Lean By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Tuesday, July 13, 2010

What would be our best success stories to illustrate what lean is all about? Unfortunately you’re asking that question at a moment when the lean community itself is trying to answer that question. The thinking about lean, and the definition of it, are evolving. Trying to answer the question by looking at success stories may be too surface-level. To gain a better understanding of what Toyota has been doing to generate its successes, some of us have been looking closely at the human dynamics that underlie Toyota’s visible practices and concepts. Learning to ask a different question A comment you often hear when ...

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Art Smalley: Lean Success Stories – The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Monday, July 12, 2010

I appreciate the reality that people need to see success stories about Lean or any topic for that matter in order to further their interest with the topic and move onto action. We are all somewhat risk averse by nature I suspect due to the way we evolved. For example you go over there and eat the purple berry on the bush and if you survive then perhaps I'll give it a try! Implementing Lean or any improvement methodology has a bit of that conservative bias to overcome. If you are interested in some Lean success stores then I recommend reading ...

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Steve Spear: What to learn from Toyota for those who already haven’t … Improvement and Innovation needed now more than ever By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Monday, July 12, 2010

BACKGROUND: WHY LOOK AT TOYOTA?  BECAUSE IT CAME FROM BEHIND TO DOMINATE ITS COMPETITION! Understanding the tremendous commercial success of Toyota, rising from an uncompetitive auto maker in the 1950s and 1960s, to the most dominant in the world by 2000s, and understanding the vast benefit that has come to some that have diligently sought to emulate Toyota--sharp reductions in time and cost, with vast improvements in quality and responsiveness, is reason for others who have not yet to look more closely. Toyota's success, after all, is rooted in its ability to generate and sustain broad based, high speed, relentless improvement and ...

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Michael Ballé: Waste elimination (in dire straights) as a key to competence increase (and saving the day) By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010

How about a 40% production cost reduction and a few million Euros cash flow improvement in less than a year? I’m not sure this is the best lean success story I’ve come across, but it’s the most recent. One plant of a large global group produces components for the tier one plants, and was losing its bid for the next generation product and facing shutdown because of a price difference of 20% with Low Cost Country competition. The group recognized that once you lose production, you lose development, and once that has happened, it’s really hard to bring work back, ...

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Jeff Liker: Can we positively influence Short-term transactional thinking? By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010

Let's consider a company that we are working with that has already decided it needs lean to improve quality, productivity, and timeliness of delivery to the customer.  It happens to be a major retailer and they brought in an outside CEO to “professionalize” the business. The outside CEO is a financial guy who grew another similar business by several times.  He claimed to use lean, but it quickly became apparent that it was what we might call "fake lean" focused only on the tools.  What we mean by that is that he had a bunch of black belts certified ...

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Jean Cunningham: Flow works for marketing as well By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster' - Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010

What could be worse than developing a great marketing plan with a very timely message, then spending all your time pushing the project through the company,only to find the key dates slipping by and ultimately missing the opportunity? To compensate, we plan the new marketing approaches months and months in advance and the message is not integrated with other selling activities.  What if instead you could have a cross functional meeting of all the key contributors to look at the existing process for delivering a marketing program, eliminate steps in the process that are not adding value to delivering the message, and reduce the time from concept to ...

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Steve Spear: Lean is about making clear and explicit the best known approaches to achieving success By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010

Sales and marketing may seem a far cry from the production shop floors on which 'lean' was first observed.  Nevertheless, that type of work lends itself to exactly the same disciplines of rigorous discovery that allowed Toyota to come from beyond, over take its rivals, and run away from the field. There is a mistaken notion that the essence of 'lean,' as an approximation of the Toyota Production System, is the stabilization of processes, heretofore chaotic, as an endpoint in and of itself. Not so when practiced by the masters.  'Stabilization,' or more generally 'specification' is both a means of making clear ...

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Mike Bosworth: Lean Success Stories By Mike Bosworth, Author of 'Solution Selling' and 'Customer Centric Selling' - Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010

Art Smalley: It starts with leadership By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Sunday, June 27, 2010

How do you build a culture such that problems are seen as opportunities for improvement? It all starts at the top and cascades down from there in my opinion. Employees are somewhat like young children in a family. They tend to model and reinforce behavioral norms that they see around them especially traits from senior leaders. In Toyota's case there are lots of roots to examine that influenced the company's culture and development with respect to this dimension. For starters there are the five Toyoda Precepts attributed to founder Sakichi Toyoda and codified by his sons Kiichiro and Risaburo in 1935. ...

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Steve Spear: Managing work to see problems when and where they occur By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Managing work to see problems when and where they occur is a necessary precondition--one too often overlooked--if an organization is going to achieve bona fide continuous improvement in pursuit of operational excellence. Here's why. Absent an ability to design perfect systems for design, production, and delivery on the first try, operational excellence depends on continuous improvement and relentless innovation.  As important as it is to have rigor in solving problems, the necessary pre condition is managing work so problems—flaws in the current design of systems and the current approaches to doing work--are seen when and where they occur. Deming, for example, was a passionate advocate of the 'Shewhart Cycle' of Plan, Do, Check, ...

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Jeff Liker: Act Your Way To A New Culture By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Saturday, June 19, 2010

I always feel a little uncomfortable when a question begins with:  "How do you build a culture that does ____?"  As far as I know there is no lego set for building culture.  In the last chapter of our book Toyota Culture we quote Edgar Schein as saying: "Never start with the idea of changing your culture.  Always start with the issue the organization faces." Why would a leading cultural guru suggest we avoid changing culture?  I do not think he is saying culture does not matter or even that culture cannot change.  He is saying that culture is extremely difficult ...

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Michael Ballé: Define Success as Learning, and the Culture Will Follow By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Saturday, June 19, 2010

Culture is largely about how you define success, and the acceptable means to obtain this success. Within lean programs, the issue of failure rarely comes up because we define success as learning, and failure and success are intimately linked in the process. What we do find, is that some people take to it quite naturally, while others adamantly refuse to learn, whatever the consequences. I was recently on the shop floor in an automotive supplier plant with the operations manager, the plant manager and the area manager. They’d been working with lean for a number of years and had implemented several ...

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Jean Cunningham: Stop Rewarding Firefighting! By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster' - Last updated: Sunday, June 13, 2010

One way to support a "opportunity culture" is to stop rewarding firefighting.  Instead of performance reviews discussing specific objectives and challenges overcome, target more on lack of crisis and even flow.  I remember discussing with a manager the performance review of a cell leader that described him as not being "action oriented" and "lacking leadership skills."  I had actually managed this person before and it did not fit with my experience.  What we determined was the new manager was expecting to see more heroics and had not really thought about the fact that the cell under this leader's guidance had steadily improved all the key metrics and had developed ...

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Sebastian Fixson: How does an organization build the appropriate culture such that problems (failures, mistakes, …) are seen as opportunities for improvement of the organization rather than opportunities for individuals to lose face, their job, etc.? By Sebastian Fixson, Co-author of 'The Power of Integrality & Evolving models of supplier involvement in design' - Last updated: Sunday, June 13, 2010

Dan Jones: Convincing Executives to go Lean By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Friday, June 11, 2010

The best way to answer this question is to summarise two contrasting real stories – one that got it and one that still does not – at different ends of the same sector. The successful case began with a question from a senior Director – “How could these lean Toyota ideas help my business?”  “Let’s take a walk and see” was my answer. As we walked it because clear there was waste everywhere. This very quickly led to a meeting with the CEO who was intrigued and gave us the go ahead to begin some experiments to demonstrate the potential scale ...

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Steve Spear: Managers are trained for decision making, not discovery and development By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Thursday, June 10, 2010

C level executives are often absent from 'lean initiatives,' 'lean transformations,' and the like. This is unfortunate given the truthy cliche, "what is interesting to leaders, is fascinating to followers." The question is, "Why?" Let me suggest two reasons: • Lean presented as a kit of system engineering tools which senior leaders feel they can delegate to technologists. • Senior leaders not taught/trained for an environment of continuous improvement/discovery. REASON 1: LEAN=TOOL KIT The interpretation of lean manufacturing as a kit of system engineering tools, meant for the 'shop floor,' largely for high volume, low variety, repeated work, certainly impacts senior leaders view that lean is tactical ...

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Jeff Liker: Lean Has a Short Half-Life Without Intense Involvement Of The CEO By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Thursday, June 10, 2010

One thing we know about lean is that you learn it by doing it, not by sitting in the office.   With all of the different types of organizations I have worked with I must admit that it has been rare to go with the CEO to the gemba.   They have not participated in kaizen activities, our meetings are in offices and board rooms, and in other cases I personally never met the CEO.  For the most part our contacts have only gone as high as the vice president level (engineering, continuous improvement, quality, operations).   That is a problem.  We have ...

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Art Smalley: Focus On Delivering Results By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Saturday, June 5, 2010

I think Tom Ehrenfeld asks an interesting question for us to consider. In its shorter form "How do you convince others to be lean?" I'll go out on a limb and say that you don't. Or more specifically at least that I don't bother trying to. Leaders have to decide for themselves what to do and how to go about doing it to a large extent. Otherwise they are not real leaders in my opinion. Sure they might need some assistance but I have never seen a very successful company of any type that did not have excellent leadership. So ...

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Mike Rother: Lean Industrial Engineering + Lean Management By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Saturday, June 5, 2010

How can you convince decision makers that lean is not a program, but a way of doing business to achieve superior performance? One thing I take from this question and the posts about it here on The Lean Edge is some consensus that Lean is a different way of managing, rather than just tools, workshops and improvement programs that happen within the existing way of managing. Maybe the ways of managing can be summarized like this: Traditional way: Establish targets Describe solutions Provide incentives Periodically check results Lean way: Establish targets Develop the capability in people to develop solutions Changing how you manage an organization is a different undertaking than ...

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Michael Ballé: Lean Is Not For Every One By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Friday, June 4, 2010

Rather than think about how to convince others to be lean, let’s try a different thought experiment: what does it take to be a lean leader? First, you need someone who has reached a senior position and is still committed to self-improvement and learning, and be willing to learn about the lean principles in depth. Secondly, this person must be ready to commit to going to the gemba at least twice a week. Thirdly, they must profoundly believe that if they train their people better and empower them to solve their own problems (and help them doing so), they can ...

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Jean Cunningham: A war story By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster' - Last updated: Thursday, June 3, 2010

Monday I was at a Memorial Day cook out (where else!).  I met a guy who does systems consulting and was telling me how he was into process improvement. His firm had hired this “crazy” guy who was into lean. He went into the client and showed them how they could get all the work for a process (I think it was entering orders) done in one and half day for the entire country by creating a flow line.  Each job had standard work and they paced the flow based on the printer sound which was ...

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Pascal Dennis: How do Lean practitioners connect with the CEO? By Pascal Dennis, Author of Getting The Right Things Done, Lean Production Simplified, and Andy & Me - Last updated: Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Building on Orrie's point, connecting with CEO means understanding upstream & downstream of the factory. Marketing, Design, Engineering, Order Fulfillment, Customer Service & the like. The CEO's gemba, and Value Streams, comprise all of these. How often do lean practitioners go see them? It's hard work, admittedly, to go see such gembas -- understand what we're seeing.   But if we don't, we'll suboptimize & CEO's will tune us out -- (rightly). A few small examples: In Marketing, Brand management would greatly benefit from the clarity & simplicity of Lean thinking. Marketing execs, for example, have found Strategy Deployment to be invaluable in aligning Design activity with emerging portfolio gaps. Moreover, Lean fundamentals like STW, visual management ...

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Orry Fiume: Lean is a Business Strategy By Orry Fiume, Co-author of Real Numbers: Management Accounting in a Lean Organization - Last updated: Tuesday, June 1, 2010

The way we approached it at Wiremold was to realize that what we call Lean is not an improvement program, not a manufacturing tactic, not a cost reduction tool, but is a strategy.  The purpose of any strategy (lean or otherwise) is to createsustainable competitive advantage. Lean does that by allowing an organization to differentiate itself in the market place through operational excellence.  We realized that if we could reduce the lead time in the market for giving quotes, delivering product, introducing new products, etc, so that we were substantially better than our competition (90%+), we could achieve a competitive ...

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Tom Ehrenfeld: How do we convince others to be lean? By Tom Ehrenfeld, author of The Startup Garden and A Leader's Study Guide To The Gold Mine - Last updated: Monday, May 31, 2010

Jeff Liker: Lean is an Innovation in Thinking Which Will Foster Many Other Innovations By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Wednesday, May 26, 2010

I agree that many people get confused on the relationship between lean and innovation.  Steve Spear explained very well that underlying this is a confusion about what innovation is.  In reality the greatest innovators are disciplined thinkers who try incremental experiments one by one learning from each.  Thomas Edison was famous for his discipline and for learning from all his failed light bulbs before finally finding something that worked.  The something that worked represented accumulated learning from years of smaller experiments that proved incremental principles and that showed what does not work.  Unfortunately when we see the results of a ...

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Michael Ballé: An Innovative Way of Looking At Innovation By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Peter Drucker once said: “since the purpose of business is to generate customers, only two functions do this: marketing and innovation.” This doesn’t seem to leave much place for lean, since lean starts with operational effectiveness – in effect the ‘industrial smile” with engineering at one end, sales & marketing at the other and production down in the middle (all problems, no glory). Nonetheless, the lean approach extends way beyond manufacturing and into engineering and contributes in specific and unique ways to innovation. Innovation is a vast word, and we can take it to mean three different things. First is the ...

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Dan Jones: Lean Insights before Lean Innovation By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Tuesday, May 25, 2010

I have always thought that innovation rather than simply quality, delivery and cost was the real purpose and ultimate result of lean thinking; innovation in terms of the products and services we design, in how we relate to customers and in how we find new ways of working together to create value. The experience with lean is that it leads to new capabilities which in turn open up new business models that turn the tables on the competition and reshape whole industries. In other words lean insights can lead to lean innovations. There is no short cut. Think of it this ...

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Jim Huntzinger: Innovation, The Scientific Method By Jim Huntzinger, Author of 'Lean Cost Management: Accounting for Lean by Establishing Flow' - Last updated: Sunday, May 16, 2010

I see applying lean and innovation as one in the same. While innovation seem to be commonly thought of spontaneously emerging from some mad scientist-type locked in some secret lab somewhere, most innovation actually comes from a much more mundane source.  And in a lean environment it certainly does come from a common source.  And this source is operators, supervisors, engineers, and managers. Since innovation is most often an evolutionary and iterative process, it is critical to have a structure which, not only helps people to behave and think in this manner, but one that also gives them the infrastructure to physically ...

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Mike Rother: A Newer and Better Definition of Lean By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Sunday, May 16, 2010

Dennis Sherwood asked:  What is the difference between innovation and lean? I agree with Art Smalley that the answer depends on what definitions of innovation and lean you are using. And from my recent observations I would say that our definitions of both of these terms, i.e., our understanding of the mechanisms behind them, are now evolving. Better definitions are coming We have tended to define "lean" more or less as eliminating waste, but by now we can see that this concept is too limited. And we have tended to think of "innovation" as new solutions and levels of performance that come from ...

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Steven Spear: Innovation is the reward of mastery By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Friday, May 14, 2010

There is a conventional wisdom that 'lean' and other efforts towards process excellence and 'innovation' conflict, the former about standardization and rigidity, the latter about free-flowing creativity. There are reasons for those wisdoms, but they miss the significant complement between rigor in design and speed in improvement. Lean grew out of efforts in the 1980s to understand Toyota's success catching American auto makers. People found approaches, particularly in the shop floor environment that allowed select organizations to operate with far greater stability and far less chaos than was the norm elsewhere. That stability and order led to far better ...

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Art Smalley: People, Product, & Process Improvement By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Thursday, May 13, 2010

The difference between innovation and lean will depend a lot upon semantics and whose definition of "innovation" and "lean" we are using. For whatever reason the innovation tag seems to be applied a lot in situations where people are looking to improve products. The lean tag seems to get applied to factories trying to improve production processes. Successful companies though will need to work upon improving products, processes, and their people as well. In Toyota the concepts of respect for people and continuous improvement (Kaizen) are the pillars of the system. Kaizen has a strange connotation to me at least here ...

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Mark Graban: Every Employee Is An Innovator By Mark Graban, Author of the 'Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction,' winner of the Shingo Prize in 2009. Creator of leanblog.org, and Senior Fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute. On twitter as @leanblog. - Last updated: Tuesday, May 11, 2010

"Innovation" is a trendy business buzzword - it's much more appealing, generally speaking, to executives than the term "lean" is. Innovation is sexy and fun. Lean sounds dull and monotonous. Improve continuously -- who has the patience for that? Not those who would rather swing for the fences and find that one silver-bullet home run innovation that will ensure future profits. Lean organizations, while not ignoring large innovations (think Toyota Prius), also focus on daily innovation through Lean and process improvement methods, like kaizen. It's often thought, mistakenly, that Lean and innovation can't go together. Those who think Lean created rigid, ...

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Denis Sherwood: How would you develop innovation from lean and vice-versa? By Dennis Sherwood, Author of Forest for the Trees and Smart Things to Know about Innovation and Creativity - Last updated: Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Michael Ballé: Learning To Think in Terms Of Lead Time By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Saturday, May 1, 2010

"Some people imagine that Toyota has put on a smart new set of clothes, the kanban system,” writes Shigeo Shingo more than twenty years ago, “so they go out and purchase the same outfit and try it on. They quickly discover they are much too fat to wear it! They must eliminate waste and make fundamental improvements in their production system before techniques like kanban can be of any help.” Lean IS about having no back-up inventory (or at least not much) and no workaround system, but it’ about getting there, not deciding this arbitrarily. We’ve all seen companies who do ...

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Mark Graban: Same Misunderstanding Occurs in Hospitals By Mark Graban, Author of the 'Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction,' winner of the Shingo Prize in 2009. Creator of leanblog.org, and Senior Fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute. On twitter as @leanblog. - Last updated: Thursday, April 29, 2010

There's a fallacy in the question as stated - that "lean" means there's a major risk of not having what you need to get your work done. This is one way the word "lean" is sometimes misunderstood (going back to the  1980s book "Zero Inventories," the title of which was taken too literally by some). During my graduate school studies in the 1990s, I worked with a manufacturer who had taken "zero inventories" and what they thought was "lean" to an extreme. They slashed finished goods inventory and very soon after couldn't make shipments to customers! They had a process ...

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Art Smalley: Just in Time 101 By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Monday, April 26, 2010

Robert's question reminds me of the caption to an article in Business Week that I read on an airplane a few days ago. The article refers to the "perils of running too lean" and highlights how John Deere is losing sales due to a longer lead-time than the competition. The article implies that more inventory would automatically result in more sales and higher profits. I have no specific knowledge on the John Deere case and can't comment on that with any factual insight. I can highlight several common mistakes that are made regarding Toyota's Just-in-Time concept. For starters the Toyota Production ...

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Mike Rother: Use the Kata, Luke By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Saturday, April 24, 2010

I think Jeff Liker and Art Smalley give excellent explanations, in their posts above and below this one, of the interplay between process variation, inventory and continuous improvement. As Taiichi Ohno supposedly remarked, “You need enough inventory to hold the system together,” i.e., to match the current amount of variation in the processes in the value stream. Another key point is that since we cannot plan for every eventuality, how an organization is prepared to react to unexpected disruptions is highly significant. The way we react is, in many ways, the backup system for big disruptions. But perhaps most importantly... behind Rob’s ...

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Jeff Liker: Inventory Reflects Variation In the Process By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Thursday, April 22, 2010

One way to think about it is like a tight rope walker.  You would not want an amateur trying it without a net.  It takes a great deal of talent to earn you way to increasing the height and eventually eliminating the net.  The equation for calculating inventory in lean is pretty conventional--enough inventory to handle the replenishment time plus safety stock.  The amount of safety stock needed depends on how stable the consuming operation is and how stable the supplying operation is.  In other words, more variability means more need for inventory.  The goal of TPS is not zero ...

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Rob Austin: When Is Lean Too Lean? By Robert Austin, co-author of Artful Making - Last updated: Thursday, April 22, 2010

Dan Jones: Lean, Quality and Cost Cutting By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Thursday, April 22, 2010

I have met many of these folks too who talk about lean but whose heads are stuck in the old cost cutting mind set. Organisations that employ them, whether as internal or external consultants, deserve what they get – traditional cost cutting! A great shame and a missed opportunity. On the other hand I have also met good lean folk who know all the tools but who do not have an A3 plan to guide their actions. And I often encounter quality folks who imply that improving quality is somehow more virtuous than the grubby task of eliminating waste, which ...

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Mike Rother: Getting a Better Understanding of How Toyota Operates By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Saturday, April 17, 2010

Now there's a revealing conundrum: Mike Micklewright asks, “Why Is Quality So Rarely Central in Lean?” He sees experts using Lean to increase efficiency and productivity, and reduce costs, without connection to quality. The word Lean is a name that in the late 1980’s we gave to what we observed at Toyota. Jeff Liker reminds us that over the last 50 years Toyota has virtually defined quality in the auto industry, and that quality is evident everywhere in the company. I think the answer to this puzzle is simple in hindsight:  We have been focusing on the what, the visible stuff that changes from ...

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Pascal Dennis: build the Toyota house By Pascal Dennis, Author of Getting The Right Things Done, Lean Production Simplified, and Andy & Me - Last updated: Thursday, April 15, 2010

Good question, Mike. Quality implied in the so-called “House of Lean” image, most obviously in the Jidoka “pillar”. But you’re raising a valid point. Too often Lean implementations underemphasize Jidoka & Quality, and overemphasize the other pillar (JIT). It’s understandable on some level – JIT seems “cooler” and promises quick payback in finished goods and WIP reduction. But the house, and our improvement activities, become imbalanced. We learn, eventually, that without Jidoka & Quality, you can’t provide the “right part at the right time in the right quantity”. So what’s the countermeasure? In my view, we need to respect the house metaphor — ...

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Michael Ballé: Quality = Sales is the hardest lean lesson for management By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Thanks for asking the question – the difficulty in getting senior executives to focus on quality has to be my number one frustration with teaching lean (number two being people engagement). I have been puzzled for years how come all our Toyota teachers always started with quality, but somehow we never took that onboard as we did lead-time reduction or spot waste elimination. To my mind, the question is: why can’t we capture senior management’s interest on quality? The first issue appears to be the mindset of price = volume. In Ohno’s terms, I’m increasingly convinced that this is a misconception. ...

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Art Smalley: Does Lean Forget Quality at Times? By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Tuesday, April 13, 2010

This topic strikes a chord with comments I have made in the past regarding the state of Lean at least in the United States. Unfortunately I do feel that the Lean movement is often guilty of under emphasizing quality at times. Of course this is just a broad characterization and I am not speaking about my colleagues here on this site or directly about any company in particular. Let me try and explain my viewpoint. The Toyota Production System for many years was depicted as having two pillars. One was the famous Just-in-Time Pillar and the other was the less well ...

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Jim Huntzinger: Quality Is In The People By Jim Huntzinger, Author of 'Lean Cost Management: Accounting for Lean by Establishing Flow' - Last updated: Tuesday, April 13, 2010

As Mr. Micklewright points out one of the aspects of the lean business model is increasing productivity and efficiency – this is often the focus of many lean programs (program, unfortunately, instead of a business model).  This aspect is manifested in developing and implementing flow.  But quality is directly linked to flow, and this link is all too often missed, or ignored. In order to maintain good flow – that is constant and consistent flow (and ideally one-piece flow) – certain outcomes have to happen, and not just by circumstance; uptime on equipment, no long changeovers, consistent supply of the right ...

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Jeff Liker: Is Quality Central or Peripheral to Lean? By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Sunday, April 11, 2010

The most stunning accomplishment of Toyota over the last fifty years is their turnaround from making “junk” to virtually redefining quality in the auto industry.  They were influenced to the core by W. Edwards Deming and quality is evident everywhere in the company.  The objective of the Toyota Production System is presented as Quality, cost, delivery, safety and morale and any metric board in Toyota will include quality indicators. Every “lean consultant” or lean training course I know emphasizes quality.  In this sense I disagree with the questioner who claims lean focuses only on cost and efficiency.  On the other hand ...

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Mike Micklewright: Why Is Quality So Rarely Central In Lean? By Mike Micklewright, Author of 'Out of Another @#&*% Crisis!' - Last updated: Sunday, April 11, 2010

Dan Jones: Essential Lean and Six Sigma By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Saturday, April 10, 2010

The fundamental power of the ideas behind Lean and Six Sigma are too important to be lost sight of as the improvement movements that champion them compete for attention. These ideas came together in a unique synthesis at Toyota in the 1960s as it was developing its business system. In my view they need to come together again as the rest of the world strives to realize their potential. What the Quality movement, of which Six Sigma is the latest incarnation, brought us is the idea that this is how we can use the scientific method to solve social as well ...

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Art Smalley: The Lean and Six Sigma Marriage By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Monday, April 5, 2010

I have witnessed plenty of Lean versus Six Sigma zealot arguments over the years at various client sites and at different conference settings. I think Tom is trying to stir the pot with this question :-) Somehow I seem to manage to find a way to offend both camps with my standard responses which I will outline below. I'll start my answer however with an interesting side story. Back around the year 2000 I was part of an effort in McKinsey & Company to look at what Fortune 100 companies were using for improvement methodologies. At that time we estimated that ...

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Mike Rother: How do We Want to Manage Our Organizations? By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Sunday, April 4, 2010

I think these kinds of questions about Lean versus Six Sigma are somewhat tangential, and don’t do much for addressing the more essential issue of, how do we want to manage our organizations? Several years ago there was a similar debate between “Agile Manufacturing” and “Lean.”  Eventually it got quiet around the agile topic, and it seemed to go away.  But agile continued on in the software development world and increasingly concerned itself with the question of, by what patterns should teams do work so that the product of that work meets customer needs?  Today agile is about using the scientific ...

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Michael Ballé: Program vs System: Lean’s ambition is to propose a full business model, not just a productivity improvement program By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Sunday, April 4, 2010

A few years ago, at the first French Lean Summit, one participant would stand up at the end of every presentation and ask “what about six sigma? Couldn’t this be done better with six sigma?” – until José Ferro, President of the Lean Institute Brasil answered with his incomparable charm that he didn’t feel competent to answer, having never worked with six sigma, but that the Toyota veterans he knew absolutely hated six sigma for its anti-teamwork spirit. The idea of having a green belt or black belt present to senior management the work of an entire team, he explained, ...

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Steve Spear: Designing, Operating, and Improving Complex Systems: Common Challenges–>Common Responses By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Sunday, April 4, 2010

TQM, six sigma, lean, TPS, and the like stem from different sources but nevertheless share common approaches because they are responses to a common challenge: managing the design, operation, and improvement of complex systems of work--many people, spanning many disciplines, using multiple technologies, to deliver value to the market. This is so challenging because the design of any complex system is a product of imperfect people's creative efforts.  Hence, the initial design is imperfect and needs to be improved relentlessly. Therefore, all these approaches have some element of rigor in: • the design of work to reduce variation and to help distinguish between ...

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Jeff Liker: All Companies Need Problem Solving Tools Based On Deming’s PDCA By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Sunday, April 4, 2010

The relationship between lean and six sigma  is one of my favorite topics....Not!  It is fitting that this question came at Easter time which is famous for the Easter egg hunt.  Let's assume that lean eggs are red ones and  six sigma eggs are blue ones.  If you gather only the red eggs you will have an imbalance.  It will allow you to gather the eggs very quickly and efficiently but the red eggs are all different sizes and therefore there is a lot of variation.  On the other hand the blue eggs are very uniform so gathering some of ...

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Tom Ehrenfeld: How do Six Sigma and Lean fit together? By Tom Ehrenfeld, author of The Startup Garden and A Leader's Study Guide To The Gold Mine - Last updated: Sunday, April 4, 2010

Pascal Dennis: Safety was always first at Toyota By Pascal Dennis, Author of Getting The Right Things Done, Lean Production Simplified, and Andy & Me - Last updated: Saturday, April 3, 2010

Dear Dr. Shein, It’s a pleasure indeed to get a question from you. In my personal experience at Toyota, I found that Safety, pardon the cliche, was always first. First thing discussed at morning production meetings, weekly status reviews, mid-year and year-end reviews. Significant safety incidents including near misses were investigated within 48 hours. Report outs, or “Safety Auctions”, were lead lineside, usually by the group leader and responsible manager. These investigations went far deeper than in any other company I know, with the possible exception of Dupont. In new model launches, safety and ergonomics, were, again, the first order of business. Once ...

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Michael Ballé: Quality First, Safety Always By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Friday, March 19, 2010

Would Toyota sacrifice safety for profits? I have no idea how to test such a hypothesis, but I find it highly unlikely. If culture is made visible by behavior, one of the first things that impressed me with Toyota engineers as I observed them working with suppliers, was their unique focus on people before machinery or parts. Certainly, their safety focus was much higher than anything we’d seen before, and they played a strong part in raising safety awareness across the board. Indeed, one of the first points I personally raise in doing lean with any company is safety and ergonomics. ...

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Steve Spear: commitment to safety is unwavering, but perfection hits bumps in the road By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010

Thanks for the question. With all due respect to Professor Schein, there are other alternative explanations to "abandon safety" or "safety never part of their culture."  It is entirely possible (more likely) that safety--both workplace and product--remains part of their culture but maintaining perfection hit bumps in the road. These bumps in the road are: 1: The need to develop an increasing number of great problem solvers at an accelerating rate because of business expansion. 2: The need to develop people's problems solving skills to greater depth because of increasing product and process complexity. 3: The difficulty of responding to the weak signals of problems ...

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Jeff Liker: The value of Trust – without safety in Toyota, nothing else matters By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010

It is interesting to get a question as direct as this, especially coming from a management icon like Edgar Schein.  Notice that the question implies Toyota is not concerned about safety regardless of how one answers. In the current recall crisis certainly the stories formulated by the press paint a picture of an arrogant company that is secretive about safety test results and has put profits before safety.  That message has been reinforced by many outside observers citing secret memos and mountains of data about sudden acceleration incidents over a decade that were ignored until the U.S. Department of Transportation had ...

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Ed Schein: Toyota’s Safety Culture By Edgar Schein, Author of Organizational Culture, and Leadership and The Corporate Culture Survival Guide - Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010

Art Smalley: Laws versus Thinking By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010

I think the analogy between thermodynamics and organizational dynamics is an interesting one to consider. It certainly made me stop and think for a couple of days. After mulling on the topic I have personal doubts regarding whether we can come up with laws for organizations as neatly as physicists did for the body of work known as thermodynamics. Even if we do the laws certainly won’t be as quantitative or specific. I'd like to point out that on a personal level laws in science carry a very positive connotation for me when I think about them. However the notion carries ...

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Dan Jones: The Laws of Lean Organisations By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010

It is not too far-fetched to think of lean as the science of getting useful work out of an organisation. But in this case the organisation does not exist in isolation – it has to serve its customers, work with its partners (employees, suppliers, distributors, shareholders etc) and find its place in the physical, economic and social environment in which it operates. This changes over time and so the laws of lean organisations will also change as societies face new challenges in the future. This is how I would summarise the “laws of lean”. The first lean law states that the ...

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Mike Rother: Possible Laws of Organodynamics By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010

What three laws of organodynamics would I suggest? Thank you for the thought-provoking question Dennis. I’m in no position to propose laws, but for the sake of discussion… Organization = An entity of two or more human beings that work together to achieve a goal. Organodynamics = The science of getting useful work out of organizations.  (Dennis Sherwood) First (proposed) law of organodynamics: Humans are equipped to deal with dynamic conditions. Our human capability for learning allows us to improve, innovate, create and adapt.  With its prefrontal cortex and synapses our brain is equipped to learn new rules and patterns. Second (proposed) law of organodynamics: The ...

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Michael Ballé: Combining the three Cs of Organodynamics: Competence, Compliance and Creativity By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010

FIRST LAW: without continuous process improvement, performance will deteriorate Entropy affects organizations as it does engines: without constant attention, any process will deteriorate. In the past this has been accepted as a necessary evil compensated by occasional investment. Let the machine run down and when you can’t do anything with it anymore, buy a new one. Kaizen thinking has opened a new way: by improving continuously existing processes we can avoid the performance decline by keeping people’s attention focused on getting the equipment and its operations as close as nominal performance as possible. Overall, significant leaps in performance will still be ...

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Jeff Liker: Managers Should Be Teachers, Not Simply Controllers By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010

1.  Clearly define the work as much as possible In the Toyota Way I discuss the concept of standardization to enhance innovation.  A core idea in kaizen is that you cannot improve a process that is not stable.  If an individual makes changes on their own nobody else benefits and if that individual moves on the improvement is lost.  Group learning (as opposed to individual learning) depends on standardization.  I also refer to Paul Adler's distinction between enabling bureaucracy (assists those doing the work and engages them) versus coercive bureaucracy (like Taylorism poses outside constraints to control the person).  In Toyota ...

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Steve Spear: The objective function in managing any system must be solving problems and learning By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010

The objective function in managing any system must be solving problems and learning.  There are four principles of a 'basic science' of system design, operation, and management, which if followed, generate, sustain, and accelerate high velocity learning, improvement, and innovation. If they are not followed, learning, improvement, and innovation are compromised. (This basic science has a sound theoretical underpinning as it is rooted in the science of closed loop control and experiential and experimental learning.) Learning, improvement, and innovation are core objective functions because the complexity of the 'socio-technical' systems (e.g., groups of people, doing interdependent work, to create value for others) upon which we depend for delivering value to customers. The complexity ...

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Dennis Sherwood: what could be the 4 laws of “organodynamics”? By Dennis Sherwood, Author of Forest for the Trees and Smart Things to Know about Innovation and Creativity - Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010

Jeff Liker: Five “Why?” Not Five “Who?” – start pointing fingers and engagement is over By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Interestingly I just spoke to a Canadian manufacturing company today that supplies Toyota and has several years of experience implementing TPS. He said his biggest disappointment was the the culture still does not support surfacing problems.  People are afraid they will be blamed and they hide problems.  So this seems to be a generic problem across manufacturing and service.  When I interviewed the first head of human resources for the Georgetown, Kentucky plant (Japanese) he said what was most startling to him when he first came to America was that Americans did not like to say they had a problem.  ...

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Dan Jones: Lean Service Delivery By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Saturday, February 27, 2010

Taiichi Ohno is reported to have said that the shop floor is a reflection of management. In my experience this is so true. Unless management can articulate a convincing case to change it is easy to get stuck in fire-fighting mode. Good people trapped in a broken process without a clear purpose will never improve. Well intentioned efforts to change the culture or even to redesign processes will run into the sand if the purpose or the performance gaps that need to be closed and the financial consequences of doing so are not clear. This means management seeing lean not just ...

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Michael Ballé: The leadership to learn to recognize the problems you create and lead the organization to solve them By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Thursday, February 25, 2010

There are reasons leadership gets stuck in a dysfunctional cycle. To get out of a bad-outcome pattern, you first have to admit to yourself that you will need to learn to dig yourself out of the hole. Sadly, I’ve met many leaders of companies in similar situations, and they are convinced that it’s a matter of making the right decisions and then executing ruthlessly. Unfortunately, they are blind to the fact that it is their very decision-making process (and not the big bad world out there) that delivers unsatisfying results. The decision-making framework assumes that 1) we already know all ...

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Art Smalley: Breaking the Dysfunctional Cycle By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Thursday, February 25, 2010

There are multiple parts to Professor Rob Austin's latest question so I am going to break it up and attempt to deal with the parts that struck me as most interesting in the paragraphs below. For starters Professor Austin would like to generally know what can Lean do about this type of situation which unfortunately  is typical whether it be in manufacturing or service type of operations. I hate to sound like a broken record but I always remind companies that we have to learn to first specify either what are the exact problems or ...

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Rob Austin: What advice can lean offer about breaking the dysfunctional cycle of “fire fighting”? How do you shift the focus from urgent rework to systematic improvement? By Robert Austin, co-author of Artful Making - Last updated: Thursday, February 25, 2010

Mike Rother: Making Improvement & Adaptiveness Part of Your Culture By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Saturday, February 20, 2010

Does lean ever become part of the culture? (Question by Jacques Chaize) As you point out in your question, Jacques, the task is not just to introduce new techniques, principles or solutions, but to establish a culture of continuous improvement, adaptation and innovation. Here's how I see the culture-change issue at the moment: Changing the culture requires changing mindset. Edgar Schein defines organization culture as the set of shared basic assumptions that operate unconsciously and govern behavior.  I think of culture as the personality or character of the organization. Organization culture, in turn, develops out of people’s mindset, which is a subconscious, ...

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Tom Johnson: Financial results such as revenue, cost, and profit are by-products of well-run human-focused processes By Thomas Johnson, co-author of Profit Beyond Measure - Last updated: Thursday, February 18, 2010

Dear “Lean Edge” Colleagues: The cause of Toyota’s current crisis is found, in my opinion, in its very recent surrender to Wall Street pressure to grow continuously, as virtually all large publicly-traded American businesses, including those that pursue “lean” practices, have attempted to do for the past 30 years or more.  Steady growth in size and scale presumably improves profitability by conferring increased control over market prices and decreased costs. Unfortunately, as Toyota has discovered, the strategy never works. The flaw in this finance-oriented growth strategy is the belief that profitability improves by taking steps aimed at increasing revenue and cutting costs.  ...

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Steve Spear: Overburdening the innovative capacity of the organization By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Friday, February 12, 2010

Dear Colleagues, What went wrong with Toyota is the flip side of what went right over so many decades. In the late 1950s or 1960s, Toyota was a pretty cruddy car company. The variety was meager, quality was poor, and their production efficiency was abysmal. Yet by the time they hit everyone’s radar in the 1980s, they had very high quality and unmatched productivity. The way they got there was by creating within Toyota exceptionally aggressive learning. They taught employees specialties, but more importantly, they taught people to pay very close attention to the “weak signals” the products and processes were sending ...

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Pascal Dennis: What is to be learned from Toyota now? By Pascal Dennis, Author of Getting The Right Things Done, Lean Production Simplified, and Andy & Me - Last updated: Thursday, February 11, 2010

What is to be learned from Toyota now? Let me suggest a chemical metaphor Leadership is the “enzyme” that catalyzes continuous problem solving. Companies that grow too fast, are unable to grow leaders quick enough. (I agree that it takes 10 years.) Conventional leaders fill open positions and dysfuntional mental models proliferate. Here are a few examples: I’m the boss — do as I say! Don’t make me look bad — (hide the problem)! Make the numbers — or else! Root cause — what’s that? Just make the problem go away! Conventional leaders also fail to see the value stream — the proverbial big picture. They ...

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Art Smalley: My Lesson from Director Nakamura By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Wednesday, February 10, 2010

I think the long term maintenance of any system is fairly difficult. In Toyota's case we are seeing that even very good companies can stumble and struggle to maintain their previous levels of performance. I don't know if the right analogy here is a fad diet as Jeff Liker alluded to or perhaps the 12 steps of AA? In either case as Michael points out the first step is establishing that there is a problem and being willing to talk about it. For all my time in Toyota I never really thought that Toyota's problem ...

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Michael Ballé: a “problems first” attitude is the key to sustaining learning leadership By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The first answer is leadership, the second leadership and the third… leadership. But a very special and specific kind of leadership. Of all the quirks of the lean thinking the one that has always fascinated me is “problems first.” In practice this means we are not so interested in successes (the right results from the right process) because there is nothing to learn there – we are only interested in problems, failures, and things that don’t work as expected, because there is much to learn. “Problems first” also means that any employee can come up to a manager and discuss ...

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Jeff liker: Can the Toyota Way become Self Sustaining? By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Wednesday, February 10, 2010

You have some overweight friends and even children who eat junk food and do not exercise.  You discover a new fitness program that is the perfect blend of exercise and diet.  You enjoy what you are eating and you feel better than ever in your life.  You wish to share the wealth and convince your children and friends to follow that fitness program.  You manage to convince them to come to a “blitz” event at the fitness center where they introduce the training regime and you have a healthy meal.  They will then prescribe a diet and schedule biweekly exercise.  ...

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Jacques Chaize: How is Lean to be Maintained in the Long Term? By Jacques Chaize, President of Danfoss Socla; co-founder of SOL-France; author of Quantum Leap - Last updated: Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Steve Spear: Lessons from Toyota’s stumble By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Monday, February 8, 2010

Long the quality and efficiency standard-setter, Toyota now has an ostrich-sized egg on its face — a problem with sticking accelerator pedals that led to global product recalls and a suspension of production and sales. There are important lessons to be learned from Toyota's stumble: Competitive success is fluid. It depends on continuously discovering better ways to do work. The capabilities to do this are powerful but fragile and need constant reinforcement. Relentless attention to their development can lead to great success; conversely, a loss in attention can have grave consequences. Please see the rest of the piece, "Learning from Toyota's Stumble http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/learning_from_toyotas_stumble.html I ...

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Dan Jones: Learning beyond Toyota By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Monday, February 8, 2010

Toyota’s impressive growth to become the largest vehicle manufacturer in the world undoubtedly gave the lean movement its unique strength. Organisations who try to follow Toyota’s example only have themselves to blame if they cannot make similar progress. They cannot claim that lean does not work, only that they have not yet fully understood what it entails. But Toyota’s example also means that the lean movement, unlike almost every other movement, was driven by practice and not theory. Indeed it was well over twenty years after the Toyota Production System was codified that Jim Womack and I described the theory and ...

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Mike Rother: What Did Toyota Lose Sight Of? By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Sunday, February 7, 2010

It seems likely that as it grew rapidly, Toyota has gotten off its own track. That is, in its day-to-day management Toyota has deviated too far from the methods and routines, the kata, that made it so successful over the last six decades. What Toyota may need to do -- it has said as much itself -- is to reapply its basic kata to get itself back on track.  And that very same kata is something that we still need to learn about, in regard to Toyota's approach. Click on the following link for a short elucidation:  "What Toyota Lost Sight Of" (enter ...

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Art Smalley – Still Lots to Learn from Toyota By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Friday, February 5, 2010

Tom Ehrenfeld asks that I not reflect on where Toyota went wrong. However it is difficult to answer his series of five questions without at least touching upon this topic at least tangentially. I will rephrase and order Tom's questions down below so that I can respond to them one by one from my point of view. Q1. What remains to be learned from this situation? I'd say a lot still remains to be learned. With respect to Toyota's quality problems the seeds in my opinion were planted in the mid 1990's when the company at least behind closed doors started talking ...

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Michael Ballé: A heroic “line stop” or has Toyota lost its way? Toyota’s unique contribution to management is collaborative problem solving, so Toyota is at its most interesting when it has problems! By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Sunday, January 31, 2010

There are two extreme ways of reading current Toyota events. From the lean perspective, Toyota is reacting to an exceedingly rare problem by stopping its sales, production and organizing its largest recall ever – regardless of the impact on its cherished quality reputation. Or in reading the press, the story is that the US government has finally forced Toyota to deal with a problem the company has been trying to fudge consistently and the accelerator issue is a red herring to divert attention and blame to a Canadian supplier from the real issue of sudden acceleration that Toyota has been ...

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Jeff Liker: Toyota Recall and the Lean Movement By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Saturday, January 30, 2010

According to some reports there have been issues of unintended acceleration over a decade and Toyota should have responded much earlier.  According to my Toyota sources they have reports of unintended acceleration all the time and need to focus on systematic causes that they can actually verify and fix.  When customers complain about unintended acceleration the dealers check a code on what they work on (e.g., fixed pedal) and then if there is some pattern (e.g., a larger than expected number) Toyota will investigate. When they investigated earlier incidents they were not finding specific engineering design problems but complex interactions ...

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Tom Ehrenfeld: What is to be learned from Toyota now? By Tom Ehrenfeld, author of The Startup Garden and A Leader's Study Guide To The Gold Mine - Last updated: Friday, January 29, 2010

Steve Spear: High Performance through High Velocity Discovery By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Monday, January 25, 2010

Dear Peter, Thanks so much for your question. A few points, elaborated on below. A: Success goes to those who improve and innovate most quickly and consistently. B: The ability to do so is rooted in core capabilities/disciplines that allow relentless discovery. C: Many managers are trained to think in terms of decisions, not discovery, thereby imperiling their ability to learn and improve continuously. A: High Performance through High Velocity Discovery In most sectors, even those with the most intense rivalry, there are standouts who achieve superlative performance by their ability to generate and then sustain improvement and innovation unmatched by breadth and speed. B: Disciplines of Discovery ...

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Art Smalley: 5 Levels of Mastery By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Sunday, January 17, 2010

Peter Senge asks a tough but fair question regarding discovery of the depth of the personal commitment it takes to lead successful change and how do you teach that reality. In all honesty I don't think any person or organization has discovered a bullet proof answer to this question. I know for a fact that Toyota struggles with this problem especially recently in their organization. Even back in the 1980's and 1990's internally many in Toyota were fretting about the fact it was growing too rapidly and that it was increasingly difficult to teach the next generation. Today the ...

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Jeff Liker: The Struggle to Inject Passion for Learning into Senior Executives By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Sunday, January 17, 2010

As one might expect from one of our most admired intellectual leaders of the learning organization movement, Peter Senge asks a penetrating, and in some ways painful question.  All of us who are writing for this lean blog are also lean advisors to organizations in some capacity.  We huff and we puff and we try to reorient the behavior and thinking of the organization to what we think of as the lean ideal.  In fact the one core principle that has brought us all together is that lean is about leadership and daily behavior, not a set of tools and ...

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Mike Rother: Learning to lead By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Friday, January 15, 2010

Thank you for your question, Peter. Generally speaking I currently coach leaders in practicing through three increasing levels of capability, in a behavior pattern I call the improvement kata.  The levels are awareness, able to do it, and able to coach it.  For some details on how, please see pages 243-6 in the book Toyota Kata (foreword by Tom Johnson!). --> Comment 1: "Discover," is the right word I think.  People can't learn how to lead such change from books, classroom training, etc.  They need to experience it for themselves, which means practicing.  Brain research backs this up.  We naturally prefer and reflexively ...

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Michael Ballé: Lean leadership is knowledge leadership – lean is for people with the ability to learn By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Friday, January 15, 2010

Lean is not always that hard. Sure it's work: difficult to think that any method  to perform better would not be. But more importantly, not all people take to it equally. A few find lean to be just work: challenging, but quite natural. Many will never get it. Peter Senge hits the nail right on the head as to the difficulties encountered with adopting the lean approach: 1) the learning component of lean is often underestimated, no matter how much the sensei insist upon it; 2) lean learning is based on acknowledging one’s mistakes and taking responsibility for the fact ...

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Peter Senge: In transformations such as the lean management movement suggests, how do you help people discover the depth of personal commitment it takes to lead such changes? By Peter Senge, Author of The Fifth Discipline - Last updated: Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Dan Jones: Goals and means to achieve superior performance By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Monday, January 11, 2010

Goals and means have to go together. Either one without the other does not lead to lasting improvements. To do this managers need to work together to dig down to the underlying root causes of the often vaguely defined performance gaps facing the organisation. Understanding these root causes helps everyone to focus on closing the vital few gaps that will make the biggest difference to the organisation, its customers and its employees. At which point someone can be given the responsibility for gaining agreement across the organisation using the evidence based, scientific method to implement and test the right countermeasures ...

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