Lean Blog

On a factory table in Japan, in December 2019, there was a binder. White cover, the word KAIZEN in big orange letters, a photo of cherry blossoms underneath. Inside the front cover, someone had printed a word cloud — IMPROVEMENT, DEMING, PDCA, TOYOTA — and a hand-drawn PDCA with a finger pointing at it. Someone had put real care into the cover. This was not a binder shoved in...

A founder's quote, in passing, about getting your hands dirty three times a day. A single sentence about top executives visiting plants and acting on what they see. That's most of what the 1992 booklet says about leadership. For a forty-page document about a production system the world spent the next thirty years trying to copy, that's a remarkably thin treatment of the peopl...

It came across my LinkedIn feed again last week, and then a day later, a friend sent me the same thing from Instagram. Same story, a few words moved around, or copied word-for-word. If you spend any time in Lean or operations circles online, you have probably seen this Taiichi Ohno 1981 story more than once yourself. I have stopped counting. I haven't stopped being annoyed. T...

The Sign on the Wall Was a Confession Two staff members are repositioning a patient by hand. The lift assist that's supposed to be used for this — the equipment the hospital bought specifically so nobody does it this way — is sitting in a closet on a different floor. If you lead this unit and you walk in on that, something flares in you. You bought the equipment. You wrote th...

I was re-reading The Birth of Lean, the Lean Enterprise Institute's collection of interviews with the people who built the Toyota Production System, and one answer from Eiji Toyoda is worth quoting in full. This is Eiji Toyoda on mistakes, and on what gets lost when we don't write them down. He led Toyota as president and then chairman, and oversaw the rise of that system fro...