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 wha...
LinkedIn has a genre of infographic that's very popular right now… that's mostly right. You've perhaps seen them. A clean illustration of a Toyota assembly line, a worker reaching up for a cord, and a caption along the lines of: “At Toyota, ANY worke...
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Why does Lean fail to stick so often? Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant join me on Episode 547 to make the case that the missing precondition is psychological safety, and that it has to exist at the top before any Lean rollout ever begins. Scroll down...
Nearly two million improvement proposals in a single year. Ninety-seven percent implemented. That doesn't sound like the suggestion-box model most organizations know. It sounds like something else. The number comes from Toyota's April 1992 publicatio...
The target printed on the chart was zero percent. The red line had never been near zero. Not in the nine months posted on the wall, and probably not in any month before them. It sat between 6.43% and 6.98%. Every month, someone updated it. And every...
Picture your best week as a leader. Every meeting ran on time. Every status update was green. You walked the floor and people smiled and told you things were going great. Your open-door policy was working beautifully, because employees kept walking t...
The Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :Three years ago, my book "The Mistakes That Make Us" came out. Around the same time, Elisabeth Swan published "Picture Yourself a Leader." Two diff...
The Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :I haven't mentioned this here yet, but I'm writing a new book. It's a practical guide for Lean leaders on psychological safety -- why so many impro...
The Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :There's a limit to what you can learn about the Toyota Production System from books, courses, and conferences. I say that as someone who writes the...
The Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :I'm giving away 10 free quarters of the Lean Hospitals AI Coach. Here's how to get one.If you own a copy of Lean Hospitals -- any edition, any lang...
The Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :Here's something odd about AI coaching tools: they're all trained to be maximally helpful, which means the moment you ask a question, they give you...
