Norman Bodek is once again back for episode #47 of the LeanBlog Podcast. Today, he shares insights from his 68th study trip to Japan. Norman reflects on decades of visiting Toyota and contrasts what he saw there with Canon's groundbreaking approach to cellular manufacturing and skill development.
Key themes from our conversation:
- Toyota's strengths and limits: What Norman saw at the Lexus Tahara plant–and why even Toyota still struggles with waste on the final assembly line.
- Canon's “supermeisters”: How Canon developed highly skilled workers capable of building entire copiers, and why Norman sees this as potentially “leapfrogging Toyota.”
- Respect for people in practice: Why the phrase “work smarter, not harder” misleads, and what real investment in people looks like.
- History and context: From Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford to Toyota's Just-in-Time system–how work design has evolved and where it still needs to go.
- Quality of work life: Why so many employees say they “hate their jobs,” and how idea systems and skill development can restore pride and enjoyment in work.
Norman also shares memorable stories of Taiichi Ohno, Shigeo Shingo, and Toyota's leadership culture, while raising a bold question: What will it take for companies outside Japan to truly leapfrog Toyota?
For earlier episodes, visit the main Podcast page, which includes information on how to subscribe via RSS or via Apple Podcasts.
Episode #47 Key Words and Links:
- Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way, recommended by Norman for its discussion of the “respect for people” principle.
- Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford as the fathers of modern industrial engineering — and repetitive work, as opposed to people being master craftsmen. This repetitive work created income for workers who were uneducated, even “if the work was denigrating, boring, and tedious”
- Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations, by Alan Robinson
- Do 60 or 80% of people “hate” their job? How can we help people enjoy their work?
- What is a “supermeister” in a Canon factory?
Transcript
Norman Bodek:
Welcome to the Lean Blog Podcast.
Adam Grimwood:
Visit our website at www.leanblog.org. Now, here's your host, Mark Graban.
Mark Graban:
Hi, this is Mark Graban. You're listening to episode number 47 of the Lean Blog Podcast. It is June 23, 2008. Our guest today once again is our good friend Norman Bodek, who's going to be talking about his most recent trip to Japan. For more information and links about this podcast, you can visit leanblog.org and find the post page for episode number 47. As always, thanks for listening.
Well, Norman, it's been some time, but it's great to have you back here with us on the Lean Blog Podcast.
Norman Bodek:
Thank you very much, Mark. It's always my pleasure.
Mark Graban:
So I understand that you recently came back from another trip to Japan, your 68th trip over there over these years. So I'm happy you're here with us and curious to hear what you wanted to share about what you saw on that most recent trip.
Norman Bodek:
Thank you. These trips, I've been doing them since 1981. They're miraculous. I mean, those of you that know about me, I found so many of what we call the Lean tools, and it's sort of the miracle in my life. Not that I created any of this, but somehow I have the talent to find it and to recognize these geniuses and then to publish their material in English and to share it with the rest of the world outside of Japan.
Well, I went over in April. It was sponsored by the Institute of Lean Systems, which is really a fabulous consulting group. They asked me to lead a study mission for them. And it wasn't very easy. It's a real challenge to do this, but it's probably, for me personally, it's the best learning experience of my life, is to do this.
And also for the travelers. I'm always amazed why more Americans don't go to Japan on study missions. In the past, I mean, Japan, which was literally destroyed after World War II, and they looked at us as their guardian angel. And tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Japanese with very little money came to America to study everything about our businesses. And then they went back and they did the best to replicate it, to copy us, and then to make incredible creative improvements.
I mean, such as Toyota. Toyota was, you know, I don't know how much of the factories were destroyed, but at the end of World War II, they thought that MacArthur was not going to let them make trucks and cars again, that they were going to have to make bean paste. Bean paste is used in Japanese sweets. But MacArthur insisted, “You go back and make your trucks and your cars.” And they did.
And with very little money and lots of problems, slowly, through continuous improvement, they created this amazing monster. In a positive sense, they created this organization which is one of the richest companies in the world today and making more cars than General Motors. And so on this trip, I did not know what to expect. It was very hard to set up. About 20 people joined me.
Maybe half came from Australia and half came from America. And it was a fabulous experience. I think of all those that I've taken, this was probably the best, the best by far. And I'll try to share what I learned. That is, to me, so powerful, that should make a dynamic shift for many companies in the world. What I've been struggling with in the last, say, six months, is how can we leapfrog Toyota? I mean, they're so far ahead in so many ways with these Just-in-Time systems. I keynoted the Shingo Prize conference in April, and I asked about 500 people in the audience, “How many of your companies are attempting to be Lean?” and Mark, all the hands went up.
And then I said to them, “Well, how many of you think you are Lean?” Not one hand went up. Not one of the 500 went up. So what is Toyota doing? And is it possible to leapfrog them?
And that's been my quest. Toyota leapfrogged America somehow, leapfrogged General Motors and Ford slowly but meticulously as they move forward, and especially using their, what we know as the Toyota Production System, or Just-in-Time, or what we call Lean, right? So I was very fortunate this time. It was not very easy for me, but I was accepted at the Toyota Tahara plant. And at that plant, they manufacture the new Lexus.
And we were able to go in and see the SUVs being built. And they built maybe four or five models on the same line, some for Lexus, some just for Toyota. I am walking along and this was the epiphany, the moment of awakening. I look at a worker, and this worker is installing maybe eight to 10 bolts.
And it's very hard work because the car is above him. It's not tilted to the side, it's above him. And it was very hard work. And his takt time was 60 seconds, which means Toyota makes approximately 500 of those SUVs in a day. And in order to stay on schedule, they established this takt time of 60 seconds.
And then the whole manufacturing process is wrapped around that takt time of 60 seconds, including this man who has about 60 seconds to install and tighten those eight to 10 bolts. Then I walked over to him, I couldn't talk to him, but there was a supervisor there, and I asked him through an interpreter, “Does he rotate?” He said, “No, no, he doesn't rotate. He's going to do that all day.” And I said, “Well, for how long?”
He said, “Well, maybe the next three to six months he'll do the same job.” Now, that really shocked me in many ways, you know, because recently I read a wonderful book by Liker and Hoseus. Excellent book. I recommend it to everyone, and it's called Toyota Culture. I liked that.
I liked his other books, but I like this by far the best. And the essence of the book, Toyota Culture, is that what Toyota does uniquely is a second pillar, which is called respect for people. This is what's really missing in America. We're all installing the tools, but very few understand what respect for people is all about. So if you read the book, you see the essence of Liker and Hoseus' focal point is the development of people, development of people's skills. And as you develop people's skills, that's the way you really give them respect. You know, the old saying is you can, you know, you can feed somebody or you can teach somebody to feed themselves. And which is more powerful? Of course, teaching people to feed themselves. So I read this wonderful book.
I go to Japan and I've been to Toyota 35 times in my life, something like that. But I never stopped to think about what I saw. I mean, sure, I've been thinking about it, I've been writing about it, but there's very little I knew what you could do to change the essence of work. I mean, if we go back to Frederick Taylor, father of industrial engineering, and you go back to Henry Ford, they created, especially Henry Ford created the modern manufacturing mass production. And when he set up his assembly line, the worker would stand and do the exact same thing over and over again.
When we go back to the 1800s, I wasn't there, but I assumed from my reading that a carpenter was able to make an entire table on his own. As a young man, the carpenter would apprentice with a master and slowly, over a six-year period, they would learn to become a master on their own. And so they could do virtually anything in the field of carpentry. And that to me sounds very exciting and very wonderful to build your skills and then to apply it in life. Now, Henry Ford set up this mass production and it did wonderful things, wasn't negative, did wonderful things because it made Ford the most successful company in the world and it gave the worker a living.
And most of these workers were immigrants. Many of them could not even speak English and they had families to feed. And then Henry Ford did an amazing thing as he doubled their salary, you know, giving them a great sense of dignity even though the work itself was denigrating, the work itself, do you know what I mean, was boring and tedious. In fact, a friend of mine, Alan Robinson, who's a professor at University of Massachusetts and wrote the book Ideas Are Free, was speaking to him last week and he mentioned that he stays in touch with all of his former students, about 35,000 of them.
Takes a survey of a base of them and what they said: 60% of them said, “I hate work, I hate my job.”
Mark Graban:
Yeah, that's sad.
Norman Bodek:
And then I sent another letter back. I said, “Alan, is that figure correct? 60%?” He said, “Well, I'm not sure what I said, Norman, but I saw a study in England where it said 80% hate their job.” When I keynote a conference, I ask the audience, “What's the favorite day of the week?”
And almost everybody says Friday or Saturday. Almost nobody says Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. So in essence, you know, we go to work without the love of work. Okay, this is my preface to what I discovered. Then I go to Canon Camera.
Norman Bodek:
And this is what is explosive. This is what is revolutionary. This is what I believe we can leapfrog Toyota. Talk about that in a second. If we go back to Toyota, to this factory.
This is amazing. Toyota's coming from Ohno and Shingo. The focal point was Just-in-Time and TPS or Lean was the elimination of all non-value-adding waste. And we defined these wastes. The first waste for Ohno was inventory.
That was the biggest one that he attacked was inventory. And whenever I met Ohno on my frequent trips to Japan, he would give the same lecture as he would show a picture of a river and then underneath the river was considered to be inventory. And inventory would cover all of the waste, machine failures, people not skilled, defects, et cetera. And then he said what he did at Toyota was just to lower the river slowly and allow some of those peaks to pop up. And then they would attack them.
Okay? Ohno died many years ago. And then even though Toyota attacked these wastes, they called seven wastes. And then I added two. But the seven wastes, most of us know about those seven, and one of those seven is inventory.
Well, when you walk along, when I walked along and saw this final assembly line, see, Toyota has, in the machining sections, they have cells, cellular manufacturing, which is what we've tried to copy over here. But in the final area, building the final car, it's on a conveyor belt, okay? And inherently there's a tremendous amount of waste in a conveyor belt. Tremendous waste in a conveyor belt. For many reasons, people have to wait pretty much for each other.
Their time to takt time, right? If somebody is fast, they just have to wait, right? That's one thing. The other thing, in the conveyor belt system at Toyota, there's a tremendous amount of inventory. I mean, Ohno probably is rolling over.
You can look up and you'll see the way it's designed. The cars, many of the cars are on hooks, you know, and many of the cars are not being worked on as they move from area to area. When they come down to the final assembly part, then you'll see one car and a group of workers working on those cars one at a time. But prior to that, there's a lot of waste of cars in the process. And then Mr. Cho comes along because he didn't like the idea of the whole factory stopping.
Mark Graban:
Sure.
Norman Bodek:
When somebody pulled the Andon cord. And so he put buffers. Now, I know he did this in Georgetown. I'm not sure if he did this in Tahara. I didn't ask and I didn't see it, but I know he did it in Georgetown where he put… so somebody, you know, pulls the cord, only about 15 people stop. And there's like three cars of buffer between. Okay, so the enormous amount of waste still exists at Toyota. In fact, the present chairman of Toyota just said this week that Toyota has to take out a lot of the waste.
So he's going to focus on what can they do to substantially reduce costs. And I think that he can. Okay, this is all in preface to the next step, which I think is amazing, is at Canon. I visited a Canon plant. Probably the best plant I've ever seen of the 280 plants I've probably seen in my life in Japan.
Yeah. At Canon, we come to the first cell, and I'm seeing a man assembling a copier. And I asked the guide, “What's the takt time?” And the guide said, “The takt time there is 30 minutes,” which means this particular man, right, has 30 minutes to complete his job or complete that part of the copier that he's working on, right? That means he has to install by memory, you know, 100 or so parts.
Mark Graban:
That sounds more like building a table.
Norman Bodek:
Yeah, that's more like building a table. You're absolutely right. Look at the skill, right? That this man. Look at the education, the training that had to go into this man, to know how to in sequence.
And they're not looking at any manuals or anything. They have all this in memory and they're building that copier. And I'm told from Canon, number one, because they used to have an assembly line. I was in that plant years ago, and there was a final assembly line, a final conveyor belt. And they don't have that anymore.
They learned from Toyota. They learned from the Toyota system and established the cells. And he said it only took them two months to increase productivity when they went to the cellular manufacturing over the conveyor belt, two months. So they've increased productivity, number one, because you see, we went from the carpenter of the 1800s to the Ford assembly line to increase productivity, which they did. Now in the 2000s, Canon has determined that they can go back to the skills, building skill sets for people, right, and also be highly productive at the same time.
And producing that product with a very high level of quality. They call these people, the ones that really develop their skills to the fullest. They call them supermeisters. Meister is a German word meaning master. There is one lady. No, there is eight of them in that plant, I believe. Eight or nine that are called supermeisters.
Mark Graban:
Okay, so this isn't every employee. This is…
Norman Bodek:
No, every employee's skill level is built up, up, up, up, up. Okay. Right. So I don't know what the takt time is with everybody on that plant. It was a very big plant.
You know, three, 400. I mean, three or four football fields in size. It was very large. So I don't know what everyone is doing, but the people that I saw, their takt time was somewhere around 30 minutes or more. And these supermeisters could build a copier in four hours on themselves.
That's from… I don't know… that's from 3,000 to 5,000 parts that they could build, assemble. Not the machining, but they can assemble on their own without even referring to a manual. I tell you, this is incredible.
Mark Graban:
It flies in the face of what most people are taught about efficiency.
Norman Bodek:
Right? Yeah. Why this is so beautiful, Mark. And this is one of the areas that I've always was interested in: the quality of work life. It's why I asked them what day of the week that you like.
And I was hopeful that using Quick and Easy Kaizen and getting lots of ideas from people, then people through their ideas would begin to change their own quality of work life. And they would find work so much more interesting. And as they implement their own ideas… why American companies don't do this, that's another thing. I mean, The New Yorker last week, a week ago, had a wonderful article on the financial page where it said that the average company in Japan gets 100 times the number of suggestions that American companies get. And the average Japanese company saves about $333 per suggestion.
That's about $4,000 a year per worker from their ideas. And American companies don't do this. We run to China to save money. And we don't open this incredible resource that's in the minds of all of the people that work for us. Now, the quality of work life in this plant, Canon, was the best I've ever seen in the world by far, and in so many ways.
First of all, the plant was spotless. You know, for a factory, it was super clean. It sparkled. It was well lit. Another thing is the plant was noiseless.
Mark Graban:
Silent.
Norman Bodek:
Yeah. They took all of the tools and scientifically took the drills, etc., and somehow took out the noise. And you go to any other factory, most of the factories I go to, they say, “Look Norman, here's a pair of earplugs.” Instead of attacking the noise in the machines, they say, “Wear earplugs.”
And a lot of people don't like earplugs and they don't wear them. And eventually when they reach my age, they're deaf. You see the American unionism and they're getting clobbered. They're really getting clobbered. And I'm not saying that they deserve it in a certain sense because American unions said the following: “We want workers to work smarter, not harder.” And that's their downfall. Because number one, working smarter… they never forced companies to teach workers how to work smarter. Except if you were a trade union. I mean if you were an electrician or carpenter, the unions were very good and they did high-level teaching to those trades.
But when you go to the big unions, the automotive unions especially, they would say, “Work smarter and not harder.” And they put people into become drones doing the same thing over and over and over and over again in their whole life. I mean, I was at one plant, an Oldsmobile plant. I wrote this in my book Kaikaku, which is I looked at one man doing repetitive work and I turned to the guide and I said to the guide, “How long is he going to do that?” He said, “I don't know how long he's going to do it.
But we had one man in this plant for 43 years and all he did was put a tire on a hook. That's all he did, pick up a tire, put it on the hook and the hook would take the tire to the line. The irony of the story is that this particular worker only collected two retirement checks. He died within one month of retiring. So, “Work harder and not work smarter.” The unions never insisted on that. The companies educate the workers and “not harder” is baloney. We have to work harder in order to survive in this world. If we're going to compete with the Indians and the Chinese and the Koreans, we got to work our tails off. Not necessarily in hours.
I don't think we have to put more hours in, but we have to work harder to learn, to develop skills. So now so many of the high-skilled jobs are going to India or going to China. What are we left with? What are we left with? We're left with McDonald's and service industries, and people make a fraction less than they made on the factory floors.
I think we're into something astronomical. I think that what Canon is doing, if we can emulate it, if we can get American companies to start to invest and you know, you ask people, “What's your most important asset?” What do they say?
Mark Graban:
I mean, the cliché is to say “our people.”
Norman Bodek:
Right, of course, “your people.” But they don't invest in these assets and they get rid of them. I think what I saw at the Canon plant is revolutionary. It's explosive. The Wall Street Journal mentioned it.
Also this week The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article talking about what Japan is doing to confront not sending everything to China, how they're keeping their skill base and building more factories in Japan and how to develop talent. Of course, Japan has made a dynamic shift to part-time labor. When part-time labor used to be maybe 5 to 10% of the company, some companies I visited, part-time labor was up to 50%. Yeah, yeah.
So they're using that. One is the one that they're using part-time labor. And secondly, I saw that they're all rushing to automate. I mean, really rushing to automate. Because if I can automate, then I don't have to worry about China. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Mark, we're into something fantastic and you're the first person that I'm sharing it with. I'm writing a story for superfactory.com and I'm going to include what we're talking about in that story. But you and I have to do more work in this area to teach, especially as consultants. We have to teach American companies the advantages of continuously educating our people. Right, right.
Toyota wants everybody to be an engineer. They don't do it yet. And also, you know, I'm not faulting Toyota because they're in transition. You know, I'm sure within five years they will have corrected all of these problems and they'll be more like Canon. Because we're taking time to get there.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Because when you describe that person doing the same eight bolts over and over again, that doesn't necessarily sound like a learning culture or investing in people. So hopefully…
Norman Bodek:
Well, but you see, they do. I mean, Mark, they do. I don't want to be misleading in this. Toyota probably invests in their people more than anyone else.
But those that really get a chance to take advantage of this is when they reach the level of team leader, when they reach a level of team leader or group leader, then they could use the vast base of knowledge that Toyota has poured into them, but the average worker… and it could take, you know, it could take seven to 10 years, take seven years maybe to become a team leader in Japan. Not an easy jump. I think it's quicker in the United States. Georgetown. Maybe take four years at Georgetown.
At least it has been traditionally to maybe become a team leader. Then once you're a team leader, you're making a lot of decisions and then you are training people in very, you know, multiple skill sets. And Toyota and Georgetown does rotate every two hours. And I was shocked that they didn't do that in Japan.
Mark Graban:
Well, because it seems like the idea of involving everybody would include the frontline production workers, not just group leaders and team leaders, I guess in a…
Norman Bodek:
Well, you know what I'm saying, Mark? I think that these people are educated, but many of them are not given the opportunity to use that skill. If they work in a machine shop, then I think they have an opportunity to use more of those skills. Right. But not on the final assembly line.
So they got a couple of thousand people at each of these plants which pretty much function like robots. And I hope that will change soon. Canon has done it. Canon is brilliant. The funny thing in that plant, this is the funny joke, is the only noise that I really heard was a Toyota forklift.
And I visited Toyota forklift too. I visited that company and it was… we had a brilliant visit to there. Really brilliant. I mean, they were teaching us how they do training and it was just wonderful to look at how they do train. I have at least two other brilliant stories that you're going to have to call me back on. Okay. Really brilliant. I want to talk… I met…
We met on this trip an ex-Toyota plant manager. And it was absolutely wonderful. And of course, what I love, for one of the things I really loved, I mean, he was just brilliant. But what I loved is he worked personally with Cho, current chairman, and he worked also with Ohno and Shingo for a number of years. And he said the following.
So I'll give you a little hint. He said the following about Ohno: Ohno, you know, was brilliant on the factory floor. So Ohno came to the factory floor each day to move his concepts forward. And of course he was a brilliant, brilliant teacher. Shingo, on the other hand, taught Toyota industrial engineering, taught Toyota problem-solving techniques.
And Shingo was the prime person to spread JIT throughout Toyota. He was the prime person to spread it throughout Toyota. Ohno worked on the factory floor, discovering and working daily with it. And Shingo was this great consultant that would come to Toyota and to teach. Just before Shingo died, I said to Shingo, “Who invented Just-in-Time?” Shingo said, “I did. I was Ohno's teacher.” And I also said the same thing. I asked the same question to other people that worked with both Shingo and Ohno, both top managers. In fact, one of the most successful managers in the world today is Michael from Shingijutsu, and he told me that which came first, the chicken or the egg?
So thank you, Mark. We'll talk again soon about what I learned from this ex-Toyota plant manager. And I also want to talk about what I learned from one of the top Toyota suppliers. And it's absolutely brilliant. People are just going to have to wait for the next installment.
Mark Graban:
Oh, great.
Norman Bodek:
Okay, great. Thanks an awful lot, Mark, and enjoy the weekend. Bye.
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