This week's episode of the “My Favorite Mistake” podcast features Mike Kaeding, the CEO of a company, Norhart, that designs, builds, and rents apartments.
They are transforming the way this is done by incorporating technologies and techniques that have revolutionized other industries. This has resulted in improved quality and reduced cost of housing. Ultimately, they are committed to solving America's housing shortage and affordability crisis. And in doing so they hope to improve the way we all live.
Their mission and vision sound sort of Toyota-like?
That might be one reason Toyota's TSSC organization is helping Mike and Norhart, and that's one of the secondary topics in this episode. We also recently recorded an episode of my Lean podcast where we dive deeper into Lean and TPS. Subscribe to make sure you don't miss it.
Here is a recent article about the way TSSC helps manufacturers. Says TSSC's Jamie Bonini:
“‘Lean' has come to mean different things to different people,” he continued. “But this is what we mean by a Toyota production system: an organization-wide culture of highly engaged people who are solving problems and innovating to drive performance.”
“When we work with a company, [our solution is] customized; it's highly situational. What we're trying to build in an organization is a culture. And to build it, it has to be nurtured, fortified. That's why we like these longer-term engagements.”
Below the video, I'll share a summary of the part of episode that's related to Toyota and TSSC.
CEO Mike Kaeding Learned That Paying to Hire the Best Was Worth the Investment
Kaeding described how Norhart applies lessons from manufacturing to construction — an industry where labor productivity has barely moved in 60 years, while manufacturing improved by 760% and agriculture by 1,500% over the same period.
One example: Norhart's teams shift through a building every five hours, with a finished apartment unit coming off the end of the line at that pace. That single change took a 15-month project down to nine months.
The Toyota connection came naturally. Kaeding reached out to TSSC, and after a months-long evaluation process — where both sides assessed cultural fit and readiness — the partnership began.
At the time of recording, TSSC was on-site for a week every month. Kaeding said the biggest lesson from a recent meeting with Toyota executives was about culture: you can bring people in to improve something, and then they leave, and things revert. The real work is changing how everyone thinks so that improvement becomes embedded in how the organization operates.
That cultural fit matters to TSSC. As Kaeding put it, Toyota is open to working with companies, but the engagement will not be effective without the right people and a genuine willingness to change. Norhart was in talks to become one of TSSC's showcase sites — a reference for how these principles can spread into the construction industry.
TSSC's track record spans manufacturers, food banks, healthcare systems, disaster recovery, and more. What connects these engagements is not the industry but the approach: coaching methodology and building capability, not coming in as the idea people.
