tl;dr: The andon cord isn’t a tool–it’s a trust signal. Toyota’s thousands of line stops reflect psychological safety and leadership support. Ford’s rare pulls reflected fear and mistrust. Lean succeeds or fails on culture, not mechanics. In 2007, a BBC…
From 0 to 60 to World Domination – New York Times More from Sunday’s long NY Times piece… We’re used to Jeff Liker saying good things about Toyota, but also Bill Gates? “It’s influencing just about every major company in…
Here is Episode #18 of the LeanBlog Podcast. My guest today is Eric Christiansen, the President of a translation services company, OmniLingua (more can be found here on their philosophy as a company, being a self-described “Deming Company.”) I was…
Business Report – Toyota’s gold standard status at top of quality pile takes a knock on 500 000 recalls: Here’s an article that examines if Toyota’s quality is slipping or not. This detail was interesting for some perspective on Toyota’s…
LeanBlog Podcast #17 is a discussion with a good friend of the Lean Blog, David Meier, a former Toyota Georgetown Group Leader, founder of Lean Associates, and the co-author of the excellent book, The Toyota Way Fieldbook, and the upcoming…
Lean Blog: Misunderstandings About Value Stream Mapping, Flow Analysis, and Takt Time The link above is my first blog post, from January 2005 (back when the blog looked like this). I let the blog “birthday” slip by again this year.…
Thanks to Pete for findng this and sending it my way. This link takes you to an animation thats apparently produced for Toyota Sweden. Here is the animation with English subtitles (you can view this with or without sound). The…
Mulally Pans `Paranoid’ Ford, Pushes Toyota-Style Production I criticized Alan Mulally earlier, via my criticism of Boeing. To be clear: I respect Mulally. I am really rooting for Alan Mulally. Mulally is such an outspoken promoter of the Toyota Production…
Lots of Toyota news with the new Tundra and the Detroit Auto Show going on:Toyota Enters the Auto Show With a Swagger (NY Times)From the article: No longer does Toyota fear the reaction it faced as recently as the 1990s,…
Are you working on the True Problem? Lean Blogger David Meier tipped me off to this interesting post about root cause problem solving, an example inspired by the book he co-authored with Jeff Liker, The Toyota Way Fieldbook. Check out…
As you may know, if you’re a regular Lean Blog reader, this isn’t a solo venture. I’m happy to have other bloggers on the site and I’m happy to add one more: David Meier, co-author of the outstanding book The…
How to Fix a Broken Bicycle Chain – WikiHow Here is a WSJ article on WikiHow, printed today. Standardized Work is a core concept and a foundation of the Toyota Production System (scroll down) and Lean Manufacturing. The idea is…
