Lesa Nichols worked closely with Hajime Oba at Toyota’s Supplier Support Center (TSSC) and later became a production manager at Toyota’s powertrain plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. In this episode, she shares lessons from Mr. Oba on overburden, learning from mistakes,…
Joining me for Episode #397 is Hide Oba. His father was the late Hajime Oba, famous for his work at Toyota and the TSSC, as Steve Spear and I discussed back in Episode #386. Hide worked with his father at…
I’ve seen a number of people post on LinkedIn about the passing of the legendary “Mr. Oba” of Toyota (sometimes spelled “Mr. Ohba”) — Hajime Oba passed away on September 4th, in Connecticut. I’ve heard many stories from people who…
Last week at the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, I really enjoyed the presentation by Jamie Bonini, General Manager of the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC). Jamie started his career at Chrysler (where he knew Jamie Flinchbaugh, a good friend…
When I was a young engineer at GM’s Livonia Engine Plant in the mid-1990s, I wrote down some of the things production workers said to me. One of them stuck, a worker in a machining department: “I want to stop…
For years, I’ve been asking a very specific question about Lean history: Where was Toyota’s first andon cord? Jeff Liker didn’t know. Neither did Isao Yoshino. I’ve asked other former Toyota people. Toyota histories and books about the development of…
A nurse executive posted on LinkedIn this week about what she called “assembly-line medicine.” She was describing an ambulatory surgery center where she once worked, where physicians booked roughly 80 percent of the day’s procedures into a six-hour window. Then…
The 1992 Toyota booklet says surprisingly little about leadership. There’s a Kiichiro Toyoda quote about engineers getting their hands dirty. There’s a brief sentence about executives visiting the workplace and acting on what they see. That’s about it. For a…
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…
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:…
Gary Peterson spent almost 40 years helping O.C. Tanner build a continuous improvement culture, work that earned the company the Shingo Prize in 1999. He joins me to talk about psychological safety, autonomy, leading change from the middle, and the…
Picking up the thread from the previous post on Toyota’s April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” This one’s about the line-stop rope or andon cord. The booklet describes the mechanism with care. From the jidoka section: “The ‘fixed-position stop…