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…
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…
There’s a hospital somewhere this quarter presenting a labor efficiency story to its board. A unit that used to have a dedicated charge nurse now has a “Working Charge Nurse” – someone who takes patients and runs the unit. The…
Ford spends roughly $100,000 a year on each of its first-line production supervisors. The title on the job posting is “Process Coach” – language borrowed directly from Lean thinking. The role description talks about Sounds great, right? Online job board…
Jamie Bonini described a person who looks like 25% overhead to a finance team — but without whom the entire Toyota Production System falls apart. Bonini is the vice president of Toyota’s Production System Support Center (TSSC), which has spent…
