Twenty years ago, on July 16, 2006, the Lean Blog Podcast began with a conversation with Norman Bodek. Norman was my friend and mentor–and the person who suggested that I start doing audio interviews in the first place. What began…
Sean Dow was on the 22nd floor of a Manhattan high-rise last week, working on the building’s sprinkler system, when he noticed something wrong with the concrete slab: cracks where cracks don’t belong. He went down a floor to get…
Someone walks into your office and says, “We have a problem.” Notice what your body does before your brain catches up. A small tightening. A breath you take to steady yourself. Maybe your face does something you didn’t authorize. All…
On a factory table in Japan, in December 2019, there was a binder. White cover, the word KAIZEN in big orange letters, a photo of cherry blossoms underneath. Inside the front cover, someone had printed a word cloud — IMPROVEMENT,…
Blog What Toyota’s 1992 Booklet Leaves Out About Leadership ByMark Graban July 8, 2026 Comment (0) 36 The 1992 Toyota booklet says surprisingly little about leadership. There’s a Kiichiro Toyoda quote… Read More Blog The Taiichi Ohno 1981 Story Keeps…
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…
No. The claim that “Lean is for speed and Six Sigma is for quality” misrepresents both methodologies. Lean — based on the Toyota Production System — improves safety, quality, delivery, cost, and morale (SQDCM) together, with built-in quality (jidoka) as…
I was reading The Birth of Lean, the Lean Enterprise Institute’s collection of interviews with the people who built the Toyota Production System, and one answer from Eiji Toyoda is worth quoting in full. This is Eiji Toyoda on mistakes,…
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:…
Why does Lean fail to stick so often? Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant join me on Episode 547 to make the case that the missing precondition is psychological safety, and that it has to exist at the top before any…
102 seconds versus 300 seconds. That’s the comparison the 1992 booklet uses to make the case for one-piece flow. Three employees on an assembly line. Three processing steps. Same work, same number of people, same total processing time. The only…
If you’ve read much of my work, you know I keep circling the same question: why do smart, capable people hold back what they know? Sometimes they stay quiet because they tried speaking up once and got burned. Sometimes a…
