Kaizen is often misunderstood as small ideas or isolated improvement events. In practice, Kaizen is a daily, people-centered approach to learning and improving work—supported by leadership, good systems, and psychological safety. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and real-world examples of Kaizen in action, across healthcare and other industries, with a consistent focus on leadership behaviors, respect for people, and learning from problems rather than hiding them.
Another email arrives about a potential podcast guest. I haven’t responded to the first pitch, but the sender wants to make sure it didn’t get lost in my inbox. A few days later, there’s another reminder. I don’t necessarily object…
When the door from the office area opened onto the production floor at Toyota’s plant in Durban, South Africa, I heard a familiar sound from other Toyota plants I’ve visited: the andon music. Earlier this month, before speaking at the…
I’ve been reading The Birth of Lean, a collection of talks and interviews with the people who helped build the Toyota Production System. One passage stood out because it explains something I had never seen described this clearly: Toyota copied…
Standardized work and kaizen are connected: one establishes the current method, and the other improves it. Toyota’s April 1992 booklet describes how the people doing the work participate in both. The 1992 Toyota booklet doesn’t see them as opposites. It…
The kaizen board held a couple dozen sheets. Each one numbered, each one stamped “jisshi-zumi” — already done. A board full of carried-out improvements is a strong sign in any factory, in any country. But that wasn’t the part that…
Twenty years ago this month, I recorded the first episode of Lean Blog Interviews. My guest was Norman Bodek, who spent decades studying Toyota and introducing American audiences to the work of people, including Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo. I’m…
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…
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,…
Nearly two million improvement proposals in a single year. Ninety-seven percent implemented. That doesn’t sound like the suggestion-box model most organizations know. It sounds like something else. The number comes from Toyota’s April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” It…
Somewhere along the way in my career, someone handed me a copy of “The Toyota Production System,” published by Toyota Motor Corporation in April 1992. I don’t remember who gave it to me. The document itself is unassuming – a…
TL;DR: Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy is a useful provocation for Lean practitioners. Lean already knows how to test small, low-cost ideas without demanding an airtight ROI in advance. We sometimes forget. A Small Idea, Quietly Killed A few years ago, I…
In July 2006, I pressed record on a conversation with Norm Bodek. The audio quality was poor. I had no idea what I was doing. Norman, who had spent decades going to Japan and had published Ohno and Shingo in…
