Toyota is often cited as the inspiration for Lean, but its success is rooted in leadership behaviors, management systems, and a deep commitment to learning—not tools or slogans. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on Toyota’s approach to quality, continuous improvement, psychological safety, and respect for people. Many of these posts explore what leaders outside Toyota often misunderstand—and what truly matters if they hope to learn from Toyota rather than copy it.
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 rereading Takehiko Harada’s book Management Lessons from Taiichi Ohno. Harada joined Toyota Motor Corporation in 1968 and spent about four decades there, including time as project general manager of the Operations Management Consulting Division, the group Toyota used…
Somebody says it in the comments of nearly every post about Lean, usually with a few exclamation points. “Toyota doesn’t call it Lean!” It gets offered as if it settles the matter. I’ve said a version of it myself. Talking…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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:…
