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.
I’m in my home town of Livonia, Michigan this week, having arrived to the snow and cold yesterday, staying through Thursday. Boy, my blood has really “thinned out” from 15 years of mostly living in Texas or Arizona. I made…
I had a chance to go back to the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas (TMMTX) plant in south San Antonio last week with a group of executive education students at Trinity University. I first visited the plant back in 2010 and…
Since the “Lean” in the “Lean Startup” methodology basically comes from Toyota, it was fascinating to see two engineers from Toyota, Matt Kresse and Vinuth Rai, speak at the 2013 Lean Startup Conference. Matt and Vinuth (pictured below) are from…
The Philadelphia Eagles are playing in an NFL playoff matchup tonight against the New Orleans Saints. I’d admired Eagles head coach Chip Kelly and his somewhat unlikely rise through the coaching ranks. He’s well known from his successful stint at…
I was able to tour the NUMMI factory in 2005, which I really enjoyed (see my series of blog posts here). NUMMI was, of course, a joint venture between Toyota and GM (as John Shook talked about recently at the…
Thanks everybody for reading my blog in 2013! I appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to read and participate in the discussion and I h0pe you’ll continue visiting the site in 2014… in what will be my…
Mark’s note: Christina Kach is back with a new post, this time a review of what should probably be considered a “Lean classic.” Come back tomorrow for my first podcast interview with one of the co-authors, Dan Jones. You can…
After their recent recorded conversation, it was great to see John Shook, CEO of LEI, and Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup together on stage at Day 2 of The Lean Startup Conference in SF. Some in the software-dominated…
It was an amazing first day of the Lean Startup conference yesterday in San Francisco. Videos will be available online soon, but for now I can share some notes I took during the main stage sessions in this Google Doc…
The Thanksgiving weekend was a great opportunity to catch up on some reading and viewing that had accumulated in my browser and inbox. One thing I really enjoyed was a conversation (in advance of next week’s Lean Startup conference) between…
TL;DR: Understanding Variation by Donald J. Wheeler is the most influential book in my Lean journey. It taught me how to distinguish signal from noise in data, avoid overreacting to normal variation, and focus leaders on improving systems instead of…
Mark’s note: What follows is a guest post by Keivan Zokaei about the necessary and unsurprisingly overlap between Lean principles and environmental stewardship. I wrote about this dynamic in a 2010 blog post: “Lean Leads to Green, Which Supports Lean,”…