Tag: Toyota

Toyota Thinking: Leadership, Systems, and Continuous Improvement

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.

Guest Post: 11 Common Misconceptions About Lean

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Mark's note: Here's another great vacation guest post by Jeff Hajek: By Jeff Hajek Despite having been fairly main stream for going on three decades now,...

Guest Post: Reports of Kaizen’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated

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Mark's note: Today's vacation post is from my good friend Dan Markovitz, who normally blogs here.  Listen to my podcasts with him here...

The Two Root Causes of Everything?

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One thing I have enjoyed in the past few years is meeting and working with more people with direct experience working at Toyota (including...

ASQ Influential Voices: Quality & Social Responsibility (& Lean)

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In this month's ASQ blog post, their CEO Paul Borawski writes a new post "The Intersection of Quality and Social Responsibility," where he defines...

Google Nexus Q – Made in the USA

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I'm not sure Google has much of a market for a $299 media player (with the AppleTV and Roku players being under $100), but...

Partial Transcript of Podcast #142 – @EricRies on Taiichi Ohno &...

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Here is a transcript of last week's podcast with Eric Ries talking about the impact that Toyota legend Taiichi Ohno had on his work...

Today Would Have Been Taiichi Ohno’s 100th Birthday

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Hat tip to John Shook and the Lean Enterprise Institute for pointing this out via his email newsletter  -- today would have been the...

A Lean Guy Watches Moneyball

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When it first came out, I was a big fan of Michael Lewis' book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game about the Oakland...

Yes, We Need Staff Ideas – But, How to Manage Those...

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It's always great to see stories in the major media outlets about engaging front-line staff in improvement ideas. Recently, we had a piece in...

Lean Healthcare featured on PBS Nightly Business Report

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Friday night's PBS program the Nightly Business Report had a nice feature on the use of Lean at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downer's Grove,...

‘Moneyball’ Lessons – Listen to Your Front-Line Staff

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I loved the book  Moneyball by Michael Lewis, but I haven't seen the movie yet (I hear it's good -- Edit: It was GREAT). To...

One-Question Poll on Healthcare Employee Idea & Suggestion Programs

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I volunteered to give a presentation last Friday for the North Texas Society for Healthcare Risk Management, where  I was able to debut some...
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