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.

David Meier on Toyota’s 2010 Quality Crisis: Facts, Bias & Lean...

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Episode #85 is a conversation with David Meier, a former Toyota Georgetown Group Leader and the co-author of the books The Toyota Way Fieldbook and...

Video Interview with LEI’s Jim Womack

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Jim Womack visited  Lantech, a manufacturer of stretch wrappers and other packaging equipment. While there and visiting the "gemba," Jim was interviewed about Lean,...

Detroidenfreude

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Random thought related to those from the Big 3 Detroit 3  who are happy to see Toyota suffer, I think I'm coining a term...

Akio Toyoda’s Testimony to Congress

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I only watched a few minutes of Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda's live testimony (thanks to online cable news streaming), but the first things I...

Familiar Voices and New Voices on Lean

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You heard enough from me yesterday... today I want to share some other voices with you and their thoughts on Lean. First, familiar voices...

When “Efficiency” Misses the Point: A L.A.M.E. Lean Story on NPR

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TL;DR: An NPR story about workplace "efficiency" illustrates L.A.M.E.--Lean As Misguidedly Executed--where tools like 5S are applied without respect for people or employee engagement....

Re-visiting Chapter 2 of Out of the Crisis (Part 1)

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Continuing my series on re-reading Dr. W. Edwards Deming's book Out of the Crisis, I'm posting a series of tweets from the Chapter along...

Great Newsweek Cover Story on Why Layoffs Are Harmful

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I had long given up on Newsweek as a source of news (hey, at least it's published weekly unlike IndustryWeek). But this cover caught...

The Role of Purpose and Your Role

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What is your role at work? Your purpose? Those questions might make you really stop and think. I sat in yesterday on a class, taught...

Revisiting and Re-reading Dr. Deming’s “Out of the Crisis” – Chapter...

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For a number of reasons, I've decided to re-read my copy of one of the most influential books I've ever read: Out of the...

The Impact of Toyota’s Quality Problems on “Lean Healthcare”?

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As I'm traveling back from Sweden today, I think I'll be catching up on the web reaction to Toyota's major quality problems and recalls....

Lean: Letting our human characteristics flourish…

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Yesterday, I was in the first day of two for John Shook's "Managing to Learn" class about A3 management here at the Lean Enterprise...
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