April Fool: A New Way to Learn Lean? Wii Lean!
Note: I edited the post title on April 3 to make it clear this was an April Fool’s Joke. Comments posted by readers on 4/1 and 4/2 may have been “fooled” – thanks for taking the joke in good spirits.…
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.
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A Lean Urban Legend/Myth Busted about Toyoda and Toyota Names?
Last month, in the midst of Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda’s appearance in front of Congress, there was a little sidebar in the USA Today that caught my eye (“Toyoda vs. Toyota“). An oft-repeated (including here in my blog) story in…
Dr. Deming – “More Relevant Than Ever”
Being a huge fan of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, especially so some 17 years after his death, I like any article that concludes with this line: “The lesson of the Toyota recalls is not that Mr. Deming’s Japanese model is…
Lessons from NUMMI’s Closing: NPR’s “End of the Line” and What GM Failed to Learn
TL;DR: NPR’s “End of the Line” on NUMMI reminds us that performance problems weren’t caused by “bad workers,” but by bad management systems. The same people who sabotaged cars under GM built world-class quality under Toyota. My experience with a…
David Meier on Toyota’s 2010 Quality Crisis: Facts, Bias & Lean Lessons
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 Toyota Talent: Developing Your People the Toyota Way. With Toyota facing widespread attention during the 2010…
Video Interview with LEI’s Jim Womack
Jim Womack visited Lantech, a manufacturer of stretch wrappers and other packaging equipment. While there and visiting the “gemba,” Jim was interviewed about Lean, what he saw at Lantech, and Toyota’s recent problems. You can see the interview here, in…
Detroidenfreude
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 (I can’t find it, or this spelling, via google anywhere): I think I’m coining a phrase:…
Akio Toyoda’s Testimony to Congress
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 heard prompted me to Tweet about it and I’m following up with a quick post. You…
Familiar Voices and New Voices on Lean
You heard enough from me yesterday… today I want to share some other voices with you and their thoughts on Lean. First, familiar voices (John Shook and Jeff Liker) and someone who might seem like a new voice in the…
When “Efficiency” Misses the Point: A L.A.M.E. Lean Story on NPR
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. True Lean builds capability with the people doing the work, not through top-down cost cutting. Oh…
Re-visiting Chapter 2 of Out of the Crisis (Part 1)
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 with my thoughts and comments. At about 70 pages, it’s a long, dense chapter, including Deming’s…
Great Newsweek Cover Story on Why Layoffs Are Harmful
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 my eye at the airport on Friday, I had to buy it instead of waiting to…
