What is your target condition here? What is the actual condition now? What obstacles are now preventing you from reaching the target condition? Which one are you addressing now? What is your next step? (start of the next PDCA cycle) When can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step? — Mike Rother, Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Toyota
If I Had a Toyota
If I had a Toyota, I’d drive it to work one morning, crash it right into the front lobby of the building, get out, say good morning to everyone, and blame the whole thing on a faulty accelerator, just to break up the monotony of daily living . . . Read more →
What Was Difficult
One friend described an interaction with Fujio Cho, former head of Toyota, visiting a plant and gently chiding people for too much attention to accomplishments and too little on struggle points. If he didn’t know what was difficult for them, he was reported to ask, how would he know where he could be of help? — HarvardBusiness.org. Read more →
Why Don’t You Go Ahead and Do Something?
We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action. There are many things one doesn’t understand and therefore, we ask them why don’t you just go ahead and take action; try to do something? You realize how little you know and you face your own failures and you simply can correct those failures and redo it again and at the second trial you realize another mistake or another thing you didn’t like so you can redo it once again. So by constant improvement, or, should I say, the improvement based upon action, one can rise to the higher level of practice and knowledge. — Fujio Cho, President, Toyota Motor Corporation, 2002 Read more →
EppsNet Book Review: The Elegant Solution
Unreadable . . . unbelievably bad. Ironically, for a book about innovation, the concepts are trite and the prose consists of one lazy cliche after another. Watch — I’m going to open the book to a random page and list the cliches: “secret sauce,” “blow the doors off,” “boil the ocean,” “where the action is,” “ivory tower,” “marching instructions.” The book is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who might conceivably want to read it. Read more →