Everybody Wants It, Toyota’s Got It
Posted on September 21, 2005 Comments (2)
Everybody Wants It, Toyota’s Got It by Grant Robertson, Globe and Mail (Canada):
Despite riding atop the North American auto sector for the past decade, the company’s manufacturing methods are an open book.
People often look for the secret new idea instead of just executing well. So much improvement is available just using ideas that have been known for decades. But instead of doing that people keep searching for new magic bullets.
Line workers spend two hours at one job, then transfer to another within their group of half a dozen people, a strategy Toyota believes helps break monotony, foster teamwork and keep the plant flexible when employees are away.
“Toyota has probably laughed behind everybody’s backs for years,” he says. “Everybody goes in there and looks at [the Cambridge plant] and walks out, but doesn’t really understand how to do it. So because of that, I guess they still continue to let them look at it.”
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September 30th, 2005 @ 8:29 am
Access to the cited material is open to subscribers only. You can sign up for a free 14 day subscription but you have to provide a credit card/billing information to do it. Which necessitates remembering to cancel if one doesn’t want to incur charges.
August 17th, 2006 @ 10:37 am
[...] I share this frustration with declaring old ideas new: Management Improvement, Better and Different, Quality, SPC and Your Career, Deming and Six Sigma, Management Lessons from Terry Ryan, Everybody Wants It, Toyota’s Got It, Fashion-Incubator on Deming’s Ideas and on and on. Why does this matter? Two reasons, most importantly to me is that when we fail to value the best ideas, instead valuing the new ideas, we are not as effective as we could be. We often accept pale copies of good old ideas instead of going to the good old ideas – which will often lead to a much richer source of knowledge. When I compare copyrighted versions of management thinking to ideas from people like Ackoff, Deming, Ohno, Scholtes, McGreggor the depth and richness of those I admire is much greater than the packaged solutions, as I see it (and they are often more concerned with furthering the practice of management than further their brand). Second, it is often dishonest, or at least sloppy thinkers, that don’t acknowledge the history of management ideas. There is a huge body of research that shows they are ineffective, yet no one seems to remember these policies have failed over and over in the past. [...]