Why Toyota Won and How Toyota Can Lose by James Womack
Toyota’s great risk, the way it can lose, is that its new managers and the managers in its new suppliers will revert to the old, mass-production mentality of the companies or schools they have come from. If this happens, Toyota’s management performance will regress toward the mean. Instead of moving the whole world to embrace lean management, Toyota will become just another company. And that will be a tragic failure for us all.
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The heart of the lean manager’s knowledge is strategy deployment originating with senior managers,
A3 problem solving for line managers in the middle of the organization, and standardized work for primary supervisors near the bottom.
This is another excellent article by Womack. See more articles on lean management by Womack. Reissue addition of the Machine that Changed the World (with revised forward and afterword).
Related: lean manufacturing portal - lean thinking articles - Toyota Production System posts
April 28th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
If you click on previous eLetters, you have to sign in. The LEI’s insistence on making you register and sign in for any bit of information seems to violate the “don’t waste the customer’s time” rule from Lean Solutions, don’t you think?
Is this lean information private and not for everyone’s non-registered eyes? I can understand the LEI wanting a customer mailing list, but can’t they just have you volunteer your info if you want to be contacted for forget the log in nonsense?
April 29th, 2007 at 8:06 am
I agree. They have good content on their web site but the usability of their site is not very good.