Category Archives: Management Articles

Creating Customers For Life

Posted on December 18, 2008 by John Hunter

Shopping at Trader Joe’s is odd. The workers actually seem like they like that they have customers. Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Management Articles, Popular, Respect | Tagged ,

Lean and Kanban for Software Developers

Posted on November 15, 2008 by John Hunter

Lean and Kanban for Software Developers by Clinton Keith Time-boxing allows us to employ a very powerful aspect of Kanban. The cards in each column represent capacity for each stage of the value stream. As we see above, each stage can only handle one zone at a time. That is the capacity of each stage, if we have one person working at each stage. Time-boxing is the first step in beginning to find a balanced flow for our value stream … Continue reading →

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Idle Workers Busy at Toyota

Posted on October 12, 2008 by John Hunter

Idle Workers Busy at Toyota Instead of sending the workers home, as the Detroit makers often do, Toyota is keeping them at the plants, though. The employees spend their days in training sessions designed to sharpen their job skills and find better ways to assemble vehicles. … At its Princeton plant, by contrast, Toyota is using the down time to hone its workers’ quality-control and productivity skills. The company has pledged never to lay off any of its full-time employees, … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Manufacturing, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

New Management Truths Sometimes Started as Heresies

Posted on September 7, 2008 by John Hunter

‘New’ management truths sometimes started as heresies by Cecil Johnson “The most effective management ideas follow a life cycle — from heresy to outlier (championed by a small group of people) to ingrained practice to conventional wisdom,” Kleiner writes. “In the process, if they are genuinely powerful management ideas, they distinguish the organizations that adopt them.” One of the management heresies focused upon by Kleiner that has morphed into accepted management wisdom of the highest order is the Toyota Production … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Management Articles, quote, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Management Articles, Posts…

Posted on September 4, 2008 by John Hunter

Reddit is a web site that ranks web pages by user votes. If you login and vote yourself they will develop a pattern of what you like and can show you a list of the pages you are likely to enjoy. I believe this is done by matching your likes and dislikes with others. When showing you a list of recommended links it gives some importance to up votes by anyone and more priority to up votes by those that … Continue reading →

Posted in curiouscat.com, IT, Management, Management Articles, Tags | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Lean Management in Policing

Posted on August 18, 2008 by John Hunter

Justice served up Jacksonville–style is all lean [broken link was removed] by Joe Jancsurak: The Jacksonville Sheriff Office’s (JSO) Crime Reducing Initiatives Management and Enforcement Strategies (CRIMES) measures, tracks and analyzes crime-fighting statistics, such as the number of arrests and value of stolen and recovered property. Such findings are instrumental in determining the overall effectiveness of the JSO and where improvements need to be made. Investigations stress uniformity. Lean “changed how we approach investigations,” says Sheriff Rutherford. “We found that … Continue reading →

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India Lean Management

Posted on August 4, 2008 by John Hunter

India’s Economic Times has an interview with James Womack, Now is the time for lean management, with an interesting quote: When I last visited India in 2002, I looked carefully at several operations of the TVS group in the Chennai area. I found that they were the best examples of lean manufacturing I had ever seen outside of Toyota City. In my mind these facilities completely eliminated any questions as to whether “lean” would work in India. However, I have … Continue reading →

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Drucker’s Ideas at Toyota

Posted on July 8, 2008 by John Hunter

The Drucker difference and Toyota’s success [the broken link was removed] by Ira A. Jackson, dean of the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, the business school of the Claremont Colleges. Because of this core belief in the power of people, Toyota invests in people. And at the same time, the company has come to realize that when people grapple with opposing views … Embrace contradictions as a way of life. Sticking to old practices can lead to rigidity. … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Management Articles, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , ,

Fairness Matters

Posted on June 9, 2008 by John Hunter

Sense of Fairness Affects Outlook, Decisions Burnout has been long associated with being overworked and underpaid, but psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter found that these were not the crucial factors. The single biggest difference between employees who suffered burnout and those who did not was the whether they thought that they were being treated unfairly or fairly. … Their research on fairness dovetails with work by other researchers showing that humans care a great deal about how they are … Continue reading →

Posted in Management Articles, Psychology, Respect, Science | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Outsourcing To America

Posted on May 30, 2008 by John Hunter

Outsourcing To America [the broken link was removed] Toyota began operating in North America in the mid-1980s. It currently operates seven automotive plants there, four of which are in the U.S. A fifth plant is under production in Mississippi. Toyota employs 40,000 manufacturing employees in North America. In addition to the manufacture of cars and trucks, Toyota runs four unit factories in the U.S., where they produce such parts as engines, transmissions and wheels. Toyota also has a wholly owned … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Lean thinking, Management Articles, Manufacturing, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , ,

Toyota Execution Not Close to Being Copied

Posted on May 7, 2008 by John Hunter

The Open Secret of Success Toyota’s innovations, by contrast, have [focused] on process rather than on product, on the factory floor rather than on the showroom. That has made those innovations hard to see. But it hasn’t made them any less powerful. At the core of the company’s success is the Toyota Production System, which took shape in the years after the Second World War, when Japan was literally rebuilding itself, and capital and equipment were hard to come by. … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Popular, quote, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Toyota Canada CIO on Genchi Genbutsu and Kaizen

Posted on April 24, 2008 by John Hunter

What’s driving Toyota Canada’s success? – CIO reveals all for Hao Tien, chief information officer (CIO) at Toyota Canada Inc. those two Japanese phrases – Genchi Genbutsu (go and see) and Kaizen (continuous improvement) really capture it all. … the innovation wasn’t in the technology, but in the way the various partners were brought together to agree upon processes, which were then consistently executed. CustomerOne is only project of its kind in the Toyota empire. … A computer system links … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Toyota Presses On

Posted on February 24, 2008 by John Hunter

At Toyota, a Global Giant Reaches for Agility With plants in 27 countries, more new factories under construction and workers speaking languages that include Russian and Turkish, Toyota’s top executives are trying a difficult balancing act – replicating the company’s success and operating principles in other countries while ceding more control to these new outposts at the same time. … Next year, it expects to sell more than 10.4 million cars worldwide, double what it sold in 2000. … At … Continue reading →

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Toyota’s Effort to Stay Toyota

Posted on November 22, 2007 by John Hunter

Toyota’s All-Out Drive To Stay Toyota “We are making every effort not to lose our DNA,” says Shigeru Hayakawa, president of Toyota Motor North America. … Just in case St. Angelo forgets any of his Toyota training, he has someone watching his back. His retired predecessor, Gary Convis, still gets paid to advise him. That’s an idea Toyota imported from Japan, where the company asks retiring engineers to stick around to mentor young employees. The ranks of these old-timers are … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Toyota Production System (TPS) | 1 Comment

“2007 has been a difficult year for Toyota”

Posted on November 5, 2007 by John Hunter

I find the quote “2007 has been a difficult year for Toyota” found in The Dings and Dents of Toyota a bit amusing. Toyota has had some problems as the article notes like product recalls and losing a handful of employees to Ford and Chrysler. They are about even with GM in worldwide sales and posted a profit of nearly $14 Billion (I believe maybe 20 companies have ever earned that much in any year) in the year ending March … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Management Articles, Toyota Production System (TPS) | 1 Comment

Bringing Lean Principles to Service Industries

Posted on October 27, 2007 by John Hunter

Bringing ‘Lean’ Principles to Service Industries by Julia Hanna “One of the important lessons we’ve seen on the ground is how Wipro approached the launch of this lean initiative,” Staats says. “They didn’t come out with big banners and say, ‘OK, today your work is lean work, and yesterday it wasn’t.’ They started with a small group and recruited other people from there. It was a very controlled experimentation.” In their research, Staats and Upton document how the use of … Continue reading →

Posted in India, IT, Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Software Development