Post-Toyota Lean: Eliminating The Mirage of Culture

In my early days as a lean consultant, I could really only talk about what I had learned about Toyota and what I had experienced myself in my work for HP.

When talking about Toyota to a skeptical audience, I would inevitably hear two things: 1) We're not a car company. 2) We're not Japanese.

The first is easy to dispatch: "I don't think that you can become Toyota. I think you can become the Toyota of your industry: deeply respected, even revered for your ability to make products that delight both customers and shareholders."

As far as culture goes, that's always been a smokescreen. Toyota did nothing more or less than deeply understand their systems and seek to optimize them. I agree that their culture probably gave them greater ability to do this than most Western companies would have had, but that doesn't mean that we can't benefit from their knowledge about manufacturing systems or product design.

But they themselves demonstrated that the "Japanese culture issue" was a mirage when they took over the NUMMI plant in Fremont, CA and turned it around in the 1980s - and even more so recently when they allowed ambition to overshadow their commitment to customer value, proving that their culture and history did not grant them immunity from the laws of physics.

Fortunately, we're nearing the 20th anniversary of the release of the book The Machine That Changed the World, and that book did indeed change the world. Today, we find exemplary examples of lean manufacturing, lean office and lean product development on every continent, in such a wide variety of cultures and industries that the criticisms I used to receive are now laughable.

At some point along the way we learned that lean was never about Toyota, and it was never about Japan. It was always about the passion we share for creating customer value, eliminating waste and enriching ourselves in the process, both materially and as people.

Post-Toyota Lean: A Conversation with Doc Hall

I've received a number of private messages about my last post on Toyota.

Then yesterday, I had a great conversation with Robert "Doc" Hall, one of the founding members of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence.

Doc shared his ideas about "post-Toyota lean" - the idea that we now have a lot of history with implementing lean manufacturing techniques and lean thinking. One would think that we would have learned some things about how to do it well outside of Toyota!

This idea intrigues me because on the product development side, there are some companies doing things that look awfully "lean" but who have no connection to the Toyota Product Development System.

Google is one of the most visible examples, with its creative use of technology to support rapid learning cycles on new features, the way that it avoids overload by giving engineers "personal time" to work on ideas of their own, and its willingness to pursue multiple alternatives at once.

What makes a product development organization lean? Here is my definition: "Product developers systematically solving problems permanently to maximize (value - waste) across the entire system."

Meanwhile, Doc Hall has taken a hard look at how new economic pressures will change the world of business: climate change, limits to growth and resource constraints. The opportunities will continue to be rich, but the goals will be different: conservation not excess, sustainability not growth-at-all-costs, a more balanced set of metrics than simple financial results.

Doc calls this model Compression. He has a fantastic electronic mind map that visualizes his thinking.

In the post-Toyota lean world, we have much to learn from companies like PortionPac Chemicals that seek to systematically maximize (value - waste) across the global system.

What About Toyota?

We lean consultants have had to answer many embarrassing questions about Toyota's recent performance since their massive recalls were announced earlier this year. How could this have happened to the company that embraced Taichi Ohno, and then revolutionized how we think about cost and quality?

An article in the current issue of BusinessWeek, "The Humbling of Toyota" explains what went wrong under the leadership of Fujio Cho (1999-2005) and Katsuaki Watanabe (2005-2009): rapid expansion and aggressive cost-cutting that strained the company's celebrated systems to the breaking point.

Jim Press, once the only North American on Toyota's board, spared no words in describing the damage:

"The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-[Toyoda] family, financially oriented pirates," Press charged in a recent interview with Bloomberg News. . .The financial pirates, he said, "didn't have the character necessary to maintain a customer-first focus."

The company has already taken action. In June of 2009, Akio Toyoda, the grandson of Toyota Motor Corporation's founder, took over in a move that seemed to point towards a restoration of Toyota's core values and a return to the company's cultural traditions.

The good news/bad news for them is that their systems are built from the ground up to respond. When Watanabe was in charge, he wanted cost-cutting and that's what he got. Now that Toyota realizes how foolish that path was, it will not take long to restore the quality of their designs.

However, it will take years to restore Toyota's image with the public. They spent decades building a highly profitable business based upon cars that were solidly built and long lasting, if not the flashiest. The financial pirates threw that reputation overboard in a quest for fast growth and higher profits.

In the meantime, what do we lean consultants do? It's pushing us to do what we should have been doing already for at least the last five years: Stop holding up Toyota as the shining city on the hill, perfect and therefore unattainable.

Instead, we should spend more time drawing upon the experiences from companies in a wide range of industries where lean thinking has produced dramatic performance gains.

The Power of a Knowledge Supermarket: The Queen Susan Shawl

Last time, I described Ravelry as a public knowledge supermarket for knitters. This time, I want to share a major achievement that would not be possible without this knowledge supermarket.

Sometime in the nineteenth century, a craftswoman in the Shetland Islands created an exquisite shawl. She made it out of over a half million stitches using the finest wool available, and her own deep knowledge of traditional lace knitting technique:



Shetland lace shawls are delicate, and this one was apparently damaged after the photograph was taken. The photo is now in the collection of the Shetland Museum in Lerwick.

Last fall, a Ravelry member called Clarabeasty found the photograph on the museum web site and initiated this exchange on Ravelry:

October 16, 2009
Clarabeasty: Does anyone recognize the border pattern on this piece of lace? Specifically the part that looks like little wreaths and twigs.

Sophiphi137: No, but it is beautiful! I also am now very curious about it.

M1K1: Look again in the Shetland Museum photo library. There is a close up detail of another shawl which has the scalloped (wreath) effect made by placing roses.
You can get a really good look at it by selecting Large Image.
Isn’t it a fabulous effect - softening the straight lines of the zigzags.
Actually this might be the same one you showed above...

fleegle: Wow! That’s the most beautiful border I’ve ever seen…..gets out graph paper immediately….

That exchange kicked off a worldwide effort to bring this shawl back to life, through recreating the pattern. By December, fleegle (AKA Susan) had led a team to the finish line, publishing the pattern in a 73 page comprehensive instruction booklet.

They did not just recreate the shawl - they improved it with modern construction techniques that make the work go faster and refinements to the border and center patterns. Today, there are over 30 knitters working on their own interpretations of this pattern.

Ravelry's knowledge supermarket contributed to this in many ways:

• Provided a place where expert lace knitters could build a shared knowledge base of techniques and libraries of patterns so that the knowledge created was commonly understood, believed to be true and actionable, as they individually developed their craft.


• Built relationships between the primary collaborators so that when this challenge arose, the community was ready for it.


• Provided a platform for sharing their work products (pattern charts, photos of swatches, calculations) - and capturing these work products in process so that future projects like this will be able to benefit from their experiences.


• Allowed the collaborators, who were all doing it for the love of the craft, to pull knowledge and the current state of the work products, when they were next able to turn their attention to the project.

Mature knowledge supermarkets open up all kinds of possibilities for teams. If a virtual team with no connection other than the knowledge supermarket can bring a 150 year old lace back to life, what could your team do?