"Work like the tortoise, not the hare." I knew I was onto something.
Completely unrelated but...
I was listening to the "The Rocky Road to Dublin" when reading your comment during the "hunt the hare" part.
Funny coincidence.
The Toyota Way
101–110 of 227 posts
Re: The Toyota Way
#102Whenever I see articles like this, I like to remind people that a great production system doesn't make a company more honest or accountable.
Unintended acceleration flaw in Toyota models around 2005 to 2011, due to firmware bugs: http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende...
Great for USA customers. They were made whole.
I personally was driving a 2011 Toyota minivan in Thailand in 2013 when I suffered this firmware bug. Toyota refused to consider it was anything other than driver fault. I was only going 5kph when it happened so no damage, but damn scary as hell. No recall in that country, and unless dealers did a covert firmware upgrade during maintenance, the flaw still exists in similar model years.
Re: The Toyota Way
#103"The Machine That Changed the World" is a wonderful title on this. Kiichiro Toyoda invented the lean production model after coming to the states and studying the inefficiencies of the assembly lines of Ford. This was a process dependent on modularizing every manufacturing component due to a demand for the Toyota company to serve a market with a need for an immense variety of vehicles, and giving teams ownership of th…
Ironically Toyota now has longer product lives than many other mainstream manufacturers. The Camry and Corolla are on roughly 6 year product lifecycles. The 4Runner has barely changed in 10 years.
>The Camry and Corolla
Saw this:
Re: The Toyota Way
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though of course in traditional theory the company should be run for the shareholders rather than the executives. It's a bit of a flaw in the system if they can extract large bonuses while tanking the stock. Maybe the government could write some laws that bonuses have to be held in escrow for a while to check the company survives. (And in more modern views maybe you should worry about the other stakeholders too.)
Active shareholders are happy to see their stock value rise to unsustainable levels and then selling them to the next suckers. Passive shareholders, well, don't participate on decision making. Expect this feature to get worse with increased share of index funds. But not by much, because most people never were active anyway.
> Passive shareholders, well, don't participate on decision making.
That's not true, fund managers vote on behalf of those shareholders, and not always go along with the board's position. See for example Vanguard's voting record: https://about.vanguard.com/investment-stewardship/how-our-fu...
Re: The Toyota Way
#105"The Machine That Changed the World" is a wonderful title on this. Kiichiro Toyoda invented the lean production model after coming to the states and studying the inefficiencies of the assembly lines of Ford. This was a process dependent on modularizing every manufacturing component due to a demand for the Toyota company to serve a market with a need for an immense variety of vehicles, and giving teams ownership of th…
I've never seen Toyoda mentioned as the inventor of the lean model, I usually seen Taiichi Ohno credited for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiichi_Ohno
Can't confirm or the reverse, but I do remember Taiichi Ohno's name being mentioned multiple times in the book (The Toyota Way), which I bought and read some years ago. Interesting book.
One of the things mentioned was the concepts of muri and muda, related to (not) wasting (stuff), IIRC [1]. Related to Kaizen [2].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+word+muri+and+muda&
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muri_(Japanese_term)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term)
Re: The Toyota Way
#106FYI, practice of Kanban also comes from Toyota: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
Re: The Toyota Way
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never seen Toyoda mentioned as the inventor of the lean model, I usually seen Taiichi Ohno credited for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiichi_Ohno
W. Deming also played a pretty large role too[1]. The whole history around Lean/Kaizen/etc is pretty fascinating. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
Do you have some links for the history? I'm interested in Lean and Kaizen. Made a comment about it in this thread.
Re: The Toyota Way
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it's a culture thing? IIRC, you don't actually legally have to bring more value to shareholders every quarter at the cost of everything else. Maybe Toyota's execs and shareholders have some sort of "gentlemen's agreement" where they just agree to not prioritize the short term at all costs? Maybe that's naive and they're just saying one thing and doing another.
A lot of times (speaking generally, not specifically about Toyota) CEO compensation is tied to share price targets, which aligns CEO & management behavior to whatever will make the Wall Street analysts happy, which is often quarterly earnings
many other things are tied to share price too. Enron would still be around if the share price hadn't dipped and started the domino fall ending in the scandal that killed the whole company.
Re: The Toyota Way
#109>Principle 5 Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time. Quality takes precedence (Jidoka). Any employee in the Toyota Production System has the authority to stop the process to signal a quality issue. I heard culturally Japan and to an extent other Asian manufacturing nations would never actually press the button. Can anyone confirm this?
If you can get your hands on the HBS case study of TPS it's a great read. Details how much emphasis is put on blaming any/all issues on process, rather than people. To the extent that if a clumsy worker drops a wrench, it is assumed to be a problem with process, not that worker, and addressed immediately. The case study also describes a couple of examples of assembly line workers pulling the stop levers and how manag…
>and how management runs over asap (every minute of stoppage is much money lost) to ask the question "why" five times in order to understand the root issue of the process breakdown.
Re: The Toyota Way
#110Whenever I see articles like this, I like to remind people that a great production system doesn't make a company more honest or accountable. Unintended acceleration flaw in Toyota models around 2005 to 2011, due to firmware bugs: http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... Great for USA customers. They were made whole. I personally was driving a 2011 Toyota minivan in Thailand in 2013 when I suffe…
Weirdest thing, a colleague had unintended acceleration in a Toyota 4WD of much older vintage, 80s or early 90s. Must have been something different entirely, those things were much more mechanical in nature.