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The Toyota Way

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Re: The Toyota Way

#51

Post by richman777 »

A lot of this was covered in "The Phoenix Project". A good read but a bit idealistic in the expected outcome. The fake company was essentially able to right the sinking ship after the band had already stopped playing, in 2 quarters no less.

However, the core tenets were valid from a general approach. My fear when reading was the potential to go overboard. We have all met over-zealous scrum masters. Same could be applied to a lot of the stuff they were essentially transferring from manufacturing to development and more specifically devops.

Re: The Toyota Way

#53

Post by lemax »

"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 the entire production process rather than one error check at the end a lá Ford. Introducing a vehicle with a steering wheel on the opposite side might take a year to implement in lean production, while handling that kind of variation in the assembly line model could take years (generally double the amount of time); The net result of this being that Toyota could offer 2x the vehicles of GM at half GM's size. Toyota was able to make extremely reliable vehicles and modify them as consumer demands shifted. By 1990, the Japanese were making cars with 4 year product lives and 500k total units (125k per year) while the Western companies were building 2M over 10 year product lives.

Re: The Toyota Way

#54

Post by tvanantwerp »

richman777 wrote: post #51

A lot of this was covered in "The Phoenix Project". A good read but a bit idealistic in the expected outcome. The fake company was essentially able to right the sinking ship after the band had already stopped playing, in 2 quarters no less. However, the core tenets were valid from a general approach. My fear when reading was the potential to go overboard. We have all met over-zealous scrum masters. Same could be appl…

I really enjoyed The Phoenix Project. I agree that things come together a bit too nicely at the end--seemed unrealistic. The first half though, when everything is going wrong, seemed very realistic. I couldn't read it before bed, or else I'd get too worked up to sleep.

Re: The Toyota Way

#55

Post by Jtsummers »

richman777 wrote: post #51

A lot of this was covered in "The Phoenix Project". A good read but a bit idealistic in the expected outcome. The fake company was essentially able to right the sinking ship after the band had already stopped playing, in 2 quarters no less. However, the core tenets were valid from a general approach. My fear when reading was the potential to go overboard. We have all met over-zealous scrum masters. Same could be appl…

It's worth reading The Goal as The Phoenix Project is somewhat based on it. The Goal introduces the idea of Theory of Constraints in a similar novelized form, and The Phoenix Project takes ToC and applies it to information systems/software work. There's overlap between ToC and the Toyota Way (Toyota Production System, Lean, etc.) as all are based on taking a systems view of things, and place a great deal of emphasis on identifying problems with the process, not the people (that is, no individual blame).

Re: The Toyota Way

#56

Post by Kluny »

wil421 wrote: post #26

>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?

It's something that can be overcome with role-play training and consistent reinforcement. Examples are actually given in the book. One case study is a Korean airline that had a horrifying safety record in part because copilots and other staff didn't feel empowered to overrule the captain even if the captain was wrong. It was a cultural problem, but was overcome through training.

Re: The Toyota Way

#57

Post by csours »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #41

Isn't this based on a "philosophy" published by Bell Labs a couple of decades prior?

Toyota took all of the good ideas they found in American companies (most specifically Ford) in the 1950s and added continuous improvement. Then they actually iterated with continuous improvement.

So I don't think it's fair to say that any of the ideas are outright stolen (I know you didn't say that either), because Toyota took them well past the starting point.

Re: The Toyota Way

#58

Post by curiouscats »

Those interested might also find these worth reading:

Deming and Software Development

  https://management.curiouscatblog.net/2014/03/17/deming-and-software-development/
What’s Deming Got to Do With Agile Software Development and Kanban

  https://blog.deming.org/2013/07/whats-deming-got-to-do-with-agile-software-development-and-kanban/

Re: The Toyota Way

#59

Post by curiouscats »

radcon wrote: post #17
gotts wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing! Good read

Thanks for reading! I think Deming is extremely under-appreciated. It seems like Six Sigma is all anyone talks about in terms of management philosophy these days...

I agree, you might enjoy the Deming subreddit

  https://www.reddit.com/r/Deming/
with links to applying his ideas on management.

Re: The Toyota Way

#60

Post by Someone1234 »

rb808 wrote: post #23
Someone1234 wrote: post #2

How do you maintain "Principle 1" while being a publicly traded company? The way the stock market is designed (and the fact that stockholders often get to appoint the board who gets to appoint the CEO) means they're going to put short term profits over long term viability. Many companies have been ruined and continue to be ruined by this short-term-ism chase for quarterly and yearly profits. For example look at the f…

> The way the stock market is designed (and the fact that stockholders often get to appoint the board who gets to appoint the CEO) means they're going to put short term profits over long term viability. Many companies have been ruined and continue to be ruined by this short-term-ism chase for quarterly and yearly profits. That's a myth. Yes CNBC loves short term stuff as it makes good TV. In the real world see Black…

You call it a "myth" then use one example, that disproves the point (why urge to act against a "myth") and another that's a single data point, while ignoring the rest of the market.

That's a pretty poorly explored position.

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