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That shit works only if you are Japanese.... Have Japanese mentality and work culture... Also your product is a car.. Or something tangable made on a production line.... Agile IS the Toyota way... Or at least tries to be
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most stock holders have figured out that long term profits are important as well. Companies that only focus short term go out of business quickly and so are worth less than companies who will be around longer. Doesn't matter if the stock holders who pushed for the decisions managed to flip their stocks when they were still rising in value. Aren't most stock holders playing this game to flip stocks, without caring m…
Aren't most stocks are held in index funds and ETFs?
[0]: https://qz.com/1623418/index-funds-now-account-for-half-the-...
"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 initially misread that as "The Toyota War". Which was a real thing, named that because Chad used Toyota Land Cruisers to defeat Libya. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War
The entire decades-long overseas diversion saga surrounding American Toyota pickups has always fascinated me. Top Gear did an episode [0] trying to destroy a Toyota Hilux (similar to the Land Cruiser) and literally couldn't, which explains why it's so popular with terrorists. It's a worthwhile watch if you want to see truck survive after being drowned in water, fire, and the rubble of a demolished skyscraper. Say wha…
I initially misread that as "The Toyota War". Which was a real thing, named that because Chad used Toyota Land Cruisers to defeat Libya. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War
The entire decades-long overseas diversion saga surrounding American Toyota pickups has always fascinated me. Top Gear did an episode [0] trying to destroy a Toyota Hilux (similar to the Land Cruiser) and literally couldn't, which explains why it's so popular with terrorists. It's a worthwhile watch if you want to see truck survive after being drowned in water, fire, and the rubble of a demolished skyscraper. Say wha…
Also really good: Deming wrote his perspective in "Out of Crisis" and Toyota's Taiichi Ohno wrote about his experience in "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production". As others have mentioned, Deming laid the ground work for this type of thinking in post-war Japan. Taiichi Ohno led the initial development of the Toyota Production System.
In any case, Toyota / Lean / etc. is a mindset that has a lot of really good ideas embedded in it. I'm sure you can take it and distort it and come up with a monstrosity (like people do with "Agile") but the core stuff is really good.
As noted by lemax, The Machine That Changed The World is a really good book on this topic.
It's also interesting to note that a lot of the "Toyota" system was inspired by the teachings of an American, W. Edwards Deming. If I recall the story correctly, Deming was pushing these ideas on statistical process control, and nobody in America would listen to him, so he want to Japan and they embraced his stuff, ran with it, and it helped them become a manufacturing juggernaut.
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.
Then when it wrapped up very nicely I felt like I was bad at my job. "Wait, how did they fix it so fast!?!" (hyperbole here but it was sort of a gut punch)
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…
Toyota has been publicly traded for 70 years and their shareholders (which are primarily other large Japanese conglomerates) have never even tried to make these kinds of short-term-over-long-term pushes and keep electing Toyoda family members into the top leadership positions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All publicly trade companies have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. That means different things to different companies and is not a hard and fast rule. Amazon did not prioritize short term profits for a long long time and Bezos famously told investors they were too shortsighted. Many large manufacturing companies adopt the Toyota principles here in the US as well. Principle 1 is up to interpretation about w…
Sure, I just meant the fiduciary responsibility doesn't necessarily always mean "short term profits at all costs." Why does it seem to always be that way, though? Most every company I see appears very shortsighted with no thought to the long game.
Yep. Arguably an over-fixation on "short term profits at all costs" would be a gross violation of one's fiduciary duty if it puts the long-term viability of the enterprise at risk.