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Volume 10 Issue 10 | October 2009 | www.superfactory.com |
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From the Editor
Now is the time to invest in lean improvements. The Superfactory LinkedIn group has over 3,500 members. If you're a member of LinkedIn, or are interested injoining the largest professional social networking group, also join theSuperfactory Group. You can also follow us on Twitter to stay informed of new content and lean manufacturing news. - Kevin Meyer |
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Manufacturing Excellence NewsStories of interest to the lean community.
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In the Evolving Excellence BlogJoin over 5,000 readers who get their daily dose of blunt manufacturing and business reality by subscribing to the Evolving Excellence blog!
Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:
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Featured Book
By Mike Rother This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower. Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines--called kata--that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation. The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations. |
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Featured Article
By Tom Shaw, Definity Partners A combination of self-inflicted wounds more than a decade in the making plus a global economic crisis shows us that Toyota Motor Corporation has lost its way. While not completely unexpected, it is still surprising that Toyota could lose its grasp on key fundamentals of its management system. The company’s problems and efforts to recover offer many high-value lessons for any manager who is willing to learn. For those who study and practice Lean management, Toyota Motor Corporation has always been our guiding star, our true north. But what happens when Toyota turns east, or even south, as they have slowly done over the last decade or so? Toyota has always been the principal Lean practitioner to learn from because they have done such a brilliant job of putting together a wonderful management system based on work done by other people [1] and through the addition of many of their own unique contributions [2] and steady maintenance and improvement. Their non-zero-sum, principle-based, human-centered management system is undoubtedly the best that has been created in modern times. Its practice should be the norm in any organization, not the exception. Toyota’s recent problems originated with Toyota Global Vision 2010 (launched in 2002 and running through 2010), which, among other things, stated an objective to grow and obtain 15% global market share by the early 2010s. This required Toyota to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 7% per year for a decade (staring from a large base). The owners of this plan and the prior one, Toyota 2003 Vision (launched in 1996 and running through 2005), are the past president and chairman of Toyota, Hiroshi Okuda; the past president and current chairman, Fujio Cho; and the past president and current vice chairman, Katsuaki Watanabe. |
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Featured Evolving Excellence Blog Post
Who Wants to be Spum? The truth always comes out in the end. That is a universal fact, even though sometimes it takes a while for the end to come around and the truth to be known. In the meantime, what Lincoln said about fooling all of the people some of the time and so forth may be true, but sooner or later, the facts matter. In the case of business - any business - the truth and the facts mean the value of the product or service. I am becoming more and more convinced that there is an inverse relationship between a commitment to lean and the advertising budget. There are those companies that provide a superior value proposition and don't have to spend much money to sell the high value products - and those that do the opposite. You can read all about those Type B companies - lousy value/lotta advertising in a Business Week article called The Great Trust Offensive. The article cites American Express, for instance, as a company with a growing trust issue they are addressing via a campaign to represent themselves as the business partner of the mom-and-pop-main-street-entrepreneur. People trust the local small business person, so American Express is going to ride their coattails. The problem is that American Express jacked up their rates and fees on good customers to cover their losses on bad deals, even though the Fed has slashed rates to just about 0%. Providing a service that is not worth the price charged, then launching an ad campaign to paint the situation as something else is not going to work in the long term because no lie can withstand the test of time. "Trust is what drives profit margin and share price," says Larry Light, CEO of the Stamford (Conn.) brand consultancy Arcature. "It is what consumers are looking for and what they share with one another." I suppose that is true enough, but value is what creates trust - not spin. In fact spin destroys trust when the truth behind the spin comes out. |
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© 2009 Superfactory by Factory Strategies Group LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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Welcome to the Superfactory Newsletter!
Check out 
Toyota Kata: Managing People for Performance, Results, and
The Need for Speed: Building Early Momentum on the Path to