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Toyota

The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement: Linking Strategy and Operational Excellence to Achieve Superior Performance

Building upon the international bestselling “Toyota Way” series of books by Jeffrey Liker, “The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement” looks critically at lean deployments and identifies the root causes of why most of them fail. The book is organized into three major sections outlining: why it is critical to go beyond implementing lean tools and, instead, build a culture of continuous improvement that connects operational excellence to business strategy. Case studies from seven unique industries written from the perspective of the sensei (teacher) who led the lean transformation Lessons about transforming your own vision of an ideal organization into reality Section One: Using the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) methodology, Liker and Franz contrast true PDCA thinking to that of the popular, superficial approach of copying “lean solutions”. They describe the importance of developing people and show how the Toyota Way principles support and drive continuous improvement. Explaining how lean systems and processes start with a purpose that provides a true north direction for all activities, they wrap up this section by examining the glaring differences between building a system of people, processes, and problem- solving that is truly lean versus that of simply trying to “lean out” a process. Section Two: This section brings together seven case studies as told by the sensei who led the transformation efforts. The companies range from traditional manufacturers, overhaul and maintenance of submarines, nuclear fuel rod production, health care providers, pathology labs, and product development. Each of these industries is different but the approaches used were remarkably similar. Section Three: Beginning with a composite story describing a company in its early days of lean implementation, this section describes what went right and wrong during the initial implementation efforts. The authors bring to light some of the difficulties the sensei faces, such as bureaucracies, closed-mi

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Toyota

Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results

“Toyota Kata gets to the essence of how Toyota manages continuous improvement and human ingenuity, through its improvement kata and coaching kata. Mike Rother explains why typical companies fail to understand the core of lean and make limited progress–and what it takes to make it a real part of your culture.” –Jeffrey K. Liker, bestselling author of The Toyota Way “[Toyota Kata is] one of the stepping stones that will usher in a new era of management thinking.” –The Systems Thinker “How any organization in any industry can progress from old-fashioned management by results to a strikingly different and better way.” –James P. Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute “Practicing the improvement kata is perhaps the best way we’ve found so far for actualizing PDCA in an organization.” –John Shook, Chairman and CEO, Lean Enterprise Institute 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 and provide specific answers to questions such as: How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization? How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance? How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers? Mike Rother explains how to improve our prevailing management approach through the use of two kata: Improvement Kata–a repeatin

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