tl;dr letting nature shape you vs shaping nature: great success is had by learning to obedience enforce your environment to do what you want, rather than letting the world's constraints make your decisions for you. not always, but often the rules turn out to be negociable afterall.

People studying what Toyota was doing and not the process they used to determine what to do.

If an area is believed to be clear than a preconcieved plan is used, rather than paying attention to the environment.

It is generally not possible to catch up with competitors.

Small incremental changes are paramount.

Competitiveness comes from incremental improvement.

Kaizen workshops: ???

Toyota employees conditioned to see and spread ways of improving their jobs.

Improvement katas: methods to ensure workers carry and implement the katas

Teaching katas: methods to ensure management continues teaching the katas

Workshops: a meeting to swap tips

Value stream mapping: the 'outcome' of items of business interest are the result of processes

Toyota managers expected to collect suggestions from workers, mentor workers to fine tune their suggestions. contrast to suggestion box where people mostly ignore what is written there.

Action item list: identify waste, put in list, hope engineers fix some day. Reportedly doesn't work.

Heavy traditional focus on detecting defects or outsourcing, little focus on producing less defects.

"I don't know" is preferable to pretending that you do.

Changing at most one thing (in a single process) to check if the change meets expectation.

the purpose of management is to improve processes

Certainly the thieves may be able to follow the design plans and produce a loom. But we are modifying and improving our looms every day. So by the time the thieves have produced a loom from the plans they stole, we will have already advanced well beyond that point. And because they do not have the expertise gained from the failures it took to produce the original, they will waste a great deal more time than us as they move to improve their loom. We need not be concerned about what happened. We need only continue as always, making our improvements. -- Kiichiro Toyoda

Companies implementing improvements based on whoever is most persuasive (wins an argument) until the next time someone argues.

A long-term goal/mission attempts to counteract direction by whoever is most presently persuasive.

Continuous, one-by-one: finished pieces go directly to the next product, there are no buffers or stalls.

Production planning: changing the workspace to make batches of goods; pricing batches around the cost to switch workplace around

Traditional: CBA determines direction; that is, whether we do something or not. “This proposal is too costly? Then we must do something else.”

Toyota: CBA helps define what we need to do to achieve a predefined target condition. “This proposal is too costly? Then we must develop a way to do it more cheaply.”

Relatively luxurious / non-competitive conditions in the USA allowed poor management to endure; it did not have to meet the competitive demands of a global market.

Takt time: amount of time available divided by number of items to produce

1x1 flow: there are exactly enough operators, and consumption, items pass directly from the output to the input of another without hitting a buffer.

Slowing production after building up a buffer to measure where problems actually are

Heijunka, levelling: reordering a backlog of orders to minimize some problem; ex. reducing changeover.

Sticking to the schedule by asking why it can't be followed, resolving those problems, using modified schedules to ship product while resolving the problems.

Target condition: use of targets (ex. workstation needs a new part every five minutes); then observing why goals are not met.

Voting techniques used to pretend people know what to do.

Assume people are doing their best and problems are systemic; they are caused by a faultily designed system.

Be hard on the process, but soft on the operators. —Toyota

Toyota prefers mentors and management from inside the company since they will already carry and reinforce improvement katas.

PDCA

Plan, Do, Check, Act: we promise its not the OODA loop :blobcatgoogly:

PDCA cycles: plan to meet some target, then do things to reach it, check how the result matches expectation, figure out how to adjust for expectation, repeat

PDCA cycles should be short so changes can be checked

the "improvement kata" is basically setting a lofty goal, figuring out how to come closest to the goal, doing it, measuring how far off you were from expectation, repeat, with continuous short cycles so analysis can be done before all the knowledge has fled.

Andons

Andon "pulls"/board: a cord you pull when something happens that is not normal, calls a manager to come look at the problem. There should be plenty of "andon pulls" because all the problems should be sent upstream to get fixed.

If the number of "andon pulls" is anomalously low then check if people are not reporting problems or if there actually is a small amount of problems going on.

Thonks

Covering up the flaws instead (hiding failure with QA, hiring cheap labor overseas)

Dunning-Kruger: pretending you know what you don't

Asking the wrong question

Triage: solving temporary problems quickly, not solving the system that is creating them