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“This book brings to us Taiichi Ohno’s philosophy of workplace management— the thinking behind the Toyota Production System. I personally get a thrill down my spine to read these thoughts in Ohno’s own words. My favorite part is his discussion of the misconceptions hidden within common sense and how management needs a revolution of awareness.” Dr. Jeffrey Liker Director Japan Technology Management Program University of Michigan Author, The Toyota Way “While no one person invented lean, no one is given more credit than Taiichi Ohno. Access to his true thoughts and ideas are rare, and this book is the best and most useful of Ohno’s work. Many lean students would want nothing more than to spend a day with Taiichi Ohno walking through their plant. This book is the closest thing we have left to that experience. Jon Miller has done a diligent job, not just in translation, but ensuring that the true meaning comes through in a readable fashion. You truly feel as if you are in conversation with the father of the Toyota Production System. While this book won’t paint a clear picture of what to do next on your lean journey, it should be required reading for any serious student of the subject.” Jamie Flinchbaugh Co-author, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean: Lessons from the Road “This book and its translation provide the reader a wonderful opportunity to learn directly from the master architect of the Toyota Production System. One is able to hear, in his own words, the principles that have evolved into the most successful management method ever developed. Today, these lessons are being applied in many industries, including health care, in addition to their long-term application in manufacturing. This book enables the reader to get inside Taiichi Ohno’s thinking as he makes concepts such as kanban, The Supermarket System, and Just in Time come alive in ways that can be easily understood. This book will help me, as a senior executive in health care, better implement our management method, the Virginia Mason Production System.” Gary S. Kaplan, MD Chairman and CEO Virginia Mason Medical Center “Most of the chapters in Workplace Management can lead you to assume the ‘revolution of awareness’ Taiichi Ohno calls for is about lean specifics like customer focus, sensitivity to waste, increasing flow, and moving away from command-and-control management. But readers can see right in the first two chapters that Ohno is also suggesting we look back at ourselves and our mindset. Ohno espouses greater awareness not just about the lean goals we pursue but also about the habits and patterns of how we pursue them. “Human capability for learning and change is astonishing, and I think Ohno was an optimist about that. But to mobilize that capability throughout an organization, and even society, we should acknowledge that our unconscious mindset and habits often drive us to try to solve problems in unscientific (overconfident, emotional, mechanistic) ways. When I read Workplace Management today that’s as much a part of Ohno’s message as the rest of the book, and I think the book endures, in part, because of that message.” Mike Rother Author, Toyota Kata (McGraw-Hill) Co-author, Learning to See (Lean Enterprise Institute) Copyright © 2013 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-0-07-180802-6 MHID: 0-07-180802-7. 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CONTENTS Foreword by Fujio Cho Preface by Taiichi Ohno CHAPTER 1 The Wise Mend Their Ways CHAPTER 2 If You Are Wrong, Admit It CHAPTER 3 Misconceptions Reduce Efficiency CHAPTER 4 Confirm Failures with Your Own Eyes CHAPTER 5 Misconceptions Hidden within Common Sense CHAPTER 6 The Blind Spot in Mathematical Calculations CHAPTER 7 Don’t Fear Opportunity Losses CHAPTER 8 Limited Volume Production Is to Produce at a Low Cost CHAPTER 9 Reduced Inventory, Increased Work in Process CHAPTER 10 The Misconception That Mass Production Is Cheaper CHAPTER 11 Wasted Motion Is Not Work CHAPTER 12 Agricultural People Like Inventory CHAPTER 13 Improve Productivity Even with Reduced Volumes CHAPTER 14 Do Kaizen When Times Are Good CHAPTER 15 Just in Time CHAPTER 16 Old Man Sakichi Toyoda’s Jidoka Idea CHAPTER 17 The Goal Was Ten-fold Higher Productivity CHAPTER 18 The Supermarket System CHAPTER 19 Toyota Made the Kanban System Possible CHAPTER 20 We Learned Forging Changeover at Toyota do Brasil CHAPTER 21 “Rationalization” Is to Do What Is Rational CHAPTER 22 Shut the Machines Off! CHAPTER 23 How to Produce at a Lower Cost CHAPTER 24 Fight the Robot Fad CHAPTER 25 Work Is a Competition of Wits with Subordinates CHAPTER 26 There Are No Supervisors at the Administrative Gemba CHAPTER 27 We Can Still Do a Lot More Kaizen CHAPTER 28 Wits Don’t Work Until You Feel the Squeeze CHAPTER 29 Become a Reliable Boss CHAPTER 30 Sort, Set in Order, Sweep, Sanitize CHAPTER 31 There Is a Correct Sequence to Kaizen CHAPTER 32 Operational Availability vs. Rate of Operation CHAPTER 33 The Difference between Production Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering CHAPTER 34 The Pitfall of Cost Calculation CHAPTER 35 The Monaka System CHAPTER 36 Only the Gemba Can Do Cost Reduction CHAPTER 37 Follow the Decisions That Were Made CHAPTER 38 The Standard Time Should Be the Shortest Time Afterword About the Author Seeking What Taiichi Ohno Sought by Jon Miller Ohno’s Insights on Human Nature by Bob Emiliani A Revolution in Consciousness by John Shook Taiichi Ohno as Master Trainer by Jeffrey Liker Reflections on the Centenary of Taiichi Ohno by Masaaki Imai Selected Sayings of Taiichi Ohno A Note on Translation from Japanese to English Index About Kaizen Institute Worldwide Contact Information for Kaizen Institute Consulting Group