Table Of Content
“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)
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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
