Jul 20 2014
The Toyota Production System (TPS), Philosophy, and DNA
According to Ranga Srinivas, “TPS is a ‘Philosophy’, not a system (System in TPS is given by Western world). That philosophy is in their DNA.”
We tend to get carried away with metaphors, and I think we need to get back to earth.
In Japanese, TPS is not only NOT a philosophy, it is not even a system, but just a method! The term is Toyota Seisan Hoshiki (トヨタ生産方式), and Hoshiki means “method,” not “system.” It reminds me of Louie de Palma, the Danny de Vito character in the series Taxi, saying about his girlfriend, “She sees something in me that no one ever saw, something that isn’t there.”
Let us study TPS for what it really is: the best known way to make cars. And, if Mark Graban can learn from it and improve hospitals, it’s wonderful. But let us not go to a car maker for philosophy. It’s the wrong shop.
Saying it’s the best known way to make cars is not talking it down; it’s what drew me to it. Philosophy is also a wonderful thing, but corporate philosophy is to philosophy as advertising is to poetry. If you parse it, it should be to understand the image management wants to project, not what the company does.
There is a Japanese word for philosophy (tetsugaku, 哲学). Googling “toyota tetsugaku” yields a single occurrence on the Toyota website, in one paragraph about “Business strategy” (hoshin), which translates as follows:
“Toyota aims to be a good corporate citizen through the provision of clean and safe products, to contribute to the prosperity of society, and earn the trust of the international community. I will introduce the vision for the future and Toyota’s philosophy, which is alive in the Toyota Production System and the corporate concept.”
For comparison purposes, this is what GM says about itself on its website:
“In order to achieve our goals, GM has remained committed to the following formula for success:
- Move faster and take risks to achieve sustained success, not just short-term results
- Lead in advanced technologies and quality in creating the world’s best vehicles
- Give employees more responsibility and authority and then hold them accountable
- Create positive, lasting relationships with customers, dealers, communities, union partners and suppliers, to drive our operating success.”
I have the greatest respect for TPS, and have experienced its adaptability to industries ranging from making frozen foods to computers and aerospace. And I understand that you can’t go to a hospital and tell administrators, doctors, and nurses that you are going to help them with a method for making cars. You not only have to adapt it, you must also present it in such a way that they will listen. For 25 years, the word “Lean” has been used for this purpose. It has also been abused, to leverage the respect inspired by TPS in order to promote unrelated ideas.
We also need to be careful about references to DNA in this context. I believe it started with Spear and Bowen Harvard Business Review Article Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System. Culture is nurture; DNA, nature. Your culture is the way your family, school, and society molded you; your DNA is the genetic program that made you.
Generally, we should treat national culture as irrelevant to manufacturing. If Japanese business leaders in the late 19th and early 20th century had considered it relevant, they would have decided that manufacturing was a product of European and American culture that could not be transplanted to Japan.
About housekeeping habits specifically, I remember being impressed, while walking the streets of Rotterdam at night, by houses with the drapes pulled and the lights on to let passers-by admire spotless living rooms. What we saw in factories in the same country, however, told us that the cultural obsession with neatness in daily life did not carry over to the production shop floor.
DNA is even less relevant. In every society, there are misguided individuals who believe that having been born into a particular group makes them better at some activities; the rest of society calls them bigots. If DNA had anything to do with manufacturing excellence, it could not be achieved by learning. You can learn a method, master a system, and even assimilate a culture, but you can’t change your DNA.
I surrendered, and confessed that I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about with clouds, crocodiles, pots of gold, UDEs, DEs, and Ds, and asked for help. The first response I received was from Henry Fitzhugh Camp:
It didn’t help much, but then, fortunately, he added:
He included a link to a video about Goldratt’s change matrix. Others also directed me to webinars, and debated whether there was rich knowledge embedded in the jargon, which prompted me to respond that yes, sometimes, technical terms do embed rich knowledge, for example in math or biochemistry. Often, however, the primary purpose of jargon is to exclude the uninitiated.
Some like to learn from webinars and videos. I don’t mind them for cooking recipes, but I find them an excruciatingly slow way to learn vocabulary. Clouds, crocodiles, pots of gold, UDEs, DEs, crutches and mermaids should be explained each in 25 words or less.
Lisa Scheinkopf then came to my rescue with explanations for at least some of these terms, which I summarized as follows:
As metaphors, Pot 0f Gold and Alligators are OK, but Crutches and Mermaids make no sense. A crutch is a device that helps you, not a risk. And I can’t see what mermaids have to do with the benefits of the status quo. In many cultures, mermaids, or sirens, lure sailors to their deaths. That is not much of a benefit. In others, they fall in love with human males, which makes you wonder what kind of “mermaids” a woman employee would have.
These terms are all about what you have to do to convince members of an organization to embrace a change you are recommending or have been tasked with implementing. In my experience, words are ineffective. To drive change, I have usually focused on finding protagonists rather than persuading antagonists.
Among the first-line managers in a manufacturing plant, for example, you usually encounter about 30% of antagonists who, for whatever reasons, oppose what you are recommending, about 50% of fence-sitters who are waiting to see which way the wind blows, and 20% of protagonists, who see an opportunity and want to take it. You work with the protagonists to get pilot projects done.
Their success then wins over the fence sitters and, together, the original protagonists and the converted fence sitters overcome the objections of the antagonists. Of course, this approach requires you to take human issues into consideration when selecting projects. You may select a smaller pot of gold because the manager in charge is ready to go for it.
And I still don’t know what Kelvyn meant with his “clouds.”