Jan 24 2018
Why It Makes Sense (Sometimes) to Start With Hoshin Kanri | Dan Markovitz | IndustryWeek
“Strategy deployment is a powerful way to get the leadership team involved in the lean journey.For a long time, I’ve been dismissive of organizations that want to start their lean journeys with hoshin kanri, (also known as strategy deployment). When you’ve got a company where people are not engaged (at best) or suspicious of management (at worst), it seems to me that getting people involved in everyday improvement to make their jobs easier is a better place to start.[…] Until now. Recently, my colleague and friend Katie Anderson pointed out something I’ve completely missed: that strategy deployment is a powerful way to get the leadership team involved in the lean journey.”
Sourced through IndustryWeek
Michel Baudin‘s comments: As I have great respect for both Dan Markovitz and Katie Anderson, I have to paraphrase Judge Haller from My Cousin Vinny, “That is a lucid, intelligent, well thought-out argument… Overruled.”
The flaw I see in Dan’s argument is that it only addresses employee engagement, which isn’t the only reason to start with local, tactical shop-floor projects with both technical and managerial content. In an organization that is just starting on its journey, the successful initial projects are most commonly setup time reduction or cell conversion of a process segment. Besides engaging employees, they also produce tangible improvements, develop technical and managerial skills, and let leaders emerge.
Oct 21 2025
From MBO to Hoshin Kanri
In 1995, Peter Drucker conceded that Management By Objectives (MBO) was not “the great cure for management inefficiency” he had believed when he coined the term 41 years earlier. In the meantime, the technique had contributed massively to the decline of American industry by turning managers into metrics gamers.
On 10/7/2025, The Conversation published an article by Aurélien Rouquet, reassuring us that Management by objectives is not a Nazi invention, contrary to what historian Johan Chapoutot claims. Rouquet attributes its paternity to Alfred P. Sloan, the head of General Motors who made it the most powerful company in the world by the end of World War II.
Rouquet’s article also includes a link to another article, dated 9/2/2024, where George Kassar asserts in the title that At 70, management by objectives remains unsurpassed. The most surprising thing, for an article on such a subject, is that it does not cite any company whose performance has been improved by MBO. And the author seems to ignore the existence of an approach that has surpassed MBO for decades, the Hoshin Kanri, which perhaps has the misfortune of coming from Japan.
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By Michel Baudin • Policies, Uncategorized 1 • Tags: Bridgestone, Hoshin, Hoshin kanri, Hoshin planning, Lean, Strategy, Strategy Deployment, Toyota