Sep 29 2025
My Toyota Forklift
For most participants, Day 2 of the Global Lean Summit was a visit to the Toyota Material Handling (TMH) plant in Columbus, IN, organized by Sam McPherson and hosted by Tom Lego. There were two busloads of us.
Toyota
Feb 7 2024
Toyota’s job rotation policy
Kerry Creech became President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Kentucky (TMMK) in July 2023. He had joined Toyota as a team member in powertrain quality control in Georgetown, KY in 1990. Toyota’s policy of developing people and promoting from within made this career possible. Kerry Creech got a degree in electrical and electronics engineering in 2010 while a manager at Toyota.
There are many dimensions to Toyota’s Human Resource Management, and I would like to focus this post on the specifics of Job Rotation as a policy that sets Toyota apart from most other manufacturing companies. A blog reader asked about it, so I checked with Tracey Richardson for accurate details, at least for Toyota’s US operations when she was working there.
There are two types of rotations, involving, in different ways, production operators – “team members” in Toyota parlance – and the support staff, starting with first-line managers – known as “group leaders.”
Dec 30 2023
Greatest Hits of 2023
This blog’s greatest hits of 2023:
- Nissan’s Quick Response Quality Control (QRQC)
- Runners, Repeaters, and Strangers among Components
- Where do “Value Stream Maps” come from?
- The Fox Knows Many Things, But The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing
- Deming’s Point 4 of 14 – End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag
- Does Amazon Use Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma?
- Does Toyota Use SPC?
- Deming’s Point 3 of 14 – Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality…
- Deming’s Point 5 of 14 – Improve Constantly and Forever the System of Production and Service
- Deming’s Point 11.b of 14 – Deming versus Drucker
- Metrics in Lean – Chart junk in performance boards and presentations
- Why “Smart” part numbers should be replaced with keys and property lists
- Wrong things ChatGPT says about me
- Project Manager Versus Chief Engineer: What’s The Difference?
- Deming’s point 1 of 14: Create constancy of purpose…
- Why 5S fails
- Quality in a Manufacturing System
- Why we Need a Quality Department
- Orbit charts, and why you should use them
- What is an A3?
#greatesthitsof2023, #quality, #VSM, #ValueStreamMap, #deming, #toyota
Feb 20 2022
Visual Management
[Featured image from Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information)
Tracey Richardson started a spirited discussion on LinkedIn just by posting this quote, presumably from Toyota training materials, and asking “what else would you add to describe ‘Visual Management’”:
Jan 24 2022
Does Amazon Use Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma?
In 2019, Christoph Roser posted six articles on his blog about the inner workings of Amazon Fulfillment Centers, based on visits to locations in the US and Germany. His blog is called AllAboutLean but the word “Lean” appears nowhere in his articles about Amazon. “Six Sigma” does not appear either, and Christoph does not mention meeting any black belt.
In addition, in Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (2021), Amazon alumni Colin Bryar and Bill Carr make no reference to Lean, and all they report about Six Sigma is using DMAIC to define metrics.
Yet you find some published descriptions of Amazon as a showcase for Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma but, if you consider them without confirmation bias, the evidence is underwhelming. The keywords appear, along with a few more, like “Operational Excellence” or “Scrum.”
Based on the small amount of published data, the leaders of Amazon, starting with Jeff Bezos, “learned a bunch of techniques, like Six Sigma and lean manufacturing and other incredibly useful approaches.”
In other words, they learned everything they could get their hands on while staking out uncharted territory. Then they developed their own system. Now they are sharing with outsiders a few homilies but no details, as is their privilege. Their system is to retail as Toyota’s is to manufacturing. It’s not reducible to Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma.
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