These days, there must be people at Toyota waking up in a cold sweat from dreams in which they are being scolded by Taiichi Ohno, furious at the massive vehicle recalls caused ostensibly by the pursuit of scale and volume production at the expense of quality. At least I sincerely hope this is the case, for the sake of Toyota’s future. My fear is that there are not enough people left at the company who have felt the heat of being scolded up close by kaizen sensei like Taiichi Ohno and Kikuo Suzumura. There is nothing like having your confident ignorance and misconceptions burned away by the heat of good sensei scolding.

If you strip away the high expectations and pressures of an intensive sensei-driven kaizen event, the sheer showmanship and theater of the experience, and the effects of having to listen to the Japanese sensei through a delayed, filtered, and sometimes inscrutable interpretation, the best of the Japanese kaizen events are 60 hours of nonstop scoldings. To scold is to reprove or criticize openly, but to scold like a kaizen sensei one must make a few important choices.

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