Once again I’m going through old files. Looking back at my notes from 2005, I believe I was thinking about nailing these points to a church door somewhere in the company. That actually isn’t a bad analogy because I was advocating a pretty dramatic shift in the role of the kaizen workshop leaders.

This was written four years before I first encountered the book Toyota Kata (McGraw-Hill, 2009) and reflected on my experience as a lean director operating within a $2 billion slice of a global manufacturing company. What reading Toyota Kata did for me was to solidify what I wrote below and provide a structure for actually doing it.

Kaizen events

Kaizen events (or whatever we want to call the traditional weeklong activity) can be a useful tool when used in the context of an overall plan, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient to implement our operating system.

There are times when any specific tool is appropriate. There are no universal tools, kaizen tools included.

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