Jeffrey K. Liker Quotes

«las medidas de contención en la raíz, llevan consigo el concepto de “esto y, aun así, esto otro”».

TPS starts with the customer. Always ask, “What value are we adding from the customer’s perspective?” Because the only thing that adds value in any type of process — be it a manufacturing, service, or development process — is the physical or information transformation of that product, service, or activity into something the customer wants.

Respect: We respect others, make every effort to understand each other, take responsibility and do our best to build mutual trust.
Teamwork: We stimulate personal and professional growth, share the opportunities of development and maximize individual and team performance.

When there is a problem, do not just keep going with the intention of fixing it later. Stop and fix the problem now.

It is comforting to believe that if we could only implement the right cells and other lean tools to eliminate waste in the process, we could let it rip and get great results forever . . . or at least for a long time. But processes do not work that way.

We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent — attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines. — Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time

management has no more critical role than to motivate and engage large numbers of people to work together toward a common goal. Defining and explaining what the goal is, sharing a path to achieving it, motivating people to take the journey with you, and assisting them by removing obstacles — those are management's reasons for being.

More important than the actual improvements that individuals contribute, the true value of continuous improvement is in creating an atmosphere of continuous learning and an environment that not only accepts, but actually embraces change. Such an environment can only be created where there is respect for people — hence

Be responsive to the day-by-day shifts in customer demand rather than relying on computer schedules and systems to track wasteful inventory.

Rather the power behind TPS is a company’s management commitment to continuously invest in its people and promote a culture of continuous improvement.

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle, a cornerstone of continuous improvement. The Japanese term for continuous improvement is kaizen and is the process of making incremental improvements, no matter how small, and achieving the lean goal of eliminating all waste that adds cost without adding to value.

No matter how many improvements have been made, every process is still full of waste and rife with opportunity to improve.

Toyota’s success, in short, is not rooted in its application of a standard “lean” methodology to manufacturing, nor can it be found in any internally implemented equivalent of Six Sigma. Instead, it is rooted in its leaders. More specifically, it can be found in the approach that a Toyota leader takes, seeing self-development and training others as the only possible path, not only for finding the right solution for the problem at hand, but for constantly and consistently improving performance day after day.

Exceptional People and Exceptional Processes Must Go Hand in Hand

If you are responsible for a problem and make recommendations on possible solutions, you might be asked whether you went and looked at the situation yourself in person.