Respect: We respect others, make every effort to understand each other, take responsibility and do our best to build mutual trust. Teamwork: We stimu… - Jeffrey K. Liker

One Toyota executive stated the sentiment well, “Team members are the only appreciating asset we have. Everything else starts depreciating from the moment we buy it.

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.

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