Friday, September 21, 2018

TPS, the Thinking People System

by Michael Ballé
September 11, 2018

People often ask: how does one get CEOs to adopt lean? I honestly don’t know. The CEOs I work with are curious about lean in the first place. I generally explain that what we mostly do is discuss the business current state, then draw the Toyota Production System(TPS) “house,” then go to the gemba to see what we get right and what we don’t, and observe new problems appear; and then discuss with the people how they see things, what they think about the problems and what they could do about it. I’m mostly met with puzzled disbelief.

And yet, it works.

Which begs the question: what is the theory of lean? How does it actually work? And why always go back to the TPS rather than a simpler version of lean thinking?

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