Lean Blog

Eiji Toyoda on Mistakes: Give Your All, Then Write It Down

Mark Graban — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:03:15 +0000

I was re-reading The Birth of Lean, the Lean Enterprise Institute's collection of interviews with the people who built the Toyota Production System, and one answer from Eiji Toyoda is worth quoting in full. This is Eiji Toyoda on mistakes, and on what gets lost when we don't write them down. He led Toyota as president and then chairman, and oversaw the rise of that system from the management side. Here an interviewer asks what […]

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No, One Toyota Worker Can’t Stop the Whole Factory

Mark Graban — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 06:19:10 +0000

LinkedIn has a genre of infographic that's very popular right now… that's mostly right. You've perhaps seen them. A clean illustration of a Toyota assembly line, a worker reaching up for a cord, and a caption along the lines of: “At Toyota, ANY worker can stop the ENTIRE factory.” It usually gets a few hundred likes. The comments fill up with admiration, and rightfully so. One example: I don't want to be the pedant in […]

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Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: June 26, 2026

Ryan McCormack — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:44:02 +0000

Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better. This edition examines how AI, leadership, employee engagement, and problem-solving are reshaping the future of work. Highlights include building human capability in the AI era, creating a culture of continuous improvement, avoiding false executive […]

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Why Lean Fails to Stick — with Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant

Mark Graban — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:56:24 +0000

Why does Lean fail to stick so often? Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant join me on Episode 547 to make the case that the missing precondition is psychological safety, and that it has to exist at the top before any Lean rollout ever begins. Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guests for Episode #547 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant. We structured this episode as […]

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What Toyota’s 1992 Booklet Means by Kaizen and Job Ownership

Mark Graban — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:32:54 +0000

Nearly two million improvement proposals in a single year. Ninety-seven percent implemented. That doesn't sound like the suggestion-box model most organizations know. It sounds like something else. The number comes from Toyota's April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” It appears in the introduction: “Employees at Toyota operations in Japan proposed nearly two million improvements in 1990, and the employees implemented 97% of their proposals.” I've spent a lot of years around organizations running suggestion […]

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Even in Japan: A Target of Zero and a Process That Lives Near Seven Percent

Mark Graban — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:38:00 +0000

The target printed on the chart was zero percent. The red line had never been near zero. Not in the nine months posted on the wall, and probably not in any month before them. It sat between 6.43% and 6.98%. Every month, someone updated it. And every month, I'd guess, someone was asked why the number had moved a little up or a little down. That's the part that stays with me. Someone was being […]

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‘No Debbie Downers’ and the Hidden Cost of a Positive Team

Mark Graban — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:41:00 +0000

Picture your best week as a leader. Every meeting ran on time. Every status update was green. You walked the floor and people smiled and told you things were going great. Your open-door policy was working beautifully, because employees kept walking through it to tell you how well everything was going. That should worry you. A workplace where nobody brings you bad news is not a workplace without problems. It's a workplace where the problems […]

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ThedaCare’s Collaborative Care, Captured on a 2009 Video

Mark Graban — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:05:00 +0000

Back in 2009, I pointed an early iPhone at my TV and recorded a Fox News segment about ThedaCare's collaborative care model. The footage is grainy. You can see the glare on the screen and hear the room around me. I'd forgotten I still had it until recently. I'm sharing it because of what it captured. This was ThedaCare near the height of its reputation as a model for Lean healthcare, and the segment puts […]

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