Toyota = Abundance of rice

[cali yaris]

their notion of "kaizen", where everyone is encouraged to contribute to improvement, is something I instituted in my own company.

[GeneW]

Originally Posted by cali yaris

their notion of "kaizen", where everyone is encouraged to contribute to improvement, is something I instituted in my own company.

Kaizen is wonderful if it's promoted fairly and uniformly. Toyota has a MINIMUM QUOTA of suggestions, I think it's one every two weeks, for every worker.

Some companies make a mess out of Kaizen. One firm I once worked for used to demand a cost/benefit analysis of each suggestion. Another firm refused to give credit unless the suggestion netted the firm at least $1,000,000 profit per year. One group of pirates, a "name" manufacturer based in Japan, sometimes would steal suggestions from employees, develop them and then give the prize to the lead engineer.

The saddest part of suggestions is that really radical and market shaking suggestions will be the first ones tossed out as "useless". We keep hearing all sorts of asinine predictions by CEOs (like Watson of IBM claiming that there might be a market for five computers in the entire world) and must realize that sometimes if you want something new you have to go do it yourself.

Gene