Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results Author: Mike Rother | Language: English | ISBN:
0071635238 | Format: EPUB
Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results Description
"Toyota Kata gets to the essence of how Toyota manages continuous improvement and human ingenuity, through its improvement kata and coaching kata. Mike Rother explains why typical companies fail to understand the core of lean and make limited progress—and what it takes to make it a real part of your culture."
—Jeffrey K. Liker, bestselling author of The Toyota Way"[Toyota Kata is] one of the stepping stones that will usher in a new era of management thinking."
—The Systems Thinker
"How any organization in any industry can progress from old-fashioned management by results to a strikingly different and better way."
—James P. Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute
"Practicing the improvement kata is perhaps the best way we've found so far for actualizing PDCA in an organization."
—John Shook, Chairman and CEO, Lean Enterprise Institute
This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower.
Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines--called kata--that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation. The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as:
- How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization?
- How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance?
- How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers?
Mike Rother explains how to improve our prevailing management approach through the use of two kata: Improvement Kata--a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions, working step-by-step through obstacles, and always learning from the problems we encounter; and Coaching Kata: a pattern of teaching the improvement kata to employees at every level to ensure it motivates their ways of thinking and acting.
With clear detail, an abundance of practical examples, and a cohesive explanation from start to finish, Toyota Kata gives executives and managers at any level actionable routines of thought and behavior that produce superior results and sustained competitive advantage.
- Hardcover: 306 pages
- Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (August 4, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0071635238
- ISBN-13: 978-0071635233
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
"Toyota Kata" could be the most important book on "lean" since "The Toyota Way". Based on six years research at Toyota, Mike Rother's book provides a very readable and straightforward approach to embedding continuous improvement - putting the "principles" of the Toyota Production System into action.
Interestingly, Mr Rother argues that the "Kaizen Event" approach to improvement is not effective or sustainable because, at best, each process area will only get one or two bursts of improvement in a year. This is not continuous improvement and does truly engage the workforce. He also argues that such events produce lists of improvements which are taken on by engineers and managers as "projects" to be completed. The project approach to improvement has little impact on changing the culture of the organisation.
Instead Mike Rother argues for constant daily improvement - thus "kata" - a simple PDCA routine which is enacted every day by everyone in the process, and supported and coached by managers and team leaders who have roughly 50% of their time allocated to teaching this approach to improvement. Small step-by-step improvements are more effective over time than occasional kaizen bursts, and have a significantly greater impact on the organisation culture -creating an environment of involvement and improvement.
The book describes this "improvement kata" routine with a rapid cycle of small improvements. It is one of the most interesting books I have read in years. The "lean tools" are touched on briefly - described as methods for highlighting obstacles in a controlled manner for improvement - but this book is about the behavioural routines that, by persistent and regular teaching at all levels in the organisation, become the embedded culture.
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