Sublime

Toyota couldn’t afford those luxuries. In fact, during the postwar years, they couldn’t afford much of anything. They had to find ways to turn Toyota into a lean, mean, automaking machine with little margin for error.‡ Kiichirō, Eiji, and Ohno made three important decisions—three concepts that have become staples of successful manufacturing for ove

Ray Stata, former CEO of Analog Devices and founder of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, wrote that “One of the highest leverage points for improving system performance, is the minimization of system delays.”

A strong component of Deming’s approach to management is called MBM, or management by means, the counter to management by objectives (MBO) and management by results. The key difference between MBMs and MBOs is Deming would ask by what means did you achieve your goal? If you don’t know how you achieved your objective, how do you know if you can do i

Dr. Deming and fellow engineer and statistician Dr. Genichi Taguchi founded what would become the American Supplier Institute.

As we saw earlier, this is a manifestation of the principle of small batches.

Let us be absolutely clear. In most enterprises, around 30%–50% of the total time to market is spent on activity which provides almost zero value in terms of mitigating the risks of our investments. This near-zero-value activity is mostly driven by financial management and planning processes. In our experience, the fuzzy front end presents the bigg