Taiichi Ohno - Taiichi Ohno’s Workplace Management: Special 100th Birthday Edition

This book brings to us Taiichi Ohnos philosophy of workplace managementthe thinking behind the Toyota Production System. I personally get a thrill down my spine to read these thoughts in Ohnos own words. My favorite part is his discussion of the misconceptions hidden within common sense and how management needs a revolution of awareness.

Dr. Jeffrey Liker
Director
Japan Technology Management Program
University of Michigan
Author, The Toyota Way

While no one person invented lean, no one is given more credit than Taiichi Ohno. Access to his true thoughts and ideas are rare, and this book is the best and most useful of Ohnos work. Many lean students would want nothing more than to spend a day with Taiichi Ohno walking through their plant. This book is the closest thing we have left to that experience. Jon Miller has done a diligent job, not just in translation, but ensuring that the true meaning comes through in a readable fashion. You truly feel as if you are in conversation with the father of the Toyota Production System. While this book wont paint a clear picture of what to do next on your lean journey, it should be required reading for any serious student of the subject.

Jamie Flinchbaugh
Co-author, The Hitchhikers Guide to Lean:
Lessons from the Road

This book and its translation provide the reader a wonderful opportunity to learn directly from the master architect of the Toyota Production System. One is able to hear, in his own words, the principles that have evolved into the most successful management method ever developed. Today, these lessons are being applied in many industries, including health care, in addition to their long-term application in manufacturing. This book enables the reader to get inside Taiichi Ohnos thinking as he makes concepts such as kanban, The Supermarket System, and Just in Time come alive in ways that can be easily understood. This book will help me, as a senior executive in health care, better implement our management method, the Virginia Mason Production System.

Gary S. Kaplan, MD
Chairman and CEO
Virginia Mason Medical Center

Most of the chapters in Workplace Management can lead you to assume the revolution of awareness Taiichi Ohno calls for is about lean specifics like customer focus, sensitivity to waste, increasing flow, and moving away from command-and-control management. But readers can see right in the first two chapters that Ohno is also suggesting we look back at ourselves and our mindset. Ohno espouses greater awareness not just about the lean goals we pursue but also about the habits and patterns of how we pursue them.

Human capability for learning and change is astonishing, and I think Ohno was an optimist about that. But to mobilize that capability throughout an organization, and even society, we should acknowledge that our unconscious mindset and habits often drive us to try to solve problems in unscientific (overconfident, emotional, mechanistic) ways. When I read Workplace Management today thats as much a part of Ohnos message as the rest of the book, and I think the book endures, in part, because of that message.

Mike Rother
Author, Toyota Kata (McGraw-Hill)
Co-author, Learning to See (Lean Enterprise Institute)

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Learn Ways of Looking at Things
and Thinking about Things

While Taiichi Ohno is considered to have been an influential and revered business leader, to me he was a mentor as well as a strict teacher to be feared. One of my lifes treasures is that I was able to learn the basic teachings of