If you do Lean, you are copying Toyota and their production system — probably extremely poorly, but you are copying nonetheless. After all, Lean is a copy of TPS — a rather poor copy, but a copy nonetheless. And if the mantra has long been “don’t copy Toyota,” why was Lean created? Anyway, all of the top Lean people, and even lots of Toyota people say do not copy Toyota. They say every organization is different and that your situation is unique. Is it? Let’s think and learn together.
Most organizations are led according to the strictures of classical management and processing is nearly always batch-and-queue. So, your organization and situation is not nearly as unique as you think. The facts is that organizations share many more similarities than differences, including:
- Every company does work
- All work is made up of processes
- All processes have customers and suppliers
- Just about every company does not understand the work
- All processing consists of value-added work and non-value-added but necessary work
- All processes contain waste, unevenness, and unreasonableness
- Every company has some combination of cost, delivery, quality, lead-time, and safety problems
- Process improvement works wherever material and/or information is processed and exchanged
- Process improvement applies to both repetitive and creative work
Scores of books have been written about Toyota over the last 50 years. Toyota has been studied and written about more than any other company in history. These books describe Toyota’s revolutionary approach to management and clearly suggest there is something useful to be copied, in whole or part. Even Taiichi Ohno wrote books about TPS — Toyota Production System, Workplace Management, and Just-in-Time for Today and Tomorrow — hoping that other companies would copy TPS to benefit their customers, their business, and society. In the early-1980s, Ohno-san also launched the “New Production System Research Association” hoping to teach others TPS, knowing for certain that new production systems in other companies would not be exactly as they were at Toyota. But the fundamentals of TPS were all necessary no matter what company. Around that time, Ohno-san encouraged Yoshiki Iwata and Chihiro Nakao to start Shingijutsu Consulting to teach TPS to companies around the world.
It seems that when it comes to TPS and Lean, people have great difficulty with the notion of copying. But why? Mainly because they hear from other people higher in status or with more experience than them that they should not copy Toyota. Yet they blindly copied that message and thus failed the number one test of TPS which is to “think for yourself.” If people did that, they would realize that there is much to learn by copying others. Copying is a great starting point for learning, one which you can spend many years doing. If you stick with it, you will evolve and eventually find your own way that may be better than what you initially copied.
Pink Floyd’s great guitarist “[David] Gilmour credits guitarists such as Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, John Fahey, Roy Buchanan, and Hank Marvin of the Shadows as influences. Gilmour said, ‘I copied – don’t be afraid to copy – and eventually something that I suppose that I would call my own appeared’.” Part of what an aspiring musician likes to do is take on the challenge to figure out if they can reproduce (copy) the wonderful sounds that their favorite professional musicians make. It takes a lot of effort to do only that. Your job as a Lean (hopefully kaizen) person is to take on the challenge to reproduce the effect that TPS creates, which is a flow of material and information. It will likewise take a lot of effort to do that. Copying others is your foundation to build upon. Why are you afraid to copy, to build on the work of others? Why do you think copying other companies is a bad thing? Again, you heard it from someone influential, blindly copied the message, and did not bother to think for yourself.
All different types of artists — writers, painters, dancers, photographers, sculptors, film makers, architects, etc. — begin learning their craft by copying others whose work resonated with them. Professional athletes do the same, and so do hobbyists. Children learn to write by copying. As they get a little older, writing becomes thinking. Copying goes on all the time in business, so much so that bad leadership behaviors and bad ideas become entrenched for centuries.
In a recent blog post, “Taiichi Ohno’s Lectures,” Ohno-san said that when you are far behind and need to catch up, it is okay to copy or imitate others’ ideas and methods. This is exactly what Toyota did when it started in 1937. It copied Western automobile designs and batch-and-queue mass production methods. But after they caught up, they came up with their own ideas and methods (flow production; JIT). Likewise, once your company has caught up, you will come up with your own new ideas and methods. Today, almost every company is still catching up to Toyota. So it’s okay to copy Toyota. You may as well copy from the best there is.
But according to Jeffrey Liker, in the second edition of The Toyota Way (p. xxvii):
“…Toyota sensei will tell you that TPS should really stand for ‘Thinking Production System.’ They want people to think. Copying is not thinking or learning.”
No doubt TPS is a “thinking production system,” and people do need to think. But the last sentence, “copying is not thinking or learning,” is not supported by experience. The statement can be true, but it is not axiomatic — meaning, it is not true under all circumstances. Copying can be thinking, copying can be learning, and copying can be both thinking and learning. If you were to copy this blog post on a piece of paper by long-hand writing, you would learn more than just by reading it. That’s why we take notes; to learn important points by copying. And with reflection, we will learn even more and may develop important new insights. So you need to think more deeply about Liker’s words because they can easily be falsified.
I heard someone say “copying what another company does is not ‘respecting your people’.” To that I say, being so far behind does not respect your people. Copying is fundamental to learning. Being born, you are way behind. So you start life by copying your parents. That is a smart move, much better than copying the family dog! You get a job and before you know it you are copying your boss, their ways of thinking and doing things, for better or worse. Copying is pervasive because humans are social animals and we learn from each other, for better or worse. But in business, where success is never guaranteed, people spend way too much time reinventing things when they could instead learn from others though deep study and practice, and build on that.
A far worse problem than copying Toyota is doing a terrible job of copying Toyota, which for most organizations means putting in a lot of effort and getting little or no gain in return. Most people do not try very hard to understand TPS and they cherry pick the parts they like best, which Taiichi Ohno warned against doing. But people are free to ignore sagacious advice, born of incredible experience, and fail much more quickly.
“Companies make a big mistake in implementing the Toyota production system thinking that it is just a production method. The Toyota production method won’t work unless it is used as an overall management system… those who decide to implement the Toyota production system must be fully committed. If you try to adopt only the ‘good parts’, you’ll fail.” — T. Ohno in NPS: New Production System, by I. Shinohara, Productivity Press, Cambridge, MA, 1988, p. 153 and 155
Copying is merely the apparent problem. The real problem is: 1) ignorance or misunderstandings about copying, 2) cherry-picking the “good parts” of TPS, and 3) a lack of perseverance.
Efforts to copy TPS directly on your own or with the help of top consultants like Shingijutsu, or indirectly via Lean (an unnecessary and still incomplete copy), are always a struggle and will often fail because companies, who are way behind, are not dedicated to copying in ways that produce the thinking and learning that elevates their practice of management. And they do not stick with it long enough to come up with their own new ideas and methods. So, don’t avoid copying Toyota. View copying Toyota, as Taiichi Ohno says, as an excellent strategy for catching up and learning.
Today, your company is way behind where Toyota was 50 years go. That means you are way, way, way behind. Leave Lean behind and start copying Toyota now. Do it better. And do it faster.
Note: To be clear, copying includes three components: the technical aspects, the mindset (ways of thinking), and to some extent the culture, where culture in large part reflects the mindset (especially preconceptions). The technical part is always easier in comparison to mindset and culture — though not to diminish the how difficult the technical part can be to understand and do properly. Consequently, special attention must be given to mindset and culture because without them the technical part is guaranteed to be deficient.