Book Report

Book Title: Toyota Kata, Mike Rother

Book Overview: My first impression of this book was that I had to read it before or at
least before to the previous ones. They spoke about the projects and how many we
have to do to involve our organization on this “Lean Journey”.

But if the main aim of any organization is try to reach or become similar to Toyota,
maybe we need more details and different approach of what Continuous Improvement
means. The grade of detail that they have developed is interesting, hoping and very
hard to start from my particular point of view but not impossible.

It’s true that when we visit another companies we take a look to the facilities trying to
see what is useful for our own sites, and copy it. But normally we don’t try to figure out
why that site is using a particular tooling, system or improvement, we just think: “it looks
good”, “I can do the same in my plant”, etc but maybe also we should ask ourselves why
they are using that specific tooling, system or improvement and we would find the key
whereby Toyota is successful.

My main learning points:

At this point looks like I have done all in the wrong way. Methods and tools that I
considered correct maybe they are not, at least at this point (Part II). I´m curious to see
what´s next.
But there are another interesting topics, I have never ask about the business
philosophy, and is interesting to know what is the company´s thought, what they expect
and how they expect that we achieve the goals. According with the author we can see
on that “statement” if the company is thinking in a short term or long, if the company
wants to sell only no matter what or if they are thinking on improve our current process
in order to reduce operating cost and get more profits with the sales, which is the same
goal but with different approach.
Another interesting topic was Target Condition, often we thought that set a target is
easy, just say a number or statement and that it. After read this book (Part III) I realized
that is not so easy or maybe it is if we had in mind the correct concept of Target
Condition.
All the tools that we have learned on this Lean Journey have the intention to set a
Target Condition to reach, but we take the implementation of Kanban for instance as a
statement, something mandatory to do even when we do not know how to do it.

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Toyota Kata mentions that error or mistakes are normal, and it is true, when we try to
apply some of those tools and then we do not get the expected outcome we think or our
managers think that we are doing something wrong, even worst that this “Lean stuff”
does not work, but how we can expect get the better results after just one trial?, make
mistakes is normal as long as you do not stop learning of those mistakes.
Entropy, another concept usual in different applications but that perfect fits on this as
any system if we stop follow any improvement or thinking on “the people understood
already, they can take care of that” means what we are going to lose any advance
automatically, all the systems tend to chaos no matter what. If we think that we improved
something and it is done, we´re wrong and this time is not normal.
Usually when we make improvements we try to see what is working well and we say we
have achieved our goal in a X%, for Toyota this is not relevant, for them NO PROBLEM
= PROBLEM, if we are not able to see them we cannot continue improving.

What will I apply to my business?:

Toyota Kata talks about Coaching, Mentor and Mentee. Until now Training = Coaching
for me, but after this book I could say that my concept has changed a little bit.
Training is the recurrent concept that all the companies have: a classroom, copies,
presentation, Trainer and Trainees, just one project, one week dedicated to that, present
open issues and make a list to follow the plan and then…maybe nothing happens,
depends on the company or of the person in charge.
The concept for Toyota is different, they have a Mentees and a Mentor, and those
Mentors have another Mentor and so on; this way they are learning and improving at the
same time all the time, coaching to their mentees through the problem solving, give
them the possibility to express their ideas or thoughts and then correct them if is
needed.
I´m not saying the method used until now is not correct, but I think the purpose of read
all these books is all about Continuous Improvement, it´s about combine methods, good
practices and so on in order to get our own path thru our Target Condition, one step at
the time.
I would like to start as I mentioned in another report with a Quantity Management for our
Team Leaders, Supervisor, all the people involve with Production, training them and
explaining them the importance of this Lean Journey and then they can be the Mentors
of our Operators, at same time our Mentor will have a Mentor who could be me, it’s a
challenge of course, I need to structure this very well because I would like to include our
top management on this, in order to flow in the same way.
For now, my first step will be the training first for our Leaders and Supervisors and after
that, start coaching them to assure that they still have the same concept and guide them
if is something wrong to keep them focused to reach our Target Condition.
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As a Mentor I´m confident that I will have help from you Craig and all the Trainers that I
met during this year in order to get the answer to the questions of my Mentees if I
cannot do it.
It is very exciting and stressing but now I know that this will not be a miracle, from one
day to another, this kind of teaching method took to Toyoka almost 10 years to get
results as we know. So, I will make mistakes on my way, I´m pretty sure of that but with
the confident that at least I will comply my first target and then I will continue working to
my second one, and so on…which is the purpose because the improvement never
stops.