Monthly Archive for April, 2009
Toyota invests in people and in return it gets committed associates who show up to work every day and on time and are continually improving their operations. On one of my visits, I found that in the past year at the Toyota, Georgetown, assembly plant associates made about 80,000 improvement suggestions. The plant implemented 99% [...]
Taylor’s Scientific Management. Taylorism is the ultimate in external motivation. People come to work to make money—end of story. You motivate workers by giving them clear standards, teaching them the most efficient way to reach the standard, and then giving them bonuses when they exceed the standard. The standards are for quantity, not quality. In [...]
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Abraham Maslow’s need hierarchy looks at motivating people as equivalent to satisfying their internal needs. Your highest level of motivation will be to do the things that better you as a person—called “self-actualization.” But there are a few steps you have to take before you can get there. Humans can work [...]
Most of us at some point in our education learned about human motivation. If you took a class, you may recall a dizzying array of different theories and theorists and no clear way of figuring out who was right or wrong. Which motivation theory does Toyota, implicitly, subscribe to? As it turns out, all of [...]
In a conventional automotive plant, white-collar or skilled-trade staff is responsible for problem solving, quality assurance, equipment maintenance, and productivity. By contrast, shop floor work groups are the focal point for problem solving in the Toyota Production System . Source: Bill Constantino, former group leader, Toyota, Georgetown The associates who perform the value-added jobs are [...]
One surprise I had when I was visiting the Hebron operation was the frequent reference to “situational leadership” that they had learned from Ken Blanchard, famed author of The One-Minute Manager. This was only one of a number of leadership models they had learned from, but it at first struck me as incongruous with the [...]
By the time Toyota began setting up its service parts facility in Hebron, Kentucky, the management team had learned from experience that a successful startup depended much more on creating a Toyota culture than on building a facility with the right technology. Years earlier, Toyota set up a global service parts distribution center in Ontario, [...]
Talk to somebody at Toyota about the Toyota Production System and you can hardly avoid getting a lecture on the importance of teamwork. All systems are there to support the team doing value-added work. But teams do not do value-added work. Individuals do. The teams coordinate the work, motivate, and learn from each other. Teams [...]
General Motors has had a unique opportunity through its joint venture with Toyota at the NUMMI plant to learn the Toyota Production System firsthand. In recent years, they have been doing quite well in applying TPS. But that was not always the case. In the early stages of the joint venture, GM tried to carbon-copy [...]
Toyota leaders have a distinctive approach and philosophy that fits the Toyota Way. The two-dimensional leadership matrix helps depict what distinguishes leadership at Toyota from leadership at other companies. On the one hand, leaders can either rule by top-down directives or use a bottom-up involving style to develop people so they can think and make [...]