Toyota has put a couple of 4 minutes videos on line that provide a fluffy, pretty basic explanation of the origins of Jidoka, JIT and the TPS. In typical Toyota fashion, they give all of the credit to the Toyoda family and Taichi Ohno – no mention of any of the thousands of other folks who played important roles. Just the same, they make for some entertaining viewing – lots of old pictures of the Toyoda boys and the early plants. Depending on how fast your computer loads, they will take fifteen or twenty minutes to watch, but they are well worth the time. They are not bad TPS 101 level pieces for anyone in the company who knows right next to nothing about lean.
Go get yourself a box of popcorn, put your feet up, and click here to watch ’em.
If low class comedy is more your style, you can always click here instead and watch an incredibly stupid promo for Microsoft XBox
Mark Graban says
It’s not “typical Toyota fashion”, it’s “typical corporate fashion.” The leaders always get the credit… as in news stories that say so-and-so CEO “turned around the company” as if it were a single handed effort. It’s not right but it’s not just a thing to beat up Toyota over.
Bill Waddell says
You’re right, the popular media always wants to give credit to individual superstars, but this web site is not the popular media – it is Toyota’s own site.
The Ford web site does not give credit to Henry Ford for the assembly line – just for his vision. The Microsoft web site does not give credit to Bill Gates for writing any software code – just for having a dream.
But not Toyota – their official site gives 100% of the credit for every aspect of the TPS to the 3 Toyodas and Ohno. Not a single other person in the company had an idea that made a significant contribution to the system worth metioning, according to the Toyota Corporation.
These guys are so absurd about avoiding the mention of anyone other than the Toyodas and Ohno, they state in their video that “The Machine That Changed The World” was written by MIT. MIT may well have published it and underwritten much of it, but the fact is that it was written by Womack, Jones and Roos.
It may well be a part of the Japanese culture to reserve honor and respect for the founders, and who thought up what is not really important – understanding what they thought up is the key – but Toyota takes their creative version of history to an extreme that undermines their credibility.
Shingo and his work in SMED have been written out of the Toyota history books, along with any lessons they learned from Ford. According to the video, Kiichiro came to North America in 1929 to sell rights to the automatic loom – nonsense. The rights had already been sold to a British company along with the North American rights. Kiichiro came to spend three months in Detroit, mostly at Ford … but that has been written out of the Toyota corporate history as well.