The secret of long-term success
In the 1980’s, Taiichi Ohno
(head of production at Toyota, creator of what we call Lean Management) was
asked the secret of Toyota’s success. He responded with one word: Respect.
Ohno-san’s use of the simple word “respect” carries with it a number of behaviors, attitudes and practices. These are grouped into three areas known as the Three Pillars of Respect:
- Respect for people
- Respect for your craft
- Respect for the customer
Respect for People
This idea is expressed by the
phrase: “Build great products by building great people”. Respect for People
means all the things you would expect: treat each person as an individual, care
for each in their context, etc, but it does not mean a facile “empowering”.
Instead it means to challenge people with high expectations and support
their achieving them. It is not simply sending people to training but giving
people space to learn (and even fail), support their learning and expect
that they will learn. It means to focus on understanding their situation and
what they are dealing with. It means to ask rather than tell, and when you ask “why”,
listening for the answer. Having respect for people is the key enabler of
continuous improvement.
Respect for Your Craft
What does it mean to “respect
your craft”? We assume everyone is a professional. You are a professional. You
know what your work – your craft- is and what its professional standards are.
You know what is quality work. You have learned the skills needed to do
the work you do. You attend professional conferences where you meet with your
technical peers. More importantly, you seek to uphold those professional
standards to the point where you are actually annoyed when you can’t deliver at
anything less that perfection. You "pull the Andon" when your process is not creating quality work of value. You notice waste and wasteful practices, and
make a point of putting an item to eliminate each one on your Continuous
Improvement backlog. But more than that, you work to constantly improve your
skills, constantly learning and challenging yourself to get better.
Respect for the Customer
How do we have “respect for
the customer”? We seek to know what the customer’s objectives are. We want to
know what is important to them, and what they consider useful and
helpful – what has value. We want to get that value to them as quickly
as we can. Often this pillar becomes operational as “having a sense of urgency”:
a deep desire to deliver something meaningful to the customer right now.
This leads directly into the idea of “pull”: we are always urgently pulling
work into Done.
The three pillars are
mutually-reinforcing. “Respect” - the Three Pillars of Respect - are a set of
high-level principles that can be applied throughout an
organization at any level.
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