Toyota kata
managing people for continuous improvement, adaptiveness, and superior results by mike rother.
by Mike Rother · first published 2009
67% recommend33% neutral
"How any organization in any industry can progress from old-fashioned management by results to a strikingly different and better way.—James P. Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute"One of the stepping stones that will usher in a new era of management thinking.—The Systems ThinkerThis game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower.Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's
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…books to recommend: "Lean Software Development" by Mary Poppendieck. Talks about what Lean Manufacturing principles look like when applied to software development: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321150783 "Toyota Kata" by Mike Rother. Nominally about Toyota's personnel management. Actually about the philosophy behind Lean, and how most American companies trying Lean are missing the deeper point. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071635238…
on “Lean” ↗…out that there are stories and good research that might be a lot more helpful. I would suggest: Chris Argyris work on management, especially his ideas around defensive-reasoning vs productive-reasoning. Toyota Kata work by Mike Rother might also be helpful. This is about switching to an evidence backed mode of thinking (scientific thinking). Next would be Robert Kegan's work on constructive developmental framework…
on “In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)” ↗…business of making cars; GM is in the business of making money." Carmakers like Toyota, on the other hand, focused on making cars very well (and making customers happy), and kicked Detroit's ass. (The book Toyota Kata and the TAL episode NUMMI give good intros to why, and why it was the philosophy of American carmakers that prevented them from adapting.) The problem with focusing on maximizing return on capital is…
on “Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features” ↗…continuous improvement, which helped them go from post-WWII decimation of Japan to the world's dominant carmaker. They're explicit that "respect for people" is foundational. A good book here is Rother's "Toyota Kata", which goes into Toyota's culture and people-management practices. Another is airplane safety. For its ubiquity and technological complexity, flight is amazingly safe. But this requires a culture of…
on “HN comments are underrated” ↗If this has some resonance for you, I'd encourage you to check out one of the Lean Manufacturing books. The Toyota Way and Toyota Kata are two of my favorites. Also great is the "This American Life" story NUMMI: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n... I bring up Lean Manufacturing because they have a strong analytical…
on “The Well Intentioned Commissar” ↗Seconded. It's such a good portrait. The way the workers talked about the change sticks with me years later. Adding to the recommendations, I found Rother's Toyota Kata very valuable in understanding how to make Lean approaches work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Kata For applying it in software, I loved Mary Poppendieck's books, which are listed about half-way…
on “The Toyota Production System (2013)” ↗…specializing too much. Much of their efficiency comes from bottom-up innovation, which you don't get if people are focused only on their one little piece of the problem. (For more on this in particular, Toyota Kata is a great book.)
on “Ask Valve employees: How well does the flat organization work?” ↗…the higher end of Maslow's hierarchy. Money will be part of why people show up, but it would not longer be the only reason. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs [2] Liker's Toyota Kata is a great book on this. [3] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n...
on “Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult” ↗What I do is to "average" a book a week. I mean, I listen to 3 books on audible (pretty easy to do). Light entertaining books like Predictable Irrational, Toyota Kata, etc. At the same time the whole month I'm working / doing exercises of a difficult math or programming book. Therefore 4 books in a month an average of 1 a week.
on “Fuck You Startup World” ↗…about running extremely effective manufacturing operations. But they have deeply changed how I think about systems of making software and running businesses. Other great books in this category include "Toyota Kata" and "Principles of Product Development Flow". "Crossing the Chasm" is about how tech products get adopted. But its mindset around segmenting audiences and building credibility taught me a lot about…
on “Ask HN: Books on specific topics that have applied to many areas of your life?” ↗…he said that. But the US car industry has a long history of boldly declared but ultimately failed attempts to adopt Toyota's process in a way sufficiently deep to get Toyota's results. Rother's book "Toyota Kata" is a good dive into why: they adopted some of the rituals, but never made the deeper cultural and philosophical changes needed to get most of the value.
on “Tesla opens the Model 3 reservation floodgates” ↗…"Confronting Managerialism", which looks at the history of the ideology and how it has become basically a caste system. Or read some of the Lean literature on how non-MBA-driven companies approach things. E.g., "Toyota Kata". As an occasional manager, there's some value to the work that some managers do. But managerialism itself often extractive (that is, part of its function is to justify siphoning a lot of cash into the…
on “Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally big, competitively small” ↗Exactly. And if you're curious what this says, I'd recommend reading Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism". It's a great look at the dominant ideology of MBA-style management. And for me Rother's "Toyota Kata" was a good inspiration as to how to think of management not as control layer, but where teaching and support are the most important functions.
on “Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?” ↗…Everybody coalesces around a vision quite detached from reality and then just kind of lives in it for years. It's a weird sort of collective arrogance/faith. There are alternatives, though! In Rother's "Toyota Kata", he describes a Toyota practice where they pick some far-off goal (which I think is called a "target condition"). That can be something that nobody knows how to do. Then they take one step in that direction…
on “SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'” ↗…eyeing some of Deming's myself -- but this one is probably as good a primer as any) - The Flaw of Averages (to get more accurate predictions, focus on distributions and ranges, not single numbers) - Toyota Kata (a rote way to build a culture of continuous improvement) - Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It (general high-quality exposition on evidence-backed techniques -- maybe not strictly…
on “An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage (2017)” ↗