Comment by mrguyorama
2 days ago
You specifically need a culture that considers "Unskilled labor" to be an oxymoron. Where a literal assembly line worker feels like they have enough expertise to say "No, this is a problem worth stopping production over".
American car companies for example have always preferred to just keep the line moving and have a later QA step fix up the problem, or literally push the problem onto the dealer.
You need to treat even your low employees as not replaceable cogs in a machine.
This is the opposite of what American business school culture has taught for decades, which is why Toyota was unable to teach GM how to do what they were doing.
Not only did GM managers not do a good job of respecting their employees, but decades of that lack of respect meant that the employees didn't trust management enough to play along with the system in good faith. Everyone was "Defecting" and it makes everyone worse off.
Yet Japan DOES have a strictly hierarchical work culture, where openly countering something your boss says isn't exactly welcome. So I wonder how this sort of "Trust your employees to have good ideas" thing came about.
> Yet Japan DOES have a strictly hierarchical work culture, where openly countering something your boss says isn't exactly welcome. So I wonder how this sort of "Trust your employees to have good ideas" thing came about.
What happened is that they bought into the Edward Deming viewpoint of Total Quality Control (TQC), and instituted this throughout their business in a way which melded correctly with their culture, ultimately resulting in Kaizen and The Toyota Way. It didn't happen overnight, it happened over a period of about 20-30 years, so that now we think of it as something inherent to Toyota that is not possible to replicate. Because of Toyota's strict commitment at the upper levels and the strict hierarchy of Japanese work culture, once they had committed they expended every necessary effort until the thing was done, which differs from American companies where it's often hard to get folks to even try anything new in the way they approach their work.
> once they had committed they expended every necessary effort until the thing was done
That's too simplistic to describe the reality of humanity. Whatever Toyota's discipline, it's a matter of degree and they have challenges implementing it.