Standards should not be forced down from above but rather set by the production workers themselves.
Taiichi OhnoRead
Where there is no Standard there can be no Kaizen
Interpretation
What this quote means
Without established standards, continuous improvement (Kaizen) cannot occur.
The quote emphasizes the importance of having clear standards or benchmarks in any process or organization. Without these standards, it becomes challenging to identify areas for improvement, making it difficult to implement the philosophy of Kaizen, which is centered on the idea of continuous, incremental improvement.
Themes
KaizenStandardImprovementProcessBenchmark
In practice
Example use cases
In a business meeting discussing quality control, this quote could be used to stress the need for consistent procedures.
More from Taiichi Ohno
All quotes →The slower but consistent tortoise causes less waste and is more desirable than the speedy hare that races ahead and then stops occasionally to doze. The Toyota Production System can be realized only when all the workers become tortoises.
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The key to the Toyota Way and what makes Toyota stand out is not any of the individual elements…But what is important is having all the elements together as a system. It must be practiced every day in a very consistent manner, not in spurts.
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I’m proud to be Japanese and I wanted my country to succeed. I believed my system was a way that could help us become a modern industrial nation. That is why I had no problem with sharing it with other Japanese companies, even my biggest competitors.
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