Taiichi Ohno

During that time, the press wasn't producing anything, but that was simply accepted as part of manufacturing.

Until one man named Taichi Ono started asking some uncomfortable questions.

Ono was one of the driving forces behind the Toyota production system, wanted Toyota to manufacture smaller quantities of different parts rather than producing large batch sizes and storing them.

But there was a problem.

He began by challenging an assumption.

And when you look at our other three stories, a fascinating pattern emerges.

At Toyota, Taichi Ono challenged a standard everyone had accepted.

A changeover that took hours was reduced to minutes, helping transform an entire production system.

It's, it's other people's interpretations.

Taiichi Ohno is one of these people that I could never really warm to him, um, because I th- I feel somewhere that he, he kind of misled us a little bit.

Uh, in, in one of the books, uh, it's called The Seven Kata from, I think it's Soltero.

Um, ment- it mentions in the book that, you know, Ohno was an economic warrior and he went out of his way to, you know, sort of deceive the West because he was worried that we would understand what they were doing and beat us at their game.

But many people, they'll go and see with a preconception.

And I think it was Taiichi Ono that said, you know, go and see without preconception.

And a preconception is a solution.

that you already have in mind to the problem you're going to go see.

Henry Ford, standardization is only the best we know today, but to be improved tomorrow.

Taiichi Ohno, no standards, no rules.

great it's just made up these sayings that don't mean anything and most companies their standards suck so it's the last thing everyone does but it's it's really the first thing you should do but it's hard it's hard and it's hard to get people to follow them and it's hard to follow them yourself like i said it's hard work that makes everything easy

Yeah, just got to stay the course, so it makes sense.

Oh, well, I'll, I'll just say this from a cursory standpoint.

Something that doesn't get mentioned a lot is Taiichi Ohno's precepts or principles.

And some of the things that he said was, "Say yes, then figure out how to do it.

Stick with something until it's done." And then the other thing is, "Make something exist before you optimize it." So Taiichi Ohno was very much a person of, like, "Let's go get some stuff done." If he had his own construction company, it would be GSD Construction, Get Stuff Done.

So we've gotta go make it first with good drive, invent it, experiment with it a little bit, and make sure that that standard works.

Then create standard work on it, meaning this is how you do it.

And one footnote from that era.

In February 1987, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Goldratt and Bob Falks had recently spent an afternoon with Taichi Ono, the architect of the Toyota production system.

The same article reported that two Japanese management groups had already translated the goal and that Goldratt was refusing them permission to publish for at least another six months.

In fact, the Japanese edition didn't appear until 2001.

A control system you can run off a whiteboard.

That paper is also where he pays his debts.

He names two giants, Henry Ford and Taichi Ono.

Forward limited the space for inventory between work centers, which meant that when the space was full, workers had to stop, which meant Ford had to abolish local efficiencies.