The Real Meaning of Kaizen

  Manufacturing   Knowledge Shelf  

A friend of mine used to work at the Toyota Technical Center in Michigan, where he was a design engineer and I was a system engineer. Recently, he started a new job at an oil company, and what surprised him was how fascinated his new coworkers were when they heard about Toyota’s Kaizen processes (considering the company’s reputation and achievements in the global automobile market); some of them even followed him around, asking him all sorts of questions about Kaizen.

During this period, I joined a Kaizen group on LinkedIn and started getting regular e-mails about different kinds of Kaizen topics, and what surprised me the most was how many people seemed to think Kaizen was something epic and highly complex.

Kaizen is the Japanese word for “improvement” or “change for the better” and it refers to a philosophy or practices that focus on the continuous improvement of work processes. Kaizen is something anyone can easily adopt to be more effective at work—you don’t have to work in the engineering or manufacturing industry. To help you get started, I have compiled a list of four things you can do to become more effective by doing things “the Toyota way.”

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