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Comment by thendrill | Hacker News Reader

That shit works only if you are Japanese.... Have Japanese mentality and work culture... Also your product is a car.. Or something tangable made on a production line....

Agile IS the Toyota way... Or at least tries to be

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A sibling post mentioned Deming, the American who's WWII work on bomber production formed the basis for "The Toyota Way," and not in some indirect way, either. Deming went to Japan at the behest of the US to help them rebuild their economy after WWII.

I read somewhere that the context for this was all the men returning from WW II. While it was mostly women worked in the factories during the war and had to find ways to improve production, Deming ideas were solid. But as soon as the egoistic men came back from the frontlines after the war, he was kinda "pushed away" because no one in the US wanted to listen to him anymore. Which naturally was a big mistake as it turned out in the 70s when Japanese car manufacturing made American cars look like garbage.

Nah. I see some of those points could very well be adapted to German companies.

And focussing on long-term growth and stability is probably one of the main aspects of the German "Mittelstand" (medium companies, often led by families over generations) which usually has a strong focus on providing a sustainable place to work and therefore not optimizes its business for shareholder value.

His post would have been correct if he had omitted the word "only". As you've pointed out, it isn't only Japanese culture that values long-term stability and value to the society. The problem is that American culture absolutely does not value this stuff, and that's why our companies work the way they do.

While it don’t think it was ever applied to GM as a whole, the NUMMI plant in Fremont was able to use many of the Toyota principles when it was run as joint GM-Toyota venture, using UAW workers. The tragedy was that GM executives didn’t understand or care about transferring lessons learned there to other parts of the organization, until it was too late.

Of course, you can’t minimize the different financial environments Japan and US have for manufacturers...

This story about NUMMI (where Tesla factory resides) shows that it is not just Japanese who can enjoy improvement, same goes for Americans whose managers are a bit more open minded. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

GM has successfully incorporated most of the strategies with it's North American workforce.

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