Workplace Management

Taiichi Ohno is the creator of the Toyota Production System, an industrial engineering system that focuses on producing no more than is sellable. They invented the just-in-time system of inventory to minimize inventory buildup by only replenishing a production part when a part has been used. Ohno’s system is the precursor to the “lean” movement that I had just read about, but this book goes on to tell more of his work philosophy than just operations details about Toyota’s system (he wrote about that in a previous book). On the vision-operation spectrum for executives, Ohno is more or less completely operations-focused. His philosophies on work are quite different than usual and usually flip concepts on their head (“one equation can mean three different business ideas, depending on the way it’s written”), and yet his arguments make intuitive sense; they remind me of Zen Buddhism’s emphasis on paradoxes as understanding instead of contradiction.

Ohno uses many examples derived from the Japanese language to make his points. In Japanese, the character 動 means to “move”. The character 働 means to “work”. The only difference between the characters is that the one for “work” has the character 人 on the left, denoting “person”. So, “move” plus “person” would mean to “work”. His point in using these characters is that just by doing busy work, like shuffling around on the floor or doing menial labor, that doesn’t constitute productive work; productive work necessarily requires a human’s intelligence. Conventional robots can “move”, very efficiently, but they cannot do “work”, as it takes humans to direct the robot to whichever task should be done. In a similar vein, an employee that just follows orders without thinking about why or how to improve would simply be “moving”, and it’s especially dangerous if the manager similarly didn’t think about the work but rather assigned some task because that was just the manager’s job. If I’m stuck in a lot of “moving”, or busywork, I think the key questions to ask periodically are, “to what ends am I doing this? Are there better ways to achieve the same result?” which would engage the mind both in clarifying the goal of the work and in brainstorming on ways to improve.