Word: kaizen
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...says Valiante, is Woods' constant quest to be better. As TIME wrote in a 2000 cover story about Woods: "What is most remarkable about Woods is his restless drive for what the Japanese call kaizen, or continuous improvement. Toyota engineers will push a perfectly good assembly line until it breaks down. Then they'll find and fix the flaw and push the system again. That's kaizen. That's Tiger." These words were written after Woods' first reconstruction of his golf swing, a revamping he undertook after winning the 1997 Masters by a record 12 strokes. Despite his continued dominance...
...organizing philosophy behind TPS is popularly ascribed to a concept called kaizen - Japanese for "continuous improvement." In practice, it's the idea of empowering those people closest to a work process so they can participate in designing and improving it, rather than, say, spending every shift merely whacking four bolts to secure the front seat as each car moves down the line. Continuous improvement constantly squeezes excess labor and material out of the manufacturing process: people and parts meet at the optimal moment. Kaizen is also about spreading what you've learned throughout the system. And then repeating...
...industry. Toyota is weathering the recession far better than its American counterparts not just because it has been making the fuel-efficient automobile customers wanted - though that helped a great deal - but because the Japanese giant makes a fetish out of efficiency. (The term for it in Japanese is kaizen, or continual improvement.) Even Wal-Mart, once environmental Enemy Number One, has made its Byzantine supply chain greener and more efficient - and spreading those values to its network of suppliers. The message is sinking in: a 2008 survey by Johnson Controls found that 72% of building managers are now paying...
...Japan last week, Mazda's new American employees were learning things they never heard much about at the union hall. In particular, they were lectured about the Japanese tradition of kaizen, meaning a worker's commitment to finding ways to do his job better and more efficiently. On the Hofu assembly line, a group of Americans clutching stopwatches and clipboards hovered around Kazuyuki Toda, a Japanese worker, as he demonstrated how to do a job poorly, with too much muda, or wasted motion. The Americans were then asked to suggest ways of doing the job faster. Their ideas ranged from...
...like Toyota, which overcame consumer prejudice in part by inventing kaizen, a manufacturing process and corporate mantra translated as "continuous improvement," Hyundai has rapidly built up regard for its products through an almost fanatical attention to Getting It Right. Consumer Reports magazine recently named the Sonata the most reliable car in the U.S. And Hyundai rose to second place in J.D. Power and Associates' 2004 survey of initial car quality, tied with Honda and trailing only Toyota. Six years ago, Hyundai ranked among the worst in terms of initial defects. The comeback "is astounding," says Chance Parker, executive director...