Respect is the Key
尊重. Sonchō. Respect. The point of lean. Lean is based on respect above all else. We can say that it is a technique of trying to be respectful to the employee, the worker, the work, the nature and everything.
🔸 Let’s start with an event from the life of Sakichi Toyoda. Sakichi Toyoda became interested in the hand loom used by local farm families at some point in his life. He decided to increase the efficiency of these hand looms and help many people here. And he went to work, built and destroyed many looms.
In 1890, Sakichi went to Ueno in Tokyo to visit the machinery show. Machines produced from many countries were exhibited here. Sakichi frequently visited exhibitions and fairs in the future, trying to understand how the machines work. And after his studies, Sakichi Toyoda made his first successful invention. Where previous looms were two-handed, the Toyoda wooden hand loom required only one hand to operate. In this way, it increased efficiency by 50%. He was 24 years old when he received his first patent.
Afterwards, he worked continuously on efficiency and started to work on an electric loom instead of a manual one. Then Ito Shoten Co., Okkawa Mempu Co., Toyoda Shokai Co. opened new companies and accelerated its work, and continued to work on improving its machines.
🔸 The looms on electrically generated machines used a coil to hold the weft. And when the weft was finished, the loom had to be stopped by a worker to refill the bobbin. He felt it was disrespectful to the workers, as the workers had to stand and watch the machines constantly. When a thread broke, workers had to manually stop the machine and re-thread to prevent a faulty fabric product. Toyoda, on the other hand, wanted to give his workers more valuable work so he could pay higher wages. As it turned out, this downtime greatly reduced operational efficiency, and this non-value-added business greatly increased operational time. Therefore, Sakichi set about inventing a device that could automatically replace the loom bobbin when the weft ran out. He invented this mechanism in 1903 and working with this mechanism, producing the world’s first shuttle-change automatic loom, Type T.
(For a more detailed history you can take a look this page)
🔸 Lean was not actually born as a production development system. Its basis was always respect for people, and the developed methods were built on this basis. Therefore, it is necessary to focus not only on techniques, but also on issues of respect and sustainability.
🔸 Professor Yasuhiro Monden, in the 1983 publication “Toyota Production System” wrote, “At Toyota, respect for humanity is a matter of allying human energy with meaningful, effective operations by abolishing wasteful operations. If a worker feels that his job is important and his work significant, his morale will be high; if he sees that his time is wasted on insignificant jobs, his morale will suffer as well as his work.”
🔸 The philosophy of respect is a philosophy that is difficult to explain in a paragraph. And respecting people, those around you and your employees also increases their motivation and enables them to learn and develop regularly. We can work with more pleasure when we are happier. In conclusion, if we summarize this blog, the most important condition for the goal of continuous improvement is the establishment of a continuous cycle of respect, as in Toyoda.
Just think lean, the rest will be easier.
