Relentlessly Pursue Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement, or kaizen in Japanese, is another key idea from the Lean movement. Taiichi Ohno, a key figure in the history of the Toyota company, once said,

Kaizen opportunities are infinite. Don’t think you have made things better than before and be at ease… This would be like the student who becomes proud because they bested their master two times out of three in fencing. Once you pick up the sprouts of kaizen ideas, it is important to have the attitude in our daily work that just underneath one kaizen idea is yet another one.

Don’t treat transformation as a project to be embarked on and then completed so we can return to business as usual. The best organisations are those where everybody treats improvement work as an essential part of their daily work, and where nobody is satisfied with the status quo.