Episode page with video, transcript, and more: https://leanblog.org/551
My guest for Episode #551 of Lean Blog Interviews is Darril Wilburn, a senior partner at Honsha.ORG, a founding partner at niwaki, and a former Toyota team member. Darril joined Toyota’s Kentucky plant in Georgetown in 1999. He led the teaching of The Toyota Way 2001 to the plant’s senior leaders, and he later led the global pilot of Toyota Business Practices.
Darril is co-author, with former Toyota leader Hiro Yoshiki, of the new book Courage, Humility, Kaizen: The Three Disciplines of Toyota Leadership. We talk about how the Georgetown plant went from needing to build almost 90% of its capacity just to break even to a much healthier 60%, and what Hiro did to lead that turnaround.
Topics include:
- What really happens when someone pulls the andon cord
- Building psychological safety with new hires before line-off
- Respect for humanity, and why it includes challenge
- “Healthy paranoia” and why Toyota didn’t talk about being number one
- Toyota’s careful entry into the U.S., from NUMMI to Georgetown
- No blame: equipping people to succeed instead of blaming them
- Pulling wisdom out of the masters into curriculum like TBP and FMDS
- Sending managers back through jishuken to relearn TPS
- Straight talk instead of spin
- Hiro, not heroes
- Balancing formal and informal communication
- Why every VP’s first A3 was sent back by design
- Why “doing TPS was never the point”