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Thursday, February 01, 2018

Why can't you replicate Toyota? You can't copy thinking

There are hundreds of books written about Lean Thinking, Toyota Production System and much more detailing the quality initiatives within Toyota. However, no other company has been able to replicate Toyota till date.
Personally, I believe that no matter, how much ever practices one tries to copy from successful companies, one can't replicate the success. The secret sauce lies in "thinking" behind the practices rather than the practices itself. 
Thought would detail out some of the popular practices the organisations try to copy ignoring the original thinking...
Every practice at Toyota has emerged from Thinking. Copying the practice won't help. You need to replicate the thinking. Things like "Respect the customer," "Stop and Fix" are not just practices but the thinking that needs to become part of the DNA.
https://flic.kr/p/drziYW
Another popular trend is copying the "Spotify model." Mostly organisations get carried away with the buzzwords of "Guilds," "Tribes," etc. They are not aware that, Spotify came up with a model due to their culture of experimentation based on many years of thought process. Copying Guilds, tribes won't make them Spotify. 
Organisations need to focus on building a "thinking" culture rather than "copying" culture. This is one of the critical reasons why Scrum/LeSS took the framework approach. You can start with the simple set of rules and build your method based on the proven principles. 
If you are keen to learn more about Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS), you can register for my upcoming courses. The details about the Sydney and Melbourne courses are below:
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