Novayama LLC

Another Tale from the Past

This all happened nearly three decades ago. Since then the company has been through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Thus, the only thing I can be certain of is that things are different today – at least I hope so. It was Tuesday afternoon of a traditional five-day kaizen event. Monday morning had been …

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The CEO’s New Strategy

by Hank C. Andersen Not many years ago there was a CEO so exceedingly fond of finding the right strategy that he spent all of his money on consultants to tell him what the strategy should be. One day there came two consultants and they said they could craft the most magnificent strategy imagianable. Not …

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Toyota Kata: Coaching vs a Report Out

Andrea brought up an interesting point in our weekly open Toyota Kata discussion. She noted that as the coaching conversation became more and more fluid, it tended to become more like a report-out from the learner than coaching them. That got me thinking about a couple of things. Reverse Coaching Something I think I have …

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TWI: Is it Time to Rethink Job Relations?

My intent with this post is to spark a conversation about whether it is time to adjust what we teach people to say when they are teaching TWI Job Relations. It is based on, and expanded from, a talk I gave at the 2023 TWI Summit. Background TWI stands for Training Within Industry, a program …

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A First-Timer’s Guide to KataCon

The 2023 Toyota Kata Summit, aka “KataCon9” is coming up fast – officially 14 and 15 March, with a extra breakout sessions on “Day 0” on Monday March 13th. Also the evening of the 13th is the Kata Geek Meetup, a less formal series of short presentations and discussion. Last year (2022) was “Old friends …

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