You can't do kaizen just once or twice and expect immediate results. You have to be in it for the long haul.

I am beginning to see a large-scale introduction of various management tools, philosophies and practices in the service sectors and have a high hope that it will become a global trend.

The message of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company.

Japanese management practices succeed simply because they are good management practices. This success has little to do with cultural factors. And the lack of cultural bias means that these practices can be - and are - just as successfully employed elsewhere.

Progress is impossible without the ability to admit mistakes.

There are various non-statistical tools that have been typically developed by lean companies, notably by Toyota for minimizing variability in production, such as standardization, introduction of takt time, synchronization, shortening the total production lead time which I am fond of referring to as non statistical tools.

Under the lean system, any tools which are required for solving problems are used.