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.

Progress is impossible without the ability to admit mistakes.

All of management's efforts for Kaizen boil down to two words: customer satisfaction.

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.

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.

It is impossible to improve any process until it is standardized. If the process is shifting from here to there, then any improvement will just be one more variation that is occasionally used and mostly ignored. One must standardize, and thus stabilize the process, before continuous improvement can be made.