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.

Where there is no standard, there can be no improvement. For these reasons, standards are the basis for both maintenance and improvement

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.

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.

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

I have a theory that among the large Western companies (mostly American) the higher an executive is promoted, the more wisdom is lost and by the time he or she reaches the top becomes a complete idiot. Certainly they do not deserve the outrageous salary.

Control charts are one of the statistical tools for solving quality related problems.