Not being Japanese is not what’s holding any company back from operational greatness

Every now and then I see posts on my LinkedIn feed from Lean practitioners who have become infatuated with Japanese culture and language, glorifying (actually great) figures such as Ohno and Shingo, to a degree implying that there is something mystical behind the Toyota Production System, which is why it can only ever really work in Japan, and the rest of us are just doing our best to attain such godly heights.

Being a Japanophile is fine. It is, however, highly unlikely that what is holding your organization back from, e.g., developing better products faster with Lean Product Development ideas is that you are not actually Toyota or have no Japanese heritage.

It’s also highly unlikely that what is missing are cargo-cult rituals like post-it notes, “canvas” frameworks, belt designations of various colors, stand-up meetings, Slack channels, etc. … but here we are, debating whether kanban or Scrum or the SAFe bureaucracy is the key to success.

I am having lots of fun asking OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate fictitious arguments for various business situations; the problem is that sometimes what it generates sounds a lot like the gist of what appears on my feed.

Here’s one example: