Kaizen is like a hotbed that nurtures small and ongoing changes, while innovation is like magma that appears in abrupt eruptions from time to time.
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.
The Kaizen Philosophy assumes that our way of life – be it our working life, our social life, or our home life – deserves to be constantly improved.
Kaizen means ongoing improvement involving everybody, without spending much money.
Progress is impossible without the ability to admit mistakes.
You can’t do kaizen just once or twice and expect immediate results. You have to be in it for the long haul.
Where there is no standard, there can be no improvement. For these reasons, standards are the basis for both maintenance and improvement.
All of management’s efforts for Kaizen boil down to two words: customer satisfaction.
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.