Toyota’s Free Riders

Sometimes this is how I think about things — hitching one’s derivative TPS product/service to Toyota. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The free riders shown in the image below can indeed be useful in certain circumstances. It is not as if they are without merit. You may agree or disagree with what the image portrays, but for sure Toyota has been and remains benevolent and generous in accommodating the management practices shown sitting in the trailer. Toyota does not point out the defects these, but that is what I and others do. In my case, as a university professor, to educate my students and the public. So I’d like to point out how the mindset, thinking, and spirit that created TPS is missing in these management practices.

Hitching one’s derivative product/service to Toyota, good as they may be, has resulted in a loss of contact with the original system of management and all that it had (and has) to offer — especially the mindset, thinking, and spirit that created and improved TP…