Martin Svoboda

“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.”

“You can’t do kaizen just once or twice and expect immediate results. You have to be in it for the long haul.”

“We are doomed to failure without a daily destruction of our various preconceptions.”

“Progress cannot be generated when we are satisfied with existing situations.”

“Standards should not be forced down from above but rather set by the production workers themselves.”

“Data is of course important in manufacturing, but I place the greatest emphasis on facts.”

“Something is wrong if workers do not look around each day, find things that are tedious or boring, and then rewrite the procedures. Even last month’s manual should be out of date.”

“Any organization’s competitiveness, ability to adapt, and culture arise from the routines and habits by which the people in the organization conduct themselves every day. It is an issue of human behavior.”

“Distribution of reaction to change What Mr. Koenigsaecker’s diagram suggests is that only a small percentage of people in the organization (the right tail of the curve) will welcome a change effort and actively participate.”

“It is conceivable that the point here is not that we do not see the problems in our processes, but rather that we do not want to see them because that would undermine the sense of certainty we have about how our factory is working.”

“Management: The systematic pursuit of desired conditions by utilizing human capabilities in a concerted way.”

“The ability of your organization to be competitive and survive lies not so much in solutions themselves, but in the capability of the people in your organization to understand a situation and develop solutions.”

“The best we can do is to know the approach, the means, we can utilize for dealing with the unclear path to a new desired condition, not what the content and steps of our actions—the solutions—will be.”

“The systematic pursuit of desired conditions by utilizing human capabilities in a concerted way.”

“The competitive advantage of an organization lies not so much in the solutions themselves—whether lean techniques, today’s profitable product, or any other—but in the ability of the organization to understand conditions and create fitting, smart solutions.”

“The way from where we are to where we want to be next is a gray zone full of unforeseeable obstacles, problems, and issues that we can only discover along the way.”

“There are perhaps only three things we can and need to know with certainty: where we are, where we want to be, and by what means we should maneuver the unclear territory between here and there.”

“Art and science can best grow and develop in a society which cherishes freedom and which shows respect for the needs, the happiness and the dignity of human beings.”

“Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.”