Taiichi Ohno's Principles Are Changing the World

If Moses had descended from Mount Fuji instead of Sinai, he might've brought with him not stone tablets but a clipboard and a stopwatch.

- REY ELBO

That's because in the gospel of operational excellence, one prophet stands out with a wrench in one hand and an eagle eye for quality issues and low productivity in the other.

Re-introducing Taiichi Ohno (1912-1990), the architect of the Toyota Production System (TPS). He didn't just build better cars – he built a mindset on how to eliminate waste. TPS summarizes Ohno's core philosophies, distilled over the years by Lean practitioners and Kaizen consultants. That includes my former boss, Masaaki Imai (1930-2023), founder of Kaizen Institute, who helped distill Ohno's Ten Precepts – a powerful cocktail of brutal, simple solutions, shop floor common-sense and just enough Japanese mysticism to make everyone become Japan visitors.

Ten Commandments

Actually, there are more than 10. So, let's simplify and skip the term "precepts" to avoid making it part of a dusty manual. Instead, let's call them what they truly are – commandments to make them bold, tinged with a sense of reverence. By framing it that way, we elevate their importance from mere suggestions.

They're guiding principles to be lived by everyone, not necessarily limited to the manufacturing sector. So, without further ado, here are the commandments – timeless and tested by believers: