[jacquesm]

One of the key questions in my due diligence practice is whether people are allowed to 'be negative' and to literally stop the line to avoid shipping a defective product.

This one question tends to separate out a very large fraction of companies that take unacceptable risks and allows the ones that don't to be justifiably proud of their attitude towards risk. These are not trivial things either, medical devices and software used in medical diagnosis, machine control and so on where an error can quite literally cost someone their life or a good chunk of their healthy life-span. Companies where people can not or won't speak up tend to have a lot of stuff that's wrong wiped under the carpet.

Kudos to you for speaking up, and irrespective of who got to be called a hero (that part isn't all that relevant to me) also kudos to your employer for acting on your input.

[Zagill]

Jidoka[1] is a key feature of Toyota's manufacturing process that emphasizes detecting defects before they make it out the door and empowering workers to stop the line and get to the root of the problem. It's weird that this isn't a no-brainer for most orgs but I guess there's enough profit incentive in shipping faster at the cost of quality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomation

[bartread]

Yes, it's worked really well for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic....

I worked for a company that swallowed the (so-called) Toyota schtick hook, line, and sinker. About 14 years ago I tolerated some Toyota UK fossil coming in and berating me, in front of my entire team, for being a crap project manager, in spite of I was the most reliable and accurate product manager said (very successful and healthily growing) company had at the time. Seriously, still, fuck that guy with a nail-festooned cricket bat. I fucking shipped everything within the constraints I'd descrived at the beginning of the project, and it did great in the market. Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to kiss my ass. But whatever.

Toyota or, more accurately, consultants who like to hawk the Toyota Production System (TPS), talk a good game, but the reality isn't always aligned with the ideals. Jidoka is evidently not a reality at Toyota, and they aren't much more enlightened than other orgs when it comes to pointing out problems, despite their A3 reports and multicoloured boards.

The Reckoning, by David Halberstam, makes it clear that "Toyota-like" practices aren't unique to Toyota amongst Japanese auto manufacturers. It also makes clear that these practices primarily exist to keep workers engaged and morale high (because, for those of you who've never worked on a production line [I have], in case there's any doubt in your minds, yes, it's boring as fuck).

The reason Toyota was much more successful than other Japanese auto makers in the second half of the 20th century is bugger all to do with their production process, and is instead the result of them being more aggressive and decisive in the wake of WWII: they simply opened a bigger factory sooner than their competitors and were therefore able to meet demand better. This gave them a trading advantage that lasted decades. The TPS didn't hinder their advantage, but it's absolutely disingenuous to claim it as the root cause.

Do NOT drink this koolaid about the TPS. I'm not saying there's nothing of value in it (I like genchi genbutsu, for example), but take it all with a pinch of salt. The value depends on who you are, who your team is, and how as a group you best operate. Fork-lifting business practices thoughtlessly from one organisation to another often doesn't work that well and TPS is no exception. It's no better than Agile cargo-culting but, because TPS is less mainstream, perhaps hasn't come under the same critical scrutiny.

Plus TPS's penchant for fault finding and negative culture overall just pisses people off and drags them down when they are (or should be) engaged in more creative problem solving. So something didn't work out: get over it, move on, and find another solution. Don't spend ages navel gazing about it. WTF? Seriously, if you think nitpicking everything and everybody makes you a good manager, you're an idiot and you should find another vocation. Fuck the fuck off. You're a tedious oxygen thief who's boring everyone.

Maybe it makes sense when you build the same thing over and over and over again, but we don't do that and we never did so it was always ridiculous to expect this to work well (and I say this as someone who, good faith, gave it a go, but the problem is that perhaps all the people pushing it at the time weren't acting in good faith).

[jacquesm]

As soon as something becomes a religion it loses most of its value.

To me the 'Toyota way' was more of an illustration than an exact guideline to follow and I've found this to be true for most of these things that tend to become a religion. Scrum, TDD etc all have this potential to become fodder for consultants that essentially sell a dream that they can not deliver on. But that doesn't mean there isn't a kernel of truth in there.

[hef19898]

Form over substance. Toyota, and other Japanese companies, are living the substance of Lean and TPS. Most other companies implement the form and hope they magically get where Toyota is without any additional effort. Same goes for Agile and any other management "philosophy".

[jacquesm]

Yes, it's the essence of cargo culting. The tech world is also full of this stuff. The number of small companies that I've seen that implement the Spotify development team structure is pretty tragic.

People are always looking for silver bullets and the industry is rife with examples of this kind of thing.

[908B64B197]

Even better, "we're like Google" except they give you a blank stare where you ask about the 20% time, free food, compensation or where they hire from. Turns out it's all bootcamp/local wages no stock, no 20% time. But hey, they have beanbag chairs!

[bartread]

I'd like to apologise for the overly aggressive tone of this comment: I was drunk when I posted it. I have long since learned that drunk posting is a bad idea and yet, sometimes, I still am unable to resist that temptation. Anyway, this post isn't kind, and whilst I do have some issues with the TPS and think Toyota's history is often misrepresented, nobody needs to read a frothy mouthed rant about it.

[Zagill]

First off, name a single auto company that hasn't had a recall in its history. I think it's a bit unfair to point at a recall and imply that the systems they employ are bad because of it.

Secondly, more to your point, I'm certainly not trying to defend the whole system or even imply that it's effective at accomplishing its stated goals. I'm merely saying that the concept of encouraging employees working with/creating/designing a product to point out flaws and making a point of digging into where defects are introduced is a good idea. I definitely can't speak to how well that philosophy is applied at Toyota but I think that's moot regardless.

[analog31]

I don't dispute this, but at the same time, the cars from Toyota and Honda during the 1980s were vastly higher quality than their American and European counterparts. This could have contributed to the desire to emulate TPS.

[Cthulhu_]

Could it be an example of... well not survivorship bias, but, TPS gave them a competitive advantage in the 80's, and since then, other car companies have adopted it or something similar and upped their game, normalizing it to the point where people don't care about it anymore?

That is, once something is normalized you don't notice it anymore. Like how people that saw the 'rona epidemic was under control (ish) thought the measures were no longer needed.

[analog31]

I do think that people have much higher expectations today. Getting an engine rebuilt is mostly no longer a thing. The US mostly caught up, then Europe.

[jacquesm]

That depends on the car brand. Mercedes' don't require engine rebuilds because the engines outlast the body they are in. Most cheaper brands don't require engine rebuilds because it isn't economical to do so, by the time the car clocks over 250K its book value is way higher than an engine rebuild.

But for classic sports cars they're fairly normal, those engines were not made to last forever, tend to be fairly high power for their displacement and the book value of the cars is high enough that rebuilding an engine can make sense.

[varjag]

Same for their JIT supply management. The attitude I have a hard time mitigating with manufacturing contractors years after the global supply chain have deteriorated.

[jacquesm]

Those things work well when you're the only one doing them to gain an advantage over your competitors. But as soon as everybody starts doing it that means that the whole chain will adapt and suddenly all that stock that allowed you to do JIT and offload the costs of keeping that stock onto your suppliers evaporates which takes all of the slack out of the system. Now everybody has to perform and that will work right up to the first crisis and then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

It is always important to know what the underlying assumptions of your strategic advantages are. Going 'countercurrent' can work, but then if the tide turns you need to be aware that your previous advantage is now a risk.

[aj7]

Toyotas DO break less. But their designs are stodgy, very slowly updated, and generally draw premium prices. So customers keep flashier makes in business.

[MichaelZuo]

There definitely is a lot of pretend, or alleged, authority floating around in a large organization. But when it comes to brass tacks, the number of folks who really can do something and have it accepted is quite small.

[jacquesm]

In my experience this very much depends on two thing: the industry and upper management.

Some industries have a really lax attitude and in quite a few cases upper management basically makes it impossible for people to speak up.

[xyzzy123]

The flip side of "quality first" / stop the line is getting killed in market by a worse but faster or cheaper solution. You are locked in game theory with your regulators (if you have any) and your competitors.

It's disappointing (and career limiting) to do the "right" engineering and lose because you didn't correctly gauge the risk tolerance of the market.

I don't think there's any one answer for this.

My observation is that people will pay a premium for demonstrable physical safety features but privacy & security in software do not win markets.

[jacquesm]

This is mostly true but for things like medical devices, aerospace, industrial control and so on any corner cutting should be allowed.

I'm pretty sure that Philips right now has some thoughts on this as does Medtronic. Those two should have never happened and personally I'm all for liability of executives in such cases.

[jacquesm]

Should not be allowed, apologies. I always spot these errors only after the edit window has closed.

[aj7]

Heh, heh. They ignored my input and kept shipping. Then the customers began calling…

Meanwhile our major competitor cleverly placed their rotating element in such a position that the beam retraced itself through the rotating element, thereby substantially cancelling this effect.

[jacquesm]

Oh I totally misread that! From your story it seemed to me that they fixed it. Ok, that is less nice then.

I've played around with some - at the time - fairly high powered lasers and have extreme respect for them, the number of near accidents with those things was large enough that I learned to triple check everything and check for stray reflections at reduced power and the cleanliness of all optics before going all in. That saved me more times than I care to remember and is a nice reminder of how finicky a powerful beam of light can be. It doesn't take a whole lot to get a sizeable fraction of your beam ending up in places where you really don't want it to be. But they're lots of fun, even if they are dangerous :)

[smrtinsert]

I've also learned this as "bring the solution", regardless of whether or not you find the problem.

[actually_a_dog]

Do you actually use the phrase "be negative" when you ask the question? I could see that distorting the responses by people who don't consider pulling the cord to stop the line "being negative."

[quickthrower2]

Or … can the first officer order a goaround? Reading too much Admiral Cloudberg!