Leading the Toyota Way with Matthias Fischer

[Music] it's never perfect there's always something what you can do better you will never achieve a satisfactory level people do not like change even if we know the world is changing and we have to change we have to adapt to new environments it's not the fluffy subjects say everybody wants to go lean until they realize what it takes during my time in Toyota I have moved my internal borders of what I think is possible now we're output today is 400 units a day if you don't have the right level of quality it will not be a stable process challenge what you should rather than what you can we are just at the beginning Intel [Music] if you gain more and more in stock here and then when you think resources today my name is Matthias Fischer I'm president and CEO for geometry you know when I was joining Toyota was a bit afraid because it's a big name it's a giant company and my expectation was everything is written in stone and we have procedures and like you have it in big companies normally and what I found is a it's a culture in the company is very very similar to small companies we have a lot of family values you have connection to the top management without any problems and who sold see you you really feel that you're working in a family based company with family values as well instead of a huge conglomerate that's lovely what a success first of all you can measure numbers this is one way of measuring it the Euro people like to overachieve for people we have as a target so this is how I met a successful for myself and then as well how satisfied as a team do we have a good team how do we have a good collaboration I think it is even more important I think than the numbers because the numbers are just result but if you have a good team together than the numbers we can't follow automatically started with a strategy to become number one in the European market and then our Japanese colleagues handed over this nice gift to me and say okay you have the target and the ambition to become number one and in Europe so let's color one eye and if you color that I this is the target setting and when you achieve the target then you can color the other eye you can still see that the Roma has only one eye color so we are not number one in Europe so far I won't be achieved a number one position then I will go then color the other eye the Daruma is watching you so watching everyday what you're doing to achieve your target we are number one already in the global market was a huge distance our next competitors but in Europe we are number two position if we would like to achieve the number one position Europe as well and burn Japan is setting a target should be not achievable it's just a direction so if you 800 and say you should go to 150 and we say 150 is a joke we cannot defeat it so the normal behavior in Europe would mean we do not even start because we cannot achieve hundred fifty and then our behavior number is why should we go for it at all because we cannot achieve it but for Japan is important the direction they say you need to go in that direction doesn't matter if you achieve hundred twenty one hundred thirty they do not expect that you have cheese 150 but they would like to have the same that is high target to a set of directions for us in Europe isn't difficult to understand where is the satisfaction level in between between hundred and hundred fifty another cell it's five 105 420 so we have to translate that and into our let's say our local targets them well the target setting I will never adapt to the European culture because this is something that we will never never accept let's say in the European environment so we need to translate that into into our our culture and our our target settings and we have a good agreement with Japan how we do that we have a say a plan for the next year and then we have a given or challenging target in addition to that so we always running with these two numbers the challenge in target and the one where we said this is the European target we are doing things differently compared to Japan as well if you look at the so corny mawashi process Japan is extremely consensus driven so no mercy process me before you make a decision you all the stakeholders you know I have to agree to that and then you go to the big meeting and saying yes this is what we do so it has already been aligned before in Europe we have different cultures as well I think Sweden is very close to the Japanese culture when you talk about consensus if you go more to the southern part of of Europe and you have more the Latin countries they are know of walking and working in the hero keys what your half is more top-down the boss decides that then everybody is following when I worked in Italy as an MD for example I had to learn that as well because when you make a decision there you have to stick to your decision even it's wrong yet but you have to stick to your decision in a Latin country because otherwise your people will use lose the respect so you need to get the information and forehand to make the right decision because you have no chance to switch it around look for a German culture for another German is different as far as army you make a decision and then the discussion starts and the team normally was it is a ride was the wrong should we adjust what a stupid decision and then they changed it to maybe a better way so I think as well in Europe we have different decision-making processes in the cultures we are working in from and is going we can say from from Norse much more consensus driven to the flowers much more thinking here at keys when we have management team meeting we have a closed room and then we say everything can be said there are no written roads that you're not allowed to complain or something if somebody has something against something we should openly put it on the table I don't like to have a team where everybody is saying but the seas I was saying is right a relentless pursuit of lean its quality first you need to have stable process you need to involve people and then when you have the involvement you need to have the organization the management and then try to narrow in this Factory when Toyota bought the company year 2000 we produced around 25,000 units and today this year we went about 80,000 units so four times almost a higher volume by double number of people working in Factory the biggest change was to go from station wise assembling till line thinking cycle time I was three four five hours and then suddenly cut it up in smaller pieces the new system with line thinking is all work load in smaller pieces so it's much easier to adapt and train we focus a lot compared to other companies in Europe on our daily business find out all the muda all the waste so that we really can become number one when you have full control over your day then it's much easier to understand also what's necessary for tomorrow the morning meeting is to really take control over the day there we report the status from the shift before so that we are 100% sure about how we are prepared for the next shift to have continuous flow in the production that's our main target not running faster but always have the process is rolling to have a stable process running smooth without any interruptions that's the the main target the main vision in our production system no process can always be perfect it's never perfect you will never achieve a satisfactory level before this is as well in inside the culture this is very very deep in the DNA and there's a kosher show if you if you think you have a very good process there's always something what you can do better they're looking into second so they can adjust how they can produce it better every day we should never be satisfied and we should not have never say they are living in a of a world are we living a perfect company this will never be perfect even if we are striving to be perfect they are always room for improvement we have been on the lean transformation journey ourself now for quite some time we have studied the TPS concept deeply together with our Japanese sensei's with the knowledge we now have we decided to create the Toyota lean Academy being our limit Weiser II service to the market to the production system is actually a quite technical system it's a set of methods slide on a process to make it more efficient less waste and so on however to implement that centers very much around the leadership and the culture which is for us in the Western world something that we need to address what we have in Swedish culture and perhaps also in the Western culture is the question why why should I do this and what is the purpose of this so we need to spend a lot of time to introduce the purpose and I think that's valid you should always introduce why me and actually my whole team decided to join the masterclass leading the Toyota way two years ago I think the cultural and leadership part of it was the most fascinating to learn from Jeffrey Lacker who has made interesting research on Toyota for many years we found out even ourself being from Toyota that he had a very interesting cultural outside in aspect we talked about the success rate of a lean project in the beginning of a lean project there will be a lot of new energy a lot of focus on the task in the initial parts of a lean project you might find that everybody becomes quite emotional and want to join and so on it is more when you come to the part where maybe the lean team goes away then the voices might appear that would like to go back to the old ways of working because they might find some examples of the new way which is not working perfectly which is natural because it takes time to change and the trick to make it is to really try to integrate the new ways of working in the process into the leadership routines so that you have something that can continuously ask for the waste and ask for the for the solutions to eliminate the waste I think during my time in Toyota I have moved my internal borders of what I think is possible or impossible we have a saying that challenge what you should rather than what you can when we started to approach the 90% reduction of quality defects we thought that was more of a vision rather than the target but our Japanese sensei Nomura son he kept supporting us and pushing us towards his target looking back on the journey we did we managed to go almost all the way we reached more than 8% reduction of the quality defects which we in the beginning thought was impossible but looking back yes it's possible one of the main pillars is challenge and that is really driving us forward everybody wants to go lean until they realize what it takes because it's it's not a fluffy subject it's something that you do on a day-to-day basis and you always aim for more and you never give up we have the serum Buddha so Buddha's waist we decided to put these words and because it's makes customer curious about it because they do not understand what is it so you have a chance as well to discuss and have a conversation about it and if you look at logistics flows today and retail business or in in the industry there's a lot of waste in it but we would like to do with our strategy is making the customers logistics leaner so taking the waste out of the processes the strategy is targeting to two directions one is from from the outside view with customers but we can use it as well internally because our processes are as well not lean enough and then we have a different business environment say we are in the so-called old economy and with forklift trucks what we have sold in the past but now we are moving into AVS and AGVs or automated guided vehicles everything is going into automation this is very important for the future that we have all the data available customers can learn from it and then they can improve their logistics with the data what we can offer we are producing products but this is not the main content main countries really servicing them as well afterwards we have more service technicians compared to you what we have on workers on the production side for us and we have 3500 service businesses huge organization we have to look into your total lifecycle cost as well it's fun when they're purchasing it using it scrapping it at the end or giving it back to us and we are refurbishing them and it goes to the second life cycle if you look at to the automation journey what we have in front of us and where we are today I think we we are just at the beginning in total huh but not only we is I think the whole whole industry if you look at the industry 4.0 there will be a lot of changes coming in the future and and automation is just at the beginning if you look into what we are planning for the future when we have a deep learning into the machines and it's the trucks and they're talking to each other we are not there so far the self learning the AI is not in this is what we were working on this will take some time you need to have the right algorithms for that as well but I think we will see big changes in the next five years [Music] then he just be in front of the BT want of Fame we have not only executives here like tattoo Yoda or Sakichi Toyoda our founder you can find employees on his as well like over there good cars and she has worked for 50 years of the company you even can find a very famous actor like Sean Connery was product placement made in 64 the company has even paid for it I said it's a nice nice way of us about explaining our culture but that everybody is important in our company not only the executive but everybody is involved the next two years we would like to execute our strategy that's the most important thing that we're following our high priority program what we have that we invest into the automation business moving forward there for sure would like to become a phone number one we would like to know further are the the focus point is really execution of the strategy sometimes I think we can be faster so if I regret about something is we are sometimes a bit too slow we need to be faster we need to accelerate this is something I already say this is whatever can be better I think that the pressure what behalf most probably all over here personally is you you would like to do everything right and this is something what you normally cannot do you as a as policy see if you you make mistakes from time to time and you have to live with that and another challenge most probably you see the size of the organization is growing that's growing it's getting bigger and bigger and you would like to have everything under control what is difficult so you need to have as well a lot of trust to your team to your organization because you kind of control everything and cannot manage everything by yourself what motivates me I think the most important thing for me is the team what I have around me when I talk with people here that they're satisfied that they're moving forward that you have an environment where people can feel we are successful moving in the right direction they have a working place where they say yeah I love to work work in here and enjoying the success together I think this is biggest motivation it's not coming from your bosses it's not coming from salary is more coming from really from from the team what you have around you that you have success together when I was 25 years old I just started I'd say in my career as a very young trainee after University and I would say don't make a career plan do your work do it good as you can I move forward in a couple of years when I go into retirement and ask the people in five years later so they still still knowing mr. remember me and talking good about me as a person I think that would be that would be good achievement not about the achievement the numbers but as a person as I say it was a good boss of me had moving in the right direction was good to interact with them but that would be nice [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Leadership Network

Views: 9,192

Rating: 4.9083967 out of 5

Keywords: lean manufacturing, lean, operational excellence, toyota, toyota production system, lean culture, sweden, manufacturing, forklifts, toyota CEO, the toyota way, the boardroom, the leadership network

Id: -zyCrlMONAU

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019