Overview

Lesson 1: People, not technologies, are the key to world-class performance.

I sat in the classroom listening to Yoshiki Iwata, then president and later chairman and CEO of the international consulting firm Shingijutsu Ltd., as he addressed another group of business leaders from around the world. This was my fourth in a series of trips to expose managers to the principles of lean, world-class production, and Iwata was teaching us about Just in Time (JIT), the production system his mentor, Taiichi Ohno, had pioneered at Toyota Motors.

My mind drifted back to 1966 and a U.S. Army Civil Affairs Advisory Course in which I had participated prior to becoming an infantry advisor to the South Vietnamese army. Speaking at Fort Gordon, GA, instructor, historian, and Fulbright scholar Dr. Bernard B. Fall had declared, "Technology doesn't win wars, people do. Soldiers do." He had both the academic and practical insight to inform this claim; by the time of his death by landmine the following year, he had traveled to Indochina five times and authored seven books on the subject, most notably Street Without Joy. I gained first-hand experience with Dr. Fall's teachings in my 1967 tour of duty. In the hot Vietnamese sun, and later in Mr. Iwata's classroom, I realized that a balance of people and technology was the key to both military and production victory.

What a great message, a simple message, that has been taken up and put into practice now at great companies everywhere, including...