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TL;DR: In a 1993 speech, Toyota leader Fujio Cho said organizations can create their own Lean systems, but success depends on three principles: leaders going to the gemba, asking “why” to learn from problems, and respecting and motivating people — not copying Lean tools.

The blog post

What if a book could become an interactive coach instead of a static reference?

In this episode, Mark Graban shares a behind-the-scenes look at his experiment turning the award-winning book Lean Hospitals into an AI-powered chat assistant embedded directly on his website. What started as a Friday afternoon curiosity quickly evolved into a working WordPress plugin, a subscription model, and a new way to deliver improvement knowledge on demand.

Mark walks through how non-developers can use AI tools to write functional software, what he learned comparing different AI coding assistants, and why the real breakthrough isn’t the technology — it’s the ability to access proven Lean thinking at the moment of need.

He also explores the broader implications for leaders and organizations: Could AI assistants trained on your own standards and practices reinforce daily management, support problem solving at the gemba, and scale coaching without more training sessions?

This episode is both a practical case study in rapid experimentation and a thoughtful discussion about the future of learning, leadership, and continuous improvement in the age of AI.

Key themes include:

• Turning expertise into on-demand guidance

• Using AI to prototype software without coding experience

• Subscription models for knowledge delivery

• Point-of-use support for leaders and frontline teams

• Why technology alone won’t create a Lean culture — but can reinforce the right behaviors

If you care about scaling improvement capability, preserving organizational knowledge, or simply experimenting with new ways to learn, this episode offers a candid look at what works, what broke, and what might come next.

The blog post

In this episode, I explore the 1987 NUMMI Management Practices Executive Summary — a confidential General Motors report that documented why the joint venture between GM and Toyota was succeeding so dramatically.

What’s striking is how clearly GM’s own study team understood the real drivers of NUMMI’s performance. It wasn’t tools. It wasn’t discipline. It wasn’t copying Toyota’s production techniques.

It was leadership.

The report describes a management system built on mutual trust and respect, problem-solving at the source, quality built into the process, and supervisors acting as coaches rather than enforcers. Nearly 40 years ago, GM documented that NUMMI’s success came from management philosophy — not Lean tools.

And yet, insight proved easier than action.

In this episode, I walk through the document’s key sections, including NUMMI’s basic principles and five major management strategies, and reflect on why translating those lessons into broader cultural change proved so difficult.

If you’re interested in Lean leadership, psychological safety, or the origins of what we now call continuous improvement, this historical document offers powerful — and still relevant — lessons.