The Toyota Way, Second Edition: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer, 2nd Edition

 Principle 13 

Focus the Improvement Energy of Your People Through Aligned Goals at All Levels

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

—John Lennon, lyrics from “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”*

I first learned about hoshin kanri, aka policy deployment, in the 1980s when consulting for Ford as it adopted it as part of a package of Toyota management practices. The concept was simple. At the top of the company, develop the policy that will allow the company to perform well in the business environment (mainly profits in Ford’s case), deploy the policy down into the organization with some give-and-take discussions called “catchball,” and when all the people in the organization have their targets aligned to the top-level ...