Masaaki Imai Quotes & Sayings

The Kaizen Philosophy assumes that our way of life - be it our working life, our social life, or our home life - deserves to be constantly improved. — Masaaki Imai

Kaizen is like a hotbed that nurtures small and ongoing changes, while innovation is like magma that appears in abrupt eruptions from time to time — Masaaki Imai

The essence of 5S is to follow what has been agreed on. It begins with discarding what we don't need in the gemba (seiri) and then arranging all the necessary items in the gemba in an orderly manner (seiton). Then a clean environment must be sustained so that we can readily identify abnormalities (seiso), and these three steps must be maintained on a continuous basis (shitsuke). — Masaaki Imai

You can't do kaizen just once or twice and expect immediate results. You have to be in it for the long haul. — Masaaki Imai

Where there is no standard, there can be no improvement. For these reasons, standards are the basis for both maintenance and improvement — Masaaki Imai

All of management's efforts for Kaizen boil down to two words: customer satisfaction. — Masaaki Imai

It is impossible to improve any process until it is standardized. If the process is shifting from here to there, then any improvement will just be one more variation that is occasionally used and mostly ignored. One must standardize, and thus stabilize the process, before continuous improvement can be made. — Masaaki Imai

Japanese management practices succeed simply because they are good management practices. This success has little to do with cultural factors. And the lack of cultural bias means that these practices can be - and are - just as successfully employed elsewhere. — Masaaki Imai

Kaizen means ongoing improvement involving everybody, without spending much money. — Masaaki Imai

Progress is impossible without the ability to admit mistakes. — Masaaki Imai

The message of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company. — Masaaki Imai