Customer Reviews

The Idea Generator: Quick and Easy Kaizen

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book contains important ideas that if implemented well can change the atmosphere of the workplace and reap significant beneficial changes. However, it is a rather poorly organized, repetitive, poorly written book. So if $45 is chump change that you're going to expense to your company anyway, buy it. If $45 is a lot of money, then don't. Go read what's available at Google's book section and you'll know 80% of what the book contains.

Basically I give it 3 stars. An average of 5 stars for the idea. 1 star for the book.

The basic idea is this:
* The best people to ask about how to improve how work gets done are the people who do the work not the people they report to.
* If you can create an environment that allows people to feel that offering ways they can improve their own method of working without fear of being seen as a critic, heretic or fool you will get a lot of creative input.
* Impose the constraint the the change must be something that the person can do themselves, to improve their own way of working.
* Make it clear that it's okay if the change does not work as expected.
* Make it clear that we learn more from analyzing why something did not work than we do from analyzing why something did work.
* Encourage people to try something else if the first suggestion does not work.
* Encourage people to write down their suggestions.
* Implement a system that reviews and says yes/no to the suggestion within one working day of it being written and submitted.
* Keep all the suggestions and their effects in a location where everyone can see them and learn from both the items that worked and did not work.

Honestly that's pretty much it. But the fact that it's a simple, easy concept to describe doesn't mean it's a simple, easy thing to implement. You're really talking about instigating a fundamental change in the work culture.

Nearly all companies do not work like this. Most companies pay lip service to the intellectual capital of their staff. This is a line cribbed from another location but in essence what is being said is "Every Pair of Hands comes with a Free Brain". Treat your people with empathy and respect and you will nearly always be surprised at how well people respond - it's amazing but they might even start treating you with empathy and respect as a result - how about that?

Footnote: "The Toyota Way" is the one book on this whole area of revolutionizing the workspace that I heartily recommend. It's a entirely different way of working, and "Kaizen" is just one part.

In any organization, all of us are smarter than any of us. Here is a book about all of us. Wisdom resides not only in senior-level people, but widely throughout the organization. How can organizations draw on the huge amount of knowledge, experience, and wisdom of everyone in the organization and apply this capability to continuously improve organization performance? The Idea Generator; Quick and East Kaizen, by Bunji Tozawa and Norman Bodek describes how, with examples from American companies that use these methods. The book draws on experience in Japan and in the United States to show how everyone in the organization can be involved in improving the way work is done, and achieving organization success. While the concepts and methods presented in this book are not yet in widespread use, they're growing. The book cites company experience showing how they create competitive advantage, and a motivated, high-morale organization. I highly recommend this book for everyone concerned with participation, motivation, and world-class operations.

William F. Christopher
Company Executive
Author, Award-Winning Business Books
Fellow, World Academy of Productivity Science

The Quick and Easy Kaizen system recognizes that every worker has hidden creative talent locked inside of them. Toyota successfully harnesses employee innovation, with over 1.5 million employee suggestions implemented each year. This represents about $300 million in annual savings that go straight to the bottom line. In his book, Norman Bodek discusses how the Quick and Easy Kaizen system becomes a powerful tool for bringing forth numerous small but significant improvement ideas from all employees.

A cultural transformation powered by employee commitment to continuous improvement is critical to your lean journey. Our clients have found Mr. Bodek to be an inspiring and effective resource, providing the experience, inspiration, and tools for a cultural transformation to continuous improvement. In addition to being a LEAN Affiliate, Mr. Bodek is the founder of Productivity Inc. / Productivity Press and has published over 400 books including 100 Japanese books in English. In 1988 he initiated the Shingo Prize for Manufacturing Excellence.

Mark Edmondson
President
www.LEANaffiliates.com

I am actually using this book to help me implement a Kaizen program in a Fortune 500 company. It's useful and quite a good book. The author has been very helpful!

I believe that "Quick and Easy Kaizen" offers the potential for a revolution in developing a fully participative and involved workforce. Whereas traditional "suggestion schemes" are bureaucratic and costly, often taking weeks to feedback to the individual, and taking the idea out of the responsibility of the originator and giving it to managers, the "Quick and Easy Kaizen" route is a simple workplace based process where the individual (or team) implements most of their own ideas. The book focusses on the sort of simple ideas that arise as part of our work - by learning we do things better and improve - that is Quick and Easy Kaizen. At 350 pages the book seems daunting, but it is actually very easy to read, and repeats its key points over and over (they are important points). The book is packed with anecdotes and examples. The whole focus is on encouraging staff to raise simple ideas and implement them themselves. The author doesn't have the best writing style ever, and the structure of the book is fairly random, with lots of repetition, but it is an important concept and worth reading for that. If you are serious about improving involvement in your workplace then you should read this book.

For quite a long time, I try to figure out a strategy that can support the three generic ones such as low cost, differentiation and focus scope and go beyond for a corporate. Bunji Tozawa and Norman Bodek's The Idea Generator: Quick and Easy Kaizen offers a fundamental solution for my question. It did convince me why small, continuous, and alternative-seeking changes can benefit companies as well as individuals in them. Further, by volumes of examples and how-to information, I found their way matching the core idea in complex adaptive system theory: Creating an impact sensitive and interaction friendly environment in an organization can trigger more effectiveness than simply summing up the individual efforts respectively. They prove that by accumulating quick and easy improvements, the power and profit Kaizen activities result in will go beyond our imagination. I love this book and highly recommend it to the management level and frontline people in an organization together work for their viable future.

This book gives excellent common sense suggestions to involve employees in improving any type of business in a quick and easy manner.