10 insights from Toyota Group and Japan

1. Beat the Curve – Disrupt Before the Plateau

Russell opened with lessons from elite teams like the All Blacks under Richie McCaw and Steve Hansen, and Manchester United under Alex Ferguson. These teams mastered the sigmoid curve – the pattern where teams struggle initially, then fly, then plateau and decline. The key is to break something before the downward part hits. They didn’t break the core, they disrupted the edges.

Russell translated this to manufacturing with a company that was top five out of 170 businesses in a $40 billion organization. Rather than rest on their success, they deliberately disrupted their own processes before stagnation set in, maintaining excellence through continuous reinvention.

2. The Best Kept Secret in Lean – Control Comes First

Russell saved this insight for near the end but emphasized its critical importance. Lean enthusiasts talk about 5S, standardized work, and line balancing, but that’s not what you need first. What you need first is control. He used a sandcastle metaphor – if you try to make improvements without control, the waves will come in and wash it away. Control for a team leader means four skills: giving a good forward-looking team brief at shift start that tells people what might trip them up today, area patrol during the shift with “eyes like an outhouse rat” to find problems early, dealing with what they can and escalating what they can’t, and having simple ways to avoid people marching down to HR to complain. This is the starting point before any other lean tools make sense.

3. What Do You See – Don’t Just Filter for the Gap

Russell shared a powerful lesson from walking a factory floor in Edinburgh with his sensei. When asked “what do you see?” Russell reeled off observations about 5S issues, blocked gangways, parts presentation problems. His sensei kept asking “what else do you see?” until Russell struggled. Then came the critical question: “Do you see nothing good?” This was Russell’s number one lesson.

We’re paid and trained to filter for the gap, but we must also look for the positive and value. In that same “carnage” factory, Russell discovered a man making beautiful little jigs that made jobs easier – something he wouldn’t have looked for without that lesson. The ability to see both problems and excellence is essential for effective leadership.

4. Train Your People to Be Time Travelers

Russell illustrated this with a bottle of tonic water leaning against a cabinet in a bar – an abnormality that becomes a problem when someone opens the cabinet and it smashes. In a radiator factory, he showed a coil with a small mark on the edge.

You have three choices: Choice one, no one spots the mark and you make scrap parts (problem solving mode, not ideal). Choice two, someone spots the abnormality when putting the coil in (no scrap but delayed coil change, better than a problem). Choice three, the materials handler tells the setter the day before because they’ve got good communication networks (no scrap, no delay).

The goal is training people to spot abnormalities before they become problems – to become time travelers who prevent issues rather than react to them.

5. Process Professional – Recognition Beyond Problems

Mayumi-san at Toyota came up with something called Pro Process (Professional Recognition of Operators).

The insight: we only tend to tap operators on the shoulder when there’s a problem. But if they’re on a 62-second cycle time making 100,000 parts a year, why not tap them on the shoulder before there’s a problem and ask them to show their skill? The Pro Process system turns operators around, introduces professional recognition, does standardized work confirmation on the cell, asks operators to recite their standardized work from memory, and requires 12 weeks defect-free before awarding accreditation. If you’re only looking at backs and tapping shoulders when problems occur, Russell urged reconsidering this approach.

6. The Floor Tells You Everything – Read the Messages

Russell showed a series of photos demonstrating how the floor reveals management commitment and system health. Management offices left messy with unidentified parts and chaotic paperwork tell you there’s a problem – they’re telling people to do 3S on the shop floor while failing to maintain it themselves.

A Kanban card lying on the floor is a critical signal – Russell emphasized that “every kanban card should be treated like a baby bird with a broken wing.” Small details like snapped-off tabs reveal system degradation.

His recommendation: look at the floor and see what it’s telling you. It’s a good starting point for understanding true organizational health.

7. Standardized Work – People Want It, Management Hasn’t Enabled It

Russell challenged a factory where senior management claimed “people weren’t interested in standardized work.” His response: “Utter hooey.”

He showed a wall with at least ten expressions of people wanting to use standardized work – handwritten notes saying “keep an eye on this,” “do that,” “put it at this angle,” “I like my tools hung up.” The clues are everywhere. It’s not that people don’t want standardized work; management simply hasn’t found a way to provide it for them.

This is a failure of leadership, not worker engagement. Russell urged looking for these signals and catching the breeze – people are already trying to create standards, they just need proper support.

8. Embrace the Fish Metaphor – Many Small Fish, Not One Big One

Japanese master engineers love fish metaphors, Russell explained, because it links to the Kaizen concept. Don’t spend weeks, months, or years hunting for one big fish – you’re not going to find it. Instead, accumulate many small fish.

This applies to A3 thinking, 5S, and cleaning processes. Russell’s sensei constantly sent him pictures of fish to illustrate various concepts. If you take nothing else away, Russell urged embracing fish metaphors – they work for lots of things in lean thinking. The message: consistent small improvements accumulate into significant results far more reliably than searching for breakthrough transformations.

9. Self-Reliance is the Highest Expression of Lean Skill

Russell concluded with a three-level framework from the JCB Academy, deliberately ending with self-reliance. This concept, borrowed from Toyota, defines self-reliance as the ability to find your own gap without rose-colored spectacles. It’s not about “being lean” – that’s not the aim. The highest expression of lean skill is the capacity to accurately assess your own situation, identify opportunities for improvement, and take action without external prompting or direction. If you can find your gap honestly and objectively, you’re doing well. Russell’s advice: look in the mirror and form useful habits. He even recommended forgetting lean books in favor of “Atomic Habits” by James Clear to learn about building these capabilities.

10. Learn and Steal Mercilessly Without Ego

While Russell presented this as background about himself, it’s actually a profound insight about continuous improvement. He jokes that he hasn’t had an original thought in years, but combining two skills – stealing ideas mercilessly without caring where they come from, and learning relentlessly – has served him exceptionally well. There’s very little original in the world. Success comes from being humble enough to recognize good ideas wherever they appear, secure enough to adopt them without ego, and disciplined enough to learn from both successes and failures. Russell’s willingness to share his mistakes on podcasts and strip away his ego demonstrates this principle in action.