The Spirit of Kaizen: Creating Lasting Excellence One Small Step at a Time

Chapter FourIMPROVE QUALITY

Improve your ability to spot littlemistakes. Small oversights, glitches,and snags may seem merely annoyingat first, but they can developinto quality-control calamities if youdon’t address them early on.

Some of you are old enough to remember a time when it was routine to take a new car back to the dealer a dozen times in its first year. The more you drove the car, the more defects you found. You’d go out one morning in the early fall and discover that your engine didn’t like cool weather. You’d reach to switch on an interior light … and the toggle would fall out. The passenger seat might start to wobble. If the dashboard clock told the correct time, you considered yourself lucky.

These manufacturing mistakes slipped ...