E127: Applying Kaizen in Developing Countries with Sammy Obara

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS

In this episode, I share an interview with Sammy Obara, Founder and Senior Partner at Honsha, a consulting firm made up of former Toyota employees. He recently presented a topic called “Kaizen without Borders” at the 2025 UCSD ProcessPalooza, and I invited him on the podcast.

We discuss applying these powerful concepts to NGOs and not-for-profits. From medical supply distribution in East Timor to coconut oil production in Kenya, Sammy shares inspiring stories of sustainable change and how simple and low-cost improvements can have a big impact.

00:00 Introduction to Lean Six Sigma for Good
00:18 Meet Sammy Obara: Background and Experience
01:05 Journey with Toyota: From Brazil to Japan
03:40 Transition to the US and Academic Career
04:52 Setting Up Honsha and Work with the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI)
06:43 Cultural Differences: Brazil vs. Japan
12:14 Lean Principles in Action: NGO Projects
15:06 Case Studies: East Timor and Kenya
23:05 Lean for Hope: Global Impact
41:26 Conclusion and Contact Information

Listen to the podcast on this page, download it on your favorite podcast player (search “Lean Six Sigma for Good”) or watch the entire interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm1dX_Me3mc

Links

If you enjoy this podcast, please follow us on your favorite podcast app. Any ratings you could give us, or shares across social media would be greatly appreciated!

Promotions

Have you ordered the book, “Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 2)?” The book is made up of 8 chapters written about experiences from Lean and Six Sigma practitioners, to give you tips and tricks to help you work with nonprofits in your area. All proceeds donated to charity. Now available in audiobook as of Feb 2024. You can also order Volume 1 released in 2019.

Transcript
Note: may contain typos and errors, generated with AI


Brion Hurley
Welcome everyone. Today I’ve got a great guest, Sammy Obara. He is a managing director at Honsha.org. Sammy is nice meeting you last week at ProcessPalooza in San Diego. I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while, so thanks for taking the time to join me today. Can you tell everyone a little bit about your background and process improvement and your work experience?


Sammy Obara
Yes, and thank you for having me today. I’m one of the faculty members. With San Diego State University. But I also thought at UCSD, which is where we met the first time my class is about lean root cause analysis, Kaizen team, and the culture of Kaizen. Leadership for lean leaders. It’s always around things I learned when I was with Toyota. I spent 13 years in Toyota in Brazil and Japan, Venezuela. I lived in Toyota City for three years before Toyota started the new venture in Venezuela. So I got trained for that purpose. And they came to the US about 29 years ago to almost 30 now, and to learn English, to finish a Masters degree. And and they was supposedly 2 years of studying and leave of absence from Toyota. It turned out to be 30 years now, but it’s been a great. Adventure and a blessing.

Brion
What was your background? Did you go to school for something specific that got you into Toyota?

Sammy
Yes, he was right. When I was finishing technical high school in Brazil. There is a technical high school level that you study for three years and then you can get a job. In my case, I needed to finish one internship for one extra year that year, Toyota was. Experimentally, opening up two slots for intern. Toyota in Brazil is the first Toyota outside Japan was everything is experimental, with a union company in that location, which is the diametrically opposed to Japan. Different language and everything else. And they were trying for the first time to offer. This internship program so they gave me one year internship. Which turned out to be the 13 more years of real life employment, three of which they sent me to Japan. My technical high school was in Electromechanics when I finished College in information systems and the digital technology which in the US equates to. Computer science or computer engineering? Yeah. Then they sent me to Japan to learn how to start up a new facility. So I got trained on how to convert this CKD complete knocked down. Client for Toyota, they were just assembling land cruisers and converting that into a full production facility owned by Toyota. So that was quite a challenge. And then after that they went back to Brazil for two years and then that’s when I decided to finish. This some master’s degree here in the Silicon Valley in San Jose, CA. Long story short, the company was very expensive. California is not the cheapest place to live and study. There was a person I met in the airport in Detroit after talking to him for a while. He said if you come and work with us, we can give you the green card. We can give you this and also sponsor for your masters. Great. That’s when everything changed. I decided to stay in the US longer and do some work. Many other things happened like universities coming to the organization I was helping and wanting me to teach at the educational facilities. Once with many campuses. In the Silicon Valley and Southern California and then UCSD and SDSU, I bumped into opportunities there and became a faculty member, guest speaker, guest lecturer, and that’s what I do today. A lot of that.

Brion
I see that you also that time with LEI. OK. And then I don’t know if that’s the same time you said Honsha, but if you talk about your experience with setting up that organization but also with LEI.

Sammy
Lean Enterprise Institute invited me to be a faculty with them, and you run workshops, do some some of their clients support. So I want to clients all over the world and spoke for the linear press institute in Hungary, Mexico, Brazil and several other countries. Around the world, Poland been there quite a few times and I became a faculty member for them and their client. Partners at that time, I was already running an alumni association for former Toyota Professionals. We were inspired by a lot of the the Lynn community is very large and always ask us and my colleagues, my friends, you know, how are things really done? Inside. Toyota and the question was so frequent that it came to a point where we said, well, maybe we should just write a book and make a website or or just something that answers all those questions. This is, you know, how it works internally and it was just a step away from. You know the organization becoming a standard, a lot of companies come to us because of that. The relation and proximity to the source. And that’s the reason why, you know we we are called hosha because it’s headquarters in Japanese and that’s where most of us had our beginnings training and development.

Brion
When you’re in Brazil, since they were setting up and getting started, do you feel like? And then you went to Japan. How close did they get in Brazil with trying to replicate? The the culture. Where did you find a big difference when you went to Japan to see more mature organization? Were they able to translate that into the Brazilian facilities?

Sammy
Brazil is a country that’s 24 times larger than Japan, and Japan is an island, so it’s surrounded by water, isolated by language, by the way, because it’s the only country in the world that speaks Japanese, and they have a very unique and protected culture. The Brazil, on the other hand, it has its own culture, but it’s a lot from immigrants that there are so many different countries that immigrated to Brazil and it speaks Portuguese, which is widely spoken. It’s spoken in Asia. You know, East Timor, for example, it’s spoken in several countries. In Africa, Portugal speaks Portuguese. Believe it or not, Brazil is almost like a continent. It’s so large and we can communicate with all Hispanic speaking countries. So you can you can imagine. Easy to permeate any knowledge in Brazil and Japan is the opposite, diametrically opposed to Brazil. There it is, you know. And now, for example, it is standing the evening in Japan. It’s a long answer to your short question. But it is a night and day very different culture. The one thing I learned is that the company or corporate culture prevails above any country culture, the organization, the Toyota in Brazil had very similar discipline. Adherence to standards. Then we saw it in Toyota Japan and you know the Brazilians. And I’m Brazilian. So I think I can speak about that at very good at soccer at Samba and so many other things. We are not the most disciplined people in the. World and still we could produce excellent cars at that time. We were just making the land cruisers, called them in Portuguese in Brazil, but with all the great techniques following the same production process and system that Toyota and Japan was using. That was, to me, a great deal. Covering the company culture is always much stronger than everything surrounding it.

Brion
Yeah, that’s great. And I think it sounds similar to what knew me experienced when they set up the facility in Fremont, you know, trying to get the GM company to adopt the Toyota culture, it needed to prevail over the American workers and managers primarily, but have that flexibility to change things to say. We have a different workforce and how do we adopt some of the cultural things to? Acclimate better, but also keep our key priorities or principles.

Sammy
Yes, I think that’s probably the strongest example of how a corporate culture is much stronger than past history because that plant, new me, is new United motor manufacturing corporated how that joint venture taking another General Motors facility with bad history. Considered bad workforce, but of course that was good to be bad. Systems, but how they could turn that around and become the best managed General Motors? Of course it was a joint venture, but in terms of results, we’re all culturally speaking it was 180° improvement.

Brion
Yeah, it’s a great story. And I think that was really key to show that this works outside of Japan. It’s not a Japan only thing or their culture is only ones who can do this. It’s really showed the importance of the management in the system, like you said. That is needed. The people can adapt to that, no matter where they’re from.

Sammy
Yeah. Then the opposite is true also, because we take people to Japan twice, sometimes 3 * a year. One of our guests, speakers and partners, Mr. Hiro Yoshiki. He during one dinner he said one thing that you know, it’s so true. He said he was a high level executive in many. Countries. But then he came back to Japan and he needed to turn around one of the planes he was assigned to, he said. The Japanese culture is not the answer because I wanted this company and the results were not very good. We’re terrible thinking that just because it’s in Japan. Culture is different and everything is easier. Lean is almost natural. It’s not that. So it is a combination of great leadership but also the surrounding culture has a little effect in the begin. It, but it’s really the corporate culture that will set the standards base values, expectations.

Brion
Yeah, that’s great. So what got you pulled into some of your projects in other countries or maybe some of the work with NGOs, how did you get involved in some of those activities and teaching maybe supporting some of their initiatives?

Sammy
Well, I got exposed a lot of needs around the world, but sometimes we cannot see, not even in our own neighborhood. It’s a different reality. It’s a different world from where you live. It’s not your day-to-day saying that you see well. I need to help these people. Sometimes they are behind walls. They show that. There is a need to bring these people to the top of the mountain, so a lot of people can see. The. Needs and then how can you make sure that the people who see the needs can see where they can fill those gaps? I had this thought because my older sister, she is a dentist and became a missionary in the Amazon. She would go there with the indigenous people and and help them with with their dental needs and and then I started seeing well, there’s so many things that we don’t even imagine people need. But we have plenty of we are throwing a lot of that in the trash. That made me think. Like what are the places where things I don’t value a lot of can make a difference in the world? And I noticed there are so many E Timor is a great example. I didn’t know that they needed so much help and there were so few people that could fill those gaps. Then I learned they speak Portuguese. That’s something I speak. I I I was born in Brazil. That’s my first language. So maybe I can help. That already showed me there are so many things besides just language. Anything that you learn in school. And in my case from Toyota, I think I can help with medication distribution. And with that childcare system that they have. But there they had groceries or retail things that they needed to borrow money to run a business in Toyota. We learned so much about maybe Sarah borrowing, make sure first you lower your cost, maybe you don’t need to borrow that much by not needing that much inventory. You can do your turns a lot better and those kind of things showed me we just need to make things more visible. Specifically for that, we separate part of our publications to fund those types of initiatives and bring more visibility to ours communities in need. That’s how things got started.

Brion
Did you have a contact or someone in East Timor? That. You found out about some of these challenges or problems. How did you get aware? Of that country.

Sammy
Yes, I had a contact to supporting some organizations there, but she was living in Brazil at that time. I was going to Brazil almost every month or twice a month. So I started learning more of the needs they had. Specifically one of my uncles, a former chief. Boy Scout Eagle Scout. Spend some time there and started giving me some of their needs and I said, well, if that’s all it takes, I think I already have that. I have a little knowledge and I speak the language. I have a some weeks vacation. Me. Give it a try. That’s how I got connected to the people locally.

Brion
And you’re talking about distributing medical supplies. So was it a matter of helping them map out their processes or teach? Them how to manage their inventory or to remove waste in the process. What? What did you find most helpful for them?

Sammy
Yes, it was all of them. In the beginning we used the Toyota approach, they call it genchi genbutsu, which is you go there and see you understand everything before you make a plan. Meaning this is part of the plan. So deep understanding of what they need and just by helping them see waste. Better, for example, they will that not too many roads are paved or with asphalt, and they are easy to travel. But then they take the van. We filled with medicine and we go there and distribute for one full day, and then we come back and fill the van again and go to a different village. And you start seeing how much medicine we need for that village a. And then village B and village C. Is proportional to the times or the frequency that you go there the next time. So your medicines today will have to last until next time you come. Ideally you would come back every single day and receive it just one day’s worth of medicine. Ohh, but that’s too long. It’s too much. It’s you know you’re adding a lot of trips and then coming back and then all the way here and coming back because every time you come back you come back empty and you’re taking so much and many times what you take is not enough. And you have to do a second trip before it’s the next week, and then they started thinking, wow, So what if with you and Toya, they call it milk run. So what if you take just a person? Per day for each place, and you do that again. So by the time you come back, it’s very little. You’re dead weight when when you travel empty. So we try to do that and we are always understanding what’s the needs for each one of the communities. But do we spend more time in gas? A lot more time and money and they found out. Now we we have a lot more agility, see will fulfill their new. It’s our inventory in the headquarters doesn’t need to be that much though was inventory that was expiring. Most of the inventory was very close to expiration because donors would donate things that are about to expire, but it’s the oldest inventory that they say, you know, it’s going to expire in a month. So you have the immediate need. So we we can’t afford to have expired inventory in in something that’s so valuable to those communities. We met the process, we met the routes we met how much inventory you will need to fulfill their needs, not having more than that. So you have less waste. And that’s how we started.

Brion
Yeah, the difficulty of trying to guess how much need you have in 30 days and supply all that at once is. Not realistic to be able to make more frequent trips in smaller amounts and give them exactly what they need. Yeah, people don’t see all that waste and inefficiencies and the trips back and forth. They could go and hit multiple places a day and be more responsive and lower inventory for everyone. That’s not intuitive. Until you really think about an alternate way of doing it and realize there is a better way and it works much better and easier hopefully.

Sammy
Yeah, this just in time thing has so much more to it than just lowering cost. We learned that by doing it in smaller batches when people receive something that’s enough for the day, they treasure that a lot more than if they get the I think for a week. For a month and then they lose a few and they misplace. And then and then they see. While I have this and I know that by tomorrow I’m gonna receive another dose for another day. They treasure that they don’t treat it as abundant resource because when whenever we have that abundance of the image of abundance here, I think people do not treasure that much what they receive.

I did some work with them through other processes. I helped a restaurant in this team or the inventory control in one of the the retail stores there about two hours from building the capital that was remote. After I came back from Mr. Moore, I did that through through emails, but other countries. I did with the Kenya. For example, I want to spend some time in Mombasa sometime in Nairobi. That was through one client I had in Salt Lake City. And they were already doing some work there. I was training the client in Salt Lake City. They made synthetic diamonds. The name of the company is US synthetic, which is a tremendous organization. The CEO was already going there yearly and taking his. Senior level staff to do the same thing. I thought I’m doing this for this company already. It wouldn’t hurt doing that for this community in need, so I did that for a microfinance organize. Mission in Kenya and also for a coconut oil extraction organization. There too they would extract oil from coconuts and then send back to Europe and the US and Canada. And there’s so much that people like us, we studied some lean. Some TPS, some waste reduction, root cause analysis. So much that we can do with a fraction of what we know that helps them it. It is amazing.

Brion
Yeah, that’s great. Do you want to share some of your slides?

Sammy
It gives me a lot of pleasure to share what’s been done there. OK, so here is what we call in for hope. It’s arm. Of huncha that will help the institutions all over the world. Some of the pictures here show our people, volunteers from Honsha Sensai who work as consultants, but on weekends and many times during. Case they promote support in organizations needing help. Sometimes support for the elderly, disabled kids and for refugees. This year, this one here is from the Amazon, and this is just a brief collection of pictures of places where we’ve been to. I have the pleasure to go there myself. This is my older sister who lives in the Amazon. So she’s been there for so many years, probably over 30 years. This is from East Timor. When I spent some time there in my mission was to help the retail and inventory control and this in this case for this retail organization, they had plenty. The things that would last them years and had to get. Loans from banks, so they keep stuff there for so many. Three years and this is just one example, but I also worked in it’s a gas station, you know, they have a lot of motorcycles and combustion bikes, and this is the gas station, the childcare facility. This is the one I told you about. And this is just real life in that country. Mombasa was another great example. I thought it was an excellent lesson for myself personally. It it can change your life. This year is a microfinancing for women only. Women that were explored, abused. So they could borrow money, and from this bank this is the bank and I don’t know if you can see the calculator here. That’s the highest level of technology that they have in that micro lending business. So women can purchase a generator. Electrical generator and keep bananas from spoiling for a little bit longer than two or three days so they can sell or even eat. Them Speaking of technology, this year is their records. That’s the closest that they are to our Excel spreadsheets and now also spend some time with the coconut farmer they. Purchase coconut from all over that region and then they processed to get coconut oil out of it. But if you see the inventory levels. That party. You know, they had 60% losses from coconut that was spoiling and then we showed them this bags and we said, hey, you’re gonna have 16 bags, fill those bags and stop bringing in more coconuts. Just stop buying coconuts. And as we say in Toyota, the obsolescent. Comes, you know, worried or not, but then we have a saying there. That is, if you want to keep milk from turning sour, keep it in a cow, which means you don’t take the coconut out of the tree until you really need it. And by bringing or filling 16 bags of coconut. That’s what you can. Process in one day don’t take more because you won’t be able to process within our productive time. So by doing that they eliminated some of their. Waste. Now we have opening coconut as one processed. We have another process doing exactly the same thing. Whenever we have two processes. Doing the same thing with inventory before and after upstream and downstream. Then you’re quadrupling the number of inventory. In this case, you can also see the machine that she has. And the way that they are happy working and singing and breaking the coconut shell at the same time, it’s frightening. They are talking about the day and singing. But not only that is bad, but also having these two processes of cracking coconut shells. They send the coconut here to be processed or grated so they have to grate the coconut so they can. Then press the coconut here in this press. But before they go straight to pressing the coconut and extracting oil, if they do it right away after they grate here, the press is going to extract not only oil, but it’s gonna be mixed with water. So before you do that, you have to bring it back to this little room and. Burn the coconut so you can get dried coconut. And then extract pure oil. But the other thing you. Notices that these places here that you see that are a little bit darker. These are certain areas that are not covered with coconut, so they take more heat while you have some other places here that the coconut is piled up to a level where it doesn’t dry too much. So it’s not very homogeneous and because of that they had 40% losses in, in, in coconut that was contaminated with humidity. We taught them that they could use smaller ovens, smaller plates that they can do smaller. Batches have coconut dry a lot faster, it’s more homogeneous, and then we finally we would bring the coconut here for passing. But the prices are so huge they are a purse size type of press. We require the strongest person in the village. It was amazingly hard for him to accept a few, a few liters of coconut oil. But after that, once they started. Reducing the batch size, even the older ladies, the smaller people, smaller ladies, even kids. But the smaller ladies that were doing the cracking of the coconut oil or the coconut shell, they would come here and press. They would need to rely on the strongest person in the village anymore, and finally we will take that oil and fill some buckets that will be ready to ship to another packaging facility in in the central area in Mombasa and Nairobi. But then they had to check every single day. Inventory control, inventory levels and all those things. And that would require a lot of counting inventory, physical county. So they would count every month, 30 hours a month of opening the buckets of county. And we taught them how to use charts, how to do inventory control without having any technology. They thought, well, this is extra work before I didn’t need to do any of that, but in no time it was very natural that after a month or two they would say wow, this is saving us so much time. We’re not even counting or recount triple counting things anymore just by looking at. The charts we already know how much we have. We talked to the people who come to pick up the products, the working process or semi finished goods and we all can tell them already what size of truck, how much room they have to have to bring, you know, to accommodate all the inventory we produced. You can see some examples here. The way we support this initiative, I’ll just show you it’s unfortunately it’s done in sequence. Here, but it’s through a publication, a series of publications that we have that’s called the publications, 100% of the margins on any of these publications. They go to fund those initiatives. Some of them are in different. Languages for different countries and some we can even see from the logos. They are specific for different industries. Some sectors ask us for comic books or publications specifically for their people. People, but that’s pretty much it. At least now you have an idea of how the ecosystem works, how we support, and why we do that.

Brion
Yeah, that was really cool. I like seeing these fundamental processes that every village and country can take with the natural resources they have. I got a chance to spend time in a small island in the Pacific called Micronesia and a specific island called Koshari, and they made. Banana paper. Out of banana trees, it was a simple process of cutting down the tree. The bark off making strips, mashing it up and creating paper and turned it into wallets and other paper products. But and those locations, it seems like if those industries can grow and become a source of Labor and a profitable business, then it has just as much. Help to that community is providing financial aid or humanitarian aid. Just giving them an opportunity to earn money and learn these skills is so valuable in some of. These places where business is not very well established or there aren’t that many businesses where they can be self-sufficient, it’s almost like helping some of these organizations build a business with best practices and learning some of these methods to keep their costs down and not have so much wasted labor and wasted materials. I think is so valuable, so that’s really cool to see.

Sammy
Yeah, we coincidentally tried to do the same thing with the banana leaves from Brazil. There were an artisan there doing exactly that, but not just from in paper products, but in some ornaments for the house. That didn’t go through fruition, but we were trying to marry the needs of East Timor and the abundance of Labor that they have there. Idle labor with that type of activity, unfortunately for several reasons, it didn’t pan out, but I like that type of thinking. Because somebody said and I forgot the name of the philosopher, the best social cause is to provide employment. And whenever you find ways to keep people busy. With a purpose, not just busy. Then you’re changing their lives in the country and the economy.

Brion
And especially to do it in a safer way so they don’t harm themselves, they’re not hurting themselves on the press or cutting their fingers with the machete. I think it’s always important that people leave just as healthy and safe as when they came in each day. And so like the examples you have of trying to help them come up with. Better, safer options and better ergonomics to make the work better and safer. It’s not just taking advantage of the labor, but making sure that it’s something they can do over and over again and not. Have damage to their body or hurt themselves.

Sammy
This is extremely important. Sometimes we need to understand a little bit more of the local laws local culture. There are things that you cannot do. There are things that might be controversial in some rooms in the US because sometimes we believe everybody should. Follow the laws that we have in our country for several reasons. Sometimes it’s religious, sometimes it’s the different beliefs. But we have to be respectful to the way they do things.

Brion
I think that’s an important thing as part of the respect for humanity as well, it’s understanding cultures and trying to change behaviors and cultures, but also respecting what is existing there and working with that, or trying to align what we’re trying to accomplish or help them with with what they already know. And believe and. Support, but yeah, I could see where that could conflict sometimes too.

Sammy
Yeah, but it’s been a very interesting journey. I think this is a place where more and more entrepreneurs, business people, like executives and leaders, are starting to pay more attention. I believe there is still a big gap between what we can do for people. And and what they need. Sometimes we have exactly what they. Need and we know we can do it, but we don’t know who needs that. Getting those communities on top of that mountain where everybody can see is is a crusade.

Brion
How was the response from the people you worked with? Were they open to the ideas? Were they excited to learn or there are a lot of resistance initially? How do people handle some of the ideas and teaching and work that you were bringing in?

Sammy
In Africa, it’s almost like you are not outsider. You know, I must call her. You get there. Everybody starts. Hey, who’s that guy? I’m not an agriculture. The closest I got to coconut was to be a. The. But never crack the host coconut shell and then they start seeing. What is this guy trying to teach us? We’ve been doing this for generations and now this guy who’s visible he’s not from here. He’s amazing guy. It is a natural initial resistance. Yeah, I can’t hide. That fact, but after they. But when they start following what you’re teaching, you need to teach with a, you know, a great level of the tax patients to show them. Well, let’s just try not to influence them and they would do it out of respect, out of little friendship, but not out of trust. No, they are still skeptical. Until maybe 3-4 or five times and they say Ohh wait a. And I think he’s right. Look, smaller batches, we have less losses. So all those coconuts that we have to process before we have to process a lot less and get same results, it’s less effort, but it takes time because you are lowering resistance through. Trial and error and proofing of concept and then they say yeah, that guy knows a little bit about process so smaller batches is working better. Let’s do one of the chief of that tribe says that.

Then everybody follows. When a foreigner comes in, tries the same thing. It requires A convincing ability. I still don’t have it, but I learned a little bit more about that by spending my time there.

Brion
And I think that’s similar resistance anywhere, especially when it’s someone. As perceived as being further away from understanding their work and their culture and their needs and their challenges, it seems like it’s the same way we can convince others is through experience, practice, implementation, and data. Getting people to see this is easier. This is nicer. I do like this, so actual results.

Sammy
Right.

Brion
Change his mind? Yes.

Sammy
Yes, true one thing I. Very interesting is that when people in the US, it first column in the world think we are far ahead from places like that with very little technology and. Which we go to several companies and many times people will say we don’t have anything to learn. It’s different reality. But if you bring up the fancy spreadsheets that people have and they have a few examples of those where they can put all the numbers and very accurately. And then you show. This is beautiful. You’re doing excel. It gets all things aligned, same font size, nothing like the ones we saw enough. Later. But how come you listed all the reasons here for pieces lost and downtime in your if you see the reasons for that, how many times are they repeating four days for months? Look at the previous shift you stopped for the same reason. And chances are last year you also did the same thing and two years three years ago. So that means you can do fancy stuff, but your mentality is is not linear because you’re not removing each one of those justifications or reasons and its root cause. So the root cause is still there. It’s still causing pieces lost down time. For the same reason. So how come we think we are much better, but you might as well just do that on a piece of? Napkin because it’s not helping you improve. You’re just keeping records of something and repeating the same mistakes from yesterday.

Brion
Yeah, just better record keeping and charting. That’s not necessarily improving. Yeah, very true. Well, great. Thanks, Sammy. How can people reach you? What’s the best way?

Sammy
No. Raising awareness. We can visit honsha.org or contact me via e-mail s.obara@onsha.org and I’ll be glad that you respond 100% of all the emails I receive, so feel free to contact me and we need more people for link for hope.

Brion
Yes, that’s great. They can find the books on the Honsha website.

Sammy
Yes. And actually you know those boats Toyota by Toyota, they are right here. So those are supporting link for home. Whenever you purchase you can go to Amazon, Toyota by Toyota editors are there or will burn and Samuel.

Brion
Yep. Cool.

Sammy
Or you can purchase them. They were published in the quite a few languages.

Brion
I think that’s maybe where I first learned about you because Patrick Mueller, our friend in common, wrote a chapter and I think I got the book to read his chapter and then got tied in through all that. So yeah, it’s been out for quite a few years now. Great book to check out and learn from many different Toyota former employees. And their experiences and working in many different countries. That have common principles and methodologies are using very neatly.

Sammy
Yeah, next time, please read my Chapter 2.

Brion
Oh yeah, I read all of them, but that was the reason I got it was to. Read Patrick’s.

Sammy
My chapter talks about how Toyota eliminated mosquitoes in Thailand. They eliminated mosquitoes from the Thailand facility where they made the engines for vehicles, yes.

Brion
Yeah, it’s like how it applies to any kind of problem. Mosquitoes or coconuts. Or making cars and vehicles and then lean for hope is on the show website as well. Or is that separate website?

Sammy
Yes, yes, yes. And once a year we do leave for hope connections where we bring in people or organizations that are implementing lean and they are usually NGO’s from all sectors, from recycling to plantations. There are several different sectors that we are helping. And yeah, leave for home connections is coming up in two months.

Brion
That’s great. Thank you so much for your time and it’s great getting to meet you in person. And thanks for being a guest.

Sammy
Thank you for inviting me, Brion. We will stay. In touch.

Brion
OK, sounds great.

Sammy
Talk to you soon.

Related posts:

Previous Article
Next Article