"HOLLAND IS NOT JAPAN!"

I really hate to fly longer than 2-3 hours, but in 2025 I found myself yet again on board of a plane, this time being imprisoned for almost 14 hours as it would fly from Amsterdam to Tokyo. This already long flight had become even longer due to the fact that certain airspace had to be avoided due to political factors. Be it as it may, with such an ocean of time at my disposal, I drafted a new offline course and I watched Joker Folie a Deux, not once but twice. I actually appreciated it too, contrary to the vast majority of people. In fact, I found it to be a masterpiece! 

I wanted to make the trip to Japan for years, but every time something had come up and I couldn’t get the factory access that I wanted. But this time was different and I managed to secure a good mix of factory tours and interviews with professionals and academics. The trip was worth the hassle.

On the third day of the trip, I left an extremely hot Tokyo to travel to an even hotter Nagoya. I would have never imagined Tokyo to be so hot, but it really is and it probably is the humidity that makes it even more unbearable. Be it as it may, much of Japan’s automotive activity is clustered in the Nagoya region and I got to take a factory tour, do two interviews, as well as visit the Toyota Museum which was also quite interesting and a “must see” for any automotive enthusiast.

In Nagoya, I had secured an interview with a retired production engineer and former teacher, Mr. Yoshida, who had previously worked for Toyota. He saw with his own eyes how their Toyota Production System became a phenomenon around the world and rebranded as “Lean.” I explained to him that in the past I had experience in Holland and Germany applying Lean principles. He asked me how that went and I openly answered that it was really challenging to maintain the Lean culture in Dutch organizations. Implementing was easy, in fact it was extremely easy for someone like me, but it was a challenge to come up with a mechanism that would make the gains “sticky.” 

Mr. Yoshida smiled and nodded, as if he wanted to signal: “Of course it’s challenging in Holland! Holland is not Japan!” He said that in his time, he had seen every nationality in the world come to Toyota and try to learn the Toyota Production System directly or indirectly, but that he very quickly realized that most of them would fail to implement it in the way Japanese implemented it. The Japanese went deep. They entrenched it in the corporate culture. The rest did not do that.  

I asked him why and he asked me a follow up question. He asked me how long I was in Japan. I told him that it was my third day. He asked me if I saw the morning commute of the endless “salary men” (these are the office workers of Japan and of course also include women) and I answered that I experienced and survived being sandwiched among them in the train. He laughed and asked me what clothes the male salary men were wearing. I answered: ”The males wear short sleeve white button business shirt, black trousers and black shoes!” He paused and went on: ”What are the Dutch salary men wearing during morning commute?” I answered: “I don’t know, each dresses like he wants I guess.” He paused again, this time for a considerably longer time and looked at me silently as if he wanted me to figure something out. Then it suddenly hit me. He is referring to the highly collectivist Japanese corporate culture in which there is little room for individualism and deviation. It is reflected in many ways, partly by the semi-uniforms that the Japanese salary men wear to work. 

Mr. Yoshida was truly a wise man and a great teacher who lets the student figure the lesson out by themselves with minimal intervention! In our application of Lean, we too often neglect the crucial difference between the Japanese culture and the other cultures. The Japanese are collectivist and once management wants to implement a system (such as Lean), they take their positions and play that game. They play the game without asking questions. They play the game with unpaid overtime. They play it with passion. They play that game and try to become better at it every single day.  

Not all cultures are like that. Without sufficient convincing, the workers of less collectivist cultures will eventually spit out the medicine that the management has prescribed. Maybe they take three months, or three years to do it, but they eventually spit it out.

So in cultures where collectivism is not the norm, one would have to spend much more time on convincing the various organizational layers of the merits of Lean, before actually starting with the implementation. This “convincing of the whole organization” is a step that you can easily skip in Japan, but if you are not in Japan, you need to reconsider your tactics. These little things, you can’t learn from books.

Mr. Yoshida pointed out one last thing which I will never forget. He pointed out that it's not a coincidence that the "US born" methodology Six Sigma, which is often coupled with Lean, devotes an entire phase of the project to anchoring the proposed change to make sure it sticks, to make sure that the organization has no choice but to accept the medicine. This phase of the Six Sigma project is called the control phase. America is after all, far less collectivist. Like Holland, America too, is not Japan.   

Maz 

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