Kaizen
Kaizen is the Japanese practice of continuous improvement that Toyota made famous. Its core philosophy is that big results come from many small changes accumulated over time.
The question it answers
What's one better or easier way to do something we already do?
Use it when
Growth has stalled and you’re not looking for one big fix.
You’re tempted to hire someone to come in and reset the culture for you.
You want improvement to be a weekly habit instead of a yearly project.
It’s the wrong tool when
The model itself is broken. Small tweaks to an offer the market stopped buying just get you to the wrong place faster.
You're tuning something that isn't the bottleneck.
You're in a cash crisis. "Many small changes over time" assumes you have time.
Nothing is written down yet. You can't improve a process that changes every time someone else does it.
Don’t roll the dice on a new CEO
When growth stalls, publicly traded companies try to revive it by bringing in a new CEO. Most of the time they get a manager of the status quo who uses different buzzwords than the last one. Every once in a while a Lee Iacocca or a Jack Welch shows up with the energy and vision to reset the culture.
Instead of rolling the dice on someone to replace you, adopt the mindset of continuous improvement. I think it’s the single best chance you have at growing or streamlining your business to its full potential.
Good change
The Japanese call it Kaizen, and it became wildly famous in the late 1980s. It means good change.
Where owners get it wrong
[JOSH ADDS]
What you walk away with
A habit of finding better and easier ways to do what you already do, one small change at a time.
Related frameworks
Small changes add up faster with the right people in the seats.
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