"Sustainability and 'Lean Operations'"
Cost Management
March/April 2006, pp. 40-45
The author of this article states that "Those who study business sustainability miss a unique opportunity by ignoring Toyota, not because Toyota is a paragon of sustainability but because key features of its current operating system will likely be emulated by any company that might become truly sustainable in the future.
The article argues that the only truly sustainable system we know is the system of all living systems on Earth. To emulate this system, three principles must be followed:
- Everything that exists is related, ultimately, to everything else that exists
- Everything that exists is self-organizing
- Constant interaction among all self-organizing entities produces a continual unfolding of more diversity and complexity
The author argues that Toyota views operations in similar ways to these three principles. In addition, Toyota manages to achieve competitive costs at almost any scale of operations. Companies that try to understand the deep elements of Toyota's approach would be able to operate at smaller scale and in local regions. This in turn, could help reduce the current waste of excessive and complex accounting controls: "as in Toyota, all the information needed would be contained in the work and the work would be the primary source of information about results and consequences."
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