The Harada Method

INTRODUCTION

If you are digging for oil, you must be sure that there is oil under the place you are digging.

– Rudi

The reasons why people cannot achieve their goals are not because they lack abilities or characters, but because they are setting their goals in a wrong way and trying to achieve them in a wrong way.

– Takashi Harada

A few years ago, I was introduced to Day-to-Day Management, a methodology created by Takashi Harada. It was claimed to be the world's best process to develop people to their fullest capability. At first, I was both skeptical and fascinated, but I allowed my curiosity to guide me to discover more about the truth. After meeting, Mr. Harada several times, taking a number of his courses in Japan, reading hundreds of translated pages about his work, teaching this methodology to my students at Portland State University, and training and certifying managers, executives and consultants; I am thoroughly convinced of the authenticity of Mr. Harada's work. I hope as you read this book you will agree that his technique is a jewel and ranks with the work of Deming, Ohno, Shingo, and other giants of management.

The Harada Method is a Sport's Analogy on how you can take the best from athletics and apply it successfully to your life both on and off the job. I believe we all love a winner; but most of us have not been taught how to become one. Here in this book, we give you the steps to carefully follow to transform yourself to a new and very exciting life.

Please note as you read the indented quoted areas are words directly from Mr. Harada while other copy areas are both my stories and experiences in teaching and using the method.

Over 30 years ago, in 1979, I started a company called Productivity, Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut. At the time American productivity growth rates were declining and the Japanese were advancing at 9% per year. The difference between the two countries was attributed to the Japanese manufacturerʼs ability to produce and deliver products at low costs with very high quality. My goal at that time was to discover the innovative ideas that the Japanese manufacturers were doing, that we not doing in America, and introduce them to the West. The funny thing is, I wasnʼt a manufacturing professional. I had never worked a day of my life in a plant – not on the line and not in an office. Yet, I became fascinated with the idea of exploring what was happening in Japan and looking at the possibility of U.S. manufacturers replicating the Japanese methods into their facilities. Remember, this is long before anyone had heard the words Lean, TPM ¹, JIT ², SMED ³, QCC ⁴, Kaizen Blitz ⁵, or any of the acronyms so common to most of us today.

For anyone who knows me, they know that once I get excited about an idea itʼs hard to hold me back. Nothing as minor as no manufacturing experience and no contacts in Japan was going to stop me. I became interested in looking at the question of why the U.S. productivity rates were dropping while the Japanese rates had increased by 9% that year. I first studied at the library but couldnʼt find the answer at all and then I went to New York City to attend an Industry Week conference and heard a presentation by Joji Arai, manager of Japan Productivity Centerʼs Washington, DC office. After his talk, I went up to him to ask him if he could help me arrange a study mission to Japan. I wanted to get inside some of the world’s best plants to see for myself what they were doing. He agreed, and soon I was in Japan walking through Toyota, Canon, and other world-class plants. I was hooked. The innovations I saw were breathtaking, and I knew that U.S. manufacturers needed to learn what I was learning.

The next thing you should know about me is that I have an incredible ability to meet some of the worldʼs most amazing people. Maybe it is that I have no fear of picking up the phone and calling someone, (and yes, I have had the phone hung up on me many times), but over the years I have been honored to meet some incredible people – true geniuses. This was definitely true over 30 years ago when I arrived in Japan. On my first few trips, I soon found myself shaking hands with such visionaries as Taiichi Ohno ⁶, Dr. Shigeo Shingo ⁷, Dr. Yoji Akao ⁸ and Dr. Ryuji Fukuda ⁹ to name a few. These were the people developing what we all know of today as Lean manufacturing. Somehow I managed to have them agree to let me translate their books into English and publish them in America.

Since those early days, I have been to Japan over 80 times, led over 25 study missions, toured more than 250 plants, published over 250 books, ran close to a thousand conferences and seminars and was even inducted into the Industry Week’s Manufacturing Hall of Fame. Yet, with all I did to help promote Lean manufacturing, I always felt that something was missing. There was a link that I didnʼt know about that would pull it all together.

I felt as if I had finally found that link when I learned about Takashi Harada and the Harada Method. Here finally was the next step in the Lean journey. Here was the human side of lean using a systematic way to develop employees to increase their skill levels to the point that they will become totally self-reliant and virtually irreplaceable. Yes, Lean has taught us how to continuously make improvements on the shop floor, and now even in our hospitals and other institutions, but what was missing was the way to harness the creativity and motivation of all of our employees and even ourselves. The Harada Method is a personal journey of growth which you can set and achieve your life goals, help lead your employees toward reaching their individual goals and help your organization reach greater success. It is designed to teach you how to be a great leader, a great coach to develop people to their fullest, and to build a winning team.

A few years back, A Chinese fortune cookie told me, You have the talent to discover the talent in others. Yes, that is my little magic in life to be able to travel the world and to continue to discover true geniuses in management and have the opportunity to bring these discoveries back to American shores. In this book, you will meet Mr. Harada and hear in his own words how he developed his method and what it meant for countless children and adults throughout Japan.  Just as I felt all those years ago when I met Mr. Ohno, Dr. Shingo, and the other Lean leaders, I feel the same way now. The Harada Method is life-changing. It has changed my life and if you follow me on this step-by-step journey, I am sure that it will change your life too.

In this book, it is our intention to give you a deep understanding of the world’s best management training method to teach you how to have a very successful life. It was my miracle to have discovered Takashi Harada, and I now have the privilege to teach his work and to co-author this book. There are many success teachers in the world who have written best-selling books: Stephen R. Covey, Malcolm Gladwell, Jack Caldwell, and others, but in my opinion only Takashi Harada really gives you a step-by-step exact method to follow to reach your goals and your personal success. This book is about that method. If you follow the Harada Method you will find your personal and professional success. Let’s get started now, looking at what the Harada Method is and how you and your employees can get started learning the steps right away.

1 TPM – Total Productive Maintenance

2 JIT – Just-in-Time

3 SMED – Single Minute Exchange of Die

4 QCC – Quality Control Circles

5 Kaizen Blitz – a team workshop that radically changes the factory floor

6 Taiichi Ohno was the vice president of production for Toyota and the key discoverer of the Toyota Production System.

7 Dr. Shigeo Shingo was an independent consultant to Toyota and taught over 3000 of their engineers and managers the principles of Industrial Engineering, problem solving techniques and the keys to the Toyota Production System. He invented the SMED system and Poka-Yoke.

8 Dr. Yoji Akao introduced us to Hoshin Planning and QFD.

9 Dr. Ryuji Fukuda was the vice president of production for Sumitomo Metals, authored my first book Managerial Engineering and introduced me to many of the Lean tools and techniques.

1

FINDING HARADA

When people pick strong goals, with purposes and values that serve not only themselves but also serve others, their entire character changes.

- Takashi Harada

Selling my business,

Productivity, Inc., in 1999, I found myself with time to do some things I always wanted to do but retiring was not one of them. Instead, I started to consult, write books, keynote conferences, and teach some courses at Portland State University. After taking one of my classes, a group of my students asked if they could intern with me to study Lean principles. The students heard me give a guest lecture on the Best of Japanese Management and they wanted to learn more. We agreed to meet at my office on Friday afternoons, first to discuss ideas and then to learn from Mr. Shigehiro Nakamura over Skype from Tokyo. Mr. Nakamura is a former senior manager with Hitachi Metals and now is an instructor with the Japan Management Association (JMA). He also was the author of The New Standardization: keystone of continuous improvement in manufacturing. Mr. Nakamura has developed over 30 different courses to teach the best of Japanese management.

Every other week, at 8:00 am Tokyo time around 4:00 pm our time, Mr. Nakamura would review with us his Production Technology MAP, which showed in detail how a company could discover specific steps to take to become world-class competitive.

The MAP is an instrument that gathers the best ideas from a wide group of managers on how to become world-class manufacturers onto one piece of paper. To do this, researchers and consultants of the JMA studied and benchmarked the best companies in the world in order to determine what those companies had done to attain their level of superiority. The MAP showed managers and executives what world-class techniques or countermeasures ¹ are being used by the worldʼs most successful companies. They wanted not only the entire plant to be world-class but also every part of the operation to be world-class. In the MAP, 38 categories were investigated, including; Quality, Cost, Delivery, Production, Safety/Ecology, Morale, Management Indicators, Standard Manpower, Reviews in Advance, Set-up Improvement, Equipment Management, Automation, Zero-Defect Production, etc. ²

Within each category on the MAP we saw examples of countermeasures or world-class methodologies being used by the most competitive companies in the world. To the right of the countermeasures were those companies in the world that either developed the methodologies or were using them successfully. For example to the right of quality is Six Sigma and in the next column, it says General Electric.

The MAP fascinated me. It was a gold mine! For the past thirty years, I have been looking for the best tools, techniques, and methodologies that would help American companies become more competitive, and here on one sheet of paper was what Mr. Nakamura and other leading scholars in Japan considered to be the current best management ideas in the world. Many companies in Japan have used this MAP. Having known Mr. Nakamura for over 20 years and having published his books in English, I trusted his endorsement of the MAP. It was obviously a very valuable instrument to help companies be internationally competitive.

Each week the students and I would take one or more of the categories and ask Mr. Nakamura to explain the details to us. He would send us slides (I have slides in Japanese for over 30 of his courses which go in detail on most of the categories listed.) In addition, Mr. Nakamura also sent us videos.

Having translated and published over one hundred books on Japanese management techniques while I was at Productivity Inc./ Press, I was familiar with many of the techniques on the MAP, but not all of them. Shortly after we began our sessions with Mr. Nakamura, he taught us about the seventh category – Standard Manpower, that included the following countermeasures: 100% standard time achievement rate + 3% improvement per month and Day-to-day management by objectives. The benchmark examples were Old Canon Production System and Daily Management System by Takashi Harada.

The Worldʼs Best Concept on Day-to-Day Management

I was somewhat familiar with the Canon Production System ³, but I knew nothing about Takashi Harada and his Daily Management System. Mr. Nakamura gave us some of the details of Mr. Haradaʼs work and sent us a video of Mr. Harada giving a lecture. The video was in Japanese but my wife, Noriko, (who is Japanese), and some of the students, who also knew Japanese, could understand it. They all gave me details about the video. What I heard got me very excited. Most of the categories on the MAP related to process and product improvement, but day-to-day management was about how managers could better manage and develop their employees as well as their own careers.

According to the JMA, Takashi Haradaʼs Daily Management System was the world’s best concept on day-to-day management. It was the best technique for managers to develop their employees and create a new culture within the company. Mr. Harada had found a new way to inspire people to reach for their maximum, creative potential.

The Harada Method compliments the work of Dr. Shigeo Shingo and Taiichi Ohno by addressing the people side of Lean. Virtually every company today is attempting to be Lean, but very few know how to achieve it. The Harada Method can be used to gain full cooperation for a companyʼs Lean efforts. When people know how to take full responsibility for their own lives and be self-reliant, with the support of management, they can become like an arrow clearly focused on how to be successful personally and also how to better serve well their company. The Harada Method is the Human Side of Lean. It overcomes the Eighth Waste of Lean: the underutilization of peopleʼs creative talents. It empowers people to take charge of their own life to become highly skilled on the job. It teaches how the company and every employee can be successful at the same time.

Meeting Mr. Harada

My wife Noriko went to Amazon Japan and noted that there were several books written by Mr. Harada. We ordered many of them, and when they came I distributed them to my student interns and Noriko. They were all fascinated reading what Mr. Harada had done and the simplicity and power of the system he had created.

After studying his material, I felt exactly the same way as when I discovered Dr. Shigeo Shingo and Taiichi Ohno. I believed that Japan had another great genius for me to bring to the Western world. I wanted to learn more, so I called Mr. Harada in Osaka. Through Norikoʼs interpretation, I told him I wanted to come to Japan to meet him, learn more about his methodology and publish his works in English. He agreed to meet me in Tokyo, and I quickly made arrangements to fly to Japan to meet him.

A few weeks later, Noriko and I flew to Japan and met Mr. Harada at a very small hotel in the Asakusa area of Tokyo. In meeting with Mr. Harada, I told him I wanted to take one of his old books and have it translated and published in English, which is what I had done many times when I owned Productivity Inc. Mr. Harada, however, told me he preferred to write a new book for an American audience, and agreed to let me co-author the book, adding in my own understanding of and experiences in teaching his methodology.

Mr. Haradaʼs background is very unique and varied which helped him to develop his method based on his own personal experiences over a number of years. In Japan, Harada is a world-renowned coach, trainer and consultant. But prior to entering the business world, Harada was a junior high school track and field coach at the worst school out of 380 in Osaka, Japan. The school was probably in the most depressed area of Osaka with very few students able to believe that they were capable of achieving anything in their life. Not only were so many of the students failing academically, but few had ever experienced any kind of success athletically. Harada set out to change that and within three years his school became one of the best for athletics and many of the students started to make dramatic improvements academically too. The school became number one in track and field out of hundreds of schools and continued to be number one for the next 6 years in a row - with 13 students winning gold medals and being recognized as the best athletes in their age group in all of Japan. Many of these former underachievers also received scholarships and went on to high school, college and into successful careers in industry.

In 2002, Harada left the school system and opened a consulting practice in Tokyo to teach his method to industry.  Since then, he has taught over 55,000 people at 280 companies. Harada first developed his method to transform his underachieving students to turn them into outstanding athletes but soon recognized that he had a powerful method that could help businesses transform their employees too.

Today in Japan, thousands of people who use the Harada Method are improving their lives and contributing more to their companiesʼ bottom lines. They are increasing sales, more successfully implementing projects and working together to set and attain common goals. The Harada Method leads people through a carefully thought-out process, similar to a winning sports team, to build a great company with outstanding employees.

Before starting his consulting business, Takashi Harada, working in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Osaka, was challenged to find a way to help his students become winners - to have personal success in addition to being outstanding athletes. He felt his students were underachievers. Many of those students did not want to come to school; very few went to high school and almost none went on to college. Mr. Harada, however, felt that he could bring positive change and motivate the students to become better athletes.

Mr. Harada noticed that there were schools in Osaka that were consistently successful in track and field. He thought, If another coach in Osaka can produce a winning team, so can I! The other coaches have to get athletes from their local areas too. Harada realized that he could not just pick winners; he had to somehow develop them.

It was not at all easy and he faced a lot of resistance. For example, one day, students and parents, with the school principal in attendance, confronted Mr. Harada. You are too hard on our children, they said. Mr. Harada replied, I want your children to be winners. Do you want your children to be winners or do you want them to stay where they are? If you give me three years, I will make this the best school in the city in track and field and if I donʼt, then fire me.

Three Years Later, the School Became Number One in Osaka

Mr. Harada found a method to take those underprivileged children and make them winners. To the students, winning the competition felt like winning an Olympic medal. The junior high school also substantially improved academically. As the athletes became winners, their success was noticed by the other students and drove them to improve as well.

How was it possible to take those children who had so few advantages at both their homes and at school and motivate them to work on themselves to become winners? That is what this book is about. Mr. Harada believes every person can and should be allowed to pick their own success goal, something that will get them excited about their life and future. Of course, if you work for an organization, you want the goals to be in alignment with those of your company. Virtually anyone can be a master at some discipline given the guidance and willingness to work hard over a period of time and with the perseverance and