‎"‎Toyota Kata gets to the essence of how Toyota manages continuous improvement and human ingenuity‎,‎ through its improvement kata and coaching kata‎.‎ Mike Rother explains why typical companies fail to understand the core of lean and make limited progress‎-‎-and what it takes to make it a real part of your culture‎.‎‎"‎ ‎-‎-Jeffrey K‎.‎ Liker‎,‎ bestselling author of The Toyota Way ‎"‎[Toyota Kata is] one of the stepping stones that will usher in a new era of management thinking‎.‎‎"‎ ‎-‎-The Systems Thinker ‎"‎How any organization in any industry can progress from old‎-fashioned management by results to a strikingly different and better way‎.‎‎"‎ ‎-‎-James P‎.‎ Womack‎,‎ Chairman and Founder‎,‎ Lean Enterprise Institute ‎"‎Practicing the improvement kata is perhaps the best way we‎'‎ve found so far for actualizing PDCA in an organization‎.‎‎"‎ ‎-‎-John Shook‎,‎ Chairman and CEO‎,‎ Lean Enterprise Institute This game‎-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota‎,‎ providing new insight into the legendary automaker‎'‎s management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower‎.‎ Drawing on six years of research into Toyota‎'‎s employee‎-management routines‎,‎ Toyota Kata examines and elucidates‎,‎ for the first time‎,‎ the company‎'‎s organizational routines‎-‎-called kata‎-‎-that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation‎.‎ The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as‎:‎ How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization‎?‎ How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance‎?‎ How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic‎,‎ unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers‎?‎ Mike Rother explains how to improve our prevailing management approach through the use of two kata‎:‎ Improvement Kata‎-‎-a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions‎,‎ working step‎-by‎-step through obstacles‎,‎ and always learning from the problems we encounter‎;‎ and Coaching Kata‎:‎ a pattern of teaching the improvement kata to employees at every level to ensure it motivates their ways of thinking and acting‎.‎ With clear detail‎,‎ an abundance of practical examples‎,‎ and a cohesive explanation from start to finish‎,‎ Toyota Kata gives executives and managers at any level actionable routines of thought and behavior that produce superior results and sustained competitive advantage‎.‎