Kaizen VS. Boeing Failures, Lean Loops & Startup Learning - E630
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
12 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 16 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the Kaizen learning flywheel and how does it relate to startup MVPs?
This is how the Kaizen model is very much about learning, improving, measuring. There's a similar approach of a flywheel where we're doing that, but for learning about the company that we're trying to build. So all of us understand the part about the learning loop, and one of them that is really I like, of course, and we all like is the building part. Because we judge our perspective about how things are done by building. Who builds or somebody who's just critiquing or observing or financing. But so we respect builders. But what's important is that instead of building, you build a minimum viable product, which is what is the easiest version to test your hypothesis. Then you measure the results, whether people like it or not, whether it actually works or not, so you improve on it.
Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between. No BS on success. I'm Jeremy O, Venture Capitalist, Sarah founder, Harvard MBA, science fiction nerd, and dad of two daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesea.com. Stay well and stay brave. I wanna talk to you about something called Kaizen, right? And the secret of Toyota. What used to happen was that cars used to be produced in a very haphazard way. So obviously, people were producing cars that were in different parts of the factory.
There were different teams walking in and out.
How does Toyota empower frontline workers to drive continuous improvement?
There's very bad version control. And basically what happened at that point of time was that. There was a struggle to make cars that were cheap, viable, and on time. And what happened as a result, obviously, is we know of Henry Ford created an assembly line that basically meant that cars would travel in a row and people work on it in a sequence. And then more recently, we talked about Toyota, which is Kaizen. And in Chinese it would be the Japanese version of Gai Shan, which just means improvement for the better. And what's really important about changing for the better is a philosophy was that Toyota basically said that our job is not to make this giant improvement. Our job is necessarily not necessarily to have a very top down approach of how managers change the assembly line.
We want to give the power to the front line. The workers who are touching the metal every day To have the ability to suggest improvements, but also have the ability to stop if there are errors or defects in the production. And this is an important piece for us to think about because what Toyota was able to do was basically say our job is not to think about large changes or large insights. Our job is to accumulate and accelerate the number of small insights from the front line. And this is really important because we saw that this has allowed Toyota obviously to become One of the number one car manufacturers in the world. But we also realize that the ability for us to learn and relearn this keeps happening over and over again.
For example, we know about the Boeing safety disasters that all of us have been concerned about. And if you understand the news, one of the issues they identified was that for many years, basically, Boeing had a strong culture of safety, reliability, and M most of us have grown up our lives flying in Boeing planes. And if you and I go on a plane tomorrow, you and I would not care about whether it's a Boeing plane or Airbus plane. But for a time, we always hear about a story about, for example, on a plane, there was a door that was was supposedly part of the fuselage, basically blew out, right?
Why did Boeing’s safety failures stem from ignoring frontline feedback?
And this teenager, university student, almost got sucked out. All right. And he was basically had his ship re shirt ripped off because the air was rushing out. And if he wasn't wearing his T belt, he would have died because he had been pulled out of the plane, right? But what was the issue of that? The issue about that was that when people were rushing around in a Boeing plane trying to make things happen, there were mistakes that were being made and people were not checking each other, and people saw the mistakes that were being made, but did not choose to
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the Kaizen learning flywheel and how does it relate to startup MVPs?
0:00–1:43
2
How does Toyota empower frontline workers to drive continuous improvement?
1:43–3:44
3
Why did Boeing’s safety failures stem from ignoring frontline feedback?
3:44–5:59
4
How does a faster rate of learning give startups a competitive edge?
5:59–7:29
5
What is the staged MVP approach (skateboard → car) and why does it accelerate learning?
7:29–8:41
6
How do divergence and convergence cycles shape effective product brainstorming?
8:41–10:07
7
What practical steps help founders define the real problem before building a solution?
10:07–11:04
8
Why should teams continuously loop through testing, learning, and iterating?
11:04–12:13
Speakers
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