Dear Lean people, words from non-English languages have meanings!

I don't mean to pick on Pawel Brodzinski in this blog post, but I stopped reading right at the top:

In its original meaning, Kanban represented a visual signal. The thing that communicated, well, something. It might have been a need, option, availability, capacity, request, etc.

I hate to come off as a pedant here, but something that's always annoyed me about the entire family of Lean practices in the Western world is the community's penchant for its uncritical adoption of regular-ass nouns and verbs from Japanese. Lean consultants have spent literal decades assigning highly-specific nuanced meanings to random words, and if you actually listen to anyone introducing Lean, it's hard to go 5 minutes without getting the icky sense the use of those words is being deployed to trade on appeals to nonsensical Oriental exoticism. I've lost track of how many times I've heard something like, "according to the ancient Japanese art of Kaizen," or similar bullshit.

It's true that Lean's existence is owed to the work of luminaries like Deming, Ohno, and Toyoda and their development of the Toyota Production System, but what eventually grew into the sprawling umbrella term "Lean" was based on surprisingly brief and incomplete glimpses of those innovations. As a result, the connective tissue between Lean as it's marketed in the West and anything that ever actually happened in Japan is even more tenuous than most Lean fans probably realize. So the fact that everyone carries on using mundane Japanese words as industry jargon makes even less sense.

For example, here are some words Lean people use and what they actually mean:

• Kanban (看板) - this just means "sign", most often the kind you'd find outside a store, not "a signaling device that gives authorization and instructions for the production or withdrawal"
• Kaizen (改善) - the word for "improvement" and doesn't refer to some special methodology. It doesn't even mean "continuous improvement"
• Muda (無駄) - this word means "waste", as in you order a bunch of sushi and don't eat it all. Nothing to do with "creating value for the customer"
• Muri (無理) - just means "unreasonable" or "impossible", not "overburdening equipment or operators"
• Gemba (現場) - literally means "actual location", usually used in broadcast news to convey things like the site of a car accident, not "any place where value-creating work actually occurs"
• Jidouka (自働化) - just means "automation", as opposed to, "ability to detect when an abnormal condition has occurred and immediately stop work"
• Hansei (反省) - means "reflect" (with a gloss of "regret"), rather than a "thinking about how a process or personal shortcoming can be improved"
• Hoshin Kanri (方針管理) - this one just means "policy management", which could mean documenting how many smoke breaks employees are allowed to take. Hardly "a strategic framework for building sustained high performance"

And so on.

As an entitled white man, I'll be the first to admit I don't lose much sleep over cultural appropriation. I'm just saying, if you're trying to come up with a name for a specific concept or process, remember that existing words have meaning before cherry-picking a noun from a foreign language textbook and calling it a day.

UPDATE: Just as I was worried I might have been a bit too harsh here, I realized his blog has comments.

This one is just incredible:

A post it note is not a kanban

Theo, you might have to reconsider your idea of “idiocy”, potentially in front of a mirror. “Kanban” is not a noun so of course a post-it can’t be one. The concept originated from Japan (Toyota factories to be specific) so it makes absolute sense to use the original word. Their method did not use a signboard at all, Kanban is the system, which you would learn with a couple minutes of focused googling.

Of course, open a dictionary and you'll see that kanban (看板) is categorized under meishi (名詞), which (unless the Lean folk have some other made up definition for it), means noun.

Well, Theo, we use a Japanese name because that’s where it came from. Have you ever heard of a tsunami, or kamikaze, or sushi? These are also Japanese words we use in the English which have more nuanced meanings than just googling their “literal translation”.

Additionally, I can understand that being as unintelligent as you are must be difficult but if you try your hardest you might be able to google “kanban” and “signboard” to learn that one refers to a methodology and the other does not.

For example, real expert Lean practitioners know that "ahou" (阿呆) refers to observing a mistake repeatedly and forming an expensive twelve step correction plan, even though its literal translation is "idiot."