Story
Thirty years on the same loom.
Sakichi Toyoda was born in 1867 in a farming village in what is now Shizuoka Prefecture. His father, Ikichi, farmed and worked as a carpenter, and taught his son the trade. Sakichi built a wooden hand loom in 1890 and was granted his first patent, No. 1195, in 1891, at 24. Toyota puts the productivity gain from that loom at 40 to 50 percent.
In April 1910 the president of Toyoda's Loom Works told him the company was lagging because, in his words, "the employees' attention is consumed by all this invention and testing," and asked him to resign. Sakichi's own recollection is that he could not contain his anger, stormed out of the room, went home and wrote the resignation letter immediately. He sailed for the United States on 8 May 1910, by several accounts intending to stay. He was 43, twenty years into the work, and the loom that would make his name was fourteen years away.
He came back and went straight at the same machine. Toyota dates the Type G automatic loom to 1924, more than thirty years after the wooden hand loom, and in 1926 he founded Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, the company that is Toyota Industries today. He did not found Toyota. His son Kiichiro did that in 1937, seven years after Sakichi died in Nagoya at 63.
The Code
Code 3 — Remove All Distractions
Code 3 of 7 · Business Brainwash
You don't have a time problem. You have a subtraction problem.
Less is more. Replace entertainment with edutainment. Fewer nights out, more nights in.
- Subtract before you add.
- Trade entertainment for edutainment.
- Protect the hours where the real work actually happens.
Lessons
Four shifts that make this Code real.
Stay on one problem long enough to finish it.
From the 1890 hand loom to the Type G he worked a single question: a loom that runs without a person standing over it. He did not spread himself across ventures.
Name the one problem you would still be working on in ten years. Then cut what competes with it.
Design the work so nobody has to watch it.
The Toyoda looms carried halting devices that stopped the machine when a thread broke, instead of weaving defective cloth. One operator could then run many looms rather than babysit one.
Automate the watching, not only the doing. Supervision is the expensive part of most jobs.
Check who is calling your work a distraction.
A company president told him invention was what was holding the business back. The invention was the business. It simply had not paid yet.
A slow-paying activity is not the same as a distraction. Judge it by whether it compounds, not by this quarter.
Build the mechanism. Let someone else name it.
Sakichi built the halting devices. The word jidoka came from Taiichi Ohno, who in a March 1969 column identified those devices as its origin, thirty-nine years after Sakichi died.
Do not wait for a framework to exist before you build the thing. The vocabulary arrives afterward.
Data
Forty-five rights, and one number that never fully arrived.
The patent record is what staying on one machine looks like on paper. The Platt Brothers figure is the one almost everybody quotes wrong.
Toyota Industries · Toyota
Figures from Toyota Industries' company history and Toyota Motor's 75-year history. First patent No. 1195 granted 1891, at 24. Toyota's official history counts 45 industrial property rights awarded in Japan in his lifetime, 40 patents plus 5 utility models; Japanese sources including Kosai City publish a competing tally of 84 domestic patents, 13 foreign patents and 35 utility models, so the count is not settled. The Platt Brothers patent assignment was signed in England by his son Kiichiro on 21 December 1929 for £100,000 in four annual instalments; the balance was reduced in July 1934 and the total actually paid was £83,500. The Type G date and its authorship are both disputed: some sources date it to 1925, and Toyota's own records credit Kiichiro on parts of it.
Strategy
The play: pick one machine and refuse every other one.
Sakichi Toyoda's advantage was not range. From 1890 until he died he worked a single question, and when the company carrying his own name told him that work was the problem, he wrote the letter, took the boat, came home, and went back to the same machine.
Run the play: name the one problem you would still be working on in ten years, list what is currently competing with it, and cut the biggest item this month. That's Code 3 of Business Brainwash — remove all distractions.
A University of Tokyo economic historian working from evidence rather than corporate folklore, which this subject badly needs — it traces the line from Sakichi's looms through Kiichiro to Taiichi Ohno.
Write down the one problem you would still be working on in ten years. Then cut the single biggest thing competing with it this week.
References
Sources for this article.
- The Story of Sakichi Toyoda — Toyota Industries
- 75 Years of Toyota — resignation from Toyoda's Loom Works, 1910 — Toyota Motor Corporation
- 75 Years of Toyota — the birth of jidoka — Toyota Motor Corporation
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Code 3 · Remove All Distractions
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You don't have a time problem. You have a subtraction problem. I'll send you the plays behind this Code — the part that turns it into a system.
- The play behind this Code
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- What to stop doing first
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