There's lots of examples of that, people doing things that you would see brutally optimized out of western city and those cities I feel are worse off for that optimization.

One way to look at it is that with their wealth they've decided to employ more people and do more good, versus pocketing the profit and calling it efficiency.

The famous railway networks in Japan are actually privatized rail companies which was very surprising to me. When the rail companies privatized in my country they immediately became worse, as they were suddenly serving a very different purpose. Staff were let go, the trains are cleaned less often, services were cut. That kind of thing.

It references other patents (prior and subsequent).

How would liability play out for the construction company in a Japanese court? It's already a low margin competitive industry so passing risk management costs onto customers (the cost of the people monitoring the holes) is likely more practical than risking all profits evaporating and years of litigation, especially if insurance has anything to say about it.

In Australia we certainly don't have those people, construction companies just use a few signs, some cones and barricades and that's all that is required to be compliant. If someone falls in the hole they shouldn't have walked past the cones!

Not the case in Victoria. Pretty normal to see a couple of workers standing near the site entrance making sure pedestrians don't get run over by a truck. Or standing in front of a closed footpath, directing pedestrians to cross the road.

There's pretty strict rules around keeping the public out of construction sites and excavations. Putting a couple of cones around a hole is definitely not all that's required.

There's absolutely a limit where adding another person only adds marginal safety. For instance, children who don't know they should not jump to jump a barrier and then go into a pothole should not be allowed alone on the streets. We are not talking about a random hole in the street, these things are already heavily warded in Japan with barriers and signs AND on top of it there's also workers AND on top of it the mentioned security guards. My argument is, many or all of these security guards are not needed.

Here is the thing: there are adults who know all this and they fell into a potholes by accident, or momentary negligence

The privitization is split into different companies, the best having had a 30 year contract to revitilise their line, and they've done wonders with it, while one of the worst was (pre covid) run to the exact orders of the government

You mean vs allowing those people to spend their time on something that might instead be more productive for society?

If that person is going to spend an hour doing something, is that truly the greatest contribution they can make? Maybe it is! Then again, maybe not.

They don't even have to be deceptive about it. Just in time is obviously about not having undue spare capacity, not about not having any spare capacity at all. But Toyota knows this nuance is going to be lost on buzzword-loving PHBs and greedy management consultant firms. You see the same thing happening with corporate Agile.

I have no idea of whether this is true at all, but I really like the story anyway.

----

What I do know is true is that modern day Toyota doesn't mind sharing the solutions they have come up with to various problems, because they think the real value is in the people and processes to (a) identify the problems in the first place, and (b) come up with solutions suited to those specific problems.

Blindly applying Toyota's solutions to Toyota's problems to your organisation, just hoping that you have the same problems as Toyota and that their solutions will work also for you is a recipe for confusion, and not what matters. (Yet virtually every "development methodology" is a specific solution to a specific problem blindly applied to an organisation.)

The competitor probably could have purchased a sewing machine and replicated the engineering drawings themselves. Teardowns of competitor products is common today, and I'm sure it was back then as well.

I think Toyota's "helpful" attitude comes from the Western paranoia in the 70-90s that Japan was going to completely dominate worldwide manufacturing. After all, their rise was fast: in the mid 60s, Japanese manufactures were practically begging to sell rudimentary formed metal components in the USA, but by the early 80s, they were a leader in the high-tech manufacturing. That rise caught many people off guard and I've heard it said that the "lost decade" in Japan was the result of American trade policy specifically designed to curtail Japan's growth in manufacturing.

Viewed in that light, it makes sense that Japanese companies would appear "helpful" to American ones. Why else would Toyota co-build a plant with GM in order to teach GM their Kaizen philosophy for manufacturing?

Edit: found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI&t=804s

At 13 min. 24 seconds:

> Just in time is such a simple principle, but the pursuit of the elimination of waste is now the central mission of any major manufacturer.

> However, most did it wrong. Manufacturers globally saw the headline “elimination of inventory leads to massive efficiency gains” and jumped on that without actually determining what made it work for Toyota.

> They ignored that Japan's small physical size made for short domestic supply chains, less vulnerable to things going wrong.

> They ignored the company's production leveling: finding the average daily demand and producing that regardless of short-term changes and demands.

> They ignored the fact that eliminating excess inventory is different from eliminating all inventory.

> They ignored the principle of growing strong teams of cross-functional workers predicated on respecting people.

> They ignored the culture of stopping and fixing problems to get things right the first time.

> They ignored huge swaths of the Toyota Way and created a system that’s less effective and less resilient but can impress shareholders through short-term savings.

> How Toyota has effectively implemented this system fills books but many are just reading the covers.

> Even Toyota though is not perfect.

> In 2011 japan was rocked by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake the fourth strongest ever recorded anywhere. Not only did this cause immense destruction to life and property but it also led Toyota to recognize a flaw in its own system.

> As japan recovered some supply chains were quick to as well. For example, securing plastic resin for door panel production is not difficult: there are plenty of manufacturers globally creating easily substitutable alternatives.

> That’s not the case with, say, semiconductors: the hugely expensive facilities that create these chips require years to construct and after the 2011 earthquake it took many months to mend them back to operating status.

> This surfaced a truth that had never been fully considered: not all supply chains are made equal. Plastic resin can handle supply chain disruption, semiconductors cannot. Therefore Toyota made changes: all along, their mission was not to eliminate inventory full stop; it was to eliminate excess inventory.

> Supply chain disruption is inevitable. It's inevitable in the same way that Titanic's flawed design would eventually encounter an iceberg, or the structural economic vulnerabilities of 2008 would eventually collide with a market panic. Therefore semiconductor inventory is not excess because inevitably, due to the inevitability of disruption, excess semiconductor inventory will eventually become necessary.

> Recognizing this, Toyota in recent years has started to build up a stockpile of two to six months worth of chips and that's why the company is the only major vehicle manufacturer that is unfazed by the semiconductor shortage.

> Toyota followed its own principles. It did not stray from them, and it did not reinvent them. It’s no surprise that Toyota excels at implementing its own system, but it is a surprise that the entire manufacturing world has so wholeheartedly embraced flawed implementation of the system.

> Just IN tiime, is such a SIMple principlee, but the purSUIT of the ELIMination of waste...

Tab closed, thanks for the transcript.

That's what manufacturers had done ever since Ford tried to scale up his initial (very Toyota-esque) operation, and scaled it incorrectly but managed to inspire hordes of other manufacturers to repeat his mistakes.

The novelty of Toyota et al. was not that they asked the what if question, but that they answered it unconventionally: they worked on making the supply chains more reliable instead of adding buffers.

That's what makes this next move counter-intuitive to so many people: when Toyota encountered a supply chain that couldn't be made more reliable, they chose the previously-conventional response, apparently in defiance of their whole thing. Except it wasn't.

You're right in that it is simple, but in trying to show that you're making it too simple.

Just stockpiling is not really an answer as much as it's trying to just do the least amount of problem solving and thinking.

Naively it looks like it's cheapest to get close to 100% utilisation by removing all slack from the system.

If you do that though you can't deal with shocks to the system and it costs you much more in the medium term. In the long term your company dies.

This is very well illustrated by John Sterman's Beer game[1]. That's aimed at supply chains in general but works well in any system you can make brittle via cost over optimisation.

This happens a lot because initially over optimisation makes accountants and managers look good to share holders. By the time the chickens have come home to roost they've moved on to another job.

1. https://www.isixsigma.com/training/training-materials-aids/t...

Also about making spare capacity undue. The lazy solution to unreliable delivery is inventory. The efficient solution is working with the supplier to make delivery more reliable.

I spent some time in Belgium a few years ago and was amazed to see that the two people on road projects who turn the "slow/stop" signs to control traffic on single-lanes were replaced with robots. So the EU has managed to figure out how to go under skeleton at least.

Meanwhile, when I was in Japan, there were indeed lots of seemingly "useless" people doing "useless" jobs on similar sized projects.

The minute we got off the plane in Tokyo we were met by a greeter pointing people to the escalator. Not that you could miss it, that was the only exit.

In the city you could see people guarding potholes. Bus stations (not particularly busy) would have a couple men at each station that would help arrange the passenger luggage: something usually helped by the driver in the West.

Once we took a night stroll in the city, meeting a roadwork on a deserted street. There were 3 men along the fenced dig basically showing us to walk around it.

Can't see any of that sustainable if you pay people full wages.

Those jobs hardly add any value to society (let alone economy). If you just hand out money instead, some people might find something more useful to do, or at least be better off for themselves. See also David Graeber's essay "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs".

We provide a jobs program for white-collar folks through our excessively-large and exceptionally expensive healthcare system. We pay for whole categories of jobs that don't need to exist and are only adding costs. A double-digit percentage of our healthcare costs are a white-collar jobs program paying people to do nothing useful whatsoever, and we spend a lot on healthcare so even 10% makes it a fairly big program.

https://d-pt.ppstatic.pl/k/r/1/6c/83/5b7d5e3b2b9de_p.jpg?153...

Anyhow my point is it has little to do with system redundancy.

It's not important that all jobs are high value, it is important that we as a society have a way to create and recognize purpose for individuals to support their mental and personal wellbeing. While welfare / UBI may ensure they have basic needs met to sustain life, it does nothing to support their mental and personal wellbeing, which is why these systems often results in the creation of delinquent behaviors that are mostly absent in a system like that in Japan.

It may be the the same economically, but socially it is much better to have someone doing an "unnecessary" job that is recognize as valued by society vs simply collecting a check.

You say they're standing there in place of a traffic cone, Japanese society instead says that they're there to provide a friendly face ensuring safety of passersby around the dangers of construction work. A traffic cone cannot assist someone who has trouble walking to traverse rough ground because of the work being done. A traffic cone doesn't smile or acknowledge your presence.

That sociocultural element is what has value, and as long as it has value, the job is valuable.

That's why I believe these market forces push to at-capacity, because if someone has spare capacity or a lot of profit another company is going to come in at a lower margin and win the market. Yes this leads to breaking at some situations that happen once every 20 years, but otherwise you die from competition so that's what we are stuck with.

You would. But the guy doing the hiring is just giving the job to his drinking buddy, sure that the favor will come back in some way or the other.

There’s also the social factor to consider. These extra people could be superfluous, but if they’re not there everyone walking past will condemn that construction site as being unsafe.

Why do I phrase it this way? Because the only market mechanism is a sale, you either buy or you don't. Low price is visible before a sale, so a new sale is reward for the low price offered. Quality and timeliness are only apparent after a sale, so can only be punished retroactively by not buying again.

The punishment signal is also far weaker than the reward signal, lots of goods are not bought too often and problems get forgotten by customers, alternatives may have their own problems, etc. And prices can be compared objectively for standardized goods, and at least easily for other goods. Quality and timeliness are often in the eye of the beholder, subject to variation. Comparisons in those areas are also systematically prevented by most vendors.

That's not always true. When a rail network gets privatized, the argument is that the market will make sure it's a good service still. But they are usually paid by the government, not the patrons. The commuters vote becomes negligible, and the rail network has every incentive to optimize for a minimum viable network that meets their government set targets while the service gets worse and worse in all other metrics. Seats are shittier, service is less clean, graffiti stacks up, railstock gets rickety etc.

Mid and long term cost actually turned out a lot higher than if they had chosen the better slightly more expensive bids.

Some Italian construction company underbid, and slightly later went bankrupt after finishing some of the work. They just about missed the contract milestones for payment too, and got nothing out of it. Then, the contract went to someone else who bid, with expected costs adjusted. Think there was an 8-ish month delay.

1. Submit a low bid for EXACTLY what's written in the RFP

2. Submit contract delay notifications with contract amendment offers, explaining that the original bid was incorrect and therefore if the amendment is not accepted the project can't continue.

3. rinse and repeat

No. 2 is basically legal speak to make sure you get paid(or win a lawsuit in the event that you don't) even though you can't continue construction.

It's basically saying, you made a mistake in your original RFP, therefore nobody could have continued the construction anyway and therefore you have to accept my amendment.

Good bidders will actually tell you that your RFP was wrong. As an example in the construction project I was in the main architect requested custom spliced decades outdated Fiber wiring, when I finally got a hold of the wiring company and asked them why didn't just do MTP, they mentioned that a) they mentioned to the architect that the request wiring makes no sense and b) they were not allowed to talk to us(the engineering department) directly. Same happened with the fire protection rules from anything like stair handles to the garage.

That's also why I don't think the Airport delays in Berlin were engineering mistakes but rather gross mismanagement.

Also, while in this whole project there is a lot of physical work that you can't optimize away, a lot of the physical work delays and do-overs were also due to gross mismanagement, which is something the toplevel comment completely ignores in his assessment of the 4 day workweek.

But yes any description of economics is necessarily a simplification. For example market segments where people intentionally pay more for the exclusivity that comes with being charged more.

Construction isn't like that. Companies aren't cranking out a million buildings a day, so they can't remove every ounce of unnecessary materials; they don't control the environment, making delays a fact of life; they don't control all of the companies and people involved; etc. There's just so much unknown when it comes to construction. Like software, it can be difficult to figure out how much padding to put into estimates. It's a good bit easier when it comes to things like roads, but companies still need to contend with unexpected delays a lot.