At LEI’s Lean Summit 2025 yesterday in Atlanta, Mark Reich delivered a keynote presentation during which he discussed the role of hoshin kanri throughout his career, first while working at Toyota for more than 20 years and recently as Chief Engineer, Strategy, for LEI. Mark described his learnings from these professional experiences, starting with Toyota:
- Mark was an employee at Toyota’s headquarters in Toyota City from 1988 to 1994, where, like most Toyota employees, he started by working on a manufacturing line for three months and then selling cars for three months. As he rose up the ranks, he engaged with hoshin kanri as every Toyota employee would — seeing the corporate hoshin objectives and knowing he, like thousands of Toyota employees, had a role in achieving them.
- While in Corporate Strategy, Mark was responsible for the hoshin kanri process for Toyota’s varied companies in North America in the 2000s. A primary objective during that time was to lessen the reliance of North American facilities on Japan headquarters and sister plants. Hoshin kanri was instrumental in making that happen and driving tremendous growth on the continent.
- As the General Manager at the Toyota Supplier Support Center he helped to transition the organization to a non-profit for sharing the Toyota Production System (TPS) with manufacturers, non-profits, and community organizations. As a Toyota entity, TSSC also had its hoshin kanri process.
His Toyota past taught Mark that hoshin kanri is an amazing way to build both horizontal and vertical alignment, thereby engaging everyone in achieving business objectives, and the process helps to define a PDCA-based management system.
Mark also described how his time with Toyota proved hoshin kanri as an excellent method to develop capabilities of business leaders and grow an entrepreneurial spirit at all levels of an organization as individuals pursue problem-solving. He said these traits are not widely found in companies outside of Toyota.
“Unlike Toyota, where people development was a primary focus, [other] companies never talked about it relative to strategy, which is kind of amazing to me,” said Mark. “We engaged everybody in this activity up and down the organization in Toyota. There was a structure in place for leader development that was part of the hoshin kanri process, and part of that was gemba-based understanding… This means understanding what is happening on the frontline, like me building cars in the plant. We understood the issues that existed. Leaders understood that.”
To further illustrate how hoshin kanri within Toyota is different than what many companies experience, he shared a video of Isao Yoshino, a 40-year veteran of Toyota and a driving force behind the company’s success with hoshin kanri.
Mark then transitioned to his hoshin kanri experiences since joining LEI in 2011. For more than a decade he has been sharing his knowledge of hoshin kanri with the LEI community, helping organizations of various sizes and industries apply the strategic planning and execution process. Many companies, with Mark’s support, developed a hoshin kanri process and closed organizational gaps — ability to execute, staff engagement, problem-solving culture, rigorous management system — that had been keeping them from achieving corporate objectives.
“This is applicable in any industry,” said Mark. “I’m going to invite a panel of people up here — practitioners from manufacturing, construction, and software — but I’ve applied this thinking in healthcare, the hospitality industry, just about any industry. It gives you good, sustainable business results. But in order to get that it requires some vision and rigorous PDCA.”
Mark was then joined on stage by executives he has assisted whose companies prove the power of hoshin kanri beyond Toyota:
- Marcia Brey, VP Logistics, GE Appliances
- Charlie Murphy, SVP, Turner Construction
- Geoff Miller, CEO Grand Rapids Chair
- Mukesh Bangia, Vice President, Nucleus Software
Panelists commented on a number of hoshin kanri topics, including:
- Hoshin as a method for executive development: “Every year, every cycle that we go through it, we get better and learn more about it,” said Marcia. “Because it’s not just about clarity of thought from a metrics standpoint. It is about developing people. It is about being able to empower an organization to make real-time decisions on a daily basis.”
- Hoshin to solve a critical business problem: “We’re a very deadline-driven company,” said Charlie when discussing a hoshin objective to improve safety. “We do anything to make the deadline. It doesn’t matter what it costs… The deadline was our driving force. But being able to shift the paradigm [means] you can meet a deadline and still have safe and quality work, and that’s another aspect of what hoshin has helped us do.”
- Hoshin in a small company: “Safety, quality, reliability always trump our longer-term hoshin work; we’re very much in that tension,” said Geoff of trying to balance hoshin objectives with daily management targets in the company that has completed four years of hoshin. “The hoshin and daily management of Grand Rapids Chair is very fragile. But in a significant way it’s part of our day-to-day work in how we’re running the business to work toward that strategy, that mission, and that vision of where we want to go.”
- Getting started with hoshin: “With hoshin kanri we started creating objectives that would help us as an organization to bring certain results quickly,” said Mukesh of his company’s first year of hoshin. “When you create a hoshin you are creating future-state goals. These future state goals have certain gaps, and those gaps are problems. We started realizing that over a period there are problems that we need to solve as part of hoshin. And then comes the A3 framework, which we have started… Over time we got our people understanding how the A3 can help them solve problems.”
Look for more highlights from the Lean Summit to come in the weeks ahead. And to learn more about hoshin kanri, be sure to get a copy of Mark’s book, Managing on Purpose, which was released at the Summit.
Welcome to The Management Brief — a weekly newsletter from the Lean Enterprise Institute delivering actionable insights, strategies, and stories on lean management. Each issue explores proven methods like hoshin kanri for strategic alignment, A3 problem-solving, and daily management that foster stability, improvement, and innovation. We aim to help you build resilient, high-performing organizations prepared for long-term success. Subscribe for free and join a community dedicated to management excellence.
Related book
