I’m very excited to be leaving for Japan for another study trip in just over a month. This will be my second trip this year, this time with Honsha, after previous (and hopefully future) trips organized by Kaizen Institute.

Even though the previous tours have been focused on Toyota, as well as Lean and Kaizen in various organizations, one common thread is Total Quality Management, or TQM. In many Japanese organizations, TQM has been a solid foundation of practice for two or three decades, where it tended to be a fad here in the U.S., as I’ve blogged about: