What is the main message of Kaizen?

The main message of Kaizen is continuous improvement through small, incremental changes.

Who is the author of Kaizen?

The author of Kaizen is Sarah Harvey.

Productivity

Kaizen Book Summary - Kaizen Book explained in key points

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Kaizen summary

Name: Kaizen
Rating: 4.6 (734 reviews)
Author: Sarah Harvey

Sarah Harvey

The Japanese Method for Transforming Habits, One Small Step at a Time

4.6 (734 ratings)

18 mins

Brief summary

Kaizen by Sarah Harvey explores the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. The book presents actionable steps to increase efficiency and productivity in personal and professional life. It's a great resource for those seeking to improve their routines and daily operations.

Topics

Focus Mindful Work Routines & Habits Success Eastern Philosophy Goals Self-Help

Table of Contents

Kaizen
Summary of 6 key ideas

Audio & text in the Blinkist app

Key idea 1 of 6

What’s in it for me? Transform your habits in small steps.

Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution, only to find yourself throwing in the towel by the second week of January? If you struggle to make changes to your routine, you’re not alone.

Making a leap into the dark can be scary when it comes to changing habits. To conquer this natural fear, the kaizen approach focuses on taking slow and steady steps forward. Originally a Japanese management theory, it’s now a widely-applied philosophy that values continuous improvement toward lasting change.

In these blinks, you’ll find out how you can adopt kaizen techniques to take small steps to transform daily habits across your personal life, and accomplish ambitious goals.

You’ll also learn

how kaizen became credited for the success of the Toyota car brand;
about yokoten, the Japanese concept of copying positive changes; and
how improving by 1-percent margins led the British cycling team to repeated victory.

Kaizen values incremental growth.

Let’s say you want to beat your sugar addiction. So you sign up with a hypnotherapist who promises to make your sweet cravings vanish in five sessions. It may be an expensive solution, but you feel like you’ve tried everything else.

After the last hypnotherapy session, you walk out feeling empowered. In fact, you manage to go the entire following week without any sugar cravings. But fast-forward to a bad morning the week after that and you find yourself at a vending machine, begrudgingly pressing for a candy bar. As you toss the cold coins in the slot, you regret the money spent on the hypnotist.

The key message here is: Kaizen values incremental growth.

We live in a culture that expects instant results, so it’s no surprise that many health and self-help trends promise overnight success. But a much more effective way to transform habits is to take one small action at a time, repeating it until you get results. This underpins the Japanese philosophy of kaizen.

While kaizen is a Japanese word for change, the kaizen method originated as a business theory, created by the US government to help Japan reboot its economy after World War II. Kaizen is credited as influencing the ensuing success of many Japanese companies, most notably Toyota. Labeled “the Toyota Way” by the company, kaizen has been used as a strategy to enhance product lines, by incrementally reducing production waste while improving quality.

Ironically, by the 1980s, Japanese companies were doing so well that it gave American businesses reason to fret. So kaizen returned to the US, as an organizational theory, in a book titled Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success by Masaaki Imai.

In his book, Imai encourages managers to set short-, medium-, and long-term goals around four criteria: business growth, product quality, customer service, and staff motivation. Additionally, every employee – from the receptionist to the CEO – is invited to contribute suggestions for ways to improve. The emphasis is always on long-term goals and continuous improvement through small changes.

As Imai acknowledges, kaizen has wider applications far beyond the business world. Whether you want to adopt a healthier lifestyle, get better at saving money, or rethink your career, kaizen can set you on the path to success. But first, you have to know where you stand.

The first stage of kaizen is to step back and analyze your habits.

Think of the most basic activities you undertake each day, like drinking water or checking your phone. Now, imagine if you had to focus all your mental energy on each of those tasks, every single time you did them. Chances are, you’d quickly become mentally exhausted.

This reveals why we form habits in the first place. According to Ben Gardner, senior lecturer in psychology at King’s College London, our brains “lock in” repeated behaviors to preserve mental resources necessary for bigger, more important tasks.

Your first commitment should be so small you barely notice any difference.

When Sir David Brailsford became head of the British cycling team in 2002, the team was doing poorly. To improve performance, Brailsford got the team to break down every aspect of cycling into small parts – from the cyclists’ nutrition to bike maintenance – and gave them the target of improving each part by just 1 percent.

Instead of aiming for perfection from the start, Brailsford took on the kaizen approach, aiming for small gains that would add up. Over time, this accumulation began to generate a “contagious enthusiasm” among the once-struggling team, who went on to win the majority of gold medals in both the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games.

Set a time frame for your short-, medium-, and long-term goals.

We’ve talked about forming goals for transforming your habits. But after you’ve established your goal and “first kaizen step,” where do you go from there?

Well, once you have a long-term goal, the next kaizen step is to break it down into smaller shorter- and medium-term goals. Not only will breaking your goal down into chunks make it seem more manageable, it’ll also help you plan your actions around a clear time frame.

Monitor your habits closely and review your progress regularly.

Hani Motoko, the woman known as Japan’s first female journalist, believed that keeping on top of one’s finances was essential to happiness. So in 1904, she invented a journaling method known as kakeibo, intended to help women at the time keep track of spending.

A practice still popular in Japan today, the purpose is to keep a register of all incoming and outgoing expenses. Motoko stressed the need to physically put pen to paper as a mindful way to process what you spend. She encouraged checking in with the ledger monthly to analyze how your spending is progressing, and to inform which goals to concentrate on the following month.

Kaizen is a personalized approach to lifelong change. Go at your own pace.

Let’s say you want to take up drawing. So you allocate an hour per week to your new activity. It goes well for a few weeks until, one day, you get some bad news: your apartment contract isn’t going to be renewed as planned. You have to move out next month. Faced with this distressing new reality, it’s likely that you’re going to have to put your sketchbook down for a while.

This is the key message: Kaizen is a personalized approach to lifelong change. Go at your own pace.

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What is Kaizen about?

Kaizen (2019) is a guide to the improvement philosophy known as kaizen, which encourages taking small steps to complete ambitious goals. Already well established in the world of business and sports, this method can also be applied to personal development. Using practical examples, this guide explains how to take a kaizen approach to setting goals that’ll improve health, relationships, money, and work.

Kaizen Review

Kaizen (2019) by Sarah Harvey presents a powerful concept for continuous improvement that can be applied to all aspects of life. Here's why this book is worth reading:

Offers practical techniques to create lasting change by making small, incremental improvements that accumulate over time.
Provides real-world examples of individuals and organizations that have achieved significant results through the practice of kaizen.
Emphasizes the importance of mindset and self-reflection in the journey of personal growth and improvement.

Best quote from Kaizen

The Kaizen philosophy assumes that our way of life – be it our working life, our social life, or our home life – deserves to be constantly improved. – Masaaki Imai

—Sarah Harvey

Who should read Kaizen?

Anyone trying to overcome a habit or take up a new challenge
Anybody wishing to improve an aspect of their life
Anyone interested in Japanese culture and philosophies

About the Author

Sarah Harvey was a publishing consultant in Tokyo when she was introduced to kaizen. She now lives in London, where she works for a literary agency. Kaizen is her first book.

Categories with Kaizen

Productivity Mindfulness & Happiness Personal Development

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