Toyota's Production System (TPS) is based on "lean" principles including a focus on the customer, continual improvement and quality through waste reduction, and tightly integrated upstream and downstream processes as part of a lean value chain. Most manufacturing companies have adopted some type of "lean initiative," and the lean movement recently has gone beyond the shop floor to white-collar offices and is even spreading to service industries. Unfortunately, most of these efforts represent limited, piecemeal approaches-quick fixes to reduce lead time and costs and to increase quality-that almost never create a true learning culture. We outline and illustrate the management principles of TPS that can be applied beyond manufacturing to any technical or service process. It is a true systems approach that effectively integrates people, processes, and technology-one that must be adopted as a continual, comprehensive, and coordinated effort for change and learning across the organization.

Recent theoretical developments emphasize that social interactions are dynamic and reciprocal, and this has led to widespread use of time-series data on behavior in two-person systems. In principle, such data allow one to separate the influences of two actors on each other, Statistical methods currently being used, however, are deficient in several respects. In this article, we show that a statistic proposed by Sackett and later "proved" by Gottman is incorrect. We also show that the failure to control for autodependence can produce misleading results. Finally, we introduce new procedures that are based on both traditional and more recently developed methods for the analysis of contingency tables. Using these procedures, we show how to test for dependency, how to measure dependency, how to test for differences in dependency across subgroups, and how to test for dominance in reciprocal behavior sequences.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract