The Circle

What is on this wall is a later telling, not a page from Ohno’s own books and not a transcript.

In 2004 IndustryWeek interviewed Teruyuki Minoura, then president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America. He described Ohno drawing a circle on the shop floor at a trouble spot and leaving students there to watch. The magazine quotes him in one line. Ohno “wanted us to watch and ask why over and over again.” 1

The article calls that the genchi genbutsu step, and it glosses the phrase as go and see. It names the shop-floor teaching of Ohno and Eiji Toyoda. It also says Fujio Cho, Hajime Ohba, and Minoura were trained by Ohno. 1

How long a person stood, whether notes were forbidden, and what was said at the end are not in that article. They are not printed here. 1 A page by someone who stood in the circle, in his own book, was not opened for this room.

Footnotes

  1. Step Inside the Circle. John Teresko. IndustryWeek. 2004. https://www.industryweek.com/leadership/companies-executives/article/21942244/step-inside-the-circle. Retrieved 28 October 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3