I feel this is true, but more to the philosophical point. I remember reading an article where the Toyota factory employees are giggling because the American com

I feel this is true, but more to the philosophical point. I remember reading an article where the Toyota factory employees are giggling because the American companies that try to study them are so obsessed about the actual manufacturing process instead of the central idea. To me, the central idea in Kaizen revolves around trust and flexibility instead of efficiency and "metrics" tracking. This creates what seems to be opposing practices while in actuality is consistent. They abstract platforms, but have SWAT-like teams to provide custom tooling for the assembly workers for incremental improvements (Directly on the floor, <1 day feedback loop[0], not supplier/consulting tenders with >1y timeline). Every worker are encouraged to improve the process at least 2 times a month. Another example of flexibility > efficiency is the Toyota practice of having flexible factories that's responsive to demand (to cover for peaks of certain models) instead of every factory has to be a hyper-efficient factory for select models[1]. Having buffer and flexibility (spare capacity) > fragile efficiency. Software development can't map to assembly line, of course. Agile (the manifesto) maps very closely to the initial principle of trusting the developer and customer/user/domain expert and being flexible (deliver incrementally and iterate many times). Derivatives like Scrum seems to miss the point from me. If you're interested to see how it works day to day in a modern manufacturing company, take a look at FastCap and their YouTube channel[2]. It seems obsessive around incremental improvements, but I think the Software industry need to take note and develop our own way to make the SDLC be less painful. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5GzHHE3udU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5GzHHE3udU [1]: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26955/inside-toyotas-takaoka-2-line-the-most-flexible-line-in-the-world https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26955/inside-toyotas-takaoka-2... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqtKKkastWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqtKKkastWk