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Peter Sorgenfrei recounts a Toyota factory visit where he learned how American motivational posters clash with Japanese workers' pragmatic approach. A worker's simple answer: just do it, no inspiration needed.
Peter Sorgenfrei recounts a Toyota factory visit where he learned how American motivational posters clash with Japanese workers' pragmatic approach. A worker's simple answer: just do it, no inspiration needed.
So I used to live in the United States where in many offices there are these motivational posters, you know, the kind where there's an eagle soaring over a mountain range where it says, you know, soar over your challenges or something inspirational. And so one time I was at a factory visit and I spoke to one of the line workers. I was working for Toyota at the time, and, uh, and she— I talked to her about these posters because I thought they were kind of funny. I just moved to the United States. And she was like, well, we don't have any of those because we don't really need to talk about it. We kind of just do it. And it was interesting because it showed me how it had been imprinted in her, not really worrying about sort of talking about or not needing this kind of external validation, but rather looking at what was in front of her and then just do it. So I thought that was an interesting observation.
