I’m merely speaking from my personal experience when I worked for a subsidiary of a Japanese company that loved talking Kaizen; but I’d be shocked to see an outfit that has traditionally done it just abandon it in favor of telling everyone to focus on Q4 and the Gordon Gekko poster gazing down on them.
What I would be deeply unshocked by is a dedicated preservation of the forms and processes, along with alteration of the metrics and who measures them and how, that massively changes the effective objective of the exercise without any admission that there has been a change.
Overt deviation seems especially unlikely when there’s so much Kaizen-and-Kaizen-adjacent stuff that is about various sources of waste reduction or process optimization that aren’t even obviously in conflict with neoliberal market fundamentalist imperatives. Sure, it hits differently when you are doing it because efficient production means getting to fire some headcount and spend the savings on stock buybacks; rather than because Toyota-san believed that doing things right was the right thing to do; but it’s not as though sloppy process timing has any friends.
It’d be sort of like seeing an organization that has traditionally espoused cost-benefit analysis or competitive bidding just outright repudiating the idea. You’d never just outright do that. But there are so very many details involved in how you measure costs and benefits or construct RFPs and compare bids that it’s simply not necessary to be so crass as to let someone put their thumb on the scale, where everyone can see it, in order to ensure that the process delivers the desired answer.
