by Bradley Staats and David M. Upton. "our research in IT, financial, engineering, and legal services reveals that such work can in fact benefit from the principles of the Toyota Production System. For one thing, a substantial amount of knowledge assumed to be tacit doesn’t have to be; it can be articulated and captured in writing if the organization makes the effort to pull it out of people’s heads. For another, all knowledge work includes some activities that have nothing to do with applying judgment and can be streamlined by training employees to continually find and root out waste. Even when knowledge is genuinely tacit, creating systems and rules to guide workers’ interactions can lead to more-effective collaboration."
