ABSTRACT
Hoshin is a strategic planning process, also known as hoshin kanri, policy deployment, and strategy deployment, developed by Kaoru Ishikawa in the 1950s. Hoshin is a powerful methodology to engage the entire organization in achieving what are called breakthrough objectives, or simply BTOs. Jim Collins, in his book, Built to Last, called BTOs “big hairy audacious goals,” or B-HAGs. You can choose Collins’s or Ishikawa’s terminology and methodology or another one, depending upon your experiences and culture. We will demonstrate Ishikawa’s hoshin planning methodology simply because it has proven to be very successful in our practice over 20 years working with both Fortune 500 companies and small manufacturing and nonmanufacturing organizations. The steps are straightforward and simple to execute per the hoshin planning model shown in Figure 9.2.
