Toyota Motor Corp. Ken Kreafle is Vice President of Quality at Toyota's massive Georgetown, Ky., production facility. Among various subject, he spoke about how Toyota is "marinated" in a lean culture and how difficult it is to maintain the lean system especially when introducing new products. Here are some of the questions he answered: What makes it so hard for a company that is not deploying these techniques to come up to full speed on a Toyota Production System (TPS) or a lean production system? How much of the success of the TPS is focused on management? How hard is it to change an old-line management mentality? What are the differences between TPS and the production systems run by your competitors? How hard is it for management to give up control? Is it inevitable that lean will become the dominant form of operation for companies in order for them to compete? How will the Toyota Production System evolve over the next decade? Can the Toyota Production System adapt to a make-to-order manufacturing system that might soon come about thanks to the Internet? Is TPS capable of handling potentially radical change? How hard is it for a company to come up to speed on a lean production system? Is there a lot to learn? Does a lean production system naturally atrophy over time? Does TPS have more of a focus on productivity or quality? Have you learned things that you can apply to the next model introductions so that you keep the lean focus throughout the process of introducing a new vehicle? How important is it for your suppliers to get on board and become a similar type of organization? Is the supply chain's adoption of TPS where the savings are going to come for Toyota? Japan has been criticized for this evolutionary approach to change, which has hurt its economy while U.S. technology companies took the revolutionary approach with great success. Can the evolutionary approach backfire on Toyota? Toyota is well ahead of other auto companies -- evidence the early introduction of the hybrid Prius. Why hasn't any other automobile company yet caught Toyota? Does Toyota achieve Six-Sigma quality? Can you define the Toyota Production System? Are there other basic lean principles that are not well understood by most companies? What are the specific tools of the Toyota Production System? To view questions from other interviews in Lean Machines, Click Here. Click Here to order a copy of Lean Machines.