For the third time this year, Happy New Year! A tribute to new beginnings and continuous improvement - Kaizen - on the eve of Rosh Hashana

I’m lucky to celebrate multiple New Years every year. Every December 31st, I flip on CNN to watch the ball drop in Times Square and raise a glass to the New Year with Anderson Cooper, before falling promptly asleep (kids). Here at LinkedIn, our Fiscal Year wraps on June 30th so, every July, I wish my colleagues/friends at work a Happy New Year. And then, come the fall, usually in September, I’m again wishing and being wished a Happy New Year - Shanah Tovah - as Rosh Hashana marks the start of the Jewish New Year.?

I feel blessed to have this 3-for-1 New Years deal. It builds into my year a regular cadence to check in, reflect on what’s working, part ways with what’s not and reenergize for the future. In the Jewish tradition, Rosh Hashana is a day of celebration, yes. We dip apples in honey for a sweet new year. We listen to the sounds of the shofar herald the New Year with its staccato and boom. But it is also a somber day of thought and reflection. The exuberance of the New Year festivity is tempered by the heaviness of repentance, culminating on Yom Kippur, just ten days later. Even as you are invited to embrace the year ahead, you are at the same time challenged, beseeched - dare I say, commanded! - to take gritty stock of the lowlight reel of the past year- your shortcomings, your misses, your failures and those you failed.?

A central theme of the days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is teshuva. Teshuva is most commonly translated as “repentance” but the literal Hebrew meaning is “return.” There are no doubt hundreds of interpretations (a mainstay of our tradition). I personally like the idea of revisiting the past to understand what I can learn and where I can do better as I embark on a new chapter in the New Year.?

This interplay between optimism for the future and reflecting on (returning to) the past - represented in the Rosh Hashana / Yom Kippur doubleheader? - is also, I would argue, a pretty good business model.

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I’ve admittedly forgotten most of the cases I studied at Kellogg a decade ago but one that remains nestled in my brain is a case focused on Toyota and the concept of Kaizen or Continuous Improvement. Current OPNS 430 students can fact-check my memory but here’s what I recall: The case highlighted how Toyota, in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, in the midst of a labor crisis, plummeting production and vehicles that lagged competitors, implemented the practice of Kaizen. Through a focus on continuous improvement, Toyota empowered every member of its workforce - from executives to assembly line workers - to suggest process improvements, openly and frequently. Most of the improvements were small, low cost, easy-to-implement tweaks. But all these small changes had a massive cumulative impact. Production soared. Business boomed. Toyota employees did cartwheels and danced the Macarena along the ever-improving assembly lines of freshly minted Camrys, which would go on to become one of the best selling, best performing cars of all time. Or something like that.?

Shoichiro Toyoda, son of Toyota’s founder and longtime Chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation, explained: “Human beings think our way is the best, but at Toyota, we are told we have to always change. We believe there is no perfect way, so we continue to search. The goal is to break the current condition through Kaizen."?

“Change is the only constant” is an axiom often heard in the virtual or in-office hallways of companies, especially tech companies, like LinkedIn. Commonly, it’s also accompanied by exasperation, the emotional bruising of change fatigue.?

There’s no doubt that organizational changes can be tiring, taxing and even, in some cases, downright traumatizing. Big decisions should never be made lightly and “change for change’s sake” is a counter-productive hellscape we can all only hope to avoid. Still, on the whole, I definitely find myself wearing the jersey of Team Change. A Kaizen fangirl.?

This Rosh Hashana, my team at work is rocketing to the finish of the first quarter of our new Fiscal Year. As we face a landscape that brings new complexities and heightened challenges, our incredible team is oozing Kaizen. We aim to create an environment where every member of the team feels safe and empowered to innovate and advocate for improvements. Our Consultants around the world are thinking of new ways to improve technical health monitoring, amplify automation, expand data-driven insights and elevate customer experience and success. Our Leaders are meticulously revisiting former processes to identify opportunities to streamline and create greater ease of doing business for our teams, our partners and our customers. We are looking hard at Fiscal 23 to understand how we can continue to invest, evolve and improve in Fiscal 24. We are doing teshuva, returning.

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Only by examining our past can we learn and do better. Only by changing can we continuously improve.?

Shanah tovah.

(If you'd like to learn more about the months of the Jewish Year - and see some cameos from my kids, Bea and Zoe - check out this two-minute 12 Months song & video, created by the talented Sagit S. as part of her Yeladim Project.)