Our Purpose
Based on our timeless principles, we shape cultures that drive organizational and operational excellence.
Our Mission
Our mission is to improve the process of improvement by conducting cutting edge research, providing relevant education, performing insightful assessments, and recognizing organizations committed to achieving sustainable world-class results.
Our History: Dr. Shigeo Shingo
Few individuals have contributed more to the development of total quality management (TQM), just-in-time manufacturing (JIT), and Lean manufacturing as Dr. Shigeo Shingo.
Many years before these ideas became popular in the Western world, Dr. Shingo wrote about ensuring quality at the source, flowing value to customers, working with zero inventories, rapidly setting up machines through the system of “single-minute exchange of die” (SMED), and going to the actual workplace to grasp the true situation there (“going to gemba”).
Over the course of his life, Dr. Shingo wrote and published 18 books discussing these and other topics, seven of which have been translated from Japanese into English. He also worked extensively with Toyota executives, especially Mr. Taiichi Ohno, who collaborated with Dr. Shingo to apply these concepts.
Always on the cutting edge of new ideas, Dr. Shingo envisioned collaborating with an organization to further his life’s work through research, practical-yet-rigorous education, and a program for recognizing the best in organizational excellence throughout the world.
In 1988, Dr. Shingo received an honorary doctorate of management from Utah State University in Logan, Utah, due to the efforts of Professor Vernon Buehler, an early advocate of Dr. Shingo’s teachings. Later that year, Dr. Shingo’s ambitions were realized when the Shingo Prize was established as part of the university due to a generous gift from Norman Bodek. The intention was to set a rigorous standard toward which organizations might aspire.
After years of assessing various organizations around the world, we began to understand more clearly the difference between organizations that were successful in sustaining cultures of continuous improvement and those that were not. After much study and deep evaluation of our findings, we developed the Shingo Model. The accompanying Shingo Guiding Principles and Three Insights of Organizational Excellence were developed later. Now, the Shingo Prize is awarded to organizations that have robust key systems driving behavior closer to the ideal, as informed by the principles of organizational excellence and measured by strong key performance indicator (KPI) and key behavioral indicator (KBI) trends and levels.
While the Shingo Prize remains an integral part of the work of the Shingo Institute, the scope has expanded to include a focus on research and various educational offerings, such as conferences, webinars, podcasts, benchmarking visits, study tours, and the Shingo workshop series. The Shingo workshops are taught by a growing network of Shingo Licensed Affiliates from around the world. Each workshop has a companion book that has been published or is in the process of being published.
Across all these efforts, the focus at the Shingo Institute: our goal is to help every organization reach excellence, wherever it may be along that path.
Our History: Mr. Ritsuo Shingo
Ritsuo Shingo’s experience in China started when he was appointed president of Toyota’s joint venture operation in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in early 1999. Mr. Shingo ran the joint venture company for three years before moving to Beijing to join Toyota’s China office. After a little over two years working in that office, Mr. Shingo was appointed president of Hino Motors in China, including the joint venture production facility in Guangzhou. Mr. Shingo’s final assignment in China was president of the Toyota Research and Service Center, also located in Guangzhou. Mr. Shingo returned to Japan after 13 years in China.
The Shingo Model is based on the teachings of Ritsuo’s father, Dr. Shigeo Shingo, who is the namesake of the Shingo Institute, a program in the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. Dr. Shingo helped create and wrote about many revolutionary practices related to operational excellence, a number of which were incorporated into the renowned Toyota Production System. Mr. Shingo learned leadership from his father—something he readily admitted—and he was a true practitioner of the Shingo Guiding Principles. After 42 years with Toyota in various positions around the world, Mr. Shingo ended his career as president of the Institute of Management Improvement, a company started by his father. In addition to helping the Shingo Institute expand its work, he helped many organizations around the world.
Beginning in 2009 and continuing until his death in 2023, Mr. Shingo was actively involved in the work of the Shingo Institute. He served on the Shingo Executive Advisory Board, spoke at Shingo conferences, and helped lead study tours and develop video training materials. He interacted in many ways with the Shingo Institute community as a teacher, mentor, and friend. In 2016, he wrote a book called My Leadership: The China Years and assigned publication rights to the Shingo Institute.