Fujio Cho (b. 1937), taiichi-ohno's most prominent student and the Toyota leader who guided TPS's global transmission. Cho learned TPS directly from Ohno through years of gemba practice and a3-thinking mentoring. As president of Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky plant (the first wholly-owned Toyota factory in the US), Cho proved that TPS could work outside Japan with a non-Japanese workforce. He later served as president and chairman of toyota-motor-corporation. Cho is credited with distilling TPS into "The Toyota Way" — the two-pillar framework of "continuous improvement" and "respect for people" — formally codified in the toyota-way-2001-document distributed to all Toyota affiliates worldwide. His insights on TPS and Toyota culture are captured in the cho-legacy-lecture at the University of Kentucky. Purists argue this codification oversimplified Ohno's more nuanced system.