Continuous improvement — the practice of making small, incremental improvements to processes every day, driven by the workers who perform those processes. At Toyota, kaizen is not a program or initiative but a cultural expectation: every worker is expected to identify waste and suggest improvements. This connects directly to w-edwards-deming's teaching of the PDCA cycle in Japan — Plan-Do-Check-Act as a continuous cycle of learning and improvement. taiichi-ohno operationalized kaizen through the expectation that standard-work is not a permanent specification but the current best-known method, always subject to improvement. The gemba walk, five-whys, and a3-thinking are kaizen tools. "Kaizen events" (intensive multi-day improvement workshops) were a Western adaptation; at Toyota, kaizen is daily practice, not periodic events. Masaaki Imai's "Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success" (1986) popularized the concept for Western audiences. Mike Rother's toyota-kata extends kaizen thinking into a structured practice of improvement and coaching routines.