The Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement is called kaizen.
The Japanese word kaizen is commonly translated as “change for better” or “improvement.” In business, it usually describes an ongoing effort to make small, practical improvements to processes, products, and workplaces. The idea emphasizes participation by people throughout an organization, not just directives from senior managers.
Kaizen became strongly associated with postwar Japanese manufacturing and quality management, especially the production system developed by Toyota. Workers might identify wasted motion, unnecessary inventory, delays, defects, or safety problems and suggest changes that make the process more efficient. Improvements are often tested, measured, and refined rather than treated as one-time transformations.
Masaaki Imai helped popularize the term internationally through his 1986 book Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success. Kaizen is often confused with kanban, a scheduling and visual workflow method, or muda, the Japanese term for waste. Those concepts can support kaizen, but they are not synonyms for it.