The first time I came into contact with sweeping Tao, not from this book, but last Wednesday to the Mingde Academy (which located in QUANZHOU CITY FUJIAN CHINA it’s known as an international garden city at home and abroad, one of the three major financial comprehensive reform pilot zones in China, and one of the five central cities in the Economic Zone on the West Coast of the Taiwan Strait) class when teacher Mr. Jian feng talked about sweeping Tao, from the beginning of how to prepare tools, to how to clean, and then how to clean up and organize the tools after the cleaning, the whole PDF has more than a dozen pages, that moment stunned me, a simple cleaning of the toilet actually so elaborate, so standard… …. So today I searched the Internet for some more information and video about the sweeping tao, it turns out that in a five-star hotel in Japan, the lobby manager took a reporter to visit the freshly cleaned toilet, directly picked up a cup, scooped out a small glass of water from the toilet and drank it, the reporter was dumbfounded on the spot. This is the standard of hygiene in this five-star hotel after the implementation of the sweeping tao.
The first thing I felt when I read this news was that Japan as a nation is so perverted. I was curious to find out more about “Sweeping the Way” and it became clear that behind this perversion was the rigorous work style and decades of perseverance of Hidesaburo Keyama.
I decided to give my toilet a thorough cleaning, as there was nothing better to learn from a book than to experience it for myself. I didn’t have all the cleaning tools in the book, but I did have a brush, rag and cleaner. It took me about thirty minutes to start and finish, which was probably the first time I had spent so much time cleaning a toilet.
It took me a lot longer to clean the whole toilet inside and out than before, when a few strokes with a brush took ten seconds or so. It’s not quite the same as when I bought it, but the whole thing looks brand new. The most noticeable change is that my daughter is careful when she goes to the toilet, and after she has finished, she takes the initiative to wipe the mouth of the toilet with toilet paper/bathroom tissue roll few times, which is a big improvement compared to her bad habit of not flushing the toilet after peeing.
Wow, that’s how a change in environment affects a person!
In fact, the book “Sweeping Away the Tao” has a lot more to offer us, such as focus, intention and leading by example. It is not for nothing that Hideyasaburo Kamikeyama chose to start with such a trivial task as cleaning the toilets and elevated sweeping to a path that led to his success. By doing the smallest things to the best of his ability, he achieved great things. Our ancient people also have the warning saying “If you don’t sweep a house, how can you sweep the world”. Combined with the company’s ongoing site management improvement activities, we should start by cleaning the shift room, operation room and work site, correcting our thinking and elevating cleaning to the same level as the company’s development strategy to implement. Speak obedience, order and prohibit, seriously put the company’s work objectives of management improvement in the focus of the current work position, to the site to benefit, with the site to promote the promotion of efficiency.
Hidesaburo Keyama’s success was not only about doing the little things well, but also about persistence. The first thing that struck me about this book was not how clean he cleaned the toilets every day, but that he kept cleaning the toilets throughout his life and continued to do so even after his success. In fact, combined with the company’s site management improvement goals, we should seize the most is also the two words – persistence. Site management improvement is not something that can be achieved overnight, but it is a matter of persistence. Persistence is also a manifestation of struggle. Speaking of struggle, every one of our employees should love their jobs and be dedicated to on-site management as their part of the job, and stick to it for years and years. Only when all the employees turn this insistence into action consciously, the site management can really be internalized in the heart and externalized in the form.
Finally, Hidesaburo Keyama also tells us to be thankful through The Way of Sweeping Tao. “Those who are grateful for the smallest things artificially shrink pain and trouble. Conversely, those who cannot be grateful for the small things artificially magnify pain and trouble.” Knowing how to be grateful creates a sense of belonging. Instead of thinking about what you still lack, think more about what you have; instead of thinking about what you can’t do, think more about what you can do. Since you have chosen this career, you must accept all that he has to offer, take the initiative to do things, always be grateful, and be dedicated to your job.
In fact, the book “Sweeping Away the Tao” has a lot more to offer us, such as focus, intention and leading by example. The reason why I chose the above three aspects to talk about in detail is that I think they coincide with our company’s initial corporate culture of “three talks and five hearts” – about gratitude, about obedience and about struggle. A hundred people reading the same book will have a hundred different opinions, because everyone has different ideas in mind. But whatever you think, as long as we can draw what we need from it, that’s good enough!