Toyota Way Quotes

Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status, become prioritised to the point of destructiveness. It is exacerbated by a culture that understandably exploits this mechanic as it's a damn good way to sell Mars bars and Toyotas.

You can start by wiping that fucking dumb-ass smile off your rosey, fucking, cheeks! Then you can give me a fucking automobile... a fucking Datsun, a fucking Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a fucking Buick! Four fucking wheels and a seat! And I really don't care for the way your company left me in the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking keys to a fucking car that isn't fucking there. And I really didn't care to fucking walk down a fucking highway and across a fucking runway to get back here to have you smile at my fucking face. I want a fucking car RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

The Boy will not be a failure. Mythili knows.She has seen the generations before.The boy will make it.As his father has said,he does not have the option of failure.He will crack atleast one entrance exam,and he will one day have a nice house in a suburb of San Francisco,or in a suburb of a suburb of San Francisco.He will find a cute Tamil Brahmin wife and make her produce two sweet children.He will drive a Toyota Corolla to work.And there,in the conference room of his office,he will tell his small team,with his hands stretched wide in a managerial way,'We must think out of the box

You can live a good life without ever knowing real love, of the Corinthians variety, but I was fortunate to have found it with Harold. He was a sixteen-year-old Toyota Corolla

Most Business Processes Are 90% Waste and 10% Value-Added Work

Every team member has the responsibility to stop the line every time they see something that is out of standard. That's how we put the responsibility for quality in the hands of our team members.

We have to change the culture from one in which people simply do their own job in their own function to make their own numbers look good (a vertical focus) to one in which people are focused horizontally on the customer and on improving value streams that deliver value across functions.

Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation (genchi genbutsu).

The act of deeply thinking through problems, energizing people, and aligning them toward a common goal is the only way to practice and develop real leadership ability.

We build cars, not intellectuals

Andon works only when you teach your employees the importance of bringing problems to the surface so they can be quickly solved.

Standardization Is the Basis for Continuous Improvement and Quality

I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. —Ralph Nader, consumer advocate

The use of a good process that engages people is much more desirable, even if it does not initially achieve all the results.

Our own attitude is that we are charged with discovering the best way of doing everything.

The Toyota Production System can be realized only when all the workers become tortoises. (Ohno, 1988)

While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

The Toyota Way

All we are doing is looking at the time line from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that time line by removing the non-value-added wastes. (Ohno, 1988)

In my Toyota interviews, when I asked what distinguishes the Toyota Way from other management approaches, the most common first response was genchi gembutsu—whether I was in manufacturing, product development, sales, distribution, or public affairs. You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.

I believe benchmarking best practices can open people’s eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up. As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, “They always say ‘Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.’ They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together.” I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another “great person.

Maybe you've been in love. I mean real love, the kind my grandmother used to describe by quoting the apostle Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, the love that is kind and patient, that does not envy or boast, that beareth all things and believeth all things and endureth all things. I don't like to throw the L-word around; it's too good and rare a feeling to cheapen with overuse. You can live a good life without ever knowing real love, of the Corinthians variety, but I was fortunate to have found it with Harold.

Be responsive to the day-by-day shifts in customer demand rather than relying on computer schedules and systems to track wasteful inventory.

Automobiles account for about 20 percent of the carbon dioxide from all human sources, yet about one fourth of the world's population enjoys their benefits.

Grinning, she hovered over him. Then, like a fist closing around a doorknob, her grin closed around him. With her lips, she turned the knob first one way and then the other: left, right, open, shut; left, right, open, shut. The knob did not squeak. In fact, Wiggs was unusually quiet. Now, falling into rhythm, she sucked the knob from its axle, sucked the axle from its door, the door from its hinges. Out onto the lawn, tempo increasing, she sucked up the flagstone walk, the rosebushes, the petunia bed, the sprinkler, the driveway, and the small Japanese car parked in the driveway: oh, what a feeling! Toyota! Wiggs moaned as the neighborhood disappeared. The towers of the city began to sway, and soon, the planet itself fell victim to the force, swelling at its equator, throbbing at its poles. It wobbled violently on its axis, once, twice, then exploded. The Big Bang theory, proven at last. Continuing to impersonate a black hole, she pulled in every drop and particle – she’d never had a man in such entirety – and it wasn’t until the final spasm had subsided and the cosmos was at peace that she loosened her grip and, lips glistening like the Milky Way, looked up to see – the legs of a third party standing there.

Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.

The Toyota Production System unlocked employees’ capacity to suggest innovations by giving them more control. The Disney system does something different. It forces people to use their own emotions to write dialogue for cartoon characters, to infuse real feelings into situations that, by definition, are unreal and fantastical. This method is worth studying because it suggests a way that anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clichéd, is paying more attention to how things make us feel. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

Some might debate whether people are born with talent, or whether it is developed. Toyota’s stand is clear—give us the seeds of talent and we will plant them, tend the soil, water and nurture the seedlings, and eventually harvest the fruits of our labor... Of course the wise farmer selects only the best seeds, but even with careful selection there is no guarantee that the seeds will grow, or that the fruits they yield will be sweet, and yet the effort must be made because it provides the best chance of developing a strong crop.

There are perhaps only three things we can and need to know with certainty: where we are, where we want to be, and by what means we should maneuver the unclear territory between here and there. And the rest is supposed to be somewhat unclear, because we cannot see into the future! The way from where we are to where we want to be next is a gray zone full of unforeseeable obstacles, problems, and issues that we can only discover along the way. The best we can do is to know the approach, the means, we can utilize for dealing with the unclear path to a new desired condition, not what the content and steps of our actions—the solutions—will be.

That awkward moment when you realize you’ve lived your entire life inside of a picture.” ~Peregrine Storke~ It was raining when my mother pulled up to the simple two-level brick home. Drops of water pounded on the roof of her beat up red Toyota, the sound both ominous and comfortable, before tunneling down her windows in rivers and tiny tributaries. The damp infiltrated the interior, soaking my skin despite the vehicle surrounding us. Rain was never simple this time of year in Louisiana. It always came followed by lightning, thunder, and a myriad of warnings. Leaves blew against the windshield, still full and green from summer, and I watched as one of them stuck against the glass, the leaf’s veins prominent. I wanted to sketch the way it looked now, alone and surrounded by tears, but there was no time. “Don’t forget to call me when you get there,” Mom murmured. Her knuckles were white against the steering wheel, her lips pinched. She wouldn’t cry. Mom seldom cried, she

Miraculously, thirty minutes later I found Marlboro Man’s brother’s house. As I pulled up, I saw Marlboro Man’s familiar white pickup parked next to a very large, imposing semi. He and his brother were sitting inside the cab. Looking up and smiling, Marlboro Man motioned for me to join them. I waved, getting out of my car and obnoxiously taking my purse with me. To add insult to injury, I pressed the button on my keyless entry to lock my doors and turn on my car alarm, not realizing how out of place the dreadful chirp! chirp! must have sounded amidst all the bucolic silence. As I made my way toward the monster truck to meet my new love’s only brother, I reflected that not only had I never in my life been inside the cab of a semi, but also I wasn’t sure I’d ever been within a hundred feet of one. My armpits were suddenly clammy and moist, my body trembling nervously at the prospect of not only meeting Tim but also climbing into a vehicle nine times the size of my Toyota Camry, which, at the time, was the largest car I’d ever owned. I was nervous. What would I do in there? Marlboro Man opened the passenger door, and I grabbed the large handlebar on the side of the cab, hoisting myself up onto the spiked metal steps of the semi. “Come on in,” he said as he ushered me into the cab. Tim was in the driver’s seat. “Ree, this is my brother, Tim.” Tim was handsome. Rugged. Slightly dusty, as if he’d just finished working. I could see a slight resemblance to Marlboro Man, a familiar twinkle in his eye. Tim extended his hand, leaving the other on the steering wheel of what I would learn was a brand-spanking-new cattle truck, just hours old. “So, how do you like this vehicle?” Tim asked, smiling widely. He looked like a kid in a candy shop. “It’s nice,” I replied, looking around the cab. There were lots of gauges. Lots of controls. I wanted to crawl into the back and see what the sleeping quarters were like, and whether there was a TV. Or a Jacuzzi. “Want to take it for a spin?” Tim asked. I wanted to appear capable, strong, prepared for anything. “Sure!” I responded, shrugging my shoulders. I got ready to take the wheel. Marlboro Man chuckled, and Tim remained in his seat, saying, “Oh, maybe you’d better not. You might break a fingernail.” I looked down at my fresh manicure. It was nice of him to notice. “Plus,” he continued, “I don’t think you’d be able to shift gears.” Was he making fun of me? My armpits were drenched. Thank God I’d work black that night. After ten more minutes of slightly uncomfortable small talk, Marlboro Man saved my by announcing, “Well, I think we’ll head out, Slim.” “Okay, Slim,” Tim replied. “Nice meeting you, Ree.” He flashed his nice, familiar smile. He was definitely cute. He was definitely Marlboro Man’s brother. But he was nothing like the real thing.

An example is the campaign that Goodby, Berlin & Sil- verstein produced for the Northern California Honda Deal- ers Advertising Association (NCHDAA) in 1989. Rather than conform to the stereotypical dealer group advertising ("one of a kind, never to be repeated deals, this weekend 114 Figure 4.1 UNUM: "Bear and Salmon. Figure 4.2 UNUM: "Father and Child." 115 PEELING THE ONION only, the Honda-thon, fifteen hundred dollars cash back . . ." shouted over cheesy running footage), it was decided that the campaign should reflect the tone of the national cam- paign that it ran alongside. After all, we reasoned, the only people who know that one spot is from the national cam- paign and another from a regional dealer group are industry insiders. In the real world, all people see is the name "Honda" at the end. It's dumb having one of (Los Angeles agency) Rubin Postaer's intelligent, stylish commercials for Honda in one break, and then in the next, 30 seconds of car salesman hell, also apparently from Honda. All the good work done by the first ad would be undone by the second. What if, we asked ourselves, we could in some way regionalize the national message? In other words, take the tone and quality of Rubin Postaer's campaign and make it unique to Northern California? All of the regional dealer groups signed off as the Northern California Chevy/Ford/ Toyota Dealers, yet none of the ads would have seemed out of place in Florida or Wisconsin. In fact, that's probably where they got them from. In our research, we began not by asking people about cars, or car dealers, but about living in Northern California. What's it like? What does it mean? How would you describe it to an alien? (There are times when my British accent comes in very useful.) How does it compare to Southern California? "Oh, North and South are very different," a man in a focus group told me. "How so?" "Well, let me put it this way. There's a great rivalry between the (San Francisco) Giants and the (L.A.) Dodgers," he said. "But the Dodgers' fans don't know about it." Everyone laughed. People in the "Southland" were on a different planet. All they cared about was their suntans and flashy cars. Northern Californians, by comparison, were more modest, discerning, less likely to buy things to "make state- ments," interested in how products performed as opposed to 116 Take the Wider View what they looked like, more environmentally conscious, and concerned with the quality of life. We already knew from American Honda—supplied re- search what Northern Californians thought of Honda's cars. They were perceived as stylish without being ostentatious, reliable, understated, good value for the money . . . the paral- lels were remarkable. The creative brief asked the team to consider placing Honda in the unique context of Northern California, and to imagine that "Hondas are designed with Northern Californi- ans in mind." Dave O'Hare, who always swore that he hated advertising taglines and had no talent for writing them, came back immediately with a line to which he wanted to write a campaign: "Is Honda the Perfect Car for Northern Califor- nia, or What?" The launch commercial took advantage of the rivalry between Northern and Southern California. Set in the state senate chamber in Sacramento, it opens on the Speaker try- ing to hush the house. "Please, please," he admonishes, "the gentleman from Northern California has the floor." "What my Southern Californian colleague proposes is a moral outrage," the senator splutters, waving a sheaf of papers at the other side of the floor. "Widening the Pacific Coast Highway . . . to ten lanes!" A Southern Californian senator with bouffant hair and a pink tie shrugs his shoulders. "It's too windy," he whines (note: windy as in curves, not weather), and his fellow Southern Californians high-five and murmur their assent. The Northern Californians go nuts, and the Speaker strug- gles in vain to call everyone to order. The camera goes out- side as th

As with Japanese keiretsu, the member firms in a Korean chaebol own shares in each other and tend to collaborate with each other on what is often a nonprice basis. The Korean chaebol differs from the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or postwar keiretsu, however, in a number of significant ways. First and perhaps most important, Korean network organizations were not centered around a private bank or other financial institution in the way the Japanese keiretsu are.8 This is because Korean commercial banks were all state owned until their privatization in the early 1970s, while Korean industrial firms were prohibited by law from acquiring more than an eight percent equity stake in any bank. The large Japanese city banks that were at the core of the postwar keiretsu worked closely with the Finance Ministry, of course, through the process of overloaning (i.e., providing subsidized credit), but the Korean chaebol were controlled by the government in a much more direct way through the latter’s ownership of the banking system. Thus, the networks that emerged more or less spontaneously in Japan were created much more deliberately as the result of government policy in Korea. A second difference is that the Korean chaebol resemble the Japanese intermarket keiretsu more than the vertical ones (see p. 197). That is, each of the large chaebol groups has holdings in very different sectors, from heavy manufacturing and electronics to textiles, insurance, and retail. As Korean manufacturers grew and branched out into related businesses, they started to pull suppliers and subcontractors into their networks. But these relationships resembled simple vertical integration more than the relational contracting that links Japanese suppliers with assemblers. The elaborate multitiered supplier networks of a Japanese parent firm like Toyota do not have ready counterparts in Korea.9

Never be satisfied with inaction. Question and redefine your purpose to attain progress.

Economic growth requires investment in things—more machines, more basic facilities like highways or broadband—and in people, who need more and better education. Knowledge needs to be acquired and extended. Some of that extension is the product of new basic science, and some of it comes from the engineering that turns science into goods and services, and from the endless tweaking and improvement of design that, over time, turned a Model-T Ford into a Toyota Camry, or my clunky personal computer of 1983 into the sleek, almost weightless, and infinitely more powerful laptop on which I am writing this book. Investment in research and development enhances the flow of innovation, but new ideas can come from anywhere; the stock of knowledge is international, not national, and new ideas disperse quickly from the places where they are created. Innovation also needs entrepreneurs and risk-taking managers to find profitable ways of turning science and engineering into new products and services. This will be difficult without the right institutions. Innovators need to be free from the risk of expropriation, functioning law courts are needed to settle disputes and protect patents, and tax rates cannot be too high. When all of these conditions come together—as they have in the United States for a century and a half—we get sustained economic growth and higher living standards.

management: The systematic pursuit of desired conditions by utilizing human capabilities in a concerted way.

It was while at the Toyota plant that he had a revelation. Toyota has a rather unusual production process. If anybody on the production line is having a problem or observes an error, that person pulls a cord that halts production across the plant. Senior executives rush over to see what has gone wrong and, if an employee is having difficulty performing her job, she is helped as needed by executives. The error is then assessed, lessons learned, and the system adapted. It is called the Toyota Production System, or TPS, and is one of the most successful techniques in industrial history. “The system was about cars, which are very different from people,” Kaplan says when we meet for an interview. “But the underlying principle is transferable. If a culture is open and honest about mistakes, the entire system can learn from them. That is the way you gain improvements.

aggressively. In the case of the G21, he might have neglected it as

Senior management is simply a flag bearer when a business decision is made. It is of no use unless others follow the flag. —Eiji Toyoda, former chairman of Toyota

Apple, the most successful firm selling a low-cost product at a premium price. The total material cost for the iPhone X is $370, a fraction of the $999 price tag.80 Put another way, Apple has the profit margin of Ferrari with the production volume of Toyota.

Source: Peter R. Scholtes, The Leader's Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 1998.

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This operational excellence is based in part on tools and quality improvement methods

Everyone should tackle some great project at least once in their life. I devoted most of my life to inventing new kinds of looms. Now it is your turn. You should make an effort to complete something that will benefit society. (Reingold, 1999)

Defining and explaining what the goal is, sharing a path to achieving it, motivating people to take the journey with you, and assisting them by removing obstacles—those are management's reasons for being.

More important than the actual improvements that individuals contribute, the true value of continuous improvement is in creating an atmosphere of continuous learning and an environment that not only accepts, but actually embraces change. Such an environment can only be created where there is respect for people—hence

management has no more critical role than to motivate and engage large numbers of people to work together toward a common goal. Defining and explaining what the goal is, sharing a path to achieving it, motivating people to take the journey with you, and assisting them by removing obstacles—those are management's reasons for being. We

Obstetrics went about improving the same way Toyota and General Electric went about improving: on the fly, but always paying attention to the results and trying to better them. And

His brother Najib owned an auto-parts store at bustling Shikarpur Gate, the mouth of the narrow road linking their village to the city—an ancient byway that had once led southward through the passes all the way to India. At dusk it is clogged with a riot of vegetable sellers’ handcarts beset by shoppers, Toyota pickup trucks, horse-drawn taxis, and three-wheeled rickshaws clambering around and through the throng like gaudy dung beetles. Nurallah’s brother Najib had gone to Chaman, just across the border in Pakistan, where the streets are lined with cargo containers serving as shops, and used motor oil cements the dust to the ground in a glossy tarmac, and every variety of automotive organ or sinew is laid bare, spread out, and strung up for sale. He had made his purchases and set off back to Kandahar. “He paid his customs dues”—Nurallah emphasized the remarkable point—“because that’s the law. He paid at every checkpoint on the way back, fifty afghanis, a hundred afghanis.” A dollar or two every time an unkempt, underage police boy in green fatigues slouched out of a sandbagged lean-to into the middle of the road—eight times in the sixty-six miles when last I counted. “And then when he reached the entrance to town, the police there wanted five hundred afghanis. Five hundred!” A double arch marks the place where the road that swoops down from Kabul joins the road leading in from Pakistan. The police range from one side to the other, like spear fishermen hunting trout in a narrows. “He refused,” Nurallah continued. “He said he had paid his customs dues—he showed them the receipt. He said he had paid the bribes at every checkpoint all along the way, and he was not paying again.” I waited a beat. “So what happened?” “They reached into his window and smacked him.” “They hit him?” I was shocked. Najib might be a sunny guy, but Kandahar tempers are strung on tripwires. For a second I thought we’d have to go bail him out. “What did he do?” Nurallah’s eyes, beneath his widow’s peak, were banked and smoldering. “What could he do? He paid the money. But then he pulled over to the side of the road and called me. I told him to stay right there. And I called Police Chief Matiullah Qatih, to report the officer who was taking the bribes.” And Matiullah had scoffed at him: Did he die of it? The police buzzards had seen Najib make the call. They had descended on him, snatched the phone out of his hand, and smashed it. “You call that law?” Now Nurallah was ablaze. “They’re the police! They should be showing people what the law is; they should be enforcing the law. And they’re the ones breaking it.” Nurallah was once a police officer himself. He left the force the day his own boss, Kabul police chief Zabit Akrem, was assassinated in that blast in the mosque in 2005.1 Yet so stout was Nurallah’s pride in his former profession that he brought his dark green uniform into work and kept it there, hung neatly on a hook in his locker. “My sacred oath,” he vowed, concluding: “If I see someone planting an IED on a road, and then I see a police truck coming, I will turn away. I will not warn them.” I caught my breath. So maybe he didn’t mean it literally. Maybe Nurallah wouldn’t actually connive with the Taliban. Still, if a former police officer like him was even mouthing such thoughts, then others were acting on them. Afghan government corruption was manufacturing Taliban.

We strive to decide our own fate. We act with self-reliance, trusting in our own abilities. We accept responsibility for our conduct and for maintaining and improving the skills that enable us to produce added value.

Mr. Ohba, who started the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC) in the United States. In a public presentation, he explained:† TPS is built on the scientific way of thinking. . . . How do I respond to this problem? Not a toolbox. [You have to be] willing to start small, learn through trial and error.

In the abstract, science is hard to define, and there are endless philosophical debates over what it means. Rother is not focused as much on defining science per se, but rather on developing a practical approach to teaching people to think scientifically in everyday life. He describes it as:8 a mindset, or way of looking at the world/responding to goals and problems, that’s characterized by . . .   Acknowledging that our comprehension is always incomplete and possibly wrong.   Assuming that answers will be found by test rather than just deliberation. (You make predictions and test them with experiments.)   Appreciating that differences between what we predict will happen and what actually happens can be a useful source of learning and corrective adjustment.

TPS starts with the customer. Always ask, “What value are we adding from the customer’s perspective?” Because the only thing that adds value in any type of process—be it a manufacturing, service, or development process—is the physical or information transformation of that product, service, or activity into something the customer wants.

Rather the power behind TPS is a company’s management commitment to continuously invest in its people and promote a culture of continuous improvement.

The Toyota Way provides a model for fast, efficient, and effective execution of long-term strategy based on:   Carefully studying the market and planning in detail future products and services   Putting safety first for team members and customers   Eliminating wasted time and resources in execution of those plans   Building quality into every step of design, manufacturing, and service delivery   Using new technology effectively to work in harmony with people, not simply replace people   Building a culture of people who learn and think scientifically to achieve aligned, challenging goals

Sakichi Toyoda’s personal and professional philosophy continues to influence Toyota today through what the company has distilled as his “five main principles”: 1.   Always be faithful to your duties, thereby contributing to the company and to the overall good. 2.   Always be studious and creative, striving to stay ahead of the times. 3. Always be practical and avoid frivolousness. 4.   Always strive to build a homelike atmosphere at work that is warm and friendly. 5.   Always have respect for spiritual matters and remember to be grateful at all times.

The Toyota Way, I introduced 14 principles of lean management organized around 4 Ps—philosophy, process, people, and problem solving.

Toyota’s success, in short, is not rooted in its application of a standard “lean” methodology to manufacturing, nor can it be found in any internally implemented equivalent of Six Sigma. Instead, it is rooted in its leaders. More specifically, it can be found in the approach that a Toyota leader takes, seeing self-development and training others as the only possible path, not only for finding the right solution for the problem at hand, but for constantly and consistently improving performance day after day.

It is comforting to believe that if we could only implement the right cells and other lean tools to eliminate waste in the process, we could let it rip and get great results forever . . . or at least for a long time. But processes do not work that way.

So physically shifting from batch and queue operations (explained in greater detail later in the chapter) to one-piece flow without inventory almost guarantees you will encounter many more problems. So why do it? Precisely to allow the processes to break so we can discover the weak points and improve through kaizen.

we create confusion so we have to do something different in approaching this problem.

Exceptional People and Exceptional Processes Must Go Hand in Hand

We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent—attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines. —Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time

A cornerstone of the Toyota Way is “challenge

Continuous improvement means getting better every day and is the driver for building a sustainable enterprise. Only those at the gemba can understand the problems fast enough to react quickly. Continuous improvement depends on a different paradigm of the role of the human—all humans are problem detectors and problem correctors—thinking scientifically.

However, in a perverse twist on the modern take of the rich, our society gives those who have achieved the greatest success by work and diligence short shrift.We are not interested in emulating the Toyota-driving, modestly attired, bling-less entrepreneur or sales professional. Instead, we take as our role models celebrities and athletes, masters of the universe. Rather than attempt to find their luck, we have come to think that if we act like them, look like them, drive the cars they drive, we are glitteringly rich. In the process of buying into the marketing hype, of getting sucked into the brand advertising, we have frittered away our wealth. It’s not your fault, in a way, as some of the smartest people in the world seem to be working in marketing and advertising,

Is it really economical to provide more information than we need - more quickly than we need it? This is like buying a large, high performance machine that produces too much. The extra items have to be stored in a warehouse, which increases the cost. Toyota's just-in-time production is a way to deliver exactly what the production line needs, when it is needed. This method does not require extra inventory. Similarly, we want information only when we need it. Information sent to production should be timed exactly.

Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say “We have done this ourselves.” —Lao-Tsu, founder of Daoism

the only thing that adds value in any type of process—be it in manufacturing, marketing, or a development process—is the physical or information transformation of that product, service, or activity into something the customer wants.

Toyota’s concept of a good process is one that expects and reveals problems, without blame, not one that is problem-free.

The Lean Startup takes its name from the lean manufacturing revolution that Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo are credited with developing at Toyota. Lean thinking is radically altering the way supply chains and production systems are run. Among its tenets are drawing on the knowledge and creativity of individual workers, the shrinking of batch sizes, just-in-time production and inventory control, and an acceleration of cycle times. It taught the world the difference between value-creating activities and waste and showed how to build quality into products from the inside out.

When an aspirational looks at a Mercedes Millionaire, he only sees what is on display. He focuses on the leaves of the oak tree, not its roots. But the values and work habits of millionaires, like the roots of the oak, are what support their lifestyles (the leaves), not the other way around. Who should the aspirational seek to emulate instead? The Toyota Millionaire. This advice may be painful for some hyperspenders.

also watched the advanced tape. But Squeaky had gone grad school on me. He’s throwing reach casts, curve casts, roll casts, steeple casts, and casts he calls squiggles and stutters. He’s writing his name with the line in the air. He’s making his dry fly look like the Blue Angels. He’s pitching things forehand, backhand, and between his wader legs. And, through the magic of video editing, every time his hook-tipped dust kitty hits the water he lands a trout the size of a canoe. The videotape about trout themselves wasn’t much use either. It’s hard to get excited about where trout feed when you know that the only way you’re going to be able to get a fly to that place is by throwing your fly box at it. I must say, however, all the tapes were informative. “Nymphs and streamers” are not, as it turns out, naked mythological girls decorating the high school gym with crepe paper. And I learned that the part of fly-fishing I’m going to be best at is naming the flies: Woolly Hatcatcher Blue-Wing Earsnag Overhanging Brush Muddler Royal Toyota Hatchback O’Rourke’s Ouchtail P.J.’s Live Worm-’n-Bobber By now I’d reached what I think they call a “learning plateau.” That is, if I was going to catch a fish with a fly rod, I had to either go get in the water or open the fridge and toss hooks at Mrs. Paul’s frozen

The Toyota Way, written by the co-author of this book, Jeffrey Liker, summarized the management principles of Toyota in a 4P model: Philosophy, Process, People, and Problem Solving

Do you have a driver's license?" "Of course," she said, not knowing if it was true or not. She was already sitting behind the steering wheel. He tossed her the keys and she turned the ignition as he climbed into the car. She pressed hard on the gas pedal and the car shrieked away from the curb. The back end fishtailed. She needed to get to school quickly and find some answers. She had a feeling that Catty wasn't going to last long in that place. The light turned yellow ahead of her. "Slow down!" Derek shouted as the car in front of them stopped for the light. She didn't let up. "You're going to rear-end it!" Derek cried, and his foot pressed the floor as if he were trying to work an invisible brake. She jerked the steering wheel, swerved smoothly around the car, and blasted through the intersection, ignoring the flurry of horns and screeching tires. Derek snapped his seat belt in place. "Why are you in such a hurry to get to school?" "Geometry test," she answered, and buzzed around two more cars. At the next junction she needed to make a left-hand turn, but the line of traffic waiting for the green arrow would delay her too long. She continued in her lane, and when she reached the intersection, she turned in front of the car with the right-of-way. Angry honks followed her as she blasted onto the next street. "We've got time, Tianna!" Derek yelled. "School doesn't start for another fifteen minutes." Would fifteen minutes give her enough time to get the answers she needed? She didn't think so. She pressed her foot harder on the accelerator. The school was at least a mile away, but if she ignored the next light and the next, then maybe she could get there with enough time to question Corrine. She didn't think her powers were strong enough to change the lights and she didn't want to chance endangering other drivers, but she was sure she could at least slow down the cross traffic. She concentrated on the cars zooming east and west on Beverly Boulevard in front of her without slowing her speed. "Tianna!" Derek yelled. "You've got a red light!" She squinted and stalled a Jaguar in the crosswalk. Cars honked impatiently behind the car, and when a Toyota tried to speed around it, she stopped it, too. She could feel the pressure building inside her as she made a Range Rover and a pick-up slide to a halt. She shot through the busy intersection against the light. Derek turned back. "You've got to be the luckiest person in the world.

The most important lesson to derive from this chapter is that many of us are managing our companies with a logic that originated in the 1920s and 1930s, a logic that might not be appropriate to the situation in which your company finds itself today. GM’s approach proved highly lucrative during the period of growth and oligopolistic isolation from global competition that extended until the 1970s. It became our model and accepted management practice, and is still taught in business schools today. That means, for many of us the way we currently manage our companies is built on logic that originated in the conditions faced by companies in the U.S. automobile industry during the late 1920s. The problem is not that the logic is old, but that it does not incorporate continuous improvement and adaptation. If our business philosophy and management approach do not include constant adaptiveness and improvement, then companies and their leaders can get stuck in patterns that grow less and less applicable in changing circumstances. The solution is not to periodically change your management system or to reorganize, but to have a management system that can effectively handle whatever unforeseeable circumstances come your way.

Rough waters are truer tests of leadership. In calm water, every ship has a good captain. —Swedish proverb

They started with no budget and had to justify every cost—and were told that only those costs that were absolutely essential to making product for the customer would be approved.

A defect presents the opportunity to learn about how the process is failing. Learning is best done with the people who were witness to the defect, at the place where it occurred, and as close to the moment that the defect occurred. This brings together four of the Toyota Way principles: build a culture of stopping to fix problems; respect for people; continuous process improvement; and go and see for yourself.

The ideal goal is to achieve small batches all the way down to single-piece flow along the entire supply chain. Each step in the line pulls the parts it needs from the previous step. This is the famous Toyota just-in-time production method.

every Toyota team member goes through a basic set of development steps at each stage of her development, following the process of basic learning by copying exactly (shu), mastering the basics so that they become second nature (ha), and becoming so masterful at the basics that she can go beyond these and improvise (ri).

If you are responsible for a problem and make recommendations on possible solutions, you might be asked whether you went and looked at the situation yourself in person.

When there is a problem, do not just keep going with the intention of fixing it later. Stop and fix the problem now.

underlies the Toyota Production System. At Toyota, this goes by the Japanese term genchi gembutsu, which is one of the most important phrases in the lean manufacturing vocabulary. In English, it is usually translated as a directive to “go and see for yourself” so that business decisions can be based on deep firsthand knowledge. Jeffrey Liker, who has extensively documented the “Toyota Way,” explains it this way: In my Toyota interviews, when I asked what distinguishes the Toyota Way from other management approaches, the most common first response was genchi gembutsu—whether I was in manufacturing, product development, sales, distribution, or public affairs. You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to

But in 1947, an American working in Japan turned that thinking on its head. His name was W. Edwards Deming, and he was a statistician who was known for his expertise in quality control. At the request of the U.S. Army, he had traveled to Asia to assist with planning the 1951 Japanese census. Once he arrived, he became deeply involved with the country’s reconstruction effort and ended up teaching hundreds of Japanese engineers, managers, and scholars his theories about improving productivity. Among those who came to hear his ideas was Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony Corp.—one of many Japanese companies that would apply his ideas and reap their rewards. Around this time, Toyota also instituted radical new ways of thinking about production that jibed with Deming’s philosophies.

The systematic pursuit of desired conditions by utilizing human capabilities in a concerted way.

tailspin

According to John Shook, “‘Go see, ask why, show respect’ is the way we turn the philosophy of scientific empiricism into actual behavior.” It’s an expression he originally learned from Fujio Cho (past president and chairman of Toyota). In an LEI blog, Shook went on to say, “We go observe what is really happening (at the Gemba where the work takes place), while showing respect for the people involved, especially the people who do the real value-creating work of the business.

The Five Whys The "Five Whys" is another lean manufacturing tool pioneered by Toyota. When faced with a problem, the first answer will likely be superficial and fail to address the root cause. Asking "why?" five times in succession can help get to the root of the problem. For example, a software company releases a new product feature that caused its service to fail: Why did the service fail? Because a particular server failed. Why did the server fail? Because an obscure subsystem was used in the wrong way. Why was it used in the wrong way? The engineer didn't know how to use it properly. Why didn't he know? Because he was never trained. Why wasn't he trained? Because his manager doesn't believe in training because he and his team are "too busy." Without the Five Whys, most companies would stop at the first question, fix the server and move on. However, pursuing the five whys reveals the root cause which is the manager's negative attitude on training. Without fixing the training problem, issues like this would probably happen again. Note that the process of five whys typically moves the focus from a technical fault towards human error.

She’d give her right arm to get the whole story on each of the summarized events. Most of them were worded in a way that left a lot open to interpretation. She wondered if the vague nature of the content was on purpose. Did they mean to make it funny? 6/5 5:15 p.m. A grandson is continually breaking into his grandfather’s locked cabinet and stealing his quarters for the laundry. 6/6 9:36 a.m. A fireman’s ladder was reported stolen from the side of a house on Magnolia Street. 6/6 12:49 p.m. A dog was seen panting inside of a red Toyota in front of the Piggly Wiggly. It may be suffering. Turned out to be the taxidermy remains of the family pet.

Basically people will do what upper management wants them to do. So if that's consistent, if they're not whipsawed and being governed by different priorities, they learn what is truly important and what is not….

When I was a child, I just assumed that in order for a sailboat to go, say, east, the wind had to be blowing from the west to the east. I was amazed to learn that, no matter which way the wind blew, a sailboat could always get to where it wanted to go—if it had a skilled sailor at the helm. To me, the five forces are kind of like the wind, the direction that competition within an industry is moving. Strategy is about positioning the firm relative to the prevailing winds in a way to make sure that the firm gets to where it wants to go, no matter what direction the wind is blowing.” {...]. “In fact,” added Gordon, “some of the most successful firms in the world are successful precisely because they have figured how to use very unfavorable industry winds—high rivalry, high threat of entry, and so forth—to their advantage. Look at Walmart, Southwest Airlines, Nucor Steel, Toyota, Starbucks. These firms have played in some pretty unattractive industries—at least according to a five forces analysis—and still they have been successful.

When I was a child, I just assumed that in order for a sailboat to go, say, east, the wind had to be blowing from the west to the east. I was amazed to learn that, no matter which way the wind blew, a sailboat could always get to where it wanted to go—if it had a skilled sailor at the helm. To me, the five forces are kind of like the wind, the direction that competition within an industry is moving. Strategy is about positioning the firm relative to the prevailing winds in a way to make sure that the firm gets to where it wants to go, no matter what direction the wind is blowing.” [...]. “In fact,” added Gordon, “some of the most successful firms in the world are successful precisely because they have figured how to use very unfavorable industry winds—high rivalry, high threat of entry, and so forth—to their advantage. Look at Walmart, Southwest Airlines, Nucor Steel, Toyota, Starbucks. These firms have played in some pretty unattractive industries—at least according to a five forces analysis—and still they have been successful.

Times of rapid change and increasing complexity require a shift from optimization towards innovation. Forcing workers to blindly execute the upfront plans and sequential processes of the “waterfall model” turns out not to be the one best way. But we do it anyway. Taylor’s obsession with time, order, and efficiency has been absorbed into the fabric of our culture. We share his faith in reductionism. We divide projects into phases into tasks. We separate people into teams into roles. We split work into steps and silos. Then things fall through the cracks. Figure 1-6. The Waterfall Model. It’s not that waterfall is wrong. In many contexts, it’s a useful model. The problem is that, all too often, we apply it without realizing it’s not the only way. Again, it helps to know history. In the 1950s, Toyota figured out how to avoid the pitfalls of Taylorism by embracing what’s now called Lean. In design, all relevant specialists were involved at the outset, so conflicts about resources and priorities were resolved early on. And in production, managers learned that by making small batches and giving every worker the ability to stop the line, they could identify, fix, and prevent errors more quickly and effectively. [40] Rather than serving as cogs in the machine, workers were expected to solve problems by using “the five why’s” to systematically trace every error to its root cause. Similarly, suppliers were expected to coordinate the flow of parts and information within the just-in-time supply system of kanban.

Defining and explaining what the goal is, sharing a path to achieving it, motivating people to take the journey with you, and assisting them by removing obstacles—those are management's reasons for being. We must engage the minds of people to support and contribute their ideas to the organization. In my experience, the Toyota Way is the best method for fulfilling this role.

INPUTS: Stated succinctly, what is the clear and compelling purpose for the system? OUTPUTS: What are the meaningful outcomes you are committed to achieving? FEEDBACK: To what degree does your feedback process allow you to manage the inputs and improve the outputs on a consistent basis? In what ways has your “systems intelligence” grown?

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle, a cornerstone of continuous improvement. The Japanese term for continuous improvement is kaizen and is the process of making incremental improvements, no matter how small, and achieving the lean goal of eliminating all waste that adds cost without adding to value.

As long as Toyota is continually identifying “anomalies” in the manufacturing process, every single defect is seen as an opportunity to make the process better. There are, in effect, a set of rules that ensure that this happens. For example, an employee must never add value to a part until it is ready to be used in the next step of adding value. It must be done in the same way, every time. That way managers know, definitely, that the value-adding step worked with the next step in the process. That creates an environment of repeated scientific experimentation. Each time it’s done the same way constitutes a test of whether doing it that way, to those specifications, will result in perfection every time. For Toyota, the theory was embodied in the set of processes they developed to lead to defect-free manufacturing. Each activity can be seen as an individual if-then statement: “If we do this, then that will be the result.” Through this theory of manufacturing, the quality movement was born. As a consequence, the Americans took what they’d learned from their Japanese competitors to heart and the US automobile industry today churns out very reliable cars. Innovation, in a very real sense, exists in a “pre–quality revolution” state. 1 Managers accept flaws, missteps, and failure as an inevitable part of the process of innovation. They have become so accustomed to putting Band-Aids on their uneven innovation success that too often they give no real thought to what’s causing it in the first place.

He turned from Lashgarak Road onto Route 425, a paved two-lane road into the mountains, bordered by a guardrail and trees. A place of incredible beauty, with waterfalls tumbling from rocks to a gorge beside the road. About five kilometers up and above the tree line, the snow got deep enough that he had to stop at a turnoff to put on chains even with the rented Toyota RAV4’s all-wheel drive. He looked around at the mountains, stark and covered with snow. No one was following him on the road and only the occasional car or truck came the other way, down the mountain from Shemshak. He didn’t expect a lot of traffic heading up. It was late afternoon and there was no night skiing at the resort; not to mention the crisis. He didn’t need to check his iPad again to see where Zahra was. She had left her cell phone on, and his tracking software on the iPad showed she was about ten kilometers ahead of him up toward the Dizin ski resort.

The boy will not be a failure, Mythili knows. She has seen the generations before. The boy will make it. As his father has said, he does not have the option of failure. He will crack at least one entrance exam, and he will one day have a nice house in a suburb of San Francisco, or in a suburb of a suburb of San Francisco. He will find a cute Tamil Brahmin wife and make her produce two sweet children. He will drive a Toyota Corolla to work. And there, in the conference room of his office, he will tell his small team, with his hands stretched wide in a managerial way, ‘We must think out of the box.