Toyota Way
Finally got around to reading the piece on Toyota in last Sunday’s magazine. It’s fascinating to see the similarities between engineering the next Tundra and engineering the next OS or browser. Toyota has gone from selling just 288 cars in 1958 to outselling Ford and soon GM. I tried to pick out as much of the “Toyota Way” as I could for the reader:
Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”).
Some of Ohno’s and Toyota’s ideas also had a deeply subversive quality. It is human nature to cover up a problem rather than call attention to it. At a Toyota plant, the identification of a problem became imperative and exciting. Because then it could be addressed.
Improving efficiency in the factory, though, doesn’t necessarily lead to greater profits. Savings on the assembly line can mean a nicer dashboard without making the customer pay more for it. “If you’re efficient in the things the customer doesn’t see, then you can put it into the things the customer does see,” Ron Harbour, a consultant whose company rates the efficiency of auto plants, told me. A result is a car more popular with customers. Success on the assembly line, in this way, begets success in the showroom.