How Toyota Became #1 |
Author: David Magee
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1591841798
ISBN-13: 9781591841791
Topic: Business Management
SPONSOR: Business Books
Publisher's Note:
What we can all learn from the strategies that have made Toyota the world’s best car company
Everyone who follows the auto industry knows that Toyota has had an amazing twenty-five-year run, rising from humble Japanese start-up to thriving global giant. But the big puzzle is how Toyota did it while so many other car companies have struggled or failed.
Journalist David Magee dug deeply into Toyota’s past and present, interviewing senior executives who rarely talk to the press, along with many other sources. And he found that the company’s famous mastery of lean production is only part of the story. Magee explains the surprising power of Toyota’s corporate culture, which includes:
• Focusing on the long term: While most companies worry about the next quarter, Toyota is thinking about the next quarter century
• Jumping beyond the current trend: When Ford was still ramping up its gas-guzzling SUVs, Toyota was very quietly taking a huge lead on hybrids
• Making quality everyone’s responsibility: Toyota expects people at every level to think and act like quality-control inspectors
• Managing individual strengths: Toyota is revolutionizing the way people are managed, to maximize their strengths instead of criticizing their weaknesses
The lessons that Magee explains here will be valuable for managers in all disciplines and industries.
REVIEW:
This is book designed to help the management student (employed or otherwise) develop along their skills to achieve success. If you aren't already a student of Toyota and its production system or the principles that make up its culture, you will find this book an informative and well written overview of what the company is trying to do each and every day. There are indeed dozens of valuable and useful leadership lessons for the reader to learn from the material the author shares. I found it fascinating the way Toyota introduced the philosophy of Buddhism and implemented it into the company. Toyota calls this kaizen and the aim is to continually correct and improve the system an incentive program was created to reinforce kaizen. Toyota refers to this as a self-regenerating internally combustive enterprise.