The Toyota Way

Concentrated Knowledge™ for the Busy Executive • www.summary.com

Vol. 26, No. 12 (2 parts) Part 2, December 2004 • Order # 26-30

Fourteen Management Principles
From the World’s Greatest Manufacturer

THE TOYOTA
WAY
THE SUMMARY IN BRIEF
By Jeffrey K. Liker, Ph.D.

CONTENTS
Using Operational Excellence
As a Strategic Weapon
Page 2

How Toyota Became
The World’s Best ManufacturerPages 2, 3

Eliminating Waste
Page 3

Long-Term Philosophy
Page 4

The Right Process Will
Produce the Right Results
Pages 4, 5, 6

Add Value By Developing
Your People and Partners
Pages 6, 7

Continuously Solving Problems
Drives Learning
Pages 7, 8

Using the Toyota Way to
Transform Technical and
Service Organizations
Page 8

Build Your Own Lean
Learning EnterprisePage 8

Toyota is the world’s most profitable automaker. Its “secret weapon” is
lean production — the revolutionary approach to business processes that it
invented in the 1950s and has spent decades perfecting. Today, businesses
around the world are trying to emulate Toyota’s remarkable success by
working to implement the company’s radical system for speeding up business and service processes,reducing waste, and improving quality. It is a
system that is derived from balancing the role of people in an organizational culture that expects and values their continuous improvements, with a
technical system that is focused on high-value-added “flow.”
To help other companies learn to continually improve on what they do,
Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the Universityof
Michigan Dr. Jeffrey K. Liker describes the results of his year-long research
into Toyota and its managers, executives, suppliers and training centers.
While detailing the company’s culture, processes and people, Liker provides
readers with a management model that can be used to transform business
across industries, and the key principles that drive the techniques and tools
of the ToyotaProduction System and the management of Toyota in general.
These principles embody the long-term philosophy, processes, results, people, partners and problem solving that drive the organizational learning at
Toyota, and can make the Toyota Way work for any organization.

What You’ll Learn In This Summary
✓ How to foster an atmosphere of continuous improvement and learning.
✓ How to satisfycustomers and eliminate waste at the same time.
✓ How to get quality right the first time.
✓ How to groom leaders from within rather than recruit them from the outside.

✓ How to teach employees to become problem solvers.
✓ How to grow together with suppliers and partners for mutual benefit.
Published by Soundview Executive Book Summaries, P.O. Box 1053, Concordville, Pennsylvania 19331 USA
©2004 Soundview Executive Book Summaries • All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part is prohibited.

FILE: MANUFACTURING

®

THE TOYOTA WAY
by Jeffrey K. Liker, Ph.D.

— THE COMPLETE SUMMARY
PART ONE: THE WORLD-CLASS POWER OF THE TOYOTA WAY

Using Operational Excellence
As a Strategic Weapon
Toyota first caught the world’s attention in the 1980s,
when it became clear thatthere was something special
about Japanese quality and efficiency. Japanese cars
were lasting longer than American cars and required
much less repair. By the 1990s, it was apparent that
there was something even more special about Toyota
compared to other automakers in Japan. It was the way
Toyota engineered and manufactured the autos that led
to unbelievable consistency in the process andproduct.
Toyota designed autos faster, with more reliability, yet
at a competitive cost, even when paying the relatively
high wages of Japanese workers. Equally impressive
was that every time Toyota showed an apparent weakness and seemed vulnerable to the competition, Toyota
fixed the problem and came back even stronger.
Today, Toyota is the third-largest auto manufacturer in
the world,...